ABSTRACT
The arrival of Constantine in the capital was noted by Syropoulos, who added that it was accompanied by a bad omen. Bad luck seems to have been hounding Constantine, as his contemporaries remarked after his death and after the fall. The face of Constantine, with its expression, portrays all the despair and the torment of a man, who fights on in full knowledge of the fact that the contest is lost. The corpse of Constantine, tightly wrapped in a shroud, is further depicted in a sixteenth-century manuscript that contains the prophecies of Leo the Wise. Constantine was neither Alexander the Great nor a statesman of the caliber of Manuel II. The picture that emerges indicates that Constantine was an average individual, whose accomplishments in military strategy, scholarship, and statesmanship were neither outstanding nor impressive but mediocre, at best. Tafur has preserved in his narrative an otherwise unmatched picture of Constantine dispensing justice, in a matter that involved Tafur directly.
