Konstantinos XI Palaiologos

Constantine XI Palaiologos, commonly called Constantine XI Dragases Palaiologos after his mother, was the last reigning emperor of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire. He was born in Constantinople on 8 February 1405, a younger son of Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos and Helena Dragaš, a Serbian princess of the Dejanović family. The empire he was born into had already been reduced, in the early fifteenth century, to Constantinople and a narrow hinterland, a few islands, and the Morea (the Peloponnese), and it lived under the growing power of the Ottoman sultans. Constantine grew up among several brothers, of whom John VIII would succeed their father as emperor, while Constantine, Theodore, Andronikos, Demetrios, and Thomas were employed as despots and governors in the remaining provinces. His mother’s Serbian connection later supplied the byname Dragases, which he used alongside Palaiologos.

Much of his adult career before the throne was spent in the Morea, with Mystras as his chief residence. There he and his brothers sought to recover Latin-held districts of the Peloponnese, to hold the Hexamilion wall across the Isthmus of Corinth, and to keep the peninsula as a viable Byzantine stronghold. Contemporary observers regarded him as an energetic soldier and a more practical administrator than some of his brothers. In 1428 he married Theodora Tocco, of the Tocco family then ruling in Epirus; she died in 1429, and the child of that marriage did not survive. In 1441 he married Caterina Gattilusio, daughter of Dorino Gattilusio, the Genoese lord of Lesbos; she died in 1442. He left no surviving issue. After John VIII died childless in 1448, Constantine was accepted as emperor, with the decisive backing of the dowager empress Helena, who held authority in Constantinople during the interregnum. He was crowned at Mystras in January 1449 rather than in the capital, a decision bound up with the still-bitter quarrel over the Union of Florence, which John VIII had accepted in the hope of Western military aid against the Ottomans.

Constantine reached Constantinople in March 1449 and reigned for little more than four years. The treasury was exhausted, the field army tiny, and the young Ottoman sultan Mehmed II was determined to take the city. Constantine appealed repeatedly to Latin Christendom and, in December 1452, permitted a union liturgy to be celebrated in Hagia Sophia, a step that alienated much of the Orthodox clergy and urban population without producing a relieving army of any size. A modest number of Western volunteers did arrive, most notably the Genoese Giovanni Giustiniani Longo and his men. When Mehmed opened the siege in April 1453, Constantine personally oversaw repairs to the Theodosian Walls and the organisation of a garrison of only a few thousand against an Ottoman force many times larger and equipped with heavy cannon. He refused to abandon the city or to accept terms that would have surrendered it.

On 29 May 1453 the Ottomans forced a breach. Greek, Latin, and later Ottoman accounts agree that Constantine died in the fighting in the streets near the walls. Several reports say that he discarded imperial ornaments so that he would not be taken alive as emperor and that he fell among ordinary soldiers. His body was never identified with certainty; stories of a corpse wearing purple boots, or of a head shown to Mehmed, remain unverified, and no authenticated tomb exists. In later Greek folk tradition he became the Marble Emperor, sleeping until Constantinople should be restored. He is remembered as the last emperor in the Roman imperial line that had continued at Constantinople after the fall of the West, and in much Orthodox popular piety he is honoured as a martyr, especially on the anniversary of the city’s fall, though he was not the object of a formal patriarchal act of glorification comparable to later, documented canonisations.