The Greek Delegation

Who sailed to Italy for the union, and who they were: the great Byzantine delegation of some seven hundred persons that departed Constantinople in November 1437 on papal galleys — Emperor John VIII Palaiologos; the aged and dying Patriarch Joseph II; the brilliant young metropolitans Bessarion of Nicaea and Isidore of Kiev, both destined to become Roman cardinals; the lay theologian George Scholarios, the future Patriarch Gennadios II; the philosopher Plethon; and the twenty-odd bishops, several of them carrying the proxies of the Eastern patriarchates — among whom Mark of Ephesus stood as the chief defender of Orthodoxy.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

The Voyage

The Greek delegation departed Constantinople in November 1437 — Orthodox tradition gives Mark’s own departure as 24 November — aboard papal galleys fitted out at the expense of Pope Eugenius IV, reaching Venice on 8 February 1438 and then Ferrara, where the emperor arrived on 4 March and the patriarch on 7 March 1438 (Gill, The Council of Florence [1959], ch. 3; Davies, JLARC 19.1 [2025], on Mark’s departure). The delegation numbered roughly seven hundred persons, including the emperor, the patriarch, and some twenty to twenty-three metropolitans, several of whom also carried the proxies of the absent Eastern patriarchates (Gill 1959; Davies 2025: 31). That the Greeks traveled on the pope’s ships, at the pope’s expense, is a fact that the later Orthodox critique of the council would not let pass: a delegation so dependent, so far from home, in a city ringed by the pope’s resources, was not, on the Orthodox reading, in a position to negotiate as equals (see The Pressure to Unite).

The Emperor: John VIII Palaiologos

John VIII Palaiologos (1392–1448; sole emperor from 1425) led the delegation in person — a measure of how much the empire’s survival was felt to ride on the council. He came not as a theologian but as a sovereign seeking the Western aid that union would unlock (see The Dying Empire and the Hope of Union), and his hand is visible at every turn: it was he who pressed his own theologians toward agreement, who at times restrained Mark, and who in the end secured the signatures. His brother, the Despot Demetrios Palaiologos, accompanied him but left before the union was signed.

The Patriarch: Joseph II

Patriarch Joseph II of Constantinople was old and ailing throughout — by some accounts near eighty (born c. 1360), and reportedly a natural son of the Bulgarian tsar Ivan Shishman. He would not live to see the union proclaimed: he died at Florence on 10 June 1439, before the decree was signed, and was buried in the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella, where his tomb-fresco remains (Gill, Personalities of the Council of Florence [1964], chapter on Joseph II). After his death a written note, a profession accepting “all that the holy catholic and apostolic Church of Rome confesses,” was found and attributed to him.

[Disputed: the authenticity of Patriarch Joseph II’s death-bed profession of union is contested. The pro-union party treated it as genuine; critics from Frommann onward have judged it spurious — “so Latinized… its spuriousness is evident” — and noted the silence of the eyewitness Syropoulos about it (cf. Gill, Personalities [1964], on Joseph II; Frommann’s verdict as reported in the older literature). It is best treated as a contested document, not a settled fact.]

The patriarch’s death left the Greek side leaderless on the ecclesiastical side at the very moment of decision — a circumstance that the Orthodox reading counts among the pressures that produced the signatures (see The Pressure to Unite).

Even before the doctrinal debates opened, the patriarch was at the center of the first and most symbolically charged friction of the whole encounter — the dispute over how the Greeks were to greet the pope. By Western protocol, every visiting prelate, including a patriarch, was expected to kneel and kiss the pope’s foot (the osculum pedis). Joseph II, learning of this expectation as the galleys neared Venice and Ferrara, refused outright: it was, he is reported to have said, an unheard-of novelty, and he would sooner turn back than render to the bishop of Rome a homage no canon or ancient custom warranted (Gill, The Council of Florence [1959], ch. 4; Syropoulos, Memoirs, ed. Laurent 1971, on the reception at Ferrara). The Greeks pressed the point hard, threatening that the patriarch would not disembark on such terms, and Eugenius IV gave way — the foot-kissing was dropped, and the two prelates met instead with an embrace. The episode is small in itself, but it was remembered as a token of everything at stake: the very gesture of greeting encoded the question of primacy that the council would spend a year failing to resolve, and the Greeks had served notice at the outset that they had not come as suppliants (Gill 1959, ch. 4; Davies, JLARC 19.1 [2025]: 33).

The brilliance that made Bessarion so formidable an advocate, and so great a loss to the Orthodox side, is hard to overstate. Schooled at Constantinople and then under Plethon at Mistra, he was at home in the whole of Greek patristic and classical literature, and at Florence he matched the Latin scholastics on their own ground in a way few Easterners could; Gill judged his conversion to the union the fruit of genuine conviction rather than calculation, the verdict of a man persuaded by the texts (Gill, Personalities of the Council of Florence [1964], chapter on Bessarion; Gill, “The Sincerity of Bessarion the Unionist”). His later career carried that brilliance into the heart of the Latin Church. As cardinal he served repeatedly as papal legate, was twice a serious candidate for the papacy itself — in the conclaves of 1455 and 1471 — and for a season administered the see of Constantinople as titular Latin patriarch. Above all he became a patron and preserver of Greek letters in the West: his library of some five to six hundred Greek manuscripts, bequeathed in 1468 to the Republic of Venice, became the founding core of the Biblioteca Marciana and did as much as any single act to carry Byzantine learning into the Italian Renaissance (Gill, Personalities [1964], on Bessarion). The man who might have stood beside Mark as the second pillar of Orthodox resistance instead became one of the makers of Western humanism.

The delegation also carried a contingent of secular officials and lay scholars whose presence shaped its temper. Beside Scholarios and Plethon stood men such as George Amiroutzes of Trebizond, a philosopher and imperial counsellor who supported the union and would later, after the fall of Trebizond in 1461, pass into the service of the Ottoman court — a trajectory that, like Bessarion’s and Isidore’s, illustrates how thoroughly the unionist current ran through the lay intelligentsia and not merely the episcopate (Gill, Personalities [1964]; Davies 2025: 33). The lay senators, judges, and archontes who accompanied the emperor gave the embassy something of the character of a state mission as much as a synod, a point the anti-unionists would press: a council, they held, is no place to be governed by the calculations of statecraft.

What most clearly prefigured the eventual split, however, was the sheer heterogeneity of the company. The delegation was never a single mind. It contained committed unionists prepared to be persuaded and rewarded (Bessarion, Isidore, Dorotheos of Mytilene, Amiroutzes); a large body of waverers who would in the end sign more from exhaustion and the emperor’s example than from conviction; and a hard core of committed anti-unionists — Mark of Ephesus above all, with Antonios of Herakleia, who would try to flee the council in Mark’s company, and the Grand Ecclesiarch Syropoulos, who signed under duress and recanted. The fault line that would open at the signing in July 1439, and then crack the whole Byzantine Church on the delegation’s return, was already present, latent, in the company that sailed from Constantinople (Gill 1959, with the roster; Davies 2025: 33).

Bessarion of Nicaea

Bessarion (1403–1472), elevated to the metropolitan see of Nicaea for the council, was, with Mark, one of the two principal Greek spokesmen — and the great might-have-been of the Orthodox cause. He and Mark began aligned, both holding the procession of the Spirit from the Father alone; but in the course of the Florentine debates Bessarion was genuinely persuaded by the Latin patristic case as John of Montenero presented it, and crossed to the unionist side, delivering the famous pro-union Oratio dogmatica of 13–14 April 1439 (Gill 1959: 226–230; Gill, “The Sincerity of Bessarion the Unionist”). He signed the union, was made a cardinal by Eugenius IV in December 1439, and ended as one of the most learned men of the Italian Renaissance and very nearly a pope. Notably, it was Bessarion who, earlier at Ferrara, intervened to prevent Mark and his brother John from leaving the council, arguing that Mark’s absence would gravely weaken the Greek position (Syropoulos, Memoirs 6.16–17 [ed. Laurent 1971: 306–308]; Davies 2025: 26). The two men who had set out as allies in defense of the same faith ended as the emblematic figures of the two sides.

Isidore of Kiev

Isidore (c. 1385–1463), Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus’, based in Moscow, was a committed unionist who signed the decree and was, with Bessarion, made a cardinal in December 1439. Returning north as papal legate, he proclaimed the union in Moscow — and was promptly arrested and forced to flee by a Russian Church that would have none of it, a foretaste of the union’s wider fate. He was present at the fall of Constantinople in 1453, having proclaimed the union in Hagia Sophia the previous December (see The Union and the Fall).

George Scholarios

George (Georgios) Scholarios — Mark’s first pupil (see Constantinople and Formation) and the future Patriarch Gennadios II — attended as a layman, a senator and katholikos krites (chief justice), serving as a lay theologian and adviser. At the council he was comparatively conciliatory, making accommodating speeches and helping to draft deliberately vague formulae; he left the council in June 1439, with Plethon and the Despot Demetrios, before the decree was signed, not yet known as an outright opponent (Syropoulos, Memoirs 9.25 [ed. Laurent 1971: 460]; Davies 2025: 22). Only later, at Mark’s urging and finally at his deathbed charge, would he become the leader of the anti-unionist party (see The Anti-Unionist Leader). His trajectory — conciliatory at Florence, the union’s “most uncompromising enemy” within a few years — is one of the central arcs of the whole story.

Plethon and the Bishops

George Gemistos Plethon, Mark’s old teacher and the Neoplatonist of Mistra, came as a lay philosopher; at Florence he lectured the Italian humanists on Plato, seeding the Florentine Platonic revival, and he too left before the signing. Among the metropolitans were Dorotheos of Mytilene (a unionist, and probably the author of part of the official Greek Acta), Antonios of Herakleia (an anti-unionist who would try to leave with Mark), Dionysius of Sardis, and some twenty others, several serving as proxies for the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem (Gill 1959, with the full roster; Davies 2025: 31, 33). The proxy assignments were reshuffled by the emperor and patriarch in a way the anti-unionists later found telling — Mark himself was successively designated exarch for Alexandria, then Jerusalem, then Antioch (Syropoulos, Memoirs 3.32, 4.43–44 [ed. Laurent 1971: 194, 244, 248]; Davies 2025: 31). The Grand Ecclesiarch Sylvester Syropoulos, who signed under duress and then recanted, would write the major anti-unionist eyewitness Memoirs of the whole affair.

This, then, was the company: an emperor seeking an army, a dying patriarch, two future cardinals, a future Ottoman-era patriarch, a crypto-pagan philosopher, and the bishops of a vanishing empire — and among them, the metropolitan of an occupied see who would prove the one man none of the pressures could move.

References

Gill, Joseph. The Council of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. (The voyage, dates, and roster; Bessarion’s conversion; the size of the delegation.)
Gill, Joseph. Personalities of the Council of Florence and Other Essays. Oxford: Blackwell, 1964. (Joseph II; Bessarion; the contested death-bed note.)
Syropoulos, Sylvester. Les “Mémoires”… de Sylvestre Syropoulos. Ed. V. Laurent. Paris: CNRS, 1971. (Bessarion’s prevention of Mark’s departure, 6.16–17; the reshuffled proxies, 3.32, 4.43–44; Scholarios’ early departure, 9.25.)
Davies, Ewan. “Mark of Ephesus (1392–1444): Revisiting the Sources.” Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture 19.1 (2025): 18–54. (Mark’s departure; the delegation’s composition; Scholarios’ role; the proxy assignments.)