The Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans by Michael Angold

Author:Michael Angold [Angold, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, History, Turkey
ISBN: 9781317880509
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2011-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

VI

While Bessarion lived, Greek exiles in Italy had a focus. After his death only Anna Notaras, the daughter of the Grand Duke Loukas Notaras, had any real standing in the exile community.83 Despatched to Rome at the beginning of the siege of Constantinople, she found protection with Gregory Melissenos, the refugee patriarch of Constantinople. The Notaras family had great wealth, some of which was in the safekeeping of Venetian and Genoese bankers. When news of the fall of Constantinople reached Venice and Genoa, their respective governments acted to protect the Notaras bank accounts.84 Thanks to support from the Patriarch Gregory and Cardinal Isidore among others, Anna Notaras was able to secure control of her family’s still considerable assets in Venice and Genoa. She used some of it to ransom her sisters, who came to join her in Rome. Their youngest brother Isaac later joined them, after escaping from Ottoman service, to which he had been consigned. Also in Anna’s entourage were her niece Eudokia Kantakouzena85 and the latter’s husband Matthew Spandounes, who came from an Albanian family settled near the Venetian stronghold of Lepanto (Naupaktos). Their lives and those of their children illuminate some of the choices facing Byzantine aristocratic families following the fall of Constantinople.86 Matthew Spandounes entered Venetian service and became a distinguished commander of the stradioti, the light cavalry of Greek and Albanian descent who formed an important arm of the Venetian forces. His children were born in Venice in the 1450s. His daughter married into the Trevisan family, but a very different fate awaited his sons Theodore and Alexander. They were sent to the Ottoman Empire for their education; to the court of their great-aunt Mara, the widow of Sultan Murad II. It was a matter of using family contacts at the Ottoman court to prepare Theodore and Alexander for the role of intermediaries between the Ottomans and Venice, which they duly carried out: Theodore as a diplomat and Alexander as a merchant at Constantinople. Several of their relatives held high office under Mehmed II, while another, Loukas Spandounes, was a very successful merchant at Thessaloniki. His tomb there in the Church of St Demetrios is emblematic of a family caught between East and West.87 It is a Renaissance monument, a product of the same Venetian workshop which a few years earlier created the magnificent tomb in the Church of SS. Paolo and Giovanni at Venice for Doge Pietro Mocenigo (1474–76).88 The Classical Greek lettering on Loukas’s epitaph conforms to the highest Renaissance standards and owes absolutely nothing to Byzantium, even if it describes him as ‘a scion of Byzantium and the Hellenes’.89 His tomb brings a touch of the Venetian Renaissance into the heart of an alien world, for the Church of St Demetrios was not only one of the greatest pilgrimage churches of the Orthodox World but was soon to be converted into a mosque. The example of the Spandounes family is a reminder that Byzantine aristocratic networks survived the fall of Constantinople. They

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