The Fall of Constantinople

CNG 102, Lot: 1213. Estimate $3000. Sold for $13000. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

Constantine XI Palaeologus (Dragases). 1448-1453. AR Eighth Stavraton (13mm, 0.63 g, 12h). Constantinople mint. Facing bust of Christ Pantocrator; IC-XC across field / Crowned facing bust of Constantine; K-C across field. Bendall, Coinage 154 (this coin); DOC 1789 (same dies); LPC –; PCPC –; SB –. Good VF, toned. Rare.

From the M. A. Armstrong Collection. Ex Classical Numismatic Group 45 (18 March 1998), lot 2488.

By the time the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, succeeded his brother John VIII on the throne, the Byzantine Empire consisted of a small parcel of land in Morea and the city of Constaninople. When the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II finally decided to eliminate what had become a minor nuisance to the Turks, the final result was inevitable. Constantinople was taken by siege, and Constantine died fighting at the battlements, rejecting the pleas of his courtiers to flee to safety. His heroic and gruesome death (his body was so mutilated that it was only identifiable by his clothing) led to a popular legend that Constantine had never died, and would return at some point in the future to free Greece from her conquerors. 

The current lot comes from a hoard of coins of John VIII and Constantine XI published by Simon Bendall in 1991. Prior to the hoard, the coinage of Constantine was only known from two specimens. Bendall believed the eighth stavrata of Constantine to be “prime contenders for being the very last coins struck in the Byzantine Empire” (p. 141), and thought those with the shortened “KC” form of the emperor’s name to be the final eighth stavrata to be struck. Several contemporary sources specifically tell us that Constantine ordered sacred vessels to be removed from churches and melted down to strike coins as payment to his soldiers (Bendall pp. 140-141).