Qualla: Byzantine Empire under the Palaiologos Dynasty

Byzantine Empire under the Palaiologos Dynasty: Introduction

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Pitchka at English Wikipedia., Public domain. On 25 July 1261, a Byzantine general named Alexios Strategopoulos approached the walls of Constantinople with a small force and discovered that the Latin garrison was elsewhere. He walked in. The empire that had ruled from this city for nine centuries, lost it to the Fourth Crusade in 1204, and survived in exile in Nicaea for fifty-seven years had its capital back. The man whose dynasty would inherit this restored empire, Michael VIII Palaiologos, blinded the rightful young heir to make his own claim secure - a brutal opening note for what would become the longest twilight in European history. The Palaiologoi held Constantinople for 192 more years. Most of that time was spent losing.

Image: The original uploader was Pitchka at English Wikipedia. | Public domain

Byzantine Empire under the Palaiologos Dynasty: The Empire That Was Returned

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LatinEmpire, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Byzantium Michael VIII recovered in 1261 was a fragment. The Fourth Crusade had broken the empire into pieces; the Greek successor state of Nicaea had reassembled some of those pieces, but not enough. The city itself was half-ruined, stripped of treasure and population. The H...

Image: LatinEmpire | CC BY-SA 3.0

Byzantine Empire under the Palaiologos Dynasty: Anatolia Slips Away

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frislr, CC BY-SA 4.0. Anatolia had been the heartland of the Byzantine Empire for a thousand years - Constantinople fed itself from Anatolian wheat, raised its armies from Anatolian villages. By 1263, two years after Michael's restoration, Turkic ghazis - frontier warriors driven west by the Mongol pr...

Image: Frislr | CC BY-SA 4.0

Byzantine Empire under the Palaiologos Dynasty: Civil War and Plague

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frislr, CC BY-SA 4.0. Twice in the fourteenth century, Palaiologan emperors fought one another for the throne while the Ottomans grew. The first civil war pitted Andronikos II against his grandson Andronikos III. The second, far more destructive, broke out in 1341 between the regency of the boy empero...

Image: Frislr | CC BY-SA 4.0

Byzantine Empire under the Palaiologos Dynasty: The Final Siege

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Erny51, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 6 April 1453, the cannon of Sultan Mehmed II began firing on the Theodosian walls. The defenders inside were perhaps 7,000, including 2,000 Italian volunteers; the besieging Ottoman army numbered 80,000 or more. The siege lasted fifty-three days. On the evening of 28 May the c...

Image: Erny51 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Byzantine Empire under the Palaiologos Dynasty: What the Refugees Carried

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LatinEmpire, CC BY-SA 3.0. The strangest thing about the Palaiologan period is that, while the empire shrank and starved, its scholars and painters produced what historians now call the Palaeologan Renaissance - a quiet flowering of icon painting, manuscript illumination, mathematics, and classical scholar...

Image: LatinEmpire | CC BY-SA 3.0