narch to protect his sons from the danger of her second nuptials; and
her solemn engagement, attested by the principal senators, was deposited
in the hands of the patriarch. Before the end of seven months, the wants
of Eudocia, or those of the state, called aloud for the male virtues of
a soldier; and her heart had already chosen Romanus Diogenes, whom she
raised from the scaffold to the throne. The discovery of a treasonable
attempt had exposed him to the severity of the laws: his beauty and
valor absolved him in the eyes of the empress; and Romanus, from a mild
exile, was recalled on the second day to the command of the Oriental
armies. Her royal choice was yet unknown to the public; and the promise
which would have betrayed her falsehood and levity, was stolen by a
dexterous emissary from the ambition of the patriarch. Xiphilin at first
alleged the sanctity of oaths, and the sacred nature of a trust; but a
whisper, that his brother was the future emperor, relaxed his scruples,
and forced him to confess that the public safety was the supreme law. He
resigned the important paper; and when his hopes were confounded by the
nomination of Romanus, he could no longer regain his security, retract
his declarations, nor oppose the second nuptials of the empress. Yet
a murmur was heard in the palace; and the Barbarian guards had raised
their battle-axes in the cause of the house of Lucas, till the young
princes were soothed by the tears of their mother and the solemn
assurances of the fidelity of their guardian, who filled the Imperial
station with dignity and honor. Hereafter I shall relate his valiant,
but unsuccessful, efforts to resist the progress of the Turks. His
defeat and captivity inflicted a deadly wound on the Byzantine monarchy
of the East; and after he was released from the chains of the sultan, he
vainly sought his wife and his subjects. His wife had been thrust into
a monastery, and the subjects of Romanus had embraced the rigid maxim of
the civil law, that a prisoner in the hands of the enemy is deprived,
as by the stroke of death, of all the public and private rights of
a citizen. In the general consternation, the Caesar John asserted the
indefeasible right of his three nephews: Constantinople listened to
his voice: and the Turkish captive was proclaimed in the capital, and
received on the frontier, as an enemy of the republic. Romanus was not
more fortunate in domestic than in foreign war: the loss of two
battl