Maria Melissene, Byzantine empress

## Maria MelisseneΜαρία Μελισσηνή

**Maria Melissene** (Greek: Μαρία Μελισσηνή, c. 1263 – after 1312) was Byzantine empress and Augusta by marriage to emperor Skantarios Laskaris from 1281 to 1285.

As a widow, Maria was forced to join a monastic community and took the religious name of **Athanasia**.

## Biography

Maria was born to Basil Melissenos and Theochariste Petraliphene in 1263 at Philadelphia. Her grandfather, the family patriarch Romanos the Elder , always had high ambitions for his most senior granddaughter, and more than once offered her as a bride to young John Laskaris . To account for his imperial expectations, Maria was educated in the finest arts acceptable among the provincial aristocracy. She was taught letters and sums, and her daily lessons with a Byzantine private tutor hired by her grandfather made her familiar with the holy scriptures and the lives of saints (a widespread religious literary genre in Rhomania), although she was not permitted access to the profane knowledge of the ancients, which ironically made her uninteresting to both the Emperor Theodore II and John Laskaris, two scholars.

As a young maid, Maria was a blossoming beauty, but also possessed a strong character, perhaps intrinsic to her martial family. She was particularly passionate about hunts, a trait she shared with young Skantarios Laskaris, who was her grandfather's ward and spent many years at the Melissenid main residence at the city of Philadelphia, capital of the Thracesian theme. By all accounts, Skantarios was smitten by the girl, who also intended to seduce the purple born prince and live her life in the luxury of Constantinople, rather than her provincial court. Of course, the union was encouraged by Romanos the Elder, and they were married at the Palace of Nymphaion in Asia in March 1279, less than a year after Theodore II's death.

Maria Melissene was named *Augusta* following the acclamation of her husband as Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans at the Palace of Nymphaion in 1281 by the Eastern army. She held splendid court at the Asian winter palace for the wives of the great dignitaries while Skantarios marched against Constantinople. As Empress, Maria was in her element and, once John IV had been subjugated and exiled to a monastery, she ably maneuvered the intrigues of the imperial court at the capital in a dangerous time of transition, overseeing the purges of the Laskarid New Men in the Empress' court at the behest of her grandfather.

For her entire tenure as *Augusta*, Maria Melissene had to handle the fierce opposition of her predecessor, her mother-in-law Theodora Megali Komnena, as well as her sisters-in-laws Eudoxia and Sophia, who were not yet the women they grew up to be, but were nevertheless thorns at the new Empress' side. Maria's often heavy-handed policies, in addition to her distaste for ceremony, disinterest for charity, provincial background and the seemingly unnatural control she held over her husband the Emperor, made her into an unpopular figure among both the upper and lower classes at the capital. Indeed, mime shows and general buffoonery at Constantinople often had in their Empress an object of attack and ridicule, which sometimes resulted in the blinding or sexual mutilation of the offenders, depending on the offense. Her failure to deliver children throughout nearly a decade of marriage only worsened her reputation.

All of this contributed to her exit from public life following the rise of Romanos V Melissenos as sole Emperor. Her grandfather, who had previously seen great potential in Maria, now saw nothing but a threat to his rule. The widow of the hero and martyr Skantarios Laskaris, if re-married, could lead another man to the purple and overthrow her grandfather. The elder Romanos, for all he knew, could not discard that possibility. Against her will, Maria Melissene was forced to take the veil. She chose the monastic name of Athanasia ("immortal"), for her late husband). Two years later, after an attempted escape from her monastic seclusion at Chalcedon, directly opposite to Constantinople, Emperor Romanos V had her taken to an isolated convent in Thrakesion, near to Philadelphia.

Maria-Athanasia died there some time after 1312, as she is mentioned in a land grant to her local convent in the final decree of Romanos VI Melissenos. Her memoirs, supposedly containing scathing remarks for all of her family, was recovered decades later and was distributed as a controversial piece of literature in both the higher and lower strata of Byzantine society.