With his back to the wall

James Howard-Johnston

THE IMMORTAL EMPEROR

by Donald M. Nicol CUP, £18.95, pp. 147

Constantine Palaiologos, last, half- Serbian Emperor of Byzantium (1449-53), ruled over a diminutive empire, which was confined to the environs of Constantinople and the Peloponnese. This distant succes- sor of Constantine the Great was in a degrading position of vassalage to the Ottoman Sultan. His reign began ignomin- iously with a vain attempt to hitch a lift to his capital on a Venetian ship (he had better luck with a Catalan one), and lasted less than four years.

But as the last champion of Christendom in the east Mediterranean, he has had an extroardinarily good press. Court writers of the time compared him favourably to Themistocles and Pericles, and claimed that his political sagacity matched that of the best of previous Emperors. Although nothing certain was known about the precise circumstances of his death when the land defences of Constantinople were overrun on 29 May 1453, even the Turks gave him the benefit of the doubt, granting him a heroic death fighting to the last near the breach in the walls. Less creditable versions (which had him turn tail or commit suicide or be trampled underfoot) made little headway among contempo- raries. Subsequently he was transformed in the popular imagination into a superhuman figure, for the time being frozen in marble, who would one day wake and restore the Greeks to their rightful position of hegemony in the Aegean.

Donald Nicol does not struggle against this current of opinion. His is a sympathetic portrait of a ruler, who stood out nobly, albeit vainly, against the flow of events. Constantine is presented as a man of dignity, courage and strength of character, who skilfully deployed every available weapon, military and diplomatic, to try to halt what Nicol sees as the inexorable advance of Ottoman power.

For Nicol, as for a contemporary obitu- arist, Constantine was dogged throughout his life by ill fortune. He had too many brothers who were too fractious, hence had to spend too much of his life in family in- fighting. He received a great deal of bad advice from the intelligentsia: there were the hardline opponents of ecclesiastical union with Rome, who, to the last, placed purity of faith far above the worldly consid- eration of obtaining western aid; and there were the revolutionaries, who urged him, when he was senior Despot of the Morea (the Peloponnese), to transform it into an armed people's camp, a latterday Sparta cleansed of all lords and landowners and protected by a revamped wall across the isthmus of Corinth. Even George Sphrantzes, his lifelong aide and friend, whose memoirs are the chief source used by Nicol, could generate hare-brained schemes, such as his plan for Constantine to marry the Serbian widow of the Sultan Murad H in 1451 as a way of keeping his successor Mehmed II in check, despite her age which cast doubt upon her child- bearing capacity.

The reader's verdict, on the evidence

C.H. Sisson The Trade

The language fades, the noise is more Than ever it has been before, But all the words grow pale and thin For lack of sense has done them in.

What wonder, when it is for pay Millions are spoken every day? It is the number, not the sense That brings the speakers pounds and pence.

The words are stretched across the air Vast distances from here to there, Or there to here — it does not matter So long as there is media chatter.

Turn up the sound and let there be No talking between you and me: What passes now for human speech Must come from somewhere out of reach.

presented, is likely to be less favourable. Constantine performed competently when he stood in as governor of the Constanti- nopolitan enclave during his elder brother John's two visits to the west (1423-4 and 1437-9). He won the battle to succeed John in 1448-9, though with a great deal of help from his formidable Serbian mother. But during his terms of office in the Morea, first as a junior Despot (1428-36 and 1440-42), then as senior Despot with his capital at Mistra (1443-48), he seems to have demonstrated a remarkable gift for engaging in bold but highly counter- productive ventures. Both by his seizure of Patras in 1430 and his raids north into the Greek mainland in 1444-45, he managed to alienate the key western powers, on whom any realistic hope of rescue depended, and to antagonise the Turks, thus hastening on the day when they would turn on Constantinople. Installed as Emperor, he did so again for a third and fatal time.

Unconvincing though Nicol's view may be (and the suspicion arises that too much has been recycled from Sphrantzes' mem- oirs, which are not critically evaluated), he provides a lucid and at times gripping account of Constantine's life, death and afterlife in popular legend. It would have benefited from the addition of maps and plans to the otherwise plentiful illustrative matter, as also from the inclusion of ecphraseis, evocative descriptions, of Mistra and Constantinople, the former in its heyday, latter at a nadir of decay and depopulation. It is, nonetheless, a highly readable foray into a byway of history, more antiquarian than analytical, but all the more entertaining for that.

The Immortal Emperor is, however, narrowly circumscribed. Much of the historical action takes place off-stage. There is no survey of the balance of power in Anatolia, where the Ottomans faced a dangerous adversary in the Emir of Karaman, nor of the build-up of opposition in eastern Europe under the leadership of the Hungarians. Plucked out of this wider context, Constantine's initiatives seem impetuous and foolish.

Placed in it, they begin to look like calculated acts, intended to consolidate Byzantine power in the Peloponnese and then, in alliance with the great regional powers and with naval assistance from the west, to strike at the Ottoman state before it had finally solidified. Constantine's role may therefore have been more than that of the small man caught up and crushed by a great machine, a minor tragic figure who deserves sympathy rather than respect. Ottoman reactions, at times indicative of panic, suggest that the outcome was far from pre-ordained, that luck and general- ship in the years of crisis played a vital part in assuring their imperial future. The case may not have been made but Constantine Palaiologos probably deserves the

plaudits which he gets from his first scholarly biographer.