The Council 1438–39

The flagship narrative of the collection: the course of the Council of Ferrara–Florence from its opening at Ferrara in 1438, through its transfer to Florence under plague and papal debt early in 1439, to the signing of the union decree Laetentur Caeli on 6 July 1439. It sets out the four issues that divided the Churches — purgatory (debated first), the Filioque (the addition and then the doctrine), the azymes, and papal primacy — the principal debaters on each side, and the central role of Mark Eugenikos as the chief Orthodox spokesman who was, in the end, sidelined and isolated as the emperor pressed for agreement.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

The Opening at Ferrara

The council with which Pope Eugenius IV outmaneuvered the rival Council of Basel (see The Dying Empire and the Hope of Union) opened formally at Ferrara in early 1438, with the first solemn session attended by the Greeks held on 9 April 1438 (Gill, The Council of Florence [1959], ch. 4). But the substantive public debates were then deliberately delayed for some four months at the request of Emperor John VIII, who wanted the council to wait for the secular princes of the West to send representatives: the emperor had come for an army, and he wanted visible Western political commitment, not church union alone (Encyclopedia.com, citing Gill 1959; cf. Gill 1959, ch. 4–5). Only committee work — on purgatory — occupied the summer; the full public sessions resumed in October 1438.

The controlling primary source for the proceedings is the official Greek minutes, the Acta Graeca, edited by Joseph Gill (Rome, 1953), supplemented by the Latin Acta and by the anti-unionist eyewitness Memoirs of Sylvester Syropoulos. Gill’s history weighs the conciliatory Acta Graeca above the hostile Syropoulos; the Orthodox reading reverses the weighting — a methodological divergence that runs through the whole historiography (see Florence in History and Scholarship).

The Transfer to Florence

In the winter of 1438–39 plague broke out at Ferrara, and the council was transferred to Florence, the bull of transfer being read on 10 January 1439 and the first Florentine session held on 26 February 1439 (Gill 1959, ch. 6). The stated reason was the pestilence; Gill’s reading is that the deeper motives were financial — Eugenius was in serious “pecuniary straits,” and Medici Florence could fund the council — and strategic: moving the Greeks inland from the Adriatic coast lessened the chance that they would simply take ship and sail home before a union was concluded (Gill 1959, ch. 6; see The Pressure to Unite). The whole council lasted, from the Greeks’ arrival to the signing, some fifteen months, and the wearing effect of that duration on a homesick, unpaid, and isolated delegation is itself part of the story.

The Four Issues

At an early sitting, the Latin president of the council, Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini, named the four points of difference between the Churches (Acta Graeca, ed. Gill 1953):

  1. The procession of the Holy Spirit — the Filioque — comprising both the question of the addition of the words “and the Son” to the Creed and the question of the doctrine of double procession.
  2. The azymes — whether the Eucharist should be celebrated with unleavened (Latin) or leavened (Greek) bread.
  3. Purgatory — the state of souls after death and the existence of a purgatorial cleansing.
  4. The primacy of the Roman pontiff.

The order in which they were debated differed from the order of listing, and the difference is itself revealing of the council’s strategy:

  • Purgatory was debated first, in committee at Ferrara in the summer of 1438 (Cesarini presenting the Latin position on 4 June, the Greek reply following on 14 June, the stage closing without agreement on 17 July). This is the subject of Section 05.
  • The Filioque addition was debated publicly at Ferrara from 8 October to 13 December 1438 — Mark choosing deliberately to fight first on the legitimacy of the addition rather than on the doctrine (see The Addition to the Creed).
  • The Filioque doctrine was debated at Florence in March 1439, with John of Montenero carrying almost the whole Latin case against Mark (see East and West on the Spirit).
  • The azymes were among the four issues but received the least debate; the Greeks conceded the validity of the Latin practice more readily here than elsewhere, and the final decree declared both valid.
  • Papal primacy was debated last, at Florence in June 1439, after the Filioque doctrine was substantially settled — Cesarini calling it “the last difference,” and the most difficult “regarding the human element” (Gill 1959, ch. 8; on primacy, M. A. Schmidt, “The Problem of Papal Primacy at the Council of Florence,” Church History 30/1 [1961]: 35–49).

[Disputed: papal primacy. The decree Laetentur Caeli defined the Roman pontiff as holding “primacy over the whole world… true vicar of Christ, head of the whole Church,” with “full power of tending, ruling and governing the universal Church” — but the Greek text qualified this primacy “according as it is defined… in the sacred canons,” language that became a flashpoint over what the Greeks had actually conceded. The Catholic reading takes the decree as a Greek acknowledgment of the developed papal monarchy; the Orthodox reading takes the canonical qualification as preserving the conciliar and patriarchal order of the early Church and refusing the later Roman claims (Gill 1959; D. J. Geanakoplos, “The Council of Florence (1438–1439) and the Problem of Union,” Church History 24 [1955]: 324–346).]

The Debaters

On the Latin side, Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini presided and led much of the debate (he would die at the battle of Varna in 1444); Andrew of Rhodes (Andreas Chrysoberges), a Greek-born Dominican, argued the Church’s authority to add the Filioque clause; John of Montenero (Giovanni da Montenero), the Dominican Provincial of Lombardy, was the sole Latin doctrinal spokesman on the Filioque at Florence and the man whose patristic florilegium won Bessarion over; and Juan de Torquemada, Master of the Sacred Palace, debated purgatory and the eucharist. On the Greek side, Mark of Ephesus and Bessarion of Nicaea were the two principal spokesmen — until Bessarion crossed to the unionist side, after which Mark stood increasingly alone.

[Disputed: a common encyclopedic error attributes the Florence Filioque doctrine debate to “John of Ragusa, Provincial of Lombardy.” This conflates two men: “Provincial of Lombardy” is the title of John of Montenero, the actual Florence debater; John of Ragusa was the pre-council Basel legate to Constantinople, not the Florentine spokesman (so Gill 1959 and the modern literature).]

The choice of debaters is itself instructive of the asymmetry between the two sides. The Latins fielded trained scholastic theologians — Dominicans schooled in the syllogistic method and the systematic theology of Aquinas — who came armed with florilegia of patristic citations marshaled into demonstrative arguments. The Greeks, for their part, fielded bishops formed in the patristic and liturgical tradition, more at home in the exposition of the Fathers than in the formal disputation of the schools, though Mark himself — trained in logic under John Chortasmenos (see Monk and Teacher) — could meet the Latins on their own dialectical ground, a competence the older Catholic scholarship long underestimated (Davies, JLARC 19.1 [2025]; Kappes, The Epiclesis Debate at the Council of Florence [2019]). That John of Montenero, a friar and not a bishop, carried the Latin doctrinal case almost single-handedly reflects the Latin confidence that the Filioque had already been defined at the Second Council of Lyons and needed only to be demonstrated to the Greeks from the Fathers, not debated afresh as an open question — a confidence the Greeks did not share, since for them the matter had never been settled by a council they recognized (Gill 1959, ch. 7; Siecienski, The Filioque [2010], ch. on Florence).

Mark Sidelined

Mark was the chief Orthodox debater of the council, and the Acta show him carrying the burden of the Greek case in session after session. But as the council wore on and the emperor pressed for agreement, Mark was progressively sidelined. John VIII forbade his theologians from further provoking the Latins; once union became inevitable, Mark “stopped taking active part” and was effectively silent in the final sessions (Gill 1959: 166; Davies, JLARC 19.1 [2025]: 20). The man whom the emperor had appointed to speak for Orthodoxy was, by the end, silenced by the emperor who needed Orthodoxy to yield. Gill’s own famous and unsympathetic verdict — that Mark was “convinced by his own eloquence” (Gill 1959: 166) — is the Catholic reading of a man the Orthodox tradition reveres precisely for his refusal to be moved; the divergence is treated in Section 09.

The Union Decree

Agreement on the Filioque doctrine crystallized in late May and early June 1439, on the basis of a formula declaring the patristic “through the Son” (per Filium) equivalent to “from the Son” (ex Filio). The union decree, Laetentur Caeli (“Let the heavens rejoice”), was signed by the Greeks on 5 July and solemnly promulgated in the cathedral of Florence on 6 July 1439 (Gill 1959, ch. 9; the Latin text in Gill 1959, appendix). Its central resolutions:

  • Filioque: the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son “as from one principle and a single spiration” (tamquam ab uno principio et unica spiratione), and the patristic “through the Son” was declared to mean the same as “from the Son.”
  • Purgatory: souls of the truly penitent who die before making satisfaction “are cleansed after death by cleansing pains” (poenae purgatoriae), helped by the suffrages of the living — but the word fire was conspicuously omitted, the trace of the Greek objection (see The Debate on Purgatorial Fire).
  • Azymes: the body of Christ is “truly confected” in both unleavened and leavened bread, each priest following his own rite.
  • Primacy: the Roman pontiff holds primacy over the whole Church (with the qualifications noted above).

The decree’s formulae were, on the Catholic reading, a genuine meeting of the two theological idioms: the “through the Son” of the Greek Fathers and the “from the Son” of the Latins were declared to express the same truth, with the explicit gloss that the Greeks understood the Son’s role as a matter of cause (aitia) and the Latins as a matter of principle (principium) — a formula meant to honor both traditions at once (Gill 1959, ch. 9; the decree in Gill 1959, appendix). On the Orthodox reading, this very equation was the heart of the error: to declare “through the Son” and “from the Son” equivalent was precisely to collapse the distinction between manifestation and origin that the whole Eastern doctrine of the Spirit depended upon (see East and West on the Spirit). What the decree presented as a reconciliation, Mark regarded as a capitulation dressed in the language of synthesis.

Every Greek bishop present signed — except one. Mark of Ephesus alone refused (see We Have Not Signed). That single refusal is the hinge on which this entire collection turns.

See Also

References

  • Gill, Joseph. The Council of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. (The course of the council; the transfer to Florence; the four issues and the order of debate; the debaters; Mark sidelined; Laetentur Caeli.)
  • Acta Graeca = Quae supersunt actorum graecorum Concilii Florentini. Ed. J. Gill. Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1953. (The official Greek minutes; Cesarini’s naming of the four issues.)
  • Syropoulos, Sylvester. Les “Mémoires”… de Sylvestre Syropoulos. Ed. V. Laurent. Paris: CNRS, 1971. (The anti-unionist eyewitness narrative.)
  • Geanakoplos, Deno J. “The Council of Florence (1438–1439) and the Problem of Union between the Greek and Latin Churches.” Church History 24 (1955): 324–346. (The primacy question; the Greek vs. Latin texts.)
  • Schmidt, Martin A. “The Problem of Papal Primacy at the Council of Florence.” Church History 30/1 (1961): 35–49.
  • Davies, Ewan. “Mark of Ephesus (1392–1444): Revisiting the Sources.” Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture 19.1 (2025): 18–54. (Mark sidelined as union became inevitable.)