With the last members of the Palaiologan dynasty having fled the Despotate of the Morea the previous year for Italy, Trebizond had become the last outpost of Byzantine civilization; with its fall, that civilization came to an end.[4] "It was the end of the free Greek world," wrote Steven Runciman, who then noted that those Greeks still not under Ottoman rule still lived "under lords of an alien race and an alien form of Christianity. Only among the wild villages of Mani, in the southeastern Peloponnese, into whose rugged mountains no Turk ventured to penetrate, was there left any semblance of liberty."[5]