Tea at Trianon: Emperor Constantine Palaiologos’ Heroism

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, August 6, 2025

Emperor Constantine Palaiologos’ Heroism

From The Greek Reporter:

If the urban legends are to be believed, “The city has fallen and I am still alive” were the last, painful words of Constantine XI Palaiologos, the last Byzantine Emperor.

On May 29 1453, as the world of Byzantium crumbled around him, its last emperor faced an impossible choice between heroism and humiliation. The story of his final hours on the walls of Constantinople is a blur of history, covered in myth and proud stories of national identity. It is a story that still moves modern Greece, showing how interconnected the identities of the Byzantines, the Eastern Romans and the modern Greeks are. While no one doubts that Constantine Palaiologos died like a hero, how exactly he fell remains a mystery that gave rise to one of Greece’s most prominent modern legends.

The facts, as much as we can ever know them, are pieced together from the accounts of men who were there at these historic moments for the entire region. The Venetian surgeon Nicolò Barbaro wrote in his ”Giornale dell’assedio di Costantinopoli” about the pure chaos that engulfed Constantinople as the Turks were advancing towards the once mighty Byzantine capital. Similar accounts we find in Archbishop Leonard of Chios’ writings in his letter he sent to Pope Nicholas V. Their accounts agree that Constantine, facing the vast army of Sultan Mehmed II, refused to flee or surrender his city. (Read more.)