Among these disasters Constantine VI. grew up to manhood, but his mother, who had acquired a great taste for power, and feared to see her son reverse her religious policy, long refused to give him any share in the government. [Sidenote: Constantine seizes power.] She even made the army swear never to receive her son as sole emperor as long as she should live. The young emperor, after chafing for some time in his state of tutelage, took matters into his own hands. In his twenty-first year he repaired to the camp of the Anatolic troops, and there proclaimed himself of age, and sole ruler of the State. He banished his mother’s favourites, and confined her for some months to her own apartments in the palace. When he had firmly seized the helm of power, Constantine was weak enough to take his mother again as his colleague on the throne, and to associate her name with his in all imperial decrees. The ambitious and unnatural Irene repaid his confidence by scheming against him. She had grown so fond of power that she had resolved to win it back at all costs. Constantine was, like his ancestors, a warlike and energetic prince. He won several successes over the Saracens, and then engaged in a Bulgarian war. His popularity was first shaken by a fearful defeat at the hands of the Bulgarian king Cardam, by which he lost much of his influence with the army. Shortly afterwards he entered into a fierce struggle with the Patriarch and the clergy, having divorced, in spite of their opposition, a wife whom his mother had forced upon him in early youth, and espoused Theodota, on whom his own affections were set. [Sidenote: Irene dethrones her son, 797.] Knowing that the Church was wroth with Constantine for this outbreak of self-will, and that the army no longer loved him as before, the wicked Irene determined to strike a blow against her son. She suborned some of the young emperor’s attendants to seize their master, and, when he fell into her hands, had his eyes put out. He was then immured in a monastery, where he survived for more than twenty years. It was by a mere palace-conspiracy, not by an open rising, that the unnatural mother had dethroned and blinded her son. It is, therefore, all the more extraordinary to find that she was able to cling to power for more than five years, in spite of the horror which her act had caused. The gratitude of the image-worshippers to her, for having restored to them the power of practising their superstition, partly explains, but does not at all excuse the impunity which she enjoyed after her cruel deed.