The last Byzantine emperor (1448-1453), who died childless while defending the city of Constantinople (mod. Istanbul, Turkey) against the Ottoman Turks.
Constantine was born on 8 February 1405, the son of Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos. He became emperor in 1448 when his brother John VIII died without an heir. At the time of his accession to the throne, only Constantinople and the Peloponnese remained under Byzantine control. In 1428, he married Maddalena Tocco, niece of the Italian ruler of Epiros and Cephalonia. After her death, he married Caterina Cat-tilusio, daughter of the Genoese lord of the island of Lesbos.
Although he faced problems in making the union of the Greek Orthodox and Latin churches acceptable in the Byzantine Empire, Constantine remained an advocate of the agreement that Emperor John VIII had concluded with the Roman church at Florence in 1439, since he believed that if union were brought about, the West would send the military aid the Byzantines desperately needed in their fight against the Turks. In 1452, he asked for military reinforcements from Venice and various other Italian towns, King Alfonso V of Aragon (I of Naples), the Genoese rulers of Chios, and the pope, but to no avail. The pope demanded from the Byzantines union with the Church of Rome before he would dispatch military aid to them. In October 1452, four hundred archers arrived in Constantinople, together with the papal legate Cardinal Isidore, who came to celebrate the union of the churches in a ceremony in the Church of Hagia Sophia on 12 December of the same year. In January 1453, the Genoese Giovanni Longo arrived in Constantinople with 700 troops. That aid, however, was too little and arrived too late to save Constantinople, which fell to the Turks at dawn on Tuesday, 29 May 1453. Constantine died in the fighting the same day.
-Aphrodite Papayianni
Bibliography
Malherbe, Jacques, Constantine XI, dernier empereur des Romains (Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia Bruylant, 2001). Mijatovich, Chedomil, Constantine, the Last Emperor of the Greeks, or The Conquest of Constantinople by the Turks (1453) (London: Low, Marston, 1892).
Nicol, Donald, The Immortal Emperor: The Life and Legend of Constantine Palaiologos, Last Emperor of the Romans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
World History
