Constantine XI Palaiologos

Constantine was the fourth son of Manuel II Palaiologos and Helena Dragaš, born 8 February 1404, and spent the 1420s proving himself a capable general. With his brothers he ruled the Morea, pushing Byzantine territory across nearly the entire Peloponnese for the first time since the Fourth Crusade and rebuilding the Hexamilion wall that guarded it. When his childless brother John VIII died in October 1448, Constantine was proclaimed emperor on 6 January 1449, inheriting a empire reduced to a city surrounded entirely by the Ottomans. In April 1453, Sultan Mehmed II arrived with perhaps 80,000 men; Constantine's defenders numbered less than a tenth of that. He refused to abandon Constantinople and died fighting on 29 May 1453, the day the city fell. Some saw symmetry in the arc: the New Rome founded under Constantine the Great, lost under another Constantine, just as Old Rome had been founded by a Romulus and fell under Romulus Augustulus.