In the following year Alexis fell seriously ill, and the question of successor was opened. He suffered much from gout and despised physicians. Unfortunately his own ideas of medical treatment were much more crude than those of the doctors of the time. He ordered his servants to cauterize his gouty limbs with red-hot irons, and passed into a dangerous condition. As he had no sons, a wide field was opened for competitors, owing to the abominable Byzantine system, which knew neither the hereditary principle nor serious election, and the palace was enlivened by the intrigues of a score of aspirants. None of them seemed to have the faintest suspicion that the Byzantine Empire was within five years of its first destruction. However, to Euphrosyne’s relief, Alexis recovered, and, as the earlier husbands of his elder daughters died (Eudocia was still in Servia), they were wedded to distinguished nobles, and the year ended with prolonged gaieties at the Blachernæ palace. A long absence of the Emperor in Thrace left the supreme power in the hands of Euphrosyne, and, as so many Byzantine women had done, she held the reins with a firmer and more skilful hand than her husband. The only defect noted by the censorious Nicetas is that she was lenient to members of her own family. Fraudulent officials she punished with a severity that was rarely witnessed in the East, but the admiral Michael Stryphnus, who had married her sister, was permitted to indulge criminal malpractices, for which the Empire would soon pay a heavy price. He sold even the stores and equipment of the existing galleys, and they rotted in the harbours, while pirates spread terror throughout the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. These were not crimes at which the short-sighted Emperor could cavil. Not only did he cheat his people by creating and selling sinecures, but he resorted to practices which amounted to piracy. He once sent six galleys of the fleet into the Black Sea for the ostensible purpose of salving a wreck, but with secret orders to board and loot every vessel they met. Large numbers of mercantile galleys were returning with cargoes from the Black Sea ports, often in charge of the merchants themselves, some of whom were flung overboard for resisting. The others returned to Constantinople in great anger, and, although they stood at the door of St Sophia, candle in hand, when the Emperor came to pray, he merely laughed at their complaints. From the clergy such sufferers received little sympathy; the patriarch was a brother of Euphrosyne. The city was full of violence and knavery: the seas were scoured by pirates: the remoter provinces were ground between the imperial tax-gatherers and the foreign raiders.