Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium, episode 345, the immortal emperor.

Some of you may be thinking, Robin, I know where Constantine died.

I didn't need an hour on that.

I want to know about how he was turned into marble and is waiting to return.

As we established last week, Constantine's death and the fate of his remains became a mystery pretty quickly.

Aside from the claim that his decapitated head was sent to Egypt, or Adernay,

no one really mentions what happened to the head after it was displayed,

and no one mentions the body.

Most likely, Constantine's remains were burnt,

along with the piles of dead bodies which lined the Pempton sector.

The new Ottoman garrison of Constantinople then rebuilt the walls that had been knocked down,

so there was no body nor any obvious spot where Romans could gather to remember their fallen emperor.

There were very few native Constantinipolitans anyway.

Of the 5,000 or so that Mehmet sent back into the city,

how many would have known the details of the final battle,

or where the emperor likely fell?

And once that generation had passed, there was little real knowledge of what had taken place in 1453,

or the physical reality of the defence.

We can see this absence of knowledge in a text written by the revived Patriarchate a few decades later.

They record that the emperor was near the gate of

St. Romanos, inspecting the defences when he encountered some Turks who'd entered the city. In the

melee which followed, the emperor was decapitated, his opponents not realizing who he was.

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