page_title: Constantine XI Palaiologos
section_title: Lamentations
hierarchical_section_title: Constantine XI Palaiologos / Legacy / Lamentations
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Constantine XI Palaeologus, half-length turned to the left, bearded, looking upwards to the left, hands raised, wearing turban; illustration from Thevet's 'Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres' (Paris, 1584), page 291. Engraving, letterpress below and on verso
context_page_description: Constantine XI Dragases Palaiologos or Dragaš Palaeologus, known in later Greek folklore as the Marble Emperor, was the last Byzantine emperor, reigning from 1449 to his death in battle at the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Constantine's death marked the end of the Byzantine Empire, an institution tracing its origin to Constantine the Great's foundation of Constantinople as the Roman Empire's new capital in 330. Since the Byzantine Empire was the Roman Empire's medieval continuation, with its citizens continually referring to themselves as Romans, Constantine XI's death and Constantinople's fall also marked the definitive end of the Roman Empire, founded by Augustus almost 1,500 years earlier.
  Constantine was the fourth son of Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos and Helena Dragaš, the daughter of Serbian ruler Konstantin Dejanović. Little is known of his early life, but from the 1420s onward, he is repeatedly demonstrated to have been a skilled general. Based on his career and surviving contemporary sources, Constantine appears to primarily have been a soldier.
context_section_description: The Fall of Constantinople shocked Christians throughout Europe. In Orthodox Christianity, Constantinople and the Hagia Sophia became symbols of lost grandeur. In the Russian Nestor Iskander tale, the foundation of Constantinople (the New Rome) by Constantine the Great and its loss under an emperor by the same name was not seen as a coincidence, but as the fulfilling of the city's destiny, just as Old Rome had been founded by Romulus and lost under Romulus Augustulus.
  Andronikos Kallistos, a prominent 15th-century Greek scholar and Byzantine refugee to Italy, wrote a text entitled Monodia in which he laments the fall of Constantinople and mourns Constantine Palaiologos, whom he refers to as "a ruler more perceptive than Themistocles, more fluent than Nestor, wiser than Cyrus, more just than Rhadamanthus and braver than Hercules".
  The 1453 Greek long poem Capture of the City, of uncertain authorship, laments the bad luck of Constantine, which the author blames on Constantine's ill-advised destruction of Glarentza (including its churches) in the 1420s. According to the author, all of Constantine's other misfortunes—the destruction of the Hexamilion wall, the death of his brother John VIII, and the Fall of Constantinople—were the result of what happened at Glarentza. Even then, Constantine was not to blame for Constantinople's fall: he had done what he could and ultimately relied on help from Western Europe that never came. The poem concludes that people say Constantine died by his own sword, and ends with personally addressing the dead emperor:
  Tell me, where are you to be found? Are you alive, or did you die by your own sword? The conquering Sultan Mehmed searched among the severed heads and corpses, but he never found you ... There are those that say that you are hidden beneath the almighty right hand of the Lord. Would that you were really alive and not dead.
caption: Constantine XI as depicted in 1584 by André Thevet
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