He was last seen at the Gate of St Romanos, stabbing wildly at the invading Turks. He had a lance and a sword and was wielding them with deadly effect.
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| Wanted! Preferably dead - Constantine |
The Emperor Constantine XI - last ruler of the Byzantine Empire - was determined to go down fighting as his imperial capital was overrun by the Turkish army in the spring of 1453.
What happened next is one of the great historical mysteries of all time. Emperor Constantine simply vanished into thin air.
Was he killed? Captured? His mysterious disappearance was to fuel countless myths about ‘the emperor who never died’. They were to end in a bizarre obituary published in The Times in 1988.
The victor of the battle, Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror, was desperate to have confirmation that the emperor was indeed dead. No sooner had Constantinople been secured than he ordered a hunt for Constantine. He offered a vast sum to anyone who could bring him the corpse.
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| Just the head will do. |
And this is where the stories become confused. According to one account, the emperor’s body was found lying by the city walls. A Turkish janissary named Sarielles hacked off the head with a knife and delivered it to the sultan.
But there is no evidence to substantiate the claim, and the reward that the sultan is said to have given Sarielles - the province of Anatolia - does not ring true.
Other testimonies say that the emperor escaped by boat and would one day return with an avenging army. His intention was to re-enter the city through the Golden Gate - an entrance to the city that was immediately walled up. It remains closed to this day.
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| He's over there! A fight to the death. |
The claim that Constantine and his heirs had survived the battle persisted for years to come. It was not long before there were any number of claimants to the Byzantine throne, all claiming direct blood-links with the imperial family.
These blue-blooded oddballs were welcomed by a Western Christendom that was desperate to keep alive the dream of a Christian empire in the East. Papal pensions, royal grants and wealthy brides were the prizes that awaited anyone with a half-convincing claim to the throne. Unfortunately, most were complete wastrels.
The allure of the imperial bloodline continued for centuries, even though there were no longer any prospects of an empire to go with the title.
One of the more recent (if eccentric) claimants to the throne was Peter Mills of Newport in the Isle of Wight. In the 1980s, he began claiming he was actually Prince Petros Palaeologos.
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| Winner takes all |
He styled himself ‘His Imperial Highness Petros I, Despot and Autokrator of the Romans’. His letters bore the seal of the imperial double-headed eagle. He cut a decidedly eccentric figure in the streets of Newport, with his ‘flowing white hair, sandals but no socks, and some sort of order or military award around his neck.’
When he died in 1988, both The Times and The Telegraph took his claims at face value: they printed obituaries of His Imperial Highness, Petros I Palaeologos. They believe that he was the true heir to the imperial throne.
Petros’s claim was ridiculed by many - not least his own son. Yet it’s conceivable that he had a drop or two of imperial blood in his veins.
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| Sword still in hand |
His grandmother was a Colenutt and was perhaps descended from John Palaeologos, himself a descendant of the emperor. Centuries earlier, John had married into the Colenutt family. The children of this union settled in the Isle of Wight in the reign of King Henry VIII.
Whether or not Petros had a genuine claim to the imperial title will probably never be known. Nor, indeed, will the facts surrounding Emperor Constantine’s death.
But there’s a lesson to be learned from the mystery surrounding the emperor’s disappearance. When figures of global importance are killed, it’s always good to have proof that they’re dead. Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror knew the value of a corpse: it’s why he was so desperate to find the emperor’s body.
President Obama might yet rue the decision not to publish the photographs of the dead Osama Bin Laden.
My new book, Wolfram: The Boy Who Went to War, is now available: click here for more information.
