He was an upstart in epicureanism, and it is therefore not strange that he followed the recent and abominable practice of taking a child to wife. An earlier wife, of whom he had a son named Alexis and two daughters, had died, and, when he came to the throne, there was the customary scanning of the lists of royal families in order to secure an Empress. His choice fell on the nine-year-old daughter of Bela, King of Hungary, and the wondering maiden was brought to Constantinople by his resplendent officers and eunuchs and prepared for the impressive ceremonies of an imperial marriage. The tender little Margaret became the Empress Maria, and was entrusted to the care of the troop of strange beings whom she would learn to call her eunuchs. She would not be old enough to know that Isaac provoked a dangerous revolt at once by imposing the cost of his marriage on the overburdened provinces: or to perceive that the vast aggregation of palaces had, for the first time in Byzantine history, been looted by the mob. Isaac had ignobly lingered in the Blachernæ palace while the people of Constantinople, after despatching Andronicus, had wandered through the imperial apartments and stolen all the money and portable treasures they contained. One pious looter had even carried off the autograph letter of Christ to King Abgar. But Isaac, as soon as his throne was secure, repented of his liberality, and, by means of extortion and spoliation and adulteration of the coinage, contrived even to surpass the luxury and parade of his predecessor. Maria will not interest us until, in her womanhood, she begins to encounter the adventures of a fallen Empress, and one or two anecdotes will serve to describe the kind of life she endured during the ten years’ reign (1185–1195) of her husband. Isaac was a florid-faced, red-haired young man with imperial appetites. His banquets consisted, Nicetas says, of “a mountain of bread, a forest of game, a sea of fishes and an ocean of wine,” at which he sat, richly perfumed and clothed with the conscious gorgeousness of a peacock, amidst a crowd of female relatives, and other females who were not relatives. When the dishes were removed, the choicest mimes and conjurers and musicians of the Empire were summoned to entertain him and his guests. It is narrated that one famous comedian, when he was for the first time admitted into the presence of this cohort of wine-flushed ladies, bowed to the Emperor and said: “Let us make the acquaintance of these first, and then you may bring the rest.”