Her integrity as a ruler soon excited the hostility of the vicious nobles, and a struggle began which makes it difficult for us to judge certain aspects of the character of Euphrosyne. The rule at Constantinople was to impeach the morals of an Empress when her public virtue was beyond question, and this the angry nobles proceeded to do. She had ventured to appoint a first minister on the mere ground of ability, and her brother Basil, her son-in-law and other nobles plotted to restrict her power. They approached Alexis and whispered that Euphrosyne was criminally intimate with a handsome young officer named Vatatzes, and that he might before long find his throne occupied by her paramour.
Nicetas, who was at the Court, has clearly no doubt about the liaison, and we must admit that Euphrosyne’s family is not distinguished for asceticism. Her youngest daughter, Eudocia, had been married in 1185 to the King of Servia, and had, after a few years, been driven from the Court, naked, for her misconduct, and brought back in shame to Constantinople. Euphrosyne’s brother Basil, who owed his office to her, was her chief accuser. Alexis, at all events, was convinced. He sent for the head of Vatatzes, who was in Bithynia at the time, and, when it was brought, addressed it, says Nicetas, “in words which cannot be included in this history.” Euphrosyne trembled, and appealed to her courtiers to intercede. Alexis had gone to Thrace for a time, and he returned to find the Court divided into two parties over the affair. Some said that she was guilty; some were for punishing the libellers.
He went with Euphrosyne to the Blachernæ palace, and his dark demeanour and refusal to sleep with her made her fear that her head would be the next to fall. She therefore demanded a trial of the charge, but Alexis merely handed her maids and eunuchs to the official torturer, and they could only obtain release from their horrible sufferings by declaring her guilty. Alexis was not normally a cruel man; very little blood was shed in his reign. But the suggestion that Euphrosyne meditated taking from him his throne and his splendid pleasures alarmed him. He stripped her of her gold and purple, dressed her in the rough tunic of a common prostitute, and handed her to two barbaric slaves to be conveyed to the Nematorea monastery, near the entrance to the Black Sea. There, guarded by two uncivilized slaves who could hardly speak Greek, she looked back with bitterness on the two or three years of power and the ingratitude of her brother and son-in-law. But Constantinople pitied her, or at least despised her opponents. Basil and Andronicus were assailed in the street with jeers and popular songs, and began to repent. They had not, they pleaded, imagined that the luxurious Emperor had energy enough to take such a step; they had wished only to restrict the power of Euphrosyne. They and others now pleaded with the Emperor to reconsider his decision, and, after a solitary confinement of six months, Euphrosyne returned in triumph to the palace and wielded more power than ever. It is pleasant to read that Alexis found himself incapable of ruling without her judicious aid; and that she took no vengeance whatever on her accusers.