Historians do not say for certain who it was that built this palace. Most of them inclined to the belief that it derived its name and origin from Constantine Porphyrogenitus, a builder of many castles, and thus would put its date in the tenth century.
We would like to reconstruct this oblong building, to rebuild the arches that supported its three storeys, and fill up the gaps that time and impious hands had torn in the mosaic patterns of brick and stone that decorated the exterior. By the aid of imagination we may succeed in this, but not in giving to the interior its former splendour. All we may safely do is to go back
to those days when history was made here, take up a strand or two of the City’s and the Empire’s skein of destiny.
Near here and separated from this palace only by a courtyard stood yet another, a lordlier one, that of Blachernæ. This was the usual residence of the Imperial family in the fourteenth century, so Andronicus III found the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus convenient quarters when he came to wrest the sceptre from his grandfather, Andronicus II.
The history of this revolt gives some insight into the state of affairs that reigned in the Imperial City. Andronicus the Elder had devoted the best part of his reign to an absorbing interest in the disputes of the Greek Church. On this account, perhaps, he had failed to appreciate the rising power of the Ottoman Empire. According to the custom of the Palæologi, Andronicus associated his son Michael with the honours of the Purple. Michael proved an exemplary Cæsar in every respect, and his son, also Andronicus, was in time admitted to the dignity of Augustus. So there was a triumvirate of Cæsars in the Imperial Purple. But Andronicus the Younger turned out a spendthrift and a profligate, and matters came to a head when one night he shot his brother Manuel in the street. The details of this unsavoury adventure are of no moment, suffice it to relate that the shock of his son’s iniquity brought about the death of Michael, already ailing, within eight days of the unhappy occurrence.
Andronicus the Elder dispossessed his unruly grandson, who, however, escaped from confinement under pretext of hunting, and raised the standard of revolt in the provinces. During a ruinous period of seven years the quarrel between grandfather and grandson was protracted, till in 1328 Andronicus the Younger effected his entry into the city by surprise, forced his aged grandfather to retire, and as third monarch of that name usurped the throne. Four years after his abdication Andronicus the Elder died, known to his monastery as Monk Authoy.