The Pressure to Unite

The conditions under which the union was reached: a Greek delegation funded entirely by the pope, with its stipends in chronic and crippling arrears; stranded far from home, deterred from departure by both Ottoman danger and empty purses; worn down by fifteen months of homesickness and isolation; leaderless after the death of the patriarch; and pressed relentlessly by an emperor who needed an agreement to secure Western aid. This file sets out those pressures and the historical question they raise — whether the Greek consent at Florence was free — argued on the evidence with both positions sourced; for the Orthodox Church, the council’s claim fails on the further and decisive ground that its union was never received.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

The Purse Strings

Pope Eugenius IV had undertaken to bring the Greeks to Italy, to house them, and to feed them — and the entire delegation, from the emperor down, lived for fifteen months on the pope’s money. Promised monthly stipends ran from thirty florins for the emperor and twenty-five for the patriarch down to four for each prelate and three for other members (the figures are given in the older conciliar literature following Mansi). The promise was not kept on time. The Greeks “received nothing… from the time of their arrival in Florence until 22 May” 1439; their consent to move from Ferrara to Florence had itself been partly bought by a promise to pay the withheld allowance; and after the signing the emperor had to linger roughly a month to collect five months’ arrears before he could afford the voyage home (the older literature following Mansi; corroborated by Syropoulos as below).

This is not merely Orthodox polemic. The eyewitness Memoirs of the Grand Ecclesiarch Sylvester Syropoulos record the payment failures in detail, and — the decisive scholarly point — when Joseph Gill, a Catholic historian by no means sympathetic to the anti-unionists, checked Syropoulos’ dates and sums against the Vatican’s own Acta Camerae Apostolicae (the papal treasury records), he found them accurate. The Greeks, Gill concluded, “had real grounds for complaint” (Gill, The Council of Florence [1959], on the finances; Syropoulos, Memoirs, ed. Laurent 1971). The financial dependence of the delegation is thus established from both sides.

[Disputed: how far the financial pressure was deliberate coercion. The stronger Orthodox claim — that the Greeks were intentionally starved into submission — is contested framing; Gill (1959) holds that the arrears were administrative failures, not a calculated policy, even while granting that the Greeks suffered real hardship. The bare fact of the arrears, and of the delegation’s total financial dependence, is agreed; the intention behind them is disputed.]

Stranded and Worn Down

To the financial pressure was added the pressure of distance and time. The delegation was hundreds of miles and a sea-voyage from home, in a country where it did not speak the language, surrounded by the resources and the hospitality (and the hosts’ interests) of the pope. The transfer of the council inland to Florence — whatever its stated reason in the Ferrara plague — had, on Gill’s own reading, the effect of “lessening the chances of the Greeks going home” before a union was concluded (Gill 1959, ch. 6). The Greeks were, in plain terms, deterred from leaving “by dread of the Turks and empty purses.” Fifteen months of this — of homesickness, of arrears, of endless sessions in a foreign tongue, of a council that would not let them depart without a result — wore the delegation down. The men who signed in July 1439 were not the men who had arrived in February 1438.

The Daily Conditions

The abstractions of “isolation” and “homesickness” had a concrete daily texture that the sources let us recover. The Greeks were lodged among a population whose language almost none of them spoke, dependent on a handful of interpreters for everything from the theological sessions to the marketplace; the long delays between public sessions left hundreds of clergy and laymen idle, far from their families, in cities visited by plague (Gill, The Council of Florence [1959], ch. 6; Syropoulos, Memoirs, ed. Laurent 1971). The stay was not free of death. Beyond the patriarch, members of the delegation died of illness during the prolonged sojourn in Italy — the conditions of a foreign climate, recurrent epidemic, and a stay stretched far past anyone’s expectation took their toll on a body of men many of them elderly — and the transfer of the council from Ferrara to Florence was occasioned in part by plague at Ferrara (Gill 1959, ch. 6; Tsirpanlis, Mark Eugenicus and the Council of Florence [1979]). Syropoulos’ Memoirs preserve the human register of all this: the complaints of arrears and hunger, the longing for home, the sense of men worn thin by a process that would not end (Syropoulos, ed. Laurent 1971). The fifteen months were not a deliberation among equals at leisure but an ordeal endured by a stranded and dwindling company.

The Greeks Who Tried to Leave

The pressure becomes most visible in the repeated attempts of Greeks to depart, and in how those attempts were checked. More than once, as the sessions dragged and tempers frayed, members of the delegation resolved to go home, and more than once they were prevented or dissuaded. Mark of Ephesus himself, with his brother John and Antonios of Herakleia, sought at Ferrara to leave the council; it was Bessarion who intervened to stop Mark’s departure, arguing that the absence of the chief Orthodox spokesman would fatally weaken the Greek position (Syropoulos, Memoirs 6.16–17 [ed. Laurent 1971: 306–308]; see The Greek Delegation). The emperor, for his part, forbade unauthorized departures outright: determined that the embassy hold together until it produced the union his policy required, John VIII set guards and gave orders against any leaving on their own initiative, and the transfer inland to Florence — whatever its sanitary justification — had, on Gill’s own reading, the effect of “lessening the chances of the Greeks going home” before a settlement (Gill 1959, ch. 6; Syropoulos, ed. Laurent 1971; Tsirpanlis 1979). A delegation that cannot freely leave is a delegation under constraint, and the Orthodox reading presses exactly this point: the men who finally signed were men who had been kept from the one act — departure — that would have registered genuine dissent.

The Death of the Patriarch

At the climax of the proceedings, on 10 June 1439, the aged Patriarch Joseph II died at Florence, before the decree was signed (see The Greek Delegation). The Greek side lost its ecclesiastical head at the very moment of decision, leaving the emperor — whose overriding interest was the agreement — effectively in sole charge of the negotiations. A pro-union profession attributed to the dying patriarch was produced after his death, its authenticity disputed (see The Greek Delegation). Whatever its standing, the patriarch’s death removed the one figure who might have checked the emperor’s drive to a settlement.

The Emperor’s Pressure

The heaviest pressure of all came from the top. John VIII Palaiologos had come to Italy for an army, and union was his instrument (see The Dying Empire and the Hope of Union). As the council neared its end he forbade his own theologians from further provoking the Latins and pressed his bishops toward assent. Mark of Ephesus, the chief Orthodox debater, was progressively silenced as agreement became the emperor’s settled aim (see The Council 1438–39). The Greek bishops who signed did so under the eye and the will of their sovereign, on whose policy the survival of the empire was thought to depend.

All of this converges on the single question that decides how the council is to be read: was the Greek consent at Florence free? On the answer hangs whether Laetentur Caeli was a genuine conciliar act or a coerced capitulation — and so whether Mark, in refusing it, defied a true council or kept faith against a false one. For the Orthodox Church that verdict is not in suspense — the union was never received, and Mark is glorified as a confessor — but the question of the consent is a question of historical evidence, and it is set out here, per the methodology’s evidential rule, with both positions sourced.

[Disputed: the freedom of the Greek consent — the central question of the entire historiography.

The Catholic / “free consent” reading (Joseph Gill). Gill argues that, for all their disabilities, the Greeks “retained freedom of action and expression”; that they twice issued the pope ultimatums and resisted Latin pressure obstinately; that Mark opposed union through most of the sessions with the emperor’s own consent; and that “all who signed the decree did so freely, though in some cases influenced more by example than by conviction” (Gill, The Council of Florence [1959], conclusion). On this reading the union was a real agreement, validly reached.

The Orthodox / “coerced or unfree” reading. This reading marshals the very pressures set out above — the papal purse strings and the arrears, the isolation and homesickness, the death of the patriarch, the silencing of the theologians, the emperor’s overriding need — to conclude that the consent was not the free consent that a genuine ecumenical council requires. Constantine Tsirpanlis argues the assent was “not entirely free” and challenges Gill’s handling of the sources (Tsirpanlis, Mark Eugenicus and the Council of Florence [1979]). The classic Orthodox study by Pogodin presents the union as wrung from a broken delegation (Pogodin, St. Mark of Ephesus and the Florentine Union [1963]).

A third, balanced voice. Deno Geanakoplos and others argue that no genuine reconciling ecclesiology yet existed at Florence — that the council “debated issues without solving them and solved issues without debating them” — so that the deeper failure was theological and ecclesiological, not merely a matter of duress (Geanakoplos, Byzantine East and Latin West [1966]). Notably, the Orthodox scholars Aristeides Papadakis and John Meyendorff conceded that the signatures “were not forced” in the crude sense, while still holding the union a failure of reception (Papadakis with Meyendorff, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy [1994]).]

The Measure of a Free Council

The force of the both-sides question sharpens when Florence is set beside the conditions a genuinely free council is thought to require. The bishops at a freely deliberating synod are, in the classical understanding, present at no one’s expense but their own or their churches’, able to remain or to leave at will, under no external need to reach a particular result by a particular date, and answerable in their judgment to no temporal sovereign whose policy hangs on the outcome (the standard accounts of conciliar freedom; cf. Gill 1959 and Tsirpanlis 1979, who frame the dispute in these terms). On every one of these counts Florence is, on the Orthodox reading, the contrary case: a delegation fed by the very party across the negotiating table, kept from departing by danger, poverty, and imperial order, pressed to conclude before its purse and patience gave out, and steered throughout by an emperor for whom failure meant the loss of his city. The Catholic reply, fairly stated, is that none of these conditions amounts to coercion of the will — that the Greeks debated obstinately, issued ultimatums, and signed, in Gill’s words, “freely, though in some cases influenced more by example than by conviction” (Gill 1959, conclusion) — and that a council is not invalidated merely because its members are tired, homesick, or politically motivated, since few councils in history have been free of such circumstances. The two readings do not dispute the facts of the delegation’s condition; they dispute whether those facts cross the line from ordinary pressure into the kind of constraint that voids consent. That is the line on which the scholarly argument over the council finally turns (see Florence in History and Scholarship).

The reception of the union by the faithful — its overwhelming rejection at home (see The Union Collapses at Home) — is, on the Orthodox account, the final answer to the question: whatever the bishops signed under the conditions of Florence, the Church did not receive it, and an unreceived union is no union. That is the conviction Mark of Ephesus carried back to Constantinople, and to which the rest of this collection is devoted.

See Also

References

  • Gill, Joseph. The Council of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. (The finances and the arrears verified against the Acta Camerae Apostolicae; the transfer’s effect; the conclusion on free consent.)
  • Syropoulos, Sylvester. Les “Mémoires”… de Sylvestre Syropoulos. Ed. V. Laurent. Paris: CNRS, 1971. (The eyewitness record of the payment failures and the pressures.)
  • Tsirpanlis, Constantine N. Mark Eugenicus and the Council of Florence: A Historical Re-evaluation of His Personality. New York, 1979. (The argument that consent was “not entirely free.”)
  • Pogodin, Archimandrite Ambrose. St. Mark of Ephesus and the Florentine Union. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1963. (The Orthodox reading of the union as coerced.)
  • Geanakoplos, Deno J. Byzantine East and Latin West: Two Worlds of Christendom in Middle Ages and Renaissance. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The balanced ecclesiological assessment.)
  • Papadakis, Aristeides, with John Meyendorff. The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy: The Church 1071–1453. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994. (The concession that the signatures were “not forced.”)