The two years’ reign of the Emperor Andronicus was an orgy of bloodshed, spoliation and vice. Perhaps the most abominable detail of it is that he at once married the child-widow of Alexis, Anna, the beautiful daughter of Louis VII. She had not yet completed her twelfth year, yet she now became the daily and--one fears--nightly companion of an erotic old man of seventy, whose devices to maintain his virility are hardly less repulsive than his murders. It is in one sense a relief to know that little Anna was only one member of a veritable harem of singing and dancing girls, and some nobler women, who filled the palaces, especially the pleasure-palaces on the Asiatic coast, of the repulsive monarch. Powerful in frame and fresh in countenance to the end, Andronicus maintained even in the palace his sobriety and moderation at table in order to preserve his youthful vigour. He was, if ever a man was, an erotomaniac, one of the strangest personalities in the whole of Byzantine history. He brought about several excellent reforms in the administration of the failing Empire, and had, almost to the end, the enthusiastic attachment of his people; but his brutality in the punishment of rebels, who were numerous, was too appalling to be described, and his conduct in many ways approached insanity. He raised a statue in the city to his first wife; she was represented as a nun accompanied by a handsome youth.
We hasten through this welter of brutality and licence to the natural termination. Deliverers of the Empire arose in various places, and were either savagely crushed or showed a savagery equal to that of Andronicus. The natural son of Manuel, whom he had married to his daughter Irene, rebelled; his secretary was burned alive in the Hippodrome, his eyes were removed, and Irene was banished for shedding tears over his fate. A nephew of his mistress Theodora (of Acre) rebelled, and captured the island of Cyprus, and Andronicus impotently ordered the two innocent nobles who were Isaac’s sureties to be stoned to death by their fellow-nobles in the palace; but Isaac proved as savage and licentious as Andronicus. Then another Alexis Comnenus, a grand-nephew of Manuel, fled to the West for assistance, and the Sicilian army set sail for Constantinople; but the soldiers merely fell like a fresh flood of savagery on the miserable Greeks. At last a deliverer arose, almost by accident, in the city.