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Constantine XI Palaiologos

Constantine XI ruled four years and died on the walls of Constantinople in 1453. His life, the impossible position he inherited, his death, and the legend of the marble emperor.

Constantine XI Dragases Palaiologos was emperor of the Romans for four years and four months, and for most of that time his empire consisted of the city of Constantinople, a few Aegean islands, and a province in the Peloponnese governed by his brothers, who were usually quarrelling with each other. He died on 29 May 1453 in the fighting at the breached walls, in circumstances that were never established, and his body was never certainly identified.

He is a difficult subject for a biographer because the last eight weeks of his life have absorbed everything else. Modern Greek tradition made him a national martyr; the Orthodox Church has never canonised him, because he died in communion with Rome. Both facts say more about later centuries than about the man.

Early Life and the Morea

Constantine was born on 8 February 1405, the eighth child and fourth surviving son of Manuel II Palaiologos and Helena Dragaš, a Serbian princess. His use of his mother’s family name — Dragases — is unusual for a Byzantine emperor and appears on his own documents.

His formative years were spent not in the capital but in the Despotate of the Morea, the Byzantine province in the Peloponnese ruled from Mystras. He was despot there from 1428, and the record is the best evidence for what kind of ruler he might have been in better circumstances. He recovered almost the whole peninsula from the Latin principality of Achaea, negotiated the surrender of Patras in 1429 after a two-year siege, rebuilt the Hexamilion wall across the Isthmus of Corinth in 1443, and pushed north into central Greece as far as Thebes.

It ended badly. In 1446 Sultan Murad II came south with an army and artillery, broke the Hexamilion in a few days, and devastated the Morea. Constantine survived as a tributary. The episode is worth remembering because it is a rehearsal in miniature for 1453: a well-built wall, a competent defender, and a gunpowder siege train that made the wall irrelevant.

Accession

Constantine’s brother John VIII died childless in October 1448. The succession lay between Constantine and his younger brother Demetrios, who had positioned himself as the leader of the anti-union party. Their mother Helena backed Constantine, and — a detail that captures the position of the empire exactly — the matter was referred to Sultan Murad II, who approved Constantine.

He was crowned at Mystras on 6 January 1449 by the local metropolitan, and entered Constantinople in March. There was no coronation in Hagia Sophia. Whether this was because of the religious division in the city or simply practical, it has been read ever since as an omen.

The Impossible Position

The empire Constantine inherited had perhaps fifty thousand inhabitants in a city built for half a million, with fields and orchards inside the walls. Its revenue came from customs duties it could barely enforce, and its foreign policy consisted of playing Venice, Genoa, the papacy and the Hungarians against the Ottomans while avoiding provocation.

Three things then went wrong at once.

Murad II died in February 1451 and was succeeded by his nineteen-year-old son Mehmed II, who had been deposed once before as a boy and had spent the interval planning the capture of Constantinople. Western observers underestimated him badly; so, initially, did Constantine.

Constantine made a clumsy threat. In 1451 his envoys hinted that the empire might release the Ottoman pretender Orhan, held in Constantinople on an Ottoman pension, unless payments were increased. Mehmed’s response was to stop the payments altogether and begin preparations.

The union was proclaimed. On 12 December 1452, in Hagia Sophia, the union agreed at Ferrara–Florence was formally celebrated by the papal legate Isidore of Kiev. Constantine judged that western help required it. The city’s reaction was hostile enough that many of the clergy and population boycotted the cathedral thereafter, and the practical return was a few hundred archers with Isidore and some Genoese volunteers.

The Siege

Mehmed built the fortress of Rumeli Hisarı on the European shore of the Bosphorus in the summer of 1452, closing the strait. The siege began on 6 April 1453 and lasted fifty-four days; it is described in detail in the fall of Constantinople.

Constantine’s conduct during it is well attested by several eyewitnesses. He refused an offer from advisers to leave the city and organise resistance from the Morea. He walked the walls nightly. He gave the Genoese commander Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, who arrived with seven hundred professional soldiers in January, overall charge of the land defence — a sensible decision by a man who knew the limits of his own experience.

Mehmed’s final offer, made shortly before the assault, was that Constantine could withdraw to the Morea and rule it under Ottoman suzerainty if he surrendered the city. The reply, as reported by the Greek chronicler Sphrantzes, who was Constantine’s close friend and secretary, was that to surrender the city was not in his power nor in anyone’s, since all its inhabitants would rather die than live.

His Death

The final assault came before dawn on 29 May. Giustiniani was wounded and carried off, the Genoese wavered, Ottoman troops entered by the Kerkoporta postern and over the stockade at the Blachernae section, and the defence collapsed.

Constantine was last seen at the breach near the Gate of St Romanos. The accounts differ, as they were bound to: Sphrantzes was not present; the Venetian surgeon Nicolò Barbaro, who was in the city, says the emperor hanged himself in despair, which no one else supports; other accounts have him throwing off his imperial insignia and charging into the fighting to die anonymously. Ottoman sources report that a body claimed to be his was found and identified by the purple boots, and the head displayed. No grave is known.

The ambiguity is the origin of the legend.

The Marble Emperor

Greek popular tradition developed the story that an angel took the emperor at the moment of the city’s fall, turned him to marble, and hid him in a cave near the Golden Gate, from which he will return to drive the Turks from the city and reclaim Hagia Sophia. The legend, first recorded in the sixteenth century and elaborated in folk song, became one of the central images of Greek irredentism and fed directly into the Megali Idea of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

There is a parallel and equally persistent tradition about the priest who was celebrating the liturgy in Hagia Sophia when the Ottomans broke in, and who walked into the wall of the sanctuary, to emerge and finish the service when the church is Christian again.

Reputation and Sainthood

The Church of Greece commemorates Constantine as an ethnomartyr, and a statue of him stands in Athens and in Mystras; the Ecumenical Patriarchate has not proclaimed him a saint. The obstacle is that he died having accepted the union of Florence, which the Orthodox Church rejected, and that formally canonising a unionist emperor would create difficulties it has no reason to invite.

Historians are divided in a different way. The critical view is that Constantine mishandled Mehmed in 1451, that the union was a strategic error that divided his own city for no material gain, and that the Morea would have been a better base for resistance. The sympathetic view is that none of these choices had good alternatives, that the empire had been strategically doomed since the 1390s, and that what he actually controlled was the manner of the ending.

What He Left

The Ottoman conquest made Mehmed Kayser-i Rûm, Caesar of Rome, a title he used deliberately, and the city became the Ottoman capital, as described in Constantinople to Istanbul. Constantine’s brother Thomas fled to Italy with the family’s relics and claims; his niece Zoe, renamed Sophia, married Ivan III of Moscow in 1472, which is one root of the Third Rome idea.

The last emperor thus produced no dynasty, no tomb and no settled reputation — and two legends, one Greek and one Russian, that outlasted the empire by five hundred years.

The Defence in Numbers

The arithmetic of the siege explains the outcome better than any account of individual heroism, and Constantine knew it before it began.

A census of the defenders was taken shortly before the siege by George Sphrantzes, the emperor’s secretary and friend, on Constantine’s orders. Sphrantzes reports that he found fewer than 5,000 Greeks capable of bearing arms, plus perhaps 2,000 foreigners — Genoese, Venetians, Catalans and a few others. He also reports that Constantine ordered the figure kept secret.

Against this, Ottoman forces of somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000, plus a fleet, plus the siege train of bombards described in the walls of Constantinople.

The circuit of the land and sea walls runs to about twenty kilometres. Holding it properly requires something in the region of 20,000 men. Constantine had a third of that, which meant no reserve, no rotation, and no ability to concentrate against a breach without stripping another sector.

Under those conditions the defence lasted fifty-four days, which is the genuinely remarkable fact.

The Witnesses

An unusual number of eyewitness accounts survive, from several nationalities, and they disagree productively.

George Sphrantzes was Constantine’s secretary and close friend, present in the city, and his chronicle is the most personal account — he lost his children to the aftermath. A longer version of his work, the so-called Chronicon Maius, is a sixteenth-century expansion by Makarios Melissenos and should not be used as a witness.

Nicolò Barbaro, a Venetian ship’s surgeon, kept a day-by-day diary of the siege. It is the closest thing to a log, and it is also the source of the isolated claim that Constantine hanged himself, which no other account supports.

Leonard of Chios, the Latin archbishop of Mytilene, wrote a report to the pope within weeks, blaming the Greeks for their schism and their unpreparedness.

Doukas, writing shortly afterwards but not present, supplies the Kerkoporta story and the Notaras remark about the turban.

Kritoboulos of Imbros wrote a history dedicated to Mehmed II, from the victor’s side, and is markedly respectful toward Constantine — which, coming from a source with every incentive to be otherwise, is the strongest evidence for how the last emperor conducted himself.

Ottoman and later Turkish accounts add their own layer, including the identification of the body by the purple boots.

The Speech

Every account of the last night includes a speech by Constantine to the defenders, and the versions differ enough that none can be treated as a transcript.

The best known is in Sphrantzes, where the emperor addresses the Greeks and the Italians separately — reminding the Greeks of their faith, their families and their city, and thanking the foreigners for a defence that was not their obligation. Leonard of Chios gives a different version with a Latin emphasis.

What the accounts agree on is the framing: that the defenders were told the city could not be replaced, that those who died would die for their faith and their homeland, and that the emperor asked to be forgiven by anyone he had wronged. Then, by several accounts, the defenders went to a final service in Hagia Sophia — Greeks and Latins together, for the only time since the union had divided them — and returned to the walls.

Whether that service happened as described is unverifiable. It is the image that has carried the last night of Byzantium for five and a half centuries, and it is at least consistent with what the eyewitnesses report of the mood.

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