Andronikos Palaiologos

About the ceremony to create a despot, Pseudo-Kodinos says:
The triklinos is prepared: one readies the throne of the emperor where a curtain of gold silk separates the throne from the audience. Among the archons, they wear their insignia, that is the skaranikion and others; those the emperor has designated dress the despot in the interior of the triklinos, at the last moment, in the bi-colored shoes and a violet or red kavvadion embroidered with pearls. The emperor comes out of his chamber with the crown and other insignia to his throne. The curtain is opened, everyone cries out "Chronia polla!" (πολυχρονίζουσι); then the two most important archons lead the proposed despot before the emperor. The emperor standing addresses him: "My Majesty raises you to Despot," and immediately everyone again cries out"Chronia polla!"

One should know that not only when the emperor raises up a despost, but when he confers any office, even the most insignificant, he stands.

The despot kneels and kisses the emperor’s foot. Once he is standing, the emperor puts on his head, with his own hand, a crown ornamented with precious stones and pearls which has four small arcs, in front, behind, and on each side, on which he is named son of the emperor; if it is a relative, there is only an arc in front; this crown is called the stemmatogyrion.  

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This is Andronikos Palaiologos in 1403 or so, when he would have been about four years old.  The inscription over his head identifies him as αὐθεντόπουλος - "Andronikos authentopoulos Palaiologos his son" which indicates that Manuel has officially recognized him as a "true son."  By 1408, when he was eight years old, he had gone through the despot-making ceremony and was installed in Thessalonike as Despot there, under the fortunate guidance of Demetrios Laskaris Leontaris, military hero of the last Palaiologan naval success in the battle of the Sporades.  But that came later.  In 1408 Leontaris was responsible for trying to hold on to Thessalonike for Andronikos.

Like Theodoros the year before, Andronikos was separated from childhood and sent out to put an imperial face on a very fragile imperial city.  The city of Thessalonike was an island surrounded by Ottomans, and for a number of years it had barely been part of the Eastern Empire.  Reports tell of the diminishing population, abandoned houses, and areas within the wall used for farmland.  Unlike Theodoros, Andronikos was given a house in the lower city, and he seems to have been less restricted by his handlers than Theodoros, despite the tremendous insecurity of the city and what must have been constant anxiety about what to do. At least, he was in a real city and not perched up on a mountainside under a bell jar.

Somewhere between 1408 and 1423, Andronikos contracted leprosy.  I had said he had the family disease of gout, in resistance to the various names the chronicles gave his illness -- leprosy, elephantiasis, and the "holy sickness," which is translated as epilepsy. Tim Miller, authority on Byzantine medicine, kindly explained away my problem with the chronicle sources.  He says that the holy sickness hadn't been the name for epilepsy since the 4th century; the medical people knew leprosy was not generally contagious and a person so affected did not have to be isolated.   A major historian says Andronikos "was prematurely wasted and destroyed by disease" but we don't know when it developed.

We know less about Andronikos than any other Palaiologos.  He was born in Monemvasia in 1400, while his father was visiting Venice, Paris, and London, in search of aid for Constantinople. Two sisters and a brother died there. His uncle, Theodoros I, had sold the major cities of the Morea to the Knights of Rhodes who might be better able to defend them than the Greeks, and had withdrawn to Monemvasia.  Then there were a few years in Constantinople  during which three brothers were born -- Constantine, Michael, and Demetrios -- and Michael died in the palace of plague.

Andronikos had fifteen years in Thessalonike, and much of that time the city was beset by Ottoman raids, and finally the siege of 1423.  He was apparently fairly debilitated from his illness by this time.  After Andronikos handed over Thessalonike to the Venetians on 19 September 1423 -- all of this was done with messengers back and forth to Constantinople for advice and approval -- he traveled, along with his son John, to the Morea on a Venetian galley. 

One of the less-reliable chronicles reports that his friends advised him to sell Thessalonike, and that the Venetians paid him 50,000 ducats, which sounds about right if you consider that they paid 10,000 for Nauplion. [Late correction: I have found the document of the payment and they only paid 2,000 for Nauplion.]  It also says that some of the money he wasted "in a sorry manner" and some he gave to his banqueting companions. I hope he did get some fun out of his life in Thessalonike, but I don't have any confidence in any of that. Venetian documents report letters and emissaries from Andronikos asking them to take the city. [The previous year Theodoros had asked them to take over the Morea -- more on that in another entry.] A letter of 27 July says Thessalonike was a gift, and directs the new Venetian administration to arrange to pay him 20,000 to 40,000 aspers a year out of whatever was left over from the taxes after the necessary administrative expenditures.  That is something like 350 - 700 ducats a year, a comfortable living if he had a small entourage, but hardly imperial.  (It is interesting that they mention Ottoman coinage -- had that become the common currency of Thessalonike and northern Greece?)


The galley left Andronikos off in Nauplion and he went over the mountains to Mantinea for a while. It is difficult to know why: the Google aerial view is extremely interesting, especially if you have been there, but it doesn't explain anything about Andronikos. I don't know where he could have done much spending on that high, austerely beautiful, nearly empty plateau. We don't know if he visited Cleofe and Theodoros at Mistra, or if anxieties about illness on the part of Theodoros kept him away.

He died at the age of 28 or so on 4 March 1429, either in Mantinea, or in Constantinople where he took vows as the monk Akakios ("sinless") in the Pantokrator, and died and was buried there.  Just like his father. A chronicle that gets a lot wrong says that he joined a monastery on Mt. Athos where he died. One source says that when Constantine became Despot -- 1443 -- he made Andronikos' son John governor at the castle of Navarino.  John disappears after that, and he may not even have existed, but some of those wisps of evidence suggest that Constantine made deliberate efforts to be in touch with John, and with Theodoros' daughter Helena, and you don't see that kind of thoughtfulness from anyone else in the family.

We have information about each of his brothers that lets us construct some sort of personality: for Andronikos, we have nothing.  It is easy to make assumptions based on early childhood separation, illness, too much responsibility, and too many threats, but we don't really know who he was.






Tim Miller has a forthcoming book on Byzantine leprosy.  The most useful sources for Thessalonike are the books by John Melville Jones:  Venice and Thessalonica 1423-1430: The Venetian Documents, and Venice and Thessalonica 1423-1430: The Greek Accounts, Archivio del Litorale Adriatico, Unipress, Padua, Italy.