Keratsa of Bulgaria

Not to be confused with Keratsa Petritsa.

Keratsa-Maria
Manuscript miniature of Keratsa (Tetraevangelia of Ivan Alexander).
Byzantine Empress consort
Tenure	1362 – 1 July 1379
Tenure	May 1381 – June 1385
Tenure	1399 – 1400
Born	1349 Bulgaria
Died	C. 1400 Byzantine Empire
Spouse	Andronikos IV Palaiologos
Issue	John VII Palaiologos
House	House of Shishman House of Palaiologus
Father	Ivan Alexander
Mother	Sarah-Theodora

Bulgarian Princess

Keratsa-Maria was born in 1349 as the princess of Bulgaria. She was the daughter of the Bulgarian king Ivan Aleksandar Sratsimir. As a young child, she grew up in the Bulgarian court, but she only lived in Bulgaria until 1356, when she was about seven or eight. She lived in Bulgaria during the empire’s final periods of stability, which came about as a result of Ivan Aleksandar expanding Bulgaria's territory and improving its economy. In a Bulgarian image of her brother Ivan Asen’s funeral, Keratsa is placed in the back. She is left out of another family portrait, which featured only her father and three brothers. This shows that Ivan Alexander did not consider her to be as important as his sons. But in a different family portrait, she is included in a prominent place along with Ivan Alexander, her sisters, and her sister Kera Thermara’s husband. Lilyana Yordanova argues that Keratsa’s red dress and green mantle in the image suggests that she was already betrothed in 1355.

Wife of Emperor Andronikos IV

The Byzantine historian Nicephorus Gregoras relates that Keratsa was married to the Byzantine Emperor Andronikos IV, son of John V Palaiologos, when they were both about eight or nine, around 1355 to 1357. Bulgaria and Byzantium had gone to war about fifteen years earlier, so the marriage was made to seal peace between the two nations. Byzantium was struggling due to attacks from the Turks, Serbs, and Bulgarians, as well as civil wars and the Black Plague. By forming a marriage alliance with Bulgaria, Byzantium protected itself from war with Bulgaria and secured an ally against the Turks. A poem called “Vatican cod. gr. 1851” is suspected by Cecily Hennessy to have been written about the child marriage between Tsar Ivan Alexander’s daughter Keratsa and John V Palaiologos’s son, porphyrogenitos and co-emperor, Andronikos IV. Keratsa arrived by ship and was immediately married to Andronikos. The poem opens with the King (Ivan Aleksandar) of a Western land (Bulgaria) deciding whether or not he should give Keratsa to Byzantium. He decides to do it for the sake of the empire. He then sends a messenger to Byzantium, and all the Byzantines rejoice when they hear the news. Then the princess arrives at the great city, and the emperor sends all his female members of the court to receive her and prepare her to be empress. Keratsa was educated among the children of the palace, including her husband. She had to change her name to Maria when she moved to Byzantium. Since Keratsa and Andronikos grew up together, they were incredibly close, and Keratsa was often at the side of her husband. She stuck by her husband through many hardships, including war, exile, prison, and their difficulty in conceiving. They had one child together, John VII, in 1370. Keratsa’s marriage to Andronikos was the final attempt at building a diplomatic relationship between Bulgaria and Byzantium. This attempt was initially successful. However, the Byzantines eventually became dissatisfied with the union, resulting in conflict between Bulgaria and Byzantium in 1364. She played a small but consequential role in the dynamics between Bulgaria and the Byzantine Empire, but the Ottoman Empire took over both nations by the middle of the fifteenth century.

Empress by Marriage

Keratsa was empress by marriage to Andronikos IV Palaiologos from 1376 to 1379 and from 1381 to 1385. She became empress as Byzantium was recovering from recent civil wars and the Black Plague. It was rapidly losing territory to the Turks, Serbs, and Bulgarians. Keratsa helped to give stability to Byzantium and prevented the empire from collapsing during these difficulties. Much of Keratsa’s political life occurred against the backdrop of Andronikos IV and her son, John VII’s political struggles (See “Byzantine civil war of 1373-1379,” “John VII Palaiologos” for more details of Byzantine political struggle in the late Palaiologan period). The historian Petra Melichar writes extensively about Keratsa-Maria’s life. Melichar says that Keratsa would have accompanied Andronikos IV and John VII in important diplomatic missions throughout the civil disputes as a loyal wife and mother, and that she would have played an active role in the disputes. The Spanish traveler R.G Clavijo says that when Andronikos had been blinded by John V with hot vinegar in 1373, Keratsa partially healed the blindness. According to the Vita Caroli Zeni, Maria had a jailor's wife tortured in 1376, because she held Venetian plans to rescue John V from Tenedos. By doing this, she foiled the Venetians' plans to escape. Melichar also asserts that Maria likely governed Selymbria in 1390 in John VII’s absence on a military campaign. In 1392, Keratsa-Maria gave a Gospel book to Peter Philargos (who later became Pope Alexander V). It reads thus: “This most holy Gospel Book was given to me, Brother Peter… [I received it] from the exalted and illustrious lady of the Romaioi, Empress Maria, who took the name Makaria, after she came with her son, the most exalted and illustrious emperor of the Romaioi, Lord John Palaiologos… in the year 1392.” This is concrete evidence that Keratsa-Maria was politically active, and it lends more credibility to Melichar’s assumptions about her life.

Widow, Nun, and Senior Empress

Sometime before 1392, but after Andronikos died, Keratsa-Maria became a nun, taking the name Makaria. According to Alice-Mary Talbot, taking the habit after becoming a widow was not uncommon. The main reason why widows became nuns was to ensure financial security. Additionally, becoming a nun gave wealthy women the opportunity to recover control of their dowries to use them for pious purposes. Perhaps this was how Keratsa was able to exercise charity to the extent she did while empress. When Keratsa became senior empress in 1399, she was still a nun. Although certainly not the historical norm, some Byzantine empresses became nuns and then went back to ruling. In 1055, Theodora Porphorigenita, the last Macedonian dynasty ruler, came out of retirement from the monastery on two separate occasions: in 1042 and 1055. In 1042, she was installed by a mob to co-rule with her sister Zoe. In 1055, she voluntarily came out of retirement in the monastery to take the vacant throne for herself. Keratsa-Maria serves as another example of this rare phenomenon in Byzantine history. In 1399, Keratsa’s son John VII was entrusted with co-emperorship and rule of Constantinople. Since John VII’s wife Eirene was young and inexperienced, Maria assumed the position of senior empress. As empress in Constantinople, Keratsa was moved by the plight of her subjects. She and her son provided a dowry for Tzykandylina, the daughter of Anna Palaiologina, whose mother had died. That same year, Maria helped a monk named Methodios, who had fallen on hard times due to the multiple sieges of Constantinople. For help, Methodios appealed to the Patriarch and Maria. Maria reduced the rent of the Church of St. Euphemia for the Patriarch, Matthew I. In May 1399, Empress Maria put John Kallikrinites in charge of her monastery, Bassos. Melchar says that the document documenting this is rare evidence that late Byzantine empresses had courts of their own. Hill and Liz argue that Byzantine Empresses didn’t have any official power before more modern ones like Keratsa. Instead, they relied on personal influence to achieve the results they wanted.

Keratsa-Maria died around 1400 and was likely buried next to her husband at the Pantokrator Monastery.

Works Cited

Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK ; Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Georgieva, Sashka. “Marital Unions as a Tool of Diplomacy between Bulgaria and Byzantium from 1280 to 1396.” Bulgaria Mediaevalis 5, no. 1 (2014): 453–78.

Gregoras, Nicephorus. Byzantina Historia: Graece et Latine. Translated by J. Reisacker and N. Rosenstein. Vol. 3. Bonn: Weber, 1829.

Hennessy, Cecily, “A child bride and her representation in the Vatican Epithalamion, cod. gr. 1851” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 30, no. 2 (2006): 115-150

Hilsdale, Cecily, “Constructing a Byzantine ‘Augustu:’ A Greek Book for a French Bride” The Art Bulletin, 87, no. 3 (2005): 458-483

James, Liz, and Barbara Hill. “Women and Politics in the Byzantine Empire: Imperial Women.” In Women in Medieval Western European Culture, 1st ed., 157–78. Routledge, 1999. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203054871-13.

Kalavrezou, Ioli, Angeliki E Laiou, Arthur M. Sackler Museum., and Harvard University. Art Museums. Byzantine Women and Their World. Cambridge: Harvard University Art Museums, 2003.

Kaldellis, Anthony. The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2024.

Melichar, Petra. Empresses of Late Byzantium: Foreign Brides, Mediators and Pious Women. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019.

Vasiliev, A. A. History of the Byzantine Empire 324-1453. Madison: The Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1961.

Talbot, Anne-Marie. Varieties of Monastic Experience in Byzantium 800-1453. University of Notre Dame Press. 2019.

Treadgold, Warren. A History of Byzantine State and Society. Stanford University Press. 1997.

Yordanova, Lilyana. “The Story Behind the Image: The Literary Patronage of Tsar Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria between Ostentation and Decline?” In Late Byzantium Reconsidered: The Arts of the Palaiologan Era in the Mediterranean. Routledge, 2019. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351244831.