The nearest of the Princes’ Islands to Constantinople and the one most used for political exile, where the blinded Romanos IV Diogenes died in 1072.
Proti is the closest to Constantinople of the Princes’ Islands, the small archipelago in the Sea of Marmara about twelve kilometres south of the city. Its Greek name means simply "first" — the first island a ship reaches on the way out from the capital. In Turkish it is Kınalıada, "henna island", from the reddish colour the iron and copper in its soil give the ground.
It appears in Byzantine history for one reason: it was where the empire put people it had removed from power. Close enough for the authorities to keep an eye on an exile, far enough that he could not walk back, and monastic enough to give the arrangement a respectable name.
Distance is the whole logic of the place. Sending a deposed emperor to a distant frontier gave him time, allies and an army; sending him to a monastery inside the city left him within reach of a mob or a faction. An island an afternoon’s sail from the palace solved both problems, and the Princes’ Islands became the standard solution.
Proti, as the nearest, was the island most commonly used. The monastery of the Transfiguration stood on the island’s hill, and monastic tonsure was the usual formal condition of confinement: a man who had become a monk was, in theory, permanently disqualified from ruling, which made the cloister a political instrument as well as a religious institution.
The list of names attached to the island is a summary of Byzantine political failure. The deposed emperor Tiberius III was buried here. The empress Irene, who had ruled in her own name and was overthrown in 802, was sent to the islands; so was Michael I Rangabe after his abdication in 813, and Romanos I Lekapenos, deposed by his own sons in 944, ended his life as a monk in the same archipelago.
The pattern is consistent enough to count as policy rather than coincidence. Byzantine politics rarely killed a fallen emperor outright when it could blind, tonsure and island him instead — a set of measures designed to remove a man from the succession while allowing his successors to claim they had shown mercy.
Romanos IV was captured by Alp Arslan at Manzikert in 1071 and treated honourably by the sultan, who made terms and released him. It was his own capital that destroyed him: while he was a prisoner the Doukas family had him deposed, and when he returned he found himself fighting a civil war for a throne he had already lost.
Defeated, he surrendered on a guarantee of safety and was blinded anyway — brutally and incompetently, by the accounts, so that the wounds became infected. He was sent to Proti as a monk and died there in 1072, not long after arriving. He was about forty-two.
The two events belong together and are usually separated. The military disaster at Manzikert opened Anatolia to Turkish settlement; the political disaster that followed — a returning emperor blinded by his own court and dying on an island within sight of his capital — is what made the defeat irrecoverable, because it left the empire fighting itself at exactly the moment it needed to fight for Asia Minor.
Monastic life continued on the Princes’ Islands throughout the Byzantine centuries and into the Ottoman period, and Greek Orthodox communities remained on Kınalıada into modern times. Of the medieval buildings almost nothing survives above ground; what the visitor finds is a small residential island, a ferry stop from Istanbul, and a landscape.
Its place in the archive is as a category rather than a monument: the address to which the Byzantine state sent people whose careers had ended, and where at least one emperor’s life ended with them.