Martha of Georgia

Martha of Georgia, known to Byzantine history as Maria of Alania, was the Georgian princess who became empress as the wife of two successive emperors and a kingmaker in the coup that brought the Komnenoi to power. Born about 1053, she was the daughter of Bagrat IV of Georgia and his Alan queen Borena; the Byzantines called her after her mother's people. At about five she was sent to Constantinople as a hostage for her father's good behavior and placed under the patronage of the empress Theodora, returning home after Theodora's death later that year.

About 1065, or by other reckonings between 1066 and 1071, she was married to the junior emperor Michael VII Doukas, a match Georgian tradition regarded as an unprecedented triumph for her father. She became empress when Michael assumed sole rule in 1071 and bore him a son, Constantine, in 1074. Michael's reign, marked by defeat against the Seljuks and the debasement of the coinage, ended in his deposition in 1078, and the usurper Nikephoros III Botaneiates, seeking legitimacy, took Maria as his wife although her first husband was alive as a monk; the church regarded the union as irregular. Nikephoros conferred the title of caesar on her brother George II of Georgia. When he declined to name Constantine his heir, Maria backed the general Alexios Komnenos, adopting him as her son to give him access to the palace, and in 1081 Alexios overthrew Nikephoros and made Constantine his co-emperor and the betrothed of his daughter Anna Komnene.

The birth of Alexios's own son John in 1087 ended those hopes. Constantine was demoted, and Maria withdrew into monastic life, though she kept her palace of the Mangana, her wealth, and a circle of scholars that included Theophylact of Ohrid. Anna Komnene, raised partly in her household, praised her beauty at length in the Alexiad. Constantine died in the mid-1090s. Maria remained a patron of the Georgian monastery of Iviron on Athos and is said to have founded a convent in Jerusalem with her mother. The date of her death is uncertain: she was still commemorated at a Georgian church council of 1103, and modern accounts place her death between then and about 1118.