Essays on the Latin Orient

by William Miller

4. BALKAN EXILES IN ROME

Those of us who are students of Punch may remember a caricature, which appeared in 1848, the year of almost universal revolution. Two distinguished foreigners were represented as arriving at Claridge’s Hotel and asking for accommodation. “I regret,” replied the manager, “that I cannot oblige you; my hotel is entirely occupied by dethroned monarchs, all except one single-bedded room, and that I am reserving, in case of necessity, for His Holiness the Pope!” What London was to the royal refugees of western Europe in 1848, that was Rome to the Balkan exiles of the second half of the fifteenth century. The Pope was then their generous host, and the Borgo their Claridge’s Hotel. In the words of Pius II’s biographer, “he summoned to Rome almost all those whom the Turks had ejected from their homes, and contributed money for their maintenance[909].”

There has never been a period in the history of the Near East, when such a clean sweep has been made of principalities and powers. When Pope Nicholas V celebrated the mid-century Jubilee, the Balkan peninsula and the Levant were still largely occupied by a long series of Christian States, which had existed there for well-nigh 250 years. The romantic Duchy of Athens was still standing under the Acciajuoli of Florence; the Morea was divided between the two brothers Thomas and Demetrios Palaiologos; their more famous brother, the Emperor Constantine, had just left his Peloponnesian palace at Mistra, the Sparta of the Middle Ages, to ascend the throne of all the Cæsars at Constantinople. The Italian family of Crispo, from whom the greatest Italian statesman of our time traced his descent, still ruled from their castle at Naxos over the far-flung Duchy of the Archipelago. Another Italian clan, the Gattilusj of Genoa, in whose veins flowed both the Imperial blood of the Greek Emperors and that of the House of Savoy, were still governing the island of Lesbos and the city of Ænos in Thrace, with their respective dependencies. A Genoese syndicate, the Maona of the Giustiniani, the forerunner of the Chartered Companies of our time, managed the rich mastic-plantations of the island of Chios. The picturesque Kingdom of Cyprus, with which were united the long-empty titles of King of Jerusalem and King of Armenia, was still in the hands of the French family of Lusignan, to which our Richard Cœur-de-Lion had sold it more than two-and-a-half centuries earlier; but the most important Cypriote harbour, that of Famagosta, where the Lusignans had been wont to be crowned Kings of Jerusalem, had passed into the possession of the Genoese Bank of St George, that famous institution, whose palace, lately restored, is now the seat of the Genoese Harbour Board. The family of Tocco, whose ancestors had migrated to Greece from Benevento, had just lost almost the last fragment of its possessions on the Greek mainland, but still retained the County Palatine of Cephalonia, which embraced four of the Ionian Islands and included the mythical realm of Odysseus. Venice was still the Queen of the Adriatic. The whole of the Dalmatian coast was Venetian, save where the commercial Republic of Ragusa maintained that independence, of which the recently erected statue of Orlando was the symbol and still is the memorial. From the southern extremity of Dalmatia, a chain of Venetian harbours—Antivari, Dulcigno and Durazzo—names familiar to modern diplomacy—united the northern territories of Venice with her colony of Corfù. Far to the south she held Crete; off the east coast of Greece she occupied the long island of Eubœa. In the north of the Balkan peninsula, Serbia was still a Christian Principality, and the riches of its Prince, derived from the Serbian mines, were almost fabulous. Montenegro, under the first of its “Black Princes,” had started on its career of independence; Albania was still largely unconquered, owing to the heroic resistance of the great national hero, Skanderbeg; while its capital, Scutari, was still a Venetian colony. The mediæval Kingdom of Bosnia with its elaborate feudal system, still survived; the sister-land of the Herzegovina, then known as Hum, was ruled by a great Slav magnate, Stephen Vuktchich, who had lately received the title of Duke of St Sava, from which, in its German form of Herzog, his former Duchy to-day retains the name of the Herzegovina. Beyond the Danube, the two Roumanian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia were, the former still independent, the latter, if tributary, still restive. And far away on the shores of the Black Sea, the Greek Empire of Trebizond still lingered under the family of Grand-Komnenos—whose Princesses were the most beautiful women, whose Princes the most tragic figures of their time.

Such was the map of the Near East in 1450, on the eve of the accession of the greatest of the Sultans, Mohammed II. With his advent ancient Empires and mediæval Principalities disappeared as by magic, and a political earthquake shook the thrones of the Levant to their foundations. In 1453 the last Byzantine Emperor fell at his post on the walls of Constantinople; the oldest political institution in the world came to an end, and the Turkish capital was moved from Adrianople to the Bosporus. In 1456 Moldavia was made to pay tribute, the Gattilusj were driven from Ænos and the Acciajuoli from the city of Athens; in 1459 Serbia, in 1460 the Morea and the rest of the Duchy of Athens ceased to exist. Next year the Empire of Trebizond was incorporated with Turkey, the year following the Gattilusj no longer ruled over Lesbos. In 1463 the last native King of Bosnia was beheaded in the presence of the great Sultan on the meadow opposite the lovely city of Jajce; in 1468 the death of Skanderbeg deprived Albania of her brave defender. Two years later Venice lamented the loss of Eubœa, the greatest blow that had ever befallen the Republic. In 1479 the Tocchi were driven from their island county; by 1483 the Herzegovina was wholly Turkish. The rulers and nobles of most of these countries sought refuge in Rome, and thus the epilogue of the long and tragic drama of Balkan history was played here. Italy was their nearest land of refuge; it had been the cradle of many of their ancestors; and the Pope was the head of Western Christendom, to whom some of them had appealed in their distress.

The most notable of these distinguished exiles was the Despot Thomas Palaiologos, who sailed from Corfù for Ancona towards the end of 1460, accompanied by most of his magnates, and bearing the head of St Andrew, which had long been preserved at Patras. The relic was known to be a valuable asset in the dethroned Despot’s balance-sheet, although Amalfi already possessed a portion of the saint’s remains. Many Princes offered large sums for it, and its fortunate possessor had accordingly no difficulty in disposing of it to the Pope in return for an annuity. The precious relic was deposited for safety in the castle of Narni, while Thomas proceeded to Rome, where Pius II bestowed upon him the Golden Rose, the symbol of virtues which he had scarcely displayed in his long career of intrigue, a lodging in the Santo Spirito hospital, and an allowance of 300 gold pieces a month, to which the Cardinals added 200 more—a sum which his too numerous followers considered barely enough for his maintenance and certainly not for theirs. Venice, however, contributed a further sum of 500 ducats to his treasury, but the cautious Republic begged him not to return to Corfù or any of her other colonies, so as not to embarrass her then rather delicate relations with the Turks. Meanwhile, on April 12, 1462, the day after Palm Sunday, Pius II received the head of St Andrew at the Ponte Milvio, on the spot where the little chapel of that Apostle with its commemorative inscription now stands. A recent visit to the chapel, which has been completely isolated, and is now standing alone in a network of tramlines and roads, suggests the melancholy reflection that ere long it too may be sacrificed to that civile progresso, which has cost this city so many interesting mediæval monuments. Thomas’ fellow-countryman, the famous Cardinal Bessarion, handed the case containing the head to the Pope, who bade the sacred skull welcome among its relatives, the Romans, “the nephews of St Peter”—a ceremony depicted on the tomb of Pius II in Sant’ Andrea della Valle. Shortly afterwards, upon the death of his wife, whom he had left behind in Corfù, Thomas summoned his two sons, Andrew and Manuel, and his daughter Zoe to join him in Rome. But before they arrived, he died, on May 12, 1465, and was buried in the crypt of St Peter’s, where all efforts to find his grave have proved fruitless. But every visitor to Rome unconsciously gazes upon his features, for on account of his tall and handsome appearance he served as a model for the statue of St Paul, which still stands at the steps of St Peter’s.

Misfortunes make strange bedfellows, and a common disaster had brought together as exiles in Rome, condemned to live upon the papal charity, the former Greek Despot of the Morea and his enemy, the natural son of the last Frankish Prince of Achaia. After two centuries of conflict, the Greeks had succeeded, at the eleventh hour, in extinguishing the rule of the Franks in the peninsula, only to fall themselves before the all-conquering Turk. To consecrate the Greek conquest, Thomas Palaiologos had married the heiress of Centurione II Zaccaria, the last Frankish ruler, and the last legitimate descendant of a famous Genoese family, which had made a fortune out of the alum-mines of Phocæa on the coast of Asia Minor, become lords of the rich island of Chios in the days before the Chartered Company, and had at last attained to the throne of Achaia. But Centurione had left a natural son, Giovanni Asan, who had raised the standard of revolt against the Greeks. Imprisoned by Thomas in the splendid castle of Chlomoutsi, or Castel Tornese, the mint of the Morea, whose ruins still stand on a tortoise-shaped eminence which overlooks the fertile plain of Elis and the flourishing harbour of Zante, he had escaped a lingering death by hunger, rallied his old adherents, and actually received the congratulations of the King of Naples and the Venetian Republic upon his release and their recognition of his title. Thomas had, however, suppressed this rebellion with Turkish aid, and the pretender had fled first to one of the Venetian colonies, and thence to Naples, whence we find him writing for aid to the Bank of St George in his ancestral city of Genoa[910]. In 1459 a Genoese document reveals him begging the Genoese government to recommend him to the generosity of Pius II. Genoa was at that time under French rule, and the Duke of Calabria, who was the royal lieutenant, accordingly wrote to Pius II and to Cardinal Lodovico Scarampi, the Patriarch of Aquileia, who was the Pope’s Chamberlain, recommending to their notice “the magnificent lord Centurione Zaccaria, not long ago Prince of the Morea.” I think that there was a special reason for the activity of the Genoese government on the exile’s behalf. There is in the Cathedral of Genoa a splendid relic, known as “the cross of the Zaccaria,” and consisting of a piece of the true cross, encased in gold and studded with precious stones. This is said to have been brought by St John the Evangelist to Ephesus, captured by the Turks when they took that place, and pawned by them at Phocæa, which then belonged, as we saw, to the Zaccaria family. In 1307, in consequence of a quarrel between two of its members over the accounts of the alum-mines, Tedisio Zaccaria begged the famous Catalan chronicler, Ramon Muntaner, who was then encamped with the Catalan Grand Company at the Dardanelles, to assist him in sacking the town. Muntaner informs us that his share of the booty was this cross, and the problem has hitherto been to find when and how it was brought to Genoa. Now, as there is no mention of the cross at Genoa before 1466, I have no doubt whatever that it was this last scion of the Zaccaria who brought it from Greece, just as his brother-in-law, Thomas Palaiologos, had brought the head of St Andrew, and disposed of it to the city of Genoa for a valuable consideration, of which one portion was a letter of introduction to the Pope.

Until recently there was no trace of the “Prince of the Morea’s” sojourn in Rome. I noticed, however, in a book by a German scholar, Gottlob, on the subject of papal finance, an allusion to a certain “Prince of Sani.” There being no such place, it seemed to me that the learned German must have misunderstood the name of Giovanni Asani. Examination of the original documents in the “Archivio di Stato” proved this surmise to be correct. The Liber depositarii Sancte Cruciate contains numerous entries of twenty florins a month paid to domino Johanni Zaccarie olim Amoree principi, beginning with September, 1464, and ending with December 31, 1468, after which there is no more mention of the pension, and the pensioner was therefore probably deceased. These sums, which Paul II, and after him Sixtus IV, gave to Oriental potentates in distress, were derived from the proceeds of the alum-mines, discovered at Tolfa in 1462 by another exile from the Near East, Giovanni de Castro, who had been engaged in the dyeing trade at Constantinople, had fled to Rome after the Turkish conquest, and had been appointed treasurer of the patrimony of the Church. Genoese workmen, formerly employed in the alum-mines of Phocæa, were summoned to Tolfa, the Pope declared that the discoverer deserved a statue, Court poets wrote more or less excellent verses in his honour, and Pius told the world that the alum of Tolfa had been given by Providence as the sinews of war against the Infidels, and bade all good Christians deal exclusively with the papal alum factory. Thus, by a curious coincidence, the last of the Zaccaria kept body and soul together by a pittance derived from the sale of that mineral, which had formed in happier days the foundation of his forefathers’ fortunes.

In 1461 another very distinguished relative of the dethroned Imperial family of Constantinople arrived in Rome—Queen Charlotte of Cyprus. There are few more remarkable figures even in the romantic history of the Latin Orient than this brave and masculine woman, the offspring of France and Byzantium. Queen Charlotte was the only daughter and heiress of King Jean II de Lusignan by his marriage with Helen daughter of Theodore II Palaiologos, Despot of Mistra, and she was therefore grand-niece of Thomas Palaiologos. Succeeding to the throne of Cyprus in 1458, at the age of 18, she was already both an orphan and a widow—for her first husband, a son of the King of Portugal, was dead—and she therefore hastened to conclude a second marriage with her cousin, Louis, Count of Geneva, second son of Louis, Duke of Savoy. Her consort had already been engaged to a daughter of Robert III of Scotland, and those of us who are of Scottish descent will learn with a flush of pride that our business-like ancestors demanded a huge sum as damages for this breach of promise. Possibly the young scion of the House of Savoy would have done better to establish himself in Scotland rather than Cyprus; for his Cypriote bride in the year after her marriage was driven from the greater part of her realm by her late father’s illegitimate son James, aided by the Sultan of Egypt. The castle of Cérines, or Kyrenia, however, which overlooks the sea to the north of the island, and of which a full description has recently been published by the British authorities, held out; and there the royal pair took refuge. During an interval in the siege, the intrepid Queen and her feeble husband journeyed to Rhodes on board a galley of the Knights, which lay in the harbour, to ask for aid. The Grand Master, Jacques de Milly, received them politely; but their journey had no practical results, beyond the gift of some money, corn and cannon, and after their return the Queen accordingly resolved to leave her husband at Cérines, and seek assistance in the West. On this journey, however, between Cyprus and Rhodes, her galley was stopped and pillaged by the Venetians, while some Mameluke prisoners, who were on board, cut the rigging and nearly murdered the Queen. Even thirty years later the Republic had not paid the damages due for this high-handed act of piracy[911]. At last, under the escort of Sor de Naves, the Sicilian governor of Cérines, the Queen arrived at Ostia in the second half of October, 1461, and proceeded up the Tiber till she reached St Paul-outside-the-walls. There she landed, and was met by the Cardinals, who escorted her to the city, where she took up her temporary residence at San Ciriaco[912], the church mentioned by the British visitor of 1450, Capgrave, recently introduced to our notice, and which was the predecessor of Sta Maria degli Angeli in the Baths of Diocletian. We have in the Commentaries[913] of Pius II an interesting description of the royal suppliant on the occasion of her first audience with the Pope. She appeared to be twenty-four years of age, she was of a mediocre height, and dressed like a Frenchwoman, her eyes sparkled with fire, and her tongue was “like a torrent.” It seems possible, however, that the Holy Father may have exaggerated her volubility, owing to the fact that she spoke in a language which was not his own. For to the end of her days, Queen Charlotte, although she could write French, Italian, and perhaps Latin, was unable to speak French and always used Greek, the language of her mother. Indeed, in the most important business transactions of her life, she resorted to an interpreter, whom we may be surprised to find a man of English extraction—not the last occasion, I fear, on which treaties relating to the Eastern question have been negotiated by persons imperfectly acquainted with the language in which they were negotiating. The Queen humbly kissed the Pope’s feet, and on the next day delivered a set speech to him through the medium of a translator. She began by firing off a well-worn tag from the Æneid, which doubtless tickled the palate of the classical Æneas Sylvius, whom she saw before her. “My first husband,” she said, “is dead; my second is besieged: whether he be alive or dead, I do not know. Cérines is our only refuge; on the way hither the Venetians have robbed me. I can stand no more voyages by sea; I have neither horses nor money for a journey by land.”

The Pope, who had refused to receive officially the envoys of her rival, bade the Queen be of good cheer, for he would not desert her. “You are expiating,” he replied, “the faults of your father-in-law, who declined to offer Us aid against the Turks, and of your husband, who would not even take the trouble to meet Us when We were at Mantua. So We said, ‘the House of Savoy despises the Church’”—a remark which might have been taken from a clerical newspaper of our own day. Pius II concluded by the promise of horses and money for the journey to her father-in-law’s Court in Savoy. She remained on this occasion some ten days more in Rome, until she had seen the chief churches and had had four or five audiences with the Pope, who gave her much corn and wine for revictualling Cérines and twelve horses and 200 ducats for her journey. On November 5 she wrote from San Ciriaco to the Florentine Republic, stating that her business with the Pope was terminated, and asking for a passport for the dominions of Florence. On the 20th she reached Bologna, where she was lodged gratis at the “Osteria del Leone[914],” and whence she proceeded by way of Venice and Milan to Savoy. The Duke of Milan and the Council of Geneva gave her a good reception; but her father-in-law told her plainly that the connection with Cyprus had “exhausted” his Duchy, and complaint was afterwards made of the expense of entertaining her for nearly four months at Lausanne and Thonon, where the Court then was. Her appeals to the King of Aragon and to Pierre-Raymond Zacosta, the new Grand Master, were in vain; so, after bequeathing the Crown of Cyprus to the House of Savoy in the event of her death without heirs, the indomitable Queen returned in September of 1462 to her island, and shut herself up once more in the royal apartments at Cérines. Having obtained so little from the Christian Powers, she sent the Count of Jaffa to ask the aid of Mohammed II, offering to pay tribute and to surrender a city of the island to the Turks—a fact, which is probably the origin of the erroneous statement of the Greek historian, Phrantzes[915], that Mohammed II rendered Cyprus tributary. The Sultan’s reply was to order her envoy to be sawn asunder. Meanwhile, her craven husband had abandoned Cérines and fled to Rhodes, whence he returned to Savoy in 1464. At last, when the garrison of Cérines was reduced to eat the cats that prowled along the battlements, the Queen likewise sought refuge in Rhodes, whither many of her knights and vassals accompanied her. Sor de Naves surrendered the castle to her relentless enemy, who thus, in October, 1463, was King of all Cyprus, save where the Banca di San Giorgio still held Famagosta.

The heroic Queen did not despair of recovering her Kingdom. She wrote from Rhodes a year later to her husband, urging him to send assistance, and telling him that her poverty alone prevented her from reconquering it. But Louis had had enough of both his consort and his castles, as the Italian chronicler[916] tells us, and remained for the rest of his life, which ended in 1482, in his native land, without occupying himself with either. Queen Charlotte continued to reside for several years in Rhodes, whence she could watch Cypriote politics and where she received a monthly allowance from the Order. The Holy See continued to recognise her as lawful sovereign of Cyprus; and in 1471, when the usurper sent the Archbishop of Nicosia to Rome to ask the Pope to crown him King and to give him in marriage the hand of Princess Zoe, daughter of Thomas Palaiologos and then a young widow, living there under the care of Cardinal Bessarion, His Holiness refused both requests. This is the version of the contemporary Greek chronicler; but the Italian annalist cynically remarks that the Pope agreed to crown him if he would marry the Holy Father’s niece, but that when the King of Cyprus saw the lady’s portrait and heard her habits, he declined the crown on such terms. Instead, he married the famous Catherine Cornaro, who in 1489 brought the Kingdom of Cyprus to Venice.

Upon the death of the bastard in 1473, we find Queen Charlotte renewing her attempts to recover the island. She then waited at Rhodes, and endeavoured to negotiate with the Sultan of Egypt, who arrested her envoy, and with the Venetian Admiral then in the Levant, who plainly told her that he marvelled at her ignorance of the fact that kingdoms were obtained by might not by right, and that Catherine Cornaro was the adopted daughter of his government. A plot to deliver Cérines to her failed; and, although there was a party in the island favourable to her, most of the Cypriotes preferred the Venetians, as being better able to protect them. Venice ordered her exclusion from the coveted kingdom, many of her followers abandoned her, when they found that all chance of a restoration was over, and in 1475 she settled at Rome in the Palazzo Spinola, or dei Convertendi, in the Piazza Scossa Cavalli, where from September, 1476, Sixtus IV gave her a monthly allowance of 200 ducats. But in her Roman exile she did not abandon her schemes for the recovery of Cyprus. She had adopted Alonzo, son of Ferdinand I, King of Naples, and her plan was to proceed to Cairo on a Genoese galley, and thence, with the aid of the Sultan of Egypt, to recapture her throne. The Sultan actually invested her with the crown, and Venice was so much alarmed that a Venetian envoy was authorised to proceed to Rome, and offer her an annuity of 5000 ducats, if she would consent to reside on Venetian territory. Her schemes failed; she returned to Rome in 1482, and continued to be the honoured pensioner of the Pope. Such was the honour which he showed her, that in November, 1483, on the occasion of an audience, she was granted a seat “neither less distinguished nor lower than the chair of the Pontiff”—a mark of attention, so the contemporary diarist[917] remarks, “which was not approved by some.” On February 25, 1485, she ceded the Kingdom of Cyprus to her nephew Charles, Duke of Savoy, whose descendants, the present Italian dynasty, have thus inherited from her the titles of Kings of Cyprus, Jerusalem and Armenia. This document was executed in the presence of several Cardinals, of her Cypriote confessor, and of her councillor, James Langlois, who acted as interpreter. In return for this act of cession, the Duke agreed to pay to his aunt, as long as she remained in Rome, an annual pension of 4300 florins and to provide her with a residence worthy of her rank. A subsequent deed charged this pension upon the rates of Nice. The Queen did not long enjoy this annuity; on July 16, 1487, she died at her Roman residence of paralysis, and was buried in St Peter’s “near the chapel of St Andrew and St Gregory,” and not far from the spot, where, eleven years before, her faithful Chamberlain, Hugh Langlois, lord of Beirût, had been laid to rest. Eleven Cardinals were present at the mass held in St Peter’s for the repose of her soul; but her body was not allowed to rest permanently where it had been placed. In 1610, at the time of the destruction of the old basilica by Paul V, her tomb was opened, when it was found to contain the remains of a woman of moderate height, a few pieces of black silk, and some gilded buckles[918]. These remains were then re-interred in their present resting-place in the crypt of St Peter’s, where a slab in the pavement bears the simple inscription: “Karola Hierlm̅ Cipri et Armenie Regina obiit XVI Julii an D. MCCCCLXXXVII.” Other memorials of the exiled Queen of Cyprus still exist in Rome. One of the pictures (no. XXXI) in the Santo Spirito hospital represents her as kneeling before Sixtus IV, and the inscription below describes how “Charlotte, Queen of Cyprus, despoiled of her kingdom and her fortune, flees as a suppliant to Sixtus IV, and is received by him with the utmost benignity and munificence.” Torrigio adds, that on this occasion the voluble Queen felt unequal to the task of expressing her admiration for and gratitude to her benefactor. I think it is possible to identify the personages who are depicted behind the kneeling Queen. The two divines are probably John Chafforicios, her confessor, and Lodovico Podochatoro, a member of a well-known Cypriote family, who became secretary of Alexander VI and a Cardinal, and whose monument is still admired in Sta Maria del Popolo. The laymen are, I would suggest, Hugh Bousat and his wife, Charlotte Cantacuzene de Flory, daughter of the Count of Jaffa, who were her pensioners and who were in receipt of a small papal allowance as late as 1513, and Philip Langlois, who lived about 40 years in Rome, and was granted an annuity of 15 ducats from Julius II, increased to 20 in that year. The vestments, altar cloths, and the four lbs. of silver, which the Queen bequeathed to St Peter’s, have disappeared, but another proof of her piety is to be found in her entry, recorded in Latin by her own hand, into the Confraternity of the Santo Spirito on March 27, 1478. An example of the seal, which she used in Rome, is preserved in Turin, and reproduces the streamers of the Cypriote Order of the Sword, while her two rare coins are, I believe, in the King of Italy’s collection. Her little band of courtiers lingered on for many years here; Innocent VIII recommended them to the charity of the Duke of Savoy as distinguished by lineage and virtue; and one of them, Giorgio Flatro, by marrying his daughter to Pietro Aldobrandini, became the ancestor of Clement VIII. As late as January 1520, Leo X assigned 70 ducats out of the alum-mines of Tolfa to two other Cypriotes of the lineage of Lusignan—Eugène and John, natural sons of Queen Charlotte’s rival, whom the cautious Venetian Republic had removed from Cyprus with their mother and sister in 1477, and had imprisoned in the castle of Padua, lest they should embarrass Catherine Cornaro[919]. This is another example of papal generosity, which contrasts with the selfish conduct of the Venetian Republic, and incidentally disproves the statement of Count Mas Latrie[920], that the two illegitimate sons of James II died at Padua, where their sister is buried.

Another exiled Queen was living in Rome at the same time as Charlotte of Cyprus, and, like her, died and was buried here. Most visitors to this city have seen the tomb of the Queen Dowager Catherine of Bosnia in Ara Cœli; but perhaps her story is less familiar, because the very interesting history of Bosnia is little known. Queen Catherine was the daughter of Stephen Vuktchich, the Duke of St Sava, from whom the Herzegovina derives its name, and boasted her descent through her mother Helen from the mediæval Princes and Tsars of Serbia. Like her father and most of the Bosnian rulers and nobles of the fifteenth century, she belonged to the Bogomile or Patarene heresy, which corresponded with the Albigensian heresy of Provence, which coloured several centuries of Bosnian history, largely contributed to the Turkish conquest of that country, and survived there in the case of one family down to the memory of persons still living. Owing, however, to the efforts of the papal legate, the young Princess was converted to Catholicism probably at the time of her marriage in 1445, or 1446, to King Stephen Thomas of Bosnia. A Slav poet has commemorated her beauty and sung of her wedding; but her fate was hard, and many a tragedy was in store for her. To marry her, Stephen Thomas had put away his first wife, a woman of obscure birth, whom his proud barons would not accept as their Queen, and it was the discarded consort’s son, Stephen Tomashevich, who murdered him to obtain the crown on July 10, 1461, assassination or abdication being the usual alternative of Balkan monarchs. Thus, at the age of 37, Catherine was left a widow, with two children of her own, Sigismund and Catherine. In view, however, of the political situation, the stepmother and the stepson agreed to bury the past, and the Queen Dowager remained in Bosnia till the fall of the Kingdom in 1463. Both her children were then captured by the Turks and forced to embrace Islâm, while she managed to escape to the Republic of Ragusa, where the authorities offered her an annual rent for the land and houses of her late husband, and where she presented “marvellous choral books,” destroyed by fire in 1667, to the Franciscan convent. Thence she crossed the Adriatic and came to Rome, where we find her in receipt of a monthly pension of 100 ducats from 1466. In addition to this, Pope Paul II paid to one Jacopo Mentebone, a Roman citizen, a sum of 20 ducats a month from October, 1467, “for the rent of a house let with all the necessary utensils to the Queen of Bosnia.” At the time of her death, she was residing “near the Church of San Marco de Urbe in the Rione Pigna,” surrounded by a considerable court of faithful Slavs, and she was a personage of importance, figuring for example at the wedding of Zoe Palaiologina in 1472. She had, however, bitter disappointments. Her father, the Duke of St Sava, who died in 1466, cut her out of his will; the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, whom she begged to lend her money for ransoming her children, declined to assist her. After a twelve years’ residence here, she felt her end approaching, and on October 20, 1478, made her last testament, a very curious document of great political interest. After directing that she should be buried in the church of Ara Cœli, she expressed the hope, that one day the Kingdom of Bosnia would once more submit to Christian rule—an aspiration accomplished in October, 1908. Meanwhile, mindful of the munificence of the Holy See and of the benefits which she had received from Paul II and Sixtus IV, who had always treated her hospitably, helping her according to her royal dignity with an annual pension and provision sufficient for her necessities, she bequeathed her kingdom in trust to the Holy See, until such time as her son or her daughter should return “from the vomit of Mahomet” to the true faith. Should they, however, remain Mohammedans, then Bosnia was to be at the absolute disposition of the Pope and his successors. It was this clause which prompted a well-known Slavonic journalist in Rome to announce immediately after the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia in 1908, that the Emperor Francis Joseph would receive the Bosnian crown, as the last native King of Bosnia had received it, from the hands of the Pope. Having thus disposed of her phantom kingdom, Catherine proceeded to bequeath the rest of her real and personal property to the three faithful ladies-in-waiting, Paola Mirkovich, Helena Sempovich and Maria Misglenovich, who had shared her Roman exile. To the first she also left a legacy of 50 ducats, a dress of black satin lined with squirrel, and another of black cloth lined with lynx; to the second 25 ducats and a long gown of black cloth with a lining of marten-skin; to the third 30 ducats and a long, simple gown of black cloth. To her major-domo, Radich Klesich, she left 50 ducats, a scimitar inlaid with silver, and a Turkish dress of red silk woven with gold, as well as a sum of 38 ducats, which she had borrowed from him; to her servants, George Zubravich and Abraham Radich, respectively 50 and 30 ducats. To her son Sigismund she bequeathed his father’s sword, inlaid with silver; but, if he remained an infidel, the precious heirloom was to pass to her nephew Balsha, whom we find thirty years later as titular “Duke of St Sava.” To both her children she also left a silver dagger, two cups and two tankards of silver, with lids inlaid with emeralds. To the church of Ara Cœli she devised her royal mantle of cloth of gold and a silk dossal of divers colours for the altar, which had been used in her private chapel; to the hospital of San Gerolamo degli Schiavoni all the furniture and sacred vessels of the latter. The relics in her possession she bequeathed to the Franciscan church of St Catherine at Jajce—a church in which she had always been deeply interested. In 1458, at her request, and again in 1462, Pius II had granted indulgences to all who visited this church, which was believed to contain the body of St Luke, brought thither from the castle of Rogus in Epeiros[921], and of which a beautiful Italian campanile still remains. Finally, after naming her executors, she directed that her will, together with the royal sword, should be presented to the Cardinal bishop of Porto, the vice-chancellor of the Church, then Rodrigo Borgia, afterwards Pope Alexander VI.

Five days later the testatrix died, and was buried in Ara Cœli, as she had directed. It is said that over her grave was placed a Slavonic inscription, which ran as follows: “To the Bosnian Queen Catherine, daughter of Stephen, Duke of St Sava, and of the race of Helen of the house of Tsar Stephen, and wife of the Bosnian King Thomas, who lived 54 years and died in Rome October 25, 1478, this Monument was erected by her own written orders.” This Slavonic inscription has, however, long ago disappeared. It was fortunately copied by Palatino[922] in 1535 as an example of Slavonic writing from the monument in Ara Cœli, with an accurate Latin version. Casimiro Romano[923], the historian of that church, states that the monument of Queen Catherine, with that of Cardinal Alibret, was moved from the floor of the presbytery in front of the high altar in 1590 to its present position on a pillar behind an ambon to the left as one faces the altar. The Slavonic inscription was probably then lost and the present Latin inscription substituted. This latter corresponds with neither the Slavonic text nor the truth; for it describes how “To Catherine, the Bosnian Queen, sister of Stephen, Duke of St Sava, born of the race of Helen and of the house of Prince Stephen, wife of Thomas, King of Bosnia, who lived 54 years and fell asleep at Rome on October 25, 1478, this monument was erected by her own written orders.” This inscription was obviously composed by someone ignorant of her genealogy, for she was the daughter, not the “sister” of Duke Stephen, and the word sorori is probably a misunderstanding of the Slav poroda (“race”). On either side of her head is a coat of arms, that of her husband and that of her father. The latter is so greatly worn, that it can no longer be distinguished, but the former, which I examined from a ladder, still shows, on a close inspection, the two crowns and the two horsemen, but not the mailed arm with the sword, which was in the centre, as may be seen from the representation of this monument in Ciacconius’ Lives and Acts of the Popes and Cardinals. The two crowns in the quarterings are those of Bosnia and Serbia, for from 1376 the Bosnian Kings always styled themselves also Kings of Serbia; the arm with the sword represents Primorje, or “the Coastland”—also a part of the Bosnian royal title; the two horsemen are the Kotromanich emblem. Considering the worn appearance of the actual monument, and the sharply cut lettering of the Latin inscription, I think that the latter can never have been placed on the floor of the church, but was a later addition, cut at a time when the Slavonic inscription was misunderstood, or perhaps even mislaid. It is said by Luccari[924], the old historian of Ragusa, that another portrait of Queen Catherine exists in Rome, and is to be found in the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican, where a woman in the foreground may perhaps be the Queen.

The Pope did not forget the household of the testatrix. From the next month after her death her three ladies, Paola, Helena, and Maria, with a fourth named Praxina, received 14 ducats monthly from the papal treasury. Her will did not, however, prevent him from recognising another person as King of Bosnia. One of the paintings (No. 27) in the Santo Spirito hospital represents the visit of “the King of Bosnia and Wallachia” to the Pope, and the inscription adds how this monarch “although exhausted by age visits the thresholds of the Apostles and submissively venerates Sixtus IV by kissing his feet.” It does not seem to have occurred to anyone to ask who this mysterious personage was, although the last native King of Bosnia had been killed eight years before the accession of Sixtus IV, and the conjunction of the crowns of Bosnia and Wallachia is curious. It is not difficult, however, to identify this sovereign. One of the old books, which alludes to the picture, calls him “N.” which is the initial of Nicholas of Ilok on the Danube (the place where Prince Odescalchi’s Hungarian castle is situated). This great magnate, when the Hungarians temporarily captured Jajce from the Turks, received from Matthias Corvinus in 1471 the title of “King of Bosnia”—by which he is described in papal documents[925] of 1475-6. As he was also voivode of Transylvania, whose inhabitants were Wallachs, he is called also “King of Wallachia” in the inscription. His visit to Rome may be fixed from a letter of Sixtus IV, dated May 2, 1475, in which he is stated as having been “lately present.” Doubtless, he came for the Jubilee of that year, and this is the explanation of Wadding’s erroneous statement, that Queen Catherine did not come to Rome till 1475.

Another Slavonic sovereign sought refuge in Rome. This was Stephen Brankovich, Despot of Serbia, who had been blinded by Murad II years before, and who, after the fall of his country had sought a refuge with Skanderbeg, the heroic champion of the Albanians. There he married Angelina, sister-in-law of Skanderbeg and daughter of Giorgio Arianiti, a great Albanian chieftain. As the struggle in Albania became more and more desperate, Skanderbeg, at the end of 1465, came to Rome to ask the aid of Paul II, who received him with extraordinary honours, due to one who was “the first soldier of Jesus Christ.” A memorial of his stay here is the Vicolo Scanderbeg, where the house, No. 116, bears his portrait over the door with the following inscription: “Geor. Castriota A. Scanderbeg Princeps Epiri ad fidem iconis rest. an. Dom. MDCCCXLIII.” Thence, at the end of January, 1466, he returned to defend his fortress of Kroja, where two years later he died, and Albanian independence with him. Before that event the Serbian Despot had left him for Rome, for from December, 1467, he was drawing a papal pension of 40 ducats a month, continued to his widow from December, 1479. Here, too, her brother Costantino Arianiti found a living, becoming protonotary apostolic under Sixtus IV, who gave him a monthly pension of 32 ducats from October, 1476, increased to 40 from November, 1479—not, indeed, much to keep up the position of one who styled himself “Prince of Macedonia.”

The Turkish annexation of the County Palatine of Cephalonia in 1479 brought another band of Oriental exiles to Rome. The Tocco family, however, which had ruled over the dominions of Ulysses for more than a century, had gone from Benevento to Greece, and Leonardo III was, therefore, merely returning to the land of his forebears. On February 29, 1480, he arrived in Rome with his son Carlo and his brothers Giovanni and Antonio. A man so well connected was sure of a good reception—for he had married a niece of King Ferdinand of Naples, while the Pope’s nephew had married his sister-in-law, and he was himself related to the Imperial houses of both Byzantium and Serbia. Accordingly, the Cardinals’ servants met him outside the Lateran Gate and escorted him to the house which he had hired between the Via Pellicciaria and the Botteghe Oscure. Sixtus IV, whose predecessor had already given him periodical sums of 1000 to 1200 ducats from 1466, gave him 1000 gold pieces and promised him 2000 a year—an event commemorated by another of the paintings in the Santo Spirito hospital, where we are shown how the Pope “nourished with his royal bounty the rulers of the Peloponnese and of Epeiros, Andrew Palaiologos and Leonardo Tocco.” After staying rather more than a month here, he returned to Naples, leaving his natural son, Ferdinando, behind him—a spirited youth, who once said in the hearing of the diarist, Volaterranus, “though we have lost our rings, we have still got our fingers entire.” Leonardo received valuable fiefs in the south of Italy, but died in Rome under the pontificate of Alexander VI owing to the collapse of his house. His son Carlo III lived in the Via S. Marco, where, after enjoying a monthly pension, he died under Leo X, and we find that Pope paying monthly pensions of 60 and 32 ducats respectively to two other members of the family, Carlo’s sister Raymunda, Contessa de Mirandola, and his son and heir (Giovanni) Leonardo IV, Despot of Arta, and a small sum to Giovanni’s widow, Lucrezia[926]. The family of Tocco has only lately become extinct by the deaths of the Duca della Regina in 1908 and of his only son, the Duca di S. Angelo, in the motor accident near Cassino in 1907. At Naples in the Corso Vittorio Emanuele may still be seen a collection of the family portraits in the fine old Palazzo del Santo Piede (now Troise) so-called, from the foot of St Anna, which Leonardo III brought with him from Greece.

The heirs of the Palaiologoi were less fortunate than those of Leonardo Tocco. Upon the death of Thomas, Cardinal Bessarion drew up a scheme of education for his children, to whom the Pope continued his allowance. He laid it down, that they must not have an expensive retinue, like their father, but that they must be brought up by Latin priests as Latins. They were allowed a Greek doctor, one Kritopoulos, but were to dress like Franks and to show the utmost reverence to the Cardinals. They were to be taught to walk with dignity, to speak in a soft voice, not to stare about them, not to boast of their Imperial lineage but to remember that they were exiles and strangers, forced to live on charity. They were to learn by heart a humble address to the Pope, to talk little, never to laugh, and to acquire the art of kneeling with elegance. In short, they were to be perfect prigs. The result of Bessarion’s educational programme was what might have been expected. Zoe, or Sophia, indeed, soon escaped his tutelage by marrying a Caracciolo, after being regarded as a suitable bride for James II of Cyprus. The historian Phrantzes, an old and tried friend of the family, who was then in Rome on a visit, speaks with enthusiasm of the generosity of the bridegroom. Soon left a widow, and again wooed by the Cypriote King, she married by proxy in St Peter’s in 1472 the Grand Duke Ivan III of Russia—a ceremony commemorated by the above-mentioned painting in the Santo Spirito hospital, in which, besides relieving Leonardo Tocco, Sixtus IV is described as presenting “Sophia, daughter of Thomas Palaiologos, married to the Duke of the Ruthenians, with a dowry of 6000 gold pieces and other gifts[927].” These latter included 4400 ducats for her travelling expenses to Russia, whither many of the family’s retainers followed her, and where, in consequence of her Imperial origin, her husband took the title of Tsar. But her brother Andrew, who remained all his life a hanger-on of the papal court, profited little by Bessarion’s precepts. Falling into dissolute habits, he married a disreputable woman named Catherine; his garments moved the pity or contempt of the Romans; his allowance was reduced, he was relegated to a back seat at papal functions; and, after ceding all his rights to Charles VIII of France at San Pietro in Montorio, he died at Rome in 1502 in such misery that his widow had to beg his funeral expenses from the Pope. His portrait is supposed to be represented in a lunette of the third room of the Borgia apartments, where is also that of the Turkish Prince Djem, younger son of Mohammed II, and so long the prisoner of the Vatican. Thus the son of the conqueror of Constantinople and the nephew of its gallant defender are both depicted in the same room.

Besides these exiled Princes, a number of Greek authors found a permanent or temporary home in Rome, whither their famous fellow-countryman, Bessarion of Trebizond, had preceded them. Created a Cardinal in 1439 for his services to the Union of the Churches, he had shortly afterwards settled in a house to the right of the church of the SS. Apostoli, which gave him his title, and his abode became a literary centre, where Greeks and Italians alike congregated. Theodore Gazes of Salonika, George of Trebizond, and Nicholas Saguntino of Eubœa frequented his house, and another Greek man of letters, Andronikos Kallistos, lived with him, till poverty forced him to migrate to Florence and thence to England, where he died. But with the exception of Bessarion, who rose to be titular Archbishop of Nice and Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, as well as bishop of Tusculum, and who narrowly missed being elected Pope on the death of Paul II, these learned fugitives met with the usual fate of scholars. Sometimes their misfortunes were their own fault. Thus George of Trebizond, a man who could not endure criticism, quarrelled with his patron over the rival merits of Plato and Aristotle, with Gazes over their respective translations of the maestro di color che sanno, and with Valla over the pre-eminence of Cicero over Quintilian; at last, this cantankerous old man, the scourge of all authors except Aristotle, crept about Rome in rags supported by a stick, till he found near his humble abode a rest in the church of Sta Maria sopra Minerva, where the inscription on his tomb has long been illegible. His adversary Gazes, for whom Bessarion had obtained a benefice in Magna Græcia, retired thither in disgust, because Sixtus IV paid him only 50 gold pieces for his translation of Aristotle’s Natural History of Animals. Of Bessarion we have still several memorials: the tomb which he erected during his lifetime in the monastery of the SS. Apostoli, the cup which now belongs to the Greek monastery of Grottaferrata, of which he was Abbot commandatory; the beautiful little house, called the casino di Bessarione on the Via Appia within the city near the church of SS. Nereus and Achillios. This “vineyard within the walls of the city in loco qui dicitur S. Cæsarii in Turri sub proprietate ejusdem monasterii S. Cæsarii[928],” he bequeathed in 1467 with his property at “Cecchignola nova extra portam Appii,” on the right of the Via Ardeatina, to the chapel of S. Eugenia in the SS. Apostoli. When the Zona archeologica was being made in 1910, it was proposed to destroy this picturesque house, then an inn, but now deserted; but it was happily spared, after a protest. Argyropoulos, the translator of Aristotle, who died here in 1486, has been immortalised by Ghirlandajo in the Sistine Chapel, where he is the original of the bearded old man in the scene of the calling of the first disciples, and also in the Cancelleria[929]. The list of these literary wanderers may fitly close with Janus Laskaris, the Greek grammarian, founder of a Greek school at the foot of the Quirinal, whose tomb lies not far from the heart of O’Connell in S. Agata in Subura, where a touching epitaph expresses the mingled joys and sorrows of a Roman exile.