Page:A Dictionary of Saintly Women Volume 1.djvu/424

410 ST. IRENE Western empire might be useful, she negotiated a marriage between her son and Botmde, daughter of Charlemagne and St. Hildegabd. The young princess died before she was grown up, but it is generally supposed ti^at Irene broke off the engagement lest she should lose power over her son. Her conduct re- garding his marriage to Mary of Paphla- gonia and then to Theophano was fiioroughly selfish. She terminated the iconoclastic heresy by procuring, with the help of Pope Adrian I., that a council should be held in 7H7. The president was Tarasius, a creature of Irene, raised by her to the patriarchate of Constantinople. It is called the Second Nicene Council. It condemned as heretical the council of Constantinople of 754. Neither of these could be called OBCumenical, as many of the chief patriarchates were unrepre- sented. Two monks of Palestine attended, and assumed the names of two of the patriarchs. Western bishops to the number of ;ir)0 were present; they ruled for image-worship. Present at this council were two historians: Nicepborus, afterwards patriarch of Constantinople, who wrote the history of the empire from G02 to 770, and George Syncellus. Irene brought the relics of St. EupHKMiA from Lemnos to Constanti- nople, and placed them in a church she had built to receive them. Meantime Constantino was growing up. He was much less capable of govern- ing than his mother. He was married by her to a woman he did not like, so that courtiers, who might have some- thing to gain by a revolution, easily worked upon his discontent and incited him to rebel against the empress regent. Irene, without much trouble, defeated the plot, punished the conspirators with considerable severity, flogged the em- peror, and kept him for some time locked up in his rooms like a child in disgrace. She attempted to exact from the com- manders of the army a promise never during her life to call her son emperor, but her unworthy treatment of him gave general offence ; she was compelled to lot him reign, but worked on his stu- pidity to make him act nngratefdlly to his best friends, and thus estrange his partisans. He was a good enough soldier, but was no general and no statesman ; his temper was naturally fickle, and his education had been shamefolly neglected. He had feJlen in love with Theophauo, one of his mother's ladies-in-waiting, and Irene, for her own ends, enoonrag^ the intrigue, and influenced his wife to submit to a divorce and become a nun, that he might marry Theophano ; where- upon divorce became fashionable. His indolence and his affection for his mother gradually let the power slip back into her hands. The Eastern empire was declining. Irene had Charlemagne, with his heroic Franks, for an enemy and rival on one hand, and Haroun al Baschid, with his Mohammedans, on the other; the des- perate Bulgarian warriors were a per- petual danger. The superiority of the Byzantine navy, with its dread inextin- guishable Greek fire, alone saved the capital from the hands of the Saracens ; but notwithstanding all the defeats and losses she sustained, all the disadvan- tageous treaties she was driven to make, and all the blunders of her son, Irene ruled with great energy and ability. Her insatiable love of mastery could not, however, be content with a divided throne. In 797, she plotted against her son. He escaped, and if he had had a particle of his mother's ability, he might have kept his crown and reduced her to a private station ; but he acted as if he was bent on making himself unpopular, persecuting the most esteemed of the clergy because they had opposed his marriage, blinding and scourging his benefactors ; and as the quarrel dragged on, and Irene was not without fears that even her best servants might go over to his party, she threatened them that if they did not immediately bring him to her a prisoner, she would make peace with him and accuse them to him, and that he would forgive her but would relentlessly punish her tools. They knew she would act as she said, so making a great effort, they captured the unfortunate young man and brought him to his mother in the purple chamber