 Because the family was extensive before it produced emperors, the name Palaiologos was legitimately held not only by nobles part of the actual imperial dynasty.As such, many Byzantine refugees who fled to Western Europe in the aftermath of Constantinople's fall possessed the name and in order to earn prestige, some fabricated closer links to the imperial family.While the genealogies of many supposedly surviving branches of the imperial dynasty can easily be dismissed as fantasy, others, such as the genealogy of a lineage from Pesaro which survived until 1694, are more plausible.