Tombstone of Ferdinando Palaeologus in Barbados

This tombstone is in the graveyard of St John?s Parish Church in Barbados, a remarkable tropical facsimile of an English Parish Church. The Church was built in 1831, after the previous 17th Century building was destroyed in a hurricane.

It marks the burial place of Ferdinando Paleologus, a descendent of the brother of the last Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI Paleologus (who died heroically fighting the Ottoman Turks in the breach of the walls of Constantinople in 1453).

Ferdinando owned Clifton Hall House, a magnificent plantation home, first mentioned in a mortgage recorded in 1656 when it is described as belonging to "Prince Ferdinando Paleologus".

Having emigrated to Barbados after fighting, it is said, for the Royalists during the English Civil War, Ferdinando brought the name "Clifton Hall" with him from his birthplace in Cornwall, England, where his father is buried.

He rather charmingly became churchwarden of St. John?s Parish Barbados and later died there in 1678 and was buried in the churchyard of his Parish Church. The inscription on the tombstone reads:

Here lyeth ye body of ?Ferdinando Paleologus ?
Descended from ye imperial lyne
?Of ye last Christian ?Emperors of Greece
Churchwarden of this Parish ?1655-1656 ?
Vestryman, Twentye years ?
Died Oct. 3 1678

It was said that he was buried 'backways'. In 1844 a curious church official ordered the vault opened, and Paleologus? lead coffin was found to have been in a different orientation from all the others: he had been buried with his head towards Constantinople and a metal icon of the Resurrection on his chest.

This description brings us to another imperial hero who has just died: Sir Patrick (Paddy) Leigh Fermor who, as an SOE agent, famously captured and evacuated the German governor of Crete in 1944. One of his many accomplishments was as a travel writer and he wrote Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese in 1958. This contains this digression on the Caribbean:

?I was alerted and fascinated by the schoolmaster's mention of the Palaeologi, the reigning dynasty during the twilight of the Byzantine Empire. The last emperor?Constantine XI Palaeologus Vatatses?died fighting in the breach on the day the imperial city was captured by Mohammed II. In another book I have told the story of the tomb of Ferdinando Palaeologus in Barbados, whose granddaughter, Godscall Palaeologue, vanishes from historic record as a little orphan girl in Stepney or Wapping, her father having died at Corunna in 1692.

"Her imperial descent is based on the supposition that the emperor was survived by a third brother, a shadowy figure called John, as well as by the historically verified Thomas and Demetrius, joint despots of Mistra. There is no point in retracing here the slender putative thread of his line through Italy, Holland, Cornwall, Barbados, Spain and the East End of London. If John existed, which is open to question, this little girl may have been the last imperial princess of the house of Palaeologue. Alas, at the end of the seventeenth century she disappeared forever into the mists and fogs of the London Docks.?