d the decision was reached that he should be invested with the purple.
Never was Irene more queenly than in the manner with which she received
the intelligence of her fall. When the conspirators informed her that
she must retire from the palace, she addressed them with becoming
dignity, recounting the revolutions of her life, and accepting with
composure her fate. She gently reproached Nicephorus for his perfidy and
reminded him that he owed his elevation to her, and she requested the
proper recognition of her imperial standing and asked for a safe and
honorable retreat. But the greed of Nicephorus would not grant this last
request; he deprived her of all her dignities and wealth, and exiled her
to the Isle of Lesbos, where she endured every hardship and gained a
scanty subsistence by the labors of her distaff. Irene survived the
change of her fortune for only one year, and in 803 died of
grief--destitute, forsaken, and lonely.

Because of her wickedness Irene's name is perpetuated in history among
the Messalinas and the Lucrezia Borgias. Because of her religious
orthodoxy she was canonized as a saint,--a striking instance of how
outward conformity to religion covers a multitude of sins.

XIII

BYZANTINE EMPRESSES THEODORA II., THEOPHANO, ZOE, THEODORA III.

The Iconoclastic controversy was far from being extinguished with the
fall (in the person of Irene) of the house of Leo the Isaurian. It was
destined to continue for over half a century longer and to be finally
settled by another empress whose career bore marked similarity to that
of the image-loving Irene; and it then remained settled because the
second image-loving queen was succeeded by a royal house sprung from one
of the European themes which was in sympathy, accordingly, with the
Church of the West, rather than with the religious sentiment of the
people of the Orient.

But a greater change had come over the Eastern Empire with the exile and
death of Irene. Her elevation had, as we have seen, severed the
connection between East and West and led to the appointment of a Western
emperor in the person of Charlemagne. Hence, from this time onward the
interests and sympathies of the two sections of the later Roman Empire
diverge more and more, and the government at Constantinople becomes ever
more Oriental in its proclivities. It is, therefore, more appropriate to
use the adjective Byzantine for the remaining centuries of the history
of Constantinople to