Manuel II Palaiologos
Manuel II spent his reign as emperor travelling Europe asking for help and was the last Byzantine ruler with any room to manoeuvre. Born in 1350, he grew up in an empire reduced to Constantinople, Thessalonica and part of the Morea, paying tribute to the Ottomans. He spent years as a vassal at Bayezid's court and campaigned in Asia Minor under the sultan's orders against the last Greek towns there, which he described afterwards as helping to destroy what he had inherited. He succeeded his father in 1391, escaping from the Ottoman camp to do it, and Bayezid besieged Constantinople for eight years. Manuel left in 1399 on a journey no eastern emperor had made: Venice, Milan, Paris, and London, where Henry IV received him at Christmas 1400 and an English observer wrote that it was a grievous thing to see this great Christian prince driven from his own by infidels. He got sympathy, some money and no army. He was saved by something else entirely. Timur destroyed Bayezid at Ankara in 1402 and took him prisoner, the Ottoman state fell into a civil war among his sons for eleven years, and Manuel played the claimants against each other and recovered Thessalonica and the coast. He rebuilt the wall across the isthmus at Corinth. He was also a serious writer, of theology, letters and a dialogue with a Persian scholar that a pope quoted in 2006 to considerable effect. He died a monk in 1425. He also left his son a piece of advice that turned out to be exactly right. The Ottomans, he said, were most afraid of the union of the churches, and a Byzantine emperor should always negotiate it and never conclude it, because the attempt frightened them and the completion would divide his own people. John VIII concluded it at Florence in 1439, and it divided them.
- Lived: 1350 CE – 1425 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, scholar, writer
