Byzantine Throne

The State Armory Museum of the Kremlin kept the "Big" sakkos Metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia, Photius (1408-1431), in which the satin gold, silver and silk threads embroidered on more than 100 images various gospel topics, reproducing the iconographic program of some kind of Constantinople (probably the palace) of the church. On one of these images in a rectangle is represented by the Byzantine imperial couple, with all its proper attributes, and the royal regalia, surrounded by halos, and accompanied by the relevant Greek inscriptions, which show that it was "John Palaeologus, in Christ God faithful basil" and his wife, "Anna Paleologina, pious August", ie the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaeologus and his first wife, whose parents – Grand Duke of Moscow Vasily and Princess Sophia Vitovtovna – shows immediately to the right of Anne, but without the halos and accompanied by a Slavic inscriptions "Grand Prince Vasily," and "The Princess Sofia is great." This image is fraught with a kind of mystery – in science, the prevailing view that Anna never Byzantine Empress was, as she died in 1417, long before John Palaeologus was not only the "autocratic" emperor (1425), and co-regent (1421). "In the month of August (1417) died, and Mrs. Anna Majesty, that of Russia, the plague and was buried in the monastery of Lebanon "- indicates a Byzantine chronicler and a contemporary of George Sfrandzi. This reduction of the burial of Anna in the metropolitan monastery Lips or Lebanon (the tomb of emperor and the imperial name), confirmed by "walking" the monk Zosimus, who once accompanied the princess on the way from Moscow to Constantinople: "The Monastery zhensky Lipes, – he writes – Tuto lezhit Ruska Queen Anne, the great Moscow dschi Prince Vasily Dmitrievich.