The Union of Lyons, 1274

To buy off Charles of Anjou’s planned reconquest of Constantinople, Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos accepted Rome’s terms at the Second Council of Lyons (6 July 1274) — Filioque, papal primacy, and all — over a Church that had not consented and against a hierarchy already fractured by the Arsenite schism. The union was enforced by persecution, repudiated the moment Michael died (1282), and formally answered by the council of Blachernae (1285). This file follows Geanakoplos’ standard account.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

A Union Bought, Not Believed

The context is 1204’s long shadow. Michael VIII Palaiologos recovered Constantinople from the Latins in 1261, and the dispossessed Latin interests — above all Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily from 1266 — spent the next two decades organizing its reconquest. Michael’s defense was diplomatic: successive popes held the one leash that could restrain a crusade against Byzantium, and their price was the submission of the Greek Church. The profession of faith Rome required had been drafted under Clement IV in 1267; Gregory X, elected 1271 and burning to unite Christendom for a crusade, made the offer concrete: union, in exchange for protection (Geanakoplos, Emperor Michael Palaeologus and the West, 1258–1282: A Study in Byzantine-Latin Relations, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959, the standard account of the whole affair; Papadakis and 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. 8).

Michael could not deliver his Church, and knew it. Patriarch Joseph I refused the union and withdrew, bound by oath against it; the synod resisted; and the emperor extracted compliance from a portion of the hierarchy by argument, pressure, and the services of the one considerable churchman won over by study to the unionist case, the chartophylax John Bekkos, who as Patriarch John XI (1275–1282) would become the union’s theologian (Geanakoplos, Emperor Michael Palaeologus, 1959, chs. on the union; Papadakis, Crisis in Byzantium: The Filioque Controversy in the Patriarchate of Gregory II of Cyprus, rev. ed., Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997, on Bekkos). The embassy sent to Lyons was small and unrepresentative: the ex-patriarch Germanos III, Theophanes of Nicaea, and the grand logothete George Akropolites — one of its two ships was lost with its treasure in a storm off Cape Malea en route (Geanakoplos, Emperor Michael Palaeologus, 1959). At the council’s fourth session, 6 July 1274, the union was proclaimed: Akropolites swore in the emperor’s name to the Roman faith, including the Filioque and the primacy, and the Creed was sung with the addition — no Greek debate having been held, none being on offer. Lyons was not a council of union in the sense of 879–880; it was the registration of a capitulation (Second Council of Lyons, 1274, Constitution on the Trinity and the profession of Michael VIII, in Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 1990; Geanakoplos, Emperor Michael Palaeologus, 1959; the contrast with 879–880 drawn in The Council of 879–880).

The Arsenite Backdrop

The union fell on a Church already in schism with itself. Michael VIII had reached the throne over the body of the legitimate dynasty: in 1261 he had the boy-emperor John IV Laskaris blinded, and Patriarch Arsenios excommunicated him for it. Michael procured Arsenios’ deposition (1265), but a large and stubborn party — the Arsenites — refused communion with his successors for two generations, until a formal reconciliation in 1310 (Geanakoplos, Emperor Michael Palaeologus, 1959, on the blinding and excommunication; Papadakis and Meyendorff, The Christian East, 1994, ch. 8, on the Arsenite schism). The Arsenite quarrel mattered doubly for the union: it drained the moral authority of the official hierarchy that was now asked to stomach Lyons, and it seeded a standing opposition for whom the emperor was already excommunicate — men not likely to accept the pope at his word (Papadakis and Meyendorff, ibid.).

Enforcement and Persecution

What could not be believed had to be enforced. The anti-unionist opposition — led by monks, joined by members of the imperial family, and popular in the City — was met with imprisonment, confiscation, exile, tonsuring, blinding, and mutilation; Geanakoplos documents the persecutions from both the Greek sources (Pachymeres above all) and the Latin, including the parading and mutilation of prominent dissidents (Geanakoplos, Emperor Michael Palaeologus, 1959, chs. on the enforcement of the union, drawing on George Pachymeres, Relations historiques, ed. Failler, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1984–2000). Athonite tradition adds a company of martyrs: the twenty-six monks of Zographou, burned in their tower for rejecting the union, commemorated on 10 October, with other Athonite sufferings under the unionists.

[Disputed: the Athonite martyrdoms under Michael VIII. The account of the Zographou twenty-six and related Athonite persecutions is first attested in later Athonite sources (the surviving narratives are considerably post-Byzantine in their present form), and the contemporary historians of the reign do not corroborate a punitive expedition to Athos; historians therefore treat the episode with reserve (cf. Geanakoplos, Emperor Michael Palaeologus, 1959, whose documented persecutions are in Constantinople and the provinces, not Athos), while Athonite and liturgical tradition maintains the commemoration of 10 October. Per METHODOLOGY §3.5 the martyrdom is reported as what the tradition attests, pinned to its late attestation, not asserted as documented fact.]

Rome, meanwhile, discovered it had bought a signature, not a Church. Papal legates pressed for implementation — the Filioque in the Greek Creed, Roman confirmations — that Michael could not impose; and in 1281 the French pope Martin IV, Charles of Anjou’s creature, excommunicated Michael VIII himself as an abettor of schism, destroying at a stroke the union’s whole political rationale (Geanakoplos, Emperor Michael Palaeologus, 1959, on Martin IV’s excommunication). The emperor who had persecuted his Church for the pope’s friendship died (11 December 1282) outside the communion of both: the Church denied him Orthodox burial, and Rome had already anathematized him (Geanakoplos, ibid.; Papadakis and Meyendorff, The Christian East, 1994, ch. 8).

Repudiation: Blachernae 1285

Andronikos II abandoned the union immediately; Bekkos was deposed; Joseph I was restored briefly before his death. The Church then did what Lyons had never done — held a real council on the real question. The council of Blachernae (1285), under Patriarch Gregory II of Cyprus, condemned the union and Bekkos’ Filioque theology, and its Tomus gave the Orthodox answer theological depth: the Spirit proceeds hypostatically from the Father alone, while the patristic “through the Son” language signifies the Spirit’s eternal manifestation through the Son — a distinction that received the truth in the Latin evidence without conceding causation, and which prepared the theology of the hesychast councils (the Tomus of 1285, edited and analyzed in Papadakis, Crisis in Byzantium, 1997, the standard study; cf. Filioque and Papal Primacy). Bekkos defended himself in writing to the end (he died in prison, 1297), and his case — a serious Byzantine churchman persuaded of the Latin cause — remains the most interesting theological artifact of the affair, studied without rancor in the modern literature (Papadakis, Crisis in Byzantium, 1997).

Assessment

From within the Church the verdict on Lyons is straightforward and has never wavered (METHODOLOGY §4.1): a union of coercion, negotiated for reasons of state, imposed by persecution, and void of the one thing that makes union — common faith freely confessed. Its instructive value is what it proved: that the papacy of the period would accept submission in place of agreement; that an emperor could sign anything and deliver nothing; and that the Church’s body — monks, clergy, people, with the persecuted at their head — and not the palace, is where the faith is kept (cf. the 1848 Encyclical’s later formulation that the guardian of religion is the whole body of the Church: Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, 1848, §17). Every element of Lyons — the political motive, the unrepresentative delegation, the enforcement, the repudiation — recurred at Florence a century and a half later, on a larger stage and with a greater confessor; that story is deferred to Ferrara–Florence 1438–1439 and the sibling collection St. Mark of Ephesus.

References

Geanakoplos, Deno John. Emperor Michael Palaeologus and the West, 1258–1282: A Study in Byzantine-Latin Relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959. (The standard history: the Angevin threat, the negotiations, Lyons, the persecutions, Martin IV, Michael’s death.)
Second Council of Lyons (1274), Constitution on the Trinity; profession of faith of Michael VIII. In Norman Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. London/Washington: Sheed & Ward/Georgetown University Press, 1990. (The union’s terms.)
Pachymeres, George. Relations historiques. Ed. Albert Failler. 5 vols. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1984–2000. (The principal Greek narrative source for the persecution.)
Papadakis, Aristeides. Crisis in Byzantium: The Filioque Controversy in the Patriarchate of Gregory II of Cyprus (1283–1289). Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997. (Blachernae 1285, the Tomus, and Bekkos.)
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. 8. (The Arsenite schism; the union in Orthodox assessment.)
Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs (1848), §17. (The body of the Church as guardian of the faith.)