The Hero of the City

The reception that turned a lone refusal into the leadership of a Church: how Constantinople received the returning delegation in February 1440 — the signatory bishops met with reproach and self-reproach (“we have sold our faith”; “let the hand that signed be cut off”), many recanting under popular pressure — and how Mark of Ephesus, the one bishop who had not signed, was hailed as the champion and conscience of Orthodoxy, the new confessor around whom the resistance to the union would gather.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

A Hostile Welcome

The delegation that reached Constantinople on 1 February 1440 (see We Have Not Signed) found a city already turned against the union. The classic primary witness is the Byzantine historian Doukas (Ducas) — and his testimony is the more weighty because Doukas was himself a pro-unionist, reporting hostility against his own sympathies. The returning delegates, Doukas relates, “were saluted, or rather assailed, with a general murmur of zeal and discontent,” and instead of defending their conduct they “deplored their weakness” and “professed their contrition” (Doukas, Historia Turco-Byzantina, trans. Magoulias, Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks [1975]; the famous paraphrase is Gibbon’s, Decline and Fall, ch. 67). Gill, surveying the sources, concludes flatly that the union “was very unpopular at Constantinople” and that the emperor and his followers “found everyone in an uproar against them, accusing them of betraying the Orthodox faith” (Gill, The Council of Florence [1959]).

“We Have Sold Our Faith”

The reproach was met by self-reproach. Asked how matters had gone in Italy, the returning bishops are reported to have answered: “We have sold our faith; we have exchanged piety for impiety; we have betrayed the pure sacrifice, and have become upholders of unleavened bread” (Doukas, Historia, trans. Magoulias; Pogodin, St. Mark of Ephesus and the Florentine Union [1963], gives “We sold our faith; we bartered piety for impiety!”). The popular fury found its own savage formula: the people demanded that “the right hand that signed be cut off, and the tongue that professed [the union] be plucked out by the roots,” and, Doukas reports, “spat in their faces” (Doukas, Historia).

[Hagiographical and attributed material, per methodology §3.5: the verbatim reproaches — “we have sold our faith,” “let the hand that signed be cut off” — rest on the single source of Doukas, a pro-unionist historian writing of events he reports as scandal. The convergence of Doukas (primary), Pogodin (Orthodox scholarly), and Gibbon’s paraphrase makes the substance secure — the union was met with revulsion and the signatories with reproach — but the exact words are pinned to Doukas and are reported as his testimony, not certified verbatim.]

Several signatories publicly repudiated their signatures on returning, the most consequential being George Scholarios, and many metropolitans recanted under the pressure of the faithful (Gill 1959; Davies, JLARC 19.1 [2025]). The liturgical effect followed: anti-unionist clergy and monks refused to commemorate or concelebrate with the signatories, and the boycott of unionist services would harden over the following decade (Gill 1959; on the hardening, see The Anti-Unionist Leader).

The Champion of Orthodoxy

Against this reproach of the many stood the vindication of the one. Mark of Ephesus — the bishop who had not signed — was hailed as the champion and conscience of the Orthodox cause. Gibbon, again paraphrasing the Greek sources, writes: “the eyes of the Greeks were directed to Mark of Ephesus, the champion of his country… the sufferings of the holy confessor were repaid with a tribute of admiration and applause” (Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. 67, from the Byzantine historians). His own brother, John Eugenikos, reports the crowds prostrating before Mark “as though he were a new Moses and Aaron, proclaiming him to be blessed and holy” (John Eugenikos, in Davies 2025: 32). Steven Runciman, the modern historian, distills the judgment: Mark was “the conscience” of the Byzantine contingent (Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity [1968]: 72), and “was treated as a martyr by almost the whole body of the Greek Church” (Runciman 1968: 109).

The reversal is total and rapid. The man whom the emperor had drawn from his cell to speak for Orthodoxy, and then silenced when Orthodoxy proved inconvenient, returned to find that the Church had ratified his silence with its acclaim. The lone holdout had become the recognized leader of a people who would not receive the union their bishops had signed.

Mark’s Own Verdict

Mark himself saw the union not as a dawn of reconciliation but as a darkness fallen on the Church. The image he would use — “the night of Union encompassed the Church” — names the catastrophe as he understood it (Mark, as rendered in Pogodin 1963). For him the acclaim of the crowds was not a personal triumph but a confirmation that the Church — the faithful, the monks, the parish clergy — had not consented to what had been done in its name at Florence. This conviction, that the true subject of consent is the whole Church and not a pressured delegation, is the theological core of the resistance that now began (see The Pressure to Unite on the freedom-of-consent question). The non-reception of the union by the faithful was, for Mark, the Church’s own answer to Florence — and he set himself to lead and to articulate it.

The acclamation, then, was not the end of the story but its turning point. The hero of the city would spend the four years left to him organizing, in writing and in person, the rejection of the union — and handing that work, at the last, to the pupil who would carry it through the fall of the empire itself. That is the subject of the next sections.

The Monks and the Lower Clergy

The force that turned reproach into resistance came less from the episcopate, which had signed, than from the monks and the lower clergy, who had not. The bishops returned compromised; it was the monastic houses of the capital, the priests of the parish churches, and above all the spiritual weight of the Holy Mountain that gave the popular revulsion a backbone and an organization (Gill, The Council of Florence [1959]; Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity [1968]). The monks were the natural leaders of such a reaction. They held no diplomatic stake in the union, were bound by no oath sworn in Italy, and were schooled by their whole vocation to regard the integrity of the faith as a thing for which one suffers rather than negotiates. When they refused to commemorate the signatory bishops or to concelebrate with them, the refusal carried the authority of the men whom the Byzantine laity already revered as the living conscience of Orthodoxy (Runciman 1968). The parish clergy, dependent on their congregations and answerable to them face to face, followed the same course: in the testimony of the sources the unionist hierarchs found their churches deserted while the anti-unionist priests kept the loyalty of the people (Gill 1959). The result was a Church split not along the usual line of clergy against laity but along the line of those who had signed against those who had not — and the unsigned were the more numerous and the closer to the worshiping life of the city.

Syropoulos: The Signatory Who Recanted

Among the most revealing figures of this reaction is Sylvester Syropoulos, Grand Ecclesiarch of Hagia Sophia, who had accompanied the delegation to Italy, signed the decree of union under the pressures of the council, and then, on returning home, repudiated his signature and joined the resistance. His importance is not as a leader — he was never that — but as a witness, for he set down his recollections of Ferrara-Florence in the long apologia known as the Memoirs (Apomnemoneumata), the fullest narrative of the council from the Greek anti-unionist side (Gill 1959; Runciman 1968). The Memoirs are at once indispensable and to be read with care. Syropoulos wrote as a man who had signed and needed to explain why, and the work is shaped throughout by that apologetic motive: it dwells on the coercion, the hunger and isolation of the Greeks at Florence, the manipulations of the emperor and the Latins, and the duress under which the signatures were extracted, precisely because these were the grounds on which a signatory might justify his recantation (Gill 1959; Davies, JLARC 19.1 [2025]). Historians therefore weigh his testimony against the official Greek and Latin acts, conceding the vividness and the inside knowledge while discounting for the special pleading. That a man of Syropoulos’ rank felt compelled to recant, and to write at such length in his own defense, is itself a measure of how completely the reception at home had reversed the verdict of the council.

The Emperor’s Weakened Hand

The union’s unpopularity told directly against the authority of the emperor. John VIII Palaiologos had staked his policy, his prestige, and the labor of years on the council; he had pressed his bishops to sign and had returned expecting that the union would secure the Western aid on which the survival of the city depended (Gill 1959). Instead he found the union a liability at home, repudiated by the very Church he had committed to it, so that he could neither enforce it nor disown it. He declined to install a unionist patriarch with any vigor, allowed the anti-unionists to act largely unhindered, and in his last years governed a capital in which his central foreign policy commanded no domestic consent (Runciman 1968; Doukas, Historia Turco-Byzantina, trans. Magoulias [1975]). The standard accounts read the episode as a demonstration of the limits of imperial power in matters of faith: the emperor who could command the signatures of his bishops could not command the assent of their flocks, and the gap between the two left him weakened precisely where he had hoped to be strengthened (Gill 1959; Runciman 1968).

The Faithful as Guardians of Orthodoxy

The acclamation of Mark embodied a principle that runs deep in Orthodox ecclesiology: that the guardianship of the faith belongs not to the hierarchy alone but to the whole body of the Church, the laos, who receive or reject what is taught in their name. On this understanding the consent of the faithful is not a political ratification added to a council’s authority from outside but a locus of the Spirit’s own witness, so that a definition the body of the Church will not own as its faith stands, by that refusal, unreceived (Runciman 1968; Davies 2025). The Constantinopolitan crowd that hailed the one bishop who had not signed, and shamed those who had, was acting — in the reading the Orthodox tradition gives the event — not as a mob overruling its pastors but as the Church exercising its proper office of reception. Mark grasped the point exactly, treating the acclaim not as a personal vindication but as the sign that the Church itself had declined the union (see Mark’s Own Verdict above). The episode became, for the later tradition, a paradigm case of the laos as guardian of Orthodoxy: a union signed by emperor and bishops yet refused by the faithful, and held thereby to have failed the one test the Orthodox understanding makes decisive (Davies 2025).

References

Doukas (Ducas). Historia Turco-Byzantina. Trans. Harry J. Magoulias, Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975. (The hostile reception; the bishops’ self-reproach; the popular fury — the pro-unionist witness against his own sympathies.)
Gill, Joseph. The Council of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. (The unpopularity of the union; the recantations.)
Runciman, Steven. The Great Church in Captivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. (Mark as “the conscience” and as treated like a martyr.)
Pogodin, Archimandrite Ambrose. St. Mark of Ephesus and the Florentine Union. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1963. (The reproaches; “the night of Union.”)
Davies, Ewan. “Mark of Ephesus (1392–1444): Revisiting the Sources.” Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture 19.1 (2025): 18–54. (John Eugenikos on the crowds; the recantations.)
Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. 67. (Paraphrase of the Byzantine sources on Mark as champion.)
Syropoulos, Sylvester. Les “Mémoires” du Grand Ecclésiarque de l’Église de Constantinople Sylvestre Syropoulos sur le concile de Florence (1438–1439). Ed. V. Laurent. Paris: CNRS, 1971. (The fullest Greek anti-unionist narrative of the council, by a signatory who recanted; to be read with its apologetic motive in view.)