The Immortal Emperor

by Donald M Nicol

  Later Greek historians were convinced that Constantine died as a hero and a martyr. Their conviction has never been questioned in the Greek-speaking world. His tragic reign lasted for only four years, four months and twenty-four days. In that short time he acted as an emperor should. Only some western sources suggest that he ever shirked his duty. Of his dignity, courage and strength of character there can be no doubt. Of his physical appearance, on the other hand, we know almost nothing. One of the duties of an emperor was to set his seal on documents of state, often bearing his own effigy. Constantine issued several such documents; but only two of his seals survive. The grander of the two is that once appended to the golden bull which he sent to the Commune of Ragusa in June 1451 and is now in Dubrovnik.30 The other was set on a letter which he wrote to the Marquis of Ferrara, Borso d'Este, on the occasion of the mission of Andronikos Leontaris to Pope Nicholas V in April of the same year.31 Both seals bear Constantine's portrait as Emperor on one side and the figure of Christ on the other. They depict him in his late forties, for he never attained his fiftieth year. They are, however, stylised and far from realistic. Like most of their kind they display the symbol rather than the person of imperial majesty. Both show a bearded Emperor standing with the Cross in his right hand and a book or scroll in his left. Each is inscribed, with minor variations, with the name of Constantine Palaiologos in Christ Autokrator; and in each he wears an imperial crown, a fact which seems to emphasise the symbolism, since he was never officially crowned.

  Another duty of an Emperor was to mint coins bearing his own effigy. It was customary for such coins to be distributed at his coronation ceremony. Constantine never had the chance to do so. But he certainly issued some coins of his own, however limited in quantity. Two witnesses of the siege of Constantinople, Nicolo Barbaro and Leonardo of Chios, testify that in the months of crisis Constantine ordered sacred vessels to be removed from churches and melted down to produce coins to pay his soldiers, sappers and masons working on the repair of the walls.32 There is no knowing how many were minted and they would have been easy booty for the Turks to gather after the conquest. This may account for the rarity of the known coins of Constantine today. Indeed it was thought that none existed until 1974, when one small and battered silver piece was identified as belonging to his reign. It shows a crude bust of an emperor bearded, crowned and nimbate; and it bears the legend: `Const(antine) Pal(aiologos)'. The obverse shows the bust of Christ. Its denomination is that of a quarter- hyperpyron, or a quarter of the once universal gold coin of the Byzantine Empire. By the fifteenth century the hyperpyron was no longer being minted, having been replaced by the large silver coin equivalent to half its value and known as the stavraton. In recent years several other silver coins of Constantine XI have come to light, notably in a hoard of 1154 late Palaiologan pieces of which no less than 86 are from his reign. They represent the three denominations of the stavraton, the half-stavraton and the oneeighth stavraton. They depict the bust of the Emperor bearded and crowned; and the legend on the stavrata, though not always fully discernible, reads: `Constantine Despot Palaiologos by the grace of God Emperor of the Romans'.33 His title is exact, but his image remains muddy and indistinct. Their rarity may give them an inflated value in modern terms. But they are miserably eloquent advertisements for the collapse of a civilisation that had once been supported by an advanced monetary economy.

  A fifteenth-century manuscript of the Byzantine Chronicle of Zonaras now in the Biblioteca Estense in Modena is adorned with miniature portrait heads of all the Byzantine Emperors from the first to the last Constantine and, for good measure, of the father of Constantine the Great, Constantius Chlorus. Constantine Palaiologos is here designated as the brother of the Emperor John VIII, who is represented next to him. All the portraits in this imperial gallery are more or less fictitious and stylised. It may be, however, that the artist had some contemporary representations before him for the last of them. That of John VIII bears some resemblance to other known portraits of him that were painted when he was in Italy. That of Constantine XI may have been based on his seal which is still in Modena. At all events, he is shown as a roundfaced man with a beard shorter than that of his brother John and very much less florid than that of his father Manuel II.a4

  Later attempts to portray the last Byzantine Emperor range from the fantastic to the ludicrous.35 A special word of praise for post-Byzantine inventiveness should, however, be given to the sixteenth-century Cretan icon-painter George Klontzas (c. 1540- 16o8). In 159o Klontzas compiled what he called a Chronicle (Chronographia) illustrated with 410 miniatures. It is a strange concoction of fact and fiction, history and myth; and many of the illustrations show scenes from the visions and oracular pronouncements of the Prophet Daniel, Leo the Wise and Methodios of Patara.36 The manuscript is in Venice.37 It contains four fanciful portraits of Constantine Palaiologos. One of them is a striking portrayal of the Emperor with his mother Helena alongside the first Constantine and Helena. Another shows the Emperor sitting on his throne in deep melancholy with the figure of death standing over him; another shows him lying in his tomb with his sword beside him, looking more like a western crusader than a Byzantine Emperor.38

  These are flights of fancy and imagination, not portraits. They belong to the corpus of post-Byzantine myths and legends about the last Emperor of the Romans. For Constantine Palaiologos was more celebrated after his death than ever he had been during his short and unhappy reign.

  5

  THE DEATH OF CONSTANTINE

  The fall of Constantinople and the death of its Emperor were very soon interpreted as the fulfilment of prophecies of one kind or another. The monk Gennadios, who had caused the Emperor so much trouble, and whose name was not mentioned in dispatches during the defence of the city, was taken prisoner with his fellow monks and sold into slavery by the Turks. The Sultan Mehmed was well briefed about the religious dissension among the now defeated Orthodox Christians. He knew that many of them openly attributed their defeat to the union of Florence; and he knew that the unionist Patriarch Gregory III had abandoned if he had not forfeited his office. In his capacity as successor to the Christian Roman Emperor in Constantinople the Sultan felt bound to appoint a new Patriarch, who would be answerable to him for the conduct of all Christians in his dominions. His choice fell on George Scholarios, the monk Gennadios. He was generally respected by the Orthodox and particularly acceptable to the Sultan as one would could be relied upon to denounce any moves that the western Christians might make to upset the course of history. A search was made and Gennadios was found and brought to Constantinople where the Sultan invested him as Patriarch with all the traditional ceremony proper to the occasion, in January 1454.1

  Gennadios left no detailed account of the Turkish conquest of his city and the death of its Emperor Constantine. But he compiled a series of chronological observations on the ways in which the hand of providence could be seen to have influenced the dreadful events of his lifetime. He noted that the Christian Empire of the Romans had originated with the Emperor Constantine and his mother Helena and had come to its end when another Constantine, son of Helena, was Emperor and was killed in the conquest of his city. Between the first and the last Constantine there had been no Emperor of the same name whose mother was a Helena. He observed that the first Patriarch of Constantinople under Constantine I was Metrophanes and the last Patriarch was also called Metrophanes, who died in 1443; for his successor, the Patriarch Gregory III, whom Gennadios never recognised, went off to Rome and died there. There was no other Patriarch with the name of Metrophanes between the first and last. Gennadios also noted that the city of Constantinople had been founded on ii May (330), finished on another 3 May and captured on z9 May (1453), so that all the events of its birth and death occurred in the month of May. Finally, he recorded the prophecy that when an Emperor and a Patriarch whose names began with the letters Jo- reigned at the same time, then the end of the Empire and of the church would be at hand. So it had come ab
out. For the men who brought ruin on the church in Italy (at the Council of Florence) were Joannes the Emperor and Joseph the Patriarch. Gennadios was an accomplished scholar but he retained a naive faith in prophecies. It had long been foretold that the world would end with the Second Coming of Christ which, on Byzantine calculation, was scheduled to happen in the 7oooth year after the creation of the world (in 5509-08 ac), or in AD 149z. He took some comfort therefore from the belief that, in 1453, there was not long to go.2

  Gennadios jotted down his chronological notes some time after the death of the Patriarch Gregory III in 1459. He was thus not the first to remark on the coincidence of names between the first and the last Constantine and Helena. The Venetian surgeon, Nicola Barbaro, in his Diary of the siege of Constantinople, notes that God decided that the city should fall when it did in order that the ancient prophecies should be fulfilled, one of which was that Constantinople should be lost to the Christians during the reign of an Emperor called Constantine son of Helena.' Cardinal Isidore, who managed to escape from the ruins of the city disguised as a beggar, reported it as a fact rather than a prophecy in a letter which he wrote to Pope Nicholas V on 6 July 1453: `Just as the city was founded by Constantine, son of Helena, so it is now tragically lost by another Constantine, son of Helena. i4 Kritoboulos of Imbros, one of the principal historians of the event, wondered at the coincidence of names in the city's long history: `For Constantine, the fortunate Emperor, son of Helena, built it and raised it to the heights of happiness and prosperity; while under the unfortunate Emperor Constantine, son of Helena, it has been captured and reduced to the depths of servitude and misfortune. 'b The coincidence was remarked upon by several of the writers of the so-called Short Chronicles and by the author of at least one of many laments on the fall of Constantinople.' Unless God ordained that it should be so, as Barbaro believed, it is a fortuitous if melancholy juxtaposition of names of the kind beloved by pedantic antiquarians. But it answers none of the questions concerning the fate of the last Emperor Constantine.

  The Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 was an event that shocked the Christian world. It was widely reported at the time and lamented for many years afterwards. The reports were embellished and the tale grew with the telling. Laments and dirges became a new Greek literary genre and added legends to the facts. Even the more sober and nearly contemporary reports, however, in Greek, Latin, Turkish, Slavonic and other European languages, are at variance as to the fate of the Emperor Constantine. Some make no mention of his death. Others record simply that he was killed in the fighting. A few have it that he escaped.' The man most likely to have known the facts was George Sphrantzes, Constantine's lifelong friend, who was there at the time on z9 May 1453. But, as he says in his memoirs, he was not at the Emperor's side, for he was obeying orders to inspect the defences in another part of the city. All that he could truthfully say was that his master was killed, or rather martyred, during the conquest of the city.' The earliest eye-witnesses of the conquest, though not of the Emperor's death, express a general uncertainty about his fate. The Archbishop Leonardo of Chios, who was taken prisoner but managed to get away, wrote his account to the pope on 16 August 1453. He reports that once the valiant Genoese captain Giustiniani had been wounded and forced to withdraw in the fight, Constantine's courage failed. He begged one of his young officers to run him through with his sword so that he would not be captured alive. No one was brave enough; and as the Turks came pouring in through the walls he was caught up in the melee and fell. He got up, only to fall again, and he was trampled underfoot.'

  The Venetian Nicolo Barbaro, who also escaped, wrote in his Diary that nobody really knew whether the Emperor was alive or dead. Some said that his body had been seen among the corpses and it was rumoured that he had hanged himself at the moment when the Turks broke through the Gate of St Romanos. A marginal note in the text of Barbaro's Diary repeats the statement of Leonardo, that Constantine begged in vain to be put to the sword. He then fell in the crush, rose again, fell once more, and so died.10 Cardinal Isidore wrote from Crete to his colleague Bessarion on 6 July 1453 and reported that Constantine had been wounded and killed fighting at the Gate of St Romanos before the final battle. But he added a new detail to the story : he had heard that the Emperor's head had been severed and presented as a gift to the Sultan, who was delighted to see it, subjected it to insults and injuries and carried it off in triumph as a trophy when he went back to Adrianople. This gruesome detail was evidently circulated among western survivors of the fall from an early date. It was to be taken up and elaborated by the Byzantine historians Doukas and Chalkokondyles in later years. A Florentine merchant called Jacopo Tedaldi, who had taken part in the defence of the city and escaped on a Venetian ship just after the conquest, reported the sad fact that the Emperor had been killed and added: `Some say that his head was cut off; others that he perished in the crush at the gate. Both stories may well be true.' In the letter that he wrote to Pope Nicholas V on the same day as his letter to Bessarion, Cardinal Isidore says nothing of the Emperor's execution, noting only that the soul of Constantine, the last of the Roman Emperors, had been crowned with unexpected martyrdom and had gone to heaven. Perhaps Isidore too was uncertain of the truth."

  The uncertainty is reflected in other contemporary accounts. One who was in Constantinople at the time was Benvenuto, Consul of the Anconitans in the city. He had heard from a soldier that the Emperor had been killed and that his severed head, fixed on a lance, had been presented to the Lord of the Turks. The Franciscans in Constantinople, writing to Bologna about the end of November, reported simply that the Emperor was among the dead.12 So also did the Knights of St John at Rhodes, in a letter to the Margrave of Brandenburg at Jerusalem written on 30 June; and a pilgrim from Basle in 1453 heard the news of the conquest of Constantinople and the death of the Emperor while he was on his voyage. A lawyer from Padua, Paolo Dotti, writing from Crete in June, reported the same sad news.13 An account by two Greek noblemen who had been in Constantinople at the time and written not long after the event has been preserved in a German version. They reported that, when Giustiniani was wounded and left his post, the Emperor cried out to God that he had been betrayed and he was killed in the crowd."' The Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes, however, wrote to the Prior of his Order in Germany as early as 6 July 1453, reporting the rumour that the Emperor's body, discovered among the heaps of corpses, had been decapi- tated.la

  Cardinal Isidore may not have cared to worry Pope Nicholas with unsubstantiated rumours about the mutilation of the martyred Emperor's corpse. Aeneas Sylvius, then Bishop of Siena and later to become Pope Pius II, was not so circumspect. He was to be a fervent champion of the Christian cause in the east when it was too late; and he was prepared to believe the worst of the infidel Turks. In a letter to the pope on iz July, Aeneas wrote that he had it from refugees or deserters in Serbia that the Emperor Constantine Palaiologos had been decapitated and that his son had escaped and was besieged in Galata. He reported the same to Nicholas of Cusa a month later.16 His account is false in at least one respect, for Constantine had no son. But the fact that his informants were Serbian may mean that they were better acquainted with the Turkish version of events. For the Serbians formed the contingent of 150 cavalrymen which the Despot George Brankovic had been obliged to send to Constantinople as the Sultan's vassal." They had fought alongside the Turkish soldiers and those that got back to Serbia will have picked up a version more Turkish than Greek. Certainly all the earliest surviving Turkish accounts of the fall of Constantinople record that the Emperor's head was severed.

  One of the Serbian contingent left his own account. He was Constantine Mihailovic of Ostrovica who later converted to Islam and may have become a janissary in the Sultan's service. His memoirs are sometimes wrongly known as the Diary of a Polish Janissary. He did not commit them to writing until forty years after the fall, when he was living in Poland, and his account has its fanciful moments. But it may well be accur
ate in the matter of the Emperor's death. He had it that Constantine was killed fighting at the breach in the wall. His head was hacked off by a janissary called Sarielles, who took it to his Sultan and threw it at his feet saying that it was the head of his bitterest enemy. Mehmed asked one of his prisoners, a close friend of the Emperor, whose head it was; and he confirmed that it was indeed that of the Emperor (Constantine) Dragas. The Sultan then handsomely rewarded the janissary and granted him the province of Aydin and Anatolia.18 The janissary's name may be fictitious. The amount of his reward is surely exaggerated. But the rest of the story may well be true; and it is repeated in Turkish accounts, though some of them present a different version of the spot where Constantine met his death.

  Tursun Beg, who was in the Sultan's army in 1453, later wrote a History of the Lord of the Conquest, the Sultan Mehmed. He presents the Emperor's conduct in his last hours in a less heroic and favourable manner. He describes how Constantine `the infidel' and his men panicked and fled, taking the road to the sea on the chance of finding a ship on which to escape. They came across a band of Turkish marines who had changed into the uniform of janissaries to join in the plunder and were lost in the back streets of the city. The Emperor, who was on horseback, charged at one of them and felled him. The Turk, though half dead, hit back and cut off the Emperor's head. His companions were captured or killed, their horses were rounded up and the Turkish marines were amply compensated for having missed the plunder of the city by the wealth of gold, silver and jewels which they found on the Christian corpses.18 The later Turkish account by Ibn Kemal is close to that of Tursun Beg but adds some interesting details. He relates that the Emperor and his suite, having abandoned the fight, were making for Yedi Kule, the Castle of the Seven Towers. Near the Golden Gate they encountered a group of warriors, one of whom, a giant of a man, struck the Emperor down and sliced off his head without realising who he was.20 The other surviving Turkish accounts are strangely disappointing. Mehmed Neshri, writing about 1492, notes only that the Emperor was decapitated. Ashik Pasha-Zade at about the same time records only that he was killed; while Khodja Sa'ad EdDin, who died in 1599, in his Diadem of Histories, follows closely the version of Tursun Beg, though with rather more bloodshed, violence and poetic licence.21