Section 02: The Road to Florence
How the council came to be, and who went to it. These files set out the desperate situation of the Byzantine Empire in the 1430s — a capital reduced to an island, pressed by the Ottomans under Murad II, for which union with Rome had become the price of the Western military aid that alone seemed able to save it — and the composition of the great Greek delegation that sailed to Italy in 1437: the emperor, the dying patriarch, and the bishops and scholars among whom Mark Eugenikos, newly made Metropolitan of Ephesus, was sent as a chief spokesman of Orthodoxy.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine
Contents
| File | Topic |
|---|---|
| The Dying Empire and the Hope of Union | The shrinking empire under John VIII Palaiologos; the Ottoman pressure and the 1422 siege; the logic of union-as-the-price-of-aid; the convocation of the council and the rivalry with Basel; Mark made Metropolitan of Ephesus and chief Greek spokesman |
| The Greek Delegation | The company that sailed to Italy: Emperor John VIII, Patriarch Joseph II, Bessarion of Nicaea, Isidore of Kiev, George Scholarios, Plethon, and the bishops; the voyage on papal galleys; the proxies for the Eastern patriarchates |
How to Use
- Read The Dying Empire and the Hope of Union for the why of the council; read The Greek Delegation for the who.
- The formation of Mark before this point is in Section 01; the council’s actual course is in Section 03.
Cross-References
- For the late-Byzantine state, see The Byzantine Church.
- For the patriarchate at the center of the union, see The Church of Constantinople.
References
- See the collection README for the principal sources; each content file carries its own full reference list.