An Elizabethan Assassin

by John Hall

  The next emperor of significance was Andronicus’s brother, the intellectual Manuel II, who has demonstrated that the name Paleologus can invoke fury across the Islamic world to the present day. As Manuel’s reign saw the Turkish conquest of most of his remaining lands, an agonisingly long if unsuccessful siege of Constantinople, and the slaughter, enslavement or forced conversion of countless thousands of his subjects, he might not be expected to take a rosy view of the founder of Islam. ‘Show me what Mohammed brought that was new,’ he wrote to a Persian scholar, ‘and there you will find things only evil and inhuman such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.’3 Quoted by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006 during a university lecture, the fourteenth-century emperor’s musings led to mass street protests and riots, calls for the pope’s assassination and a unanimous condemnation by the Pakistani parliament, along with murders of Christians and the firebombing of churches.

  Manuel was the first Byzantine emperor since Constantine the Great to visit England, during his own futile begging tour of Europe. In 1400 he met the new king, Henry IV. The chronicler Adam of Usk recorded the spectacle of the dignified but impoverished emperor at King Henry’s court: ‘I thought within myself, what a grievous thing it was that this great Christian prince from the farther East should perforce be driven by unbelievers to visit the islands of the West, to seek aid against them. My God! What dost thou, ancient glory of Rome? Shorn is the greatness of thine empire this day.’

  The scholarly John VIII, Manuel’s son and successor, is the only Paleologus emperor of whom we have reliable portraits. A bronze medal by Pisanello shows him in profile, and in Gozzoli’s famous fresco in the Medici Chapel at Florence he is one of a trio of contemporary grandees represented as the Magi. Here John is the image of a Renaissance prince, though with a dash of the exotic: astride a magnificent white horse in gold trappings, he wears a sumptuous tunic of gold-embroidered green and the traditional red boots of the Byzantine emperors, while on his head is a fantastic crown of gem-studded gold enclosed by waving feathers. Whether his crown was mere paint and glass we do not know. The fresco dates from around twenty years after John’s visit to Italy, but if Gozzoli did not himself set eyes on the emperor he would certainly have cross-examined many who did, and may well have studied portraits then extant. Gozzoli’s John is a strikingly handsome man of kingly bearing, his long face framed by thick curly hair and neatly trimmed beard of auburn. Pisanello’s profile shows an older, careworn man with the kind of long aquiline nose which would be observed at the opening of Theodore Paleologus’s coffin in Cornwall.

  Other portraits of Paleologus emperors follow Byzantine tradition, and instead of studies from the life we have icon-like images representing the essence of royalty rather than human beings. One beard may be a little longer or greyer than the next, but otherwise the emperors are a row of solemn look-alikes, each in his stiff bejewelled robes and the elaborate semi-spherical crown which distinguishes a ruler of Byzantium. The late flowering of Byzantine art under the Paleologi did not extend to a new take on portraiture as pioneered in contemporary Italy.

  Discussing the physical appearances of these imperial figures brings me to a central challenge in writing a biography of this kind. Readers want to put a face to any character claimed as worthy of their interest. Alas, I have no portrait to offer: bizarrely, the only detailed description of my subject’s appearance dates from long after his death. Nor do I see any prospect of his long-forgotten picture turning up in some dusty corridor of a country house, no Unknown Man circa 1600 whose identity will be revealed as layers of grime are wiped from a coat-of-arms or riddling motto. The mind’s eye must fill the void, taking as a starting point an uncommonly tall soldierly figure and a long-nosed, fine-boned face owing something to the ancestral line.

  Despite the glamorous image reflecting his youthful visit to Italy, John VIII was one of the few emperors to inherit none of the obvious characteristics – vaunting ambition, cruelty, martial prowess and cunning statesmanship – of the founder of the dynasty. He was worthy and a little dull. His younger brother and successor Constantine XI, destined to be the last of the ninety emperors of Byzantium, was a man of a very different stamp.

  History has not been kind to the name Paleologus. The dynasty is inescapably linked with the empire’s decline and fall, though the die was cast long before its founder’s time. But the tragic and heroic figure of Constantine XI4 redeems the Paleologi, and to the present day his legend is an inspiration to countless Greeks. He is the sacred emperor, not dead but sleeping, the figure of prophecy who will reappear at the appointed hour.

  Constantine took pains to avoid the deadly family quarrels which had blighted his forebears. Long before succeeding John VIII, he promised to be the longed-for leader who would reclaim the empire, and in early years had successfully waged war on the petty Latin rulers clinging on in mainland Greece. But the victories ended in 1444 when the Italian duke of Athens allied himself to the Byzantines’ nemesis, the Ottoman sultan. Thereafter Constantine was constantly on the defensive. As well as his outside enemies, he had much to contend with from his two remaining brothers, Demetrius and Thomas, who shared the title of despot of the imperial fiefdom called the Morea, better known today as the Peloponnese. Of Thomas, there is more to be said later.

  For eight centuries Muslims dreamt of conquering Constantinople, ‘the bone in the throat of Allah’, yet though they overran virtually every corner of the empire, all their previous twenty-three sieges of the city had ended in failure. They had never equalled the feat of the crusaders. But a ruthless new sultan, Mehmet II, was obsessed with taking Constantinople, and at the age of twenty-one he made his bid.

  After a five-week siege the final assault began in the early hours of 23 May 1453. The advantage swung back and forth between attacker and defender as desperate fighting shifted to different points around the city walls, and the moment of crisis came when the leader of the Byzantines’ Genoese allies was grievously injured and carried from the ramparts. His loss caused panic among the defenders and the Genoese rushed for their boats. Byzantines who followed the emperor into the gap tried to hold off the invaders but were quickly overwhelmed.

  Estimates of the combatants involved differ wildly though no one has ever doubted that Mehmet’s forces vastly outnumbered Constantine’s. The emperor’s chancellor survived the fall of the city and recorded the total number of defenders – Byzantines and their allies – as less than 8,000. The Muslim host has been calculated as anything up to 400,000, though modern historians trim this down to perhaps 200,000 including camp followers. Whatever the odds, the outcome was inevitable. The fall of the city brought to an end not only the Byzantine world dating from the fourth century but an empire whose origins could be traced to the founding of Rome in 753 BC.

  All accounts of Constantine’s death were based on hearsay, though the Greek world has never doubted his end befitted a hero and martyr. Several reports say that when he realised all was lost, the emperor threw off everything that could identify him, hurled himself into the enemy ranks, and was cut down instantly. However, he had forgotten about his red boots embroidered with golden eagles, and these gave him away when the bodies of the dead were looted.

  According to one story, the sultan had his head cut off and paraded around the city on a stake, then sent as a present to the sultan of Egypt. One highly suspect source has Mehmet weeping at the sight of his dead adversary and ordering an honourable Christian burial at Haghia Sophia, while another says Constantine hanged himself the moment the Turks broke through the city’s defences. One of the surprisingly few Ottoman accounts claims he was fleeing in terror when felled by a Turkish marine. One or two sources even say he made his escape from the city by boat. But the most persistent theme is that Constantine displayed sublime courage, unhesitatingly choosing to die rather than abandon the imperial city.

  No one really knows what happened to his body. The legend quickly arose that an angel snatched him away to
sleep in a deep cavern under the Golden Gate until the day he will rise again to free his people. It is a variant of the universal legend of the sleeping hero, a Greek equivalent of Britain’s Arthur, Owen Glendower or Fionn mac Cumhaill. All appear to derive from the ancient tale of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, the Christian youths who fell asleep in a cave during the Roman persecution and woke centuries later in the Christian empire.

  All surviving tombs of the emperors were destroyed. Their favoured burial place was not Haghia Sophia but the Church of the Holy Apostles where Constantine the Great himself was interred. Crusader knights had smashed and looted their resting place two and a half centuries before, departing with a great haul of gold and jewels. Among the treasures of St Mark’s in Venice is a gold crown torn from one of the bodies cast out like so much rubbish. The Turks evicted the last scraps of imperial dust, determined that no place of pilgrimage would remain; Mehmet demolished the church itself to make way for the mosque which would house his own tomb. All that remain today are a few empty battered sarcophagi carved from the porphyry reserved for imperial use, transported to the environs of Haghia Sophia or the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, inevitably recalling the words of Hamlet:

  To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?

  More fortunate than the emperors, the English Paleologi have left us three tombs to visit, though none has remained undisturbed. The earliest and historically most important is that of Theodore at Landulph with the ancestral names set out on the monument like an incantation: besides those of the commemorated man, his wife and father-in-law, the others are of six direct ancestors and five descendants.

  In full, the inscription reads:

  HERE LYETH THE BODY OF THEODORO PALEOLOGVS

  OF PESARO IN ITALYE DESCENDED FROM YE IMPERYALL

  LYNE OF YE LAST CHRISTIAN EMPERORS OF GREECE

  BEING THE SONNE OF CAMILIO YE SONNE OF PROSPER

  THE SONNE OF THEODORO THE SONNE OF JOHN YE

  SONNE OF THOMAS SECOND BROTHER TO CONSTANTINE

  PALEOLOGUS THE 8th OF THAT NAME AND LAST OF

  YT LYNE YT RAYGNED IN CONSTANTINOPLE VNTILL SVB-

  DEWED BY THE TVRKS, WHO MARRIED WITH MARY

  YE DAUGHTER OF WILLIAM BALLS OF HADLYE IN

  SOVFFOLKE GENT: & HAD ISSUE 5 CHILDREN THEO-

  DORO, JOHN, FERDINANDO, MARIA & DOROTHY, & DE-

  PARTED THIS LIFE AT CLYFTON YE 21st OF JANVARY 1636.

  Tracing down the generations to the man buried at Landulph, we begin with an account of the last emperor’s brother Thomas, last of the despots.

  Notes

  1 Casson, Sir Stanley, Greece and Britain, Collins, 1940.

  2 Runciman, Steven, The Sicilian Vespers, Cambridge, 1958.

  3 The Pope was quoting from Twenty Six Dialogues with a Persian, translated by Professor Theodore Khoury, in an article for Sources Chretiennes, n 115, Paris, 1966.

  4 The numbering of the emperors sometimes differs depending on whether an individual was recognised as legitimate or not. Thus Constantine XI may be referred to as VIII, as on the tomb of Landulph.

  2

  They are the abstract and brief chronicle of the time: after your death, you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.

  Shakespeare, Hamlet.

  Sometime late in the summer of 1460, seven years after the fall of Constantinople, a Venetian galley tied up in the Adriatic seaport of Ancona with a party of weary, seasick and impoverished Byzantine exiles on board. The remnants of the imperial family, they had fled before a Turkish onslaught against the last imperial outposts on the Greek mainland, braving waters infested with enemy warships to reach this place of safety.

  The leader of the fugitives was Thomas Paleologus, brother of the slain emperor, and among his companions were his young sons: how many he fathered has long been disputed, but if the John named on the Landulph brass is no fiction there must have been at least three. During his futile defence of the Morea, the last despot had fought not only Turks but his treacherous brother Demetrius. Having thrown in his lot with the sultan, Demetrius forfeited any claim to the succession. Contemporaries who were fond of seeing living characters as the incarnation of figures of antiquity would call Demetrius and Thomas the new Cain and Abel, though the new Abel’s destiny was a living martyrdom.

  Thomas was now the sole survivor of five brothers of the emperor. He arrived in Italy, as a sorrowful Pope Pius II observed:

  … a prince who was born to the illustrious and ancient family of the Paleologi, the son of an emperor, the brother of an emperor, himself the first in line and so destined to become an emperor … wise, magnanimous and full of courage, a man who has been robbed of his empire, of his every kingdom … a man who is now an immigrant, naked, robbed of everything except his lineage, so poor and so needy.

  But Thomas did not arrive empty-handed. Though penniless and in rags, he had brought a gift for the pope wrapped in a white silk shawl – a grisly object, yet one of the most precious relics of Christendom. It was the head of the Apostle Andrew, brother of St Peter, patron saint of the Byzantine Church. It was removed by the fleeing heir from the basilica at Patras, the great city port of the Peloponnese where Andrew had been martyred. The head was venerated there for many centuries, but under Ottoman rule would certainly have shared the fate of Constantinople’s fabled collection of relics, among them an icon of the Virgin supposedly painted from life by St Luke. All were defiled and destroyed at the fall of the city.5

  Delighted with his present, Pius awarded Thomas a much-needed pension of 6,000 ducats a year, a palatial residence in Rome and the coveted papal order of the Golden Rose. Of all the pontiffs of the period, Pius II was the most sympathetic to the Byzantine cause, toiling constantly to persuade western monarchs to back a new crusade against the Turks. But Europe was now hopelessly divided, with France and Spain split by internal dynastic conflicts, England convulsed by the Wars of the Roses, and most of the German principalities and Italian states locked in venomous disputes of one kind or another. With Pius’s death in 1464 all realistic hope of restoring Byzantium seemed at an end.

  Thomas’s landfall of Ancona, in the region of Marche, nominally belonged to the Papal States, and ancestors of Theodore Paleologus were to live hereabouts for more than 100 years. Marche boasted a long association with Byzantium. Occupied by Goths after the fall of Rome, it was recaptured by the great Byzantine general Belisarius and ruled from Ravenna, not far to the north. The region’s other major cities were Pesaro, the birthplace of our Theodore, and neighbouring Urbino. Both were seats of the ducal Rovere family whose patronage was enjoyed by Theodore’s forebears. Other powerful pro-Byzantine nobles seated in the area were the Gonzaga, the Este and the Malatesta. One of Thomas’s dead brothers had married a daughter of the Malatesta who was a previous lord of Pesaro. However, Thomas himself lingered in Rome, the better to plead the case for his restoration. Everyone who saw Thomas in the flesh seemed to be hugely impressed, and several contemporaries recorded impressions of his dignity, refined manners and noble demeanour. His appearance was captured by several painters and sculptors, not only as himself but in the guise of various saints – for instance, he was the model for a marble statue of St Paul executed by Paulo Tacconi di Sezze, the pope’s favourite sculptor, and for one of the figures in Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation.

  The last of the despots died within a year of Pope Pius. Apart from the John named on the Landulph brass, it is generally asserted that Thomas was survived by his heir Andrew, then aged twelve, his brother Manuel, ten, and a daughter Zoe, later called Sofia, aged seventeen. In addition to the children accompanying Thomas into exile, there was a well-documented elder daughter, Helena, who married a minor Serbian royal but failed to produce an heir; there is some evidence of a third daughter who died with her name unrecorded. So how many children there were in all has long been a matter of controversy. V
arying numbers of both sons and daughters are offered in early documents, even those dates a few years from Thomas’s death. As well as Andrew, Manuel and John, mention of a fourth son called Rogerio has been found in archives in the Cilento area south of Naples, and the possibility of a fifth son, also called Thomas, has been mooted on the strength of an Italian history published in 1602. But enough is enough; the causes of Rogerio and Thomas the Younger have never attracted scholarly support and we shall concentrate on John.

  Of contemporary authorities, the Byzantine statesman George Sphrantzes was traditionally regarded as the most reliable. Born in 1401, Sphrantzes served both Manuel II and Constantine XI, and his chronicle of the fall of Constantinople is a vivid telling of the catastrophe. It is also a painfully detailed account of the fate of Sphrantzes’s own family at the hands of the sultan, for his son and daughter were both taken into the seraglio where the son was killed and the daughter died of an infectious disease at the age of fourteen. Sphrantzes shared Thomas’s exile, and nowhere in his chronicle does he mention a John among the despot’s progeny. This silence is at the heart of the case against the authenticity of the English Paleologi. Yet Sphrantzes’s testimony has been questioned by scholars in recent times since it transpired that what had always been considered entirely his own work was virtually rewritten by a later editor. The accuracy of Sphrantzes has also been queried on the grounds that, working on the dateline he gives, Thomas the Despot’s wife gave birth to one of her children at the age of sixty-five.6