Constantine XI Dragases Palaiologos, Latinized as Palaeologus was the last
reigning Byzantine Emperor, reigning as a member of the Palaiologos dynasty from
1449 to his death in battle at the fall of Constantinople. Following his death,
he became a legendary figure in Greek folklore as the "Marble Emperor" who
would awaken and recover the Empire and Constantinople from the Ottomans. His
death marked the end of the Roman Empire, which had continued in the East
for 977 years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
Biography Constantine was born in Constantinople,
as the eighth of ten children to Manuel II Palaiologos and Helena Dragaš, the
daughter of the Serbian magnate Constantine Dragaš. He was extremely
fond of his mother and added her surname next to his own dynastic one when he
ascended the imperial throne. He spent most of his childhood in Constantinople
under the supervision of his parents. He was governor of Selymbria for a time,
until surrendering the role to his brother Theodore in 1443. During the
absence of his older brother John at the Council of Florence in Italy,
Constantine served as his regent in Constantinople.
= Despot of the Morea= Constantine became the Despotes of the
Morea in October 1443, ruling from the fortress and palace in Mistra. At the
time, Mistra, a fortified town also called Sparta or Lacedaemon due to its
proximity to the ancient city, was a center of arts and culture rivalling
Constantinople. Twenty years before, he had aided his brother John to
consolidate Byzantine control over the Morea, campaigning against the Latin
princes who still held parts of it, and except for the Venetian possessions of
Modon, Coron, and Nauplion, the entire peninsula came under Byzantine control.
After establishing himself as Despot, Constantine strengthened the defences of
the Morea, by reconstructing a wall across the Isthmus of Corinth called the
"Hexamilion", on the suggestion of the famous scholar and teacher of his,
Plethon. In summer 1444, Constantine marched out
of the Morea, invading the Latin Duchy of Athens. He swiftly conquered Thebes
and Athens, forcing its Florentine duke, Nerio II Acciaioli, a vassal of the
Ottoman Sultan to pay him tribute. The Turkish response was inevitable. Two
years later, the Sultan Murad II who had come out of retirement, led an army of
50,000–60,000 soldiers into Greece to put an end to the pretensions of
Constantine. His purpose was not to conquer Morea but to teach the Greeks
and their Despots a punitive lesson. The Ottoman army reached the Hexamilion 27
November 1446. Constantine attempted to parley with the Sultan but, according to
the historian Laonikos Chalkokondyles, his terms "were not moderate, for he
demanded that the Isthmos be allowed to stand as it was for him and that he get
to keep all the sultan's lands beyond it that he had subjected."
Constantine and his brother Thomas braced for the attack at the Hexamilion,
which the Ottoman army reached on 27 November 1446. While the wall could hold
against medieval attacks, Sultan Murad used bombards to supplement the usual
siege engines and scaling ladders; the bombards breached the wall on 10
December. Murad's janissaries poured through the opening, and the defenders
panicked and fled. Constantine and Thomas attempted to rally their
soldiers, and failing, barely escaped to Mistra. Murad split his forces, giving
one part to his advisor Turahan while leading the other part along the
southern shore of the Gulf of Corinth, plundering and destroying as his troops
advanced. While neither Patras or Mistra fell to the Ottoman troops, the province
was devastated; an estimated 60,000 people were taken prisoner by the
Sultan's forces and sold to the slave markets of Turkey. Constantine and his
brother Thomas were forced to make themselves vassals of the Ottoman sultan
and pay tribute. All hopes of improving Byzantine fortunes by expanding their
hegemony in the Morea had failed. = Marriages=
Constantine XI married twice: the first time on 1 July 1428 to Theodora Tocco,
niece of Carlo I Tocco of Epirus, who died in November 1429; the second time
in August 1441 to Caterina Gattilusio, daughter of Dorino of Lesbos, who also
died, during childbirth, in 1442. He had no children by either marriage. After
his coronation, in 1451, Constantine XI sent a commission under George
Sphrantzes asking Mara Branković, daughter of the Serbian Despot Đurađ
Branković and Byzantine princess Irene Kantakouzene, by then the widow of Murad
II, to marry him. The proposal was welcomed by her father Đurađ Branković,
but it foundered on the objection of Maria herself who had vowed that "if God
ever released her from the hands of the infidel she would lead a life of
celibacy and chastity for the rest of her days". Accordingly, the courtship
failed and Sphrantzes took steps to arrange for a marriage with a princess
either from the Empire of Trebizond or the Kingdom of Georgia. The choice
eventually fell to an unnamed Georgian princess, daughter of George VIII. He
started official negotiations with the Georgian king, who had sent an
ambassador in Constantinople for that reason. It was agreed that, next spring,
Sphrantzes would sail for Georgia to bring the bride to Constantinople, but
Constantine's plans were overtaken by the events of 1453.
= Reign as Emperor= Despite the foreign and domestic
difficulties during his reign, which culminated in the fall of Constantinople
and of the Byzantine Empire, contemporary sources generally speak
respectfully of the Emperor Constantine. When his brother, Emperor John VIII
Palaiologos, died childless, a dispute erupted between Constantine and his
brother Demetrios Palaiologos over the throne. Demetrios drew support for his
opposition to the union between the Orthodox and Catholic churches. The
Empress Helena, acting as regent, supported Constantine. They appealed to
the Ottoman Sultan Murad II to arbitrate the disagreement.
Murad decided in favor of Constantine and on 6 January 1449 Constantine was
crowned in the cathedral at Mistra by the local bishop. It was rare but not
unprecedented for an emperor to be crowned in a provincial city. The
founder of the dynasty of Palaiologos had been crowned at Nicaea, Asia Minor,
John Cantacuzene at Adrianople, Thrace. But they had been thought proper that a
second coronation ceremony be held also at Constantinople, performed by the
patriarch. Constantine was the exception. The patriarch at the time,
Gregory III, was a unionist, shunned by most of his clergy. Constantine knew
that to receive his crown from Gregory would add fuel to the existing fires of
religious discord in the capital. He sailed from Greece on a Venetian ship
and arrived in Constantinople on 12 March 1449.
Sultan Murad died in 1451, succeeded by his 19-year-old son Mehmed II. Mehmed II
was obsessed with the conquest of Constantinople. Constantine responded to
this by threatening to release Prince Orhan, who was a contender to the
Ottoman throne, unless Mehmed met some of his demands. Because of this, Mehmed
considered Constantine to have broken the truce and the following winter of
1451–52, Mehmed built Rumelihisarı, a hill fortress on the European side of
the Bosporus, just north of the city cutting the communication with the Black
Sea to the east. This complemented the Anadoluhisarı fortress on the Anatolian
side of the Bosporus, built between 1393 and 1394 by Sultan Bayezid I. For
Constantine that was a clear prelude for a siege and he immediately started
organizing his defence. He managed to raise funds to stockpile
food for the upcoming siege and to repair the old Theodosian walls, but the
poor state of the Byzantine economy did not allow him to raise the necessary
army to defend the city against the massive Ottoman army. Desperate for any
type of military assistance, Constantine XI appealed to the West reaffirming the
union of Eastern and Roman Churches which had been signed at the Council of
Florence, a condition the Catholic Church imposed before any help could be
provided. The union had been overwhelmingly criticized by the strong
anti-union part of his subjects; his megas doux Loukas Notaras, his chief
minister and military commander, is alleged to have said, "Better to see the
turban of the Turks reigning in the center of the City than the Latin
mitre." Finally, although some troops did arrive from the mercantile city
states in the north of Italy, the Western contribution was negligible
compared to the needs, given the Ottoman strength. Constantine also sought
assistance from his brothers in Morea, but any help was forestalled by an
Ottoman invasion of the peninsula in 1452, executed to tie down the soldiers
there. The siege of the city began in the winter of 1452. Constantine faced
the siege defending his city of less than 50,000 people with an army only
numbering 7,000 men. Confronting the Byzantine forces was an Ottoman army
numbering around 10 times that, backed by state-of-the-art siege equipment
provided by a very competent Hungarian arms maker named Orban.
= Fall of Constantinople and death= Before the beginning of the siege,
Mehmed II made an offer to Constantine XI. In exchange for the surrender of
Constantinople, the emperor's life would be spared and he would continue to rule
in Mistra; to which, as preserved by G. Sphrantzes, Constantine replied:
To surrender the city to you is beyond my authority or anyone else's who lives
in it, for all of us, after taking the mutual decision, shall die out of free
will without sparing our lives. He led the defence of the city and took
an active part in the fighting alongside his troops in the land walls. At the
same time, he used his diplomatic skills to maintain the necessary unity between
the Genoese, Venetian and the Greek troops.
He died the day the city fell, 29 May 1453. His last recorded words were: "The
city is fallen and I am still alive." Then he tore off his imperial ornaments
so as to let nothing distinguish him from any other soldier and led his
remaining soldiers into a last charge where he was killed.
Soldiers were sent to search amongst the dead for his body. The first body that
was believed to be the emperor's, a body that had silk stockings with an eagle
embroidered in it, was decapitated and marched around the ruined capital.
However, it failed to gather any recognition from the citizens of
Constantinople. There were no known surviving eyewitnesses to the death of
the Emperor and none of his entourage survived to offer any credible account
of his death. = Legacy=
A legend tells that when the Ottomans entered the city, an angel rescued the
emperor, turned him into marble and placed him in a cave under the earth
near the Golden Gate, where he waits to be brought to life again to conquer the
city back for Christians. While serving as ambassador to Russia in
February 1834, Ahmed Pasha presented Tsar Nicholas with a number of gifts,
including a jewel-encrusted sword supposedly taken from Constantine XI's
corpse. Constantine XI's legacy was used as a
rallying cry for Greeks during their war for Independence with the Ottoman
Empire. Today the Emperor is considered a national hero in Greece.
During the Balkan Wars and the Greco-Turkish War, under the influence
of the Megali Idea, the name of the then-Greek king, Constantine, was used
in Greece as a popular confirmation of the prophetic myth about the Marble King
who would liberate Constantinople and recreate the lost Empire.
Constantine Palaiologos' legacy is still a popular theme in Greek culture. The
well known contemporary composers Apostolos Kaldaras and Stamatis
Spanoudakis have written elegies for the Marble King.
Unofficial saint Some Eastern Orthodox and
Greek-Catholics consider Constantine XI a saint. However, he has not been
officially canonized by either Church, partly due to controversy surrounding
his personal religious beliefs and partly because death in battle is not
normally considered a form of martyrdom by the Orthodox Church. An Orthodox
martyr is one who voluntarily accepts death for his faith, typically in a
situation where he has the option to give up Christianity and live, but
chooses death instead. Ancestry
In popular culture Emperor Constantine XI was portrayed by
Cahit Irgat in Turkish film İstanbul'un Fethi.
Recep Aktuğ portrays Emperor Constantine XI in the Turkish film Fetih 1453.
Emperor Constantine XI is the protagonist in Constantinopolis, a novel
by James Shipman. References
Bibliography Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for
Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West. Hyperion, 2005; ISBN
1-4013-0850-3 Jonathan Harris, The End of Byzantium.
Yale University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-300-11786-8
Donald M. Nicol, The Immortal Emperor. Cambridge University Press, 1992. ISBN
0-521-46717-9 Donald M. Nicol, The Last Centuries of
Byzantium. Cambridge University Press, 1993, 2nd edition. ISBN 0-521-43991-4
Murr Nehme, Lina. 1453: The Fall of Constantinople. Aleph Et Taw. ISBN
2-86839-816-2. Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, 1991.
Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople, 1453. Cambridge
University Press, 1965. ISBN 0-521-09573-5
Georgios Frantzes, Ioannes A. Melisseides, Rita Zavolea Melisseidou, "
Ealo I Polis, To Chronico tes halose tes Konstantinoupoles " 1998/2004,
Ekd.Vergina, Athens. ISBN 9789607171917 External links
Great Martyr, the Emperor Blessed Constantine XI Paleologos