he was equitable and rigorous: a shameful and pernicious venality
was abolished, and the offices were filled with the most deserving
candidates, by a prince who had sense to choose, and severity to punish.
He prohibited the inhuman practice of pillaging the goods and persons of
shipwrecked mariners; the provinces, so long the objects of oppression
or neglect, revived in prosperity and plenty; and millions applauded the
distant blessings of his reign, while he was cursed by the witnesses of
his daily cruelties. The ancient proverb, That bloodthirsty is the man
who returns from banishment to power, had been applied, with too much
truth, to 'Marius and Tiberius; and was now verified for the third time
in the life of Andronicus. His memory was stored with a black list
of the enemies and rivals, who had traduced his merit, opposed his
greatness, or insulted his misfortunes; and the only comfort of
his exile was the sacred hope and promise of revenge. The necessary
extinction of the young emperor and his mother imposed the fatal
obligation of extirpating the friends, who hated, and might punish, the
assassin; and the repetition of murder rendered him less willing, and
less able, to forgive. [1018] A horrid narrative of the victims whom he
sacrificed by poison or the sword, by the sea or the flames, would be
less expressive of his cruelty than the appellation of the halcyon days,
which was applied to a rare and bloodless week of repose: the tyrant
strove to transfer, on the laws and the judges, some portion of his
guilt; but the mask was fallen, and his subjects could no longer mistake
the true author of their calamities. The noblest of the Greeks,
more especially those who, by descent or alliance, might dispute the
Comnenian inheritance, escaped from the monster's den: Nice and Prusa,
Sicily or Cyprus, were their places of refuge; and as their flight was
already criminal, they aggravated their offence by an open revolt, and
the Imperial title. Yet Andronicus resisted the daggers and swords of
his most formidable enemies: Nice and Prusa were reduced and chastised:
the Sicilians were content with the sack of Thessalonica; and the
distance of Cyprus was not more propitious to the rebel than to the
tyrant. His throne was subverted by a rival without merit, and a people
without arms. Isaac Angelus, a descendant in the female line from the
great Alexius, was marked as a victim by the prudence or superstition
of the emperor. [1019] In