Alatiel—Constantine

Alatiel—Constantine is a brief, unequal relationship shaped by desire, deception, and capture. Constantine becomes enamoured of Alatiel while she is in the Duke of Athens’s custody, then takes her by force under cover of a supposed act on behalf of his sister. Their time together on Chios gives the relationship the appearance of intimacy, but its beginning is an abduction and its ending comes when Osbech seizes them both.

Attraction and political cover

Constantine first sees Alatiel at a collation in a garden, where the Duke of Athens has brought him and a small company to meet her. He studies her repeatedly and is struck by her beauty, deciding that the Duke could scarcely be blamed for risking treason or worse to possess so lovely a woman. The attraction is immediate, but Constantine keeps it secret; when he leaves, he has abandoned thought of the approaching war and is instead considering how to take Alatiel from the Duke.

The circumstances give his desire a political disguise. The Duke’s wife, Constantine’s sister, has asked her brothers to remedy the affront she believes the Duke has done her by keeping Alatiel as his lover. Constantine tells his sister that he can remove the woman, and she consents, believing he acts out of regard for her rather than from his own passion. He promises that the Duke will never learn she was involved. The plan therefore depends on a misunderstanding within the family: the sister approves the removal of Alatiel, but not for the reason Constantine actually intends it.

Abduction and life on Chios

When military preparations take Constantine away from Athens, he soon feigns illness and returns, leaving his command with his cousin. He presents the proposed seizure to his sister as a way of ending the Duke’s offence. Once she has agreed, Constantine secretly equips a light vessel and positions it near the garden where Alatiel is staying. He then visits her pavilion with companions, where her attendants and Alatiel herself receive him cheerfully.

Constantine tells Alatiel that he has come to speak on the Duke’s behalf and leads her alone toward a sea gate. The gate has already been opened by one of his men. At his signal, his companions seize her and carry her aboard the waiting vessel. He threatens her attendants with death if they move or speak, while claiming that he means not to rob the Duke of his mistress but to redress the insult to his sister. His stated justification conceals the personal desire that has driven the operation from the start.

Alatiel is weeping as Constantine sits beside her and orders the oars into the water. The vessel reaches Aegina after daybreak; after resting there, the party sails on to Chios, where Constantine settles for fear of his father’s anger and of the Duke’s recovering her. Alatiel mourns her misfortune for several days. Constantine then comforts her, and she begins, as the narration puts it, to take pleasure in what Fortune has ordained for her. The account presents this later accommodation without undoing the coercion that brought her there: Alatiel’s initial grief and Constantine’s seizure remain part of the relationship’s defining circumstances.

Capture and the relationship’s end

Their life together on Chios is exposed when Osbech, King of the Turks, arrives by chance at Smyrna and learns that Constantine is living on the island with a mistress he has stolen. Osbech comes by night with light-armed ships, enters the city stealthily, and takes many people in their beds before they can respond. The raid kills some who run to arms and burns the city; the booty and captives are carried back to Smyrna.

Among the prisoners, Osbech recognizes Alatiel as the woman taken with Constantine while the two were asleep in bed. He makes her his wife and celebrates the marriage immediately. The account thus closes Constantine and Alatiel’s shared life through a reversal of the original abduction: Constantine had taken Alatiel from the Duke, but Osbech’s raid now takes her from Constantine. The relationship does not conclude through a choice or reconciliation between its two participants; it is broken by another exercise of power, leaving Alatiel once again in the hands of a captor.