Helena had followed her victorious husband and, with warm and mutual embraces, joined him at the palace. We do not know how long she lived to enjoy her fortune. I find no further reference to her. Anna is not mentioned further in the Byzantine chronicles, but a little more may be gleaned about her from Italian writers. Du Cange quotes the Franciscan historian, Luke Wadding, as saying that she died about the year 1350, and her body was transferred for burial to the shrine of St Francis of Assisi, for whom she had had a great veneration. I do not find this in Wadding--the reference, at least, is wrong--but Wadding does in other pages (at the years 1343 and 1349) refer to Anna. In 1343 she sent a Franciscan monk from the convent at Pera to confer with the Pope in regard to the union of the Latin and Greek Churches. It is clear that she remained Latin at heart, and no doubt she had brought with her from the West a veneration for the gentle saint of Assisi. Then the civil war and the triumph of Cantacuzenus put an end for a time to the project of union, but the correspondence was renewed in 1349. From a reference to her in one of the Pope’s letters we may deduce that she still lived in Constantinople in 1349, and it is the last reference. An Italian writer says that she died in that year, but I am unable to find in Wadding’s “Annales” the statement that she was buried at Assisi. CHAPTER XIX THE LAST BYZANTINE EMPRESSES A hundred years of life still awaited the Eastern Empire from the time when John IV. returned to the throne, and half-a-dozen Empresses were yet to play their varied parts on the imperial stage. Had any impartial and sagacious observer reflected on the condition of the Empire at the time, as we have described it, he would hardly have promised it a new lease of one hundred years’ tenancy of its stricken domain. At Constantinople, of course, no one foresaw the end. It is usually in fairly robust, not in really dying, civilizations that we find an apprehension of impending ruin: as in France and England to-day. But the Byzantine Empire had shrunk to such proportions, the Turks were closing round its capital with such steady advance, and there was so little enlightenment in its mind, or real patriotism in its heart, that it seemed to be very near the end. No miracle was wrought in its favour, but it was saved for a time by one of the accidents of human history. The Tartars or Moguls attained the height of their power under the famous Timour, and the ambition of the Turk was distracted and enfeebled.