Fairest Maidans: Byzantine Bridal Consests
In the year A.D. 830, in the glorious city of Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire, the widowed empress Euphrosyne summoned the fairest maidens of the land to gather in a newly built ceremonial hall of the imperial palace so that her sixteen-year-old stepson and heir to throne, Theophilos, could select a bride for himself. The climax of this glamorous event was when Theophilos indicated his choice by handing the lucky girl a golden apple. It is the stuff of fairytales, and perhaps this event and others like it even served as the raw material and inspiration for later western European folktales.
Euphrosyne did not invent this method for finding a suitable bride for her charge. Her remarkable and powerful grandmother Irene must receive credit for that; and it is with Irene that we may also find some of the raw material and inspiration for another feature of later European folk tales: The Evil Queen.
An artist’s impression of Constantinople around 1200. Although this image represents a later time, the prominent features of the Great Palace, Hippodrome, and Hagia Sophia in the foreground and centre of the image were already in place at the time the events of this essay unfolded.
Irene
In the year 787, the widowed empress Irene held a competition to find a bride for her sixteen-year-old son Constantine, heir to the imperial throne. She invited the notable families of her empire to present their unwed daughters of suitable age for selection. From among the numerous candidates who came, she and her chief advisor, the eunuch Stavrakios, head of the imperial bureaucracy, selected a certain Maria of Amnia, daughter of a pious provincial landowner.
Irene may well have been the architect of her own widowhood and regency. She and her husband, Leo IV, had found themselves on opposite sides of a religious controversy that was started by Leo's grandfather, Leo III. The emperors of Leo's dynasty were Iconoclasts: people who took literally the Biblical prohibition on images in worship. This idea, which had little support among ordinary Byzantines, seems to have arisen from a sort of superstitious or magical logic: a) Since the rise of Islam in the early 600's, the Arabs had conquered huge swathes of Byzantine territory; b) Muslims kept their worship spaces clear of images, but Christians filled theirs with frescos and mosaics of Christ and the saints; c) monks, nuns, and the common people of the empire were often avid venerators of icons, Muslim commoners were not; therefore d) God must be punishing the Byzantine Empire for worshipping images.
Leo carried on his grand-father's and father's policies of destroying icons ("iconoclast" means "icon smasher"), punishing icon painters, and sometimes even shutting down convents and monasteries (seen as hot beds of icon production and veneration) and forcing the resident monks and nuns to marry on pain of death. But while Leo was trying to rid the empire of icons, Irene quietly had icons smuggled into her quarters in the imperial palace for her own devotional practice.
In 780, Leo discovered this secret arrangement between his wife and his servants. Fearing a plot against him by iconophiles ("icon-lovers," also called more disparagingly iconodules or "icon-slaves" or "those who serve icons"), he had the offending servants publicly flogged and paraded down the main ceremonial and commercial thoroughfare of Constantinople. One died from the ordeal and the rest were forced to become monks. To punish his wife, he enforced a separation from her. Perhaps he thought that by shaming her in this way she would repent of her sin. Instead, he only seems to have provoked Irene to revenge. In September of that year Leo died.
Irene circulated the story that Leo had developed an insane desire for a votive crown that resided in the treasury of Hagia Sophia, the chief church of the city. When he had seized it and put it on his head, boils broke out on his head, he developed a high fever, and died. It is more likely that the empress had Leo poisoned.
At the time, Irene was about twenty-five years old; her son Constantine was nine. She quickly foiled a plot by her late husband's advisors to depose her and name one of their own as emperor. She exiled the apparent leader of the plot and had the other four ordained as priests to make them ineligible to rule. To replace them she put the loyal and trustworthy Stavrakios in charge of the imperial bureaucracy.
As regent for her son, Irene proved a capable leader both administratively and militarily—one of the most successful of her time. Seeking useful alliances for the empire, she had her son betrothed to Rotrud, daughter of Charlemagne. When Constantine turned sixteen, Irene sent for the thirteen-year-old Rotrud to come to Constantinople in order for the wedding (and the alliance) to proceed. Apparently, Charlemagne did not have the heart to send his daughter away, or perhaps to see the alliance through. This prompted Irene to call off the match and look for a wife and future empress from among her own people via the mechanism of the above mentioned bridal competition.
A gold solidus or nomisma, the standard gold coin of the Byzantine Empire, showing Irene beside her son, Constantine, from her time as regent.
But young Constantine never liked the wife whom his mother and Stavrakios had chosen for him. In 790, when he turned nineteen, Constantine decided to try to assert himself. He directed a plot against Stavrakios, but the eunuch became aware of the plot and informed Irene. She was irate that her son would dare to do such a thing and had him confined to his quarters. She demanded an oath from the army that, as long as she lived, they would keep Constantine from power. While her generals agreed (several of whom were also eunuchs appointed by her), the oath incited an uprising in the army that even the generals could not master. To placate the troops, Irene had to release her son and allow him to become ruler in his own right. Constantine paid his mother back by confining her to her quarters and by exiling Stavrakios.
But within two years Constantine came to the realization that he did not have his mother's ability to rule. He freed her and recalled Stavrakios. Mother and son shared power unhappily for a few more years. In 795 Constantine decided to divorce Maria and marry his mistress Theodote, on the grounds that Maria had not provided him with a male heir. By doing this, Constantine alienated not only the church hierarchy but also much of the public who saw this as an immoral and heartless act. Irene now used her son's unpopularity to plot against him with her inner circle of officials and generals. Constantine became aware of the plot and tried to flee but was captured by some of the conspirators. They immediately blinded him, making him ineligible to rule. The story from the palace was that Constantine lived on in confinement, but all indications are that he died from his wounds.
Irene had herself proclaimed sole "Emperor of the Romans,"[1] the first woman to rule the Roman Empire in her own right. She managed to hold on to power for another five years, until she was deposed in a coup by several generals. The trigger for the coup seems to have been Irene's consideration of a proposal for marriage from the recently widowed Charlemagne: an alliance that could have united the major eastern and western Christian empires into one formidable power.[2] Many of Irene's courtiers and commanders, however, preferred to nip this possibility in the bud, perhaps fearing a watering down of their own power by an influx of Frankish grandees. They brazenly staged their coup while Charlemagne's ambassadors were in the palace awaiting Irene's response. She seems to have understood that her time was past and quietly accepted exile to a convent she had founded some years earlier.
While Irene was a model ruler for the age and did not do anything any more evil or reprehensible than any of the male rulers of her time, one can see the rough outlines of the figure of "the evil queen" in certain details of her reign: having her husband assassinated; forcing a wife of her choosing on her son; confining her son to his quarters and barring him from assuming power ("locking him in the tower" so to speak); having her son blinded and (inadvertently?) killed. Certainly, to ordinary tastes, hiring hit men to do in your husband and son in order to get and hold on to power smacks of something like evil and makes for good story telling.
Euphrosyne and Theodora
When Euphrosyne, the granddaughter of Irene, found herself in a similar situation to her grandmother (her husband, the emperor, dead before the heir was old enough to assume the throne) she took a somewhat different tack, as we saw at the beginning of this essay. Euphrosyne was the daughter of Maria of Amnia, the wife forced upon Constantine VI by Irene. Having lived with the unhappy consequences of her parents' match, Euphrosyne probably did not want to force a wife on her charge in the same way.
Another factor in her choice may have been, as mentioned above, that Euphrosyne was only the stepmother of the heir Theophilos. She was the second wife of the late emperor Michael II. Michael had come to the throne via a complex series of plots and attempted coups against his predecessor. When his first wife, the mother of Theophilos, died, Michael married Euphrosyne, the scion of a line associated with imperial legitimacy and military success, in order to strengthen his own position. Michael, true to the iconoclast sentiments of his predecessors, probably gave no thought to the fact that he had also married the daughter and granddaughter of committed and determined iconophile women.
Euphrosyne's version of the bridal contest, while seeming more considerate of her stepson's sensibilities than Irene's, may have been so only on the surface. The woman whom Theophilos chose, Theodora, who was very beautiful and exhibited many desirable traits, was also an iconophile. While coincidence should not be ruled out, it seems likely that Euphrosyne had vetted the selection of potential brides to include only iconophiles.[3] Thus, once Theophilos was married to Theodora, Euphrosyne could retire quietly to a convent to engage in her preferred manner of worship in undisturbed privacy, confident in the knowledge that the love and worship of icons was still represented in the palace.
Gold solidus or nomisma with the image of Theodora beside her son Michael, with her daughter Thekla on the reverse
Only twelve years later, in the year 842, Theodora became a widow when Theophilos died of dysentery (whether natural or induced, we do not know). Their son Michael was only two years old, so Theodora, like Irene, became regent. She proved to be a powerful and confident ruler as well, managing the affairs of the empire with skill. In the spirit of Irene and Euphrosyne, she reasserted the use of icons in the life of the church. Her proclamation of 843 permanently restored the use of icons and ended the controversy. To this day on the Orthodox calendar, the First Sunday in Lent commemorates this event as "The Feast of Orthodoxy." For her critical part in the restoration of icons in the life of the Orthodox Church, Theodora was later made a saint.
Like Irene who worked closely with the eunuch Stavrakios, Theodora worked in tandem with the eunuch Theoktistos whom she had appointed head of the imperial bureaucracy. When her son Michael turned fifteen, she conducted a bridal contest on his behalf. Unfortunately, Theodora eschewed Euphrosyne's method that had led to her own marriage and produced admirable results. Instead, she chose to follow Irene's model. She and Theoktistos chose her son's wife from among the candidates. Here began a series of developments that would become a tangled web of love triangles and affairs more akin to a modern soap opera than to a traditional fairytale.
(Three Eudokias + Two Zoës + One Theophano) ÷ Two Emperors = Byzantine Palace Politics
Michael's favourite activities were drinking wine, attending chariot races, playing practical jokes, and most of all, spending time with his mistress Eudokia Ingerina. While Theodora and Theoktistos allowed Eudokia to enter the bridal competition, they passed her over due to her non-virginal state and chose a candidate they considered more suitable for the role of empress: a young woman named Eudokia Dekapolitissa, the model of piety and propriety.
Michael was furious. In retaliation, he conspired with Theodora's brother Bardas (i.e., his uncle) to assassinate Theoktistos. With Michael wed but no male heir in sight, Bardas was technically the next in line to succeed his nephew. Apparently, Bardas also saw Theodora's eunuch as a problem to be eliminated. The plot was successfully executed. Theodora raged at her son for having had such a good and capable man killed. As for Bardas, it is not clear whether Theodora knew that her brother was also involved, but she does not seem to have berated him in the same way as her son. After several months of being harangued, Michael had had enough. Once he turned sixteen, he had himself proclaimed emperor and forced his mother to retire to a convent. He ascended the throne as Michael III.
While Michael did not try to divorce his wife, now the empress Eudokia Dekapolitissa, which would have alienated not only the church hierarchy but also the public he had to face every time he attended the chariot races in the Hippodrome, he still spent a great deal of his time with his mistress Eudokia Ingerina (not to mention his other favourite pastimes), leaving much of the civil governing to uncle Bardas, and most military matters to his other maternal uncle, Petronas.
In time, a shrewd schemer and social climber named Basil came into the emperor's inner circle. Basil hailed from a family of Armenian refugees who had fled from Arab incursions into their native country. The imperial authorities settled them, along with other Armenian refugees, in Macedonia to create a buffer against the Slavs and Bulgars to the north. When Basil was a child, the Bulgars carried him and his family off as human booty. When Basil was twenty-five, a Byzantine expedition freed many of these captives and settled them in Thrace, not far from Constantinople. Basil moved to the capital to seek his fortune. Starting as a groom in the imperial stables, the amiable, smooth operating Basil soon became the head of the stables. Michael liked his new stable master so much that when the post of grand chamberlain became vacant, he gave the job to Basil, placing the Armenian squarely in the centre of palace affairs.
In 866, when Michael learned that his mistress Eudokia Ingerina was pregnant, he saw possibilities for a change in the succession. With his uncle Bardas technically next in line for the throne, he did not want his child, a potential heir who could pre-empt Bardas, to be born out of wedlock, which would make him ineligible for the throne. To legitimize his (hoped for) son's birth, Michael had his drinking buddy and grand chamberlain, the widowed Basil, marry Eudokia Ingerina. However, to keep Basil from laying hands on her, Michael assigned his older sister Thekla to be Basil's mistress.
But Michael wanted to make sure that uncle Bardas would not try anything underhanded. During the preparations for a military expedition at a camp in western Anatolia that included Bardas, Basil, and Michael, the young emperor suddenly departed from the camp to return to Constantinople, leaving Basil with orders to kill Bardas on trumped up charges of conspiring against the emperor.
A few months later a son, Leo, was indeed born to Eudokia Ingerina. With uncle Bardas out of the way, Michael celebrated the birth with chariot races and by adopting Basil, who was twenty-nine years his senior, as his grandson. He also had Basil crowned junior emperor but warned him not to get any ideas. Within a year Eudokia Ingerina produced a second son, Stephen—more reason for Michael to celebrate.
Solidus or nomisma with Basil on the obverse as emperor, and Michael and Eudokia Ingerina on the reverse.
But Basil knew when to act. At a moment when Michael was once again besotted with wine, Basil had him killed. As junior emperor, Basil automatically assumed the throne. Basil may have found it too embarrassing to admit that he had been forced to marry his predecessor's mistress, so he did not attempt to get a divorce that the church certainly would have granted him given the circumstances. Instead, he had his own son from his first marriage, Constantine, crowned junior emperor, and he had the second son of Michael and Eudokia Ingerina, Stephen, castrated and given to the church. He refrained from going after the eldest, Leo, perhaps because he had been named heir at the time that Basil was adopted and elevated to junior emperor.
One wonders about the fates of the former empress Eudokia Dekapolitissa and the late emperor's sister Thekla who had been forced into the role of mistress. One also wonders how the new empress Eudokia Ingerina felt about having her lover killed by her nominal husband. It is reasonable to speculate that Eudokia Dekapolitissa probably retired to a convent, given that this was such a common place of refuge and retirement for members of the palace. Thekla may have been shuffled off with the widowed empress, or Basil may have retained her as his mistress. Eudokia Ingerina, now in a position of some power, seems to have bided her time.
In 879, twelve years after Basil seized power, his son Constantine died. Basil's grief was deep, and in his anguish, he badgered the Patriarch of Constantinople (whom he had appointed to the post) to declare Constantine a saint. Upon getting his wish, Basil founded a monastery in honour of his newly sainted son. Basil is also reputed to have approached a bishop named Theodore Santabarenos about contacting the spirit of his son.
Thus Leo, son of the late Michael III, but officially considered Basil's progeny, became the heir apparent. By this time Basil and Eudokia Ingerina had had a son together: Alexander. To try to keep Leo from the throne, Basil had Alexander crowned junior emperor.
In 882 Leo turned sixteen, and that year his mother, Eudokia Ingerina, held a bridal competition on his behalf. She chose a relative of hers, Theophano; a pious and decent girl. Leo hated her and objected to the match, but Basil, who detested the boy, was happy to force him into the undesired union, perhaps in a kind of retaliation for the humiliating marital situation Leo's father had forced on him. Not long after this, Eudokia died, leaving Leo without an advocate before Basil. As Leo's unhappiness increased, he took a mistress, a certain Zoë Zaützina, the daughter of Stylianos Zaützes, an influential magnate. When Theophano complained to Basil of Leo's infidelity, Basil personally thrashed Leo and had Zoë married off to someone else.
A year later, Theodore Santabarenos, the same bishop whom Basil had approached for occult services, accused Leo of plotting against Basil. Basil had the alleged co-conspirators blinded or exiled. He declared his intention to do the same to Leo, but was dissuaded by the Patriarch and by Stylianos Zaützes. Instead, Basil, following the example of Irene, had Leo confined to his quarters. Three years later another plot against Basil was foiled. By this time Basil was seventy-four and his days were clearly numbered. His advisors persuaded him to free Leo from his confinement. A month later Basil was dead.
Leo VI became emperor in 886, just shy of his twentieth birthday. Like his father Michael III, Leo was a bon vivant. After replacing, blinding, or exiling his predecessor's circle of ministers and advisors, Leo let his new deputies carry on the work of governing and waging war while he devoted himself to the pleasures of the flesh. Leo made his mistress' father, Stylianus Zaützes, head of the bureaucracy and thus Zaützes came to be the real decision maker for the empire. While Leo remained married to his detested Theophano, he seems to have still carried on with Zoë Zaützina, even though she was married to another. Perhaps behind the scenes the emperor was able to force Zoë's husband to behave as though he were not.
Whatever the secret details of this affair, just over a decade later, both Theophano and Zoë's husband conveniently died at about the same time. Rumours of poisoning circulated. As soon as they could, Leo and Zoë married. This marriage came none too soon for Zoë's father Stylianos who had fallen into some ill repute with Leo both due to several disastrous military undertakings and the fact that a number of other members of the Zaützes clan had made a failed attempt to assassinate Leo. Now with Zoë as empress, Stylianos found himself restored to favour. One wonders if perhaps Stylianos had arranged the dual poisoning as a means to get on Leo's good side again.
But the honeymoon between Leo and the Zaützes family did not last long. Leo had to punish some of Stylianos' henchmen for corruption, and Leo seems to have become increasingly dissatisfied with the way this family operated. Only a year after the long sought-after union, both Zoë and her father died (poisoning?). At this, some other members of the Zaützes family tried to assassinate Leo but were betrayed by one of their servants, an Arab eunuch named Samonas. After punishing the conspirators, Leo rewarded Samonas by taking him into his personal service as an agent.
Leo now married the beautiful Eudokia Beana, but she died while giving birth to a son who died as well. Under eastern church law, fourth marriages were not permissible under any circumstances, even widowhood, so Leo took a mistress: Zoë, who bore the appellation Karbonopsina (the Coal-Eyed). Because Leo could now only produce a legitimate heir by going against the laws of the church, conspiracies against him multiplied, some even originating in the highest circles of the church itself.
After Zoë gave birth to a son, Leo had to find a way around the church rules. The opportunity presented itself when the Patriarch, Nicholas, was caught conspiring with Andronikos Doukas, an influential general, to remove Leo and put Andronikos in his place. Humbled, the Patriarch agreed to baptize the child, but stalled on Leo's petition for a fourth marriage. Leo found a priest to perform the marriage, but at the same time sent messengers to appeal to Pope Sergius III for an indulgence to marry, because in the western church, in the case of widowhood, there was no limit to the number of times one could marry. Just before Leo's representative to the Pope returned with the Papal indulgence, Leo forced Nicholas to resign and replaced him with a respected churchman named Euthymios. On his own, without benefit of the Papal indulgence, Euthymios condoned Leo's fourth marriage. But Euthymios defrocked the priest who had performed the marriage and imposed a period of penance on Leo. The Patriarch also insisted that the emperor put into law the eastern church's traditional ban on fourth marriages. Leo agreed.
And they lived...
By this time, the fallout from Theodora and Theoktistos' choice of Eudokia Dekapolitissa over Eudokia Ingerina had nearly run its convoluted course. There was still the matter of Eudokia Ingerina's third son, Alexander, whom she had had with Basil. While on his accession Leo had appointed his castrated full brother Stephen (Ingerina's second son with Michael) to the office of Patriarch,[4] to his half-brother Alexander, whom he detested, he gave only the vague status of official colleague. In practice, Alexander remained without influence. When Leo died, his son with Zoë Karbonopsina, Constantine, was only six years old. Mysteriously, rather than assign the regency to his wife, as had been the case with Irene, Euphronsyne, and Theodora, Leo gave that job to Alexander.
Alexander immediately expelled Zoë from the palace, but he did not send her to a monastery. We have to assume that she took up residence with her extended family on one of their estates. Alexander also deposed Euthymios from the Patriarchate and reappointed Nicholas. Although Alexander was only forty-one, he was in poor health. Sensing his impending death and determined to keep Zoë out of the picture, Alexander appointed a seven-man council to act as regent for his nephew. The head of the council was the Patriarch Nicholas.
At Alexander's death, Zoë tried to return to the palace, but Nicholas sent her away and forced the leading officials and bishops to swear that they would never recognize her as regent. But Nicholas had many enemies. Nicholas' regency was ill-starred, and after a number of bungled political and military manoeuvres, he was ousted in a coup by Zoë and her supporters.
Now Zoë could assume the regency for her son as had Irene, Euphrosyne, and Theodora before her. She wanted to bring Euthymios back as Patriarch, but he declined. Grudgingly, she accepted Nicholas as Patriarch. In return for being retained, he formally recognized her regency.
Zoë's tenure lasted less than five years. The empire faced several embarrassing defeats under her watch, inspiring certain ambitious military men to plot against her. When her son was still only thirteen, she was deposed in a coup and sent away to a convent. She was never able to hold the kind of bridal contest for her son that her illustrious female predecessors had.
After Zoë's third and final departure from the palace and following a series of characteristically Byzantine intrigues and counterplots among various factions in the bureaucracy and the military, her son Constantine came under the shadow of a certain Romanos Lekapenos, a man very much like Basil: the son of Armenian refugees and an adept plotter and schemer. But unlike Basil, who schmoozed his way into the palace via the stables, Romanos, the son of a soldier, was a every inch the military man, having worked his way up to become the head of the Byzantine fleet—the position he used as his springboard to take over the palace. Poor Constantine would have to wait until he was thirty-nine before he could finally come out from under the thumb of the Lekapenos machine and assume the throne for himself.
From History Into Legend...
Thus came to an end the age of the imperial bridal contest. Over a period of 150 years, four such contests had taken place. The first had been an act of frustration by Irene over Charlemagne's failure to follow through on the betrothal agreement between their children. A precedent was set. It is curious that the pattern was not followed after Eudokia Ingerina. Was it that the last two of these contests produced such unsatisfactory results that the method was abandoned? Or was it that the same kinds of regency opportunities by widowed empresses no longer arose? Would Zoë Karbonopsina have held a bridal contest for her son had she been given the chance? Nevertheless, the idea did live on in some of the folk tales of Western Europe and lives on today in modern fairy tale films and stories.
Extent of Byzantine Empire in 802, in the reign of Irene.
[1] What we call the "Byzantine Empire" was in fact the continuation of the Roman Empire after Constantine had moved the capital to Constantinople in A.D. 330. This new capital was built on the site of the older city of Byzantium and originally named Nova Roma (New Rome), though in common usage the name Constantinople (City of Constantine) quickly took over. The Byzantines always understood themselves to be Romans. Later western historians coined the term "Byzantine" in order to make a distinction between the classical pagan phase of the Roman Empire and its later Christian embodiment. In this essay I use the word Byzantine as a nod to common usage.
[2] There was little likelihood that this union of the Frankish and Byzantine Empires could have worked. The plotting and scheming among the Byzantine military establishment would quickly have severed the ties to Aachen. Had Charlemagne come to Constantinople, he might have fallen afoul of conspirators; had Irene moved instead to Aachen, she would have been replaced back home. One must also remember that although in English we know Charlemagne by a French name, his native language, and that of his court was a form of Old German. While he may have known a smattering of Latin, he would have been utterly lost in the Greek-speaking world of Constantinople.
[3] Tradition has it that a certain Kassia (805/10 - 865), an iconophile, was also present at this bridal competition. As the story goes, Theophilos was at first attracted to her, as she was very beautiful. He would have been holding a golden apple which he was to give to the one he chose. Perhaps inspired by the apple to make a Biblical reference, he said to Kassia, "Through woman the baser things," referring to the coming into the world of sin through Eve. The quick-witted Kassia retorted, "And through woman the better," referring to the Virgin Mary's role in bringing salvation into the world. This put Theophilos off, so he chose instead Theodora. Some time after this, Kassia founded a convent in Constantinople, near the famous Stoudios Monastery. Besides her administrative duties as hegoumenë (head of the convent), she devoted herself to composing sacred poetry and hymns, which have made her one of the great poets and composers of the Orthodox Church.
As an iconophile, Kassia ran afoul of Theophilos' iconoclastic policies and was punished by scourging at one point. But she was bold in her defense of icons and is supposed to have said, "I hate silence when it is time to speak."
Not long before Theophilos died (under suspicious circumstances?), he wanted to see Kassia again for he was still smitten by the memory of her beauty. With an imperial retinue in tow, he travelled across the city to her monastery. She was working on a hymn when she saw the retinue approaching. When Theophilos got to her cell and barged in (he was, after all, the emperor), she was not to be seen, but the hymn she was writing was on the table. After looking the unfinished work over, he added the line, "those feet whose sound Eve heard at dusk in Paradise and hid herself for fear," alluding to Kassia hiding herself from him. As he was leaving, he saw her feet and realized that she was hiding behind a curtain, yet he decided to respect her wishes for them not to meet. Kassia later completed the hymn, retaining Theophilos' addition. It is now called "The Hymn of Kassia," and is sung each year at matins on Holy Wednesday.
[4] Stephen's tenure as Patriarch was short and uneventful. Most notably he cooperated with his brother Leo in having the bones of their father reburied in the Church of the Holy Apostles. He died at twenty-six years of age after only seven years in office. There is no indication of any foul play.
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