We Have Not Signed

The flagship file of the collection: the act on which St. Mark of Ephesus’ whole place in Orthodox memory rests. On 6 July 1439 the union decree Laetentur Caeli was solemnly proclaimed in the cathedral of Florence; every Greek bishop present had signed it — except one. Mark Eugenikos alone refused, and the pope, on learning that the great defender of the Greek cause had not put his name to the union, is reported to have lamented, “Then we have accomplished nothing.” This file sets out the refusal, its grounds, the reported papal words, and the return of the broken delegation to Constantinople.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

The Signing of the Union

After fifteen months of debate and pressure (see The Pressure to Unite), the Greeks gave way. Agreement on the doctrine of the procession was reached in early June 1439; the union decree, Laetentur Caeli (“Let the heavens rejoice”), was signed by the Greek delegation on 5 July and solemnly promulgated in the cathedral of Florence on 6 July 1439 (Gill, The Council of Florence [1959], ch. 9). The decree professed the Filioque, the validity of azymes, a defined purgatory, and the primacy of the Roman pontiff (see The Council 1438–39). The reference works generally give the signatories as some 116 Latins and 32 Greeks (Gill 1959; minor variants of ±1 appear in the older literature). The emperor had his union; the Western aid he sought seemed within reach; the schism of the Churches appeared, on parchment, to be healed.

The One Who Did Not Sign

But one signature was missing, and its absence is the reason this collection exists. Mark of Ephesus, alone among the Orthodox bishops present at the final act, refused to sign the decree (Gill 1959; Davies, JLARC 19.1 [2025]; Pogodin, St. Mark of Ephesus and the Florentine Union [1963]). He had been the chief Orthodox debater of the council; he had argued the canonical illegitimacy of the Filioque addition (see The Addition to the Creed), the falsity of the doctrine of double procession (see East and West on the Spirit), and the error of the Latin purgatory (see The Debate on Purgatorial Fire); and when the rest yielded, he did not. The metropolitan of an occupied see, sidelined and silenced in the council’s last phase, became the single point on which the whole edifice of the union failed to close.

[Disputed: the precise scope of “the only one who did not sign.” The claim is accurate but should be scoped to the final act: Mark was the lone refusing signatory of the bishops present at the promulgation. Patriarch Joseph II had died on 10 June, before the signing; the Georgian delegation had already departed; Scholarios, Plethon, and the Despot Demetrios had left before the decree; and at least one other (Isaias of Stauropolis) avoided signing by fleeing rather than by open refusal. Among the bishops who stood at Florence on 6 July 1439 and were asked to sign, Mark alone openly refused (Gill 1959; Davies 2025).]

The Grounds of the Refusal

Mark’s refusal was not obstinacy for its own sake but the consistent conclusion of everything he had argued. He held that the council had no authority to alter the Creed of the universal Church (the canon of Ephesus); that the doctrine of double procession was false and the patristic case for it rested in part on corrupted texts; that the Latin purgatory mistook the state of souls after death; and — underlying all — that the consent given at Florence was not the free consent of the Church but the capitulation of a pressured delegation, so that the decree bound no one. He would express the whole of it later, in his Encyclical Letter, in the conviction that there could be no middle way: if the Latins had not departed from the faith, the Orthodox had cut them off unjustly; but since they had departed, on the Filioque, “it is clear that they are heretics, and we have cut them off as heretics” (Mark, Encyclical Letter, ed. Petit, Patrologia Orientalis 17: 453–457; see The Anti-Unionist Leader). For Mark a union that papered over heresy was not peace but the betrayal of the faith.

It is worth dwelling on why a single bishop’s signature, or its absence, should have carried such weight — for the logic is precisely what separates the Orthodox and Catholic readings of the whole council. On the Latin understanding, the union was complete the moment the bishops signed and the pope promulgated: conciliar authority had spoken, and what remained was for the Greeks to implement what they had agreed. A lone dissenter was, on that view, simply a man in the wrong, to be brought into line. On the Orthodox understanding, by contrast, the truth of a council is not constituted by the act of signing but confirmed by the reception of the whole Church across time (see The Union Collapses at Home). Mark’s refusal mattered because it was the visible refusal of the Orthodox conscience to receive — the one bishop in whom the un-coerced mind of the Church found a voice at the very moment the others fell silent. His signature would have meant that the Greek episcopate was unanimous; its absence meant that it was not, and that the union therefore had, from its first hour, a witness against it from within the council itself.

Mark also refused, the sources stress, without bitterness toward the men who signed. He understood the pressures under which they had yielded — the emperor’s need, the arrears, the exhaustion of fifteen months (see The Pressure to Unite) — and his later Encyclical aims less to condemn the signatories as persons than to summon them, and the whole Church, back from what he held to be an error made under duress. The refusal was an act of conscience, not of faction; that is part of why it could become, almost at once, the rallying point of a Church rather than the banner of a party.

“Then We Have Accomplished Nothing”

The most famous words attached to the refusal are not Mark’s but the pope’s. When Eugenius IV was told that Mark of Ephesus had not signed — that the one bishop who most embodied the Greek cause stood outside the union — he is reported to have exclaimed: “Then we have accomplished nothing” (Λοιπὸν ἐποιήσαμεν οὐδέν). The line captures, in a sentence, why a single refusal mattered: a union the most respected Orthodox theologian would not endorse was a union the Orthodox Church could repudiate, and Eugenius is made to see it at once.

[Disputed: the authenticity of the pope’s reported lament. The words “then we have accomplished nothing” are traditional and much-quoted, but they derive from the hagiographical Life of Mark and the later devotional tradition rather than from the conciliar Acta; the saying does not appear in a contemporary documentary source and is traced in the secondary literature to post-event historiography (Raynaldi’s continuation of Baronius; Hefele-Leclercq). Per the repository methodology §3.5 it should be reported as a traditional saying, “reportedly” spoken, not as a documented utterance of Eugenius IV (cf. Pogodin 1963; Gill 1959 does not vouch for it as historical).]

The Return to Constantinople

The delegation left Italy and made its way home; Mark himself had departed earlier, on 19 October 1439, under the emperor’s prior guarantee of immunity (Syropoulos, Memoirs 11.4 [ed. Laurent 1971]; Davies 2025: 39). The main body of the delegation reached Constantinople on 1 February 1440 (Gill 1959). They returned to a city that had not waited passively for their decision and that received the news of the union with dismay. The empress had died in their absence; the patriarch had died at Florence; and the people and clergy of the capital were, in the main, hostile to the union before the delegates had even disembarked. The reception that awaited the signatories — and the very different reception that awaited Mark — is the subject of the next file. What had been accomplished at Florence on parchment was about to be unmade in the streets and churches of Constantinople, and the one man who had not signed was about to become the leader of a Church.

References

Gill, Joseph. The Council of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. (The signing and promulgation of Laetentur Caeli, 5–6 July 1439; the signatory counts; Mark’s refusal; the return.)
Davies, Ewan. “Mark of Ephesus (1392–1444): Revisiting the Sources.” Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture 19.1 (2025): 18–54. (Mark’s earlier departure under immunity, 19 October 1439; the scope of his lone refusal.)
Pogodin, Archimandrite Ambrose. St. Mark of Ephesus and the Florentine Union. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1963. (The refusal and the reported papal lament in the Orthodox tradition.)
Mark Eugenikos. Encyclical Letter. Ed. Louis Petit, Patrologia Orientalis 17. Paris, 1923, pp. 449–459. (The grounds of refusal: no middle way.)
Syropoulos, Sylvester. Les “Mémoires”… de Sylvestre Syropoulos. Ed. V. Laurent. Paris: CNRS, 1971. (Mark’s departure from Italy.)