The last Byzantine dynasty, which recovered Constantinople in 1261 and ruled the shrinking empire until its fall in 1453.
When the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204, the Byzantine state survived in exile at Nicaea. There the general Michael Palaiologos usurped the throne and, in 1261, recaptured Constantinople from the Latin Empire, founding the dynasty as Michael VIII.
The restored empire was a shadow of its former self — bankrupt, surrounded, and dependent on Italian sea power — but the Palaiologoi would rule what remained of it for nearly two centuries.
The fourteenth century brought civil wars between rival Palaiologan emperors, the loss of Anatolia to the Turks, and the rise of a Serbian empire under Stefan Dušan. Repeated dynastic strife, sometimes fought with Ottoman mercenaries, hastened the collapse of imperial power.
By 1400 the empire had dwindled to Constantinople, a stretch of Greece, and a few islands, its emperors increasingly vassals or suppliants of the Ottoman sultans.
Manuel II Palaiologos travelled as far as England and France pleading for aid, and his son John VIII accepted union between the Orthodox and Catholic churches at the Council of Florence in 1439 in a last bid for a crusade. The union was rejected by most of the Byzantine clergy and people and brought no effective help.
The famous saying "better the sultan’s turban than the cardinal’s hat" captured the depth of resistance to Rome in the dying empire.
Constantine XI, the last emperor, faced Mehmed II’s siege in 1453 with only a few thousand defenders against a vast Ottoman army and its great cannon. When the walls were breached on 29 May, Constantine died fighting in the streets, and the Fall of Constantinople ended both the dynasty and the Roman Empire that had endured for a thousand years in the East.
His body was never certainly identified, and he passed into legend as the "marble emperor" who would one day return.
The Palaiologan era, for all its political decline, produced a brilliant late flowering of Byzantine art, scholarship, and theology — the "Palaiologan Renaissance" — whose scholars helped carry Greek learning to the Italian Renaissance.
The double-headed eagle and the traditions of the last Christian Roman emperors passed into the heraldry and ideology of later states that claimed the Byzantine inheritance.