The Only Roman Empress: The Tape Recorder Trilogy - S3E09

(756  – 814 CE · Rome, Greece, Constantinople, & More) 

The Narrator recalls a happy time in his life where he worked as a caterer and party planner, and how this dragged him against his will into the orbit of an orphaned girl who would one day become the only Empress to rule in her own right in the history of the Roman Empire.

Based on the second half of Chapter 8 of End by Geoff Micks.

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Credits: 

Voice Acting - Geoff Micks

Editing - Geoff Micks

Music - Dimitri Kovalchuk (MokuseiNoMaguro) through Pixabay

Additional Music - Aleksey Voronin (Amaksi) through Pixabay 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In 2015, a man who has been alive since the last ice age bought a tape recorder, and over the course of three days he dictated his life story as fast as he could while waiting for a woman to visit who he believes will finally be the death of him. Hello again, everyone. My name is Jeff Mix, and you are listening to season three, episode nine of the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast. Enjoy it. And as I was saying, I was ready for a change. I sold my two wagons of smithing equipment, as well as the last of my jewels, and I set myself up in one of my favorite professions. I became a cheese merchant again, or at least I started off that way. I bought a load of regional Italian delicacies, sailed to Greece, sold what I brought with me, bought new local stuff with a little profit sticking to my fingers along the way. God how I missed using actual currency to do business like a civilized person. Anyway, once you start going out into the hinterland looking for farmers who make great cheese, before you know it, you are befriending beekeepers too. The same mule or cart I used to bring cheese down out of the hills could also carry wax and honey. Now I was wholesaling three great products that people from all walks of life love, that never spoil, and that very few people make for themselves. I became very successful. I invested my profits in a neighbor's expanding chandlery, and he used my wax to make his candles. With his expanded capacity he was able to take bulk orders from local state and religious institutions and noble houses, guaranteeing delivery on set dates. Soon I was both a silent partner and a major supplier to the biggest candle making concern in Greece. My neighbor's daughter got married, and he and I set up his son in law as a wine and olive importer. We all went in together on warehousing and retail space and staff. We hired whole families, so we might have wives and daughters making candles or running market stalls, while husbands and sons loaded wheels of cheese and amphorae of oil and wine, or drove mule trains through the hills. Within a few more years, no one in our part of Greece got married or buried or celebrated an anniversary or a Saints Day or a christening or any other kind of happy day without our cheese, our wine, our candles and oil lamps, our fine dainties. We hired musicians and singers and dancers. We rented furniture that could be easily set up and later taken apart for storage. We became famous as caterers and party planners. We happy three were the princes of public gatherings. Now in all this time in Greece, I had carefully avoided the iconomacie that was still rocking the Greek run Roman Empire. I wanted nothing to do with Constantine V whose name means shit. I also wanted nothing to do with the roving gangs of people either for or against icons. Let them crack heads elsewhere. I had good times to organize and money to make. I took precautions and I practiced discretion. There were no icons in my home or business, but I never reported any of my employees if they wore a piece of religious jewelry. I attended a church whose walls had been whitewashed and whose windows had been smashed out. I never told anyone that I saw triptychs and crucifixes and beautifully carved altarpieces wrapped up in burlap whenever I was loading or unloading my local priest's wine cellar and dry goods pantry. Still, I was one of the co owners of a wildly successful business, and that did sometimes come with opportunities that thrust me into situations I never would have sought out for myself. Like the time the governor of Greece hired my firm to escort his orphaned niece to a bride show and support her bid to win with the best our company had to offer the fussy nobility of Constantinople. Now, of course, this should have been a great honor, until you hear the specifics and start thinking it all sounds like more trouble than it is worth. Constantine V, whose name means shit, was not a popular man, as you might have guessed. Also, his radical interpretation of Christianity made it doubly difficult for him to find a suitable princess to wed his son and heir. He could not very well arrange a marriage pact with a kingdom or duchy where icons were worshipped now, could he? No, so Constantine put the word out to all of the governors and generals and tax collectors in his empire, who were committed iconoclasts. Send your daughters to be my honored guests, one of them will be an empress one day. It was to be a bride show. Constantine and his son would attend a party, look all the eligible young ladies over, and pick a wife. Yes, it is exactly as shallow and impersonal as it sounds, but if the emperor could not get a marriage alliance out of the deal, at least he could get a pretty daughter in law. Anyway, the governor of Greece had already promised his own daughter to the Khan of the Bulgars in the hopes of securing some much needed tranquility on his northern border. Now he wanted the best party planners in his province to set up his orphaned niece as the future empress. It would be quite a coup if we could pull it off, and my business partners accepted the contract gladly while I was away scouting for new cheese suppliers. Upon my return, both voted that I should be the one to actually take the girl to Constantinople, as I enjoyed travel so much and had never been to the Imperial City before. That was a lie I had told them many years earlier to avoid going to Constantinople at the time. I really did fear both the madness of the iconoclass and the stubbornness of the iconophiles, and Constantinople was the place where the struggle was fought most viciously. I was so careful, dear listeners. I checked every one of our employees coming to Constantinople with me for icons. I checked their luggage, I checked every box and barrel and crate we packed. I checked the sailors for religious tattoos. I made sure our ship's figurehead was not of a recognizable saint, and that no religious talisman was nailed to our mast or rudder, or the door frames and hatches leading below deck. No iconoclast was going to find fault with me or my people, or my ship or my mission. D'you know what I forgot to check? The girl Her name was Irene, and please do not mistake her for my wife of the same name. The only thing they had in common was their deep religious faith. Beyond that, Irene of Athens was nothing like my beloved Irene of Constantinople, who died of the plague three centuries earlier. I loved my Irene. I could have strangled the governor's niece when she was a nobody, and years later when she was one of the most important people in the world, I always felt sorry for her. The iconoclass who searched our ship did not lay hands on the noble lady or her possessions. It was only when my people were setting up Irene's rooms in the Imperial Palace that I discovered she had pictures of saints sewn into the linings of her clothes where no one could see them. Almost all of the items in her jewelry box were also religious. Even the backs of her hairbrushes and mirrors were done up in angels and cherubim and seraphim. It all has to go, I shouted. Touch it, and you lose your life, she snarled. Keep it and you will lose yours, I said. She was a teenage girl, and she was not to be reasoned with. Her chaperones and nursemaids were all secret icon worshippers too. I could not appeal to them either. In the end, after throwing an epic temper tantrum that she ignored like it was just a stiff breeze, I allowed her to keep everything that she could keep hidden from sight. I went to the market and bought her sensible jewelry with my own money, and I prayed that a governor's niece in the palace at the Emperor's personal invitation would continue to be above suspicion of a physical search of her person or baggage. On the day of the party, my team and I set up a beautiful buffet of all the best food and drink from Greece on a fine table in a wide hallway of the palace, and we coached Irene on everything she had to offer her potential husband and father in law. There were girls from each part of the empire that still swore allegiance to Constantinople. As a way to tour the provinces without ever leaving the capital, the party's theme seemed to be a roaring success from what I could tell. I stood behind my table throughout the party, pouring wine and cutting up the meats and cheeses and pastries for the fancy people who came by. I am sure Irene was nervous, but she never showed a sign of it. There was another girl with a table across from us. I believe she was from Armenia. The poor thing was so anxious she positively twitched. The emperor and his heir barely stopped to say hello before walking on, leaving the girl in tears behind them as her escorts quietly berated her. There was nothing like that at all when Constantine V, whose name means shit and his son arrived at our table. Irene was all smiles and polite small talk, remembering everything we had told her about the wine and cheese and olives and other offerings she was pleased to recommend to the two most powerful men in her world. Irene confessed to me later she was praying to her icon of the Virgin Mary before the party, and she had found great peace and comfort in knowing everything would work out. God, both the Icona class and the Icona Philes were insufferable, crazy people. In the end, I was pleasantly surprised when Irene was selected as the future emperor's bride. I was less pleasantly surprised when my company was hired again to cater her wedding with all the wonders of our famous Greek hospitality on display, sparing no expense. Oh, we made a small fortune off the governor's and emperor's largesse, but after my first trip to Constantinople with her, I wanted to see less of Irene, not more. That young woman had trouble written all over her, and I did not want to be in close proximity when her come uppence found her. Irene, on the other hand, was delighted with our services. We had, after all, been a major factor in her success. She secured a contract for us to keep the Imperial Palace stocked in delicacies from her homeland. Again, my business partners decided together I should be the one to make those deliveries. They had work to do at home, they said, and I was the one who knew the future empress anyway, right? And so I did periodically see the Empress Irene throughout much of her life, and I kept track of her in the same way I kept track of young Carl. You almost could not help but hear about them. They each ended up ruling half of the Christian world, and for a moment there was a possibility they might even marry those halves back together. Here's what happened, as briefly as I can tell it. Irene and her husband had a son, who they named Constantine, after the boy's grandfather, Constantine V, whose name means shit. They only had one child. Rumor has it Irene's husband discovered her icons one terrible day, and never slept in the same bed with her again. It hardly mattered. Constantine V, whose name means shit, died while campaigning against the Bulgars, and his son died just a few years later of tuberculosis. The Empress Irene found herself regent to their young son, Constantine VI. Meanwhile, in Francia, young Karl was well on his way to becoming Charlemagne. On the death of Teppen, the Franks continued on with the succession traditions of the Merovingians, and stupidly divided Francia between Carl and his younger brother Carloman. It did not come to the ancient Frankish custom of war to decide who would prevail, though. Carloman died under circumstances that were never made public, and Carl found himself the youngest, undisputed king of the Franks since before his people walked across the frozen Rhine. A new Lombard king menaced a new pope. Like his father before him, Carl crossed the Alps with an army of Franks. This time he beat the Lombards into pulp so fast and so hard and so thoroughly that he crowned himself as their king when he was done. A Lombard claimant to the Iron Crown fled to Constantinople, where the Empress Irene gave him shelter, and lodged a protest with the Pope in Rome that she had not authorized him to recognize Charlemagne as King of the Lombards. The Pope ignored her, he had the King of the Franks and the Lombards as his personal protector, and besides, she was just a woman ruling on behalf of the child, her empire had done nothing for the papacy in generations. Next, Charlemagne coordinated with the Abbasids and the other Muslim enemies of Abdal Rahman to invade Spain, but upon taking his Franks over the Pyrenees, he found their promises were exaggerated. Very few Muslims joined his army or opened their cities to him. He had a profitable summer campaign, but without allies, destroying the last of the Umayyads was not a realistic goal, without setting aside other more important ambitions. Charlemagne retreated back into Francia, content that every Muslim knew he would return with fire and fury if they ever encroached on his territory. Those two successful wars in quick succession definitely caught Irene's attention. She arranged a marriage pact between her young son and one of Charlemagne's young daughters, even going so far as to send the Frankish princess a Greek language tutor, but in the end, Irene dissolved the contract over her son's objections before there was ever a ceremony. To my understanding, Charlemagne was not that upset about the broken betrothal. He never allowed any of his daughters to marry. As the strongest power in Western Europe, he did not need military alliances, and he did not want to raise any of his subordinates up in the eyes of the others to the point of creating a rival to his sons. Franks did have a habit of going to war with each other for stupider reasons. Instead, Charlemagne made his daughters nuns and abbesses, ordering them to pray for his success against the heathens and the pagans. There were a lot of heathens and pagans in Charlemagne's world. Every spring, for thirty years when there was not a more pressing war somewhere else, Charlemagne gathered his army and marched against the pagan Saxons of northern Germany. He chopped down the great trees and wooden pillars they believed held up the sky, and when the sky did not fall he said it was proof that he was right and they were wrong. He baptized thousands of them against their will, and when they returned to their old gods each year after he returned to Francia, he would storm back spring after spring, killing any lapsed Christian, any pagan who raised a hand against Christian, and any pagan who refused to become a Christian. Beyond the Saxons, there were other heathen barbarians, avars and slavs for the most part. Their languages took mangled versions of Carl or Carlus or Charles to mean king, just as Caesar and Augustus saw their names echo down through history. That linguistic notoriety was not a one way street either. Charlemagne sold so many captured heathens into servitude, especially to Abbasid and Umayyad merchants, that the very word slave and slavery finds its origin in Slavs, despite all the untold millions forced into slavery before and since, including myself once. Anyway, it was exhausting keeping track of Charlemagne's wars and slaughters. I rarely bothered. I changed lives again. I was always very happy with my two business partners importing and exporting good food and drink and throwing fabulous parties, but when the Chandler's son in law became a grandfather, making the Chandler who was supposed to be my age a very spry great grandfather, I knew it was only a matter of time before people started benchmarking how the two of us were aging. He really was one of the lucky ones who looked and acted decades younger than he was. So what did that make me, who had not aged a single day? Shaving my head and bleaching my beard was not getting the job done when my closest colleague had crow's feet and laugh lines and age spots while I did not. No, I liquidated as much of my wealth as I could without alerting my business partners, and then I faked my death. I do not remember the exact specifics, but it must have been a drowning or something else where they were sure I was dead even without a body. My colleagues threw me a funeral and a celebration of life the community still remembered fondly decades later. In my next life I became a traveling bookseller. There was a roaring demand for books from the East in Christendom, and under Charlemagne's reign coinage was something that at least rich people and churches and monasteries had again after the long dark age of early Frankish ignorance of currency. All of a sudden it was worth my while to pick up volumes on mathematics or astronomy, or agriculture, or medicine in Constantinople or Baghdad or Jerusalem or Alexandria. A few strong boxes of inventory could see me travel in comfort to Rome or to Cordoba, Abdal Rahman's magnificent capital of Al Andalus, or to Aachen, Charlemagne's capital of Francia that boasted a palace inspired at least in part by what his ambassadors had seen in Constantinople and among the Abbasids. He even built much of it out of stone. Yes, Charlemagne was making some big moves in the winters between his wars, things that Pepin the Short or Charles the Hammer would never have imagined. He collected intellectuals from across Christendom, gave them free room and board and all the resources they needed to preserve what advanced knowledge was still remembered from ancient Rome, as well as to develop and study the new wonders of today, particularly as it applied to contemplating the Bible. As a bookseller, it was a very pleasant surprise to learn that monks and priests and churchmen had almost unlimited funding to buy whatever I had to offer. While there were religious texts aplenty in the East for resale in the West, I can only imagine they were bored of Holy Scripture. The variety a compendium of Roman speeches or a translated text of Arab geometry offered must have seemed like manna from heaven. If Charlemagne was going to fund their purchases no matter what, they would buy it all and thank God for their Frankish patron's interest in knowledge for knowledge's sake. Charlemagne really was full of surprises, and those surprises were as often good as they were bad. Speaking of surprises, who would have guessed the Empress Irene would prove to be an able ruler in difficult times? As a regent for her young son, Constantine VI, she seemed to make all the right moves. When she could not beat the Abbasids in war, she bought peace with tribute paid in gold and silk. She restored the public worship of icons, ending the iconomacy that had rocked the Greek speaking Romans for three generations now. With the icons restored, she did her best to rekindle warm relations with a pope who would otherwise have been totally Charlemagne's creature. All seemed to be going well, except that her son stubbornly insisted on getting a year older each and every year. Young Constantine wanted to become emperor as soon as he began shaving. The Empress Irene put him off and put him off. She even tried to have all the officials in the Empire swear allegiance to her and her alone, but that had predictable results. Men wanted a man to rule them, and when Constantine VI was no longer a boy even in his mother's biased eyes, a gang of soldiers draped him in the purple that had always been his birthright, and Irene pretended she was happy for him, while he pretended he cared about her opinion of what he should do with their empire. They were not exactly a loving mother and son. Constantine VI lost an important battle against the Bulgars. Faced with a coup attempt in the aftermath of the debacle, he took out the eyes and tongues of the ringleaders, one of whom was the general of the troops who had originally backed him against his mother. When the army of that blind and dumb general rose against Constantine, he put down the revolt with unusual cruelty, even for a Greek Roman emperor. Meanwhile, he was impatient for a male heir, so he divorced his wife and married his mistress, with whom Constantine already had an illegitimate son that he now insisted was legitimate, and would one day be emperor. People who had enjoyed the relative calm and prosperity of Empress Irene's regency launched another coup against Constantine VI. This time it was successful in part because they had Irene's support in the beginning, but things quickly got out of hand. Constantine tried to flee the city, but he was captured no farther than the Asian side of the Bosphorus. An angry mob brought him back to the palace in chains, and while they were waiting for someone to ask Irene what she wanted done with her son, someone plucked out his eyes with a little too much enthusiasm. Eye gouging had become something of a Greek Roman art form, and no one should be able to argue there must be a right way and a wrong way to do it. Constantine's eye gouger did not know his business, and Constantine died of his wounds. The Empress Irene had wanted a return to power, but I do not think she actually wanted her son dead. Still, with the eggs broken by someone else's thumbs or spoons, I really do not know the specifics, she agreed to make an omelette. She was crowned Empress of the Roman Empire. Not as a regent either. She was the first female ruler in her own right of the Roman world ever. Would you believe the Church did not know what to do about that? I mean, yes, Irene picked a patriarch for Constantinople who supported her, but that does not mean every bishop and priest and monk who in theory reports to that patriarch is going to go along with it just because he says she's in charge. A woman? The Emperor of the Christian world was a woman? If you think the Orthodox Christians struggled with that, you can imagine how the Pope and the Roman Catholics of Frankish Christendom took it. Who was the Empress Irene, really? She was not even part of the imperial family by birth. Her father was the brother of a provincial governor who was now dead, and both of her parents had died when she was still a little girl. She came to the capital as a well to do orphan. Her late husband and father in law picked her out at a party because she was pretty and had a good caterer. By what right did someone like that become the head of the empire and the head of the church? She did not even have a penis. Had no one thought about that at all before letting her don the purple? Oh, there was a huge hue and cry in Roman Catholic Christendom, where I happened to be on an extended bookselling expedition when Constantine's eye gouger botched the job. I had it down to a science by then. Load up on Greek and Latin books in the eastern Mediterranean and sell them first in Italy, then Francia, then Britain, arriving finally in distant Ireland, a place that for some strange reason had become absolutely passionate about the written word. To create a book was to worship God in that place, and so every monastery was producing tomes lovingly and painstakingly, one brush stroke at a time. They were a joy to open to any page at random. I bought as many Irish books as they were willing to part with. It helped that they knew my customers were the poor sinners of continental Christendom. May God have mercy on them, and send good Irish books to save their souls, and then I sold those little miracles on my way back through a tour of the monasteries and abbeys and cathedrals and churches of Francia and Italy, where I then took ship back to the eastern Mediterranean to start the cycle all over again. I was extraordinarily lucky to celebrate the Christmas season in Rome in the year of our Lord eight hundred. I sold two prayer books and a hymnal to a Roman cardinal, and in addition to a fat purse of coins, he insisted I stay to celebrate the holidays as his guest. I should say all of this was very normal. The Christian calendar was punctuated by a series of high holidays, some about Jesus and many more Saints' days that conveniently coincided with the holy days enjoyed by the local population before their embrace of Christianity. This time it was Stay with Us for Christmas in Rome, but it could have been the Pentecost in Tours or Saint Swivin's Day in York. Wait, was Saint Swythen's Day a thing in the year eight hundred? Well, whether it was or not, you take my meaning. Sell a churchman a church book, and he will want you to spend a holy day in his holy place. It was very normal. What was not normal was that Charlemagne was in town. Yes. It turns out the Pope at the time was not particularly popular with some of the Roman citizenry. They accused him of crimes that should have cost him his papacy at the least, and probably his life along with it. The Pope in question fled all the way to Charlemagne's war camp in Saxony to plead his case. Now Charlemagne was celebrating Christmas in Rome to make sure the Romans understood the Pope was under his protection. My goodness, but the Franks had been good to the papacy. Anyway, to see Charlemagne at Christmas in the year eight hundred was to see a giant, a lion of a man whose red gold hair was first starting to silver. He had been king of the Franks for more than half of his life, and he looked every inch a king. He was even taller than I am, and the unusual aura of command he had as a little boy had evolved into an intuitive force. Of course you were going to do whatever he said. No one needed to tell you why. He dominated every room he was in. Just to look at him was to know he was in command, even when he did look ridiculous. He looked ridiculous that Christmas day. I do not know whether it was his idea or if one of the Pope's minions persuaded him to do it, but he was attending high mass dressed as a Roman, in a colorful tunic and fashionable short cloak, instead of his more comfortable Frankish garb. In comparison to his generals and bodyguards in their more typical martial attire, he looked like he was wearing women's clothes. Still, I did not catch anyone snicker. One does not snicker at Charlemagne. I went through the mass the same as everyone else, and we were all watching when Charlemagne knelt at the front of the basilica to take holy communion from the Pope himself. Something went wrong, though. Instead of bread and wine, the Pope produced a golden circlet and said Egoloria corona capituum, Carolus Magnus, Caesar at Imperator Romanorum, Serenissimus Augustus Abdea Gratia, Rex Francorum at Lengo Bardorum. Forgive me for saying it in Latin first. This was a spell that changed the whole world, and if you think of it that way, it should be said in the original from time to time, just so people can hear its power again. The translation is I crown you, Charles the Great, Caesar and Emperor of the Romans, most serene Augustus, by the grace of God, King of the Franks and the Lombards. Charlemagne leapt to his feet in protest, and that is the only thing that makes me wonder what he knew ahead of time. Would any Pope dare to surprise the King of the Franks with something that momentous? Or perhaps it was a surprise in that Charlemagne knew the Pope was going to do something to thank him for his support, without suspecting the Pope would go as far as he did. For any of you who missed the importance of what I described, let me explain. There was no Roman Emperor when the Pope put that golden circlet on Charlemagne's head. There was an empress, but Irene did not count in most men's eyes. No, the throne was vacant with the death by eye trauma of Constantine VI, and the Pope was choosing Charlemagne to fill that role and be the secular leader of both the Roman Empire and Christendom as appointed by God and anointed by the Bishop of Rome, not the Patriarch of Constantinople, or any other kind of Greek Roman Orthodox authority whatsoever. It was a formal announcement of a reborn empire where the Franks would take the best of Rome and fuse it with Christianity as communicated to them by the Pope, just as the Greeks had tried and failed to do themselves in Constantinople before they allowed their vacant throne to be filled by some woman. Dear listeners, have you heard the old joke about the Holy Roman Empire, an empire neither holy nor Roman, nor really an empire? Well, in that moment it felt like all three were within our grasp. Charlemagne was already the direct ruler of half of Europe, a master of war, a protector and champion of the Church, a patron of learning. Why should he not be the first of a new line of holy Roman Emperors, his descendants crowned by future popes? What a shame in the next thousand years no one who ever held the title deserved it more or did more with it than Charles the Great. Let me go back and finish Irene's story quickly. She was horrified when Charlemagne became emperor, as I'm sure you can imagine. As much as Iconomaki had divided Christians into two camps, at least there had always been an understanding that the power to start and stop such matters rested with the throne in Constantinople. She had already undone much of the damage herself back when she was regent to Constantine VI. That was an example of the temporal and spiritual power Constantinople had taken for granted for the last four and a half centuries. Even back when the Romans had an emperor in both the East and the West, the Western Emperor was a junior partner to the Eastern Emperor. Now a pope, who was nominally part of the church she ran, even if he often ignored her, had made the king of German peoples who had swarmed over and infested the western half of the empire centuries ago emperor? And the Pope did so by arguing that the world did not have an emperor because an empress was not and could never be an emperor. Yes, in terms of loss of power, loss of prestige, loss of face and of dignity and of respect, it was a body blow. Beyond Irene herself, the Pope and Charlemagne had made Constantinople irrelevant to all Christians not under the immediate control of her officials. The Greek speaking Roman Empire would no longer have influence over what had once been the Latin speaking Roman Empire. That now totally rested with the Pope and a German. All because Irene did not have a penis, and the man who gouged out her son's eyes overdid it. The world turns on such small things. Trying to make the best of a bad situation, Irene thought about marrying Charlemagne. Why not? She was twelve years younger than him, and he was only in his mid fifties at the time himself, and through their union Christendom really would be united in a way impossible to imagine before. What union could be more blessed in God's eyes? Well, her advisers pointed out the thousand arguments against making herself and her empire and Orthodox Christianity the junior partner of some giant of a Roman Catholic German warlord whose kingdom was mostly wilderness. While she was figuring out her next move, a coup was launched against her that she could not resist. Not enough men were willing to die for her. Opinion makers in Constantinople felt her empire needed an emperor, a non mutilated, Greek speaking emperor with a penis, now more than ever. There were still Abbasids to the south, Bulgars in the north, and a Frank calling himself the Roman Emperor in the west. Irene's male successor decided he could not bring himself to kill or even maim the Empress Irene. She was no threat to him, and to treat her like a deposed emperor would be to legitimize her legacy. Instead, he banished her to an island in the Aegean with soldiers appointed to watch over her. She was given no money or allowance or pension, and her guards had orders to refuse all gifts and charity offered to her. Irene would only live on the proceeds of wool thread she spun herself and sold on market days. The idea was she would come to understand a woman's place in the world, as she would only eat and drink by the result of women's work. She starved to death within two years. As long as I am telling terrible stories, here is a happier terrible tale. The emperor who replaced Irene considered himself a financial genius. To refill the Imperial Treasury, he banned all private loans or money lending of any kind. If you want to find capital to support a business venture, you head to borrow from the state at seventeen percent interest. This, of course, was a crippling thing to do to private enterprise. You have no idea how much the entrepreneurs of Constantinople and I celebrated when that mental midget had his brain scooped out and his skull turned into a drinking cup by a bulgar con. I raised at least one glass silently to Irene's memory during the many parties held upon news of our new male emperor's death. Anyway, I guess I should return to finish out Charlemagne's story too. He lived for fourteen more long and productive years as the first Holy Roman Emperor. He wait, wait. Oh I'm not sure the microphone's gonna pick this up at a distance. I can hear her. I can hear she's singing. She's singing the Beatles Nowhere Man. She's climbing this hill. Here she comes. Okay. My guest from yesterday has returned. Today I will describe her before I switch this thing off. I can see her blonde hair from a long way off. She's climbing up the hill towards my front gate. She has the same backpack on her back and duffel bag by her side as she did when I last saw her. She is smiling. As she gets closer, I can make that out clearly. She smiles with her whole face. You know, if I did not feel deep down in my marrow that she might be the death of me, I would call her pretty. Okay, she is getting much closer now. I'm going to turn this thing off for the time being. If and when I turn it back on, I will not keep anything from you, dear listeners. That was my mistake yesterday, and I have already apologized for it. If you do not hear from me again, well I have the rest of the tapes in a go bag out in the woods. I will try to take this tape recorder with me too. Maybe I resume this recording once I am safely away, or maybe I resume this recording still sitting in this chair. Or maybe. Second, please like it, review it, and subscribe to it wherever you find your podcasts. We want to teach the algorithm that this show is worth people's time. Third, this podcast is based on the novels Beginning, Middle, and End by Jeff Mix available on Amazon. If you want a copy of the story for yourselves, that would be so appreciated. Fourth, I have a link to a typeform survey in the show notes for each episode. Tell me a little about yourself and feel free to ask me questions. I have already done a QA mailbag episode during the run of this series, and I probably will do another one in a little while once people have had a chance to find it and enjoy the show after the final episode airs. Fifth, while this may be the final season of the Tape Recorder trilogy podcast, I already have plans for two more shows, so please remain subscribed to this channel for updates on those when they are ready to be shared. Finally, while I don't want to break up the episode with ads, I do have a Patreon account with extra content for those of you who are willing to support this channel with a donation. A link to that is also in the show notes. With that said, thank you so much for your time and attention, and I look forward to you enjoying the next episode soon.