The life of George Sphrantzes - the last Byzantine

George Sphrantzes, (sometimes Phrantzes) was a late Byzantine historian and Imperial courtier. He served all three of Emperor Manuel, his son Emperor John VIII and his other son Emperor Constantine XI.

Late in life, Sphrantzes authored a Chronicle which is considered an important primary source, " which Steven Runciman described as "honest, vivid and convincing" and that Sphrantzes "wrote good Greek in an easy unpretentious style." In fact, for a long time it was believed he had written two: the Minor Chronicle and the Major Chronicle. The Major Chronicle is more detailed, particularly about the siege of Constantinople but in the last century researchers managed to demonstrate that the Major Chronicle was written decades later by Makarios Melissenos ("Pseudo-Sphrantzes"), the Metropolitan Bishop of Monemvasia who fled to Naples in 1571 during the Turkish invasion. It remains disputed as to whether the Major chronicle is nothing but a forgery, or whether it is an expanded edition, based on an original by Sphrantzes but with other Byzantine chroniclers appended.

As a chronicler, Sphrantzes is mediocre, glossing over much of the great events of the time. As a memoir of a Byzantine noble with a front seat on the final plunge of the empire his book is compelling. Described by one historian as 'saturated in loss' it really is one of the saddest primary sources you can ever read. Not for nothing does Sphrantzes describe himself as 'pitiful' and the chronicle as 'the account of the events that occurred during my wretched life." He was writing it as a memoir, aged 76, exiled in a Corfu monastery, wracked by rheumatism,. Two years before he had suffered an infection of the sinuses, ears, and throat. It had been bad enough that he received the last rites three times. There's something almost symbolic about that, since death seemed to reach for him throughout his life and stay its hand at the last each time. But he suffered. Physically he suffered deafness from the infection and complained he couldn't hear a bell tolling next to him, he suffered from the damp in his joints which left him too pained to walk. But more than physical pain, he must have suffered from dreadful survivors guilt, because he was there still in 1478 and nothing of his world remained.

Sphrantzes was born in 1401, a time of great upheaval in the Empire & perhaps appropriately the city was under an Ottoman blockade during the moment of his birth. He was a member of a good Byzantine family and had grown up at court. His father was tutor to Thomas, his uncle was tutor to Constantine. He had been an imperial playmate to Emperor Manuel's sons. But death and tragedy is never far from him, like Waltari's dark angel hovering at his shoulder: plague took Sphrantzes' sister, her husband, a daughter, six servants, then his parents. Still, Sphrantzes survives and at sixteen and a half, Emperor Manuel gave him a good role at court, in charge of the imperial chamber. Manuel seems to have had a real fondness for Sphrantzes and perhaps found it easier to indulge him than his own children. Tellingly, Sphrantzes identifies himself with his first title, protovestiarites, in his memoir, despite accumulating other, perhaps more illustrious honours later in life. Sphrantzes liked clothes & pays attention to them (at least his own) in his chronicle in a way he does not to other matters. There is much about the gifts he received from Manuel - a caftan (kavadi), dark & lined with fur, and a green robe for his future wife. Perhaps the position in Manuel's chamber sparked an interest and allowed him to become knowledgeable on fabrics.

When Manuel died in 1425, John inherited him and after a couple of years, Constantine appears to have begged John to transfer Sphrantzes to his service. He joining the entourage of his childhood friend Constantine in the Morea in December 1427. He was as faithful as any dog has ever been.

His time in the Morea proved quite eventful. Sphrantzes assisted Constantine in a campaign to reconquer the remainder of the Morea (still in the hands of post-1204 crusader families). He gives an account of his captured on 26 March 1429 in a skirmish outside of Patras in which he claims to have saved Constantine's life. He was held prisoner: "I had sustained multiple wounds and was thrown into the dark tower of a house, full of ants, weevils, and mice, as it was located in front of the grain storage. I was put in secure irons and my leg was held by a strong chain, which was attached to a big post." Once the identified him as Constantine's key man he was paroled back to the Byzantine side to negotiate. Constantine was greatful for what his faithful aide had gone through for him and lavished him with gifts which Sphrantzes takes pleasure in describing. Again he picks out clothing: expensive double green tunic lined with fine green linen from Lucca, a red cap embroidered with gold with a silk lining from Thessaloniki, and a heavy gold-colored caftan from Brusa. 

It was not the last time Sphrantzes underwent hardship for his master. Later, while traveling to Epirus as an ambassador, to help negotiate peace between Carlo II Tocco and his uncle's illegitimate sons over the succession in Epirus, Sphrantzes was kidnapped by Catalan pirates, along with his retinue, and held at Cephalonia until the pirates took the group back to Glarentza where they were ransomed.

He continued to travel, being sent by Constantine to attempted to secure Athens in 1435, negotiate Constantine's second marriage with Caterina Gattilusio in 1440 (a journey he would have undertaken alongside Loukas Notaras). The marriage took place at Mytilene that August, but the marriage lasted only a year. Constantine, returning to Constantinople in July 1442, stopped at Mytilene to collect his Empress, and proceeded to Lemnos where he was caught by, as Sphrantzes describes it, "the whole Turkish fleet". Perhaps it was the shock and fear of this, but although no attack fell upon them, Caterina was taken ill and suffered a miscarriage. She died not long afterwards at Palaiokastron on Lemnos. It is just one of the many tragic deaths that fill the memoir.

In 1449 Constantine became emperor and returned to Constantinople from the Morea. Sphrantzes went with him and one of his first tasks was to find Constantine a third wife. The Palaiologoi brothers seemed cursed in this way, with John having died childless and Constantine also without an heir. (Only Thomas of the five sons of Manuel produced a son of their own who lived to maturity). 

Sphrantzes appears to have selected as his first choice Mara Brankovic, the recently widowed consort of Sultan Murad. Mara, who had a complex relationship with Murad's heir, had been allowed to return to her family in Serbia upon Murad's death (the rest of the imperial hareem were remarried to high Ottoman officials - this really was an unusual exception). It's not clear why Sphrantzes thought Mara a good choice for Constantine. She had produced no children for Murad (the rumour of the day was she had withheld her sexual favours but this seems highly unlikely given the power dynamics), so it cannot have been a choice with strong expectations for a quick pregnancy. It's dynastic link to Serbia would have also been unimpressive. Durad Brankovic, Despot of Serbia had already shown himself to be unreliable when it came to helping Christian allies against Turkish attack (in fairness to him, he had little choice but to play a double game to keep any independence for his tiny kingdom). So it appears that the choice of Mara, might well have come down to a belief on Sphrantzes's part that by uniting the Ottoman Valide Hatun and Imperial Empress in one person would safeguard Byzantium from Turkish aggression. Regardless, the offer (accepted by Durad Brankovic) was rejected by Mara.

Sphrantzes then travelled to Georgia by way of Trebizond, to secure a second choice candidate - an unidentified princess. It's hard to see much logic in this choice, beyond a desperate courtier with a reduced number of options. Certainly Georgia was in no position to give military support. It could be that Sphrantzes just wanted to find someone willing and royal in a hurry - perhaps because Constantine was already in his mid-forties and without a child, or perhaps because other members of the court were putting forward candidates of their own. 

There is nothing in Sphrantzes's recounting of this period to confirm the idea that Anna Notaras was a serious candidate to become Constantine's third wife. Indeed the only evidence for it is very unreliable comments made in Italian legal papers decades later. However, one might argue that Sphrantzes (whose relationship with Loukas Notaras was certainly one of political / court rivals) has every motive to whitewash from the record any imperial linkage, the more so given that he wrote his Chronicle after the fall, when Anna Notaras was at the height of her own fame. We should recall that during the first few decades of Turkish Constantinople, the exiled community of Greeks in Italy can be divided between a staunchly Orthodox group in Venice where Anna was certainly pre-eminent, and the remnant Palaiologoi in Rome (where Thomas converted to the Latin faith in return for a Pope's pension), to whom Sphrantzes was alligned.

Whatever the truth about the third bride of Constantine, the siege of 1453 intervened before any final marriage could take place. Sphrantzes gives a rather vague account of things, perhaps because he was employed away from the front line. When the defenses broke, Sphrantzes was captured and enslaved, but was ransomed on 1 September 1453, he immediately traveled to the Morea to offer his services to Thomas. He was able to locate and randsom his wife Helena in 1454 and then served as Thomas's ambassador to Venice in 1455.


When the Morea descended into conflict between Thomas and his brother Demetrios, the latter called in the Turks who promptly seized the whole region. Thomas and his court fled, first to Corfu, then across to Ancona and finally to Rome. They took with them the Head of St Andrew, which Bessarion received at a ceremony in April 1462. Sphrantzes went as far as Corfu but no further. Nor did Thomas's wife and three children, Andreas, Zoe and Manuel. Bessarion managed their education from Rome (we have his many letters which express his concern that their Greek was poor and needed improving). We don't know if Sphrantzes was involved in raising the three Palaiologoi heirs but after they were called to join their father in Rome in 1465, Sphrantzes did make the journey to visit them in 1466 and stayed for 5 weeks.

In his younger, happier days, Sphrantzes had married a good Byzantine woman named Helena, daughter of the imperial secretary Alexios Palaiologos Tzamplakon. Constantine was best man at his wedding. He and Helena had five children, of whom two sons died in infancy, a third son, Alexios, died at the age of 5. John and his only daughter, Thamar, both lived to fourteen & Constantine was godfather to both. They were also enslaved after the fall, but Sphrantzes was unable to locate and ransom them before each died, John in December 1453, Thamar in September 1455 - reportedly of disease in the Imperial hareem. 

                                        

Of John's death, Sphrantzes recorded: "the most impious and pitiless sultan, with his own hand, took the life of my dearest son John, on the grounds that the child had conspired to murder him . . . My son was fourteen years and eight months less a day; yet his mind and body proclaimed a much more mature person." It's unclear quite what he meant here - some might be reminded of the fate of Jacob Notaras and that Sphrantzes believed his son was a victim of the sultan's supposed taste for boys, or perhaps he simply that he looked and seemed old enough to be an assassin. 

It's another sad footnote to an unfulfilled life, you can hear Sphrantzes' grief for both his grown children. Having navigated the perils of childhood, which had claimed three of their siblings, he had plans for both when the tottering empire finally fell. His daughter had not quite reached marriageable age when the travel became impossible. Sphrantzes had made plans to take his son John on the medieval equivalent of a father-son road trip. They were to go to the Morea and Cyprus, "so that my son could visit the places and learn all those things which would be of use in his life". Probably he would have left John in the Morea for safety but perhaps the demands on his time prevented it. The trip certainly never came about and the great events of history conspired to crush that dream.

He is known to have clashed with Loukas Notaras, especially during those last short years that Constantine was Emperor. Notaras was Megas Doux, the most powerful noble not of the imperial family. His father had built up the family power and wealth in Constantinople over the first half of the century. It's not hard to see how these two men would rub against one another. Both social climbers having only one or so generation previously penetrated the upper tier of Byzantine nobility. Sphrantzes from a family of intellectuals, Notaras from hard-bitten merchants. They had been two of the bright young things of Manuel's court, both sent as emissaries to Sultan Murad in 1424 when Byzantium officially submitted to being an Ottoman vassal. 

Sphrantzes saw himself very much as Constantine's man, a member of the imperial oikeios, and must have grown used to taking over and running every city that came under Constantine's remit. Each place Constantine ruled, Sphrantzes was installed into the highest administrative position: when Constantine was despot at Patras, Sphrantzes was governor (Kephale) of Patras, when Constantine was despot in Selybria, Sphranzes was governor of Selybria; when Constantine was despot at Mistra, Sphrantzes was governor of Mistra. Then Constantine becomes Emperor, but someone else already runs the show, his old contemporary from two decades prior. 

Then in 1451, Sphrantzes was told he needed to go to Cyprus for the Emperor. He had only just got back from his mission to Georgia seeking a bride. The story goes that Sphrantzes told his old friend that his wife would either marry another man or run off to the monastery if he continued to live on the road for the emperor like this. Constantine's solution appears to have been to exhume an old disused imperial title and plant Sphrantzes with that (Megas Logothete). Whether this was to mollify his wife or Sphrantzes himself is not clear. There is evidence this caused a minor stir at court, where rank was so important. It was this mission to Cyprus that Sphrantzes saw as an opportunity to take his son on, to bond and teach the young man but it never got underway. 

The rivalry with Loukas Notaras led to him painting the megas doux in an unflattering light in his memoirs but much of the dirt thrown in that direction might also be applied to Sphrantzes. He was as guilty of feathering his own nest as his rival. The trip to Georgia netted him 1,600 florins. 

Another area of friction between the two lay in religion. Notaras was the most vocal critic of Constantine's church union with Rome. Sphrantzes, if he was not the actual architect of that policy, was a fervent cheerleader for it. 

In the end, George Sphrantzes outlived not only his master Emperor Manuel but all of Manuel's sons and his own family. Not only that but he lived to see the Morea, Trebizond and Gothia follow Constantinople into Turkish possession. As an intimate member of the imperial inner circle, he has a very good claim to have been the last Byzantine.