threat that if they
did not act, she would reveal their treason. Fearing for their lives,
they acted at once with the boldness of desperate criminals. Seizing the
emperor on the Asiatic shore, they conveyed him across the Hellespont to
the porphyry apartment of the palace, the chamber in which he was born.
The son was now completely in the power of the mother, in whom ambition
had stifled every maternal emotion. In the bloody council called by the
traitors she urged that Constantine should be rendered incapable of
holding the throne. Her emissaries blinded the young prince and immured
him in a monastery. As a blind monk Constantine survived five of his
successors; but his memory was revived among men only by the marriage of
his daughter Euphrosyne with the Emperor Michael the Second.

For five years Irene enjoyed all the delights and experienced all the
bitterness of absolute power. Her crime called down upon her the
execration of all the best among mankind, but dread of her cruelty
prevented any open outbreak against her. She carried on the movement for
the restoration of images, and by her outward piety she caused men to
overlook the heinous nature of her crimes. Her reign was noted for its
external splendor and the strong influence she exerted on all affairs of
state. She offered marriage to the Emperor Charlemagne of the West, but
he repelled with repugnance all overtures from the unnatural mother and
reminded her that her intrigues had prevented the union of his daughter
with the Emperor Constantine. In fact, her accession brought about the
final severing of all bonds of union between the eastern and western
divisions of the Roman world. Pope Leo regarded a female sovereign as an
anomaly and an abomination in the eyes of all true Romans, and he
brought to an end all claims the Byzantine dynasty might have on Italy
at least, by creating Charlemagne Emperor of the West.

These years of power were troublous ones to the wicked queen, because of
rebellions abroad and palace intrigues at home. She had surrounded
herself with servile patricians and eunuchs, whom she enriched and
elevated to the highest offices of state; but her own example had
fostered in them ingratitude and duplicity, and, while they showed her
every outward mark of deference, they secretly conspired for her
downfall and their own elevation. The grand treasurer, Nicephorus, won
over the leading eunuchs and courtiers about the person of the empress,
an