Constantine XI Palaiologos

• 1. Introduction

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  Constantine XI Dragases Palaiologos was born on the 8th of February 1404 into a shrinking empire clinging to its last corners of the Mediterranean world. By the time he became emperor, Constantinople held roughly 50,000 people within walls that once surrounded one of the greatest cities on earth. And on the 29th of May 1453, those walls finally broke.

  What kind of man was Constantine XI? He was the fourth son of a dynasty with nothing left to give. He spent his life fighting for scraps of territory, patching alliances that never quite held, and writing desperate letters to western courts that politely declined to save him. Yet when a sultan with perhaps 80,000 soldiers arrived at his gates, Constantine refused to leave. He died somewhere in the rubble, sword in hand, and no one who witnessed it survived to tell exactly how.

  This is the story of the last Byzantine emperor: a man defined not by what he saved, but by what he refused to abandon.

• 2. A Dynasty in Decay

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  Manuel II Palaiologos, Constantine's father, ruled an empire that had been unraveling for centuries. The Seljuk Turks had arrived in Anatolia in the 11th century, and although emperors like Alexios I and Manuel I had briefly clawed back territory with the help of western crusaders, those gains never held. Anatolia had been Byzantium's most fertile and populated region, and its loss sent the empire into a long decline from which it never recovered.

  The Fourth Crusade of 1204 administered a wound that festered for generations. Latin crusaders sacked Constantinople and replaced the Byzantine government with the Latin Empire. Michael VIII, founder of the Palaiologos dynasty, eventually retook the city in 1261, but the empire he recovered was a shell. By 1405, the Ottomans controlled much of Anatolia, Bulgaria, central Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, and Thessaly. What remained of Byzantium was Constantinople, the Peloponnese, and a handful of Aegean islands, all of it paying tribute to the Ottoman sultan.

  Faced with too little land to give all his sons, Manuel II adopted a policy of dividing what remained into despotates, governed by his sons as appanages. His oldest son John became co-emperor. Theodore became Despot of the Morea. Andronikos was proclaimed Despot of Thessaloniki in 1408. Constantine, along with his younger brothers Demetrios and Thomas, remained in Constantinople, waiting for something to govern.

• 3. The Soldier Despot

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  George Sphrantzes, later a celebrated Byzantine historian, admired Constantine from an early age and would eventually enter his service. Encomiasts who wrote about Constantine's youth described him as courageous, skilled in martial arts, horsemanship, and hunting. Based on his actions and the surviving commentary of contemporaries, Constantine was more comfortable with military matters than with diplomacy, though he proved a capable administrator when called upon.

  His first major test came through trust, not combat. After an Ottoman siege of Constantinople in 1422 left Manuel II paralyzed by a stroke, Constantine's brother John named him regent and left for Venice and Hungary in November 1423 to seek western aid. Constantine, working alongside his bedridden father, negotiated a peace treaty with the Ottoman sultan Murad II that temporarily spared Constantinople from further attack. John returned in November 1424 having found no help. Constantine had held things together without him.

  In 1427, John VIII sent Constantine to the Morea to deal with Carlo I Tocco, the Italian ruler of Epirus who had been raiding Byzantine territory. On the 26th of December 1427, the brothers arrived at Mystras, the despotate's capital, and pressed toward Glarentza. At the Battle of the Echinades, a naval skirmish off Glarentza's coast, Tocco was defeated. To seal the peace, Tocco offered his niece Creusa Tocco in marriage to Constantine, along with Glarentza and the Moreot territories he had seized as her dowry. Constantine married her, now renamed Theodora in the Greek manner, on the 1st of July 1428.

  As Despot of the Morea, Constantine shared governance with his brothers Theodore and Thomas. Theodore kept Mystras. Constantine made Glarentza his capital and was granted northern harbor towns, fortresses in Laconia, and lands in Kalamata and Messenia. Thomas, aged 19 at his appointment, was given lands in the north centered on the castle of Kalavryta. Together, the three brothers set about recovering the Peloponnese.

• 4. Patras and the Price of Victory

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  Patras was a wealthy port city in the northwestern Morea, governed by its Catholic Archbishop. Constantine wanted it. When a joint campaign by all three Palaiologos brothers failed, partly due to Theodore's reluctance and Thomas's inexperience, Constantine arranged a secret meeting in Mystras with Sphrantzes and John. He told them he would attempt to take Patras alone; if he failed, he would retreat to his old lands by the Black Sea.

  On the 1st of March 1429, Constantine and Sphrantzes marched toward the city. They began the siege on the 20th of March. The fighting was brutal. At one point Constantine's horse was shot and killed beneath him; Sphrantzes saved the despot's life but was himself captured by the city's defenders. Sphrantzes was released on the 23rd of April in a state near death. After almost two months, the Archbishop departed for Italy to recruit reinforcements. The defenders agreed: if he had not returned by the end of May, the city would surrender. Constantine withdrew and waited. On the 1st of June, the Archbishop had not returned. Three days later, Constantine met the city's leaders at the Cathedral of St. Andrew. They accepted him as their new lord. The Archbishop's hilltop castle held out for another twelve months before surrendering in July 1430.

  Patras's recovery completed 225 years of foreign occupation, but the victory provoked dangerous reactions. The Pope, the Venetians, and the Ottomans were all affronted. The Archbishop returned at the head of a mercenary army of Catalans who showed little interest in helping him; instead, they seized Glarentza. Constantine bought the city back from them for 6,000 Venetian ducats. Pirates continued to threaten it, and Constantine eventually ordered the city destroyed to prevent further seizures.

  In November 1429, Theodora died. The grieving Constantine had her buried at Glarentza before moving to Mystras. Murad II, uneasy at Byzantine successes in the Morea, sent his general Turahan south in 1431 to demolish the Hexamilion wall as a reminder of Ottoman supremacy.

• 5. The New Sparta That Never Was

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  By the early 1440s, with Theodore withdrawn and Demetrios removed from the Morea, Constantine and Thomas governed a peninsula that had become the cultural center of what remained of Byzantine civilization. Art patrons, scholars, and clerics had settled there at Theodore's invitation. Monasteries and mansions continued to be built. The philosopher Gemistus Pletho, employed in Constantine's service, declared that while Constantinople had once been the New Rome, Mystras and the Morea could become the New Sparta, a centralized and strong Hellenic kingdom.

  Their most ambitious project was the restoration of the ancient Hexamilion wall, destroyed by the Turks in 1431. Together, Constantine and Thomas completely rebuilt it by March 1444. The project impressed even the Venetian lords in the Peloponnese, who had politely declined to help fund it. Many Moreot landowners fled temporarily to Venetian territory to avoid being taxed for the effort; others rebelled and were compelled by force. To win their loyalty back, Constantine granted them additional lands and privileges, and organized local athletic competitions where young Moreots raced for prizes.

  In the summer of 1444, encouraged by reports of a crusade setting out from Hungary, Constantine invaded the Latin Duchy of Athens, an Ottoman vassal to his north. He swiftly took Athens and Thebes, forcing Duke Nerio II Acciaioli to pay tribute to him rather than to the Ottomans. One of Constantine's counsellors compared him to the ancient Athenian general Themistocles. With 300 soldiers sent by Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy and his own forces, Constantine pushed as far north as the Pindus mountains. One of his governors, Constantine Kantakouzenos, attacked Thessaly and seized the town of Lidoriki; the townspeople renamed it Kantakouzinopolis in his honor.

  Murad II responded in 1446 with an army possibly numbering as many as 60,000 men. Constantine and Thomas rallied at the rebuilt Hexamilion wall with perhaps 20,000 defenders. Murad had brought cannons. By the 10th of December the wall had been reduced to rubble and most of the defenders were killed or captured; Constantine and Thomas barely escaped. Murad sent Turahan south to devastate the Morea while he rampaged through the north. Constantine and Thomas were forced to accept Murad as their lord, pay tribute, and promise never to rebuild the Hexamilion wall.

• 6. Emperor Without a Crown

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  John VIII Palaiologos died on the 31st of October 1448, childless. Helena Dragaš, the brothers' mother, stalled Demetrios's attempt to seize the throne and held the regency until Constantine could arrive from the Morea. Thomas accepted Constantine's appointment. Demetrios, overruled, eventually proclaimed him emperor regardless. Sultan Murad II was informed and accepted the succession on the 6th of December 1448.

  On the 6th of January 1449, in a small ceremony at Mystras, Constantine was proclaimed Emperor of the Romans. There was no crown. Constantine may have placed a pilos, a type of imperial headgear, on his head himself. The traditional coronation in the Hagia Sophia never happened. Both Constantine and Patriarch Gregory III Mammas supported the Union of the Churches, and a public coronation by Gregory would have likely sparked rebellion among the anti-unionists in the capital.

  In his earliest known imperial document, a chrysobull from February 1449, Constantine referred to himself as "Constantine Palaiologos in Christ true Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans". He arrived at Constantinople on the 12th of March 1449, transported by a Catalan ship. What he found was a city that no longer resembled the empire it had once captained. The 1204 crusader sack had broken Constantinople's urban fabric permanently. By Constantine's reign, the city had become an almost rural network of population centers, with churches, palaces, and even the former imperial palace abandoned and crumbling. The Palaiologos emperors had long since moved their residence to the Palace of Blachernae, closer to the defensive walls. Roughly 50,000 people lived there, diminished by centuries of civil war, Latin occupation, and outbreaks of the Black Death in 1347, 1409, and 1410.

  Helena Dragaš died on the 23rd of March 1450. Both Gemistus Pletho and Gennadios Scholarios wrote funeral orations for her. Pletho compared her to the legendary Penelope for her prudence. Her death left Constantine without his most trusted counsellor at the worst possible moment.

• 7. The Sultan at the Gate

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  Mehmed II was young, ambitious, and convinced that the conquest of Constantinople was essential to the Ottoman state's survival. He believed that holding the city would prevent any crusade from using it as a base against him. He also had an intense interest in ancient Greco-Roman and medieval Byzantine history; among his childhood heroes were Achilles and Alexander the Great.

  Constantine had tried to use the presence of Orhan Celebi, an Ottoman prince held as a hostage in Constantinople, as leverage, hinting that unless Mehmed paid more for Orhan's upkeep, the prince might be released to spark a civil war. Mehmed's grand vizier, Candarly Halil Pasha, received the message at Bursa and was furious, shouting at the Byzantine messengers that they were fools who would lose what little they still had. Constantine and his advisors had miscalculated badly.

  In the spring of 1452, work began on the Rumelihisari castle on the western side of the Bosphorus, opposite the existing Anadoluhisari castle on the eastern side. Together, the two castles gave Mehmed control over all sea traffic through the strait. Mehmed completed the Rumelihisari in August 1452. Some local churches were demolished to clear the site, angering the Greek population. Constantine formally declared war on Mehmed, closed the city gates, and arrested all Turks within the walls. Three days later, recognizing the futility of the move, he renounced his actions and freed the prisoners.

  In January 1453, the Genoese soldier Giovanni Giustiniani arrived with 700 soldiers and volunteered his services. Constantine appointed him general commander for the land walls and gave him the rank of protostrator, promising the island of Lemnos as a reward. Giustiniani was known across the region for his skill in siege warfare. On the 2nd of April, Mehmed's advance guard arrived and began pitching camp. On the 5th of April, Mehmed himself arrived and encamped within firing range of the Gate of St. Romanus. Bombardment of the walls began on the 6th of April.

  The number of defenders ranged from 6,000 to 8,500, including 5,000 to 6,000 Greeks, most of them untrained militia. An additional 1,000 Byzantine soldiers were kept in reserve inside the city. Mehmed's forces may have numbered as many as 80,000, including about 5,000 elite janissaries. Constantine held a chain across the Golden Horn to block the Ottoman fleet. On the 20th of April, three Genoese ships sent by the papacy and a large supply ship from Alfonso V managed to pass through, a rare victory that lifted the defenders' morale. By the 23rd of April, Mehmed had responded by having his entire fleet dragged overland on massive wooden tracks across the hill behind Galata, dropping the ships into the Golden Horn on the other side of Constantine's chain.

• 8. The Last Day

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  Mehmed offered terms. He told Constantine's court that if the emperor surrendered peacefully, he would give him the Peloponnese and other provinces for his brothers, and they would part as friends. He sent a second message addressed to the citizens themselves, offering them their lives and possessions in exchange for an annual tribute, or safe passage out of the city entirely. Some of Constantine's companions implored him to escape and establish a government in exile, perhaps in the Morea. Constantine did not reply to the sultan's offer.

  Food was running out inside Constantinople. Constantine ordered objects of precious metal from the city's churches melted down to pay for provisions for the poor, promising clergy he would repay them four-fold after the battle. The Ottomans bombarded the outer walls continuously until they opened a breach exposing the inner defenses. By late May, it was clear that no western rescue fleet would arrive in time. Cardinal Isidore and Leonard of Chios had arrived the previous October with only 200 Neapolitan archers. The Venetian armada ordered by Doge Foscari in February 1453 had not made it.

  On the 29th of May 1453, Constantinople fell. Constantine died in battle. No reliable eyewitness accounts of his death survived. Most historical sources agree that he died fighting in a last stand against the Ottoman troops who broke through the walls. He was the last Christian ruler of the city that Constantine the Great had founded in 330 as the new capital of the Roman Empire.

  His death was noted for a symmetry that later historians found impossible to ignore. The New Rome had been founded by Constantine the Great and was lost under another emperor named Constantine, just as Old Rome had been founded by a Romulus and lost under a later ruler also named Romulus, Romulus Augustulus. In Greek folklore, Constantine did not die. Instead, he became the Marmaromenos Vasilias, the Marble Emperor, said to have been turned to marble by an angel and hidden beneath the Golden Gate of Constantinople, waiting for a call from God to return, conquer the city, and restore the empire.