Barbados - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 89

spider has wove his web in the Imperial palace; and the owl has sung her watch-song on the tower of
Afrasiab.'
A legend on the walls of Viterbo traces the origins of the Palaeologi to a certain Remigius Lellius of
Vetulonia, but in authenticated Byzantine history, the dynasty emerges at the time of the Norman Con-
quest of Britain. What strange adventure ended in the burial of their descendant in this Anglican church-
yard in the Barbadian hills? Did they settle in Rome, like Cardinal Bessarion of Trebizond, or grav-
itate, like Lascaris and Argyropoulos, to the court of the Medici? Or make their way North, like the
Cantacuzeni, who were later to reign over the Rumanian principalities, and radiate powerful branches in-
to the Russias? Nobody seemed to know. It was only on returning to Europe that I learned their strange
history.
After the fall of Constantinople, two of the Emperor's brothers, Thomas and Demetrius, retired to
the Morea, of which, as tributaries of the Sultan, they remained joint overlords. As they were constantly
at war with each other, Demetrius treacherously appealed to the Sultan, who marched into the Morea
and occupied it, taking the daughter of Demetrius into his harem. Demetrius died in Constantinople as
a monk. Thomas fled to Rome, taking with him a precious relic, the head of St. Andrew. There he was
granted a pension by the Pope, and his sons were educated in Italy. Andrew, the eldest, married a Roman
prostitute, sold his rights of imperial succession to the kings of France and Aragon and died in poverty.
The second, Manuel, returned to Stamboul, where the Sultan maintained him and presented him with
a couple of wives. 'His surviving son,' writes Gibbon, 'was lost in the habit and religion of a Turkish
slave.' Thomas's shadowy third son, John, may have remained in Corfu, where, according to Chalcocon-
dyles, Thomas left his family on his departure for Rome. He, states the memorial tablet of a descendant,
was the father of Theodore, who begat Prosper, who begat Camilio, who begat yet a third Theodore, who
is the father of the Palaeologus of Barbados. The family was by then established in the Tuscan town of
Pesaro: subjects, like so many Byzantine refugee families, of the Medicean dukes. The preceding gener-
ations are more than vague, but if the authenticity of John is accepted, there are no grounds for doubting
the succession. Among his compatriots and contemporaries, at any rate, his Imperial descent was never
questioned. In 1593 he married Eudoxia Comnena, who also bore an imperial Byzantine name, in the Is-
land of Chios. She died soon afterwards, and their only child, a daughter, married a member of the Chios
family of Rhodokanaki.
The family then turned its face to the west and the north, for there is evidence that Theodore served
the House of Orange as a soldier of fortune in the Low countries. At the turn of the century he appears
at Tattershall Castle in Lincolnshire as a gentleman rider to the ferocious Earl of Lincoln. He became
acquainted here with the great John Smith of Virginia, who was living eccentrically as a hermit in the
woods 'in a pavilion of boughs,' reading Machiavelli and Marcus Aurelius. Theodore, as a scholar and
a Greek, was sent by the Earl to 'insinuate himself into his woodish acquaintances.' At about the same
time, he married, in an Anglican church, an English lady from Suffolk called Mary Balls. He crops up
again as a correspondent of the Duke of Buckingham, shortly before the Duke was stabbed by Felton. His
letter, written in excellent French, reveals that he was in poor circumstances, but it is pleasant to record
that he lived the last few years of his life as the guest and friend of the family with Sir Nicholas Lower at
Clifton in Cornwall. Lady Lower belonged to a race that was eminent for its great erudition. The family
had already produced the learned Lady Burleigh and Bacon's equally learned mother, and it may be as-
sumed that Theodore's friendship with the Lowers was based upon a common interest in European letters
and the classics. He was buried in Landulph Church near Saltash in Cornwall, in 1636. [4]