On Christmas Day 1400 the English king Henry IV and the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos sat all the way down to their festive dinner at Eltham Palace in southeast England. The embattled emperor had arrived 4 days earlier, on the ultimate leg of a determined tour throughout Europe, a last-ditch effort to encourage the rising powers of Western Christendom to come back to the help of his empire within the occasion of a (extremely doubtless) Ottoman conquest; the imperial metropolis was already enduring an prolonged siege. Manuel’s tour was unprecedented. Apart from his father, John V, no Byzantine emperor had ever left the borders of his empire. Even John had not strayed far, travelling between Naples and Rome in October 1369 in a failed try to finish the schism between Western and Japanese Christianity by means of a proper conversion to Roman Catholicism at St Peter’s. Manuel’s journey, in contrast, had introduced him to the British Isles, which, from a Roman perspective, had been situated on the very fringe of the world.
