Editing Constantine XI Palaiologos (section)

=== Legends of Constantine's family ===
Constantine's two marriages were brief and though he had attempted to find a third wife before the fall of Constantinople, he died unmarried and without children.{{Sfn|Nicol|1992|p=95}} His closest surviving relatives were his surviving brothers in the Morea: Thomas and Demetrios.{{Sfn|Runciman|1969|p=171ff}} Despite this, there was a persistent story that Constantine had left a widow and several daughters. The earliest documented evidence of this idea can be found in a letter by Aeneas Silvius (the future [[Pope Pius II]]) to Pope Nicholas V, dated July 1453. In Aeneas's ''Cosmographia'' (1456–1457), the story is elaborated upon: Mehmed II supposedly defiled and murdered the empress and Constantine's daughters in the celebrations after his victory. Aeneas also wrote of an imaginary son of Constantine who escaped to Galata, across the Golden Horn. The story of Constantine's wife and daughters might have been further propagated through the spread of the late 15th-century Russian tale called the ''[[Nestor Iskander's Tale on the Taking of Tsargrad|Tale on the Taking of Tsargrad]]'', where a similar account appears.{{sfn|Terras|1985|page=302}}{{sfn|Philippides|Hanak|2011|page=132}} 16th-century French chronicler [[Mathieu d'Escouchy]] wrote that Mehmed raped the empress in the Hagia Sophia and then confined her to his [[harem]].{{Sfn|Nicol|1992|p=95}}

The story of Constantine's supposed family survived into modern Greek folklore. One story, propagated until as late as the 20th century, was that Constantine's supposed empress had been six months pregnant at the time of Constantinople's fall and that a son had been born to her while Mehmed was warring in the north. The empress raised the boy, and though he was well-versed in the Christian faith and the Greek language in his youth, he turned to Islam as an adult and eventually became sultan himself, which meant that all Ottoman sultans after him would have been Constantine's descendants.{{Sfn|Nicol|1992|p=96}} Though the circumstances are completely fictional, the story might carry a shred of the truth; a grandson of Constantine's brother Thomas, [[Andreas Palaiologos (son of Manuel)|Andreas Palaiologos]], lived in Constantinople in the 16th century, converted to Islam and served as an Ottoman court official.{{Sfn|Nicol|1992|pp=115–116}}{{sfn|Runciman|1969|p=183–184}}

Another late folk story said that Constantine's empress had shut herself in the imperial palace after Mehmed's victory. After the Ottomans failed to break her barricades and enter the palace, Mehmed had to agree to give her three concessions: that all coins minted by the sultans in the city would bear the names of Constantinople or Constantine, that there would be a street reserved for Greeks alone, and that the bodies of the Christian dead would be given funerals according to Christian custom.{{Sfn|Nicol|1992|p=96}}