At length dropsy was added to epilepsy, and Michael determined to resign and enter a monastery. Zoe seems by this time to have been completely cowed by the arrogant monk, and she made little opposition when he went on to provide a new and strange aspirant to the throne. His sister Maria was, as I said, married to a ship-caulker named Stephen, who had been put in command of the fleet. They had a boy named Michael, a vicious youth, but young enough to submit to his uncle’s rule if he obtained the crown, and the Emperor and Zoe were persuaded or coerced to adopt this child and clothe him with the dignity of Cæsar. One of the chroniclers tells that they deceived Zoe by representing the boy as the son of a noble matron. Some such fiction may have been served to the populace, but Zoe could hardly be deceived on the point; and even the people were not long deceived, if at all, since he has passed into history as Michael the Caulker. In the chapel at Blachernæ the boy was accepted into the imperial family, after swearing the customary ponderous oaths to respect Zoe as his mother and mistress. It is not impossible that Zoe felt that this adoption of a son who was to wear the crown made her own position more secure.
Some time afterwards Michael IV. retired to a monastery, and Michael V. began to look forward to his imperial opportunities of indulgence. The next course of events is not quite clear, but it seems that the retiring Emperor felt some scruple about his action and had relegated the boy to a house without the walls. He died, refusing to see Zoe, soon afterwards (10th December 1041), and John forged a letter in his name, bidding the guards deliver the young Cæsar, and brought him to the palace. We are then told that Zoe asserted her power, bestowed the crown on the youth only on the strictest promise of obedience to her, and expelled the three brothers--John, George and Constantine--from the palace. It seems more likely that the brothers quarrelled with each other. John, promising the most absolute power to Zoe, had his younger brothers exiled, and then Constantine intrigued with the young Emperor and displaced his brother.
These details are of little moment for our purpose. By the spring of 1042, three months after the death of her husband, we find Zoe sharing the power with her adopted son and his uncle Constantine, and a fresh chapter of romance opens in her story.