Byzantine Culture

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The Despotate of the Morea

From 1349 to 1460 the Peloponnese was governed from Mystras by a son or brother of the emperor. Its recovery of the peninsula, its scholars, its civil wars, and its fall seven years after the capital.

For a little over a century the Peloponnese was the most successful part of the Byzantine Empire. While Thrace, Macedonia and Anatolia were being lost, the Byzantine province in southern Greece expanded steadily, recovered almost the entire peninsula from the Frankish principality that had held it since 1204, and became the cultural centre of the last Byzantine generation.

It fell in 1460, seven years after Constantinople, and its capital Mystras is the best-preserved Byzantine city anywhere.

The Name

“Morea” is the medieval name for the Peloponnese. Its origin is disputed: the most common explanations are the mulberry (morea in Greek), reflecting the peninsula’s silk industry, or the shape of the land resembling a mulberry leaf. A “despot” was a court rank, the highest below the emperor, generally held by a son or brother of the reigning ruler; it did not mean what “despot” means in English.

Origins

After the Fourth Crusade, the Peloponnese was conquered by Frankish knights and organised as the Principality of Achaea under the Villehardouin family, with a feudal structure imported wholesale from France.

Byzantine recovery began with an accident of war. William II Villehardouin was captured at the battle of Pelagonia in 1259 and ransomed in 1262 for three fortresses: Mystras, Monemvasia and Maina. Michael VIII Palaiologos thus acquired a defensible base in the middle of Frankish territory.

From these strongpoints Byzantine governors expanded outward over the following century, exploiting divisions among the Frankish lords, the Catalan Company’s presence in Greece, and the general weakening of the Latin position.

In 1349 the province was reorganised: John VI Kantakouzenos made his son Manuel despot with a hereditary-style appointment, and from then on the Morea was governed by a member of the imperial family from Mystras.

Expansion

The despots’ record is genuinely impressive given the context.

Theodore I Palaiologos (1383–1407) consolidated the Byzantine hold and, in a controversial move, sold Corinth and later Mystras itself to the Knights Hospitaller as a defensive measure — the local population objected so strongly that the arrangement was reversed.

Theodore II and his brothers extended Byzantine control across the peninsula. In 1429–1430 Constantine Palaiologos, later the last emperor, took Patras after a long siege, and in 1432 the last Frankish territory in the Morea passed to Byzantine hands with the death of the last prince of Achaea. For the first time since 1204, the Peloponnese was Byzantine.

Constantine then rebuilt the Hexamilion, the wall across the Isthmus of Corinth, and pushed north into central Greece as far as Thebes and Athens.

The Limits

Two structural problems undid all of it.

The wall did not work. 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. It was a rehearsal for 1453: a well-built wall, a competent defender, and a gunpowder siege train that made the wall irrelevant.

The brothers could not cooperate. After Constantine left for Constantinople in 1449, the Morea was divided between his brothers Demetrios and Thomas, who were on opposite sides of the union question, disliked each other, and spent the 1450s in open conflict — inviting Ottoman intervention against each other while an Albanian revolt ran in the background.

The Cultural Moment

Against this, Mystras in the last half-century of Byzantium was extraordinary.

Gemistos Plethon taught there from about 1410 to 1452, developing a Platonism so radical it proposed replacing Christianity with a reconstructed Hellenic religion, and writing memoranda to the despot and emperor calling for a national army, tax reform, and the recognition that the inhabitants of the Peloponnese were Hellenes. His pupils included Bessarion, the future cardinal.

The painting of the Mystras churches — the Peribleptos, the Aphentiko, the Pantanassa — is among the finest Palaiologan work, and the Pantanassa, consecrated in 1428, is the last major Byzantine church built anywhere.

The architecture developed a distinctive local hybrid, combining a basilica at ground level with a cross-in-square above.

That a province under permanent military threat, in a shrinking empire, produced this is the same paradox the whole Palaiologan period presents, in concentrated form.

The Fall

After Constantinople fell in 1453, the Morea survived for seven years as an Ottoman tributary under the two quarrelling brothers.

They failed to pay the tribute. In 1460 Mehmed II came south and took the peninsula in a single campaign. Demetrios surrendered and was pensioned; Thomas fled to Corfu and then Italy, taking the head of St Andrew from Patras, which he presented to the pope, and his claim to the imperial title.

Monemvasia and a few coastal points held out under Venetian protection. The last Byzantine territory anywhere was Trebizond, which fell in 1461.

The Aftermath

Thomas Palaiologos died in Rome in 1465. His son Andreas sold his imperial claim more than once, to Charles VIII of France and reportedly to Ferdinand and Isabella; his daughter Zoe, renamed Sofia, married Ivan III of Moscow in 1472 and supplied the dynastic thread behind the Third Rome.

The Morea itself passed between Ottoman and Venetian control for the next three and a half centuries, and was the heartland of the Greek revolution of 1821. The continuity of Greek settlement and Orthodox practice there through all of it is one of the strongest strands in the Byzantine legacy in Greece.

What It Demonstrates

The Despotate of the Morea is the strongest available counter-example to the view that late Byzantium was incapable of anything but decline. Given a defensible territory, competent governors and a population that supported them, the Byzantine state could still expand, build, tax and fight in the fifteenth century.

What it could not do was survive an opponent with artillery and a hundred times its resources, and what it could not overcome was its own governing family’s inability to agree. Both of those are also the story of the empire as a whole.

Plethon’s Memoranda

The reform proposals written at Mystras are among the most interesting political documents of the Byzantine world, and they deserve setting out.

Gemistos Plethon addressed two memoranda around 1418, one to the despot Theodore II and one to the emperor Manuel II, on the reform of the Peloponnese. His proposals:

A national army. Abolish mercenaries. Divide the population into two classes: those who fight, supported by those who work, with the soldiers free of other obligations and the taxpayers free of military service. He argues explicitly that mercenaries have no stake in the country and will not defend it.

Tax reform. Replace the tangle of existing levies with a single tax of one third of produce, simply assessed and universally applied, with no exemptions — including, pointedly, for monasteries.

Land. Land to belong to whoever cultivates it, with no private ownership in the absolute sense; the state to allocate.

Trade. Restrict imports of foreign luxury goods; encourage domestic production; prohibit the export of raw materials that could be worked at home.

Coinage. Use bronze rather than debased silver for internal circulation.

Justice and punishment. Reform the penal code, abolishing mutilation.

Identity. He tells the emperor plainly that “we are Hellenes by race, as our language and ancestral education bear witness.”

Nothing was adopted. The proposals were too radical, threatened the monasteries and the aristocracy simultaneously, and required a state with more authority than the despotate had.

They are nonetheless remarkable: a systematic programme of national reform, grounded in an explicit ethnic nationalism, written in a Byzantine province in the 1410s. Several historians have called Plethon the first modern Greek nationalist, and the claim is not absurd.

The Brothers’ War

The despotate’s final decade is worth following in detail, because it shows exactly how the last Byzantine territory was lost.

After Constantine left for Constantinople in 1449, the Morea was divided between his brothers Thomas and Demetrios.

They were temperamentally and politically opposed. Demetrios was anti-unionist and favoured accommodation with the Ottomans; Thomas was pro-western and looked to Italy. Each had a following, and they quarrelled continuously.

The sequence:

  • 1453: Constantinople falls. The Morea survives as an Ottoman tributary.
  • 1453–54: A large Albanian revolt breaks out, which the brothers cannot suppress. They appeal to Sultan Mehmed, who sends troops to put it down — establishing an Ottoman military presence in the peninsula at the brothers’ own request.
  • 1458: The tribute goes unpaid. Mehmed campaigns in the northern Morea and takes Corinth.
  • 1459: The brothers fight each other openly, each seeking Ottoman backing.
  • 1460: Mehmed invades in force. Demetrios surrenders Mistra in May and is pensioned with estates in Thrace. Thomas holds out briefly, then flees to Corfu and Italy.
  • 1461: Trebizond falls, and no Byzantine territory remains.

The Venetian ports — Modon, Coron, Nauplia, Monemvasia — held on for decades more, the last until 1540.

The judgement is hard to avoid: the Morea was militarily defensible, had defeated the Franks over a century, and was surrendered by two brothers who preferred fighting each other to governing it.

The Palaiologan Claim Afterwards

The dynasty’s afterlife in Italy is a curious footnote and is frequently embroidered, so the facts are worth stating.

Thomas reached Italy in 1461 with the head of St Andrew from Patras, which he presented to Pope Pius II in exchange for a pension. He died in Rome in 1465.

Andreas, his elder son, inherited the claim to the imperial title and lived on papal pensions. He sold or bequeathed his rights more than once — to Charles VIII of France in 1494, and reportedly to Ferdinand and Isabella. He died in poverty in 1502.

Manuel, the younger son, went to Constantinople and made terms with Mehmed II, who granted him an income. His son converted to Islam.

Zoe, the daughter, was raised in Rome under papal guardianship, renamed Sophia, and married Ivan III of Moscow in 1472 — the connection that underlies the Third Rome.

Claims of descent from the Palaiologoi have been asserted by a great many families since, in Italy, Greece, Britain and elsewhere. Almost all are unverifiable, and the genealogical literature on the subject should be approached with caution.

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