Constantine XI Palaiologos

Constantine XI Palaiologos was the last Byzantine emperor. He ruled from 1449 over little more than Constantinople and parts of southern Greece, and was killed when the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II stormed the city on 29 May 1453, ending an empire that traced its descent to Constantine the Great. His death in the final assault made him a figure of legend in Greek memory.

Constantine was born in Constantinople on 8 February 1404, the fourth son of Emperor Manuel II and the Serbian noblewoman Helena Dragaš, whose family name he also used. By then the empire had been crippled by the Fourth Crusade and the Ottoman advance, and it paid tribute to the sultans. His elder brother John VIII trusted him above his other brothers and left him as regent in Constantinople in 1423–24 and again in 1437–40, while John sought western help.

In 1427–28 Constantine and John defeated Carlo Tocco, ruler of Epirus, in the Peloponnese, known as the Morea, and Constantine married Tocco's niece Theodora, receiving Glarentza as her dowry. As one of three brothers ruling the despotate, he besieged Patras in 1429 and took its citadel in 1430, and by the early 1430s nearly the whole peninsula was Byzantine again. Theodora died in 1429 and his second wife, Caterina Gattilusio, in 1442; he never remarried and had no children. From 1443 he governed from Mystras with his brother Thomas. They rebuilt the Hexamilion wall across the Isthmus of Corinth, and in 1444, as a crusade set out from Hungary, he took Athens and Thebes and raided into Thessaly.

The crusade ended in disaster at Varna in November 1444, and in 1446 Murad II marched south with an army perhaps 60,000 strong. His cannon reduced the Hexamilion to rubble by 10 December. Constantine and Thomas barely escaped and had to accept the sultan as overlord, pay tribute and promise never to rebuild the wall.

John VIII died childless in October 1448, and with his mother's backing Constantine was chosen over his ambitious brother Demetrios. He was proclaimed emperor at Mystras on 6 January 1449 and reached Constantinople on 12 March, but was never formally crowned there, partly because a coronation by the pro-union patriarch might have provoked unrest. Like John, he supported the union of the Orthodox and Catholic churches proclaimed at Florence in 1439, hoping it would bring western aid. The policy divided his subjects and brought little help.

The young sultan Mehmed II was determined to take the city. When Constantine threatened in 1451 to release Orhan, an Ottoman pretender held hostage in Constantinople, Mehmed answered by building the fortress of Rumelihisarı on the Bosporus in 1452. Constantine repaired the walls and pleaded with Venice, the pope and Naples, but received only small contingents. On 12 December 1452 the union was celebrated in Hagia Sophia. The siege began in April 1453: Mehmed's army may have numbered up to 80,000, against probably fewer than 10,000 defenders. A boom closed the Golden Horn until the Ottomans dragged ships overland behind Galata. Constantine refused advice to escape.

In the early hours of 29 May the Ottomans attacked the land walls. When the Genoese commander Giovanni Giustiniani was mortally wounded and carried away, the defence collapsed and the city fell. No reliable eyewitness saw Constantine die. Most writers, Christian and Muslim, agree he was killed in the fighting, and several report that his head was cut off. Later Greek folklore told of a "Marble Emperor" who had been turned to stone by an angel and would one day return to retake the city.

Our 1400 map shows the tiny Byzantine remnant of Constantine's youth surrounded by the Ottoman Empire, and our 1492 map shows Constantinople as the Ottoman capital.