Eudokia Angelina

Eudokia Angelina (or Eudocia Angelina) (Greek: Ευδοκία Αγγελίνα, Serbian: Evdokija Anđel; fl. 1186–died c. 1211, or later) was the consort of Stefan the First-Crowned of Serbia from 1196 to 1198. She later became the mistress of Alexios V Doukas, the future Emperor. She was a daughter of Alexios III Angelos and Euphrosyne Doukaina Kamatera.

Life

Eudokia first married Stefan Prvovenčani, the second son of Stefan Nemanja, Grand Župan of Raška. The marriage was arranged by her uncle, the emperor Isaac II Angelos, around 1186, while her father was in exile in Syria. In 1195, on her father-in-law's retirement to a monastery, Eudokia's husband became ruler of Raška (and later king of Serbia). According to the story told by the historian Niketas Choniates, at some date after June 1198 Eudokia and Stefan quarrelled, each accusing the other of adultery, and she returned to her father in Constantinople.

At Constantinople Eudokia became the mistress of the future Alexios V Doukas, with whom she (and her mother) fled the city into Thrace on April 12, 1204, as the Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade were storming the city. Reaching her deposed father at Mosynopolis, Eudocia was allowed to marry Alexios V, but he was enucleated on the orders of Alexios III shortly afterwards, then captured and sentenced to death by the Crusaders.

Eudokia married thirdly Leo Sgouros, the independent ruler of Corinth, after he offered asylum to Alexios III and his family in 1204. Blockaded in the citadel of Corinth, Leo Sgouros committed suicide in 1207/1208. Eudokia is thought to have died around 1211.

By her marriage to Stefan of Serbia she had two children:^[1]

• King Stefan Radoslav
• Komnena Nemanjić

Sources

• K. Varzos, Ē genealogia tōn Komnēnōn, Thessalonica, 1984.
• The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, Oxford University Press, 1991.
• O city of Byzantium: annals of Niketas Choniates tr. Harry J. Magoulias (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984).
• Mihailo Laskaris (1926), Byzantine Princesses in Medieval Serbia 

See also

• List of Byzantine emperors
• List of Roman and Byzantine Empresses

Notes