A Christmas to Save the Byzantine Empire

On Christmas Day 1400 the English king Henry IV and the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos sat down to their festive dinner at Eltham Palace in southeast England. The embattled emperor had arrived four days earlier, on the final leg of a desperate tour across Europe, a last-ditch effort to encourage the emerging powers of Western Christendom to come to the aid of his empire in the event of a (highly likely) Ottoman conquest; the imperial city was already enduring an extended siege. Manuel’s tour was unprecedented. With the exception of his father, John V, no Byzantine emperor had ever left the borders of his empire. Even John had not strayed far, travelling between Naples and Rome in October 1369 in a failed attempt to end the schism between Western and Eastern Christianity through a formal conversion to Roman Catholicism at St Peter’s. Manuel’s journey, by contrast, had brought him to the British Isles, which, from a Roman point of view, were located at the very edge of the world.