Maria will not interest us until, in her womanhood, she begins to encounter the adventures of a fallen Empress, and one or two anecdotes will serve to describe the kind of life she endured during the ten years’ reign (1185–1195) of her husband. Isaac was a florid-faced, red-haired young man with imperial appetites. His banquets consisted, Nicetas says, of “a mountain of bread, a forest of game, a sea of fishes and an ocean of wine,” at which he sat, richly perfumed and clothed with the conscious gorgeousness of a peacock, amidst a crowd of female relatives, and other females who were not relatives. When the dishes were removed, the choicest mimes and conjurers and musicians of the Empire were summoned to entertain him and his guests. It is narrated that one famous comedian, when he was for the first time admitted into the presence of this cohort of wine-flushed ladies, bowed to the Emperor and said: “Let us make the acquaintance of these first, and then you may bring the rest.”
Nearly his whole reign was filled by a great revolt of the Wallachians and Bulgarians, and in 1195 he set out to take the field in person against them. One day he rode out from the camp to hunt, and had not proceeded far when he heard an alarming tumult in his rear. He found that his brother Alexis, who had astutely awaited his opportunity, was being acclaimed Emperor, and, without a struggle, he galloped across the country. He was captured, blinded and imprisoned; and his young wife now gives place to a more interesting type of Empress. Maria remained in Constantinople, and will re-enter the story presently.
Euphrosyne Ducæna--that is to say, Euphrosyne of the famous Ducas family, into which some ancestor of hers had married--was an energetic and ambitious woman of middle age at the time of her accession. Her father, Gregory Camaterus, had been an imperial secretary, and had taken advantage of his favoured position to marry into the nobility. Euphrosyne must have been born some time before 1150, in the reign of Manuel, and have witnessed the later series of revolutions and assassinations. In time she married the elder brother of Isaac Angelus, a provincial noble of no distinction or wealth, and, during the bloody reign of Andronicus, Alexis had taken refuge among the Turks. Even whole populations gladly put themselves under the Turks or Saracens to escape the vices of their Christian rulers. We cannot, however, say if Euphrosyne accompanied her husband or remained in Constantinople. At last Alexis heard the strange news that his brother was on the throne, and he hastened to Constantinople. He was arrested on the way by the Prince of Antioch, ransomed by Isaac, and promoted to high office and wealth. He was a more energetic, more handsome and superficially more attractive man than his younger brother, but his slender list of virtues did not include gratitude.