by John Hall
Theodore’s story is still running. On 18 April 2007, a large coach cautiously negotiated the narrow country lanes leading to Landulph, halted outside the ancient granite church and disgorged fifty black-robed Greek Orthodox priests. Inside, the Paleologus monument was draped with silk ribbons of the Greek colours with the Byzantine eagle flag displayed above it. Led by Archbishop Gregorios, head of the Orthodox community in Britain, senior clerics exchanged their sober garb for sumptuous embroidered vestments to celebrate vespers in honour of the heir of the Paleologi. Candlelight flickered on golden icons on the altar, chants rose and fell, and clouds of incense drifted past the massed bushy beards.
This strange evocation of Byzantium in a simple Cornish church was witnessed by a handful of bemused locals squeezed along the rear pews, peering over rows of black stovepipe hats. It was explained to me afterwards that the ceremony was not technically the full Orthodox memorial rite, in deference to the imperial scion’s conversion to the Church of England. I suspected the shade of Theodore was chuckling softly at such scruples, and it was then I knew this book had to be written. For here was a most striking demonstration of how the name Paleologus continues to exert its power over the imagination.
Byzantium has a deep spiritual significance for the Greeks and the Eastern Church, but there is a strong English interest in the vanished empire. Constantine the Great, founder of Constantinople, was proclaimed Caesar by the Roman army at York, and in the deep layers of ancient British myth Constantine’s mother was an Englishwoman, daughter of the King Coel immortalised in the nursery rhyme. King Arthur was the claimed grandson of Constantine and was himself the claimed ancestor of the Tudors.
There is no lack of present-day pretenders to the imperial bloodline. Anyone with access to the internet is free to roam their airy realms. Paleologus is a brain-turning name, and as claimants in cyberspace range from the mildly delusional to the barking mad it is a dreamlike experience to wander through their mazy pedigrees, only to find each and every claim of descent ridiculed by some spoilsport genealogist on a rival website. There is also a recurring element of the criminal. Now and then a self-declared imperial heir will materialise to offer you a Byzantine coat of arms or title for a financial consideration, only to exit fast when the police or press come knocking.
Others have at least a half-respectable claim to Paleologus blood and some of these will be examined later. The Constantine link with the British royal family may be risible, but the future King Charles III inherits Paleologus blood twice over, from his mother’s forebears and his father’s. My chapter on Victor Paleologus, the only living, breathing bearer of the name to feature in this book, does not yet present a formal claim, as Mr Paleologus is currently researching his imperial descent from a cell in Chino State Prison in California, where he is serving a term of twenty-five years to life for murder. Mr Paleologus tells me of a strong family tradition of ‘intricate connections’ with the dynasty, though he accepts that establishing ‘the constructive link’ will demand further investigation.
With the single exception of Victor Paleologus, claims of imperial descent are traceable through female lines. The pedigrees of all other pretenders twist and turn and shift sideways in the ingenious manner of the Windsor descent from William the Conqueror. If we seek the last heirs of the imperial Paleologi in direct male line, it is Theodore’s English family or nothing.
This book examines the strange and sometimes shocking history of Theodore Paleologus, his pedigree from the mysterious John and of his own descendants up to their extinction – or supposed extinction – a century after his arrival in England. Before tracing these generations in detail, however, we must begin with an overview of Byzantium’s last ruling line, a dynasty founded on assassination, heresy and treason. A chronicle of cruel deeds and dark secrets, it seems a fittingly lurid backcloth to the tale of Paleologus of Landulph.
1
Talk to me, my lords,
Of sepulchres and mighty emperors’ bones.
Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy.
For most of us Byzantium is a hazy concept. Anyone of my own post-war generation might easily envisage an Egyptian or Roman of ancient times, if only by courtesy of Cecil B. De Mille, but the Byzantine was a figure shrouded in mystery. Many must have heard the name of his empire’s great capital for the first time when taxed with the simple playground riddle:
Constantinople is a very long word – if you can’t spell it you’re the biggest dunce in the world.
The Byzantines were absent from history lessons at my grammar school; John Julius Norwich, best-known of the modern historians of Byzantium, has made the same point about his schooling at Eton. For a teenager, a next fleeting brush with the civilisation might have come on reading Sailing to Byzantium, with Yeats’s sensuous lines offering an illusory moment of empathy where history had failed, in images of hammered gold and gold enamelling, a drowsing emperor, and an artificial bird singing on a golden bough:
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Our present use of the word byzantine as a synonym for the excessively complex, tortuous or duplicitous serves to distance us further from a proud Christian empire that lasted over 1,000 years. It may not be too fanciful to discern the origin of this detachment in a collective Western guilt over the conquest of Constantinople by Islam.
Constantinople was founded in the year 330 by Constantine the Great, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. For the site of his New Rome he chose an established Greek settlement called Byzantion, located on the Bosphorus where east meets west. Like Old Rome, his city was built on seven hills. Drawing on legacies of the classical world, it became the centre of an empire which at its zenith was by far the greatest power on earth, ruling over present-day Greece, North Africa, Egypt, the Holy Land, the islands of the Mediterranean, much of Italy, the Balkans and Asia Minor – in all, the empire encompassed the territories of thirty-four of today’s nation states. Constantinople was renowned for its fabulous wealth, sublime art and unrivalled tradition of learning; above all, from the seventh century to the fifteenth, it was Christendom’s bulwark against an ever-expanding Islam. The city survived repeated sieges by the Arabs and the empire’s most formidable foes of latter centuries, the Ottoman Turks.
Constantine ruled both Old and New Rome, but in 395 the empire was divided between his descendants. Less than a century later, Rome was overrun by barbarians. The emperor in Constantinople was sole ruler of what remained, and during the next golden age, the reign of Justinian the Great, many lost territories of Old Rome were regained. But the empire was constantly assailed by enemies on all fronts – not only Ottomans, but Persians, Slavs, Normans, Huns, Bulgars, Venetians and a host of others – and repeatedly fragmented by civil wars. In the meantime the empire’s character changed from essentially Latin to Greek, though to the end its subjects persisted in calling themselves Romans.
The vast all-powerful Byzantine Empire was a distant memory by the time of Michael Paleologus, founder of the last imperial line and claimed ancestor of the man buried in Landulph Church. In 1204, twenty years before Michael’s birth, Constantinople had been captured and sacked, not by Turks but by so-called crusaders – Latins, as the Byzantines called everyone from Western Europe. Dazzled by the enormous wealth they saw en route to the Holy Land, which like so much of the former empire was now in Muslim hands, they realised that Constantinople offered easier pickings. With the great city in ruins and its treasures plundered, a Latin usurper was proclaimed emperor; much of the Greek mainland was carved up between rapacious followers who proceeded to call themselves counts, dukes and princes.
With their empire on the verge of total collapse, the Byzantine emperors-in-exile retreated to the ancient city of Nicaea across the Straits of the Bosphorus, forty miles from the old imperial capital. The short-lived dynasty of that period, the Lascaris, was soon supplanted by the Paleologi. And it must be said that all
our negative and sensational associations with Byzantine history – assassinations, plots, arcane ceremony, unbridled greed, cruelty, treachery, hypocrisy and love of ostentatious display – may justly be linked with the Paleologan era.
Though a usurper, Michael Paleologus was no upstart. The Paleologi were among the empire’s great aristocratic families, counting among their ancestors no fewer than eleven emperors of earlier times. The theoretical succession from the Caesars was maintained. Paleologus – the Greek name means ancient word – was the most talented general serving the Lascaris, but their relationship was always fragile.
Emperor John III, an epileptic, managed to recapture considerable territory from the Latins, but grew jealous of Michael’s prowess as a soldier. John’s son and successor, Theodore II, was even more suspicious of the general. At one time Paleologus was so convinced he was in mortal danger from the emperor that he defected to the Turks, then busily mopping up yet more sorry remnants of the empire. But again the quarrel between emperor and general was patched up.
When Theodore II died leaving an eight-year-old successor, John IV, the looming thundercloud burst. During a memorial service for the dead ruler, the child emperor’s appointed regent was hacked to pieces at the high altar. The outrage was almost certainly on the orders of Michael Paleologus, who soon afterwards proclaimed himself co-emperor. The fate of a child monarch was rarely a happy one and on Christmas Day 1261 the wretched boy’s eyes were put out – along with castration, blinding was a favourite Byzantine method of dealing with rivals – and he was locked up for the rest of his life. As Michael VIII, the first Paleologus ruler assumed the sonorous title of his predecessors, Basileus Basileon Basilieuon Basileonton, King of Kings ruling over Kings, and signed his name in royal red ink: ‘in Christ, true Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans, Vice-Gerent of God on earth, Equal of the Apostles’. He is known to history as Michael the Crafty. The first emperor to adopt the emblem of the double-headed eagle which looks east and west, he was by far the ablest of his line and is best remembered for recapturing Constantinople.
In 1261, following a series of victories against the Latins, Michael entered the Queen of Cities by the Golden Gate. With a display of piety calculated to impress the citizens, he is recorded as appearing humbly on foot behind Byzantium’s holiest icon. However, it is axiomatic that any Byzantine source is contradicted by the next, and another account has him entering in triumph on a magnificent white horse. Either way, Michael’s popularity was short-lived. Taxes rose steeply to finance a lavish rebuilding of the city and an imperial navy. Disgusted by the fate of the boy emperor, the patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated Michael, who responded by deposing the patriarch. But it was a more radical act which turned the majority of Byzantines against their ruler.
The schism between Orthodoxy and the Roman Catholic Church dated back to 1054. The mutual hatred between the Eastern and Western traditions intensified during the Latin reign in Constantinople, where many of the emperor’s subjects regarded the rival Christian faith as a worse enemy than Islam. Once in power, Michael schemed for a reunion of the two churches – not through religious conviction, but as the means of winning papal support against his Catholic foes. Michael’s promised submission to Rome enraged the powerful Orthodox clergy, but protest in Constantinople was crushed without mercy. Michael was not a man to cross and opponents escaping death faced exile, imprisonment, torture or mutilation. The simmering resentment of the Orthodox hierarchy was to dog the emperor for the rest of his reign, and in the end all his machinations came to nothing. Negotiations with Rome dragged on for twenty years with one pope after another until a newly elected pontiff, Martin IV, finally lost patience. He pronounced a sentence of excommunication on Michael, to add to that issued by the patriarch. ‘The usurper Paleologus’ was now fair game to any Catholic rival who wanted the Byzantine crown for himself.
The most serious challenge came from the French king’s brother, Charles of Anjou. A huge French army was assembled in Sicily, formerly Byzantine territory but now one of the many possessions that Charles ruled with a rod of iron, along with the armada needed to carry it to Constantinople. The army was on the point of sailing when, on the evening of Easter Monday, 1282, outside the church of the Holy Spirit in Palermo, a tipsy French soldier molested a local girl. As the bells tolled for vespers, an infuriated crowd fell upon the soldier and his companions and killed them all. It was a strike of lightning that set the entire island on fire. Soon every Frenchman in Sicily had been slaughtered by the vengeful Sicilians, excepting a handful who managed to scramble on board Charles’s ships. The greatest threat to Michael’s reign was wiped out overnight.
How far Michael was responsible for the extraordinary incident known as the War of Sicilian Vespers is disputed, but he was not slow to claim the credit: ‘If I dare to say that God did it by my own hands,’ he wrote, ‘I would only be telling the truth.’2 For months his secret agents had been diligently at work among dissidents in Sicily, freely dispensing Byzantine gold.
But within a year Michael VIII was dead. Exhausted by a life of campaigning, excoriated as a heretic by both churches, he left a near-bankrupt empire. Doubly damned, denied Christian burial, he was laid in a shallow grave at dead of night by his son and successor, Andronicus II. Only years later did Andronicus dare to give his father a quiet burial in holy ground, and when the body was dug up it was found in a perfect state of preservation. The scene strangely foreshadows the discovery of the body of Theodore Paleologus some 500 years later in Cornwall. In popular belief – though a paradox – it was only the most saintly and most evil whose bodies were incorruptible. After Michael’s exhumation, the legend arose that the earth itself had refused to take back a man so wicked.
The reign of Michael the Crafty set the tone for generations to come and would find echoes in the lives of Theodore Paleologus and his English brood. Recurring motifs in the family’s history are conspiracy, murder, treachery, apostasy, enforced abdication, denied burial, perjury, seduction, forgery and extortion. And, almost constantly, there was war between the generations – father against son, grandfather against grandson, brother against brother.
The strife between Michael’s successor Andronicus II and his grandson serves as an illustration. Andronicus II was the longest-reigning of the Paleologi and perhaps the unhappiest. No soldier like his father, he would have made a better monk, and during his forty-six years as emperor most of Asia Minor was lost forever. But it was the family that proved the curse of his life. When his grandson and heir, the eventual Andronicus III, suspected his mistress of infidelity, he decided to trap his rival by stationing thugs in an unlit passage near her door. Unfortunately the man they pounced on and beat to death in the dark was Andronicus’s younger brother, Prince Manuel, the emperor’s favourite, whereupon Emperor Andronicus disinherited his namesake. Years of costly civil war ensued until the humiliated emperor, at the age of seventy, was forced to abdicate and beg his grandson for his life.
Family hostilities resumed when Andronicus III died in 1341 leaving an eight-year-old heir, John V. A bitter six-year power struggle was waged between the regent, Andronicus’s widow Anne, and the dead ruler’s bosom friend and cousin, John Paleologus Cantacuzenus, who declared himself ‘spiritual successor’ of Andronicus and therefore rightful co-emperor as John VI. Aided by the empire’s wily enemies, the Turks and the Serbs, Cantacuzenus eventually proved victorious. To consolidate his claim he agreed to share the throne with the legitimate heir, now fourteen, who was married off to one of Cantacuzenus’s daughters. In the meantime thousands had died in clashes between the contending Byzantine armies or at the hands of foreign mercenaries. Part of the price Cantacuzenus paid for Turkish aid was the despatch of another daughter to the sultan’s harem.
On entering Constantinople the conqueror discovered the imperial treasury contained ‘nothing but air and dust’. Desperate for funds, Empress Anne had pawned the crown jewels and imperial plate to the Venetians. So at their s
olemn joint coronation as Johns V and VI in 1347, the co-emperors’ crowns were of gold-painted leather studded with bits of coloured glass. The ceremony could not be held as tradition demanded at the Church of the Divine Wisdom, Haghia Sophia, because the great dome had collapsed during a recent earthquake. That same year, as a crowning misery, the Black Death made its European debut in Constantinople, wiping out half the population.
Inevitably, war broke out again between the two emperors, young John V gaining the upper hand with the aid of the Genoese. There now occurs one of the few uplifting episodes in the Paleologus saga. John V allowed his defeated father-in-law to live on condition he took monastic vows, and the former John VI entered the most enriching period of his life. Finding his true vocation in the cloister, he filled a fruitful retirement with meditation and theological studies, though he was frequently called back to court as elder statesman and counsellor to his former rival. He was to die peacefully in his bed aged eighty-eight.
However, there was one hiccup. The three-decade idyll in the monastery was interrupted when the ex-emperor was seized as a hostage by his own grandson, another Andronicus – son of his daughter Helena and John V – and cast into prison. Andronicus was the latest Paleologus to rebel against his father, and with Turkish and Genoese help he took John V prisoner and locked him up. The hapless John had brought about his own downfall by touring Christendom in a fruitless search for allies against Islam. In Rome, he followed his ancestor Michael the Crafty in announcing his conversion to Catholicism, to the horror of Constantinople.
