When your father is the Emperor

  The Palaiologos family, 1408.  

[Note: I have obtained new information which has changed my mind somewhat about Manuel as a father. I no longer agree with what I have written here.]

I have lately been writing a chapter on the brothers Palaiologos, one that has made me quite sad.  It is clear that John, Theodoros, Andronikos, Constantine, Demetrios, and Thomas have to be examined both in parallel -- they are always written about in isolation -- and they have to be considered within the atmosphere created by their father, Manuel II. Manuel was fundamentally a good man.  He had remarkable endurance and courage. He was an outstanding emperor. He loved his sons -- and in the addresses to John (below) he calls him φίλτατε, dearest, but he often demonstrated it in ways that must have often been imperceptible to them. I could write another chapter analyzing aspects of Manuel's life and how it might have affected his attitudes towards his sons, but that does not belong in this book.

Sphrantzes' account of his own relationship with Manuel, one he considered generous and loving, and one of which he was intensely proud, is instructive.  If, perhaps, not taken completely as gospel, it still reflects a teenager's perspective. He wrote, "When I became a personal minister to [the Emperor], [Constantine] was able to obtain through me many favors he needed from his father." Manuel could be indulgent to his young attendant where he could not be indulgent directly to his son. 

An example of Manuel's attitude as a father comes from his commentary he wrote to his compilation of dream interpretation. In a completely gratuitous comment he says, "The affection [for a small child] will be short because (as I have observed) Greek children are especially prone to lose their charm after two or three years of age."

This is the age, as parents will recognize, when children discover the use of the word, "No"; the age when they sometimes strive fiercely for the independence they are not yet capable of using. They tend to fall a lot, have tantrums, be more difficult to manage than a month or so ago when they were perfectly loveable.  This is the age when they leave babyhood and begin to become human beings.This is clearly not the first time Manuel has expressed this view, as he says, and although there is no hint as to the date of the composition of this book, or of the manuscript, the totally extraneous nature of the comment in its location supports the idea that this was in fact his view of small children.

 In his recent dissertation, Florin Leonte has made abundantly clear Manuel's style of fatherhood, although Leonte's  primary concern is with the rhetorical devices and genre to be found in Manuel's various orations and philosophical treatises. I am basing these next comments on my understanding of Leonte.

About the time the family portrait above was painted -- John would have been 16 or so and had been made co-ruler, as you can tell by his dress which is just like his father's, Manuel addressed to him a long essay, Ὑποθῆκαι βασιλικῆς ἀγωγῆς, or Foundations of Imperial Conduct. In this he referred to John as a μειράκιον, a boy, who spent more time hunting and playing than he did studying. It is striking to learn that John, whom we can see as nearly obsessive about hunting in 1438 and 1439, had already become so attached to this physical and emotional outlet.  (I should add that by 16, John had already mastered the byways of extremely complex and formal Byzantine Greek, however much playing he had been doing.) Or that his father thought him so attached.  But then, Manuel mentions that he has given John a horse and an eagle -- wonderful presents for any boy -- and that now he is giving him more formal training. 

 

Then by 1410 when John was 18 and thus of age, Manuel followed the Foundations with seven Orations. Leonte thinks these orations were delivered in public, before an audience focused on John. In the sixth Manuel criticized John for mistakes, in the seventh for rudeness and being critical, never complimenting John or pointing out any strengths. (This from a man commonly known to have a violent temper.) However much John needed correction, it is painful to think of what must have been the effect of hearing himself publicly lectured and criticized by his father. There is evidence from later in his life that criticism, and conflict, would intensify an already chronic illness, while the pattern of humiliation set so early accompanied John even after death. Consider the incidents of his forced marriage to a woman extremely unattractive to him, his having to take jewels to pawn in Venice, his having to be carried in to the first session of the Council of Union, his rejection by the clergy and people of Constantinople after his return from the Council, his long illness, and the church’s refusal of Christian burial to his body -- all of them public demonstrations of inadequacy. 

 

Speaking both as father and as emperor, Manuel addressed the Orations to ethical concerns -- pleasure in the fifth, courtesy to courtiers in the seventh, and there is much internal evidence that these are statements about previous conversations between father and son. Manuel used Plato, Aristotle, and the Bible as his authorities, arguing that true happiness could only be found by right action and education, and humility was the highest virtue a person could attain. Despair (ἀπόγνοσις) and judgment of others’ conduct led the list of sins. There is much that is interesting in these Orations, but my concern here is the unconscious cruelty in the humiliation of a bright and sensitive boy, young man, any boy or young man, in public.

It is difficult to think that these texts, or similar letters, would not have been urged on the younger sons for study in their roles as rulers -- the second says, "it is necessary for us to say what we think about this issue for your pleasure and equally for the benefit of those who would come across this work" -- and that Manuel, when visiting Theodoros and Andronikos in their despotates, would not have spent considerable time repeating many of the points he had directed to John.

Constantine well-internalized his father's remarks on duty, not from these Orations but from the Dialogue on Marriage: "But a ruler’s and an emperor's duty is to accept any risk in order to save his people, and to regard dying a light burden, whenever freedom is at stake and whenever the risk concerns . . . Faith." Typically, John Barker in his biography of Manuel gives great attention to the manuscript provenances of these Orations but says nothing about their contents, and certainly nothing about Manuel as a father, even while criticizing John as "mediocre."

We know nothing of the attitude of Helena towards the children at any age -- she bore ten, and saw seven of them die, five of them as children. The only clue of her feelings towards any of them comes when John returned to Constantinople, emotionally ravaged and physically ill from the Council of Union, the dangerous winter voyage, and the death of his wife -- his mother refused to pray for him as emperor because of his support of Union. Constantine has always been considered particularly close to their mother -- he was named for her father, the second child to be so named, and he seemed to have used the Dragaś name -- but she also refused to pray for him in turn as emperor because of his support of Union. 

This family isolated its children, even from each other. The boys appear to have had their own households, tutors, and staffs, at about the age of seven.  Andronikos was sent off to Thessaloniki as Despot at the age of 8, Theodoros to Mistra at the age of 8 or 10.

It is not enough to say that such treatment was typical of the upper-class late Byzantine family, or normal within the Palaiologos family.  It still created lonely children.

What happened to the children?

Detail, icon of S. Georgio dei Greci, Georgios Klontzas, 16th C.

Istituto Ellenico, Venice

I have already written here about the ability of the Palaiologues to lose close members of the family, in this case the children of Manuel II's brother, Theodoros, Despot of Mistra, not to mention Manuel's own daughters.  There are more misplaced children, and Manuel's grandchildren, too -- the children of his son Andronikos.

That would be poor, sad Andronikos, Despot of Thessaloniki, who died young of leprosy. He was Despot from the age of 8, in 1408, until 1423 when he handed the city over to the Venetians with the hope that they might defend it better than Byzantine resources could.  He seems to have gone to the Morea for a while, then to Constantinople where, in the family tradition, he became a monk in the Pantokrator, and died at the age of 28, in March 1429.

A. Sideras, in "Neue Quellen zu Andronikos Palaiologos," in Byzantinische Zeitschrift 80 (1987) 3-15, has found more information on Andronikos than anyone imagined existed, and it isn't very much.  What interests me here is a footnote with a scrap from a manuscript in Moscow that says:  

. . . for your sons (παισὶ) this has been sorrowing loss, over your absence and their separation from one another as they were scattered here and there . . .

One of the children has been identified as John, and the John Palaiologos whom Cyriaco of Ancona met in Mani has been stated to be the son of Andronikos. Because of the ages and additional genealogy, I believe Cyriaco's John to be the son of Theodoros I.   But what happened to Andronikos' John and his brother?  Were there more than two children.  Why were the children scattered? 

It is not clear in that excerpt -- which is all Sideras gave me to work with -- whether the scattering was after Thessaloniki, or after the death of their father. Did no one in the family have any regard for them? Constantine probably did: he was the one for whom we have any record of family affection. It is certainly asking to much to wonder what happened to their mother.  Or mothers.

No chronicler or historian thought any of this information important to record. We are told that Byzantines, like other people, loved their children.  Of course they did, but we have precious little evidence for it outside of the wonderful essay Psellos wrote on his daughter.  If we go by the pictures they left, the Byzantines for the most part thought children were short, deformed monsters, as in the Klontzas icon above.  Look at these two fresco details from the Pantanassa at Mistra: 

 

 Seldom do we find a child appropriately proportioned to an adult:  

Detail from Triptych, Georgios Klontzas, 16th C.
Istituto Ellenico, Venice

The more time I spend with the Palaiologos family, the more I see of civil war, to the end and well past the end, and the hiving-off of young children. The family models the history of the late Byzantine period.

Don't miss Mothers and Sons, Fathers and Daughters: The Byzantine Family of Michael Psellos, by Anthony Kaldellis (Notre Dame Press, 2006).

The Little Despots

 Detail, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Ms. Ivories A53, f.1  1408.
Theodoros, πορφυρογέννετος and δεσπότης.
Andronikos, αὐθεντόπουλος  

This miniature family portrait is on the first page of a manuscript of Pseudo-Dionysios that Manuel II sent as a gift to the Abbey of St. Denis in Paris.  It is usually dated to 1403-1405* but there are reasons that doesn't seem right to me.

Theodoros is identified as Despot, and he is wearing -- agreed, there is a lot of wear on the painting -- the four-arced crown that Pseudo-Kodinos says the emperor puts on the head of the despot as part of the despot-making ceremony.  

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,

His brother Andronikos is identified as Prince, and he is wearing a diadem with no arcs.

Theodoros was created Despot of the Morea in the summer of 1407 -- a chronicle says his uncle Theodoros I died on 24 June, a date a little suspect since that is the date much more reliably given for the death of Theodoros II as well.  However, an action by the Venetian Senate of 27 August refers to the "despotum novum creatum," so he must have died around that time.  Sphrantzes  Somebody tells us, not Sphrantzes -- that Manuel went to the Morea, and I think it is safe to assume he created Theodoros Despot then.**  That gives two months for Manuel to learn of his brother's death, make the trip to the Morea, and then for news of the ceremony to get to Venice. 

 

 "dominum despotum de novo creatum"
ASVE Senato Secreti r.3, f. 74r, 27 August 1407 

 

Theodoros was about 9 years old at the time, and he had been in the Morea for several months already, watching his uncle die from gout. Manuel described his excruciating pain, his inability to use his limbs.  The painting of Theodoros I at Mistra shows him grossly swollen from progressive renal failure.  He must have died from kidney failure.  The child Theodoros saw his uncle's pain, saw his friends tending him as if he were a baby, smelled the growing sores from the gout, the odors from the kidney failure.  It was a harsh beginning for a bright and sensitive child, and it explains the end of his life.

Andronikos was created Despot of Thessaloniki after 22 September 1408, the date his older cousin John VII of Thessaloniki died.  He was not quite 8 years old. John should have been succeeded by his own son Andronikos, but Andronikos died earlier in the year. Sphrantzes tells us that Manuel took Andronikos to Thessaloniki and created him Despot there.**  It is a nice, literary, effect: Manuel replacing a Theodoros by a Theodoros, an Andronikos by an Andronikos, but it seems a hard thing to impose on small boys.  

So I believe the family painting was painted after the summer of 1407 and before the fall of 1408, which fits with the 1408 date of the gift of the manuscript to Paris.

Another thought: Manuel -- and John who is not shown in the detail -- is wearing black.  I believe Manuel is depicted wearing mourning for his brother. I have seen only two mentions of what he was wearing at particular times: both times white.  Pseudo-Kodinos says the emperor wears white or yellow for mourning, but many details of the imperial court can be seen to have changed between P-K and Sphrantzes.  Black was the usual Byzantine color for mourning, and it was the usual color for mourning in the West, where this manuscript was going.

I cannot think I am the first person to note these details: I would be grateful for any references anyone has that confirms them.

 

* Byzantium: Faith and Power.  Metropolitan Museum of Art (2004) p. 20, fig. 2.5  

** A description of the ceremony to create a despot is here..

When the Palaiologos family visited Monemvasia

Dying child, fresco of King David
Voronet Monastery, Romania  

In 1400, Manuel and Helena Palaiologos left Constantinople on a Venetian galley.  Married in 1392, they now had five children and she was pregnant again. Manuel was on his way west to get aid for Constantinople, under desperate threat from Beyazid.  Manuel had come to terms with his nephew, John VII, and had left him in charge of the City, but unwilling to take the chance of his family becoming hostages, he had decided to take them to the Morea to stay with his brother Theodoros, the Despot.

There were rumor that John had already come to terms with Beyazid, that he had 10,000 Turkish horsemen, that he would give the Turks Constantinople in exchange for the Morea. Theodoros, fearful of another Turkish invasion -- there had been two in the past four years, had sold off Corinth, Kalavrita, and Mistra to the Knights of Rhodes, and had moved his administration to Monemvasia.

So when Manuel and his family arrived in the Morea -- it was a Venetian galley so they had to bypass Monemvasia which would, of course, have been a convenient stop and go on to Methoni -- Helena and the children and her suite had to travel back to Monemvasia.  I hope there was a ship they could travel on, rather than have to make that miserable trip by land, but the famous Monemvasia shipping disappears from the record in the 15th century whenever you need a ship.


These were the children: John, aged about 7; Constantine; Theodoros, aged about 3, and two sisters.  Sphrantzes tells us about the sisters, but no Byzantine -- or anyone else -- managed to write down the names of Helena's mother or of her daughters.  We know nothing about where they stayed in Monemvasia: I have climbed up that sun-blasted rock to the citadel three times in my life, though never pregnant, and I hope Helena was able to stay in the lower city.  A few people had great wealth in Monemvasia, but we know nothing of anyone's relationship to the imperial family at this point.  It would have been a fine city for small boys to explore, with swimming off the rocks, and perhaps the occasional day on a fishing boat.

Helena gave birth to a son whom she named Andronikos.  This means that she not only named him for Manuel's grandfather, Andronikos III, but she named him for the only emperor to have visited Monemvasia. Manuel's biographer, John Barker, who has an extraordinary taste for prurience, begins on Andronikos like this:

For Manuel's third son, however, we know no precise date of birth. Since Andronicus is not mentioned among the children left behind in 1400, assuming Ducas did not overlook him, he was presumably not born at that time. As there is no evidence to warrant suspecting Helena of misconduct during her husband's absence, there would thus be two possibilities for his birth date: either Helena was pregnant with him when Manuel left.

Well, duh.

Two years earlier, in 1398, the Eighth Death, as the chronicles called it, had broken out in the Morea.  In 1401, plague erupted again.  It is recorded in ports, in Methoni and Koroni.  It was still raging in 1402, so that the Venetians, planning for Manuel's return trip, would not take the responsibility of letting him stop in Methoni.  Manuel's return was delayed, and delayed again, so that it was well into 1403 before he left Venice and by that time, Methoni was clear of plague and his ship was free to stop there.

Plague had also appeared in Monemvasia.  Three of the Palaiologos children died -- Constantine, and the two little girls.  Plague is identified first of all by its devastating high fever, and their deaths would not have been clean and tidy like that of the child in the picture above. The children were buried in a church in Monemvasia. Despot Theodoros established a fund for liturgies and Manuel later gave the Metropolitan of Monemvasia the territory of Helikovounos so the income could provide  two liturgies each week -- on Thursday and Saturday -- for the children's souls. Plague would be a commonplace for the two older sons -- two of John's wives would die of plague, and so would Theodoros.

In any mention of Manuel's daughters, the subject of illegitimacy has to come up.  Barker cannot let the topic alone: "Manuel apparently had several other illegitimate children," and continues with a breathtaking sequence of assumptions about these dead daughters for which he can offer no evidence: "Whatever our ignorance about these children, however, it is still plain that they must have been illegitimate, though by whom is not known, and that they were sired by Manuel before his assumption of the throne and his marriage."* Sphrantzes is the way we know about these daughters, and nothing he says or does not say can be twisted to justify this twaddle.

Helena had to travel back to Methoni to meet Manuel, this time with three children.  The Venetians had agreed to transport a suite of 25-30 people along with Manuel, though by the time Helena and Manuel met up in May, they had a suite of 58 people. They then apparently sailed to Vasilopotamos, near Elos, at the end of the Eurotas River, and then traveled up to Mistra where Manuel and Theodoros discussed how Manuel was going to repay the Knights of Rhodes after the people of Mistra flatly refused to let them into the city.

In Feburary 1404, there was a new son who was named Constantine in place of the one who died.

The next time you are in Monemvasia, light candles for the unnamed daughters.

* No one should write me about Manuel's illegitimate daughters who has not read Thierry Ganchou's meticulous study on the subject:  “Ilario Doria, le gambros Génois de Manuel II Palaiologos: beau-frère ou gendre?" Études Byzantines 66 (2008): 71-94, which should put paid at least to the Zampia question.

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.  

      * * * * *

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.