Sell Out

Thomas Palaiologos

The Byzantine Empire ended in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople and the death of Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos, but the Palaiologos family wasn't about to give up the a title like Emperor of the Romans just because of a minor detail like that.  Constantine's nephews Demetrios and Thomas continued to claim the Byzantine mantle from their despotate in Morea.

After Demetrios defected to the Ottomans and Thomas died in exile following the capture of Morea, the claim passed to his son Andreas Palaiologos.  Although Andreas had no hope of recovering the empire from the Turks, he still titled himself the Emperor of Constantinople.  He lived in Rome under the patronage of the Pope, who provided him with a stipend to live on.  Either because he squandered the money or because it was simply not very much (historians disagree whether the Pope was providing him enough to live the "baller" lifestyle befitting an emperor), Andreas sought to find a way to parlay his title into some additional spending money.

First, he sold the rights of inheritance to the French king Charles VIII.  Presumably, Charles his successors were content to use the title to impress some medieval ladies, as they made no attempt to recover the territory to go with it.  Regardless, it provided Andreas with a nice sum of cash with which to live the life of an emperor-in-exile back in Rome.

Andreas turned out to not be particularly fiscally responsible, and burned through all the money from the sale in a few years.  Figuring that if selling a defunct title worked once, there's no reason it shouldn't work twice, he again sold the rights to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain.  Andreas burned through this money as well, and died a pauper in 1502, despite having managed to sell the Byzantine Empire twice in a period of 8 years.

While this was all going on, his younger brother Manuel also decided to get in on the action, and traded the rights to title to the Ottomans in exchange for a hefty pension.  Thus, the last claimants of the Byzantine crown managed to sell it to three different monarchs, each time for a tidy profit.