The Dying Empire and the Hope of Union

The historical engine of the Council of Ferrara–Florence: a Byzantine Empire reduced by the 1430s to little more than Constantinople and the Morea, ringed and outmatched by the Ottomans under Murad II; an emperor, John VIII Palaiologos, convinced that only a Western crusade could save the city, and that the price of that crusade was the reunion of the Churches; and the convocation of a council of union, in rivalry with the Council of Basel, at which Mark Eugenikos — drawn from his cell and made Metropolitan of Ephesus — was sent as a chief spokesman of the Orthodox faith.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

An Empire Reduced to a City

By the time the Council of Ferrara–Florence was convoked, the Roman Empire of the East was an empire in name only. The reign of John VIII Palaiologos (co-emperor from 1421, sole emperor from 21 July 1425 to 1448) was spent governing a state that had shrunk to the city of Constantinople itself, a few remnants in Thrace and on the Black Sea, and the Despotate of the Morea in the Peloponnese (Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, rev. ed. 1969, final chapter; Gill, The Council of Florence [1959], introductory chapters). The wealth, the provinces, and the manpower that had once made Byzantium a great power were gone. What remained was a capital of dwindling population, ringed by Ottoman territory, dependent for its survival on the rivalries of its enemies and the charity — or the calculation — of the Latin West.

The Ottoman pressure was relentless and personal in Mark’s own lifetime. The sultan Murad II (reigned 1421–1444 and again 1446–1451) had besieged Constantinople in 1422 — the siege lasting from June to September, lifted only when a revolt at home forced Murad to withdraw (the eyewitness account is that of John Kananos). In 1430 the Ottomans stormed Thessalonica, the empire’s second city, an event Mark himself lamented in a Monody (see Monk and Teacher). To John VIII, the lesson of these years was inescapable: the city could not survive on its own resources. Only external aid — a Western crusade — could break the closing vise.

The Long Prehistory: The Cautionary Precedent of Lyons

The project of union in 1438 was not a new idea but the latest attempt in a long and bitter sequence, and everyone on the Greek side knew it. The most recent and most instructive precedent was the Union of Lyons of 1274, made under the Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, who — himself ringed by enemies and fearing a Western reconquest of his newly recovered capital — had submitted to Rome, accepting the Filioque and papal primacy through his envoys at the Second Council of Lyons (Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, rev. ed. 1969; Gill, The Council of Florence [1959], introductory chapters). That union had been imposed from above against the conviction of the clergy and people, sustained by force and persecution while Michael lived, and repudiated outright after his death — formally renounced at a synod in the Blachernae palace in 1285, which condemned its terms and its principal Greek architect, the patriarch John Bekkos (Ostrogorsky 1969). The lesson of Lyons was written deep in Byzantine memory: a union signed by an emperor under political duress, unreceived by the body of the Church, did not hold. The anti-unionists of Mark’s generation invoked Lyons as the exact pattern of what they feared, and its collapse stood as a standing warning that what a council and an emperor might sign, the faithful could still refuse.

Divided Counsels Within Byzantium

The policy of seeking union was never the unanimous mind of Byzantium; it divided the city’s counsels from the start. Against the emperor’s logic of survival-through-union stood a current of opinion — strong among the monks, and among churchmen of Mark’s temper — that held no earthly aid worth the price of the faith, and that any union bought by doctrinal concession was a betrayal whatever armies it might bring (Gill 1959; Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity [1968]). Bound up with this was a strain of fatalism that ran through the last Byzantine generation: a sense that the empire’s fall, if God so willed it, was to be borne rather than averted by apostasy, and that it was better to lose the city with the faith intact than to keep it at the cost of Orthodoxy. This is the temper later crystallized in the saying attributed to the anti-unionist party on the eve of 1453 — that the Greeks would rather see the sultan’s turban in the City than the Latin mitre (Runciman 1968, on the anti-unionist mood). Whether or not the famous phrase was actually spoken, it names a real and widely held conviction, and it set the human limit on what the emperor’s policy could ever achieve: a union the people regarded as the surrender of the faith could not, in the end, be made to stick.

Union as the Price of Aid

The hope of Western military aid and the project of church union were, from the Byzantine side, two faces of a single policy. The reasoning ran as follows (Gill 1959, introductory chapters; Ostrogorsky 1969):

A crusade against the Ottomans could realistically be summoned only by the papacy, and only now that the Western Schism had been healed (the Council of Constance had ended it in 1417, leaving a single, undisputed pope).
But the papacy and the Western princes were unlikely to spend Latin blood and treasure to save a Church they regarded as schismatic — a Church that did not acknowledge Roman primacy and rejected the Roman faith on the procession of the Spirit.
Therefore union was the price of aid: reunion with Rome, on terms Rome could accept, was the necessary precondition of the military rescue the empire needed to survive.

This was the emperor’s calculation, and it is the indispensable key to everything that happened at Florence. John VIII went to Italy not primarily as a theologian seeking truth but as a sovereign seeking an army, and the union he wanted was a means to that end. This does not mean he was insincere about the faith — the sources show him genuinely anxious not to betray Orthodoxy — but it does mean that the pressure on the Greek delegation to reach an agreement, almost any agreement, came from the very top, and grew heavier as the council dragged on (see The Pressure to Unite). The emperor needed a union; his theologians’ freedom to dissent was bounded by that need.

[Disputed: the conduct and very legitimacy of the council are read incompatibly by the two traditions. The Catholic reading (Gill 1959) holds that the union was freely negotiated and that the Greeks retained genuine freedom of expression throughout. The Orthodox reading holds that a delegation traveling on the pope’s money, stranded by distance and Ottoman danger, and pressed by an emperor who needed a result, did not give the free consent that a genuine ecumenical council requires (Tsirpanlis, Mark Eugenicus and the Council of Florence [1979]). The dispute is treated at length in The Pressure to Unite and Florence in History and Scholarship.]

The Council Convoked: The Rivalry with Basel

The convocation of the council was entangled in the great Western struggle of the age between pope and council — the conciliarist controversy over whether supreme authority in the Church lay with the Roman pontiff or with a general council. The Council of Basel, sitting since 1431, had become the standard-bearer of conciliarism and was locked in conflict with Pope Eugenius IV. The question of where to hold the union council with the Greeks became a weapon in that fight: Basel and Eugenius each sought to host the Greeks and so claim the prestige of reunion.

The Greeks held the decisive card, because they would come only to an Italian city near the sea, accessible to their ships and within reach of escape if needed. Basel could offer no such venue or transport; Eugenius could offer an Italian city, papal galleys to carry the delegation, and full funding. In two bulls — Doctoris gentium (18 September 1437), which transferred the council to Ferrara and declared Basel dissolved, and Pridem ex iustis (30 December 1437) — Eugenius secured the council for himself (Encyclopedia.com, citing Gill 1959; Gill 1959, ch. 1–3). The Greeks chose Eugenius’s offer. This entanglement matters for the later Orthodox argument that the council was uncanonically convened (see The Union Collapses at Home on the 1484 synod’s reasons for rejecting it).

Mark Made Metropolitan of Ephesus

It was for this council that Mark Eugenikos was drawn out of his monastic obscurity. In 1437 the emperor and patriarch built the team that would represent the Orthodox side. Mark was first appointed a procurator (exarch) for the Patriarch of Alexandria; he was then made head of the imperial preparatory commission that studied the contested questions — papal primacy, the essence–energies distinction, and the Filioque — with the young Scholarios among its experts; and in the same year he was consecrated Metropolitan of Ephesus, succeeding the deceased Metropolitan Joasaph (Syropoulos, Memoirs 3.3, 3.8 [ed. Laurent 1971: 164, 168]; Davies, JLARC 19.1 [2025]: 31).

The see of Ephesus was an ancient and honorable one — the city of St. John the Theologian, the site of the Third Ecumenical Council of 431, whose canon forbidding additions to the Creed Mark would wield against the Latins (see The Addition to the Creed). But it was, by the 1430s, a see under Ottoman occupation, so that Mark’s title was in large part honorary and conciliar: he was made a metropolitan in order to be a metropolitan at the council. With Bessarion of Nicaea he was designated one of the two principal Greek spokesmen, and in practice he would deliver most of the addresses allotted to the Orthodox side and carry the chief burden of the debates (Davies 2025: 25–26, 34; Gill 1959: 166). The monk who had not sought ordination found himself the appointed voice of Orthodoxy before the assembled West. How that delegation was made up, and who sailed in it, is the subject of the next file.

The Aid That Did Not Come

The whole calculation that drove the empire to Florence — union in exchange for a crusade — was, in the event, betrayed by history. The Western military aid for which John VIII had paid the price of union did materialize, but late, partially, and to no avail. Pope Eugenius IV did preach a crusade, and in 1443–1444 a Christian army of Hungarians, Poles, and others under King Władysław III of Poland and Hungary and the general John Hunyadi marched against the Ottomans. Its end was catastrophe. At the Battle of Varna, on the Black Sea coast, on 10 November 1444, the crusading army was annihilated by Murad II; King Władysław was killed, and with him fell the papal legate Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini — the same Cesarini who had presided over the Latin side at Ferrara–Florence and opened the debate on purgatory (Ostrogorsky 1969; Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity [1968]; Gill 1959). Varna shattered the last serious Western effort to relieve the empire and left Constantinople with neither aid nor allies for the siege that came in 1453. To the anti-unionists this outcome was the final confirmation of everything they had argued: the faith had been compromised, and the army that was its purchase price had been destroyed within five years, leaving the empire to fall with the union neither honored by the West nor received at home (Runciman 1968).

References

Gill, Joseph. The Council of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. (The convocation; the rivalry with Basel; the bulls Doctoris gentium and Pridem ex iustis; the union as the price of aid; Mark as chief spokesman.)
Ostrogorsky, George. History of the Byzantine State. Rev. ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1969. (The reduced empire under John VIII; the Ottoman pressure; the Morea; the Union of Lyons and its repudiation at Blachernae; the Crusade of Varna.)
Runciman, Steven. The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. (The divided counsels and the anti-unionist mood; the fatalism of the last Byzantine generation; the failure of Western aid at Varna.)
Davies, Ewan. “Mark of Ephesus (1392–1444): Revisiting the Sources on His Life and Work.” Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture 19.1 (2025): 18–54. (Mark’s 1437 appointments: procurator for Alexandria, head of the preparatory commission, consecration to Ephesus.)
Syropoulos, Sylvester. Les “Mémoires” du Grand Ecclésiarque… Sylvestre Syropoulos. Ed. V. Laurent. Paris: CNRS, 1971. (The preparatory commission, 3.3, 3.8.)
Tsirpanlis, Constantine N. Mark Eugenicus and the Council of Florence: A Historical Re-evaluation of His Personality. New York, 1979. (The contested freedom of Greek consent.)
“Council of Ferrara-Florence.” Encyclopedia.com (citing Gill). (The bulls of convocation; the transfer from Basel.)