Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (79 page)

and lived quietly on a small pension provided by the Sultan. Thomas's younger daughter Zoe-Sophia was married to Ivan III, Grand Prince of Muscovy, in
1472.
As niece of the last Emperor of Constantinople she brought her husband as part of her dowry the emblem of the double-

1
Even this marked no more than the end of a chapter in the Knights' long history. After a few years' wandering they settled in Malta until their expulsion by Napoleon. They are now based in Rome, where they still enjoy all the privileges of an independent state, maintaining diplomatic relations with many Roman Catholic countries.

2
The presentation is depicted in relief on Pius's tomb in the
church of St Andrea della Valle
-
better known, perhaps, as the scene of the first act of
Tosca.

headed eagle and, it was thought, the spiritual heritage of Byzantium -thereby doing much to foster the image of Moscow as the 'Third Rome'. Ivan the Terrible was her grandson.

As we have seen, there had been Palaeologi in the Empire since at least the eleventh century, and long before the Turkish conquest there were many bearers of the name whose connections with the imperial line were so tenuous as to be virtually non-existent. After the diaspora many of them settled in the West; there were numerous Palaeologi in Italy, particularly in the three cities of Venice, Pesaro and Viterbo. Later the name came to be found in Malta, France and Cephalonia, as well as in many places within the Ottoman Empire, including Athens, Romania and the island of Syros in the Cyclades. It has even turned up in England; and it is difficult to read without a thrill of excitement the words inscribed on a brass plaque in St Leonard's church at Landulph, Cornwall, which run:

Here lyeth the body of Theodore Paleologvs of Pesaro in Italye descended from ye imperyall lyne of ye last Christian Emperors of Greece being the sonne of Camilio ye sonne of Prosper the sonne of Theodoro the sonne of John ye sonne of Thomas second brother to Constantine Paleologvs the 8th of that name and last of yt line yt raygned in Constantinople untill sub dewed by the Tvrkes, who married with Mary ye daughter of William Balls of Hadlye in Sovffolke gent: and had issue 5 children Theo doro, John, Ferdinando, Maria and Dorothy, & de parted this life at Clyfton ye 21th of Jan vary 1636.

How one would love to believe it; alas, there is no very persuasive evidence to suggest that the Despot Thomas ever had a son named John. George Sphrantzes, who took care to record the names of all the family members, mentions only the Andrew and Manuel referred to above. Interestingly enough, however, a certain Leo Allatius, admittedly writing as late as
1648,
refers quite clearly to
'Andrea, Manuele et loanne Th
omae Palaeologi Despotae filiis’
Clearly, his authority is not to be compared with that of Sphrantzes, but there remains a slender possibility that Thomas might have had a bastard son John, or even that the inscription is slightly inaccurate and that the John referred to was the

1
Leo Allatius,
De ecclesiae occidentalis atque orientalisperpetua consensione,
col.
956.

son of Thomas's younger son Manuel, whom we know to have existed and to have borne that name.

In either of these cases, Theodore would be the direct descendant of Manuel II Palaeologus, and it is of some interest to read
1
that he and his two uncles were convicted in Pesaro - where they were subjects of the Medici Grand Dukes - of attempted murder. Theodore was exiled and found his way to England, where he took employment as a soldier and hired assassin in the service of the Earl of Lincoln. His marriage to Mary Balls was solemnized at Cottingham in Yorkshire - perhaps to avoid the Suffolk gossips, since their first child, Theodore, was born only ten weeks later. 'The register in Exeter Cathedral', writes Professor Nicol, 'gives the date of [the elder] Theodore's burial as
20
October
1636
and not, as in the inscription,
21
January. In
1795
his grave was accidentally opened revealing an oak coffin. When the lid was lifted the body was found to be in perfect condition; and it was possible to see that Theodore Palaeologus had been a very tall man with a strong aquiline nose and a very long white beard.'

One of Theodore's sons, Ferdinand, emigrated shortly before the Civil War to Barbados, where he married a lady called Rebecca Pomfret. He died in
1678
and was buried in St John's churchyard, where a tablet carved with Doric columns and the cross o
f Constantine bears the inscripti
on: 'Here lyeth ye body of Ferdinando Palaeologus, descended from ye Imperial lyne of ye last Christian Emperor of Greece. Churchwarden of this parish
165 5-1656.
Vestryman twentye years. Died Oct
3. 1679.'
His son Theodorious [sic] married Martha Bradbury of Barbados, returned with her to England, setded in Stepney and died at Corunna in
1693,
leaving a posthumous daughter eccentrically named Godscall Palaeologus. What happened to her is unknown; unless and until more is discovered, this fatherless litde girl in Stepney remains - given only the existence of the shadowy John Palaeologus - the last known descendant of the Emperors of Byzantium.

The Roman Empire of the East was founded by Constantine the Great on Monday,
11
May
330;
it came to an end on Tuesday,
29
May
1453.
During those one thousand, one hundred and twenty-three years and eighteen days, eighty-eight men and women occupied the imperial

1
In Professor Nicol's
The Immortal Emperor,
from which this information is taken. In his final chapter he discusses the claims not only of Theodore but of several other pretenders, providing full references. See also Patrick Leigh Fermor,
The Traveller's Tree,
pp.
145-9.

throne - excluding the seven who usurped it during the Latin occupation. Of those eighty-eight, a few - Constantine himself, Justinian, Heraclius, the two Basils, Alexius Comnenus - possessed true greatness; a few -
Phocas, Michael III, Zoe and the Angeli - were contemptible; the vast majority were brave, upright, God-fearing, unimaginative men who did their best, with greater or lesser degrees of success. Byzantium may not have lived up to its highest ideals - what does? - but it certainly did not deserve the reputation which, thanks largely to Edward Gibbon, it acquired in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England: that of an Empire constituting, 'without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilization has yet assumed'.
1
So grotesque a view ignores the fact that the Byzantines were a deeply religious society in which illiteracy - at least among the middle and upper classes - was virtually unknown, and in which one Emperor after another was renowned for his scholarship; a society which had with difficulty concealed its scorn for the leaders of the Crusades, who called themselves noblemen but could hardly write their own names. It ignores, too, the immeasurable cultural debt that the Western world owes to a civilization which alone preserved much of the heritage of Greek and Latin antiquity, during these dark centuries when the lights of learning in the West were almost extinguished.

Finally, it ignores the astonishing phenomenon of Byzantine art. Narrow this art may have been in its range, restricted as it essentially was to the great mystery of the Christian faith; within this limitation, however, it achieved a degree of intensity and exaltation unparalleled before or since, qualities which entitle the masterpieces - the
deesis
in the south gallery of St Sophia, the great Pantocrator in the apse of the cathedral of Cefalu in Sicily, the
Anastasis
in the
parecclesion
of St Saviour in Chora in Constantinople - to a place among the most sublime creations of the human spirit. The instructions given to the painters and mosaicists of Byzantium were simple enough: 'to represent the spirit of God'. It was a formidable challenge, and one which Western artists seldom even attempted; again and again, however, in the churches and monasteries of the Christian East, we see the task
unmistakably -indeed, triumphantl
y - accomplished.

One of the first and most brilliant of twentieth-century Philhellenes, Robert Byron, maintained that the greatness of Byzantium lay in what he described as 'the Triple Fusion': that of a Roman body, a Greek mind

i W. E. H. Lecky,
A History of European Morals,
1869.

and an oriental, mystical soul. Certainly these three strands were always present, and were largely responsible for the Empire's unique character: indeed, the personality of every Emperor and Empress can be seen as a subtly different combination of the three elements. For this reason as for many others, the outlook of the Byzantines was radically different from ours; at bottom, however, they were human like the rest of us, victims of the same weaknesses and subject to the same temptations, deserving of praise and of blame as we are ourselves, and in roughly equal measure. What they do not deserve is the obscurity to which for centuries we have condemned them. Their follies were many, as were their sins; but much should surely be forgiven for the heroism with which they and their last brave Emperor met their end, in one of those glorious epics of world history that has passed into legend and is remembered with equal pride by victors and vanquished alike. That is why five and a half centuries later, throughout the Greek world, Tuesday is still believed to be the unluckiest day of the week; why the Turkish flag still depicts not a crescent but a waning moon, reminding us that the moon was in its last quarter when Constantinople finally fell; and why, excepting only the Great Church of St Sophia itself, it is the Land Walls - broken, battered, but still marching from sea to sea - that stand as the city's grandest and most tragic monument.