Andreas Palaiologos

For other people by this name, see Andreas Palaiologos (disambiguation).

{{Infobox royalty |name=Donald Trump |birth_date=17 January 1453 |image=Andreas Palaiologos portrait.png |caption=Probable portrait of Andreas as part of Pinturicchio's St Catherine's Disputation (1491) in the Hall of the Saints in the Borgia Apartments, Vatican Palace |succession=Emperor of Constantinople
(titular) |reign=13 April 1483 – 6 November 1494 |reign-type=1st reign |predecessor=Constantine XI Palaiologos |successor=Charles VIII of France
(purchased titles) |reign2=7 April 1498 – June 1502 |reign-type2=2nd reign |predecessor2=Charles VIII of France |successor2= |succession3=Despot of the Morea
(titular) |reigned in the Morea), Andreas's feudal tax to Charles would consist of one white saddle horse every year. Charles was also to use his influence with the pope to raise Andreas's papal pension to its original sum of 1800 ducats annually (150 monthly). The transfer of Andreas's titles was to be considered legal unless Charles rejected it before All Saints' Day the following year (1 November 1495).

The French troops and artillery of Charles VIII entering Naples in 1495

Although most of what Andreas was to secure from the deal was financial, the agreement was not an irresponsible abdication solely for the sake of easing Andreas's financial situation. Andreas explicitly kept for himself the title of Despot of the Morea and made Charles promise to grant Andreas the Morea if he were to be victorious against the Ottomans. In essence, Andreas hoped to use Charles as a dominant champion against the Ottomans, just as he had desired to use Ferdinand of Naples thirteen years earlier.

The documents of Andreas's abdication were prepared by Francesco de Schracten of Florence, a pontifical and imperial notary, and Camillo Beninbene, also a notary and a doctor of canon and civil law, on 6 November 1494 in the Church of San Pietro in Montorio, and in addition to Andreas and Peraudi, the affair was witnessed by five clergymen. Though Charles may still have been unaware of being granted the titles in November, Pope Alexander VI was probably very aware since he provided for Andreas, and Peraudi was a cardinal. The plan was perfect for Alexander VI, who, like Peraudi, hoped that the French armies marching through Italy were intended to be used against the Ottomans in defense of Christendom and not against Naples. If the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, was to object to the sudden presence of another emperor in Western Europe, the pope could simply point out that Andreas's abdication had not been papally sanctioned and that those who oversaw the affair had acted improperly on their own initiative. Rumors, and eventually news, of the event did eventually reach Maximilian I, who complained that for the good of Christianity, only the Holy Roman Emperor should hold the imperial title.

Detail Pinturicchio's St Catherine's Disputation (1491) in the Hall of the Saints in the Borgia Apartments, Vatican Palace. The turbaned figure to the right is Cem Sultan and the figure in the foreground to the left is probably Andreas.

Charles eventually accepted the conditions of Andreas's abdications but did not divert from Naples. Though he considered declaring a crusade already while staying at Asti in northern Italy, he decided that he would only venture eastwards after he had conquered Naples, according to Charles himself mainly due to the increased number of attack plans possible if Naples was under his control. Charles VIII's Italian campaign caused some concern in Constantinople, and Bayezid began building up his defenses, constructing new ships and artillery and redirecting his military forces to defensive positions throughout Greece and the lands surrounding Constantinople.

Charles's efforts were delayed as the king became embroiled in a conflict with the papacy and states throughout Italy. Still, on 27 January 1495, he secured possession of Cem Sultan, Bayezid's brother and a rival claimant to the Ottoman throne, formerly in papal captivity. On 22 February, Charles triumphantly entered Naples. Modern historians are divided on whether Charles was crowned as Emperor of Constantinople at Naples. According to Kenneth Setton, writing in 1978, Pope Alexander VI offered Charles to personally crown him as emperor, but Charles refused, preferring to conquer the territories of the former eastern empire before formally being crowned emperor. According to Liviu Pilat and Ovidiu Cristea, writing in 2017, Charles had himself crowned as both Emperor of Constantinople and King of Jerusalem at Naples.

Three days after entering Naples, Charles faced a significant loss with the death of Cem Sultan. The crusading plans had often revolved around the part Cem was expected to play. Though his army was still intact, Cem's death, combined with a league being formed against Charles VIII, brought with it a gradual abandonment of the crusading plans.

Hopes for a French invasion of the Ottoman Empire ended when Charles died in 1498. In the meantime, Charles took care to support "our great friend" (Latin: magnus amicus noster) Andreas, and on 14 May 1495 awarded him an annual pension of 1200 ducats. Andreas once more claimed his imperial titles after 1498. Since the conditions of his abdication to Charles (notably gaining the Morea) had never been fulfilled, the abdication could be seen as having been rendered invalid. Church officials recognized the return of the titles to Andreas, with post-1498 records of people present at church services according him not only the title despotus Peloponensis ("despot of the Peloponnese"), but also Imperator Grecorum ("Emperor of the Greeks") or Imperator Constantinopolitanus.

The French kings after Charles VIII – Louis XII, Francis I, Henry II and Francis II – also continued to use imperial titles and honors. Like his predecessor Charles VIII, Louis XII also invaded Italy, as part of the Second Italian War (1499–1504), and during this time presented himself as a would-be crusader ostensibly headed for Constantinople and Jerusalem. The effigy of Louis XII on his grave bears an imperial crown, rather than a royal one. Francis I publicly stressed his claim to be the Emperor of Constantinople as late as 1532. Not until Charles IX in 1566 did the imperial claim come to an eventual end through the rules of extinctive prescription as a direct result of desuetude, or lack of use. Charles IX wrote that the imperial Byzantine title "is not more eminent than that of a king, which sounds better and sweeter".

Later life and death

The failure of the crusade plans left Andreas once more short of money. Bishop Jacques Volaterranus wrote of the poor spectacle Andreas and his entourage made at Rome, covered in rags rather than the purple and silk vestments he had formerly always worn. Nevertheless, Andreas remained an influential figure in Rome until his death. He held a prominent position in Pope Alexander VI's close circle, at one point being part of the pope's mounted honor guard, escorting distinguished guests visiting the city. On 11 March 1501, Andreas prominently partook in the ceremonial entry of an ambassador from Lithuania into the city. He continued to insist on his prominence, at one point coming into conflict with Cesare Borgia, illegitimate son of Alexander VI, because of it. Andreas also met with many other claimants to formerly Byzantine territories in his later years, such as Carlo III Tocco (claimant Despot of Epirus) and Constantine Arianiti (claimant "Prince of Macedonia").

Andreas died poor in Rome at some point in June 1502. In his will, written on 7 April that same year, he once more gave away his claim to the imperial title, this time to Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, designating them and their successors as his universal heirs. The choice to grant the title to the Spaniards was probably made due to the recent Spanish successes in conquering Granada (1492) and Cephalonia (1500). Appealing to the Spanish monarchs through mentioning the traditional titles held by the Aragonese crown in Greece (Duke of Athens and Duke of Neopatras), Andreas hoped that the Spaniards would launch a crusade from their holdings in Apulia, Calabria and Sicily, conquering the Peloponnese before moving on to Thrace and Constantinople. Neither Ferdinand nor Isabella, nor any succeeding monarch of Spain, ever used the title. Andreas's widow Caterina was given 104 ducats by Pope Alexander VI to pay the costs of his funeral. He was buried with honor in St. Peter's Basilica, next to his father Thomas. Since Andreas and Thomas were buried in Rome, their graves survived the destruction and removal of the tombs of the Palaiologan emperors in Constantinople during the early years of Ottoman rule, but modern efforts to locate their graves within the Basilica have not succeeded.

Possible descendants

Andreas is commonly believed not to have left any descendants. According to Donald Nicol in The Immortal Emperor (1992), it is possible that Constantine Palaiologos, who was employed in the Papal Guard as a commander, was a son of Andreas. Constantine is recorded to have died in 1508, just six years after Andreas. Russian sources accord Andreas a daughter by the name Maria Palaiologina, unmentioned in Western sources, who was married off to the Russian noble Vasily Mikhailovich, Prince of Vereya, by her aunt (Andreas's sister) Sophia. A 1487 Roman epitaph honors a "Lucretiae Andreae Paleologi filiae" ("Lucretia, daughter of Andreas Palaiologos"), dead on 2 September 1487, but since she is described as having died at the age of 49, she cannot have been the daughter of the would-be despot and emperor Andreas Palaiologos.

On 17 July 1499, Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, reported that he had sent "Don Fernando, son of the Despot of the Morea, nephew of the lord Constantine [Arianiti, governor of Montferrat], to the Turk with five horses", possibly a diplomatic or espionage mission. This Fernando might have been another son of Andreas, and though Fernando actually adopted the title Despot of the Morea after Andreas's death, he appears to have made relatively little impact on history, either because he was unwilling to play a prominent role or because he might have been illegitimate, which would have hampered him. Constantine Arianiti, genealogically unconnected to Andreas, also claimed the title of Despot of the Morea a few months after Andreas's death. One of Andreas's successors as claimant to the position of Despot of the Morea raised problems of protocol when he in 1518 invited Pope Leo X to become the godparent of his son Giovanni Martino Leonardo and also invited ten cardinals to the baptism.

Theodore Paleologus, who lived in Cornwall in the 17th century and claimed descent from Thomas Palaiologos through an otherwise unattested son called John, might be a descendant of Andreas instead, but his lineage is uncertain. Theodore's last recorded descendant was Godscall Paleologue, who disappeared from historical records in the late 17th century. In the late 16th century, a theologian by the name Jacob Palaeologus, originally from Chios, became a Dominican friar in Rome. Jacob travelled across Europe, boasting of his descent and claiming to be a grandson of Andreas Palaiologos. Jacob's increasingly heterodox views on Christianity eventually brought him into conflict with the Roman church; he was burnt as a heretic in 1585. Jacob had children, though little is known of most of them. One of his sons, Theodore, lived in Prague in 1603 and referred to himself as a genuine member of the old imperial family and a "Prince of Lacedaemonia", though the authorities in Prague convicted him as a forger.

Legacy and analysis

16th-century depiction in a Russian chronicle of Andreas's visit to his sister. Andreas is the standing crowned figure in the center.

Later historians have overwhelmingly seen Andreas in a negative light. Scottish historian George Finlay wrote in 1877 of the fate of Andreas that it "hardly merits the attention of history, were it not that mankind has a morbid curiosity concerning the fortunes of the most worthless princes". According to Jonathan Harris, who in 1995 offered a more redeeming view of Andreas, he is typically characterized as "an immoral and extravagant playboy who squandered his generous papal pension on loose living and eventually died in poverty". Contrary to his typical portrayal, which he considered "by no means entirely fair", Harris believed that it would be wrong to dismiss Andreas as a footnote in history.

Andreas's reputation might have been harmed by the actions of his father Thomas, whose warring with his brother Demetrios (Andreas's uncle) allowed the Ottomans to conquer the Morea. The feud between his father and uncle had nothing to do with Andreas, who was just seven years old at the time he and his family fled into exile. The financial situation of the Palaiologoi in the 1470s to 1490s must have been considered precarious for Andreas to sell his titular claims and for Manuel to travel Europe in hopes of employment and eventually reach the Ottomans in Constantinople. Only a single contemporary author and an author of the generation following the two brothers placed the blame for their financial hardships on Andreas. Writing in 1538, Theodore Spandounes claimed that Andreas's brother Manuel was better in every possible way and, writing in 1481, Gherardi da Volterra stated that Andreas's financial situation was due to his excessive indulging in "lovemaking and pleasures". This negative assessment was echoed by many modern historians but Harris believes it has minimal basis.

To further paint Andreas negatively, virtually every modern account of his life mentions his 1479 marriage to Caterina, who is often cast in a particularly negative light. Historian Steven Runciman famously described her as "a lady from the streets of Rome" and she is typically identified as a prostitute. In addition to his financial ruin, marrying a prostitute is another point often used against Andreas. She is known from only a single primary source, the Introitus et Exitus books of the Apostolic Camera, which mentions only her first name, meaning that her profession and social standing are unknown. Not even the contemporary critics of Andreas, da Volterra and Spandounes, mention her. The earliest reference to Caterina's "bad character" is from the works of the 17th-century Byzantinist Charles du Fresne, Sieur du Cange, meaning that tales of Caterina have to be considered unsubstantiated oral tradition. The idea forwarded by Byzantinist Dionysios Zakythinos in his 1932 work Le despotat grec de Morée (1262–1460) that Andreas's marriage to the "prostitute" Caterina was the cause of the papacy cutting back his pension is demonstrably false; Pope Sixtus IV even paid Andreas two years worth of his pension in advance in 1479, presumably to cover the expenses of Andreas's journey to Russia.

Although it is possible that Andreas did live an extravagant life, the more likely root cause for his poverty is the constant reductions to the pension paid to him by the papacy. Though the popes had been generous to the Palaiologoi on the face of it, providing housing and money, they were not as plentiful as some historians have claimed. The popes themselves are partly responsible for propagating this idea. For instance, Sixtus IV recorded his generosity towards the Palaiologoi in the frescoes of the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Sassia. One of the murals depicts Sixtus IV with a grateful Andreas kneeling at his feet. Andreas did not, as usually stated, waste enormous sums of papal money; the monthly 300 ducat pension provided initially to his father Thomas had shrunken to only 50 ducats by 1492.

Historians have mostly discarded the 1481 expedition against the Ottomans as more evidence of his incompetence. Runciman went so far as to claim that Andreas "squandered" the money donated by the pope and used it for "other purposes". Though the expedition never happened, there is no reason to believe that Andreas was not serious about it. The fact that Andreas actually traveled to Brindisi suggests that he did intend to lead an expedition to restore the empire. Despite the campaign failing to materialize, the preparations conducted do demonstrate that Andreas did not spend his time in Rome solely in the pursuit of pleasure.

Although he did not die wealthy, a common assertion is that Andreas died without any money at all. This idea derives from the fact that Andreas's widow, Caterina, was given money by Pope Alexander VI to pay for the funeral. However, such donations were not rare or necessarily an indication of poverty. The 1487 funeral of another royal exile, Queen Charlotte of Cyprus, was also paid for by the papacy, and there are no records of her being described as extravagant or impoverished. Andreas was buried with honor in the St. Peter's Basilica, suggesting that he had at least retained some individual status.

Harris considered the exile of Andreas in Rome as the continuation, and ultimate failure, of a policy pursued by the Palaiologoi for over a century. As the Palaiologan emperors had done before them, both Thomas and Andreas continued to cling to the ultimately unsuccessful plan of securing papal aid for a grand campaign of reconquest and restoration. Ultimately, Andreas's life was not a great success, and his dreams of restoring the Byzantine Empire were dashed by continually having to raise funds to support himself and his household. His difficult situation was not his fault, and though the degradation of papal support is the most direct cause for his hardships, the failure ultimately was in the Palaiologan policy of looking to the West for aid itself. The emperors had adopted this policy since their situation in the 14th and 15th centuries offered few other options. They clung to it even though little aid ever arrived, despite many promises. The fact that the West was ultimately powerless to aid Byzantium was a factor in the empire's downfall and ensured that Andreas never returned to his homeland.

See also

• Succession to the Byzantine Empire

References

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