[Sidenote: Fate of defenders after capture. Venetian bailey and other leading Venetians beheaded.] [Sidenote: Cardinal Isidore.] The fate of the men of most eminence among the defenders of Constantinople is illustrative of Mahomet’s methods. The bailey of the Venetians, with his son and seven of his countrymen, was beheaded. Among them was Contarino, the most distinguished among the Venetian nobles, who had already been ransomed and who in breach of faith was killed because his friends were unable to find the enormous sum of seven thousand gold pieces for his second ransom. The consul of Spain or the Catalans, with five or six of his companions, met with the same fate.[494] Cardinal Isidore in his flight abandoned his clerical robes, and, after having been captured in the disguise of a beggar and sold into slavery, was ransomed for a few aspers.[495] [Sidenote: Phrantzes.] Phrantzes, the friend of the emperor and the historian of his reign, had an even less happy experience. He suffered the hard lot of slavery during a period of fifteen months. His wife and children were captured and sold to the Master of the Sultan’s Horse, who had bought many other ladies belonging to the Greek nobility. A year later he was able to redeem his wife. But the sultan hearing of the beauty of his daughter Thamar took her into his seraglio. She was then but fourteen years old, and died in 1454, shortly after her captivity.[496] In December of 1453 his son John, in the fifteenth year of his age, preferring death to infamy, was killed by the sultan’s own hand.[497] [Sidenote: Notaras.]