The Byzantines in Barbados

After several pieces covering the fast and furious changes taking place in the world at present it is time for a brief excursion. Specifically, to follow one of those strange historical threads which we sometimes come across that lead us to unexpected places and colourful lives long gone. One such thread for some reason came back into mind recently, and purely since it tells a fascinating story I will present it now.

On the Caribbean island of Barbados lies the old Anglican Church of St. John’s Parish. While the present building dates to the 1830s there has been a parish church here since the 1640s. In the church there is a monument that was constructed in 1906 with a curious inscription:

“Here lyeth the body of Ferdinand Paleolocus, descended from ye

Imperial lyne of ye last Christian Emperors of Greece

Churchwarden of this parish 1655 1656

Vestryman twentye years

Died October 3 1678”

The Christian Emperors of Greece were of course the rulers of the Byzantine Empire, which was of course the eastern half of the Roman Empire and ended up surviving its Western counterpart by over a thousand years. (Observant visitors to Greece today will know that the Byzantine imperial standard of a double-headed eagle on a yellow background is flown by every Orthodox Church in the country). The Byzantine Empire reached its own tragic demise in 1453 when its great capital, Constantinople, finally fell to the Ottoman Turks after a siege which had lasted fifty-five days. The defending force had been an alliance comprised, in addition to the Byzantine Greeks, of Genoese mercenaries, Venetian volunteers as well as troops from the Papal States, the Kingdom of Sicily and the Kingdom of Aragon. There are conflicting accounts of the battle’s end. One is given by a Venetian survivor, Niccolò Sagundino, who stated that the Emperor Constantine refused to escape and preferred to die with his empire. When none of his officers obeyed his command to kill him he took off his imperial regalia and disappeared into the thick of the action with his men. And so he died and with him the Byzantine Empire disappeared from the pages of living history.

So where does the Caribbean connection come in? While Constantine himself had no sons, he did have brothers and the Palaiologos dynasty was to have its remnants. Several generations later there was a Theodore Paleologus (1560-1636) who was a soldier and hired assassin. He was commissioned by the authorities in the Italian Republic of Lucca to track down and kill a man called Alessandro Antelminelli, a diplomat accused of high treason. Theodore Paleologus travelled to London to commit his grisly deed but apparently couldn’t find his intended target. He did however find a new home since he opted to stay in England thereafter and raise his family there. Living at Clifton Hall in Landulph, Cornwall, the family acquired the nickname, ‘the Greek Princes of Cornwall.’ As to Theodore’s own children, we know that he had several. One of his sons, Theodore junior, became a Puritan and Parliamentarian commander during the Civil Wars. He was killed in 1644 and is buried at Westminster Abbey. Another, John, was killed at the Battle of Naseby in 1645. One of the younger sons was called Ferdinand, who fought on the king’s side as a regular soldier in the Cavalier army.

Possibly to escape the consequences after the war, Ferdinand seems to have fled to Barbados and is known to have been on the island since at least June 1644. He moved in elite Barbadian circles and married Rebecca Pomfrett, the daughter of a local magnate, before building an estate which he named Clifton Hall after his childhood home in Cornwall. Not a lot is known about Ferdinand other than that he served as church warden at St. John’s. He would go on to suffer ill health before eventually dying in 1670. He did have a son, also called Theodore, who apparently became a privateer. This latter Theodore is only known to have had a daughter, by the unusual name of Godscall, but nothing is known of her life.

There is a traditional story (although its veracity cannot be confirmed), that when Greece acquired its independence in the 1820s, an official government delegation was sent to England and Barbados to search for any living rightful descendants of the Palaiologos family, to whom the crown of the reborn nation might be given. But there were none. That ship had sailed and the Palaiologos family were to be confined to the history books.

The whole story is a curious one, and while it might serve as a mere footnote to the long history of the Byzantine Empire, it does illustrate how strange unexpected linkages can occur across time and space. Who would have thought that one of the last scions of the last dynasty to rule the Eastern Roman Empire would have been living as an English country gentleman in tropical Barbados?

Photo via Wikimedia Commons.