The known facts of Helena’s brief stint as Empress of Trapezous are few and derive only from chroniclers who lived after her death and boasted some ancestral relationship with her family.
The major account of the last years of Helena’s life are recounted by Theodore Spanoudes in his history of the rise of the Ottoman Empire, produced in Italy in 1538. If his tales are true, the Empress Helena earned more fame in her death than ever she had in her life. It was in 1460 that the Sultan Mehmet decided that the moment had come to incorporate into his lands the last vestige of Byzantium by conquering Trapezous.
The Emperor was a weak and foolish man. He provoked the Sultan into fury by refusing to pay him the tribute his late brother owed to him. The conquest of Trapezous was a major military operation conducted by sea and land with enormous number of troops and ships. Just before the siege began, David sent Helena to stay with his friend and relative the Lord Guria in Georgia.
His most potent ally was Uzun Hasan also provoked the Sultans wrath. He thought it prudent to cease assisting David and David, seeing the Trapezous was isolated, handed over the keys of the city on the 25th August 1461. The Byzantine Christian Empire of Trapezous was no more. It’s last Emperor and his Empress Helena with their children were shipped to Constantinople to await the Sultans pleasure when he returned to his capital. The number of Helena’s children is variously recorded by the sources some give it as eight and one daughter.
Others, more convincingly write of three sons and one daughter namely Basil, Manuel, George and Anna. When the Sultan returned to Constantinople he had them all moved to Adrianople and settled them there in relative comfort supported by landed estates in the capital Strymon valley near Serres. It is conceivable that he expected his step mother Mara Komnene Brankovic, who lived in the same area and was their relative to keep an eye on them. Two year later however David was accused of complicity in a plot against the Sultan and was imprisoned along with Helena and their children.
Mehmet then concluded that the best way to ensure that the line of the last Byzantine claimants to the title of Emperor would not be perpetuated was to be rid of all the male members of the family of the Grand Komnenoi. They were moved to the prison of Yedi Kule in Constantinople and there, on first November 1463, the emperor David with his three sons, his nephew and his brother in-law were executed. Helena was allowed to survive. She refused to do so. The story of her tragic end appears only in the chronicle of Spanoudes.
It may be over dramatized but it may well be true. Spanoudes himself was proud to be a Cantacuzenos and related to Helena, describing her as being a sister of his grandmother. He himself wrote that he had learnt of Helena’s story from Mara Brankovic, of whom he was a grand nephew. After their execution, Mehmet ordered that the corpses of David and his children should be thrown outside the walls of the city and left unburied to become prey for the dogs and the crows. He confiscated David’s property and commanded Helena to pay him the sum of 15,000 ducats within the space of three days or suffer the same fate as her husband. Her retainers in Constantinople contrived to find the money within 24 hours.
She had no desire to remain in this world. But she had one last Christian duty to perform. She put on sackcloth she who had been used to regal robes, refused to eat and built herself a hovel covered with straw in which she slept beside the bodies of her husband and sons outside the city walls. The Sultan had decreed that they should not be buried. Helena outwitted him. Secretly she found a spade and with her own delicate hands dug a trench inside her hut. All day she defended the corpses against animals and at night took them one by one and gave them a Christian burial. As Spanoudes writes “Thus did God give her the grace to bury her husband and her sons and a few days later she died.”
It is tragically appropriate that the last lady to bear the Byzantine title of Empress should have ended her days like Antigone. Sultan Mehmet did his work well. The imperial house of the Grand Komnenoi which had ruled Trapezous for more than 250 years was exterminated. In a single had in 1463 Helena had lost her husband and her three surviving sons, Basil, Manuel and George as well as her brother in law Alexander and her nephew Alexios.
It is no wonder that she had lost her will to live. But she would not die until she had performed the last rights of a dutiful widow and mother. Some say that she retreated into monastic seclusion before willingly surrendering her sole. The one survivor of her family was her daughter Anna. She was given as a wife to Zaganos Pasha, one of the Sultan’s viziers. He got rid of her when she refused to disown Christianity and become a Muslim. Helena’s line was carried on through her niece Theodora who had married Uzun Hasan.
Her grandson was Ismail, the first of the Safavid Shahs of Persia whose descendants ruled until 1736. The imperial family of Grand Komnenos of Trapezous came to its bitter end with the massacre of the Emperor David and his offspring in 1463 and the death of his Empress Helena. The great Empire of Trapezous lies largely forgotten, wreathed in the shrouds of time, with modern Greek historians tending to skim by those ‘alternative’ avenues within the labyrinth of Greek history that provide it with so much of its fundamental essence.
Even more so tragic then but possibly fitting, is that Helena’s sacrifice should, despite the best efforts of Spanoudes, be largely unknown and unrecognised by the Greek people, so that not only her death but also her posterity are lonely and fringed with irony. There never arose another Sophocles to add poetry to Helena’s tragic story and immortalise it in our hearts and minds.
Nevertheless, for the few who are initiated into her final passions, her story cannot but move and provoke the reader. Rest in peace then Empress Helena, obscure in history with no influence on anyone, save perhaps the souls of the Komnenoi and the entire Pontic people. * Dean Kalimniou is a Melbourne solicitor and freelance journalist.