Andreas Palaiologos

• 1. Introduction

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  Andreas Palaiologos was born on the 17th of January 1453, just four months before the world he was born into collapsed entirely. On the 29th of May 1453, his uncle Constantine XI died defending Constantinople as the Ottomans stormed the city's walls. Andreas had barely drawn breath, and already the throne he would one day claim existed only in memory. He would spend the next half century in Rome, aging in rented rooms, writing letters to kings, selling titles no one took seriously, and dying in June 1502 with the Byzantine Empire still in Ottoman hands. How does a man born into the rubble of a fallen empire spend a lifetime trying to rebuild it? And what does it say about that empire that even in death, Andreas kept giving its crown away?

• 2. A Dynasty in Exile

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  Thomas Palaiologos had governed the Morea, the Greek peninsula's Byzantine province, as its despot since 1428, sharing authority with his brothers Theodore and Constantine. The family had spent decades clawing back Byzantine territory in the Peloponnese. In 1432, Thomas ended the Principality of Achaea, a crusader holdover, by inheriting it through his marriage to Catherine Zaccaria, daughter of the last Prince of Achaea. But the Ottoman advance that swallowed Constantinople in 1453 did not stop there. Constant fighting between Thomas and his brother Demetrios, who had thrown his lot in with the Ottomans, gave Sultan Mehmed II a pretext to invade the Morea in 1460. The family escaped to Corfu. Thomas then left for Rome, where Pope Pius II welcomed and funded him. He was still nursing plans for a crusade in 1462, riding personally around Italy to gather support, when his wife Catherine Zaccaria died in August of that year. It was not until spring 1465 that Thomas finally summoned his children to join him. Andreas, his younger brother Manuel, and their sister Zoe traveled with a guardian and a handful of exiled Byzantine nobles, arriving at Ancona. They never saw their father. Thomas died on the 12th of May, before they reached Rome.

• 3. Cardinal Bessarion's Ward

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  Cardinal Bessarion, himself a refugee from the fallen empire, took the three children into his care in Rome. He had been one of the rare Byzantine clerics willing to support the union of the Orthodox and Catholic churches, a position that made him deeply useful to the papacy and deeply suspect back home. He gave Andreas and his siblings an education and arranged, in June 1472, the marriage of Zoe to Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow, a match that would reshape the political landscape of Russia. Pope Paul II meanwhile recognized Andreas as the legitimate heir of Thomas and the Despot of the Morea, allowing him to remain in the city. Andreas converted to Roman Catholicism. His earliest known seal bore the double-headed eagle of the Palaiologans and the title "By the grace of God, Despot of the Romans." By 1483, that had shifted. On the 13th of April of that year, Andreas issued a formal document to the Spanish nobleman Pedro Manrique, Count of Osorno, authorizing the count to bear Palaiologan arms and create palatine counts. He signed it as Emperor of Constantinople. The title went further than anything his father had ever claimed. George Sphrantzes, an advisor to Thomas from Patras, visited Andreas in 1466 and recognized him as "the successor and heir of the Palaiologan dynasty." Whether or not the world agreed, Andreas never stopped believing it.

• 4. The Shrinking Pension

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  Bessarion died in 1472, and the financial troubles that would define Andreas's life began almost immediately. The pension the papacy had paid his father Thomas amounted to 300 ducats a month, plus an additional 200 from the cardinals. Thomas's own courtier George Sphrantzes had complained that even that sum barely covered the costs of maintaining a household. When Andreas and Manuel took over, the money was split between them and the cardinals' contribution stopped, leaving each brother with effectively 150 ducats a month instead of the 500 their father had received. Things grew worse faster than anyone anticipated. In the first three months of 1473 alone, the two brothers received 690 ducats instead of the 900 they were owed. When Manuel left Rome in 1474, Pope Sixtus IV cut the full pension in half, paying Andreas just 150 ducats monthly. By November 1478, that had slipped further still, to 104 ducats, attributed to the "many wars" weighing on the papacy. In 1488 and 1489, Andreas received 100 ducats a month, though payments often fell short even of that. After Pope Alexander VI took power in August 1492, the pension collapsed to 50 ducats monthly. Sixtus IV went so far as to commission a fresco at the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Sassia depicting himself with a grateful Andreas kneeling at his feet, memorializing his own generosity. Historian Jonathan Harris, writing in 1995, argued that the standard portrait of Andreas as a reckless spendthrift rests almost entirely on two contemporary sources, and that the pension reductions are a more persuasive explanation for his poverty than any personal failing.

• 5. The 1481 Expedition

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  Sultan Mehmed II, who had taken Constantinople, died on the 3rd of May 1481, and his sons Cem and Bayezid fell immediately into civil war over the succession. Andreas saw his opening. In the late summer of 1481 he traveled to southern Italy, the natural staging ground for a crossing of the Adriatic into Greece, and arrived at Foggia in October with a small party that included Manuel Palaiologos, George Pagumenos, and Michael Aristoboulos. King Ferdinand I of Naples provided financial support. Among the mercenaries Andreas hired was Krokodeilos Kladas, a Greek soldier who had led a failed revolt against the Ottomans in the Morea just the previous year. On the 15th of September, Pope Sixtus IV wrote to Italian bishops urging them to do "everything in their power" to help Andreas cross the Adriatic. The timing had seemed promising: the Ottomans had suffered a heavy defeat at Rhodes in August 1480 and were now divided. But by October the window had closed. Bayezid had stabilized his rule, the major Christian kingdoms of Western Europe had no appetite for war, and the Republic of Venice, whose naval support would have been essential, had just signed a treaty with the Ottomans and was unwilling to breach it. Andreas spent October and November at Brindisi with Ferdinand I and his companions. The expedition was never launched. Historian Jonathan Harris countered the later claim by Steven Runciman that Andreas had squandered the money and used it for other purposes, pointing out that Andreas's actual journey to Brindisi is evidence of genuine intent.

• 6. Selling the Crown

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  By 1494, Andreas had been trying to interest various European rulers in his cause for nearly two decades. He had approached Ferdinand I of Naples, likely the Duke of Milan, and possibly the Duke of Burgundy, with letters offering to sell his claims to the thrones of both Constantinople and Trebizond. He had visited his sister Zoe, now called Sophia, in Moscow in 1480 to beg for money; she later complained that she had given him all her jewels. He had been received warmly by Charles VIII of France at Laval and Tours from October to December 1491, receiving 350 livres and apparently spending long hours discussing crusade plans. It was the French Cardinal Raymond Peraudi, passionately devoted to a crusade and alarmed that Charles was being drawn into Italian politics, who engineered the formal transfer of titles. The documents were drawn up on the 6th of November 1494 at the Church of San Pietro in Montorio in Rome, witnessed by five clergymen, and notarized by Francesco de Schracten of Florence and Camillo Beninbene. In return for abdicating his claims to Constantinople, Trebizond, and the Despotate of Serbia, Andreas was promised 4300 ducats annually, a personal guard of a hundred cavalrymen at Charles's expense, lands generating a further 5000 ducats a year, and, critically, Charles's military commitment to recover the Morea for him. The annual feudal tax Andreas would owe for the return of his ancestral lands consisted of one white saddle horse per year. Charles did eventually accept the terms, but he pursued Naples instead of the Ottomans. When Charles died in 1498, Andreas reclaimed his titles, since the conditions of the deal had never been fulfilled. Church records after 1498 list him as Imperator Grecorum and Imperator Constantinopolitanus.

• 7. Death and Disputed Legacy

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  Andreas died in Rome in June 1502. His will, written on the 7th of April that year, transferred his imperial titles one final time, to Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. He cited the recent Spanish conquests of Granada in 1492 and Cephalonia in 1500 and appealed to the traditional Aragonese titles of Duke of Athens and Duke of Neopatras, hoping the Spanish monarchs might launch a crusade from their holdings in Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily. Neither Ferdinand nor Isabella nor any Spanish monarch who followed ever used the title. Pope Alexander VI gave Andreas's widow Caterina 104 ducats to cover the funeral costs. He was buried with honor in St. Peter's Basilica, beside his father Thomas. Scottish historian George Finlay wrote in 1877 that the fate of Andreas "hardly merits the attention of history, were it not that mankind has a morbid curiosity concerning the fortunes of the most worthless princes." The wife Andreas left behind, Caterina, has fared no better in the historical record. The 17th-century Byzantinist Charles du Fresne, Sieur du Cange, originated the characterization of her as a woman of bad character; she appears in only one primary source by name alone, without any mention of her profession, and neither of the two contemporary writers who criticized Andreas most sharply ever mentioned her at all. The French claim to the Byzantine imperial title, inherited from Charles VIII, did not end until 1566, when Charles IX wrote that the Byzantine title "is not more eminent than that of a king, which sounds better and sweeter."