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From: "Pierre Aronax" <>
Subject: Re: Loukas Notaras - Grand Duke
Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 20:12:11 +0200
References: <f7dc395a.0304291337.38972389@posting.google.com>


".:Nichol:." <> a crit dans le message de news:
...
> Steven Runciman's "The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (Cambridge, 1965)",
> mentions Loukas Notaras and his Palaeologina wife a few times. On page
> 151 he describes the aftermath of the Turkish conquest of
> Constantinople:
>
> "Five days after the fall of the city, he [Mehmed the Conqueror] gave
> a banquet. In the course of it, when he was well flushed with wine,
> someone whispered to him that Notaras's fourteen-year-old son was a
> boy of exceptional beauty. The Sultan at once sent a eunuch to the
> house of the Megadux to demand that the boy be sent to him for his
> pleasure. Notaras, whose two elder sons had been killed fighting,
> refused to sacrifice the boy to such a fate. Police were then sent to
> bring Notaras with his son and his young son-in-law, the son of the
> Grand Domestic Andronicus Cantacuzenus, into the Sultan's presence.
> When Notaras still defied the Sultan, orders were given for him and
> the two boys to be decapitated on the spot. Notaras merely asked that
> they should be slain before him, lest the sight of his death should
> make them waver. When they had both perished, he bared his neck to the
> executioner."
>
> On the next page there is a brief mention of Notaras' widow: "Their
> womenfolk were sent back into captivity and formed part of the long
> procession of prisoners that accompanied the Court on its return to
> Adrianople. Notaras's widow died on the way at the village of Messene.
> She had been of Imperial blood and the greatest lady in Byzantium
> after the death of the Empress-Mother, deeply respected even by her
> husband's opponents for her dignity and her charity. One of her
> daughters, Anna, had already escaped to Italy with some of the
> treasures of the family." -- page 152.
>
> Runciman cites Ducas (op. cit. XL, p. 381) for the story of Notaras
> and his son and son-in-law's demise. As Ducas was no friend of
> Notaras, his account is convincing -- it's an unusually brave and
> defiant death to give to an enemy. According to Runciman on page 227:
>
> "The identity of Notaras's wife is uncertain. In letters to him, such
> as those from Gennadius (e.g. M.P.G. CLX, col. 747), he is called the
> 'son-in-law of the Emperor' -- 'gambros loy Basileos'. If his wife had
> been a daughter of Manuel II and the Empress Helena, it is impossible
> that Phrantzes, who gives all the details of the family, would not
> have mentioned it. She must have been born after 1400, as her son was
> in his early teens in 1453. It is improbable that Manuel, who was a
> devoted husband, had any illegitimate children after his marriage. The
> Byzantines would not, I believe, have used the term son-in-law to mean
> vaguely a connection by marriage. She must therefore have been a
> daughter of Manuel's nephew, the Emperor John VII, who married a
> Gattilusi princess by whom he certainly had no son; but he may well
> have had a daughter, legitimate or illegitimate. Papadopoulos,
> 'Versuch einer Geneologie der Palaiologen', p. 90, makes her the
> daughter of Demetrius Palaeologus Cantacuzenus, but his reference to
> Phrantzes says nothing of the sort. I do not know on what evidence
> Lambros, 'Suntheke', pp. 153, 170, bases his genealogy of the Notaras
> family."

This is the gambros-thing again: the fact that Scholarios call him "gambros"
of the emperor only proves that his wife was related to the Palaiologoi,
probably in female line, not that she was the daughter of an emperor.

Pierre


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