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.

Un-Boxing Helena

        Sometimes scattered pieces of historical information fit together to form a picture of the past which, whilst not definitive, appears plausible. Such is the case of Helena Notaras, the elder sister of Anna Notaras.

        As so often with non-royal women of the past, what little information was recorded of their lives comes as a side-note or afterthought in documents focused on the men around them. It is therefore a matter of collecting up these fragments and puzzling out the mosaic of a life from among them.

      Loukas Notaras was among the wealthiest (if not the richest) man in mid-15th century Constantinople, holder of several important court functions, in 1441 he sailed with George Sphrantzes and the Despot of the Morea (the future emperor Constantine XI) to Mytilene on Lesbos where Constantine married the daughter of the Lord of Lesbos, Dorino Gattilusio. The Gattilusio family, originally from Genoa, had been lords of Lesbos and the Cyclades archipelago for a century and had followed a policy of prudent integration with both their Ottoman and Byzantine neighbours: Dorino's aunt, Irene, had married the Byzantine Empeor John VII Palaiologos.

       It would appear that Notaras took the opportunity to link his own family to a royal occasion by arranging the wedding festivities to be a double union. As well as Caterina Gattilusio's marriage to Constantine, Dorino's nephew, (Giorgio Gattilusio) took the hand of the eldest daughter of Loukas Notaras in 1441. Helena.

       This was a prudent choice. For whilst Dorino Gattilusio ruled Lesbos, his brother Palamedes was ruler of Ainos (modern day Enez), a small city on the Thracian peninsula and Giorgio was his father's heir. [It's a measure of the inter-related nature of medieval aristocracy that two of Giorgio's sisters married Campofregoso brothers, both of whom served as doge of Genoa in their time]. The Notaras were a merchant family, originally from Monemvasia with estates in the Morea, Kythera & strong links to Genoese merchant familes including the Gritti and Lomellini, so a marital link into the Genoese Gattilusio was likely as much about business as imperial prestige. Loukas Notaras's father Nicholas had obtained Genoese citizenship in the 1390s while negotiating grain contracts on behalf of the emperor John VII.

        Both Helena & Constantine's marriages to the Gattilusio cousins were tragically short lived. A year after the wedding festivities, while travelling from the Morea, Constantine's ships ran into a Turkish pirate fleet and took shelter on Lemnos. There Caterina died of complications from a miscarriage. It was the second time Constantine had been widowed in this way. He never married again.

        Helena's husband Giorgio also died young, in 1449. By then, Helena had born him at least two children. We don't know if Helena and the children remained living with Palamedes Gattilusio in Ainos at this time but it's clear Helena did not give up her interest in her husband's estate. The Gattilusi of Ainos paid a tribute to the Ottoman Sultans and Mehmed's army left the city unmolested on its march to Constantinople.

       The Lord of Ainos was the first to pay respects to Mehmed as the new ruler of Constantinople and it seems that at this point Helena began to try and negotiate the ransom of her two sisters (her mother having died on the march to Adrianople). If she tried to also obtain her brother Jacob's freedom at this time it was impossible - since he had converted to Islam and joined the Sultan's palace school as a page.

      The ransom negotations for Theodora and Maria Notaras were prolonged - it took almost two years to be completed - and complicated by a legal question which arose in Italy over what should happen to the vast Notaras family fortune which was frozen in the Bank of St George in Genoa. That issue was not fully resolved until 1459, but in the meantime the ransom of the girls was set at 700 ducats - by far the highest ransom rate of any recorded among abductees of the fall. This as much as anything shows the status of the Notaras family at this time as second in social rank only to the imperial family of the Palaiologoi.

      Meanwhile in Ainos, two years after the fall, Palamedes Gattilusio himself died at the age of c.65 year old (perhaps at shock from the ransom his daughter-in-law was seeking to pay!). With Giorgio long since dead, the title of Lord of Ainos by rights should have passed to any son Helena had born. Instead, Giorgio's brother Dorino claimed the lordship. We might assume that one of Helena's children was indeed a boy, because in late 1455 she appealed to the sultan for him as suzerain of Ainos, to uphold her child's inheritance rights. An unnamed uncle was dispatched to petition the Ottoman court.

       Dorino Gattilusio's brief rein over Ainos does not seem to have been a happy one. Turkish records indicate that Helena's was not the only complaint which had been raised against him and judges from local Turkish towns had also blackened his name. Whether it was in response to this or not, we know that a squadron of 10 ships under Yunus Pasha set out from Constantinople and bore down upon Ainos on 25th January 1456 [It's not clear if this is the same man as 'Yunus Bey' aka Thomas Katabolenos, Greek secretary to the Sultan who would be killed in the failed ambushing of Vlad Dracula in 1461].

Gates of Ainos

         Dorino had the good fortune to be out when the long arm of Turkish justice came knocking that January. He was on Samothrace, another of the islands under Gattilusio control. The people of Ainos opened the gates to Yunus Pasha without contest and the town fell under Turkish control and remains so to this day. What happened to Dorino is a story for another day.

          Governorship of the town was given to Demetrios Palaiologos in 1463 when the Morea was conquered but it appears to never have been handed over to Helena Notaras or her son. Instead Helena vanished from historical sight in 1456 until we see her mentioned in the last will and testimony of her younger sister Anna and even then it is a posthumous reference. By 1493 it appears that Helena had taken the monastic name of Euphrosyne and subsequently died but we have dates for neither. We also have no certainty over whether she joined Theodora and Anna in Italy or what happened to her children. One possibility is that in 1456 they joined their young uncle Jacob in the Ottoman palace school and grew up as Janissary as many of the children of fallen Constantinople did (the siege of Malta in 1480 was commanded by Mesih Pasha, a young scion of the imperial Palaiologoi who had been ten at the time of the fall).

   

       Euphrosyne, Goddess of Joy and Mirth, was the name Helena chose to take in later life (although she probably had St Euphrosyne of Alexandria in mind)

The mystery of Helena's life between Girogio's death and her death as the nun 'Euphrosyne' will likely never be fully resolved. But following the strands along their lines of possible continuation are a good measure of how inter-connected the aristocratic families of Genoa, Serbia, Byzantium and even the Ottomans were at this time.






  

The Life of Mara Brankovic

In the words of historian Donald Nicol, "Mara Brankovic was one of the most remarkable products of the melting pot of ruling families that banded together for survival in the Balkans during and after the Turkish conquest of the Byzantine Empire in the fifteenth century."

Born around 1416, she was the eldest daughter of Durad Brankovic, whom had been anointed Despot of Serbia in 1429 by Emperor John VIII but who ruled under sufferance of the Sultan. He played a hazardous game, pretending to be their faithful vassal while trying to build up a Christian coalition against the Turkish tide. He built the fortress of Smederevo on the Danube near Belgrade, the last capital of medieval Christian Serbia.

Nicol states that Mara's mother was the sister of the Trebizond Emperor, John Komnenos, however he does not attribute a source for this and it appears unlikely for a number of reasons, the main being that there is no record of a Komnenos princess marrying a Serbian Despot from the Trebizond records or any mention of it in other sources. 

The more commonly given genealogy for Mara's mother is Eirene Kantacuzenos, of the  Byzantine noble family. She is named as the mother of Brankovic's other children. Their marriage is recorded as being in 1414. 

One feature of Durad's reign was the increasing number of Byzantines at his court. Partly this was due to his marriage to a scion of the Kantacuzenoi but in addition, the fall of Thessaloniki in 1430 saw a huge influx from that region, the Kantacuzenoi heartland. Mara's Kantacuzenoi uncle, Thomas, was in command of Durad's army for much of his rein and in 1457, during the quasi-civil war that followed Durad's death, Thomas was in Mara's entourage that sought shelter at the Ottoman court. He was still among her household when he died in 1463. It is through this enduring Kantacuzenoi influence that Mara's link to the Byzantine culture can be traced.

In 1431, Durad Brankovic concluded a peace treaty with Sultan Murad II by agreeing to give his eldest daughter as a bride. (Another reason the Nicol assertion is unlikely is that Mara would be nineteen based on his dates - rather old to be unmarried or to appeal to the Sultan in this sort of arrangement). The marriage took place in 1435 at which point Mara joined his three other wives in the harem. She bore him no children (he had 9 by his other wives) and rumours from the time held that the marriage was never consummated. 

Mara appears to have had a close relationship with Murad's son, the future Sultan Mehmed II. Mehmed's own mother died two years before he came to the throne on a permanent basis in 1451 and throughout his reign he is recorded as showing special honour to Mara, his mother-substitute. She held the title of Valide Sultan, or Mother to the Sultan - a venerated position that made her top dog in the harem. She was also allowed to maintain her own estate at Daphni at the foot of the holy mountain of Mount Athos. She seems to have had a great deal of freedom of movement in the years following her husband's death, appearing in both Constantinople, Serbia and Daphni. From there she acted as a bridge between East and West and was instrumental in arranging peace talks between Venice and the Porte throughout the Long War. Her involvement in these diplomatic schemes seems quite remarkable for a woman in the 15th century. Clearly Mehmed valued her opinion but she is lauded as well by the state records of Venice. When peace finally did arrive in 1479, Mara played a full part in the go betweens.

Remarkably (but not uniquely - her Byzantine peers in the Persian court did likewise), Mara retained her Christian faith even after marriage. Furthermore, in the years following the conquest of Constantinople she became an active defender of the religious interests of the Greek Christian population. On several occasions she intervened to try and thwart corruption in the office of the Patriarchate. In 1466 Symeon successfully obtained the Patriarchal throne after he paid the Grand Vizier's faction 2000 pieces of gold. Mara was outraged by the simoniac action of Symeon, and she went to Constantinople to complain to Mehmed. In response to her requests, and to a donation by her of 2000 pieces of gold, the Sultan deposed Symeon and appointed to the Patriarchate the candidate of Mara, Dionysius. Similarly in 1474 the Holy Synod also accepted to pay an annual fee of 2000 florins to the Ottoman state - effectively putting the office of the Patriarch up for sale. On his return to Constantinople in early 1475, Symeon was outbid by Raphael I, probably supported & funded by Mara. 

In 1459 the Sultan granted to Mara full possession of the Monastery of St Sophia in Thessalonica and all its revenues. Mara's Christian work extended to the recovery of Holy relics and their return to monasteries and churches in the west. In 1469 she arrange for the bones of John of Rila to be returned to Rila monastery. More controversially, In 1463, she is credited with the recovery of the bones of Luke the Evangelist from Bosnia to Venice. This was a pet project of the new Doge, Christoforo Moro who was rebuilding the church of San Giobbe and wanted the saint enshrined there. Embarrassingly, the Benedictine monks of Padua had been venerating bones of the same Saint Luke for centuries and they enacted a legal challenge to the veracity of the recovered relic. Later history seems to strengthen their case. The Padua relic was tested in recent years and showed them to be of the correct vintage to be the saint. If the San Giobbe bones were a fraud, did Mara know?

An unusual footnote to her history was the incident in 1451 when, newly widowed, she became briefly a candidate to wed the Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI. He had been married twice and lost each without producing an heir. The imperial advisors considered a number of ladies as suitable Empresses, possibly Anna Notaras among them. When Mara came on the matrimonial market, some thought she was the ideal choice. The matter was put to her father who welcomed the idea. It would have made Mara unique - the wife of both Sultan & Emperor. She firmly declined to have anything to do with the idea. She vowed to live a chaste and celibate life from the rest of her days but she did not - as was common for widows of her station - become a nun. She resisted another marriage proposal in 1454 from Jan Jiskra, the Czech mercenary captain who would arrest Vlad Dracula in 1463.  

Mara died at Daphni in September 1487. 

The Life of Anna Notaras

Anna Notaras was the daughter of the last Megas Doux of Constantinople, Loukas Notaras. Her father is remembered both for his court rivalry with George Sphrantzes and his opposition to Emperor Constantine’s policy of ‘reuniting’ (subverting) the Orthodox church with the Latin church – better the Turkish Turban than the Latin Mitre – he is said to have proclaimed but he was clearly under no illusions as to what the Turkish Turban in his city would actually mean.


It is often claimed that Anna was placed in Italy before the fall by her father, along with much of his wealth, but this is incorrect. There was a substantial Notaras fortune held mostly at the Bank of St George in Genoa but also some in Venice at this time but it was the grandfather of Anna - Nicholas Notaras - who put it there. Nicholas was a merchant of some renown who developed close business ties with the Genoese in the early decades of the 15th century. He was granted Genoese citizenship - a crucial point later for Anna and her sisters. His son Loukas does not appear to have dabbled in business but stuck to politics. The capital sums in Italy were not added to following Nicholas's death, but nor were they drawn upon. It appears the Notaras family kept their Italian nest egg as a rainy day fund.


It makes little sense to suppose Loukas Notaras would send his daughter Anna off to Italy alone before the fall. Politically it would have appeared very badly for the figure-head of Anti-Unionism to be openly stashing his children with the Latins. It would also have shown a lack of confidence in the ability of his Basileus and the city walls in diffusing the crisis.


The other reason we can be pretty sure Anna did not arrive in Italy before 1453 is her absence from the extensive legal documentation that grew up in the last months of that year and the subsequent two over the claims on the Notaras assets frozen within the bank. Once the fate of the megas doux was made public in Italy (in quite exaggerated style by Nicholas Sagundino, first in Venice in December 1453, then in Rome the same month, then Naples in January 1454), several legal cases were brought by claimants who said they were creditors of Loukas Notaras, seeking payment of debts. The fact that the Notaras family had both Genoese and Venetian citizenship and the size of the fortune caused those governments to become involved. Thus we see orders for ambassadors to Adrianople to ascertain the fate of the children and we see later correspondence talking of two daughters and a son (these being Maria, Theodora and Jacob). There is mention of another sister trying to ransom them (and this can only be Helena). There is no word of Anna. If she had been in Italy, firstly she would have surely begun drawing on the assets in Genoa (presumably prior to the summer of 1453) and secondly there would have been mention of her in at least one of the discussions on the frozen assets but there is not. She is entirely off the historical radar from 1453 until surfacing in Italy in 1459.


Thierry Ganchou, Byzantine Historian at the Sorbonne, is of the belief that Anna was probably sent out of the city shortly before the siege began but rather than Italy it was a refuge closer to home. Her elder sister Helena had married into the Gattilusio of Ainos, just along the Marmara coast. As tribute payers to the Ottoman sultans, Ainos was spared from attack (until 1456 but that is another story). If Ganchou is correct, then Anna and her sister Helena would then have been working in tandem to secure the release of Maria and Theodora (achieved in 1456 at the cost of 700 ducats). Helena was drive out of Ainos in 1456 by her brother-in-law and when she sought help from Mehmed II, he used it as a pretext to capture the city for himself. At this point, we can only presume Helena and her sisters headed for Italy - where the case of their family fortune was coming to a conclusion.


Another tantalizing possibility is that Anna was still in the city during the siege and somehow escaped in the collapse. This might at first appear fanciful but Byzantine historian Nevra Necipoglu mentions a record of 2 people named Notaras listed on the passenger manifest of a Genoese ship that escaped on that final fatal morning. Could one of them have been Anna?






Whatever the truth of her movements in those years, we know that she ended up in Italy (Rome at first and later Venice) and that the great Notaras fortune came into her control. Unlike some of the other surviving Byzantine nobles, such as Constantine’s wastrel brother Thomas Palaiologos, she did not spend her exile squandering it. Instead, Anna Notaras became a pillar of the Greek exile community.






Venice embraced a great many of Constantinople’s refugees but with only a pragmatic warmth. The Republic, now painfully aware of the growing threat the Turks posed to their own interests, was quick to use Greek and Albanian stradiots in its long war from 1463 to 1479 and the rollcall of these mercenaries reads like a who’s who of late-Byzantine noble houses but within la Serenissima, the Venetians were less keen on overt Greek-identity, in particular the Orthodox church which was the very core of Byzantine identity.






It was Anna who petitioned the Republic to allow the construction of an Orthodox church within Venice (something not granted until 1539) and when the Council of Ten prevaricated, it was Anna who badgered them into a compromise. She was granted permission to build an oratory within her own sizable Casa and hold Orthodox services within it from 1475. There the flame of Greek Orthodoxy in Venice flickered until San Giorgio dei Greci was finally built, almost a hundred years after the fall. To this day, three of its treasured icons were gifted to it from the estate of Anna Notaras, who had brought them with her from Constantinople.

Anna’s efforts did not end with her preservation of her religion. It is believed she was a close friend of Cardinal Bessarion, perhaps – as historian Donald Nicol speculates – it was into Bessarion’s care that the young Anna was first placed by her father in 1453. Bessarion is rightly famous for the hoard of Classical Greek manuscripts and books in his collection (donated in 1468 to the people of Venice). Anna too played an important role in the preservation and dissemination of ancient knowledge salvaged from the fires of her city. In 1470 she acquired a 12th century manuscript Catena of Job written for the Grand Duke of Cyprus.






Later, in 1499, the first exclusively Greek printing press in Venice began operation under the direction of Zacharis Kalliergis. The first product off the press was the Etymologiucum Magnum and the dedication at the front thanks the ‘most modest lady Anna, daughter of…Loukas Notaras’ who had defrayed its cost. Nicholas Vlastos is often credited with patronising the Greek printing presses of Venice but Vlastos was the factor of Anna Notaras – he was merely an agent for the noble, wealthy lady.









Her work towards preserving the Byzantine / Greek identity through the first turbulent decades of its exile extended beyond the academic and religious sphere to the material as well. Another of her projects was an attempt to create a self-ruled Byzantine colony within Italy. In around 1472 she began negotiations with the Commune of Siena to take possession of the old castle of Montauto and the lands surrounding it.

A draft contract was made which allowed Anna to oversee 100 Greek families in a self-governing community. It is unclear exactly why the project never progressed beyond this point but one point of interest from the negotiations is the fact that Anna is referred to as Anna Notaras Paleologina and from this grew the legend that she had been betrothed to the last Emperor. In reality, the styling in the contractual document was likely a political ploy to give the commune the polish of imperial legitimacy.






She never married, nor became a nun – a somewhat unusual position for a woman of that era but given her wealth she had no material need to make a marriage and appears to have enjoyed her independence. The Byzantine scholar Thierry Ganchou makes a persuasive case that her reticence to marry might have stemmed from the fact any potential husband would be a step-down from the Byzantine Emperor she had once been promised to. Ganchou is one who does not dismiss the possibility that Loukas Notaras did intend his youngest daughter to marry Constantine XI, even if a formal betrothal is never recorded by the court chronicler, George Sphrantzes. It is certainly worth noting that her lack of husband in 1453, when her older siblings had already been married off, raises questions.


Like her father, Anna appears to have been fiercely loyal to her Greek faith and refused to even learn Latin much less recognise the church union, a point noted by one diarist at her death in 1507. There are no firm dates for her birth, but she would have been at least seventy years old and had outlived not only the other notable exiles of her era but the bane of her youth, Mehmed II. Her achievements demonstrate that men and institutions in fifteenth century Italy were capable of working with and indeed for women under certain circumstances.

Much of what we know of her stems from the several legal cases she undertook in Venice against her sister-in-law (Zabeta). Among other complaints, she accused Zabeta of stealing a prized copy of Petrach which had been autographed by Thomas Palaiologos. 

Her achievements in the fields of politics, religion, book printing were noteworthy by the standards of anyone in that era, the fact they were achieved despite the social disadvantages of her sex suggest she was a woman of quite extraordinary character.

John Grant

Who was John Grant? It was this question that drew me into the history of Constantinople in the first place. Grant - the legend goes - was a Scotsman, far from home in the thick of the action when the Roman Empire fell. It is a legend added to by Dorothy Dunnett and Mika Waltari but it is one of those pieces of historical trivia that balance on precariously little solid evidence.

Two separate eye witness accounts (Leonard of Chios & George Sphrantzes) attest to the presence of a John (or Johannes) Grant among the defenders of Constantinople in 1453. He is identified as being associated to General Giovanni Giustiniani's Genoese contingent. He is also credited with heroics in the counter mining effort in the final weeks of the siege. This is about the sum total of contemporary information we have on the man. How he came to be there and what was his fate are complete mysteries, as is his origin.

The great Byzantine historian, Steven Runciman suggested he might have been Scottish but tantalizingly offers no evidence for this. One might guess Runciman is basing it on the Scottish surname. Sphrantzes identified Grant as German, although it's quite possible he used that term in a sweeping generalisation for northern Europeans - as Byzantine historians were wont to do. 'German' would have been a description applied to any northern European of a particular height and appearance. Germany of course did not exist. Leonard, who also being of the Genoese faction seems the best source - calls him 'grandi', which again could simply be in reference to his size or the size of his deeds at the siege. It's certainly credible that a Scottish (or Germanic) soldier of fortune had found his way into the Lombard Wars and the muster rolls of a Genoese mercenary company.

Whilst Grant was (possibly) the last Briton to defend the walls of Constantinople he was far from the first. A long tradition dating back to the post-Hastings conquest of England in 1066 saw hundreds of Saxons make the trek to the Byzantine court to sell their sword-and-axe-arms. There they joined Danes, Norwegians and various other 'Germanic' mercenaries in the famous Varangian Guard unit, the elite bodyguard of Emperors for centuries. The last Varangian units recorded were still active around 100 years prior to the fall.

Which is to say that absolutely nothing about John Grant is firmly established fact except his involvement in the defenses, in particular in detecting and destroying the mining efforts around the Caligaria Gate on 24th May 1453.