Theodora Palaiologina

1240 – 1303 · Generation XXXIV · Empress · Doukas

Theodora (AD 1240 – 1303). Empress. Married Michael around AD 1253. Grand-niece of John III Vatatzes; wife of Michael VIII. Orphaned young, she was raised by her great-uncle, the Nicaean emperor John III, who was said to love her as a daughter and who in 1253 matched her with Michael Palaiologos. When Constantinople was retaken in 1261 she followed her husband into the recovered capital, and that same year she turned to Patriarch Arsenios to defeat Michael’s scheme to divorce her for Anna-Constance of Hohenstaufen. The surviving record of her activity is mostly monastic, above all documents from the Patmos and Lembiotissa monasteries. She appears to have sympathised with opponents of Michael’s union with Rome at the Council of Lyons in 1274, yet backed it out of loyalty — a stance she was made to renounce publicly in 1283, after his death. As a widow she restored the Lips monastery, adding a convent and a church of St John the Baptist, where her son Andronikos II buried her with great ceremony.

Place in the family

Theodora Palaiologina married Michael VIII Palaiologos, a 4× great-grandson of Alexios I Komnenos.
The archive records 19 of her descendants, across 7 generations.

One of 13 people of Doukas (1006–1303) in this archive. A great civil house that took the throne between the Macedonians and the Komnenoi.

Partners

Married Michael VIII Palaiologos (1223 – 1282) in 1253 — 2 children together

Children

Andronikos II Palaiologos (1259 – 1332)
Irene Palaiologina (1259 – ?)

Life

1240 — Born
1253 — Married Michael
1303 — Died