In Constantinople a new revolution followed the news of the Emperor's defeat. John Ducas, brother of Constantine XI., for a time held the post of Regent for his nephew. When Romanus was released from captivity he was seized and his eyes were put out, a crime which resulted in his death. The scenes of blood and treachery which marked these years, when the Court still kept up its splendours in the presence of pestilence, famine, and decay, are almost incredible; but the vengeance that was surely coming shows the weakness that resulted from the reign of corruption and crime. Michael VII. was called Parapinakes, "the peck-stealer," a name "given him because in a year of famine he sold the measure of wheat to his subjects a fourth short of its proper contents." He was overthrown by an adventurer named Nicephorus Botoniates, whose reign of three years was a period of vice and waste which brought the Empire rapidly nearer to its fall. Michael VII. retired, like Romanus, to the Monastery of the Studium, where as titular bishop of Ephesus, he passed the last years of his life in peace. Three years exhausted the patience of the nobles with the aged and debauched Nicephorus. Maria, once wife of Michael VII. and now wife of his successor, formed a plot against him, and from a number of conspirators, Alexius Comnenus, son of the Emperor Isaac, was chosen to lead the troops who determined to give a new Cæsar to the exhausted Empire. In 1081 the friends of the conspirators escaped through the gate of Blachernae with horses they had stolen from the Imperial stables. They returned with an army: the German guards who held the gate of Charisius (Edirnè Kapou) were bribed, and the adherents of Comnenus poured into the heart of the city. A battle at first seemed certain, for the Varangians stood boldly across the forum of Constantine to defend the approaches to the great palace. But when George Palaeologus, a gallant officer connected by marriage with the Comneni, secured the fleet, the heart of the aged Nicephorus failed him, and he fled to S. Sophia, whence he was removed like so many of his predecessors to a monastery. Alexius Comnenus was not strong enough to restrain the motley rabble who had entered in his train. The city was given over to pillage. The very palaces and monasteries were spoiled by the barbarians from the Balkans. It was from this date that the ruin of the city began. If the churches still maintained their relics and their jewels, the commercial prosperity, which all through these years of imperial corruption and weakness it had struggled to maintain, now began to slip from its grasp. It was clear that property was no more safe than life; and as the Italian cities began to secure the commerce of the Levant, the merchants of Constantinople fell behind in the race for wealth, and saw the trade that had been theirs taken by the Venetians, the Pisans and the Genoese, who now settled at their very gates.