Cheilas' Cleofe

Mistra in shrouds. Photo by Stella Chrysochoou.

The monody by Nikiforos Cheilas is the last of the four monodies delivered at the mnemosyne for Cleofe in late May of 1433. I have used them frequently in entries here for information, and have looked individually at those by Plethon, Pepagomenos, and Bessarion. This by Cheilas was the third delivered that day, and the one that probably would have been most remembered by those who heard him. On first reading, it appears to rush from one high point of emotion to the next, at times almost near hysteria, but it is the most literary of the four, and demonstrates the most concern for rhetoric.

Cheilas begins, and ends, with a justification for mourning (and includes a dig at Plethon and Pepagomenos, accusing them of showing off), both times bringing the mourning directly home by listing the mourners: the godly despot, the despots, his relatives, her most dear daughter, the priests, the monastic orders, the senators, the others, and the cities and villages.  These at the beginning are all present at the mnemosyne, while at the conclusion, he gives a shorter and different list, more poetic and more poignant: all kingdoms, groves and meadows, the Graces, widows, orphans, captives, the impoverished, and your subjects.

This identification with the listeners carries throughout as he talks about Cleofe and their grief in ways that they would wish they could have thought of, moving back and forth between factual statements about her life, and then rhapsodical images of what they have lost.  The image of light is preeminent: it is one of the oldest and most persistent of the topoi of Greek mourning. "The land of Hesperia sent her, a light flowing out from a golden race, but she shone back with a radiance that made all the brilliance of that race seem less." "O ornament of queens, or rather, queen among all queens, as you shown out, surpassing them in all your virtues."  (Here he used βασιλὶς βασιλίδων in a graceful recognition of the Palaiologos βασιλεὺς or βασιλέως βασιλεων.) "You, our sun, have set." Then inverting the metaphor he says, "What a change has come to hide away what was sweetest and best, igniting the entire flame of griefs and wretchedness."

Earlier he inverts a metaphor to great effectiveness: "You gave us then a celebration, showing us all something new, a reason to sing sweetly, songs worthy of your goodness and of the good fortune that came to us from you, . . . But now you set us to deep grieving, to uttering long cries of pain, to weaving a tragic song, antiphonal to our former hymns, singing farewell to the hopes we had in better times."

He inverts another metaphor, working with κιβωτὸς, ark: "O, bitter ark, that made away with such beauty. The psalmist of old even danced before the ark, when it was returning whence it came, but before this bitter ark which carries off our great queen to the tomb, it is entirely right for us to stand and wail continuously, and to mourn, and do everything short of trying to exhume her from it."

Cheilas reminds his listeners of Cleofe's intelligence, of her quiet and effective assistance in council, of her diligence in Bible study, and her self-discipline.  He indicates a more intimate knowledge when he tells of her standing in prayer all night, and that she had said quietly to a few that she would not live through this childbirth. He is the source for the information that she died on Good Friday at noon, and was buried almost immediately.  He confirms and supplements information in Pepagomenos and Bessarion.

Towards the end, Cheilas lets loose a cascade of metaphors: "She departed leaving behind amazement . . . O, shell of our common existence, what a change has come to hide away what was sweetest and best . . . O, who was it that did not spare this loveliest and most beautiful eye for us, cutting it out? Who was it that made this loveliest object and image of all the virtues and graces vanish? O, what a thing has been looted from us in her beauty, what loveliness has been destroyed? What light is now hidden under the bushel? O, what a sun has abruptly gone down into the tomb and is now miserably concealed? What a tongue full of grace has been imprisoned in final silence. Where has such loveliness ever before been extinguished? When has a flower so utterly withered, how has that precious gem been shattered?"

His conclusion is quiet, gentle, after the summary of the mourners: "Accept these words offered by us to you, O, in all things for us best and most holy, and most regal lady, they are entirely insufficient, but we could not mourn our loss in silence."

Just before his conclusion, Cheilas said: "Therefore I think that for all time and among all nations, this account, both as a written and as unwritten message will be sent out, and you will be remembered among all men until day and night yield to one another." As far as survivals are concerned, they never mentioned her again.

 

Translation by Pierre A. MacKay.

Oh best and wisest of friends, or George and the wolves

The best and wisest of friends, Nikeforos Prinkeps Cheilas, is one of the small group of intellectuals of mid-century Mistra, and probably the most enigmatic. Cheilas first appears in 1433, when he gave a monody at the memnosyne for Cleofe. It is an extraordinary work, highly emotional, and full of powerful metaphors, but it is his only surviving writing.  A number of letters to him have survived, which collectively give a strikingly detailed portrait of a complicated but valued personality. No letters of his survive. As Eugenikos wrote him in 1455:

Your letters are double treasures, O best of men, winged reminders of your dear countenance and our association, among us even when we have received nothing whatsoever.

It seems that Cheilas left Mistra with Theodoros in 1443 when he became Despot at Selymbria. This put Theodoros in Constantinople most of the time where he intended to pick up the throne from John. In the summer of 1448, John, seriously ill,  still had not named an heir. Theodoros had been quarrelling with him over money, and it appears that with the aid of family members and aristocrats in Constantinople, and his entourage, plus the prospects of foreign troops and the promise of a foreign bride, Theodoros was ready to attack Constantinople and seize the throne.  But there was a major epidemic of plague, he delayed his attack, contracted plague and died. His body was taken to Constantinople and buried at night in the Pantokrator. His friends and entourage – including Cheilas – sat by the tomb for seven days and nights in the traditional homage, in terror of what might happen to them.

Nothing happened. Too many important people had been involved, and details were covered over, except that everyone knew about it. Cheilas must have written a mound of mea culpas to everyone he had ever corresponded with. Bessarion received one, and responded with generosity in considering why Cheilas might have decided as he did.

You thought you were doing the right thing in deceiving us, having other considerations, and saying what was not the case, but you did not escape us in your attempt to conceal the truth in your concern for loyalty and good will toward our leader and despot, for his sake keeping his secrets truly secret. . . . It is no ordinary virtue for those who consort with dynasts to understand that they must hide the mysteries of those in power . . .Why would one not speak the truth to you and not praise acts worthy of admiration? Why would he not spare a friend from accusations or not supply the defense of one most dear to him. . . . We clearly do not blame you and we have acquitted you of any crimes already. Do not write your defense to us and give no thought to supplication. . . .

For you should view it as I do, that we were harmed by the loss of a brother and a wise friend, while we hoped that you would fare well, for by doing so you would clear away our dismay and comfort us that you were together with better companions. Or, if you willingly endured because you did not accept a division and separation from your benefactor, and were overwhelmed by love, that in itself was the better, and something for which--if you had not felt it--then you might need an apology, such as is not needed now, since you did feel it.

May you be in the midst of all good things, oh best and wisest of friends, and may you overcome all your griefs and, with the support of God, enjoy all the best of the great city. For the present, we wish you to cheer us with the occasion and beauty of your correspondence, and with better words about yourself. In the future, your brilliance will be seen brightly by us who love you. For they are well whenever and wherever your situation is better and pleasanter.

Scholarios was a man of many faces. Without revealing his support of Theodoros, and using language in keeping with his role as a judge, he wrote Cheilas:

Such is your case. We shall not believe you, and forget the evidence of your actions, and we shall not listen to you belittling your state when we have many fine witnesses who honor it, and justly so.

A good bit of the Scholarios letter to Cheilas comments on letters from him, overwritten and somewhat hysterical as was his style in distress (τοῖς γράμμασιν ἦν μετ´ὑπερβολῆς), but it also dryly indicates that their situations under Constantine had changed from what they previously had been under John:

You are abandoning us who have no wish to show contempt, and who respect the eagerness of a friend . . . Let this suffice us then. We share your happiness in the good will of our best leaders as we ourselves often enjoyed it in splendor, but now let us abandon and be free of it, thinking that we and you together with us are fortunate. We are enjoying this opinion equitably, and taking pleasure in a reputation for virtue in place of our former splendor. For we, along with them, shall celebrate the brother for his praiseworthy clemency -- don't you think? -- for through that all the best will come from both God and men.

Eugenikos wrote:

You are prevented from writing frequently by the crowd of problems that surround you . . . Write, then, whenever you find it easier for you. . . . Write something short: that will be dearer and more precious than the longer effusions of others, and show by this your longing and purest feeling toward us as from the beginning.

Cheilas eventually returned to Mistra where he then became mesazon for Demetrios. In a letter to the Gemistos brothers, when their father died, Bessarion concluded:

Be well, and speak to Nikephoros Prinkeps Cheilas for me, telling him to know that he is loved by me for his goodness more than ever before.

There is much evidence for the emotionality of Cheilas' personality, and when hostile gossip produced hurt feelings , Eugenikos had written:

I learned from one of your countrymen here, a warm supporter of yours, and the good son of one of my associates, that certain ill-wishers here have corrupted the good and wise information that you receive, announcing complete untruths and have claimed that I have condemned you frequently and to many people when, by the grace of God, what I do is just the opposite, fervently and continuously. You are, with the aid of God one of those we praise, and we are not given to slandering.

John Eugenikos left his estate in Cheilas' care during his trip to Trebizond in 1454-55. Then he had a letter from his son George (the deaths of his younger brothers were discussed in the previous entry). Eugenikos wrote Cheilas with such graciousness that it becomes difficult to discover that Cheilas had been negligent.  The wolves are a puzzlement: they are generally taken as raiding neighbors, but a mountain village on the slopes of the Taygetos range is likely to be a sheep-herding village and I suspect these are real wolves.

Not but that if you stood aside for a while from our common understanding and firm resolve for the better, something that happens to people who are distracted by many important things, as nature has it though it may be against their will, nonetheless keeping in mind the letter of warm mutual affection, and those bright hopes of ours for those around you, and what we set up for my son when I left, and you promised, what I begged from you in earlier letters for yourself and those under your care, a grant to us concerning everything where you are and whatever or ours there is. My son George needs help frequently, and the village along with him, which will provide for his and my survival when I, God willing, shall return. The village is frequently besieged, and excavations are dug under the fences by the wolves nearby, and who could be a better manager and a greater assistance for us than you, when you are led by God.  




Again, thanks to Pierre MacKay for his translations.

Pavane for a Dead Princess: Part Six

At the forty-day μνημόσυνον after Cleofe's death on 18 April 1433, the intellectuals of Mistra came together to give their monodies. The four monodies that we have (there is a fifth, one page and negligible) are long, often moving, and indirectly full of information. I have been interested lately in their view of Cleofe as a political figure.

She was obviously a great help to Theodoros, and apparently participated in discussions with his advisors. Her doctor, Pepagomenos, spoke as if she were still present among them:

For there was nothing that was not communicated to your judgment and thus some difficult problems were solved, while matters of greater moment, of holy governance and of the (soul’s) ascent were determined by the superiority of your virtue.

Nikeforas Cheilas, about whom we know nothing, provides a little more information, though not enough:

She was not, in her mind, in competition with women, even as she worked to surpass the best of them, both ancient and modern, but although she was counted among women, she possessed a truly masculine intelligence, adorning her spirit with gentleness, adorning the constitution of her character with the guidance of philosophy and the practice of all the virtues and graces, and presenting herself as one belonging to a royal race . . . In the midst of turmoil, when present among the imperial councilors she gave virtuous advice of every sort and made herself available to help everyone . . .

This was not in itself exceptional: political participation was a normal activity of Palaiologan and Malatesta women. Much more striking is the fact that -- allowing for exaggerations implicit in imperial eulogy -- she was regarded as so valuable that George Gemistos used the word "salvation" (τήν τῆς ἀρετῆς ἄχρι τελευτῆς σωτηρίαν) in speaking of what her virtue had done for them. 

The men don't tell us much. Apart from that brief mention of her political skills, Cheilas spoke of her great generosity, Bessarion referred to her philanthropy and patronage -- but of what he fails to tell us. Pepagomenos was a little more specific, speaking of her great concern for the poor, visiting them in their hovels, bringing them firewood and cooking for the sick. (One wonders how a Malatesta-Palaiologina learned anything about cooking.) He also suggests that her arrival -- after twenty-five years of no imperial woman in the palace -- much improved the lives of women there and made it possible for a number to be married.

This, though is the kind of behavior to be expected of the women of her family, all of them tremendously educated and given extensive political authority -- her sister Paola Gonzaga of Mantua, her sister-in-law Battista Montefeltro Malatesta of Pesaro, their cousin Elizabeth Malatesta of Rimini. In the well-ordered court of the early Renaissance, the ruler's wife was the social security and public assistance administrations.

This, though, is not what Pepagomenos was talking about when he said:

The queen of the Romans is dead, the very eye of the people, the shared ornament of the inhabited world, the steadfast pillar, while all our present fortune totters. How the death of our queen has turned the expectations of the Romans upside down and has left none of the hopes of our race intact. The bond of union of the monarchy is gone, all is dead and nothing remains, not just of the present for the Romans but of what is to come as well, and it persuades us to prophesy the worst and to expect no end of distress. This horror has run through us like a thunderbolt, burning everything out and turning it to ash, threatening never to give up possession until it consumes all of what is left of the Romans. All the best for us came with your settling among us, and our congenital misfortune has taken away all this, and more besides, in your being gone from us in such an unnatural way.

This conveys -- again allowing for rhetoric -- an extraordinary sense of the doom that must have saturated the educated of that culture, if not the general population. Theodoros had, ten years earlier, unsuccessfully tried to give away to Venice the Morea that he could not defend, and his brother had given the Venetians Thessalonike which they could not defend either. A generation earlier, Adam of Usk reported that Greeks whom he had met in Rome told him that "their empire is almost worn out by the attacks of Turks and Tartars," and Kydones had written Manuel Kantakuzenos as early as 1353 that the Byzantines could not ultimately withstand the Turks.

Pepagomenos kept returning to the idea of doom:

What greater disaster might come than what has destroyed the whole world of the Romans . . . leaving behind sorrow not only to us, her subjects, but to all who are accounted as Roman.

How was it that Cleofe was seen, even rhetorically, as the Byzantine’s sole bulwark against the Turks? The sources give us no way to answer this question. How was it that Pepagomenos could conclude his monody with this statement?

It would be in your power, either with your prayers to the divine, as you stand immediately beside God, to alleviate the distress of our ruler, and through this the misfortune of the entire Roman people---you can do this, I know, with a mere nod of assent---or to leave us to mourn and lament throughout life, as long as the sun sends its rays over the earth.

Cleofe in the position of both Zeus and the Virgin is a stunning image!

ZeusNational Museum, Athens

The Cretan icon is signed Κὺρ Πακσύου ΑΨΙ μαεον η ετελιοθη το παρον - This was completed 8 May 1710 by Kyr Paskuos.

My great appreciation to Pierre A. MacKay for the translations of the monodies. The monodies can be found here.

Others in this series are:
Pavane for a Dead Princess, I
Pavane for a Dead Princess, II
Pavane for a Dead Princess, III
Pavane for a Dead Princess, IV
Pavane for a Dead Princess, V
Glory Days
Theodoros' Poem to Cleofe
Theodoros II Palaiologos  
Malatesta "dei Sonetti" Malatesti