Ferrara–Florence, 1438–1439

The Council of Ferrara–Florence was everything Lyons was not — a real council, with real debates, attended by the emperor, the patriarch, and the flower of late Byzantine theology — and it ended the same way: a union signed under duress and hunger for the sake of military aid, rejected by the Church’s body, with one bishop, St. Mark of Ephesus, refusing his signature. This file gives the outline and the schism-historical meaning, deferring the full treatment to the sibling collection St. Mark of Ephesus.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Setting

By the 1430s the empire was a dying city-state and the Ottoman noose was closing; Emperor John VIII Palaiologos, like Michael VIII before him, sought union as the price of Western aid. On the Latin side, Pope Eugenius IV needed the Greeks for his own war — against the conciliarist Council of Basel, which claimed authority over popes; a union council under papal presidency would be his vindication (Gill, The Council of Florence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959, the fundamental narrative history, written from the Catholic side and used here for the record per METHODOLOGY §4.1; Papadakis and Meyendorff, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994, ch. 9). The Greek delegation that sailed in 1437 was some seven hundred strong: the emperor, the aged Patriarch Joseph II, some twenty metropolitans — Mark Eugenikos of Ephesus and Bessarion of Nicaea at their theological head — with representatives holding the proxies of the other Eastern patriarchs, and the philosopher George Gemistos Plethon among the advisers (Gill, The Council of Florence, 1959; Syropoulos, Les “Mémoires” du Grand Ecclésiarque de l’Église de Constantinople Sylvestre Syropoulos sur le concile de Florence (1438–1439), ed. and French trans. V. Laurent, Paris: CNRS, 1971 — the indispensable inside account by a Greek participant; the road to the council in St. Mark of Ephesus: The Road to Florence).

The Debates and the Decree

The council opened at Ferrara (1438), moved to Florence (1439) when plague and papal finances required, and debated the real questions for month after month — purgatory first (where Mark of Ephesus delivered the Orthodox orations against purgatorial fire: see The Debate on Purgatorial Fire), then, at exhausting length, the Filioque, both its legitimacy as an addition and its truth as doctrine, with Mark carrying the Orthodox case from the Ephesus Canon 7 argument through the patristic evidence (Gill, The Council of Florence, 1959; Mark’s Filioque argumentation in St. Mark of Ephesus: The Filioque Debates; the Capita Syllogistica and related works ed. L. Petit, Patrologia Orientalis 17, Paris, 1923).

The end was not a meeting of minds but an attrition. The Greeks were far from home, dependent on papal subsidies that ran months in arrears, dying (the patriarch among them — Joseph II died in Florence, 10 June 1439, before the decree), and under imperial pressure to close; the union party (Bessarion, Isidore of Kiev, George Scholarios then among the conciliators) crafted formulas of equivalence — “from the Son” equals “through the Son” — that the majority, worn down, accepted (Gill, The Council of Florence, 1959; Syropoulos, Mémoires, ed. Laurent, 1971, the classic testimony to the pressure and the arrears; assessed from the Orthodox side in Papadakis and Meyendorff, The Christian East, 1994, ch. 9, and in St. Mark of Ephesus: The Pressure to Unite). The decree Laetentur Caeli (6 July 1439) defined the Filioque as true doctrine and the addition as licit, accepted purgatory, allowed both breads, and defined the Roman pontiff’s primacy over the whole Church in the strongest terms the Greeks had ever been asked to sign, qualified only by an ambiguous reference to the privileges of the Eastern patriarchs (Laetentur Caeli, in Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 1990).

Every Greek bishop present signed except one. Mark of Ephesus refused, and was shielded from reprisal by the emperor; the often-quoted remark attributed to Eugenius IV on learning of the lone refusal — that without Mark’s signature “we have accomplished nothing” — comes from the Greek memoirs and is reported as such (Syropoulos, Mémoires, ed. Laurent, 1971 [Disputed: the pope's remark is attested in the Greek account (Syropoulos) and not in the Latin acts; it is quoted throughout the literature with that provenance noted]; the refusal itself in Gill, The Council of Florence, 1959, and in St. Mark of Ephesus: The Lone Holdout).

The Rejection

What followed is the decisive fact for the history of the schism: the union died on contact with the Church. The returning bishops were met in Constantinople with popular fury; many publicly repented their signatures; the City’s churches where unionist clergy served were shunned; and Mark of Ephesus, imprisoned for a time, became from his confinement the voice of the Church’s refusal until his death in 1445, passing the standard to George Scholarios — the future Patriarch Gennadios II — who had crossed from the unionist to the Orthodox side (Gill, The Council of Florence, 1959, documenting the rejection with Catholic candor; Papadakis and Meyendorff, The Christian East, 1994, ch. 9; the full story in St. Mark of Ephesus: Resisting the Union and Death and Aftermath). In Muscovy, Isidore of Kiev proclaimed the union in Moscow in 1441 and was deposed and imprisoned by Grand Prince Vasily II; the Russian Church elected its own metropolitan in 1448 — the beginning of its de facto autocephaly, a permanent structural consequence of Florence (Gill, The Council of Florence, 1959; Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). The promised Western aid materialized as the crusade destroyed at Varna (1444); the union was solemnly proclaimed in Hagia Sophia only on 12 December 1452, five months before the City fell; and the synod of Constantinople of 1484 formally annulled the Florentine decree (Gill, The Council of Florence, 1959; Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968; see How the Church Dates and Frames the Schism). The bitter saying that circulated in the doomed City — better the Sultan’s turban than the Latin mitre, attributed by the historian Doukas to the grand duke Loukas Notaras — preserves, in however desperate a form, the people’s judgment that the union had asked them to sell the faith (Doukas, Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks, trans. Magoulias, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975, where the remark is reported).

The Meaning for the Schism

Rome counts Florence an ecumenical council and its decree in force; the Orthodox Church counts it a false council — examined, found wanting, and rejected by the body whose consent no signature could replace — and has glorified Mark of Ephesus as a pillar of Orthodoxy (his glorification and reception in St. Mark of Ephesus: Legacy and Reception). Per METHODOLOGY §4.1 this collection states that verdict as the Church’s own: Florence is not a “reunion regrettably lapsed” but the conclusive demonstration that the method of Lyons — doctrinal capitulation for military aid, ratified under duress — cannot unite the Church, because the Church is not the emperor’s to sign away nor the episcopate’s to deliver against the faith of the body (cf. the 1848 Encyclical, §17, generalizing exactly this lesson). Even Gill, the union’s historian and partisan, documents the data on which the Orthodox verdict rests: the arrears, the exhaustion, the equivalence-formulas, the popular rejection (Gill, The Council of Florence, 1959 — cited, per §4.1, for his scholarship, not his conclusions). Florence thus closed the conciliar road on Rome’s terms, as 1204 had closed the road of force; what remained after 1453 was the long attrition of the Unia — the subject of Section 08.

See Also

References

  • Gill, Joseph. The Council of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. (The fundamental narrative history, from the Catholic side; cited per §4.1 for the record.)
  • Syropoulos, Sylvester. Les “Mémoires” du Grand Ecclésiarque de l’Église de Constantinople Sylvestre Syropoulos sur le concile de Florence (1438–1439). Ed. and French trans. Vitalien Laurent. Paris: CNRS, 1971. (The Greek insider’s account: subsidies, pressure, the pope’s remark.)
  • Council of Florence. Laetentur Caeli (6 July 1439). In Norman Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. London/Washington: Sheed & Ward/Georgetown University Press, 1990. (The decree’s terms.)
  • Mark of Ephesus. Anti-unionist works. Ed. Louis Petit. Patrologia Orientalis 15 (the purgatory orations, 1927) and 17 (the Filioque works, 1923). (The Orthodox case at the council.)
  • Doukas. Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks. Trans. Harry J. Magoulias. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975. (The Notaras remark; the 1452 proclamation and the fall.)
  • Papadakis, Aristeides, with John Meyendorff. The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy: The Church 1071–1453 A.D. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994. Ch. 9. (The Orthodox historical assessment.)
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantium and the Rise of Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. (Isidore, Moscow 1441, the 1448 election.)
  • Runciman, Steven. The Great Church in Captivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. (The aftermath; the 1484 synod.)
  • Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs (1848), §17. (The Church’s body as the guardian of faith — the lesson of Florence generalized.)