Volume 3 / Part 2 — WOMEN OF THE EASTERN EMPIRE (continued 4)

Anna, another daughter of Alexius, was married to Bagrat VI., King of Georgia; and a third daughter was bestowed on Taharten, Emir of Erdsendjan. Alexius's sisters met a similar fate. His sister Maria was married to Koutloubeg, the chief of the great Turkoman horde of the White Sheep; and his sister Theodora, to Hadji Omer, Emir of Chalybia.

These marriages with Mohammedan nobles, though one revolts at the immolation of Christian maidens on the altar of selfish expedience, are yet the strongest proof how the Christian state was being surrounded by powerful Mohammedan chieftains, who must be conciliated to ward off the evil day of extinction. Such alliances, too, may account in part for the moral degradation which henceforth characterizes the house of Grand-Comnenus.

In the next generation, Alexius IV. wedded Theodora Cantacuzenus, of the celebrated Byzantine family of that name. Neglected by her husband, the princess consoled herself with too close an intimacy with one of the chamberlains of the palace; her son John, indignant at his mother's disgrace, assassinated her lover with his own hands. He later murdered his own father, and ascended the throne as John IV.

Under this cruel and intriguing ruler and his successors, the Christian population of the country regarded the dynasty of Grand-Comnenus as a dynasty of pagan or foreign tyrants, so little of religion or morality survived in Trebizond. His alliances with the Turkoman plunderers of the frontiers increased the popular aversion. John early recognized the growing strength of the Turks, and sought to prepare to meet the coming invasion by forming an alliance with Ouzoun Hassan, chief of the Turkomans of the White Horde, whose daring courage and rapid career of conquest made him, in the general estimation, a formidable rival of Mohammed II.

When invited to join in the league against Mohammed, Hassan demanded as the price of his assistance the hand of the emperor's daughter Katherine, renowned throughout the Orient as the most beautiful virgin in the East. John IV. was highly pleased at the prospect of purchasing so powerful an alliance on such easy terms, and readily agreed, doubtless without consulting the fair Katherine. Yet, in order to save his credit as a Christian emperor, and perhaps as a balm to his own conscience in sacrificing his daughter to an infidel, he stipulated in the treaty that Katherine should be permitted always the exercise of her own religion, and should have the privilege of keeping a certain number of Christian ladies as her attendants, and of Greek priests in her suite, to serve a private chapel in the harem. It is to the honor of a Mussulman to observe that Hassan strictly kept his promises, even after the empire of Trebizond and the house of Grand-Comnenus were no more.

Before this matrimonial alliance was fulfilled, John came to his end; but his brother David, who displaced the heir and usurped the throne,--a fit agent for consummating the ruin of an empire,--completed the arrangement. The beautiful Katherine was sent with suitable pomp to the court of her bridegroom, Hassan, and readily adapted herself to the changed conditions of her life. She soon acquired great influence over her infidel husband, who was the soul of honor and good faith, and in every phase of her life which is known to us she showed herself the most attractive character of the whole house of Comnenus.

But no matrimonial alliance could save the doomed empire. Constantinople had fallen in 1453, and it was merely a matter of time when the last surviving Greek kingdom should succumb to the Mohammedan yoke. Mohammed II., by the exercise of intrigue, gradually detached from the emperor his infidel allies. When finally the Mohammedan forces came against the city, David showed that he possessed nothing of the heroic spirit of the last Constantine. He offered but a feeble resistance, and readily sacrificed the city to outrage and plunder on an assurance of safety for himself and his family. David basely deserted his empire and embarked on board one of the Turkish galleys, with his family and his treasures, to enjoy for a brief period luxurious ease in the European appanage assigned him by Mohammed.

David's family consisted of seven sons and a daughter borne him by Helena Cantacuzena, his second wife, who, through her devotion to husband and children, deserves to rank among the noblest of mothers in the chronicles of history.

The dethroned emperor was not long permitted to enjoy the repose he had purchased with so much infamy. Mohammed at length suspected him of carrying on secret communications with Ouzoun Hassan, his niece's husband, and plotting to reestablish the Empire of Trebizond. He was suddenly arrested on his luxurious estate, and conveyed with his whole family to Constantinople. While they were on the way a letter from Despina Katon--the popular designation of the fair Katherine--to her uncle David was intercepted by the Ottoman emissaries. In this the amiable spouse of Hassan, requested David to send her brother, or one of her cousins, to be educated at her husband's court. This letter afforded convincing proof to the suspicious Sultan that David was plotting with Ouzoun Hassan and other enemies of the Porte for the restoration of his empire.

The bare suspicion of Mohammed was a sentence of death to the whole race of Grand-Comnenus. As soon as the unfortunate prisoners reached Constantinople, David was ordered to embrace Islam under pain of death. His life had been ignoble, but in his death David showed that he still possessed something of the nobility of the Comneni, and he chose death rather than dishonor his name by renouncing his religion. David, his seven sons and his nephew Alexius were all slaughtered in one day, in the year 1470: the daughter was lost in a Turkish harem.

The bodies of the princes were thrown out unburied beyond the walls. No one ventured to approach them for fear of the vengeance of the Sultan. They would have been abandoned to the dogs, the usual scavengers of Christian flesh, had not the Empress Helena, the wife and mother, repaired to the spot where they lay. She was clad in a peasant's garb, to escape detection, and carried a spade in her hand. The day was spent in guarding the remains of husband and children from the ravenous dogs, and in digging a grave to receive their bodies. In the darkness of the night a few faithful souls came to her relief and assisted her in committing the bodies to the dust. The widowed and childless empress, who had seen the last of her race, the last of the glories of the Byzantine kingdom, then retired to a convent to pass the remainder of her days in prayers for the repose of the souls of her loved ones. Grief soon brought her to a refuge from all earthly sorrows in the grave.

The story of womanhood in the Byzantine Empire of the decadence is an extremely sad one. The times were out of joint; corruption and immorality prevailed; the emperors were almost without exception extremely selfish, cruel, and unprincipled. It was impossible for womanhood in such a period not to be tainted by the general ruin, yet we have found many noble characters, and whatever may have been their feminine weaknesses and foibles, however much their lots may have been circumscribed by the caprices of sovereigns and the ceremonials of courts, the princesses of the Comneni, the Palæologi and the Cantacuzeni have, as a rule, shown themselves in virtue and in capability the superiors of their brothers.

The rest of our story of Christian women of Greek or Byzantine traditions is soon told. During all the period we have covered in this chapter there was a flourishing mediæval life further south under Greek skies, in Athens, under a Frankish and, later, a Florentine duchy, and in the Peloponnesus, or the Morea, under Frankish or Venetian princes. But this was the feudal life of mediæval times transferred to Greek soil, the life of foreigners among a conquered people, and does not concern us here.

When the Turks extended their conquests over Greek lands, it looked as if the torch of freedom, the light of Hellenic tradition, the lamp of Christianity which had for so many centuries brightened the life of Oriental women, had been extinguished forever. But all during the dark age of Turkish oppression, the Christian Church kept alive the nobler aspirations of the Greek race. Women have always been the chief exponents of religious faith, and Greek women handed on from generation to generation the traditions of religion and liberty and intellectual culture. Many of the women of Greek lands were forced to spend their lives within the narrow walls of a Turkish harem; many saw their children taken from them and carried to Constantinople to be brought up as Mussulmans for the service of the Sultan; many had to undergo ignominy and insults at the hands of petty officials. But the Church found a constant and enthusiastic ally in Greek womanhood in preserving the language, the spirit, the love of liberty, of the ancient Greeks.

Hence, when in the early decades of the nineteenth century the fulness of time had come for a portion of the Greek race to rid itself of Turkish domination, the women showed an intense love of country which enabled them not only to inspire their brothers in the fight for freedom, but they also frequently shared with them the toils and privations of actual conflict. We read in the histories of the Greek War of Independence how women at times accompanied the Greek soldiers on their forages, carrying arms and ammunition and frequently fighting themselves; how they kept the standard of military honor high, and were unsparing critics of the mettle of their husbands.

There is no more inspiring folk tale in the records of history than the legend of the Suliote women in the struggle of their people against Ali, the cruel and rapacious tyrant of Janina. Bred in the mountains of Chamouri, they refused to submit to his yoke, and the valiant people had to see the gradual extermination of their race. They had ventured to defy the rising star of Ali, and all that force or treachery could accomplish was inflicted upon them. Tzavellas was one of their leaders, and the valor of Moscho, his wife, has been commemorated in popular verse, as typical of Greek womanhood in their struggle for independence:

The final incident of the unequal struggle which shows the desperate determination and courage of these Greek women, who suckled these klephts of the mountains and kept alive that spirit of liberty which finally won independence from Turkish misrule, has been thus described:

"Some sixty of these Suliote women, with their children, were assembled on a ledge of rock overhanging a sheer precipice, and, having witnessed the gradual extermination of their defenders, they resolved to die by their own act rather than fall into the hands of the grisly tyrant of Janina. The position which they occupied suggested an easy form of death, and the manner in which they sought it was tragically weird and grim. First, each mother took her child, embraced it, and, turning her head away from the pitiful scene, pushed it over the edge of the abyss. Then these sixty women linked their hands together, and, singing the familiar daring song of Suli above the rattle of the musketry, danced the old surtos measure round and round the ledge of rock, having each her back to the void as the winding chain approached the brink. And every time the chain wound round, one dancer, the last in the line, unlinked her hand, took one step back, and fell down into annihilation. One by one, without haste, without pause, singing the dancing song, they followed each other down that leap of death, until the last sprung over alone, consecrating the mountain with their blood an altar of liberty, from which, ere long, a flame arose that fired those ancient ranges from sea to sea."

Such was the spirit of Greek womanhood in the trying year of the Greek War of Independence; and it was this spirit which enabled the Greeks to struggle on, without resources and allies, amid discouragements and misrepresentations, till finally the nations of Europe came to their rescue and established the modern Greek kingdom on a sure basis.

Athens was finally chosen as the seat of the new Greek government; and in 1837 the Bavarian king Otho and his lovely bride, the princess Amalia, entered Athens in triumph, and the kingdom of Hellas was fairly launched. Within the memory of living men the dynasty of Otho fell, and a scion of the royal house of Denmark, King George, with his Russian consort, Queen Olga, now holds sway in Athens.

The modern Greek woman of the higher classes has become so thoroughly cosmopolitan in her culture that she has lost in large measure her distinctive traits. Her sympathy is rather with Parisian life than with English, though her deportment is marked by a sobriety of manner partaking rather of Greek repose than of French effusion. Many faces seen in Greek lands exhibit, in profile especially, the Greek type of beauty.

The women of the lower classes, no doubt, preserve many of the characteristics of the race in all ages, in spite of the intermingling with foreign peoples and the results of centuries of Turkish oppression, which time alone can eradicate. Domestic fidelity, maternal affection, devotion to religious observances, the cheerful discharge of the duties and responsibilities of wedded life, are nowhere more beautifully illustrated than among the Greek women of to-day.

It is the Christian religion which makes the life of Greek women under King George superior to that of their sisters under the dominion of the Sultan, and we may hope that in the fulness of time the Greek women of Europe and Asia outside of the Hellenic kingdom may enjoy, untrammelled by Turkish authority, the rights and privileges of that religion which has elevated the sex, and that the Greek woman of the future may combine the personal graces of her sister in antiquity with the cultivation of the soul and the enlargement of spirit which comes to women with the inculcation of Christianity.

CONTENTS

I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV INTRODUCTION PREFACE PART FIRST WOMEN OF THE GOSPEL NARRATIVE WOMEN OF THE APOSTOLIC AGE THE ERA OF PERSECUTION SAINT HELENA AND THE TIME OF CONSTANTINE POST-NICENE MOTHERS THE NUNS OF THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH WOMEN WHO WITNESSED THE FALL OF ROME WOMEN OF THE FRANKISH CHURCH PART SECOND THE EMPRESS EUDOXIA THE RIVAL EMPRESSES--PULCHERIA AND EUDOCIA THE EMPRESS THEODORA OTHER SELF-ASSERTING AUGUSTÆ--VERINA, ARIADNE. SOPHIA, MARTINA. IRENE BYZANTINE EMPRESSES--THEODORA II. THEOPHANO. ZOE. THEODORA III. THE PRINCESSES OF THE COMNENI WOMANHOOD OF THE BYZANTINE DECADENCE

List of Illustrations

SUBJECT ARTIST

Seeking shelter Christ and the daughter of Jairus Christians in the arena Famine and pestilence The legend of the roses Byzantine interior, ninth century Luc Oliver Merson Albert Keller L.P.de Laubadère A. Hirschl J. Nogales S. Baron