Who Could Claim Constantinople After the Ottoman Conquest?
As I’ve previously noted, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 was not the first time that the Eastern Roman Empire had been ousted from its capital city. However, unlike the 1204 sack of Constantinople by knights of the Fourth Crusade and subsequent restoration after a six-decade occupation, there would be no Byzantine resurgence this time. However, just because the city was in Turkish hands for the moment did not mean that it would necessarily stay that way. In the decades and centuries to come, many other political entities would attempt to lay claim to Constantine’s City.
Although Emperor Constantine XI had perished while defending the city from the Ottoman invaders, he was far from the last of the ruling dynasty of the Palaiologoi. His younger brothers Demetrios and Thomas were co-ruling the Peloponnesian region of Morea far to the south of Constantinople when the city fell. When they were not squabbling with one another, they were soliciting military aid from their Roman Catholic neighbors in hopes that their Latin brothers might help restore the Eastern Roman Empire and, with it, the fortunes of the Palaiologoi.
Sultan Mehmet II eventually lost patience with their continued refusal to pay taxes to him and led an expedition into the heart of Greece. Demetrios remained in Morea where he served the Ottomans as a puppet ruler. Thomas, however, escaped to Italy with his family and attempted to raise support for a crusade to restore the empire of his late brother. Unsuccessful in his attempts at restoring the Eastern Roman Empire, Thomas died in 1465 and his son Andreas became the new head of the Palaiologos dynasty. Although Thomas never claimed the title of Emperor, Andreas adopted it gladly and his title was largely recognized by the Greek refugee community in Rome.
In 1494, while desperately impoverished, Andreas opted to sell his supposed claim to the throne of Constantinople to King Charles VIII of France. The sale came with the condition that Charles would raise a crusade against the Ottomans and grant Morea to Andreas once the conquest was complete. The whole enterprise came to nothing in 1498 when Charles VIII died. At this point, Andreas claimed that the title of Emperor of Constantinople passed back to himself, but the next French king (Louis XII) instead adopted the title for his own, a practice that would continue among French monarchs for more than sixty years.
The French claim to the throne of Constantinople was largely for show and Louis XII was far more interested in pressing his claim to the throne of Naples than he was in restoring an empire whose final collapse was nearly half a century before. However, Andreas was not the only member of the Palaiologos family who survived the carnage in Constantinople.
Sister to Andreas and daughter to Thomas, Zoe Palaiologos was around four years old when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans. When Thomas died in 1465, she was taken under the care of the redundantly-named Pope Sixtus VI. She and her siblings were given an education and Zoe herself may have been raised as a Roman Catholic, though this is not certain.
Like any good father in the late 1400s, the pope made several attempts at arranging marriages for Zoe, but the first few overtures fell through. Then, in 1467, an opportunity presented itself when Maria Tver, the wife of Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow, died. Two years later, the now 20-year old Zoe, who was now known as Sophia, married the Grand Prince of Moscow and would bear him an impressive eleven children.
The Grand Principality of Moscow was a rising power among the various independent states which would eventually become “Russia,” and Sophia is credited with helping her husband Ivan III to develop more impressive court etiquette suitable to Moscow’s ascendancy. In 1480, Grand Prince Ivan III had an opportunity to reverse a previous disaster when he faced off against an army of the Great Horde at the Ugra River and the Muscovite army prevailed, freeing Russia from punitive taxes which they had been paying to Mongol powers for over two and a half centuries.
Moscow’s power grew and its state apparatus continued to evolve along imperial lines. Future rulers of Moscow would not only continue dominating their neighbors both politically and militarily, but would also become champions of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Because Constantinople still contained a significant population who followed the Orthodox faith, and because the granddaughter of the last Byzantine Emperor married Ivan III, the rulers of Russia often fashioned themselves as the rulers of the Third Rome (the first being the original Roman Empire and the second being the Eastern Roman Empire).
Subsequent Russian sovereigns, many of whom descended directly from Sophia Palaiologos, adopted the Third Rome propaganda and continued to consider themselves the rightful patrons and defenders of all Eastern Orthodox believers. Constantinople still hosted a significant number of Orthodox practitioners for many centuries after the Ottoman conquest and it would remain a long-term target of the Russian monarchy even after the Romanov Dynasty took the reins. During World War I, the last Tsar of Russia, Nikolas, even concluded a secret agreement with Britain and France to support a campaign against Turkey which would culminate in the annexation of Constantinople into the Russian Empire. Russian forces never got even close to attaining this wartime stretch goal, but their five-hundred year interest in Constantine’s city is certainly notable. Some grudges last longer than others.
In my alternate history novel, "Califia's Crusade," Constantinople is seized by an alliance of French Crusaders and Russian opportunists in 1500. The book is available for pre-order now through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Bookshop.org and many other popular online platforms!