The Death of Mark (1444)

The end of St. Mark of Ephesus’ life: his painful final illness, an intestinal disease borne for about two weeks with great suffering; his death in Constantinople on 23 June 1444, at about the age of fifty-two; the deathbed address in which he refused communion with the unionists “neither in this life nor after my death” and charged his old pupil George Scholarios to take up the leadership of the Orthodox cause; and his burial at the Monastery of St. George of the Mangana, with the later translation of his relics that the Church commemorates on 19 January.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

The Final Illness

Released from his Lemnos exile and returned to Constantinople (see The Anti-Unionist Leader), Mark was a sick man. His last illness was a disease of the intestines, which he bore for about two weeks with great pain. His brother John, who was with him, records that he died with the words “Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, into Thy hands I commit my spirit” (John Eugenikos, Synaxarion, ed. Pétridès 1910). The pro-unionist polemicist John Plousiadenos would later seize on the agony of the death to claim it as a divine punishment for Mark’s opposition — a charge the Orthodox tradition reads, on the contrary, as the suffering of a confessor (Davies, JLARC 19.1 [2025], citing Plousiadenos).

[Disputed: the exact diagnosis of Mark’s final illness. The sources agree it was an intestinal disease borne for about two weeks; some accounts specify a cancer of the intestine, others speak more generally of an intestinal ailment. It is best stated as “a disease of the intestines,” the level of precision the primary source supports.]

The Date and Place of Death

Mark died in Constantinople on 23 June 1444, at about the age of fifty-two (born c. 1392). He was a monk of the Monastery of St. George of the Mangana, to which he had retired on his return from Lemnos, and it was there that he died and was first buried (John Eugenikos, Synaxarion, ed. Pétridès 1910; Davies 2025).

[Disputed: the year of Mark’s death. The traditional and most widely accepted date is 23 June 1444. There is a genuine scholarly dispute over 1444 versus 1445, since John Eugenikos gives only the day (23 June) and Mark’s age (he died in his early fifties): Petit and Gill argue for 1444, while Mercati and Blanchet argue for 1445 (Gill, Personalities of the Council of Florence [1964]: 222–232; Blanchet, Georges-Gennadios Scholarios [2008]: 384–390). This collection follows the established 1444, noting 1445 as a real minority position; the day, 23 June, is not in dispute.]

The Deathbed Address and the Charge to Scholarios

The most important act of Mark’s death was a final disposition of his cause. His deathbed address survives (Mark, Oratio ad amicorum coetum ac nominatim ad Georgium Scholarium, “Address to the company of his friends and namely to George Scholarios,” ed. Petit, Patrologia Orientalis 17: 484–491), and in it he did two things. First, he reaffirmed, with his last strength, the discipline of separation that had defined his resistance: he adjured that none of the unionists should “approach either at my funeral or at my memorials… until God grant the good correction and peace of His Church,” and declared that he was “absolutely convinced that the farther I stand from him and those like him, the nearer I am to God” (Mark, Address, ed. Petit, PO 17: 485–486). The refusal of communion with the union was to outlast his own death.

Second, he named a successor. Turning to George Scholarios — his first pupil (see Constantinople and Formation), conciliatory at Florence but now committed to the Orthodox cause — he formally bestowed on him the leadership of the anti-unionist party (Mark, Address, ed. Petit, PO 17: 486–489; Davies 2025: 22). The scene closes the great arc of the story: the teacher who had formed Scholarios in his school four decades earlier now, dying, charged the pupil to carry the standard he himself had raised at Florence and could no longer hold. Scholarios kept the charge, leading the resistance through the fall of Constantinople and becoming, as Gennadios II, the first patriarch under the Ottomans (see The Union and the Fall).

The Tone of the Address: Standing Apart from Error

The deathbed address is not a polemic but a testament, and its tone is that of a man composing his soul rather than scoring a point. Its governing theme is separation as witness. Mark frames his refusal of the unionists’ presence at his funeral and memorials not as a private grievance but as the final and fullest expression of the principle he had defended living: that there can be no communion in prayer with those who hold to a union he judged a reconciliation with error, and that to stand apart from such error is to stand nearer to God (Mark, Address, ed. Petit, Patrologia Orientalis 17: 485–486). The refusal is therefore meant to outlast him — a discipline he binds upon his own obsequies so that his death itself should preach what his life had preached. The measured, almost serene cast of the address, addressed to “the company of his friends,” gives the separation a pastoral rather than a vindictive sense: it is offered as a guide to the living, an instruction in how to hold the line he had held, rather than as a curse upon his opponents (Mark, Address, ed. Petit, PO 17: 484–491; Davies, JLARC 19.1 [2025]). That a dying man should make the integrity of his funeral the occasion of a last confession is, in the reading the tradition gives it, the very pattern of the confessor: the witness sustained to the end and beyond it.

Teacher to Pupil: How Tradition Is Handed On

The charge to Scholarios is more than a succession arrangement; it is a model of how Orthodox tradition understands its own transmission — not chiefly through institutions and documents but person to person, from teacher to pupil, in a living handing-on. Mark had formed Scholarios in his school four decades earlier (see Constantinople and Formation); now, dying, he returned to that same pupil to commit the cause into hands he had himself trained (Mark, Address, ed. Petit, PO 17: 486–489). The Greek word for tradition, paradosis, means precisely this “handing over,” and the deathbed scene gives it a face: the faith and its defense passing along a personal bond of master and disciple, received as a charge and not merely as a doctrine (Davies 2025). The continuity is the more striking because Scholarios had been comparatively conciliatory at Florence; the transmission was thus not of opinion but of office and conviction, the teacher entrusting to the pupil a standard the pupil then carried further than the teacher had lived to carry it (Davies 2025; Blanchet, Georges-Gennadios Scholarios [2008]). The later tradition reads the moment as exemplary: Orthodoxy preserved not by decree from above but by the fidelity of a pupil to a teacher, handed down a chain of living persons who answer for what they have received.

The Reception of His Death

The veneration of Mark began not after a decree but at once, in the grief of those who had known him. His brother John Eugenikos felt the loss most sharply and answered it with composition: he wrote the Synaxarion — the short Life that preserves the account of the final illness and the last words — and an office for liturgical commemoration, so that the family kept the anniversary of the death with a service almost from the first (John Eugenikos, Synaxarion, ed. Pétridès, Revue de l’Orient chrétien 15 [1910]: 97–107; Blanchet 2008). The immediate tradition received the death as the repose of a confessor rather than the defeat of a partisan. Where the pro-unionist Plousiadenos had read the agony of the dying as a divine judgment (see The Final Illness above), the anti-unionist circle read it as the suffering by which a witness is perfected, and they began to honor Mark accordingly — in John Eugenikos’ hymns, in Scholarios’ oration, and in the keeping of his memory — well before any synod acted (Davies 2025; Blanchet 2008). The cult thus ran ahead of the canonization from the very week of the death, the work of the brother who mourned him and the pupil who succeeded him (see Pillar of Orthodoxy).

The Eulogy of Scholarios

Scholarios delivered the funeral oration for his teacher, at the Mangana monastery (Scholarios, Éloge de Marc Eugénikos, in Œuvres complètes de Georges Scholarios, ed. Petit, Sidéridès, and Jugie, vol. 1: 247–254). Marie-Hélène Blanchet has shown the eulogy to be rich in hagiographical elements, casting Mark as the defender of “the truth of dogma” (Blanchet, Georges-Gennadios Scholarios [2008]: 396–400). In a later letter Scholarios gave a soberer appraisal that is no less admiring: Mark “proved himself excellent amongst his contemporaries in both his reasoning and his life… valiantly struggled and defended traditional teaching” (Scholarios, Letter to Demetrios Palaiologos [1450], in Œuvres complètes, vol. 3: 134). The man who had been comparatively conciliatory at Florence became the chief promoter of Mark’s memory — a measure of how completely the deathbed charge had been received.

Burial and the Translation of the Relics

Mark was buried at the Monastery of St. George of the Mangana, where Scholarios spoke over him. His relics were later — after the fall of the city in 1453 — translated by his relatives to the Monastery of St. Lazarus in Galata (Davies 2025; the Lives). The Church’s principal feast of St. Mark, on 19 January, commemorates this translation of his relics; his repose on 23 June is the historical date of his death (see Pillar of Orthodoxy). The two-stage sequence — burial at the Mangana, later translation to St. Lazarus — accounts for the apparent discrepancy between the two places sometimes given for his resting-place; both are correct, in order.

So ended the life of the metropolitan of Ephesus: in pain, in a monastery, refusing to the last the union he had refused at Florence, and committing his cause to the pupil who would outlive the empire. The honor the Church would pay him — the title “Pillar of Orthodoxy,” the feast, the glorification — and the long historical reckoning over the council he defied are the subject of the final section.

References

John Eugenikos. Synaxarion of Mark of Ephesus. Ed. S. Pétridès, Revue de l’Orient chrétien 15 (1910): 97–107. (The final illness; the last words; the death; the Mangana.)
Mark Eugenikos. Address on the Day of His Death (Oratio ad amicorum coetum ac nominatim ad Georgium Scholarium). Ed. Louis Petit, Patrologia Orientalis 17. Paris, 1923, pp. 484–491. (The refusal of communion; the charge to Scholarios.)
Scholarios, George (Gennadios II). Œuvres complètes de Georges Scholarios. Ed. L. Petit, X. A. Sidéridès, M. Jugie. Paris, 1928–1936. (Vol. 1: the funeral oration; vol. 3: the 1450 appraisal.)
Davies, Ewan. “Mark of Ephesus (1392–1444): Revisiting the Sources.” Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture 19.1 (2025): 18–54. (The death; the charge to Scholarios; the translation of the relics; the death-year dispute.)
Gill, Joseph. Personalities of the Council of Florence and Other Essays. Oxford: Blackwell, 1964, pp. 222–232. (The argument for 1444.)
Blanchet, Marie-Hélène. Georges-Gennadios Scholarios (vers 1400 – vers 1472). Paris: Institut Français d’Études Byzantines, 2008, pp. 384–390, 396–400. (The argument for 1445; the eulogy.)