Clifton Hall Great House Ties Barbados Estate to Last Byzantine Imperial Line

In July 2025, a visit to Clifton Hall Great House in Barbados brought into focus the Caribbean chapter of the Paleologus family, linked by tradition to the last imperial dynasty of the Byzantine—or Eastern Roman—Empire. The property’s present owner, Robert Carroll, said Ferdinando Paleologus built the house in 1656 and held the first mortgage on the estate.

Carroll told a visiting filmmaker that claims in local historic material naming Ferdinando a descendant of Constantine the Great are incorrect. The line, he said, runs through Constantine XI, the last emperor at Constantinople, who died fighting when Ottoman forces breached the city’s triple walls in 1453. Constantine’s brother Thomas held the Morea in Greece until that territory fell a few years later; he fled to Rome after the family rejoined the Catholic Church in a bid for papal help that never restored the empire. Descendants later settled in England.

According to Carroll, Ferdinando’s father served the Earl of Lincoln and is commemorated in a church in Cornwall. Ferdinando fought for the king in the English Civil War; after the royal defeat he left for Barbados, where a relative, Mary Balls of the Balls plantation, already held land. His brother served as a captain on the parliamentary side and has a memorial in Westminster Abbey. Ferdinando’s son later worked as a crown-licensed privateer. The last of the local line, Carroll said, was a daughter about whom almost nothing is known and who may have died in childhood.

The great house combines fabric from 1656 with additions from the 1800s. The plantation once covered about 400 acres and held more than 300 enslaved people; roughly four acres remain. Earlier restoration was done by a tourism minister named Morgan and later by Scottish-Italian owner Massimo Franchi, from whom Carroll bought the house in December. Now 79 and originally from Wales, Carroll has been repairing termite damage room by room, hosting weddings on the grounds, and furnishing the interiors—including a grand piano that came from a Clifton House in the United Kingdom.

Among surviving features is a “poor relations room,” a shuttered chamber with a food hatch, which Carroll said is one of only two such rooms still intact in the Caribbean. The filmmaker later reached St. John’s Parish Church at Galilee, where Ferdinando Paleologus’s tomb records that he was church warden in 1655–56, a vestryman for 20 years, and died on 3 October 1678, “descended from ye imperial line of ye last Christian emperors of Greece.”