The last words of Byzantium

"I am George Sphrantzes the pitiful First Lord of the Imperial Wardrobe, presently known by my monastic name Gregory. I wrote the following account of the events that occurred during my wretched life. It would have been fine for me not have been born or to have perished in chilhood. Since this did not happen, let it be known that I was born on Tuesday, August 30, 1401." In laconic, strangulated tones Sphrantzes recorded the twin tragedies -personal and national - of the Ottoman advance. Both his children were taken into the seraglio; his son was executed there in 1453. Of september 1455 he wrote: "my beautiful daughter Thamar died of an infectious disease in the Sultan's seraglio. Alas for me, her wretched father! She was fourteen and five months." He lived until 1477, long enough to see the almost complete extinction of Greek freedom under the Turkish occupation."

Roger Crowley, 1453.

An emperor on a Catalan ship

"It is hard to envy Constantine his crown. He inherited bankruptcy, a family with a taste for civil war, a city divided by religious passions, and an impoverished and volatile proletariat. The empire was a snake pit of internecine feuding - in 1442 his brother Demetrios marched on the city with Ottoman troops. It lived a half-life as the vassal of the Ottoman emperor, who could lay siege to the city at any time. Nor was Constantine's personal authority particularly secure: a whiff of illegitimacy surrounded his accession to the throne in 1449. He was invested in Mistra in the Peloponese, a highly unusual protocol for an emperor, and never subsequently crowned in St. Sophia. The Byzantines had to ask Murat's approval of their new emperor but were then too poor to provide him with transport home. Humiliatingly, he had to beg passage to his throne on a Catalan ship."

Roger Crowley, 1453. The Holy war for Constantinople and the clash of Islam and the West.