But Constantinople again showed that, favoured as it had been like a petted child, it could show its power. The people assembled in knots at street corners and protested against the banishment of the heiress of the Macedonian warrior. The conclaves became a riot and the riot a revolution. Women ran through the streets tearing their hair and beating their breasts. Officers of State joined the mob, and they rushed to destroy the houses of the Emperor's family. Zoe was hastily recalled from Prinkipo, and shown in purple robes to the people in the Hippodrome. But it was too late. The mob broke open the monastery of the Petrion (by the Phanar) where her sister Theodora had long lived in retirement, and forced her to go with them to S. Sophia and there the patriarch Alexius and the vast crowd hailed her as Empress. The Emperor and his uncle took refuge in the church of the Studium. They were dragged from the altar and their eyes were put out; and Zoe and Theodora, who hated each other, became joint Empresses. Their rule was extravagant and reckless; and while the State was advancing rapidly towards bankruptcy, the aged Zoe took a third husband, after two attempts at choice, wedding Constantine Monomachus, who reigned from 1042 to 1054 as Constantine X. The old Empress and her young husband gave themselves entirely to pleasure, to luxury and buffoonery. The Emperor, generous in giving and knowing how to confer benefits after the manner of an Emperor, beautified the city by the building of the magnificent monastery of S. George at the Mangana (near Deirmen Kapou on the Mamora), and amused the citizens by showing them an elephant and a camelopard. The court which Constantine and Zoe gathered round them was a strange assembly; its chief personage was the Emperor's mistress Skleraina, whom the Empress treated as a friend. The people resented the conjunction and cried "we will not have Skleraina to reign over us, nor on her account shall our purple-born mothers, Zoe and Theodora, die." The aged Zoe herself appeased them. It was an extraordinary state of society, reminding us of the eighteenth century in France: the intrigues that Psellus tells are indeed hardly credible. But the social corruption coexisted with a real revival of learning. Constantinople became the centre of a new study of literature, which had decayed since the iconoclastic emperors set themselves to destroy culture and Leo III. abolished the University. Constantine refounded the University, endowing two chairs--philosophy and law--which were held by Psellus and his friend, John Xiphilinos. A revival of the study of the classics followed this institution: Psellus considered himself a Platonist, and he thought himself worthy to represent as well as to revive the best traditions of Greek literature. In the hands of Anna Comnena and her contemporaries, the purism which the writers affected became little more than an Attic euphuism.