The tombs of the Palaiologan emperors

Abstract

This article examines textual and material evidence regarding the burials of emperors during the Palaiologan period. It is argued that the Palaiologos dynasty did not initially have a plan to establish an imperial mausoleum: the monastery of Lips, re-founded by Theodora Palaiologina and often regarded by modern scholars as an imperial mausoleum, was instead conceived as a family shrine. Small-scale attempts to establish imperial mausolea are discernible only from the middle of the fourteenth century onwards, with the burials of Andronikos III and John V in the monastery of ton Hodegon and of the last Palaiologoi in the Pantokrator.