Harald Hardrada (2012)
“The extraordinary Zoe – more properly, of course, styled Empress than ‘Queen’ – would seem to have figured no less prominently in Varangian tradition than in the formal history of Byzantium. As one of the three daughters of the dissolute emperor Constantine VIII, Zoe was porphyrogenita (‘born into the [imperial] purple’) and thus empress in her own right, as well as conferring the imperial title upon no fewer than three husbands and ruling jointly, albeit briefly, with her younger sister Theodo...ra.4 In 1002, and while still an attractive young princess, Zoe had been promised in marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, but he died before the ceremony could be solemnised and more than a quarter of a century was to pass before the imminent demise of her ailing father made it imperative that a husband be found for her so as to ensure the succession. Consequently, she was almost fifty at the time of her first marriage, in the year 1028, to the elderly Byzantine aristocrat Romanus Argyrus who relinquished his own wife to accept the union only under extreme duress and just in time to become the new emperor Romanus III following the death of his father-in-law on the very day after the wedding.MoreLess
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