on against the dynasty by Theodore's outrageous conduct toward
his sister Martha. The latter had a beautiful daughter who had been most
tenderly reared as became her rank. To the surprise of all, the emperor
ordered the family to bestow her in marriage on one of his pages,
Valanidiotes. Though beneath the maiden in rank, the page succeeded in
winning the affection of the highborn damsel, and the family were
consenting to the union, when the emperor capriciously changed his mind,
and compelled a betrothal between the maiden and a man of her own rank.
A report that this marriage was not consummated led the superstitious
emperor to suspect that both this event and a malignant attack of his
disease were due to some charm practised by the mother.

In his vexation and rage, he ordered Martha, though connected by birth
with the imperial family, to be enclosed in a sack with a number of
cats, which were from time to time pricked with pins that they might
torture the unfortunate lady. Martha was brought into court with the
sack thus bound about her neck, and was examined concerning her supposed
witchcraft, but the suspicious tyrant could extract nothing from her on
which to base a condemnation.

This unseemly action was an offence Michael could never forgive. From
this time he began assiduously to plot against the throne. The story of
his usurpation and of his cruelty toward the rightful emperor, the young
lad, John IV.,--Ducas,--does not concern us here. Suffice it to say that
he ascended the throne of Nicaea as Michael VIII.,--Palaeologus,--and was
fortunate enough to capture the city of Constantinople and revive the
Greek Empire there. Through the Empire of Nicaea the thread of tradition
was unbroken, and from 1261 on we have once more a Byzantine Empire.

The history of this concluding period, 1261-1453, embracing the dynasty
of the Palaeologi, is the most degrading portion of the national annals.
Michael is renowned for being the restorer of the Eastern Empire, but
his throne was gained through baseness and cruelty, and he left to his
descendants a heritage of vice and crime of such a nature that the
Empire survived for a century or two not because of its intrinsic worth,
but because the Ottomans were not yet ready to seize it. It is a period
notable for the absence of literary taste, of patriotic feeling, of
political honesty, of civil liberty. The emperors are, as a rule,
immoral and capricious men, utterly selfish in th