The Immortal Emperor

by Donald M Nicol

  The bubble of the Great Idea was finally pricked by the catastrophic failure of the Greek invasion of Asia Minor in 191z. In the same year Constantine of the Hellenes was forced to abdicate for a second time. The illusion of the sleeping emperor was laid to rest. But the myth itself lives on, as a harmless legend or a fairy tale. Perhaps its most poetic evocation in modern Greek literature is that by Kostis Palamas (1859-1943) in his long poem entitled `The King's Flute' first published in 191o:

  King, I shall arise from my enmarbled sleep, And from my mystic tomb I shall come forth To open wide the bricked-up Golden Gate; And, victor over the Caliphs and the Tsars, Hunting them beyond Red Apple Tree, I shall seek rest upon my ancient bounds.as

  The latest version of the legend comes in a popular song of the 1970s, called simply `The Marble Emperor':

  I sent two birds to the Red Apple tree, of which the legends speak. One was killed, the other was hurt, and they never came back to me. Of the marble emperor there is no word, no talk. But grandmothers sing about him to the children like a fairy tale. I sent two birds, two house martins, to the Red Apple Tree. But there they stayed and became a dream ...38

  7

  THE DYING EMBERS

  The founder of the dynasty of Palaiologos, the Emperor Michael VIII, had died condemned as a heretic and a traitor by his church and people because he had bullied them into communion with the church of Rome. They had denied him the funeral pomps of an Orthodox Emperor. His descendant Constantine Palaiologos, whatever the true circumstances of his death, died as a hero in the eyes of the Orthodox church. Yet there is no evidence that he ever repudiated the union of Florence. He too died in communion with the church of Rome, a catholicus zelator as a German poet of the fifteenth century described him.' Many had accused him of heresy and betrayal of his faith while he was alive. His death sanctified him. The Patriarch Gennadios held his peace. He would surely never have countenanced the Emperor's canonisation; and there was no question of giving him a Christian burial. But his former subjects, the Orthodox Christians, honoured Constantine as a martyr. They forgot or ignored the fact that he had died in heresy; and, as the sleeping Emperor petrified in marble and waiting for his time to come, he became the invisible symbol of the still living faith of Orthodoxy. Stories were told of the priest who would one day return to complete the Liturgy in St Sophia which had been so savagely interrupted on the morning of z9 May 1453. He had disappeared into a wall of the church. He too was not dead but sleeping, waiting for his hour to come.'

  The Turks were half afraid this might be true, just as they were afraid of the mysterious presence near the Golden Gate. There was said to be a locked door high up in a wall of St Sophia. The Sultan Mehmed ordered that it be forced open. But the skill and labours of all the locksmiths and masons in the city could not move it. For it was God's will that it should stay closed until such time as the city was once again Christian. Then the door would open by itself and the priest would come out to continue his Liturgy. Another story had it that the door was made of gold and that once, at a time of financial necessity, the Turkish government decided to remove it and melt it down, replacing it with a bronze replica. An English technician was engaged for the task. But he was uneasy because, `although an Englishman, he was a Christian'. He reported the matter to his ambassador in Constantinople, who prudently advised the Turkish authorities to leave the door alone. Fortunately for the Turks, his advice was heeded.'

  A more real and immediate worry for the conquering Sultan Mehmed was that some claimant to the Byzantine throne might find a following and cause trouble. Constantine Palaiologos had no direct descendants. The Sultan made sure, however, that all other male members of his family were carefully watched or eliminated. There were also surviving members of the family of Cantacuzene, claiming descent from the Emperor John VI who had held the Byzantine throne in the middle of the fourteenth century. The Cantacuzenes were gradually rounded up and liquidated. In 1477 many of them who had been brought to Constantinople were slaughtered in a mass execution.' Some of the imperial aristocracy, however, contrived to escape the clutches of the Turks in 1453. A passenger list survives of a Genoese ship that got away on z9 May with a full load of refugees. It bears the names of six members of the Palaiologos family, two Cantacuzenes, two Laskarids, two Komneni, two of the Notaras family and many of less distinguished birth. The ship's captain, Zorzi Doria, took some of them to Chios, others to Venetian Crete, from where they made their different ways to the Morea, to Corfu, or to Italy.5

  Those who escaped to Italy and the west were beyond the Sultan's reach. There remained Constantine's brothers in the Morea. They were a nuisance to him but hardly a threat; and he allowed them to play at being Despots. They might have thought of making their Despotate a rallying-point for the creation of a Byzantine Empire in exile. But Demetrios and Thomas had never been able to cooperate; and they were more intent on fighting each other than on continuing the struggle against the Turks. In 1452, when the siege of Constantinople had been about to begin, Constantine had sent an urgent message to the Morea for one of his brothers to come and help in the defence of the city. To prevent this the Sultan had sent his general Turahan to invade and devastate the Morea once again.' As soon as the Turks had done their deadly work and gone, a revolt against Demetrios and Thomas broke out. It was prompted and led by the Albanian immigrants in the Morea, who encouraged the grievances of many of the local Greek landowners. They nominated one Manuel Cantacuzene as their leader. He was a son of that George Palaiologos Cantacuzene who had served Constantine in earlier days and whom Ciricao of Ancona had met at Kalavryta. The Albanians called him Ghin Cantacusino. The revolt had a limited success. The Sultan was not in favour of letting the Morea pass under Albanian control. The Despots Demetrios and Thomas, however feeble and contentious, were answerable to him. In December 1453 he sent another army to Greece to restore order. But not until October of the following year, when the elderly Turahan led his own troops to the scene, was the rebellion crushed. The brave Despots had invited the Turks to help them shore up their own authority. The `pseudo-Despot' Manuel Cantacuzene was evicted. The Sultan demanded as his reward a substantial tribute in cash from Demetrios and Thomas.'

  It seemed that nothing could prevent the slide into anarchy in the Morea; and nothing could bring Constantine's brothers to agree on their policy and pool their resources. Thomas retained a naive hope that the pope and the Christian rulers of the west might yet launch a crusade for the salvation of Greece. Demetrios, who had never hoped for anything from western Christendom, was more realistic in believing that it was better to placate his Turkish masters. Neither could find the money to pay the Sultan his tribute. In the end Mehmed lost patience with both of them. In May 1458 he brought his own army down from Adrianople. Athens had already succumbed to the Turks two years before. The Hexamilion wall was a heap of ruins. The only serious resistance to the Sultan's invasion came from Corinth, which lay in the jurisdiction of the Despot Demetrios. Mehmed left his gunners to besiege and bombard the Acrocorinth while he took the rest of his army south to conquer and destroy Thomas's portion of the Morea. They marched as far as Tripolis and then up to Patras which surrendered. From there they came back along the coast to Corinth, accepting or forcing the submission of every town along their way. The defenders of the Acrocorinth were at last persuaded to lay down their arms in August 1458.

  The terms that the Sultan dictated reduced the Byzantine Despotate of the Morea, the last vestige of Constantine's Empire, to a fraction of its former extent. Corinth, Patras and the north west of the peninsula were now under direct Turkish rule. Umur, son of Turahan, was appointed as governor. Demetrios and Thomas were graciously allowed to keep Mistra and the rest of the Morea, on payment of their annual tribute to the Sultan, dividing their territory and their responsibilities between them as best they could. The Sultan must have suspected that the two brothers, who found it hard to live in peace before, would find it impossible when thrown together in a sti
ll more confined area. His suspicions were soon confirmed. They fell to quarrelling almost as soon as he had left. Thomas again implored the pope to send reinforcements. Demetrios invited the Sultan to support him against his brother. Neither had any real control over the people they were supposed to govern. The local lords were free to indulge in the feuding and anarchy which they had generally preferred.'

  The Sultan may have been a little anxious that the new Pope Pius II, formerly Aeneas Sylvius, might respond to the call of the Despot Thomas and the constant exhortation of Cardinal Bessarion and organise a crusade for the rescue of the Morea. He had no doubt heard that the pope had convened a council at Mantua in 1459 and sent Bessarion with other legates to preach the crusade in Germany and elsewhere. There was little practical response. But the Sultan was certainly aware that the pope had hired a force of 300 soldiers to go to the aid of Thomas; that they had left Ancona and arrived in the Morea; and that they had just joined Thomas's troops in attacking Patras. The attack failed, though Thomas managed to recover Kalavryta from the Turks. It was scarcely a crusade. The mercenaries from Italy soon lost interest and began to drift home; and Thomas took to squabbling with Demetrios once again. The dreams of Pope Pius II and the high hopes of Bessarion for the liberation of the land that he knew so well were dissipated and forgotten in another round of fratricidal warfare between the brothers of the last Emperor Constantine. Towards the end of 1459 the Bishop of Lakedaimonia, acting on the Sultan's orders, brought them together and made them swear to keep the peace. Within weeks they were at war again.'

  The Sultan's patience was exhausted. He had other and more pressing problems to face in the Balkans and in Asia Minor. But the time had come to bring order to the chaos in Greece, to end the pretence that the Morea was governed as a vassal state of the Ottoman dominions by the two surviving Despots of the Byzantine Empire. Conquest and annexation was the only solution. In April 146o Mehmed assembled an army and led it himself first to Corinth and then past the ruins of Argos to Mistra. The Despot Demetrios surrendered without a struggle. He had already sent his family to the safety of the impregnable rock of Monemvasia. On 29 May 1460, seven years to the day since the fall of Constantinople, the city of Mistra passed into Turkish hands. It was as well that the Byzantine Sparta, the subject of so much rhetoric from Bessarion and his master Plethon, submitted so tamely. For otherwise it would have been reduced to the `worthless soil' of Ovid's ancient Sparta and its churches, palaces, libraries and works of art might have been obliterated by the vengeful Turks. For it was the law of Islam that cities that resisted should be plundered and destroyed. Such had been the fate of Constantinople. Such also was the fate of the few places in the Morea that dared to fight back. Their men were massacred and their women and children were carried away. The Sultan's soldiers had orders to terrorise the population. Refugees flocked south to the Venetian harbours at Coron and Modon. The last known defender of the lost cause of the Despotate of the Morea was an otherwise obscure member of the Palaiologos family called Constantine Graitzas who held out at Salmenikon near Patras until July 1461.10

  By then the true Palaiologi, the brothers of the last Emperor Constantine, had abandoned their posts. The Despot Thomas and his family had fled to Modon and in July 11460 escaped from there to Corfu under Venetian protection. With them was the faithful George Sphrantzes, who died as a monk in Corfu about 11478. In November Thomas went on to Rome, ever hopeful of inciting a crusade for his restoration. He had with him, as a present for the pope, the head of the Apostle Andrew which he had brought from Patras. Pope Pius II, a romantic to the end, gave Thomas a warm welcome in Rome in March 11462. Bessarion handed over the apostolic relic and the scene of its presentation was later depicted on the pope's tomb in the church of Sant' Andrea della Valle. Thomas was rewarded with honours and pensions from the pope and his cardinals. He was still pleading his cause in Italy when he died in May 11465.11 His brother Demetrios had no escape after the surrender of Mistra. He was a prisoner, albeit a favoured one. The Sultan treated him kindly and promised him an estate in Thrace. He was obliged, however, to recall his wife and daughter from their refuge in Monemvasia and to yield them to the Sultan's whim. For a while Demetrios lived in comfort at Adrianople drawing adequate revenue from the islands of Imbros and Lemnos, Samothrace and Thasos, parts of which had been allotted to him. But about 1467 he lost the Sultan's favour. He was stripped of his assets and sent in disgrace to Didymoteichon. He died as a monk in 1470; and with him died his line. His only daughter Helena was already dead and his wife Theodora outlived him only by a few weeks. 12

  The imperial house of Palaiologos was not yet extinct, however. Constantine's brother Thomas died in 1465. But Thomas's line was perpetuated in exile through three of the four children that his wife Caterina had borne him. Caterina had been a daughter of the Genoese prince Centurione Zaccaria and she died and was buried in Corfu in August 1461. The elder of her daughters, Helena Palaiologina, had married Lazar, the third son of the Despot George Brankovic of Serbia. She had left the Morea and settled at Smederevo, the great castle which her father-in-law had built on the Danube. Lazar was an unsavoury character. When he died in January 1458 he left Helena with three daughters to care for. In the following year the Sultan Mehmed captured Smederevo and put an end to the Despotate of Serbia. He allowed the widowed Helena to leave the country; and after some time at Ragusa she moved to Corfu to join her mother. She died on the island of Santa Mavra or Leukas in November 1473 having become a nun. But she had no sons to carry on the name of Palaiologos.1'

  The younger daughter of Thomas and Caterina was Zoe. When she was sixteen the pope, Sixtus IV, arranged for her to marry Ivan III, Grand Prince of Moscow, in the hope of converting the Russians to Roman Catholicism. The pope provided her dowry and solemnised her betrothal to Ivan in Rome in 1472. Her wedding, however, was celebrated in Moscow according to the Orthodox rite of her ancestors. The Russians called her Sophia; and this union between `the new Constantine of Moscow', as Ivan liked to be known, and the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, lent substance to the already growing fantasy that Moscow was the `Third Rome'. She had four sons. They inherited through her the emblem of the double-headed eagle but not the name of Palaiologos that went with it. Ivan IV the Terrible was her grandson."

  The two surviving sons of the Despot Thomas were Andrew, born in 1453, and Manuel, born in 1455. They were brought up in Italy under the watchful eye of Cardinal Bessarion. He expected great things of them and composed improving tracts for them to commit to memory. Pope Pius II provided them with pensions after their father died in 1465, but his successor Sixtus IV was not so generous. Manuel left Rome about 1476 and threw himself on the mercy of the Sultan Mehmed who gave him an estate and an income. He married and had two sons, John who died young and Andrew who became a Muslim.15 Thomas's first born son, Andrew Palaiologos, being the eldest nephew of the last Emperor Constantine, was generally thought, not least by Bessarion, to be the lawful heir not only to the Byzantine throne but also to the Despotate of the Morea. The pope invested him with the rank and title of Despot and he adopted for himself the title of imperator Constantinopolitanus. He proved to be a disappointment. After Bessarion's death in 1472 he had no one to keep him in mind of his responsibilities. He married a woman of the streets of Rome called Catherine. The pope thereupon refused to support him for a while and twice he went to stay with his sister Zoe-Sophia in Moscow. Back in Rome after 1490, he persuaded the pope to help finance an expedition to reconquer the Morea from the Turks. The money was found and spent, but nothing came of the expedition. Andrew then sought the protection and support of King Charles VIII of France and, in 1494, when visiting his court, he ceded to Charles all his rights and title to the Byzantine throne. For himself he reserved only his title as Despot of the Morea. When Charles VIII died in 1498 Andrew was left without a patron and nearly penniless. In April 1502, just before his own death, he made a will in which he bequeathed all his titles to Ferdinand of Aragon and I
sabella of Castile. In June of the same year he died as a pauper. His widow had to beg the pope for money to pay for her husband's funeral. Some say that he died childless; others that he had a son called Constantine who was employed in 1508 as a commander of the papal guard. Russian documents ascribe to Andrew a daughter called Maria, unknown to western sources, for whom her aunt Zoe-Sophia arranged a marriage to Prince Vasili Mihailovic of Vereia.16

  The male line of the house of Palaiologos, the collateral descendants of the last Christian Emperor Constantine, was thus extinct by the beginning of the sixteenth century. This demonstrable fact has never deterred claimants to the Byzantine imperial title from appearing in various parts of Europe to the present day. The family of Palaiologos was extensive even in Byzantine times; and not all who bore that name were related to the imperial line. The temptation among later Palaiologi, however, to discover or fabricate a link with the last Emperors of the Romans was often irresistible. A destitute refugee from the wreck of Byzantium could trade on the name of Palaiologos and acquire respectability if not a pension from a prince, a pope, or a cardinal. Many of them settled in the north of Italy, in Venice, in Pesaro, or Viterbo. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there were numerous Palaiologi in the service of Venice as stradioti or lightarmed cavalrymen. Venetian documents frequently refer to their `strenuous' prowess in the service of the Serenissima. Theodore Palaiologos, whose career is well documented and who died in 1532, probably came from Mistra. Others were John in the late fifteenth century, Annibale and his son Leziniano about 1586, and Andrew Palaiologos Graitzas about 1460, from whom some of the existing Palaiologi in Athens, still surprisingly numerous, claim descent.17 Early in the sixteenth century one Lucio or Livio Andronico Paleologo lived at S. Elpidio a Mare near Pesaro. Later in the same century the theologian Jacobus Palaeologus of Chios, who became a Dominican in Rome and travelled widely in Europe, boasted of his imperial ancestry and claimed to be a grandson of Andrew. His theology carried him into the deep waters of Lutheranism and he was burnt as a heretic on the order of Pope Gregory XIII in 1585. Among his children was a son called Theodore who is known to have been living in Prague in 1603. A contemporary of Jacobus was one Panaiotus or Panagiotes Palaeologus living in Vienna. When brought to trial there on a criminal charge he identified himself as a genuine Palaeologus and `true Prince of Lacedaemonia'. He was none the less convicted as a swindler and a forger.1'