Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (70 page)

George Scholarius, whose knowledge of Latin theology and, more particularly, of the thinking of St Thomas Aquinas would, it was hoped, confound the scholars of the West; and, most revered of all, George Gemistos Plethon himself from Mistra. All these were pro-Western, to a greater or lesser degree. The leading light of the ultra-Orthodox camp was Mark Eugenicus, Metropolitan of Ephesus. One of his Church's leading theologians and an implacable opponent of the
filioque,
he was to cause John much irritation and anxiety in the months that followed.

The Emperor also took with him his brother Demetrius, to whom in
1429
he had given the tide of Despot. He did not delude himself that Demetrius would make any effective contribution to the coming debate; but he already knew him for a dangerous intriguer, and thought it safer to have him where he could keep an eye on him. Subsequent events were to prove him right.

The party reached Venice on
8
February
1438,
and anchored off the Lido. This time the Republic was determined to spare no expense in giving the Emperor the most splendid reception it could devise. Early the following morning, Doge Francesco Foscari came out to greet him, and according to George Sphrantzes - who was not himself an eyewitness but claims the Despot Demetrius as his authority - showed him every mark of respect, making a deep obeisance and standing bareheaded while John remained seated before him. Only after a decent interval did the Doge take a chair, specially set for him at a slightly lower level on the Emperor's left, while the two discussed the details of John's ceremonial entrance into the city. Foscari then returned to prepare for the official reception.

At noon the Doge, attended as always by his six-man
Signor/a,
sailed out in his state barge, the
Bucintoro,
its sides hung with scarlet damask, the golden lion of St Mark glinting from the poop, the oarsmen's jackets stitched with golden thread; as it advanced, other smaller vessels took up their positions around it, pennants streaming from their mastheads, bands of musicians playing on their decks. Coming alongside the Emperor's flagship, Foscari went aboard and once again made his obeisances. He had originally assumed that the two rulers would then be rowed into the city in the
Bucintoro,
but John demurred. His imperial dignity, he considered, made it necessary that he should disembark in Venice from his own vessel; orders were accordingly given that this should be towed from the Lido to the foot of the
Piazzetta, where what appeared
to be the entire population of the city was waiting to greet its exalted guest, cheering him to the echo. From there the procession slowly wound its way up the Grand Canal, beneath the wooden Rialto Bridge where more crowds waited with banners and trumpets, and so finally at sunset to the great palace of the Marquis of Ferrara,
1
which had been put at the disposal of the imperial party for the duration of their visit. There the Emperor stayed for three weeks, writing letters to all the princes of Europe, urging them to attend the council or at least to send representatives. It was the end of the month before he himself left on the final stage of his journey.

Compared to his Venetian reception, John's arrival at Ferrara was a lacklustre affair, not improved by pouring rain. Pope Eugenius gave him a warm welcome, but even this was somewhat clouded when the Emperor was informed that his Patriarch, on his arrival a few days later, would be expected to prostrate himself and kiss the Pontiff's foot. Old
Joseph was the mildest and gentl
est of men, but even for him this was too much. When he received John's warning message he refused to come ashore until the demand was retracted. At last Eugenius was obliged to yield; had he not done so, it is doubtful whether the Council of Ferrara would ever have taken place. This was only the first of many painful problems of protocol and precedence to arise; both Emperor and Pope were extremely sensitive on all matters affecting their dignity. The relative positions of their two thrones in the cathedral, for example, raised difficulties which at one moment seemed almost insuperable. Later, when the venue had been shifted to the papal palace, John was to insist on proceeding on horseback to his throne itself; when this proved impossible, he demanded that a hole should be broken through a wall in order that he should not be seen dismounting, and that he could be carried to the throne without his foot touching the ground. This was done — and the sessions were suspended till the work was completed.

Such extraordinary punctilio may seem excessive, even ridiculous. To some extent it was part of the elaborate protocol which had always existed at the Byzantine court; but in Ferrara, as later in Florence, it also had a deliberate purpose. If John's mission to the West were to succeed, it was essential that he should be seen not as a suppliant but as the monarch of a great — if not the only — Christian Empire, a vital element

1
This thirteenth-century palace, restored with marvellous insensitivity in the
1860s
and - in consequence of its later history - better known today as the Fondaco dei Turchi, still stands on the upper reaches of the Grand Canal, opposite the S. Marcuola
vapore
tto
station.

in the whole polity of Christendom which must be preserved at all costs from the cupidity of the Turk. The Patriarchal
official Sylvester Syropu
lus, from whose invaluable if somewhat tendentious behind-the-scenes record of the council the above anecdotes have been taken, also records a remark made by the Emperor to the Patriarch before their departure from Constantinople, about the appearance of the Greek ecclesiastics: 'If the Church makes a dignified showing, it will be honoured by them and will be a credit to us. But if it is seen to be dirty and unkempt, it will be despised by them and counted for nothing.'

Quite apart from the vexadous questions of etiquette, the council got off to a bad start. John had stipulated that four months should elapse before the formal discussions on doctrine were begun; one of his principal reasons for attending was to seek help from the other European princes, and he was determined that no important decisions should be taken before their arrival. But spring turned to summer,
and no princes appeared. The Lati
ns grew more and more impatient, the Pope — who was responsible for the board and lodging of the entire Greek delegation - more and more concerned as his financial reserves fell ever lower. In June and July - to give themselves something to do — limited numbers of Greeks and Latins opened discussions on the question of Purgatory, which was doubtless where many of them felt themselves to be; but they reached no conclusions.

With August came the plague. Strangely enough, the Greeks appeared immune - the Emperor was in any case away from Ferrara for most of the time, indulging in his favourite sport of hunting - but there was heavy mortality both among the Latin delegates and in the city as a whole. Meanwhile the Latins grew even more irritated with their guests. Fortunately for them, however, the Greeks too were losing patience. They had been away from home for the best part of a year at a time of great anxiety and uncertainty, and had so far achieved nothing. Many of them too were short of money, for the papal subsidies were becoming increasingly irregular. Finally it was by now plain that none of the European princes had any intention of attending the council at all, so that there was no point in waiting for them any longer. It was to everyone's relief when deliberations began in earnest on
8
October.

For the first three months they were concerned almost exclusively with the
filioque
clause - and not even the question of whether the Holy Ghost did in fact proceed from the Father
and the Son
(rather than from the Father only) so much as that of whether the act of introducing it into the Nicene Creed was legitimate or
no. The principal spokesman on
the Greek side was the Metropolitan Mark Eugenicus, who rested his case on a specific regulation agreed in
451
by the Council of Ephesus: 'To no one is it allowed to recite, write or compose a faith other than that defined by the Holy Fathers in Nicaea.' The Latins argued that the disputed word was a clarification rather than an addition, and pointed out that the Creed as recited in the Greek Church already incorporated various changes from the Nicene original; but the Metropolitan would have none of it. It was anyway, they suggested, a profoundly insignificant point; in that case, he testily replied, why were they so determined to keep it in? The issue was further clouded by linguistic problems. Few of the delegates spoke any language other than their own, and there were no qualified interpreters. Additional difficulties arose when it was discovered, at a fairly early stage in the proceedings, that various Latin and Greek words at first believed to be precise equivalents were in fact nothing of the sort: to take but one example the Greek word
ousia,
meaning 'substance', carried with it various shades of meaning quite alien to the Latin
substantia.
The sessions ended on
13
December with agreement as far away as ever.

At this point the Pope managed to persuade the delegates to move to Florence. He gave as his reason the continued presence of the plague in Ferrara, but his true motives were almost certainly financial: the council had been sitting for eight months, it showed every sign of going on indefinitely, and it had already made alarming inroads on the papal treasury. In Florence, on the other hand, the Medici could be trusted to help out. But the move also proved beneficial in other ways. When the sessions were resumed towards the end of February
1439
th
e
Greeks -tired, anxious, homesick and (if Syropulus is to be believed) hungry -
seemed distinctly readier to compromise than they had been in the previous year. By the end of March they had agreed that the Latin formula according to which the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father
and
the Son meant the same as a recently-accepted Greek formula whereby it proceeded from the Father
through
the Son. It was soon after this breakthrough that Patriarch Joseph finally expired; but then, as an observer rather unkindly remarked, after muddling his prepositions what else could he decently do?

With the
filioque
at last out of the way, the other outstanding questions were quickly settled. The Greeks disapproved of the Roman dogma on Purgatory (for which they could find no justification) and of the use of unleavened bread at the Sacrament (which, they thought, not only smacked of Judaism but was disrespectful of the Holy Ghost, symbolized by the leaven); they also deplored the Latin practice of giving communion in both kinds to the laity, and of forbidding the marriage of secular priests. But on all these issues they put up only a token opposition. When, on the other hand, the Latins violently attacked the recently-defined Eastern doctrine concerning the uncreated Energies of God, they declined to press the point. The question of papal supremacy might at other times have caused difficulties, but since the Council of Basel this had been a delicate subject and was consequently glossed over as far as possible.
1
Thanks largely to the Emperor himself - who employed persuasion and threats in equal measure to ensure the amenability of his subjects - by mid-summer agreement had been reached on every major issue, and on Sunday,
5
July the official Decree of Union - little more than a statement of the Latin position, apart from one or two concessions permitting Greek usages - was signed by all the Orthodox bishops and abbots except the Metropolitan of Ephesus, who had given in on absolutely nothing but was forbidden by John to exercise a veto. The Latins then added their own signatures; and on the following day the decree was publicly proclaimed in Florence cathedral, being recited first in Latin by Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini (who from the beginning had been the principal Latin spokesman) and then in Greek by the Metropolitan Bessarion of Nicaea. The Latin version began with the words
L
aetentur Coeli
- 'let the heavens rejoice'. But the heavens, as it soon became clear, had precious little reason to do so.

It was February
1440
before John Palaeologus returned, via Venice, to Constantinople. He had a sad homecoming. After the departure of his luckless second wife Sophia of Montferrat, who had fled back to Italy fourteen years before, he had married Maria, the daughter of the Emperor Alexius IV of Trebizond. She had proved the love of his life, and he was broken-hearted to learn as he stepped from his ship that she had died a few weeks before. More serious for the Empire was the fact that the Council of Florence was already almost universally condemned. The Patriarchs of Jerusalem, Alexandria and Antioch disowned the delegates who had signed on their behalf. Mark Eugenicus, Metropolitan of Ephesus, was the hero of the hour. The signatories to the hated

1
It was during discussions on this subject that the Donation of Constantine - according to which Constantine the Great, on transferring his capital to Constantinople, was said to have left the imperial crown to the Pope to bestow on whomever he wished - was used as evidence for the last time. Only a year later the Renaissance humanist Lorenzo Valla proved it a forgery. (See
Byzantium: The Early Centuries,
p.
379.)