Byzantine emperor (1391–1425) of the empire's twilight, an Ottoman vassal and learned author who toured Western Europe — reaching London — in search of aid against the Turks.
Manuel II Palaiologos was Byzantine emperor from 1391 to 1425, ruling the shrunken remnant of the empire in its twilight, when Constantinople and a few scattered territories were nearly all that remained and the emperor was, in practice, a vassal of the Ottoman sultan. A brave, cultivated, and deeply learned man, he spent his reign in a desperate search for the means to survive.
When the sultan Bayezid I laid siege to Constantinople, Manuel travelled across Western Europe from 1399 to 1403 — through Italy, France, and even to England — appealing in person for military help, the only Byzantine emperor ever to visit those lands. The city was saved not by the West but by Timur's destruction of Bayezid at Ankara in 1402, which bought the empire a last generation. A prolific author, Manuel spent his final years defending his tiny realm before dying as a monk in 1425.
Manuel was born in 1350, a son of the emperor John V Palaiologos, into a dynasty presiding over an empire in headlong decline, hemmed in by the rising power of the Ottoman Turks. He spent his early years amid civil wars and Ottoman pressure, at one point held as a hostage at the sultan's court and even compelled to accompany Ottoman campaigns. On his father's death in 1391 he slipped away from the sultan's camp to claim the throne.
Manuel II was among the most admirable of the late emperors: courageous, dignified, and intellectually distinguished, he bore the humiliations of his position — vassalage, hostage-taking, endless begging for aid — with a stoic self-possession that impressed even his Latin hosts. He was a genuine scholar and prolific writer, the author of theological dialogues, letters, orations, and poetry, who kept the flame of Byzantine learning burning as the political world collapsed around him.
His was the temperament of a wise man trapped in a hopeless situation. He understood, better than most, that Western help would come only at the price of submitting the Orthodox Church to Rome, and he was clear-eyed about how little the West would truly do; he is said to have counselled his son that the promise of church union was best dangled before the Turks as a threat, never actually concluded. Patient, realistic, and unbroken, he managed the empire's decline with a grace that its situation scarcely allowed.
The great crisis of the reign was the long Ottoman blockade of Constantinople begun by Bayezid I in 1394. With the city slowly strangling, Manuel left it in the hands of a nephew and set out in 1399 on an extraordinary journey through the courts of the West — Venice, Milan, Paris, where he stayed with Charles VI, and London, where Henry IV received him — pleading for the men and money to save Christian Constantinople. He was honoured everywhere and helped almost nowhere.
Deliverance came from the East instead. In 1402 the conqueror Timur crushed Bayezid I at the Battle of Ankara, shattering Ottoman power and lifting the siege. Manuel returned home to a reprieve, exploited the Ottoman Interregnum to recover territory and play the sultan's sons against one another, and rebuilt the Hexamilion wall defending the Morea.
The reprieve did not last. Under Murad II the Ottomans besieged Constantinople again in 1422, and Manuel, aged and worn, suffered a stroke and withdrew from affairs, leaving government to his son John. He took monastic vows as the monk Matthew and died on 21 July 1425, succeeded by John VIII.
Manuel II is remembered as the noblest of the last Byzantine emperors — a learned, courageous, and clear-sighted ruler who kept the dying empire alive by patience and diplomacy for another generation, and who embodied the intellectual brilliance of the Palaiologan twilight even as the state crumbled. He handed to his son John VIII an empire reduced almost to the walls of Constantinople, whose final fall to his grandson's Ottoman contemporaries lay less than thirty years ahead.