John V Palaiologos
John V reigned for fifty years, was deposed three times by his own family, and converted to Catholicism personally in Rome without result. He came to the throne at nine in 1341, and the regency quarrel that followed produced a civil war with John Kantakouzenos that ran six years, wrecked the treasury, and brought Ottoman troops into Europe as auxiliaries — the Ottomans took Gallipoli in 1354 and never left. He spent the rest of the century trying to buy help. He went to Buda in 1366 to ask the Hungarian king, and was rescued from creditors on the way home by his cousin Amadeus of Savoy. He went to Rome in 1369 and made a personal profession of the Catholic faith, without attempting to bring his church with him, on the calculation that a personal conversion would move the pope and not provoke his own clergy. It achieved neither. He was detained in Venice for debt on the return journey, and his son Andronikos refused to send the money; his other son Manuel came and got him. Andronikos then rebelled with Ottoman and Genoese help and reigned for three years, and John was restored by the same sultan. He became an Ottoman vassal, paying tribute and supplying troops for Ottoman campaigns in Asia, and was ordered by Bayezid to demolish fortifications he had built in the capital. He died in 1391, and his son Manuel escaped from the sultan's camp to succeed him. His reign is the point at which the empire stopped being a power and became a client. What was left of it was Constantinople, Thessalonica and the Morea, surrounded by Ottoman territory, and it survived another sixty years mostly because Timur destroyed Bayezid at Ankara in 1402.
- Lived: 1332 CE – 1391 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state
