Graitzas Defends Something Recently Useless (Part IV)

by simonxhall

In 1460, Graitzas Palaiologos found himself in a thoroughly unenviable position. He’d been abandoned by his superiors, the empire to which he had sworn loyalty was essentially dust, and seemingly invincible would-be conquerors were banging on the castle gate.

Graitzas was an obscure member of the family that had dominated Byzantine politics for the past two centuries, but in recent times the Palaiologos clan had been fastidiously discovering new depths of disgrace. Constantine XI Palaiologos, last Emperor of Constantinople, had died when the city fell in 1453, but in fairness the fall of the Byzantine Empire had long been a question of timing more than anything else. Constantine’s younger brothers, Demetrios and Thomas, then spent the next seven years bickering over who got to be the ruler of an empire that no longer existed. It was awkward, and it’s not a story I’ll tell here.

Graitzas spent the 1450s commanding a garrison of soldiers at Salmenikos, a castle situated in the western half of the Greek peninsula. The Greek peninsula was called The Morea at the time, and had been a province under the command of the Byzantine Empire. When Constantinople fell and the Byzantine Empire collapsed in 1453, The Morea limped along for the rest of the decade, commanded jointly by the squabbling Palaiologos brothers I mentioned earlier (more on this later). For reasons I won’t get into here, the Ottoman Empire decided to annex Greece in 1460, and it went rather smoothly. The Palaiologos brothers fled, and in no time at all Graitzas found himself in command of the last Roman soldiers in the world.

It’s a little hard to see why Graitzas would have bothered putting up a fight at all. The Morea had already been defeated, there were no rulers left to carry on negotiations with the Ottomans, and many garrisons had already surrendered without a fight and been treated rather well. Graitzas could have probably told his men to drop their swords, and they all would have walked away. Instead, he decided to be a bit of a dink, and a cornered dink is the most dangerous kind.

When Salmenikos refused to surrender, it became the last unconquered patch of dirt left of the Roman Empire. This doesn’t mean, however, that the ensuing siege took on any symbolic importance at the time. Mehmed II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, genuinely didn’t care if Salmenikos fell or not; he’d already captured the nearby city and couldn’t really be bothered with a castle full of starving dudes. The siege couldn’t break the walls or the spirit of the soldiers inside, and Mehmed got a bit bored. He agreed to let Graitzas and his men go wherever they wanted if they agreed to just get out of the stupid castle and leave everyone alone. With that, the Sultan left.

Unfortunately, the incoming commander of the Ottoman army at Salmenikos had other ideas. As soon as the first few Byzantine soldiers left the castle, Hamouzas had them arrested. Mehmed heard about this rather brazen action, considered it a slight against his word, and had Hamouzas replaced with Zaganos, who promptly pulled the exact same dick move. This was getting embarrassing.

In the end, Graitzas Palaiologos solved the problem himself. With the few men he had left, he charged out the front door of the castle and fought his way to freedom. Dodging Ottoman forces when he could and fighting them when he needed to, Graitzas made his way to the coastal city of Lepanto, which was under the control of Venice at the time. The Republic of Venice was so dazzled by Graitzas’ exploits that they offered him a job with their army. Graitzas, with no country left to defend, took it.

I didn’t know that the last battle involving soldiers who could trace their history back to the Roman Republic was fought in Greece. I also didn’t know it was fought a thousand years after the end of the Roman Empire or under such bleak, depressing conditions. It’s nice to know that they technically won, although the only thing they won was the chance to leave and they had nowhere to go.