The Blachernae Palace
December 31, 1180

Maria porphyrogenita, daughter of the Emperor Manuel I, stepdaughter of the Empress-Regent Maria of Antioch, and elder half-sister to Alexius II, eleven-year-old titular Emperor of Byzantium, wrapped herself in a thick woolen cloak and climbed alone up the dark, slick steps leading to the highest ramparts of the Blachernae Palace. It was a foreboding afternoon, grey and blustery, with leaden skies and wisps of fog drifting across the upper reaches of the Golden Horn. A fine mist filled the air, moistening her cheeks and adorning the strands of brown hair that escaped her cap with tiny silver droplets. The weather did not disturb her. It might ensure that she was left undisturbed, and Maria wanted to be alone with her thoughts.

She was thirty years old, a handsome woman, but with none of the soft, inviting loveliness of her stepmother Maria of Antioch. Of medium height, she had strong bones, broad shoulders and wide hips, an inheritance from her Swabian mother, Bertha of Sulzbach. But there was nothing soft about her frame: she moved briskly, and gave off an impression of compressed power. She was an excellent rider who loved nothing better than giving her horse free rein in the hilly countryside outside the city walls or along the bower-shaded paths of the Belgrade Forest. Her most memorable feature was her grey eyes: large, round, and piercingly direct, they could make generals, grand dukes, and patriarchs flinch.

She had known this would not be an easy year. It was evident to his family and the members of the imperial court that the Emperor Manuel’s health was failing as the year 1179 faded away. The sixty-one-year-old Emperor knew it, too, and Manuel had done what he could to secure the future for his only son, Alexius II. Alexius had just turned ten, and with the sands running out on the aging Emperor, a prolonged and dangerous minority clearly lay ahead for the Empire.

Manuel did what he could to buttress his family’s position. He made marriage alliances – betrothing Alexius to Agnes Capet, a nine-year-old daughter of the ailing French King, Louis VII, while Maria was belatedly affianced to the seventeen-year-old Ranier, the handsome youngest son of William, Marquis of Montferrat and Count of Jaffa in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Manuel also sent out envoys seeking pledges of support for his son’s succession from Byzantium’s neighbors: the Prince of Antioch, the King of Jerusalem, and his longtime adversary and sometime friend, the wily Seljuk Sultan of Iconium, Kilij Arslan II. (That the requested pledges were readily given was a measure of Manuel’s personal charm, the Empire’s continuing prestige and power, and the uncertain successions that likewise lay ahead for the courts of Iconium and Jerusalem.) And Manuel sought as well to conciliate potential domestic enemies, of whom the most significant was his long-estranged cousin, Andronicus Comnenus.

Maria followed the ramparts towards the Golden Horn. A pair of sentries saluted her as she passed the Tower of Anemas, but otherwise she seemed to be alone. She paused at the end of the ramparts and looked across the vast domes and buttresses of the huge church of the Virgin of Blachernae. Maria thought back to that splendid spring day in 1163 when she had marched in procession from the palace’s Danoubious Hall through a series of connecting staircases to the church for the ceremony marking her engagement to the fifteen-year-old Bela, younger brother of King Istvan of Hungary. Maria had been thirteen, but she had been serious and self-contained even then. She grew up hearing the rumors about her father and a succession of mistresses, one of them his niece Theodora. Her mother accepted her father’s infidelities with stoic grace, but Maria sensed the pain and loneliness that lay behind her conscientious observance of her religious devotions. The sudden death of Maria’s sister at the age of four had drawn her parents closer together, but then Bertha herself had died when Maria was only nine. Manuel’s grief at the time seemed genuine and deeply felt, but he was a King, with political needs, and a man, with physical ones. Within two years he remarried, taking as his bride another Maria – the beautiful young teenage daughter of Constance of Antioch and Raymond of Poitiers.

Even before her marriage to the Emperor of Byzantium, Maria of Antioch had been the talk of the Levant. Throughout her life, she prompted endless comparisons to Helen of Troy. Her hair was like spun gold, her skin white as ivory, her blue eyes large and soulful, and her features finely sculpted. She had a lovely smile that dimpled her cheeks, a voice that could be both challenging and alluring, and a bewitching laugh men did not easily forget. Only fourteen at the time of her wedding, she soon developed a figure that was an invitation to sin. Nearly two decades later, when she was thirty-three, the venerable but worldly Archbishop Eustathius of Thessalonica could still describe her as "ripe for love."

It had not been easy for the eleven-year-old porphyrogenita to adopt to having this dazzling creature, only three years her senior, for a stepmother. The porphyrogenita naturally resented this adolescent Latin newcomer for replacing her mother in her father’s life and affections, but there was more to the distance between them than that. Where the Antiochene princess was flirtatious and light-hearted, the Emperor’s daughter was somber, and she found her stepmother frivolous. And soon the two Marias were rivals not merely for Manuel’s attention and affections, but for the future rule of the Empire as well.

Initially, it had not been clear that Maria of Antioch would play a political role of any great significance. Manuel was desperate to have a son who could succeed him, and of course he hoped that his young and nubile Latin bride would give him one. But everyone in the palace knew that Manuel had fathered only two children, both daughters, during his thirteen-year marriage to Bertha (although he did father a boy out of wedlock on his niece and mistress Theodora Comnena). With his forty-fifth birthday now approaching, Manuel recognized that he might not have a legitimate son, and he knew it was necessary to make some alternative arrangement for his succession.

The solution he hit upon was to propose a union between his surviving daughter and Prince Bela, the younger brother of the ruling king of Hungary. And Manuel had more to offer than the usual dowry: he proposed to King Istvan that if he had no legitimate son, he would make the porphyrogenita and her husband-to-be the heirs to his throne. A Hungarian prince could well become the first foreign Emperor of Byzantium!

It was an astonishing offer, and King Istvan readily agreed. So the great ceremony inside the Church of the Virgin at Blachernae that spring day in 1163 was not merely a bethrothal, but an oath-taking and confirmation of Manuel’s promises to Istvan about the imperial succession. Maria had stood beside her handsome and intelligent young husband-to-be, wrapped in silk robes embroidered with pearls and silver and gold thread, a jewel-studded crown heavy on her head. She smiled shyly at Bela, and he gave her an encouraging wink as the lengthy ceremonies dragged on and clouds of incense swirled around them. The walls glittered with mosaics and the iconostasis of the great church towered above her, hammered silver framed with gold and inset with dozens of brilliantly colored images. Her life had stretched ahead of her like a brilliant dream.

Was that the happiest day of my life? the porphyrogenita wondered as she looked down upon the church. It was never empty, and even on this gloomy afternoon worshippers continued to pass in and out of the great oaken doors. She couldn’t answer her questions with certainty – for there had been many happy days over the next several years, as she grew to womanhood in the palace and watched Bela (or "Alexius," to call him by his Byzantine name) as he matured into an impressive young man. Eventually, however, she began to chafe as her father repeatedly postponed her wedding, still hoping for a legitimate son of his own from his teenaged Latin bride.

As the years passed, Maria of Antioch grew ever more beautiful. Yet she was not fruitful – until she became pregnant at last in the winter of 1169. The palace watched her pregnancy with anxious uncertainty as the months passed, and there was relief and rejoicing in the court and the city on September 14, 1169 when she gave birth to a son in the purple chamber of the great palace.

Bela-Alexius and Maria, however, did not join the rejoicing. Their futures were suddenly shadowed with uncertainty, now that Manuel had sired another "Alexius" of his own body and blood, whom he would of course want to be his successor. But no one ever knew whether infants would survive the first few precarious years of life, so for the next several years Manuel continued to keep his daughter and prospective Hungarian son-in-law in matrimonial limbo. It suited him to have an alternative Empress and Emperor in reserve, but the arrangement was harder for the porphyrogenita and her affianced prince to endure.

Maria was now in her early twenties, well past the age at which noble girls usually married, while Bela was almost twenty-five. He grew restless and irritable, seething at his now uncertain status in a foreign land he had expected to rule, where all the court’s attention was now focused on a bawling toddler. And after being engaged for nearly a decade, his affection for the porphyrogenita faded away in frustration as it became increasingly uncertain whether they would ever wed. By now, they had simply known each other too long, and the vigorous and attractive Bela therefore sought romance and excitement with a series of palace ladies and courtesans. But at least he could enjoy such outlets, Maria thought bitterly. For the Emperor’s daughter, there were no comparable avenues of release.

Then, in 1172, King Istvan of Hungary died, leaving the throne to his younger brother. For Bela, it was a heaven-sent solution to his increasingly awkward position in Constantinople, which had become a kind of servitude for him. Maria hardly knew what she should feel as she watched his excited preparations to depart and take up his rule in Hungary. They had become distant, but who would be her bridegroom now? When Bela and his retinue galloped away from the Golden Gate, he waved once and then did not look back. Maria felt a devastating emptiness. She returned to her room at the palace, threw herself on her bed, and wept in anguish while the rest of the court went on about its business, seemingly relieved that the awkward problem of Bela’s status had now been so happily resolved.

Eventually, Maria dried her tears, composed herself, and then went to her father and demanded that she be allowed to marry. All the friends of her childhood had long had husbands now, and many of them had two or even three children. Meanwhile, she endured the condescension of her stepmother and the indifference or – worse – the patronizing solicitude of the members of the imperial court, finding what solace she could in wild horseback rides outside the city walls.

Her father professed sympathy for her plight, but given Manuel’s shortage of children, Maria was a diplomatic coin of great value, and he did not want to spend her carelessly. For years he was fascinated by the prospect of making a marriage alliance with the Empire’s long-time arch enemies, the Normans of southern Italy and Sicily, in the person of King William II. Maria had of course grown up hearing ogre-stories about the Normans, but she knew that Sicily was a powerful kingdom, one moreover that possessed a high level of material culture – there were churches and cathedrals in and near Palermo decorated with mosaics as brilliant as any in Byzantium. And William was said to be a decent, civilized man and an able king. Maria was eager for the match, but Manuel temporized. Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Empire, also had a son – Henry – although he was still only a boy of ten or eleven. Manuel had certainly had his share of differences with Frederick; perhaps a marital tie might be the means of resolving them. Eventually, the negotiations with William II petered out unproductively, and he married a daughter of Henry II Plantagenet of England. The negotiations with Barbarossa likewise ultimately came to nothing. By now Maria was in her late twenties, still a maid, frustrated, loveless, and childless, like some Byzantine Electra.

Once again Maria demanded of her father – with tears, yes, but also with unmistakable anger – that he find her a husband. And so Manuel had looked around and at last settled on Ranier, the fourth and youngest son of William V, Marquis of Montferrat and Count of Jaffa. The Montferrats were admittedly a famous and wealthy family. They not only ruled a rich principality stretching from the lower foothills of the Alps to the fat plains of Lombardy, but also held extensive lands in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, making the Marquis one of the greatest barons of Outremer. But the Montferrats were nevertheless a huge step down from the Emperor of Germany or the King of Sicily, much less the inheritance of Byzantium itself. As a fourth son, Ranier did not even stand to inherit Montferrat – unless all three of his elder brothers somehow predeceased him without having heirs of their own. Moreover, although he was handsome, intelligent, and well-built, Ranier was only seventeen. That made him barely half Maria’s age – he was literally an unbearded youth! The palace women teased her with good-natured raillery about her splendid fortune in sharing her bed with such a virile and attractive boy, but Maria could not help feeling disappointed and humiliated that her once brilliant prospects had finally dwindled to this.

And so, in February 1180, she had returned to the Church of the Virgin at Blachernae for her wedding, a bride at last at thirty – with a bridegroom who had been an infant in swaddling clothes when she stood with Bela at their betrothal ceremony seventeen years earlier. Ranier was given the revenues of Thessalonica and the title of Caesar, officially placing him second in the court hierarchy, but the title had little real significance. And yet, when the ten-year-old Alexius II and his nine-year-old French bride Agnes Capet were wed a few weeks later in the Trullan Chamber of the Great Palace, all the external magnificence of the ceremony and the surrounding festivities and games in the hippodrome could not entirely quell the uncertainty that hung over the dynasty’s future. For it was increasingly clear to Maria that her father would not live much longer, no matter what the palace astrologers might be telling him. Plainly, a time of uncertainty lay ahead. Under those circumstances, who knew whether these two innocent children would ever rule as Emperor and Empress of Byzantium?

Having done what he could to strengthen his son’s position by external diplomacy, Manuel then turned his attention to potential enemies nearer at hand. The most obvious of these was his brilliant but self-indulgent cousin, Andronicus Comnenus, son of the sebastocrator Isaac, one of the previous Emperor John II’s brothers. For most of the past decade, Andronicus had lived in exile just beyond Manuel’s reach, in a castle across the border from Byzantine Pontus that was a gift to him from a Seljuk emir.

But then chance conspired to place Theodora Comnena, Andronicus’s cousin, long-time mistress, and the mother of two of his children into the power of Nicephorus Palaeologus, Manuel’s Governor in the Pontus. When Andronicus wrote to Manuel begging forgiveness for his past transgressions and piteously beseeching him to release Theodora, Manuel saw an opportunity. He invited Andronicus to Constantinople for a public ceremony of reconciliation.

The resulting meeting did not go exactly as Manuel had planned. When Andronicus was shown into Manuel’s throne room in the Anastasiacus Hall of the Blachernae Palace, he suddenly threw off his cloak to reveal that he had wrapped himself in a great iron chain extending from his neck to his feet. Andronicus then fell to his knees at the entrance to the hall, holding out the end of the chain in his hands and loudly expressing his contrition in the most self-abasing terms. The sentimental Manuel was quite overwhelmed by this display of histrionics: he burst into tears and directed his attendants to raise Andronicus to his feet. But Andronicus insisted that one of the Emperor’s attendants must first drag him across the floor and fling him at the foot of the Emperor’s throne to complete his demonstration of penance. This task fell to Isaac Angelus, the younger son of one of the Empire’s leading generals. Manuel then embraced his renegade cousin and made a great show of restoring him to favor, appointing him to succeed Nicephorus Palaeologus as Governor of Pontus.

On one matter, however, Manuel was inflexible. He adamantly refused to countenance any resumption of Andronicus’s incestuous relations with his cousin Theodora, whom he decreed must live out the balance of her life in a monastery. It was an act of high hypocrisy, given that Manuel himself had once fathered a child out of wedlock on one of his nieces. But Andronicus appeared to accept this painful edict with more grace than might have been expected.

Finally, just before Andronicus set out to take up his governorship at Oinaion [modern Unye], Manuel insisted on a last private meeting. When the two cousins were alone, Manuel required Andronicus to swear a loyalty oath to himself and to his son Alexius II. "And should I see or perceive or hear anything bringing dishonor to you or inflicting injury to your crown, I shall relay this information to you and thwart any such attempt as far as I am able," the oath concluded. It was July, 1180. Manuel did not know it, but he had barely sixty days to live.

[To Be Continued]