Zampia Palaiologina

Zampia Palaiologina (Greek: Ζαμπíα Παλαιολογίνα), also known as Zampea or Isabella, was a Byzantine princess of the Palaiologos dynasty. She was an illegitimate daughter of Emperor John V Palaiologos and married the envoy and translator Hilario Doria, with whom she had at least two daughters. Her name may not have been Zampia, which could have been applied to her by later historians out of confusion with one of her daughters of this name. Family background and name Zampia Palaiologina is mentioned as the illegitimate daughter of Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos in 16th-century chronicle writings of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, which also record her marriage to Hilario Doria, an Italian nobleman who had converted from Catholicism to Orthodoxy and served the Byzantine government as an envoy and translator. Though this relation has historically often been taken at face value, it is likely a mistake on the part of the scribe of the chronicles; contemporary Greek sources designate Hilario as Manuel's gambros (which can mean either son-in-law or brother-in-law, likely the source for the mistake) but Western documents explicitly designate him as Manuel's cognatus, levir or sororius (brother-in-law). This means that Zampia was actually Manuel's half-sister and thus an illegitimate daughter of his father John V Palaiologos. The Byzantinist Thierry Ganchou, who through examining relevant documents demonstrated that Zampia was Manuel's sister rather than daughter, has also cast doubt on whether her name was actually Zampia. Zampia was an unusual name in the Byzantine world since it was the Greek version of the Western European name Isabella; the name otherwise only appears in Byzantine records for western women such as Isabella of Villehardouin, Princess of Achaea, and Isabelle de la Rochette, an influential lady-in-waiting of Empress Anna of Savoy (John's mother). Though Ganchou noted that it was possible that John could have given his daughter an Italian name since his mother was Italian, Ganchou maintained that it would be strange for a Byzantine emperor to give such a name to one of his children, even if they were illegitimate, and suggests that the scribe of the Patriarchal chronicle confused the name of John V's daughter with the name of one of her children. Ganchou suggested that it was more likely that she had a "classic" Byzantine feminine name such as Theodora, Irene, Maria, Helena, Anna or Euphrosyne.