Seals of John VI are very rare. There is a gold example in the monastery of Iviron at Mount Athos. John came to power after a long period of civil war which seriously weakened the empire. The emperor was powerless to prevent the Ottomans from taking Gallipoli in 1354, and in that year he retired to a monastery at Constantinople where he survived a further thirty years as the monk Joasaph, and where he wrote his famous history of his reign.