Summer 1063 to late 1064
My heart stopped when a ghost walked through our gate on a hot summer day. It looked like my Uncle Costas, dead almost twenty years now, bedraggled and worn as though risen from his grave, and speaking with our gatekeeper. Behind him stood a clutch of other wraithlike figures, tired and sad-eyed. Rising from my desk, I peered more closely at the man leading the group. It wasn’t Uncle Costas; this man walked with the distinctive limp of his son, my cousin Damien. Twenty years had aged him into his father, whose face was etched in my memory.
They were soon all in the house, wan smiles on their travel-weary faces. Damien had brought his sons, Constantine and Alexander, and their wives and children, and his daughter, Sophia and her family. She had been a babe in arms when I left their home in Amasea but was now a woman with a husband, child, and a babe in arms herself. Fourteen in all.
“Irene left this earth about a month ago,” Damien responded to my question about his wife, wiping his eyes. “She’d been sick for a few months but made me promise to take the children and leave after she died. She didn’t want us staying in the house, or in Amasea, after everything that’s happened.”
I’d had food and drink brought outside to the shady terrace, where it was cooler, and handed a cup of wine to Damien.
“What do you mean? What’s happened?” asked John who had joined us.
“You didn’t hear what happened in Theodosiopolis? It must have happened maybe two months ago.”
John and I shook our heads.
Damien put his cup down, lowered his head and began rubbing his eyes as though trying to blot out something while we waited. Reluctantly, he began to speak.
“I’m not surprised there’s been little news. By now, most of the survivors are in the Damascus slave markets; very few got away. I am surprised, though, no merchants or traders brought word.”
“Survivors of what?” I asked.
“The Turks.” He gave us a hard look. “They’ve been raiding on the eastern borders for at least four or five years now, bolder every year, but this was far more than a raid, it was an invading army. The city’s flimsy walls crumbled before them. The city was sacked, most of the men were killed, the women and the children who could walk were taken to the slave markets. The soldiers smashed the infants’ skulls against walls, throwing their bodies into a pile with the men’s. A bloodbath, and the whole city put to the torch as they left. A pair of terrified survivors straggled into Amasea before Irene died. She’d been anxious because of the raids even before that, but with that news, she made me promise to leave.”
“There were what, about thirty or forty thousand people living there? Where was the army? They didn’t know this was happening?” asked John, alarm in his voice.
“The army? You mean the mercenaries they hire for those jobs?” Damien spat out in a way reminiscent of his father’s dismissive attitude toward imperial functionaries. “They’re all Franks and only show up when they get paid. Their only worry is for their own arses. Not like when your brother was strategos and we had our own soldiers. I don’t understand how the emperor could let this happen.”
“What happened next?” I asked softly, feeling sick at the news.
“We buried Irene in the cemetery at the church of St. George, but only stayed long enough for the first nine days of mourning. I sold the farm for a pittance since others are also leaving, but it was enough to get us here, with a bit left over.” Tears filled his eyes again, and his chin trembled. I moved to wrap an arm around him. John’s eyes glazed with a mixture of horror and despair.
Damien wiped his face on his stained and worn sleeve and struggled to speak. “Now, we’re here. I never expected I would have to beg your help, as your family did of us so long ago.”
Damien’s family spent the next few days recuperating from their journey, trying to decide what to do next. We managed, but the house was cramped. Our summer trip to the farm was scheduled for just a few days hence. I spoke with John about the farm before I made a suggestion to Damien.
“We’ve had a tenant farmer for years, but Simon’s wife died a couple of years ago and he’s getting on, even though he manages with help from a couple of boys from the neighborhood. I remember you never liked living in the city, did you?”
Damien shook his head. “Too many bad memories of how my father and sister were treated. And with Ducas on the throne, as bad as he treated my sister Xene, he’d treat me worse.”
“John and I wondered if you and your family would like to move to our farm? You may want to build a bigger house or add onto what we have, or even see if there’s land nearby you’d like to buy. We’ll still want to be there for a month in the summer, but otherwise you’d have it to yourselves. You can stay as long as you need to.”
Damien grasped my hands, full of gratitude. “I’ll speak to my children. I can’t think of a more welcome solution.”
John and I stayed at the farm into September, helping Damien and his family get settled and expanding the house to accommodate everyone. We were back home by the end of the month. One evening a week or so later, we were talking about Damien’s family.
“One of Damien’s grandsons, Alexander’s son Constantine, is interested in joining the Excubitors in a few years. I promised I would sponsor him when he’s ready,” John said.
I smiled at that. “Uncle Costas would be pleased to know his great-grandson, his namesake, would follow in his footsteps.”
The floor began vibrating then, as though a giant was walking across the house, with a low groaning that sounded wrenched from the bowels of the earth. The shaking intensified so that John’s face blurred, dishes fell, chess pieces rolled off their table, the chess table itself rising into the air. I stood, panicked to find and protect my children.
“John, the chil—” I started to speak when I stepped on an ivory pawn, slipping and falling into oblivion.
I next heard voices, felt a cold cloth wiping my face that, for some reason, hurt as though I’d fallen onto it from a horse.
“Ouch, stop that,” was all I could say.
“Anna? Anna!” John’s insistent voice came from far away.
I forced an eye open to what looked like many images of John and our children staring down at me, faces pale with fright. I closed them again and remembered the earthquake.
“What happened?”
“You slipped, and your head fell against the chess table. The table flipped and fell on you. I got you out of the way of anything else that might fall and brought the children in here. They’re all safe. Only you were hurt.”
The tremors started again and several of the children screamed. Isaac wrapped his arms around the two girls while Alexios pulled his two little brothers close. I shook in terror so that John covered me with his body until the world stopped trembling again.
Somehow we got outside to the courtyard. The cook and kitchen lad, the gatekeeper and stable boys were there, eyes round with fright. Screams, crying and calls for help came from outside our walls. John took Isaac and went to see what could be done to help, sending a stable boy for our physician, Maria Kourtikios, since my right leg was in terrible pain where a deep purple bruise covered almost its entire length.
The city was in chaos. Thank the good God, we heard the next morning that Manuel had survived the earthquake in his barracks, and Marina and Michael Taronites were also safe at their house.
It was over a day later before Maria Kourtikios could finally see me since so many injured and dying needing her attention. John made sure I was cared for, but he kept busy helping our neighbors dig out from the rubble. Our house was newer than most others and had withstood the shaking better than many. The oldest buildings had not fared well, with roofs collapsing, walls sagging over the street, fires starting from fallen oil lamps.
Maria Kourtikios wrapped my ankle in a tight bandage, telling me to stay off it for at least a week.
“You’re fortunate.” She dabbed ointment on the scrapes on my head where I’d been hit. “So many others died, were terribly hurt, or lost their homes.” She pressed her lips together, the pain of what she’d seen in her eyes. “Even the Great Palace. You know how old those buildings are; it’s a miracle any of them still stand.”
“Was anyone injured there? At the palace, I mean,” I asked, not sure if I was hopeful or worried.
She frowned, thinking about it. “No idea. The physicians at the Sampson Hospital took care of them. No one of note, though. The emperor and his family survived. You knew the empress was near her time, didn’t you?”
I nodded. Eudokia was expecting her sixth child any day now.
John stopped in our room. He looked exhausted from running the household, helping neighbors, repairing the damage around our house. His red hair had long since turned sandy, and now there were streaks of white in his beard. His clothes were covered in dust and stained.
“Maria, thank you for coming. I know so many need your attention. I’ve been worried about Anna.” He gripped my hand like a drowning sailor clinging to a rope, and I found myself gripping his hand back. He may not have had the strength to be emperor, but he’d been strong during the earthquakes, and I was grateful.
I spent weeks recovering, slowly regaining my strength, before the whole family made the journey across the city to the church of St. Thekla where Isaac was buried, to give thanks for our survival. The city for many days echoed with the rhythmic gongs of semantrons calling the faithful to services for the dead, or services of thanksgiving for survival.
I visited the palace the first week in November to see Eudokia and her new baby girl, Zoe, her second child born in the purple room and so a porphyrogenita.
“It was terrible. The walls rattled; the floors shook. The waves in the Marmara were so high they swept into the Boukoleon. I’d like to move into a different palace, but most of the other buildings are even older and suffered worse damage. Part of the wall Emperor Nikephoros Phocas built caved in, and the little church of St. Paul caught fire. I don’t know if it can be repaired.”
Even weeks later, the earth would occasionally tremble like an angry reminder from hell. Everyone in the city was on edge, but I’d heard the destruction was worse to the west, along the north shore of the Marmara and other parts of the empire.
“Your new baby is beautiful,” I said, cradling little Zoe. The child had Eudokia’s curling blond hair and deep blue eyes, and even her face gave no evidence of the Ducas family traits, just her mother’s. “How are the other children in the nursery?”
“They’re well. It isn’t announced yet, but Constantine decided that Michael should be betrothed to Maria of Alania. The marriage won’t take place for a year or two, when they’re older.”
Maria’s father, the king of the Alans, would be elated to have his daughter wed to the emperor’s heir, the first foreign princess to marry a Roman heir in hundreds of years. Maria would be a beautiful empress, but Michael was a child compared to her, although they were the same age. The lad was not maturing. It would be years before he would grow his first beard.
“And Thomas? How is he faring?” I asked after handing Zoe to her nurse.
“Thomas had the servants start putting things back to rights as soon as the quaking stopped. There’s still much work to be done, but Constantine was impressed with his efforts,” she said with a tremble in her voice. “He even complimented me on promoting Thomas.” Eudokia looked more relieved at that accolade than proud. Ducas was as stingy with compliments for his wife as he was with coins for the soldiers in the imperial taghmata.
Romanus Diogenes returned to the city over the winter to see his ailing wife, and to again importune the emperor for his soldiers’ pay and supplies. The emperor scowled at the request, and the coins were not enough, but John again helped my cousin develop back channels to supply needed equipment.
Manuel, at nineteen, was finishing his training, and like any aspiring young soldier he was eager for an assignment that would offer opportunities for advancement. John and I took him to visit Romanus and his family after Epiphany; an introduction masquerading as a family social call. Romanus had met Manuel several times over the years since he and I were cousins, but it had been a few years since his visit.
The family greeted us at their door, their house at once familiar and foreign to me. My grandparents had owned it and raised me there after my parents died. Romanus and his wife bought it from me after Grandfather died. Romanus’s wife, Anya, had changed the house to suit her needs, but I still walked into ghosts with every corner I turned.
Romanus stood lean and taut as the strings on a lyre, his handsome face shadowed when glancing at his wife. Anya had experienced severe headaches and dizziness for the past two years and had chosen not to remain in the Great Palace after Isaac abdicated. In any case, Ducas would not have wanted anyone in ill health nearby. Anya had lost a good deal of weight and leaned on her husband’s arm, but otherwise was in good spirits. Behind their parents stood Thea, who was fifteen, and Costas, who was twelve. Both children had inherited their father’s robust good looks rather than their mother’s sparrowlike features.
John had impressed on Manuel the importance of this meeting beforehand. My cousin served under the dux of Bulgaria, Nikephoros Botaneiates, a distinguished general in his mid-sixties. Romanus’s campaigns in Bulgaria against the Pechenegs had been successful, especially compared to the armies in Anatolia, where the Turks were slithering in. John wanted Manuel to learn from a successful leader rather than pick up bad habits from a losing one.
Anya and I and her children stayed inside while the three men went outside to confer. Braziers kept the room warm, and we sipped mulled wine while we chatted. Thea had matured into a friendly and courteous young woman since I’d last seen her in the palace. I could tell she kept a surreptitious eye on her mother, should she need assistance. Costas was still a child, but looked bored and impatient in the company of women, despite an occasional glare from his mother.
We all sat down together after the men returned from their talk.
“Manuel, it was your mother’s family that helped me get my start in the army all those years ago. My mother and I had almost nothing left, and they helped me get what I needed. I know we were all related—cousins, uncles, and grandparents—but none of our other relatives lifted a finger,” Romanus said. “And it was a little later when your Uncle Isaac thought I would make an acceptable husband for his niece, my Anya, that your mother did the matchmaking. So I have many reasons to be grateful to her.”
Anya beamed at that reminder. The plain woman’s prospects of making a good match, even with a generous dowry, had diminished after her father rebelled against the emperor. Romanus’s prospects had been equally poor, with a good family name, but no money and a father also tainted by an accusation of rebellion. It had been my first effort at matchmaking, and I had to say, it was remarkably successful. Romanus and Anya never appeared less than happy around each other.
The earth shook then, just for a moment.
“Blessed Theotokos, these tremors are terrible. I pray every day that the earth would finally settle down,” said our hostess.
“We all do,” I said. “Did you have much damage when it first hit?”
“A little, a small fire in the kitchen and damage to the walls by the street, all repaired now. But did you hear about Raidestos? So much of that city crumbled and has to be rebuilt. The emperor refused to send money to help them,” said Anya.
Romanus made a grunting sound from the back of his throat. “Is anyone surprised? If he won’t pay his own soldiers to stop the Turks from destroying his cities, he won’t be paying for any rebuilding. Manuel, you’ll be fortunate to join me rather than the Anatolian armies; no one over there cares enough to beg, borrow, or steal what his soldiers need.”
Manuel’s head swiveled around toward Romanus at the sound of his name, his cheeks reddening. I realized he’d been looking at Thea, who appeared to be blushing just as furiously. Manuel had met Thea on the day she’d been born and had known her ever since. But perhaps he had never really looked at her. Now, he reminded me of how John had looked at me when we first met.
“Yes, sir. Pardon me, sir, would you repeat that?” my son stumbled out.
Romanus raised an eyebrow and grinned. “Nothing important.”
Manuel joined Romanus when he left after Pascha to return to the Danube forts. He could not be gone long since the Pechenegs and other barbarians kept testing our frontiers, probing for weak points. Before they left, however, Manuel and Thea were betrothed with the wedding planned for autumn. It was a good match for both our families. Fortunately, although distant cousins, they were just outside of the seven degrees of kinship, so it would not require the patriarch’s approval. It was agreed that Manuel would move into Romanus’s house after the wedding rather than set up house on his own, so that Thea could stay there to help her mother.
That summer started out idyllic, with sun-washed days and many cool star-filled nights. Our daughter Marina had given birth to our first grandchild, a girl they named Anna, who we called Annetta, and a delight for us all. The one cloud overshadowing it was Catherine’s death in mid-June. She had lived quietly at Myrelion since Isaac’s abdication four years earlier, mourning his death and morose over the loss of her few glorious days as empress of the Roman Empire. Her daughter, Marika, remained quietly in the monastery following the funeral, though still without the tonsure or vows of a nun.
At the end of September, horrific news filtered in from Armenia in the farthest eastern lands of the empire. The Turkish sultan, Alp Arslan, had besieged the great city of Ani, following a foolhardy raid on the rearguard of the sultan’s army by the dux that Ducas had appointed for the city.
The siege did not last long. The Turks broke through and slaughtered tens of thousands of citizens, the streets were said to have run with blood. The survivors, some fifty thousand souls, were sent to the slave markets.
The news of this disaster was devastating. I did not understand how the Turkish sultan could have been marching an army—an actual army of tens of thousands of men—through Roman territory with no impediment from the empire’s soldiers. Where was Arslan going if he was originally going to bypass Ani for another target? Ani was a great city with strong walls. It had to have been a traitor who gave it away to these barbarians. Emperor Constantine Ducas made light of the tragedy, and pretended it didn’t matter. It was so clear now why Damien and his family had left Amaseia, just a fortnight’s journey from Ani.
A couple of weeks later, John blanched after opening a letter from Manuel.
“We’re being invaded from the north. Manuel says Scythe tribes crossed the Danube and are ravaging the countryside. The Bulgarians tried to stop them, Botaneiates tried to stop them, but he was defeated. He says the tribes are heading to Thessalonike, and Romanus’s army is moving to hold them back. Botaneiates’s army was in Nicopolis when the barbarians crossed the river where it narrows at Vidin. There are hundreds of thousands of them. I can’t believe this.”
My heart skipped a beat.
“Manuel wasn’t injured, was he?”
“No, no, he says he was with Romanus a hundred miles to the east.” John put the letter down and began pacing. “We need to do something. Ani was bad enough, but Thessalonike? How can Romanus defeat them if Botaneiates failed with his larger army? The emperor must do something about this.”
I held my tongue, hiding my bitterness of the fateful choice John had made when Isaac abdicated. Ducas’s miserly ways meant Romanus’s army never had the money or equipment it needed. John would not have let that happen if he had succeeded his brother, and his choice then might now result in our son’s death.
“If the emperor thinks no one knows or cares about it, he’ll do nothing,” he said. “We need to confront him about this.”
“We?” I asked.
“I know other men who have sons fighting with Botaneiates and Romanus. I know they’ll want to come together and speak to the emperor about sending help. He won’t listen to just one or two of us, but he’ll pay attention to a dozen or more of us. He has to.”
I wasn’t sure about that, but something needed to be done.
In the end, John and his friends found over two dozen men of the dynatoi whose sons were fighting in Bulgaria, or, often almost as important, they owned land that the barbarians were devastating. I and a few other mothers and wives insisted on joining them when they approached Ducas in the Chrysotriklinos, the golden throne room, just three days later. I stood at the back of the room with the other women, gazing at the glittering chamber. The room was much as it had been on my first visit years earlier, filled with beautiful mosaics and sunlight flowing from the dome over its center. Even Psellus was still there, as he had been on that first occasion when I was a girl.
John strode to the front with Katakalon Kekaumenos, the most senior of the dynatoi. After making their obeisances, they addressed Ducas.
“Illustrious emperor of the Romans, we have received grave news from Bulgaria of invading barbarians defeating of our armies, bringing death and destruction to our people. We hear there are hundreds of thousands of the invaders swarming the land, stealing everything they can, and killing or enslaving our citizens. We have sons fighting there and would urge you to send reinforcements to those armies.”
Ducas’s eyes narrowed as he contemplated this call to action and what its cost would be. I noticed the robes he wore were new, not from the old stock of the palace’s wardrobes of imperial attire that Isaac had used. The soft silk fabric almost floated on him, its exquisite gold embroidery complementing the deep purple color. A heavy gold ring with a cabochon ruby graced his right hand. Isaac had shunned the frivolous expense of new robes and jewelry when he sat on the throne, instead working to rebuild the army. Only the crown Ducas wore was the same as before.
“I appreciate you bringing your concerns to our attention. I will instruct the patriarch to celebrate a liturgy for the relief of our soldiers, for if we have God on our side, who can defeat us?”
John and Kekaumenos gave each other sideways glances before continuing.
“With respect, sire, while we are sure the liturgy will benefit the armies in Bulgaria, they will benefit even more from additional soldiers and weapons. And the pay the soldiers are owed,” said Kekaumenos.
“I will take your request under consideration,” Ducas said, waving his hand in dismissal.
I glanced at Psellus as we filed out of the throne room, dejected at the emperor’s lax attitude about the threats to the empire. His own court robes looked a bit tattered and patched, his shoes well-worn.
The men returned to our house to discuss this miserable outcome and determine what their next steps should be. Isaac was fourteen now and served food and drink for our guests. I stood next to John as the men gathered, grumbling about the outcome, and suddenly was filled with an urgency to speak.
“Excuse me, but I have a suggestion,” I spoke loudly over the men. The beards turned to me, surprised that a woman would speak up in their group.
“I have a suggestion,” I repeated. “We all know how close the emperor is to Michael Psellus. Is there something we can offer him, some gift, to encourage him to whisper in the emperor’s ear?”
Kekaumenos chuckled. “Lady Anna, that very thought was just coming to me as well.”
The men came up with enough gold coins, and Kekaumenos threw in a small farm he had been awarded in Macedonia years earlier, land that would be looted by the barbarians if they got there before the army did.
“It’s never done me much good before. Not the most productive land in that area, but maybe it’ll help now,” he said.
The tokens we gave to Psellus did finally get the emperor to undertake a defense, although his actions were laughable. First, he tried the usual route of sending the leaders of the barbarians rich gifts to bribe them to leave, but with his usual stinginess, those gifts were as nothing to such a large horde. Next, he decided to go on campaign against them, assembling one hundred and fifty men for that effort. One hundred and fifty men against hundreds of thousands. He rode out of the Porta Aurea, at the head of this troop of one hundred and fifty soldiers, to the hoots and hollers of so many citizens that I wondered how he maintained his imperial dignity.
In the end, it seemed that the emperor’s first suggestion of the patriarch leading a liturgy to beg God to relieve our people may have been the most effective. Much as the weather had turned against Isaac five years earlier, the weather turned against the invaders. Torrential downpours and flooding followed by epidemics and starvation ended their progress through Roman territory. Most of them perished in the trek back to their own lands, some dying as the flooding Danube consumed them when they tried to cross its swollen currents. Although Ducas and his one hundred and fifty soldiers had done nothing to defeat this invasion, the accidental victory allowed him to return to the city in a triumphal procession.
Gagik, the last king of the destroyed Armenian city of Ani, returned to the city from his theme of Lycandos, to learn that he was being reassigned to being the dux of Charsianon, a much larger theme in the east. He visited us to pay his respects.
“You would not believe the chaos in the borderlands,” he said. “It was bad before Alp Arslan destroyed my homeland.” Gagik stopped then, a catch in his voice, his face bowed and in shadow. A few glints of silver shone through his black hair, much as I saw in my own mirror.
“We were so sorry to hear the news,” I said, reaching out to pat his hand. Words felt inadequate, but they were all I could offer.
“Yes, and appalled at the tragedy,” added John.
Gagik sighed deeply. “Thank you. You’d think after being away from the city for twenty years, it wouldn’t be so painful. But it was my childhood home.” He stopped and shook his head. “I’m afraid it won’t be the Turks’ last conquest if the emperor doesn’t make some changes soon.”
John raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“It’s chaos in the themes of Iberia, Chaldia, Koloneia, Vasparakan. Really, all the themes in the east are in upheaval. What used to be random Turkish raiding parties have grown into full-scale invasions. No city or town is safe. I don’t know where Alp Arslan was going before he turned around and attacked Ani, but it could have been anywhere, maybe Manzikert or Koloneia. Manzikert would have been closest, but Koloneia is richer.”
“What about our army? Aren’t they stopping them?” I asked.
Gagik frowned. “No, not at all. The emperor has starved the themes of money and military supplies, and the best soldiers have all left, leaving a motley core of untrained and lazy troops. From what I hear, it’s worse than in Bulgaria. I can’t blame the soldiers too much—if the emperor doesn’t care, why should they? A lot of the soldiers are mercenaries, and cheap ones at that. The good ones, like the Norman, Roussel de Bailleul, are not above a little brigandage to assure themselves of adequate pay.”
“What about where you’ll be in Charsianon?” John asked.
“I think not so bad. In Lycandos, I kept the troops I had always on their guard and plan do the same there. It’s farther from the border, but after Ani, no place is safe. The minute the patrols stop, the Turks are there.”
“And the money?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I’ll do what I can with the miserable few coins the emperor provides.”