Maria Komnena Palaiologina: A Diplomat, Missionary, and Patron of the Late Byzantine Era

Maria Komnena Palaiologina was the illegitimate daughter of the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos (r. 1261–1282). She is known for her arranged marriage to the Ilkhanid ruler Abaqa, which later earned her the title “Lady of the Mongols.”¹ Maria’s story is significant not only because it reflects the broader developments of the 13th-century Byzantine Empire but also highlights the socio-political influence wielded by Byzantine princesses.

Strategic marriages with foreign rulers were a common practice throughout the history of the Byzantine Empire.² Although marriage alliances with non-Christian rulers often provoked ideological criticism, such unions became increasingly common during the Late Byzantine period, as the empire’s political and economic power deteriorated. Maria’s marriage, too, emerged as a strategic response to the changing geopolitical trajectories faced by the Palaiologan dynasty. In 1261, Emperor Michael Palaiologos reconquered Constantinople from the Crusaders, who had established a Latin Kingdom in the region in 1204. Fearing a renewed crusade against Constantinople, Michael VIII sought political and economic alliances with other powers, including the Genoese, Venetians, Mamluks, and Mongols.

At the beginning of the 13th century, the Mongol Empire emerged as a transcontinental superpower, which made it into both a fearsome threat and a desirable political ally. The defeat of the Anatolian Seljuks by the Mongols at the Battle of Köse Dağ in 1243 prompted the Turkish principalities to expand westward, threatening the Byzantine Empire’s remaining territories in Anatolia.³ Recognizing the strategic value of an alliance with the Mongols, Michael VIII arranged the marriage of his daughter Maria to the Ilkhanid ruler Hülegü Khan in 1264.⁴ However, when the imperial retinue reached Caesarea in Cappadocia, news of the death of Hülegü reached them, and a new marriage alliance was formed with the late ruler’s son, Abaqa.⁵

Besides its political importance, Maria’s marriage also aimed to advance Orthodox Christianity, identifying the Ilkhanid rulers as potencial converts. Hülegü’s first wife, Doquz Khatun, a Kerait princess, was already involved in the dissemination of Nestorian Christianity within the Ilkhanid territories.⁶ Historical sources mention ecclesiastical vessels and a tent to be used as a portable church among the rich gifts Maria brought to the Ilkhanate court.⁷ Similar to the Byzantine princesses who married Anatolian Seljuk sultans, Maria patronized the local Christian community by establishing churches and monasteries.⁸ Her successful mission continued to influence Ilkhanid politics even after she returned to Constantinople following Abaqa’s death in 1282. When Emperor Andronikos II (r. 1282–1328) requested military aid from Ghazan Khan against the Ottomans besieging Nicaea, Maria was sent as an intermediary and succeeded in securing their support, although it ultimately failed to prevent the city’s fall.⁹

After her diplomatic career, Maria became a nun and took the monastic name “Melane.” She patronized the Church of Theotokos Panagiotissa, the only Byzantine religious foundation still functioning as a church in modern Istanbul.¹⁰ Maria endowed both movable and immovable properties to support thirty-three nuns at the convent.¹¹ Like her contemporaries, she also supported literary production, commissioning the court poet Manuel Philes to write a dedicatory poem for her, as well as collecting and donating manuscripts to the libraries of Theotokos Panagiotissa and the Chora Monastery.¹²

A mosaic panel at the Chora Monastery, depicting Maria and her ancestor Isaac Komnenos in supplication to the Virgin Mary and Christ, stands as her only known pictorial representation. This mosaic has been interpreted as reflecting both her role as a benefactor of the monastery and her kinship with the megas logothetes Theodore Metochites, benefactor (ktetor) of the Chora Monastery and one of the period’s most illustrious intellectuals.¹³

Maria Komnena Palaiologina’s life embodies the complex political, religious, and cultural developments of 13th-century Byzantium. Though her legacy is fragmented, its influence endures to this day, as her story inspired the 2008 biographical novel Η Μαρία των Μογγόλων (Maria of the Mongols), written by Greek author Marianna Koromila.

Cemre Melis Yordamlı

1. Natalia Teteriatnikov, “The Place of the Nun Melania (the Lady of the Mongols) in the Deesis Program of the Inner Narthex of Chora, Constantinople,” Cahiers archéologiques 43 (1995): 163–80., esp. 171 ↩︎
2. Anna Linden Weller, “Marrying the Mongol Khans: Byzantine Imperial Women and the Diplomacy of Religious Conversion in the 13th and 14th Centuries,” Scandinavian Journal of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, no. 2 (2016): 177–200, esp. 178 ↩︎
3. Dimitri Korobeinikov, Byzantium and the Turks in the Thirteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 10. ↩︎
4. Weller, “Marrying the Mongol Khans”, 187. ↩︎
5. Connor, Carolyn L. Women of Byzantium, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 312 ↩︎
6. Ibid. ↩︎
7. Weller, “Marrying the Mongol Khans”, 187 ↩︎
8. Rustam Sukurov, “Harem Christianity: The Byzantine Identity of Seljuk Princes,” in The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East, ed. A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 115–50, esp. 122. ↩︎
9. Korobeinikov, Byzantium and the Turks, 212.  ↩︎
10. Vasileios Marinis, Architecture and Ritual in the Churches of Constantinople: Ninth to Fifteenth Centuries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 76–77. ↩︎
11. Ibid. ↩︎
12. Alice Mary Talbot, “Female Patronage in the Palaiologan Era: Icons, Minor Arts and Manuscripts,” in Female Founders in Byzantium and Beyond, ed. Lioba Theis, Margaret Mullett, and Michael Grünbart, with Galina Fingarova and Matthew Savage (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2011), 259–74, esp. 272. ↩︎
13. Teteriatnikov, “The Place of the Nun Melania”, 163-4. ↩︎