The Union and the Fall

The aftermath Mark did not live to see, in which his cause was vindicated by events: the belated and bitterly resented proclamation of the Union of Florence in Hagia Sophia on 12 December 1452; the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans on 29 May 1453, which left the union without an emperor to enforce it and dead in the East; the elevation of Mark’s chosen successor, George Scholarios, as the first ecumenical patriarch under Ottoman rule, Gennadios II; and the formal repudiation of the Council of Florence by the Constantinopolitan synod of 1484, which declared the union void and established a rite for receiving Roman converts by chrismation.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

The Proclamation in Hagia Sophia (1452)

For thirteen years after Florence the union had no liturgical reality in Constantinople (see The Union Collapses at Home). Only at the very end, with the Ottomans closing in and the emperor Constantine XI desperate for the Western aid that union was still supposed to unlock, was it formally proclaimed. On 12 December 1452 the papal legate Cardinal Isidore of Kiev — the former metropolitan who had signed at Florence (see The Greek Delegation) — celebrated the union in Hagia Sophia, reading the decree Laetentur Caeli before an assembly of clergy (Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity [1968]; Gill, The Council of Florence [1959]). The proclamation was met not with rejoicing but with revulsion: the anti-unionist faithful thereafter shunned Hagia Sophia as defiled, “a haunt of demons,” and Scholarios withdrew from public life, reportedly posting a lament on his cell door (Doukas, Historia Turco-Byzantina, trans. Magoulias; Runciman 1968).

[Disputed and attributed, per methodology §3.5: the saying “better the turban than the tiara.” The megas doux Loukas Notaras is credited with the dictum that “it is better to see the Turkish turban reigning in the City than the Latin mitre” — a phrase that has become the emblem of Byzantine anti-unionist feeling. But it rests on the single source of Doukas, a Latin-sympathizing unionist hostile to Notaras and not present at the events, and modern scholarship (Setton, The Papacy and the Levant II [1978]: 104–105) treats the attribution as probably apocryphal, a rhetorical encapsulation of the mood rather than a documented utterance of the historical Notaras, who was a pragmatist. It is reported here as an attributed and disputed saying, not as fact.]

The Fall of Constantinople (1453)

The union bought no rescue. On 29 May 1453, after a siege of some seven weeks, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, and the Roman Empire of the East came to an end (Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453 [1965]). With the empire fell the political will behind the union: there was no longer an emperor to enforce it, and the Ottoman conquerors had every interest in keeping their new Greek subjects divided from the Latin West. The union, never received by the faithful (see The Union Collapses at Home), resisted by the monks and the patriarchs, now lost even the emperor whose policy had produced it. It was, in the East, dead. Loukas Notaras was executed by Mehmed a few days after the fall.

Gennadios II Scholarios

The Church that survived the conquest was the Church of Mark’s party, led by Mark’s chosen successor. Mehmed II, organizing his Christian subjects under a single patriarch, turned to George Scholarios — the anti-unionist leader to whom Mark had given his cause on his deathbed (see The Death of Mark (1444)). Scholarios was invested by the sultan in 1453 and enthroned as Patriarch Gennadios II in January 1454, the first ecumenical patriarch under Ottoman rule (Blanchet, Georges-Gennadios Scholarios [2008]; Runciman 1968). He formally repudiated the Union of Florence and was, in Gill’s words, its “most uncompromising enemy” (Gill 1959). The line that ran from Mark’s refusal at Florence in 1439, through the resistance of 1440–1444, to the deathbed charge, now sat on the patriarchal throne of the captive Church. The union Mark alone had refused to sign was now the official non-faith of the Orthodox Church under its new patriarch.

[Disputed: the exact date of Gennadios II’s accession. Mehmed II designated and invested Scholarios in 1453; his formal enthronement is conventionally dated to January 1454, though some accounts place it in the spring of 1454. The fact of his elevation as the first Ottoman-era patriarch and his repudiation of the union are not in dispute.]

The accession of Scholarios as Gennadios II also gave the captive Church a settled institutional form under Ottoman rule — the millet system, by which the patriarch became the civil as well as the religious head of the Orthodox Christians of the empire. There is a bitter irony in the outcome that the Orthodox tradition has not failed to note: the union sought to save the empire through the West and failed; the empire fell; and the Church that survived the conquest, and was given a place within the new order, was the Church of the anti-unionists, led by the very man to whom Mark had committed his cause (Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity [1968]; Blanchet, Georges-Gennadios Scholarios [2008]). The faith Mark had refused to trade for an army outlasted the empire that had tried to make the trade.

The Repudiation of Florence (1484)

The final, formal conciliar act against the union came a generation after the fall. In 1484 a synod at Constantinople, convened by Patriarch Symeon I of Trebizond in the church of the Pammakaristos and attended by representatives of the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem — the four ancient Eastern sees together — became the first synod formally to condemn the Council of Florence (Runciman 1968; Paschalidis, “Concilium Constantinopolitanum 1484,” in The Great Councils of the Orthodox Churches, ed. Melloni [2016]). The synod declared the definitions of Florence “spurious and alien from the catholic Church,” held the council to have been unlawfully convened and at variance with the holy ecumenical councils, and annulled it as void and of no effect — that is, declared it not ecumenical. And it approved a rite for receiving converts from Roman Catholicism by chrismation (with a written abjuration of Florence), explicitly not by re-baptism — a measured discipline that treated the Latins as estranged Christians to be reconciled, not as pagans to be baptized anew (Runciman 1968: 228; Paschalidis 2016).

The 1484 synod is the institutional vindication of Mark of Ephesus. What he had asserted at Florence in 1439 — that the council was uncanonically convened, that its definitions were not the faith of the Church, that the union was void — the four Eastern patriarchates declared in synod forty-five years later. The lone refusal had become the conciliar judgment of the Orthodox East.

The Vindication of the Lone Refusal

Seen whole, the aftermath is the story of a single man’s judgment confirmed by the slow verdict of the Church and of history. Mark refused to sign in 1439; the faithful refused to receive the union in 1440; the Eastern patriarchs condemned the unionists in 1443; the union was proclaimed in 1452 to revulsion, not joy; the empire fell in 1453 with the union still dead; Mark’s own pupil ascended the patriarchal throne and repudiated the union; and in 1484 the gathered Eastern Churches annulled the council formally. The man whom the Catholic historian Gill would call an intransigent obstructionist, the Orthodox Church would call the Pillar of Orthodoxy — and the events themselves, on the Orthodox reading, decided between the two. That reckoning, and the honor the Church paid Mark, are the subject of the final section.

References

Runciman, Steven. The Great Church in Captivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. (The 1452 proclamation; Gennadios II; the 1484 synod, pp. 193–194, 228.) And The Fall of Constantinople 1453. Cambridge, 1965.
Doukas (Ducas). Historia Turco-Byzantina. Trans. H. J. Magoulias, Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks. Detroit, 1975. (The revulsion at the proclamation; the Notaras dictum.)
Gill, Joseph. The Council of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. (Isidore’s proclamation; Gennadios as the union’s “most uncompromising enemy.”)
Paschalidis, Symeon. “Concilium Constantinopolitanum 1484.” In The Great Councils of the Orthodox Churches (Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Generaliumque Decreta IV.1), ed. A. Melloni. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016. (The acts of the 1484 synod.)
Setton, Kenneth M. The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), vol. II. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978, pp. 104–105. (The Notaras dictum as probably apocryphal.)
Blanchet, Marie-Hélène. Georges-Gennadios Scholarios (vers 1400 – vers 1472). Paris: IFEB, 2008. (Gennadios II’s accession.)