Plethon’s lectures on Platonism given to Italian scholars in Florence made a great impression on contemporaries, who were enthusiastically trying to identify, translate and read every ancient text by Plato that they could find. Their relative ignorance stimulated his major work, On the Differences of Aristotle from Plato, which attacks Aristotle and exalts Plato. His scholarship gave a major boost to the study of Platonic philosophy in the West, which later bore fruit in the foundation of the Florentine Academy by Cosimo de’ Medici in about 1460. Under the direction of Marsilio Ficino, who translated Plato’s Symposium into Latin and wrote an important introduction to it, the discovery and study of Platonic texts expanded greatly. Plethon was interested in problems of geography and his discussion of Strabo’s Geographika may also have played a significant role in the debate among Renaissance scholars during the 1430s. Paul Toscanelli was one of those who met Plethon and showed him new maps of the northernmost islands of the earth: Scandinavia, Greenland and Thule, which were then being explored. In 1474, Toscanelli would write that the quickest way to the Far East was by sailing west from Europe. Strabo was certainly considered a reliable guide for the greatest voyage of exploration: Christopher Columbus’ attempt to reach the Indies by crossing the Atlantic in 1492.
Until his death in 1452, Plethon continued to defend Plato against the Aristotelianism of George Trapezountios (‘of Trebizond’) and George Scholarios. His devoted pupils, Michael Apostoles and John Argyropoulos, and his defenders, including Cardinal Bessarion, continued his study of Platonic texts, though they were in a minority. Aristotelian arguments had been incorporated into Christian theology as early as the sixth century and were an accepted part of Byzantine learning. In the West, the study of logic in medieval schools and St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa contra gentiles (1259–64) had developed Aristotelianism into a precise tool of rational argument. Scholarios championed this new western scholasticism, which he tried to introduce into the traditional Byzantine curriculum; he also translated and commented on writings by Aquinas. His opposition to Plethon was based not only on Plethon’s attack on Aristotle but also on the Book of Laws, which was sent to him after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. Scholarios, by then a monk with the name Gennadios, had been installed as patriarch by Mehmet II the Conqueror. In this capacity, Scholarios condemned as heretical Plethon’s fervent enthusiasm for Hellenic religion, and ordered all copies of his Book to be burned. He thus made sure that the rest of Plethon’s writings would also remain almost unknown.
A few years after this forceful censorship, Sigismondo Malatesta led a campaign against the Turks, who had forced the Despot Deme-trios and his wife Theodora to flee to Constantinople in 1460 when Mistras was captured. In 1464, Malatesta regained the lower town, where he found Plethon’s grave. Years before, he had tried to persuade Plethon to head his court school at Rimini, to no avail. Now, however, he could ensure a more appropriate burial for his hero. He removed Plethon’s bones from Mistras to inter them with due reverence in the wall of his Tempio Malatestiano, where the dedication inscription may still be read: ‘The remains of Gemistos the Byzantine, Prince of Philosophers in his time…’
Mistras thus lost the tomb of its most famous philosopher. During the long period of Turkish domination over the Peloponnese, Mistras was largely abandoned. Many of its churches, monasteries and houses fell into ruins. But they are now being restored, their frescoes conserved and their inscriptions published. The Palace of the Despots is to be roofed over once again and may serve as a tourist attraction in the newly founded Centre for Byzantine Studies. In appreciation of the historian Steven Runciman’s devotion to the site, celebrated in his book on Mistras, a street was named after him. Perhaps it is also time that in this most spectacularly beautiful Byzantine city a road or square may be named after George Gemistos Plethon.
27
‘Better the Turkish Turban than the Papal Tiara’
proverbial saying attributed to Loukas Notaras,
grand admiral in the years 1444–53
Between the recovery of Constantinople from the Latins in 1261 and its fall to the Ottomans in 1453, Byzantine foreign policy was dominated by the question of the union of the churches. Political considerations required emperors to pursue this policy because they desperately needed military help from the West to combat the Turks, and the spiritual leaders of the West had made the reunion of the churches, with Constantinople subordinated to Rome, a precondition of any assistance. After the crusaders’ actions in 1204, many in Byzantium considered this abhorrent, if not heretical, and consistently refused to support it. The Palaiologan emperors therefore found themselves in a cleft stick: if the price of an alliance with effective western military forces was reunion, then they had to find an ecclesiastical policy of compromise and agreement. But any such policy would be condemned by those concerned with correct theology, and by the great majority in Byzantium who remained devoted to their own church, icons and ideas of orthodoxy. Most Byzantines wanted support not subordination.
As the Christian oikoumene had expanded in the early medieval West, contracted in the East under the pressure of Islam, and then reunited during the crusading period, specific features of liturgical practice emerged as major differences. For the Byzantines, any change in the wording of the creed was always considered incomprehensible and unacceptable. The primacy of St Peter, as interpreted by his successors – the bishops of Rome – jarred with the eastern concept of the pentarchy, the rule of the five patriarchs. And in the different forms of the Eucharistic bread (leavened or unleavened), all Christians could appreciate a very obvious visual divergence. Whether all clerics were obliged to maintain celibacy, and whether all Christians fasted on the same days, was perhaps less of a problem. Similarly, geography accounted for the use of Greek or Latin in the liturgy and certain unfamiliar habits, which had given the churches distinct histories within the world of Christendom.
Nonetheless, there was a fundamental desire to sustain Christian unity, especially in the face of Muslim beliefs. Bishops of Old and New Rome traditionally accorded each other great respect and ensured that prayers for the other were included in their services. Despite a breakdown in these relations in the ninth century under Patriarch Photios and Pope Nicholas, and again in 1054, mutual excommunication did not last beyond the lifetimes of the individuals involved. When Alexios I Komnenos appealed to Pope Urban II to support the Christians of the East against the infidel Turks, he did so precisely because they shared a common faith. Whatever the divergences in their practices, the First Crusade was duly preached on this basis and Christian control over Jerusalem was restored.
The events of 1202–4, however, deepened the sense of profound difference and left both parties hostile and wary. The orthodox were particularly outraged by the crusaders’ occupation of their churches and monasteries, not to mention the desecration of Hagia Sophia. From the new centres established after the Fourth Crusade, Greek prelates denounced the Latin bishops and friars appointed to ‘their’ sees and monasteries in the occupied capital and conquered territory. Yet in the empire of Nicaea, John III Vatatzes and Theodore II Laskaris had supported contacts between Latin and Greek representatives, finding the western friars less dogmatic than Cardinal Humbert. Serious discussions took place about rebuilding unity among the Christians. After 1261, Michael VIII Palaiologos determined to intensify these contacts.
Political developments, however, continued to impede the process. When the last Latin emperor Baldwin II fled from Constantinople, Pope Urban IV received him at Rome and promised to restore him to his throne, a policy actively supported by his successor, Clement IV (1265–8). At Viterbo in 1267, the pope gave his blessing to a formidable anti-Byzantine alliance led by Charles of Anjou and sealed by political marriages: Charles married his daughter to Baldwin’s son, and his son to the daughter of William Villehardouin, prince of Achaia. Fortunately for Byzantium, Clement IV died, and after a papal interregnum of three years, Gregory X was elected in 1272. The n
ew pope’s overriding concern was to plan a new crusade against the Muslims, and to this end he announced a general council of the Church which would impose ecclesiastical reforms and reunite the western and eastern churches.
This promising declaration encouraged Michael VIII to try to win over the clerics in Byzantium who had expressed doubts and even denounced the idea of reunion: Patriarch Joseph, numerous bishops and monks who were opposed to ‘submission’ to Rome. Against the emperor’s wish ‘to spare the Greeks the terrible wars and effusion of blood threatening the empire’, they considered his proposal for rebuilding Christian unity unacceptable, because it conceded the primacy of St Peter over all churches and the Latin wording of the creed. They had additional concerns, but because the declaration of faith was held to be a critical method of teaching and preaching Christianity, any disagreement over the text was bound to cause splits (see chapter 4). During twelfth-century debates between western and eastern theologians, the filioque regularly formed a stumbling block: both Peter Grossolano and Anselm of Havelberg wrote about this after their visits to Constantinople and Thessalonike. In response, Niketas ‘of Maroneia’, later Archbishop of Thessalonike, wrote six dialogues which defended the western interpretation, although perversely he refused to add the clause to the creed.
With full knowledge of this background of disagreement, Michael VIII began a campaign to win over the Byzantine opponents of union. In 1273, he imprisoned Patriarch Joseph and obliged John Bekkos, archivist of Hagia Sophia and later patriarch, to spearhead the campaign. But very few clerics were won over to the Latin position by John’s treatise on the subject, even though the emperor and his son and heir declared their personal adherence to the Roman definition of the faith. It even became difficult to find high-ranking clerics to represent the Church of Constantinople at the General Council which Pope Gregory X had summoned to meet in Lyons in 1274. The Byzantine delegation was led by George Akropolites, the head of the government, the former Patriarch Germanos III (who held the authority very briefly in 1266) and Archbishop Theophanes of Nicaea. It was much stronger on the civilian than the ecclesiastical side.
After a difficult journey, in which all their gifts of icons and church treasure intended for the pope were lost at sea, they arrived at Lyons, where the Council had been opened with tremendous fanfare and ceremonial on 7 May 1274. In their two weeks at the council, the filioque, papal primacy and a relatively new aspect of western theology – the existence of Purgatory – were debated. Since the 1230s, theologians on both sides had been discussing what could happen to sinners who did not have time to repent before death. Pope Innocent IV (died 1254) and Thomas Aquinas in 1263 had elaborated on the purging of minor sins in the fire mentioned in the Gospels. But the Orthodox Church had no notion of an alternative post-mortem existence, as the soul would ultimately be judged and sent either to heaven or to hell, so it was unwilling to accept the new western definition. As a result, the compromise wording adopted in 1274 did not refer to Purgatory, though it stressed the power of masses, prayers and pious almsgiving to assist the souls of the departed, which both sides accepted.
At Lyons, the three Byzantine delegates signed the profession of faith previously agreed with the emperor, George Akropolites swore an oath of loyalty to the pope and the Roman version of the creed, and the Council duly accepted the ‘submission’ of the Emperors Michael VIII and Andronikos. The reunion of the churches was celebrated on 6 July 1274 in the cathedral of Saint Jean, and Pope Gregory welcomed the Greeks back into the fold. The Council was interpreted by Rome as the submission of the entire Orthodox Church, rather than of its rulers; in the East, Michael VIII was legitimized and could demand Christian support against the infidel, but he could not persuade the orthodox to accept the terms of union. After 1274, the emperor begged the pope that their church
be permitted to recite the sacred creed as it had been before the schism and up to our time, and that we may remain in observance of the rites we had before the schism – these rites not being contrary to the faith declared above.
In their later professions of faith sent to Rome, however, both Michael VIII and his successor Andronikos II accepted the existence of Purgatory, citing ‘penalties of purgatory or purification’.
The union was duly celebrated in Constantinpole by John Bekkos, who became patriarch in place of Joseph I, but George Metochites, one of the Byzantine delegation, recorded serious opposition:
Instead of a conflict of words, instead of refutative proof, instead of arguments drawn from the Scriptures, what we envoys constantly hear is, ‘You have become a Frank’. Should we who are pro-unionists… be called supporters of a foreign nation and not Byzantine patriots?
From Constantinople, where memories of the sack of 1204 were still vivid, to Epiros, where the despot presented himself as a true representative of orthodox tradition, an anti-unionist party was created. Serbia and Bulgaria also supported this view, which conveniently combined their political antagonism to Byzantium with correct theology. Nor did the union produce the promised military results, partly because Gregory X died in 1276 and Charles of Anjou continued to campaign for the restoration of the Latin empire. Eight years after the Council, when Michael VIII died, his unpopular policy was immediately abandoned. Andronikos II (1282–1328) took vengeance on John Bekkos, who was deposed, brought to trial and imprisoned; three years later the new patriarch, Gregory II, repudiated the union.
From texts that circulated in the East, it is clear that opposition to the union was based on numerous differences between Latin and Greek Church practice. On the issue of what bread should be used in the Eucharist, raised bread or the western wafer called azymes, because it lacked yeast, zymos, the Byzantines believed:
Those who still partake of the azymes are under the shadow of the Law and eat of the table of the Jews, not of the reasonable and living table of God nor of the bread which is both supersubstantial and consubstantial to us men… For indeed the azymes plainly are lifeless, as the very nature of things even more plainly teaches.
Later on this anonymous tract asks:
Why do you priests not marry?… The Church does not forbid the priest to take a wife, but you do not marry. Instead you have concubines and your priest sends his servant to bring him his concubine and puts out the candle and keeps her for the whole night.
The same text criticized the Latins for not venerating icons, calling the Theotokos ‘Santa Maria’, i.e. simply a saint, using two fingers to cross themselves from the other side, eating ‘strangled meat’ and numerous other habits which seemed strange and wrong to the Greeks. These differences would all re-emerge in the 1440s as the population of Constantinople disavowed the Union of churches negotiated by John VIII.
Although the attempt to achieve the union of churches had failed in 1274, the hope that western Christian forces with papal blessing would eventually come to the aid of the Byzantines was kept alive by a growing interest in Latin theology and the first translations of Latin Fathers by Greek scholars. Knowledge of medieval Latin in Byzantium, as well as the vernacular tongues spoken by merchants, crusaders, diplomats and pilgrims, had expanded from the eleventh century onwards. When the scholar and monk Maximos Planoudes (c. 1255– c. 1305) began to translate classical Latin authors and St Augustine, he revolutionized Byzantine understanding of the West. His complete prose version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Heroides and some amatory verses; Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy; Cicero’s Rhetoric; Macrobius and sections of Augustine’s City of God: all of these made some fundamental Latin texts available to a Byzantine audience for the first time. The brothers Demetrios and Prochoros Kydones and Manuel Kalekas extended this work, while Gregory Chioniades demonstrated the importance of Islamic astronomy through his translations from Persian into Greek.
This was a new development in Byzantine culture which reflects an awareness of the value of foreign, non-Greek learning. It marked a departure from assumptions of intellectual superiority in all fields and shows that Byza
ntium could adapt and learn from both sides in the arguments over church union. Most of those who translated from Latin into Greek had learnt the new language from friars in Byzantium. Like the ‘Apostles to the Slavs’, they used their linguistic skills to enhance Byzantine culture. Planoudes also served as ambassador on a diplomatic mission to Venice in 1296. He drew upon a very broad interest in ancient Greek culture. He made an edition of Diophantos’ theorems and other mathematical works, as well as copying and adding to the Anthologia Graeca, the late antique collection of epigrams. In contrast, two generations later, Demetrios and Prochoros Kydones were primarily concerned with theology and were directly involved in fourteenth-century church politics. The brothers were responsible for translating St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa contra gentiles and Summa theologiae into Greek, works which infused new vigour into the unionist camp. They also devoted attention to the works of Augustine, Boethius and St Anselm of Canterbury, and translated a Refutation of the Qur’an by Ricoldo de Monte Croce.
Despite growing interest in western philosophy, the style of Aristotelian logic adopted in the nascent medieval universities of Europe did not make a great impact in Byzantium. The educational system had its own traditions, based on the original texts of Aristotle and enriched by many later commentaries devoted to metaphysics, cosmology, ethics and logic, which had always been taught in the East. Another reason may lie in the growth of hesychasm and the teaching of enlightenment through spiritual contemplation, which owed more to Plato than Aristotle (see chapter 18). The hesychast monks of Mount Athos proved to be implacable opponents of church union on the terms negotiated at Lyons. On the other side, those Byzantine intellectuals who favoured union were more impressed by western argumentation based on Latin translations of Aristotle – a tradition of logic that ignored the eastern commentaries.
Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire Page 36