Florence in History and Scholarship

The both-sides reckoning over the Council of Florence and the figure of Mark of Ephesus: Joseph Gill SJ’s The Council of Florence as the major modern Catholic study, with its argument for the freedom of Greek consent and its markedly unsympathetic portrait of Mark; the Orthodox readings (Pogodin, Constas) that revere Mark as the saint who preserved the faith; the central historiographical dispute over whether the Greek consent was free; the scholarly rehabilitations of Mark by Tsirpanlis, Kappes, and Davies against the older Catholic depiction; and the irreducible confessional divide over whether Florence was a valid ecumenical council or a false union the Church rightly rejected.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

Joseph Gill and the Major Catholic Study

The dominant modern scholarship on the council is the work of the Jesuit historian Joseph Gill, whose critical edition of the Greek Acta (Rome, 1953), full-length history The Council of Florence (Cambridge, 1959), and essay collection Personalities of the Council of Florence (1964) remain the standard references. Gill’s history is meticulous, archivally grounded, and indispensable — and it is written from a frankly Catholic standpoint, treating the union as a genuine and validly reached reconciliation that the Greeks subsequently failed to honor.

Two features of Gill’s reading bear directly on Mark. The first is his thesis of the freedom of Greek consent: Gill argues that, for all their hardships, the Greeks “retained freedom of action and expression,” that they resisted Latin pressure obstinately and twice issued ultimatums, 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). This thesis rests on a source hierarchy that trusts the conciliatory official Acta Graeca over the hostile anti-unionist Memoirs of Syropoulos — exactly the weighting the Orthodox reading reverses (see The Pressure to Unite).

The second is Gill’s assessment of Mark himself, which is unsympathetic to the point of hostility. He wrote that Mark was “convinced by his own eloquence” (Gill 1959: 166), and that after the council Mark “mingled deep reverence for tradition with scorn for the ‘innovators’… serious theological reasoning with the most blatant argumenta ad hominem… writing… for the ignorant monks and the amorphous populace — very successfully” (Gill, Personalities [1964]: 64). This continues an older line of Catholic scholarship — Petit, Grumel, Jugie — that depicted Mark as ill-equipped, an apophatic monk out of his depth among the schoolmen, driven by an irrational anti-Latin antipathy. For the Catholic tradition, in short, Mark is the intransigent obstructionist who wrecked a reconciliation his Church needed.

The Orthodox Reading

The Orthodox tradition reads the same events through the opposite lens. Here Florence is a lēstrikē synodos — a “robber council,” like the discredited Ephesus of 449 — whose validity, in Orthodox ecclesiology, depends on a reception by the whole Church that never came (see The Union Collapses at Home). And Mark is the hero of the story: the one bishop who would not betray the faith, the conscience of the Greek Church, the confessor whose stand preserved Orthodox doctrinal integrity. The classic Orthodox study, Archimandrite Ambrose Pogodin’s St. Mark of Ephesus and the Florentine Union (1963), presents the union as wrung from a broken delegation and Mark as its lone faithful witness; even the secular historian Steven Runciman granted that Mark “was treated as a martyr by almost the whole body of the Greek Church” (Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity [1968]: 109).

The historiography turns, as the history did, on a single question: was the Greek consent at Florence free? The positions, set out in full in The Pressure to Unite, are these:

[Disputed: the freedom of consent and the validity of the council.
The “free consent” reading (Gill; and, with qualifications, the Orthodox scholars Papadakis and Meyendorff, who conceded the signatures “were not forced”). The union was a real agreement; the Greeks negotiated and resisted; the later repudiation was a failure of nerve, not proof of original coercion.
The “unfree consent” reading (Tsirpanlis; Pogodin). The papal purse strings, the isolation, the death of the patriarch, the emperor’s overriding need, and the silencing of the theologians together made the consent something less than the free consent a true ecumenical council requires; 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 balanced reading (Geanakoplos; Meyendorff; Chadwick). The deeper problem was that no genuine reconciling ecclesiology yet existed; the council “debated issues without solving them and solved issues without debating them” (Geanakoplos, Byzantine East and Latin West [1966]). The failure was theological as much as it was a matter of duress.]

The Scholarly Rehabilitation of Mark

Against the older Catholic depiction of Mark as a narrow obstructionist, a body of recent scholarship — much of it not devotional but academic — has rehabilitated him as a serious and competent theologian:

Constantine Tsirpanlis, Mark Eugenicus and the Council of Florence (1979), is the scholarly counterweight to Gill, contesting his reading of the Acta and defending Mark’s integrity and the unfreedom of the Greek assent.
Nicholas (Maximos) Constas, in the standard reference survey (La théologie byzantine et sa tradition II [2002]: 411–467), presents Mark as a serious theologian in academic register.
Christiaan Kappes, in The Epiclesis Debate at the Council of Florence (2019) and related work, shows that Mark had read Aquinas and Scotus and deployed them with sophistication — overturning the “impervious to argument” caricature.
Ewan Davies (JLARC 19.1 [2025]) argues directly that the Western image of Mark as “philosophically and dialectically ill-equipped” is a flawed inheritance of the Latin frame, and presents him instead as “an exceedingly competent and observant conciliar theologian.” The major recent German study of the council and the emperor is Sebastian Kolditz’s two-volume Johannes VIII. Palaiologos und das Konzil von Ferrara-Florenz (2013/2014).

This rehabilitation does not resolve the confessional dispute — a Catholic may grant Mark’s competence and still hold him wrong — but it has retired the old portrait of the ignorant monk, and it shifts the debate onto the substance: not whether Mark could argue, but whether he was right.

The Irreducible Divide

Beneath the scholarship lies a divide that scholarship cannot close, because it is a divide of faith — a divide within which this guide, per the repository methodology §4.1, stands with the Orthodox Church.

[Disputed: the validity and ecumenicity of Florence.
The Catholic position: Florence is a legitimate ecumenical council; Laetentur Caeli is valid and binding; Mark was the intransigent who refused a true union.
The Orthodox position: Florence is a false or “robber” council whose validity required a reception that never came; Mark was vindicated by the union’s collapse, by the 1484 synod’s formal annulment, and by the conscience of the Church.
The contemporary softening: the Second Vatican Council largely set aside the Florentine “return-to-Rome” model of union; the 1993 Balamand statement repudiated “uniatism”; and the modern Catholic–Orthodox dialogue effectively works around Florence rather than through it (Siecienski, The Papacy and the Orthodox [2017]). The model of union Mark refused is one the Catholic Church itself no longer urges.]

That last point is the quiet vindication the history offers. The terms on which the union was made at Florence — a Greek capitulation to the developed Latin synthesis, ratified by a pressured delegation and proclaimed over the heads of the faithful — are terms that even the Roman Catholic Church no longer proposes. The dialogue of the Churches has returned, in its own way, to the ground Mark of Ephesus held: that a true union must be a true meeting of the whole Church in the whole truth, freely received, and not a document signed under pressure and rejected by the body of the faithful. On that ground, whatever verdict the historians reach on the patristic argument, the Pillar of Orthodoxy still stands.

References

Gill, Joseph. The Council of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959; and Personalities of the Council of Florence and Other Essays. Oxford: Blackwell, 1964. (The major Catholic study; the free-consent thesis; the unsympathetic portrait of Mark.)
Tsirpanlis, Constantine N. Mark Eugenicus and the Council of Florence: A Historical Re-evaluation of His Personality. New York, 1979. (The scholarly rehabilitation against Gill.)
Pogodin, Archimandrite Ambrose. St. Mark of Ephesus and the Florentine Union. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1963. (The Orthodox reading.)
Constas, Nicholas (Maximos). “Mark Eugenikos.” In La théologie byzantine et sa tradition, vol. II, ed. C. G. Conticello. Turnhout: Brepols, 2002, pp. 411–467. (The standard scholarly survey.)
Kappes, Christiaan W. The Epiclesis Debate at the Council of Florence. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. (Mark’s use of Latin scholasticism.)
Davies, Ewan. “Mark of Ephesus (1392–1444): Revisiting the Sources.” Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture 19.1 (2025): 18–54. (The rehabilitation of Mark as a competent conciliar theologian.)
Geanakoplos, Deno J. Byzantine East and Latin West. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The balanced ecclesiological assessment.)
Runciman, Steven. The Great Church in Captivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. (Mark treated as a martyr.)
Siecienski, A. Edward. The Papacy and the Orthodox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. (The contemporary reassessment of Florence.)