The fall of Constantine was the signal for the degradation and dispersion of his whole race.  His two surviving brothers, Demetrius and Thomas, reigned as despots of the Morea in Greece; but the ruin of the empire was the gloomy prelude to their own misfortunes.  Demetrius became the pensioner of the new Turkish emperor Mohammed, and received a city of Thrace and some adjacent islands for his own maintenance and that of his followers.  In this state of humiliating dependence he remained until death released him from his ignominious servitude.  Thomas, the other brother, was driven into exile by the invasion of his dominions.  He fled to Corfu, and from thence to Italy—­according to Gibbon’s account—­’with some naked adherents; his name, his sufferings, and the head of the apostle St Andrew, entitled him to the hospitality of the Vatican, and his misery was prolonged by a pension of 6000 ducats from the pope and cardinals.’  He left two sons (he must have had a third, as will afterwards appear), Andrew and Manuel, who were educated in Italy.  The eldest degraded himself by the looseness of his life and marriage, and died the inheritor of an empty title.  Manuel was tempted to revisit his native country; and after spending the remainder of his life in safety and ease at Constantinople, he was gathered to his fathers, ’an honourable train of Christians and Moslems attending him to the grave.’

From this date—­early in the sixteenth century—­little is known of the name and lineage of the Palaeologi.  The crescent waved over the royal city of Constantine; and, as an old Byzantine annalist remarks, the last heir of the last spark of the Roman Empire seemed to be extinct.  History had forgotten them, and the restless tide of human vicissitudes rolled onwards, unconscious of their existence.  Italy was understood to be the asylum of the imperial outcasts; and there they might have vegetated in oblivion, or dropped into unhonoured graves without leaving a single representative, had not a monumental inscription revealed the fact, that a descendant of the Caesars had found a retreat and a tomb in an obscure parish in England.  In the small church of Landulph, in Cornwall, the following inscription upon a small metal tablet, fixed in the wall, removes all doubt as to the identity and royal pedigree of the person whose memory it records.  In its original spelling it runs thus:—­’Here lyeth the body of Theodoro Paleologvs of Pesaro in Italye, descended from ye Imperiall lyne of ye last Christian Emperors of Greece, being the sonne of Prosper, the sonne of Theodoro, the sonne of John, the sonne of Thomas, second brother to Constantine Paleologvs, the eighth of that name, and last of ye lyne yt raygned in Constantinople vntill svbdeued by the Turkes; who married with Mary ye davghter of William Balls of Hadlye in Sorffolke Gent., and had issu five children, Theodoro, John, Ferdinando, Maria, and Dorothy, and departed this life at Clyfton ye 21st of Janvary 1636.’[1]