If history is destined to repeat itself in an inexorable cycle until the end of time, then the little known fate of Helena, the last Empress of Trapezous, becomes ever the more so tragic. Her story, taking place during a regime change, is one of family devotion, fidelity to a moral cause and a heroic, if somewhat ignominious end, comes as a surprisingly direct parallel to that of the ancient myth of Antigone, as immortalised by Sophocles.

This particular Sophoclean tragedy revolves around the great medieval city of Trapezous in the Pontus region of Asia Minor. The sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusaders in 1204 had caused the dissolution of the great Byzantine Empire into the Despotate of Epirus, the Empire of Nicaea, while a few descendants of the Imperial Komnenos fled to Trapezous and set up an Empire there. Yet Trapezous was the capital of an Empire that existed more in a constitutional than a geographical sense.

Territorially it consisted of a long strip coast along the southern shore of the Black Sea, protected from central Anatolia by the barrier of the Pontic mountains. Its wealth and influence were far from commensurate with its size and population. By the year 1400, its rulers had called themselves Emperors for two hundred years. They were Greek by language, Byzantine by culture and tradition and Orthodox by faith.

The true Emperors in Constantinople may have not permitted them to refer to themselves as Emperors of the Romans, yet their ambition was limitless, styling themselves as Emperors of Anatolia and adopting the title Grand Komnenoi. This microcosm of a Byzantine Empire on the Black Sea was constantly threatened by its powerful and unpredictable neighbours, the Mongols and the Turks in the interior of Asia Minor.

The Grand Komnenoi survived and prospered partly by making timely submissions or payments of tribute to their enemies and partly by arranging well-planned marriage alliances with their leaders, whether Christian or Muslim. Many of the Emperors of Trapezous were blessed with a multitude of marriageable daughters and the beauty of the ladies of Trapezous was as legendary as the richness of their dowries.

Several of them were destined to keep the barbarian droves away by marrying local Turkic Emirs, especially the chieftains of the nomad Turcoman tribes of the Ak-koyunlu and Kara-koyunlu, the hordes of the white and black sheep. Some of the Emperors however, maintained the link with the real Byzantine world by marrying ladies of the imperial families of Palaiologos and Cantacuzenos. Alexios III Grand Komnenos, who died in 1390, married Theodora Cantacuzene. Another Theodora Cantacuzene married Alexios IV Grand Komnenos in 1395.

It was from this marriage that the last two Emperors of Trapezous were born. Theodora Cantacuzene presented her husband with three sons and three daughters, one of whom married the Emperor of Constantinople, John VIII. Her first son succeeded his father as Emperor of Trapezous as John IV in 1429. Her second son David became Emperor when his brother died in 1458. The Grand Komnenos David was the last of the line, reigning for only three years. The days of Trapezous were numbered.

Constantinople had fallen to the Turks five years before. In 1459 the Turkish Sultan Mehmet II put an end to what was left of Christian Serbia in 1460 he extinguished the last Byzantine light in Greece by capturing Mistra and the Despotate of Morea in the Peloponnese. The Emperor John IV had sensed his empire was next on the Sultan’s list for extinction. He planned a series of alliances with his neighbours to form a coalition of forces strong enough to defeat the Turks, such as Uzun Hasan, the Lord of the Ak-koyunlu in Diyarbakir.

His brother David dreamed of enlarging and strengthening the coalition by interesting the Western power in the fate of Trapezous such as Bishop of Rome Pius II and Duke Phillip of Burgundy. Like his father and grandfather before him David sought to enhance his prestige by marring into the Cantacuzenos family. He had been married before, to a daughter of the Prince of Gothia in the Crimea.

The date of his marriage to Helena Cantacuzene is not recorded. Judging from the number of children she is said to have born him it must have occurred at about 1440. Highlighting the extreme permeation of Byzantium in the West the marriage proposal came from Serbia, where Helena’s brother George Palaiologos Cantacuzenos had settled. George Brankovic, the Despot of Serbia, had first been married to Emperor David’s sister.

* Dean Kalimniou is a Melbourne solicitor and freelance journalist.