Manuel II Palaiologos
Manuel II Palaiologos was one of the most cultivated and personally admirable of all late Byzantine emperors, a scholar and author who spent his reign desperately seeking western military aid for an empire now reduced to a few city-states surrounded by Ottoman power. Son of John V, he became emperor in 1391. In 1394 the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I placed Constantinople under blockade. For years Manuel remained in his blockaded city, corresponding with western rulers and philosophers. In 1399 he embarked on a remarkable personal embassy to western Europe, spending two years visiting Venice, Milan, Paris, and London, making a great personal impression everywhere while receiving little concrete military assistance. He was saved not by western crusade but by the Mongol conqueror Timur, who defeated Bayezid at Ankara in 1402, shattering Ottoman power for a generation. Manuel negotiated skillfully during the Ottoman recovery period. He was also a genuine intellectual, writing theological treatises, letters of great literary quality, and the Dialogue with a Persian, a text that became briefly notorious in 2006 when Pope Benedict XVI quoted it. He died in 1425.
- Lived: 1350 CE – 1425 CE
- Nationality: byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, scholar, author
