Byzantine Culture

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The Council of Florence, 1438–1439

At Ferrara and Florence the Greek and Latin churches agreed on union, and almost every Greek delegate signed. Why it was rejected at home, and what it cost Byzantium in its last years.

In February 1438 the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaiologos landed at Venice with the patriarch of Constantinople, some twenty metropolitans, a body of scholars and a retinue of several hundred, and travelled to Ferrara to negotiate the reunion of the Greek and Latin churches. Seventeen months later, at Florence, a decree of union was proclaimed in the cathedral under Brunelleschi’s newly completed dome and signed by almost every Greek present.

It was the most serious attempt at reunion ever made, conducted with genuine theological seriousness on both sides over many months of debate. It failed completely, and within fifteen years the empire that had sought it no longer existed.

Why the Emperor Went

The motive was military. The Ottomans held the Balkans and Anatolia; Constantinople was a tributary city-state. Only the west could supply an army, and the papacy would not sponsor one for a schismatic church.

The calculation was not new. Michael VIII had made the same one at Lyons in 1274, with the same domestic result. John VIII went anyway, because the alternative was to do nothing.

There was also a Latin political motive. Pope Eugenius IV was locked in a struggle with the Council of Basel, which held that a general council outranks a pope. Bringing the Greeks to a council of his own convening would be a decisive victory over the conciliarists, and Basel and Eugenius competed openly for the Greek delegation, each offering ships and money.

The Delegations

The Greek party included some remarkable people: the patriarch Joseph II, elderly and ill; Bessarion, metropolitan of Nicaea, a pupil of Plethon and one of the finest Greek scholars of the age; Mark Eugenikos, metropolitan of Ephesus, the most formidable theologian present; Isidore, metropolitan of Kiev; and the philosopher George Gemistos Plethon, who was not a churchman and whose lectures on Plato during the council’s Florentine phase made a lasting impression on Italian humanists — a story told in the transmission of classical learning.

The Latin side was led by Eugenius IV and included the Dominican theologian John of Montenero and Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini.

The Issues

Four questions were debated, and they are the substance of the schism:

The filioque. Both the doctrine — whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son — and the legitimacy of adding words to a conciliar creed unilaterally. Most of the debating time went here.

Purgatory. The Latin doctrine of a purifying fire; the Greeks accepted prayer for the dead and an intermediate state but not the Latin account of it.

The eucharist. Whether leavened or unleavened bread should be used, and at what point in the liturgy the consecration occurs.

Papal primacy. What the pope’s authority actually consists of — the hardest question, and the one settled by the vaguest wording.

The council met in plenary session repeatedly, with set speeches and rebuttals, often over several days on a single point. It was a real debate, and the proceedings survive in Greek and Latin accounts that do not always agree.

The Decree

The union decree Laetentur Caeli (“Let the heavens rejoice”) was proclaimed on 6 July 1439. Its terms were, in substance, the Latin positions:

  • The filioque was declared orthodox, with the explanation that the Greek formula “through the Son” means the same thing
  • Purgatory was affirmed
  • Both leavened and unleavened bread were declared valid
  • The pope was recognised as holding primacy over the whole church, with a qualifying clause preserving the rights and privileges of the eastern patriarchs

Every Greek bishop present signed except Mark of Ephesus. The patriarch Joseph II had died in Florence a month earlier, leaving a short written statement of assent that his opponents immediately called a forgery. The pope, on hearing that Mark had not signed, is reported to have said: “Then we have accomplished nothing.”

The Rejection

The delegation returned to a hostile city. Several signatories repudiated their signatures almost immediately, some claiming they had signed under duress, hunger or fear of being stranded in Italy — accusations that are partly true and partly retrospective face-saving.

The population, the monks and the lower clergy were overwhelmingly opposed. Mark of Ephesus became a national hero and was canonised. Three eastern patriarchs rejected the union. In Russia, Isidore of Kiev returned as a papal legate, proclaimed the union in Moscow, and was arrested; the Russian church elected its own metropolitan in 1448 without reference to Constantinople, which is the effective beginning of its independence and of the Third Rome idea.

The union was not formally proclaimed in Hagia Sophia until 12 December 1452, five months before the city fell, by which time it was too late to matter.

What It Produced

Militarily, almost nothing. The crusade organised in response was destroyed by the Ottomans at Varna in November 1444. A papal squadron and a few hundred soldiers reached Constantinople in 1453.

Ecclesiastically, a hardening. The Orthodox rejection of Florence became a defining moment, and “Florence” is still shorthand in Orthodox polemic for union imposed under political pressure.

Intellectually, a great deal. Bessarion stayed in Italy, became a cardinal, assembled the finest Greek library in the west and left it to Venice, where it became the Biblioteca Marciana. Plethon’s Florentine lectures contributed to the founding of the Medici Platonic academy. Greek scholars and Greek manuscripts moved west in numbers — the subject of Bessarion and the Greek scholars of Italy.

The Judgement

Modern assessment is more sympathetic to the Greek signatories than the Orthodox tradition has been. They were not careerists: they were men trying to save a state and a church from an existential threat, negotiating from a position of complete weakness, and they conceded what they thought they could.

The counter-argument, made by Mark of Ephesus at the time, was that a union which sacrificed the faith would save nothing worth saving, and that the west would not deliver an army in any case. On the second point he was right.

The remark attributed to the Grand Duke Loukas Notaras — that he would rather see the sultan’s turban in the city than the Latin mitre — is reported by the historian Doukas, who disapproved of it. Whether Notaras said it, it captures the opinion that the union produced, and it is the sentence that has followed the Council of Florence through history.

Mark of Ephesus

The one Greek bishop who refused to sign deserves a fuller account, because Orthodox tradition has made him the council’s central figure.

Mark Eugenikos (c. 1392–1445) was metropolitan of Ephesus and the chief Greek spokesman in the early sessions at Ferrara. He argued the case against the filioque at length, both on the canonical ground that the creed could not be altered and on the theological ground inherited from Photios.

As the council went on and imperial pressure for agreement increased, he was progressively excluded from the negotiations. He did not sign the decree.

Pope Eugenius IV, told that Mark had refused, is reported to have said: “Then we have accomplished nothing.” The remark, whether or not verbatim, was accurate — a union rejected by the most respected theologian present could not be presented at home as the mind of the Greek church.

Mark returned to Constantinople, refused communion with the unionists, and spent his remaining years writing against the union. He was not punished; his moral standing made that impossible. He died in 1445 and was canonised by the Orthodox Church in 1734.

His position deserves to be stated at its strongest rather than as mere obstinacy. He held that a union purchased by conceding the faith would produce neither salvation nor soldiers; that the west would not deliver an army whatever was signed; and that the church would be left divided at home for nothing. On the second point he was demonstrably right.

The Mechanics of the Council

The practical conditions under which the Greeks negotiated shaped the outcome, and they are documented.

The delegation of some seven hundred people was transported at papal expense and depended on papal subsidies for living costs throughout. Those subsidies were paid irregularly and, according to Greek accounts, were sometimes withheld at points when pressure was being applied.

Plague at Ferrara forced the move to Florence in January 1439, which put the delegation further from the sea and made independent departure harder.

The council ran for seventeen months. The Greeks were far from home in a foreign city, in debt, increasingly homesick, aware that the Ottomans were at their gates, and dependent on their hosts for the ships back.

Several signatories later said they had signed under duress, hunger or fear of being abandoned in Italy. Those claims were partly self-serving and partly true.

The patriarch Joseph II died in Florence on 10 June 1439, weeks before the decree, leaving a brief written assent that his opponents immediately called a forgery. He is buried in Santa Maria Novella, where his tomb slab can be seen.

The Italian Afterlife

The council’s most durable consequences were cultural, and they happened in Florence rather than Constantinople.

The Greek delegation included the leading scholars of the empire, and for seventeen months they were in the city where Cosimo de’ Medici was building a court.

Gemistos Plethon, then in his eighties and not a churchman, lectured on the differences between Plato and Aristotle. Marsilio Ficino later wrote that Cosimo was so moved by hearing Plethon that he conceived the idea of the Platonic Academy, and commissioned Ficino’s translation of the complete Plato as a result. The story is a simplification but the connection is real, and it is traced in the transmission of classical learning.

Bessarion stayed in Italy, became a cardinal, and assembled the library he left to Venice.

Benozzo Gozzoli’s fresco of the Procession of the Magi in the Medici palace, painted about twenty years later, is generally thought to include portraits of the Byzantine emperor John VIII and the patriarch among the magi — the council remembered in Florence as a moment of exotic magnificence rather than as a failed treaty.

The Greeks came to buy an army with their theology, and left having sold their philosophy instead.

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