Sailing from Byzantium (8 page)

Cydones was a master of the flowery classical rhetoric prized by the aristocratic Byzantine literati, and in a letter to Barlaam after Barlaam's departure he laments the void it left in Constantinople's intellectual circles. There follow pages and pages of detailed theological discussion; Cydones is clearly eager for Barlaam's reply. Barlaam, still arguing passionately for union between the two churches, died in spring 1348, shortly after writing it. By that time Cydones had entered the service of the victorious Cantacuzenos, who had had himself crowned as John VI soon after winning the civil war.

The new emperor was a complex and subtle man whose career embraced a bundle of contradictions. Grimly realistic politician, brilliant statesman, able general, aristocratic magnate, devout Hesychast, accomplished man of letters— Cantacuzenos was immune to the obscurantism that so often attached itself to Hesychast beliefs, as his earlier patronage of Barlaam shows. A book lover, Cantacuzenos opened himself
wide to theological speculation, even searched it out. When forced from office less than a decade later, he would become a monk and devote himself to literature in the classical mode, writing a history of his times in the style of Thucydides. The Hesychasts’ suspicions notwithstanding, imitation of classical Greek authors was always the height of literary aspiration for educated Byzantines, and Cydones, too, would win great fame for his mastery of it.

Cydones began his employment as the emperor's chief secretary in charge of appointments, and rapidly made himself indispensable as both secretary and friend. Brilliant and prolific (his surviving letters, some 450 of them, take up three volumes of Greek and are a major historical source for late-fourteenth-century Byzantium), Cydones would walk in Barlaam's anti-Hesychast footsteps. In contrast with Barlaam's heavy tread, Cydones’ humanist slippers rustled softly through the corridors of power, even in the palace of a confirmed Hesychast such as Cantacuzenos. In a fifty-odd-year political career, Demetrius Cydones stayed light on his feet and nimble in dodging blows from the shadows.

Not all would be so lucky, and there were many others in the humanist camp who shared fates similar to Barlaam's. The Hesychasts had another friend of Barlaam's excommunicated, the erudite Simon Atumano, who made his way west and converted to Catholicism in time to succeed his friend as bishop of Gerace; also like Barlaam, he briefly but unsuccessfully tutored some Italians in ancient Greek. The theologian Gregory Akindynos, a friend of both Barlaam and Palamas, began by trying to mediate between them but was soon persuaded on purely theological grounds to support Barlaam.

Akindynos was more typical of the early anti-Hesychasts than Barlaam and Atumano, in that his wide classical learning did not instill in him any affinity for the Latins. Condemned
with Barlaam in 1341 and excommunicated by another church council in 1347, Akindynos went into exile in the East and died soon afterward. Leadership of the anti-Hesychast group then fell to the polymath and historian Nicephoras Gregoras, also no friend of the Latins, who was condemned by a church council in 1351 and placed under house arrest in Constantinople.

It was at this point—with the civil war over, Cantacuzenos still in power, and Palamas’ orthodoxy confirmed by several church councils—that Palamas can be considered to have won the controversy. From now on Hesychasts dominated the official structure of the Byzantine Orthodox Church. When Palamas died in 1358, he was widely mourned and quickly canonized; when Gregoras died sometime around 1360, his corpse was dragged through the city's streets to be jeered at by the devout populace.

Byzantium had now made its choice. After long centuries, it had rejected the Outside Wisdom. Palamas’ victory had turned Barlaam away from Byzantium and toward the West, where his humanism was welcomed, not condemned. The pattern would repeat itself in coming decades, as Byzantine humanists found themselves less and less in sympathy with the direction Byzantium had chosen.

Only after Hesychasm's victory was secure and it rose to control the church did humanistic opposition to it become more firmly associated with Western sympathies. Demetrius Cydones illustrates this, for his anti-Hesychasm—already clear in his letters to Barlaam in the 1340s—preceded his interest in the West, which arose after the church council that endorsed Hesychasm in 1351.

His “Defense of His Own Faith,” written later, after his conversion to Catholicism, tells the story. In conducting the emperor's affairs, Cydones found himself encountering the
Westerners on a daily basis. Merchants especially, but also diplomats, papal legates, mercenaries, even the odd touring noble—the West's presence at the imperial court had grown insistent. Deluged by petitions for this or that imperial favor, each of which had to be translated from Latin, Cydones soon grew frustrated with the lame attempts of the court translators to keep up with it all. He realized he had little choice but to learn Latin himself. Among the Western presence in Constantinople were Franciscan and Dominican friars, and it was a Dominican whom he knew from the Genoese quarter at Pera, across the Golden Horn, that Cydones found to instruct him.

Despite his heavy workload, Cydones tells us, he made rapid progress (like Barlaam, he didn't suffer from false modesty), and soon he was as fluent “as if trained by my parents from childhood.” So to give him something he could really get his teeth into, his delighted teacher presented him with “a little book” to work on, the
Summa Contra Gentiles
of Thomas Aquinas, one of two works in which Aquinas lays out his plan for reconciling the faith of the theologians with the reason of the philosophers.
^∗
Reading the West's Angelic Doctor was like coming home, Cydones tells us, and it ultimately set him on the path to conversion. “Having tasted the lotus,” he says, he couldn't hold back; Aquinas came as a progressive revelation as he read and translated further. As he stacked the Latins up against the Greeks who attempted to refute them, it was the Greeks who seemed to come up short, blindly parroting old arguments that didn't address the detailed and sophisticated reasoning of a writer such as Aquinas.

In 1353, by which time he himself had been elevated to the position of prime minister, Cydones decided to write out a translation of the whole book. In doing so he caused quite a stir, for he made no secret of his new fascination. The emperor himself took an interest, supporting Cydones’ efforts as beneficial to Byzantine culture—and of course to Cantacuzenos’ own avid theological curiosity.

The last part of Cydones’ manuscript of the translation, written out by his secretary with notes in Cydones’ own hand, survives in the Vatican library. At the end, Cydones left a celebratory note in Latin, no less. Its immediacy (not to mention its sentiment, familiar to any classics student) spans centuries: “The book is finished, may praise and glory be to Christ. Demetrius of Thessalonika, servant of Christ, translated this book from Latin into Greek. He worked at it for one year, finishing at 3
P.M.,
December 24, 1354.”

Only a month before, Cantacuzenos had abdicated in favor of John V, now in his early twenties and married to Cantacuzenos’ daughter Helena. With time on his hands now, Cydones says, Cantacuzenos copied out the manuscript himself, which certainly must have taken some effort. He also passed it on to others, creating a most unexpected ripple of Thomism in the highest circles of Byzantine power.

In conjunction with his younger brother Prochorus, whom (though he doesn't say) it seems likely he may have tutored in Latin himself, Cydones went on to make Greek translations of many of Aquinas’ works, as well as works of various other Latin theologians. Both made translations of St. Augustine, and Prochorus also translated some of Boethius’ theological writings. Of the two, Prochorus Cydones was the more strident anti-Hesychast, although he himself was a monk in one of the monasteries of Mt. Athos and (unlike Demetrius) never converted to Catholicism. Demetrius
would not always be able to shield him from persecution, and the Hesychasts succeeded in having Prochorus anathematized in 1368. He went into exile and died shortly thereafter. Demetrius himself would be similarly anathematized, but only after his own death.

The Cydones brothers’ enthusiasm for Aquinas reveals the temperament that the Byzantine humanists shared with the Catholics, whose church was moving toward rationalism just as the Orthodox church was moving toward mysticism. Like Boethius so long before, Aquinas strove above all to find a place for Aristotelian rationalism in Christian faith. As the Hesychasts well knew, Aquinas’ thought had recently been officially embraced by the pope. Just as Hesychasm completed Orthodoxy, so did Thomism complete Catholicism; Palamas and Aquinas were mirror images of each other.

Demetrius Cydones’ translation work gave him not only a growing enthusiasm for Aquinas and Catholic theology but also a new receptivity to the Westerners with whom he increasingly came in contact. His home became a gathering place for Westerners who had texts that needed translation. For their part, the Frangoi were pleased to be seen in a new light, to show off achievements with which no Byzantine would earlier have been willing to credit them. “For the whole race,” says Cydones, “was judged only by the sojourners, and anyone speaking of things Latin would mention nothing more than sails, oars, and other things needed for a sea journey.” Byzantines, he continues, had carried over the old Greek habit of “dividing all mankind into Hellenes and barbarians, with the barbarians assumed to be stupid and gauche.”

Now the barbarians appeared to have pulled ahead, and in theology, the queen of the sciences, no less. Entranced by the vigor of the new Latin theology, Cydones embarked on a
determined crusade to break down his countrymen's ancient prejudice—and, like Barlaam before him, to effect the all-important reconciliation between the two churches. He managed to keep his place despite Cantacuzenos’ fall from power and soon made himself equally indispensable to the new emperor, John V Paleologus, who held power on and off over the next few decades, his own rule disturbed by periodic struggles with his sons. Cydones remained in office most of that time, eventually becoming the Byzantines’ most respected elder statesman. A trip to Venice in 1353 was his first venture abroad; eventually, others would follow as he deepened his contacts in Venice, in Rome, and finally in Florence.

Engrossed in politics, diplomacy, and his Thomistic studies, Cydones let a further fifteen years go by before returning to Italy; in the interim, he converted to Catholicism. In 1369 he journeyed to Rome with John V, who at Cydones’ urging now took the drastic step of himself professing the Catholic faith in hopes of papal support against the Turks.

It is a reflection of John's general weasliness that his conversion was completely ignored by the Orthodox hierarchy at home in Constantinople, and indeed by pretty much everyone else, too. For his part, Cydones enjoyed hobnobbing at the papal curia, but his letters of the period teeter between hope and despair when it came to the ever elusive goal of Western aid. Western promises had become so empty, he writes at one point, that “even the Turks ask with laughter if anyone has word of the expedition.”

It's unlikely there was much the West could do anyway. In retrospect the point of no return was probably reached sometime around the middle of the century, with the dreadful civil war between Cantacuzenos and Anne of Savoy; after that, it seems impossible that any mere expeditionary force could have turned back the rising power of the Ottomans,
who continued conquering more and more lands in Asia Minor and, after 1347, in Europe as well.

The thirty-odd-year reign of John V Paleologos saw a rapid and catastrophic loss of territory to the Turkish juggernaut, which rolled right into the Balkans, smashing the culturally Byzantinized kingdoms of Serbia and Bulgaria. Ottoman rule in the Balkans would last until the modern period. By the 1380s, little remained of the Byzantine “empire” but a few cities and their environs: Constantinople, Thessalonica, Trebizond, bits and pieces of the Peloponnesus. The amazing thing is that Byzantines held on as long as they did.

After a close call when the Ottoman sultan Bayezid blockaded Constantinople for eight years starting in 1394, Byzantium would owe its half-century reprieve only to the fearsome Mongol conqueror Tamerlane. He devastated Bayezid's army at Ankara in 1402 before withdrawing to the East, where he died a few years later. The Ottomans’ brutal defeat at Ankara proved a temporary setback, but—for the survival of Greek literature—a crucial one. As the Turks regrouped, siege craft would again rumble toward the big walls of the Queen of Cities.

For two decades, as the Turkish tide washed into the Balkans, political concerns thwarted Cydones’ oft-expressed desire to return to the West. Throughout his letters—always, modern scholars point out, written with an eye toward publication— he mentions or congratulates friends, younger men who had made overtures to the West and its culture, either learning
Latin or actually traveling themselves to Italy or France. Plans for his own return were continually laid and put off. Finally, by the late 1380s, conditions for a trip began improving, as Cydones’ advancing age (he was now in his mid-sixties) and his open affection for John's ambitious if loyal son Manuel combined to reduce his involvement at court. In late 1389, Cydones set out for Venice, again to seek aid against the Turks.

Cydones’ second trip to Venice lasted just under a year and a half, during which he cemented his ties to this most Byzantine-flavored of Italian cities. In January 1391, a few months before Cydones ended his sojourn, the Venetian doge Antonio Venerio granted him honorary citizenship. The document, still in the Venetian state archives, confers upon “the noble and extraordinarily wise man, Lord Demetrius Cydones, now resident among the Venetians … all the rights, benefits, immunities, and honors now enjoyed by other Venetian citizens.”

Perhaps, if they had known the eventual fruits of Demetrius’ residence among them, the Venetians might have gone even further. Cydones’ traveling companion was his student, friend, and compatriot Manuel Chrysoloras, and it was sometime in 1390 that Cydones put Chrysoloras in touch with an Italian, Roberto Rossi, who wished to learn some Greek. Barlaam may have failed with Petrarch, but over the succeeding decades the remarkable Manuel Chrysoloras would redeem that failure, and much more.