by David Brewer
Yennádhios’ final conversion to the anti-union cause came four years later in a dramatic scene at the deathbed of his old tutor Márkos Evyenikós. ‘No one knows better than you’, said Yennádhios to the dying Evyenikós, ‘that formerly I did not join openly in the struggles which Your Holiness led, but let them pass in silence. Now, with God’s help, I have altogether changed my mind, and stand with you as a complete and avowed fighter for the truth. I will act for you and speak for you, with my life blood and with my life itself.’5
In 1450 he became a monk at the monastery of the Pantokrator in Constantinople, taking the monastic name Yennádhios. From there he continued to issue fierce denunciations of the union of the churches up to the time when the city fell. He was then captured and for a few months became the house servant of a wealthy Turk in Edirne. He was released, apparently on the orders of the Sultan, in September 1453 and returned to Constantinople.
At that time there was no patriarch, as the previous incumbent, the pro-union Grigórios III Mámmas, had fled to Italy two years before. Mehmed was surprised that there was no patriarch to greet him as the new ruler. He needed a patriarch, someone to deal with as the political leader of the Orthodox. He also needed an anti-unionist patriarch, as being least likely to invoke a sympathetic crusade from the Catholic west. The Sultan clearly favoured Yennádhios, but left the nomination of patriarch to the traditional synod of the Orthodox clergy, only reserving the final approval for himself.
Yennádhios at first refused the office, but was pressed to accept by both the clergy and the people as a whole. He finally yielded. ‘As there was nobody else,’ he wrote, ‘I took the role of teacher. Though sick myself, in the absence of a doctor I cared for those suffering even worse.’6 The Holy Synod promoted him successively from humble monk to deacon, priest, bishop and patriarch, and on 6 January 1454 the Sultan presented him with a new patriarchal cross – the original one having disappeared – with the words: ‘Be Patriarch, with good fortune, and be assured of our friendship, keeping all the privileges that the patriarchs before you enjoyed.’7 Everything was done according to tradition; the Sultan was not only honouring Yennádhios but was also taking for himself the role of the Byzantine Emperors.
Patriarch and Sultan had great respect for each other. Yennádhios wrote of Mehmed: ‘His understanding and benevolence have been a comfort to us; he has supported our Church and also, by the grace of God, has saved many of us from being killed.’8 And he told his flock, in a pastoral letter, that they could live aright ‘only by obedience and submission to the church and its protector’, that is the Sultan.9 For his part, Mehmed spent many hours in visits to Yennádhios, who at Mehmed’s request wrote for him an extended statement of the Christian faith, a summary of which Mehmed ordered to be translated into Turkish. Interestingly, there is no record of Yennádhios having asked for a reciprocal explanation of Muslim beliefs.
Yennádhios had agreed to become patriarch only reluctantly, and initially said that he would serve for no more than nine months, until October 1454. But he was persuaded to stay on, first for a further three months to January 1455 and then for another year until January 1456, when his patriarchate finally ended. His two years in office had been troubled ones. The clergy resisted any reform, the monks, he said, were ‘evil and turbulent’ and the people were deserting the Church. But Yennádhios gave, as his main reason for retiring, his poor health, and said that he had often been in danger of falling down in a faint while conducting a service.
He returned to monastic life, first on Mt Athos, where he had long wanted to retire. ‘If I do not live out the rest of my days on the Holy Mountain of Athos,’ he had written, ‘may I not see the face of God.’10 In fact he soon moved to another monastery near Sérres some 60 miles north of Mt Athos, and died there in 1472. In his last years he twice returned to Constantinople for a few months, some historians claim as an interim patriarch while others believe only as a private visitor. He is still remembered, in the Sunday liturgy of the Orthodox Church, as ‘a shining champion, in all his preaching and writing, of the Orthodox faith’.11
Yennádhios was, of course, a much more complex character than this reverential description suggests. He was indeed a champion of the Orthodox faith, but was an outspoken critic of the Orthodox Church. The clergy, he wrote, were corrupted by simony (the buying of church offices), and the people were drifting away through indifference, a drift that Yennádhios tried to stem by threatening to excommunicate anyone who missed three successive Sunday services. He was a man of genuine humility but a ferocious polemicist, attacking Plíthon the neo-Platonist as an enemy of religion, even burning one of Plíthon’s books. This profoundly serious man occasionally showed a lighter side: one of his poems is an acrostic in which the first letters of the lines spell out ‘Scholários, all his own work.’12
But it was on the question of the union of the Orthodox and Catholic churches that Yennádhios’ complexities were most apparent. As a young man he was a supporter of the union. He had translated and written commentaries on the works of the Catholic Thomas Aquinas and had studied other Catholic theologians. He found no difficulty with the Catholic belief that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, the subject of the filioque controversy. The Holy Spirit, he argued, was like the fruit of a tree, and can be said to proceed ultimately from the root, the Father, but also, in an intermediate sense, from the branch, the Son. When he became anti-unionist, it was not on theological grounds but for two quite different reasons. One was tradition: ‘I have returned to the doctrine of the Church Fathers.’13 The other was simply practicality: ‘God in his mercy may bring the union to fruition,’ he wrote, ‘but I believe it is difficult and almost impossible to achieve in human terms.’14
For much of our information about Yennádhios, and his successors as patriarch over the next century or so, we are indebted to a German professor Martin Kraus, usually Latinised as Crusius. Crusius became professor of Latin and Greek at the university of Tübingen in 1559, holding the post till his death 48 years later, and was fascinated by every aspect of Greece, especially the Greece of his time. ‘From my childhood onward,’ he wrote, ‘I have loved Greece.’15
Crusius never visited Greece or Constantinople, but Tübingen had links with Constantinople through a proposal that the German Lutheran and the Greek Orthodox churches should come together, both being anti-Catholic. The man charged with exploring this possibility, which ultimately came to nothing, was a friend of Crusius, Stephen Gerlach, who was in Constantinople as chaplain to the Habsburg ambassador throughout most of the 1570s. Gerlach in turn became friendly with two senior Orthodox clerics and with the patriarch Ieremías II himself. Thanks to these contacts, Crusius began a copious correspondence with Gerlach, the Greek clerics and the patriarch, and the letters ranged over a great variety of subjects, such as vignettes of life in Constantinople, details of the circumcision ceremony and the Greek language of the day.
Perhaps most importantly, Gerlach bought and sent to Crusius a copy of a book in Greek by an unknown author giving the history of Constantinople, both political and patriarchal, from 1453 up to 1578. The copyist was Manuel Malaxós, an old teacher who taught in a hut festooned with dried fish, which provided his food. He made copies for a fee, and spent whatever he earned on drink. One can perhaps imagine Gerlach and Malaxós negotiating a price for the document in this malodorous cabin and both departing well pleased, Gerlach with his book to the embassy and Malaxós with his money to the vintner’s. Crusius published the book in 1584, with his own parallel translation from Greek to Latin, and included as annotations many extracts from his correspondence. Thus our knowledge of the period is largely thanks to a failed ecclesiastical project, an inquisitive and acquisitive chaplain, a German professor who never saw Greece and an elderly drunken Greek copyist. It is a reminder of how chancy and how fragile are our links with the past.
After Yennádhios seven other men held the office of patriarch in Mehmed’s reign, which ended w
ith his death in 1481. Elections were all by a synod, whose membership was steadily widened: initially only senior clerics were members, but by the last election of Mehmed’s reign the synod apparently included ‘metropolitan bishops, archbishops, subsidiary bishops, deans, other priests, officials, prominent citizens and representatives of the people’.16 The influence of the common people, known to their detractors as the mob, had long been a feature of Byzantine Constantinople.
Removal of the patriarch, when necessary, was also done by a synod, with one exception in this period. Ioásaph, patriarch in the 1460s, refused to sanction the remarriage of a leading Greek of Trebizond who was already married with children. The Greek was cousin of a powerful pasha, who induced Mehmed to remove the patriarch, the Sultan using the power exercised by Byzantine Emperors before him.
These early patriarchs also suffered attacks from their own people. Ioásaph, before his removal by the Sultan, was so fiercely slandered by his own clerics that he tried unsuccessfully to drown himself in a well. Opponents of his successor, Márkos II Xilokarávis, stoned him in the streets. A later patriarch, Dhionísios I, under whom the Church generally enjoyed tranquillity, was falsely accused of being circumcised, and refuted the charge quite simply by raising his lower garments in a public meeting. One patriarch in particular deserved censure. If Crusius’ book is to be believed, Rapha?l I, a Serbian abbot who spoke no Greek, was always drunk, never attended the daily services, and at the service on Good Friday was so incapable that he dropped the holy sceptre, fell over and had to be removed. But most of the patriarchs under Mehmed were much better men than Rapha?l: for example, the principled Ioásaph; his predecessor Isídhoros, described as holy, virtuous and blameless; and Máximos, patriarch at the end of Mehmed’s reign, a learned and effective preacher under whom church affairs proceeded peacefully and without scandal. Nevertheless, for much of this period the Church was far from being a serene and united body of the pious. It was more like a feuding political party, racked by accusations both true and false, and consumed by internal strife.
Money played an important part in this strife, in two ways. One was the payment made by each patriarch on his accession, the peskésion, nominally a gift from patriarchate funds to the state treasury. The other was the annual tribute, the harátzi, which fell due on St George’s day in April.
The first five patriarchs paid no gift on accession. In fact the reverse had been the case in Byzantine times, the Emperor making a payment to the patriarch. The new practice was introduced in about 1466 by the sixth patriarch, Simeón I, in his machinations to get the incumbent patriarch Márkos II deposed. Simeón promised the state treasury a gift of 1,000 ducats if elected, as he duly was. Note, though, that it was and remained the synod who elected the patriarch, who was therefore not technically buying his office and so was not guilty of simony.
Conflict between Simeón and his predecessor Márkos continued, and was resolved by the Sultan’s Christian stepmother Mara, patroness of the monastery of St John at Sérres, who took a keen interest in church affairs. She proposed her own candidate, her spiritual adviser who was to become patriarch as Dhionísios I, and sent on his behalf a gift on accession, now doubled to 2,000 ducats, in a silver casket.
The other payment was the annual tribute from the patriarchate, first mentioned when the incompetent Rapha?l was elected in about 1474. Rapha?l offered a reduced gift on accession, back to the original 1,000 ducats, but an annual tribute of 2,000 ducats. When he was unable to pay this tribute he was imprisoned and deposed. Thereafter the relative amounts of the gift on accession and the annual tribute were juggled to produce a package that would satisfy the Turkish officials charged with the negotiations. During Mehmed’s reign the gift on accession varied, from a low of 500 ducats to a high of 3,500, but the annual tribute rose steadily and at Mehmed’s death was 4,100 ducats, the last 100 being paid personally by the bishop of Ochrid to secure confirmation of his disputed appointment.
It was the Greeks who had unwisely introduced the practice of a gift on accession, and it was their bidding against each other for office that had caused both the gift on accession and the annual tribute to increase, though Turkish officials had not, of course, been slow to exploit the situation. The worst of it was that the costs were passed on down the church hierarchy and ultimately fell on the Greek people. As the traveller George Wheler reported a century later: ‘The authority which they (the Greek patriarchs) thus obtain by simony, they maintain by tyranny. For as soon as they are promoted, they send to all their bishops, to contribute to the sum they have disbursed for their preferment, and such as deny, they depose and send others to their charge. Again the bishops send to their inferior clergy; who are forced to do the same to the poor people, or to spare it out of their wives’ and children’s mouths.’17 These patriarchal payments continued to be substantial, each fluctuating around 3,000 ducats, the Venetian ducat being the only gold coin used by the Turks since it was the only one not adulterated. The sum of 3,000 ducats was the value of the estate of a wealthy man who died intestate, and whose property was sold. The same sum of 3,000 ducats would pay a troop of 60 janissaries for a year, and in the expensive slave market of Bursa would buy up to 100 slaves.
It is sometimes asserted that there was a ‘steady annexation of [the Greeks’] churches and their conversion into mosques’18 and that the Turks refused to allow new ones to be built. This is only very partially true. In the immediate aftermath of the conquest only Ayía Sophía, the greatest church in Constantinople, was converted to a mosque, but apart from the addition of four minarets the conversion was inevitably superficial rather than structural. To this day Ayía Sophía, now a museum, has the sad air of a building that does not properly express either of the faiths to which it has been dedicated. A year or two later the second greatest church in the city, Áyii Apóstoli, was abandoned, then demolished and a mosque complex built on its site. Áyii Apóstoli was Yennádhios’ first headquarters as patriarch, but the building was in decay, the area around it was deserted and dangerous, and as a final straw a dead body was found one night outside the church.
With the Sultan’s approval the patriarchate was moved to the convent of the Pammakáristos, the resident nuns being transferred to the neighbouring church of Áyios Iánnis. The Pammakáristos was a far better location, being in the Phanar district in the north-west of the city, which was, and remained, a predominantly Greek area. The only indignity suffered by the Pammakáristos came 100 years later towards the end of Suleyman’s reign (1520–66), when on the orders of an unidentified official the cross surmounting the Pammakáristos was removed. This cross had been visible from afar, and it was not altogether surprising that the Turks, especially the more conservative, did not want to see a Christian symbol dominating a Muslim capital city.
As for the abandoned Áyii Apóstoli, Mehmed built on its site a great mosque complex, the Fatih Sultan Mehmed, which stood for three centuries until destroyed by an earthquake in 1766. The complex covered 26 acres, and the dome of the mosque was 85 feet across. The mosque owed much to Byzantine architecture, and those who saw it, including Mehmed himself, compared it to Ayía Sophía. The two faiths were here in harmony rather than in opposition.
The greatest threat to the churches of Constantinople came in 1546, in the reign of Suleyman. It is a curious story.19 The Turkish religious leaders issued a fatwa declaring that, as Constantinople had been taken by force, not by surrender, Muslim law required that all Christian churches should be destroyed. This was to be done without delay, in five days’ time. Frantic discussions followed between the patriarch and the grand vizier, who granted the Greeks twenty days to produce witnesses, who must be Turks, to testify that the city had in fact surrendered. Two aged janissaries were found in Edirne and persuaded, on payment of a considerable sum, to come to Constantinople and swear before the grand vizier that they were now 102 years old and at the age of eighteen had been present at the capture of the city. The Emperor Constantine, they testified,
had initially rejected peace offers but had finally surrendered. Furthermore, Mehmed had given Constantine a written acceptance, now unfortunately lost, of his surrender. The grand vizier reported this to Suleyman, who immediately overturned the fatwa and ordered that there should be no more harassment of the Greeks over their churches, now or forever. The averted threat had actually left the Greeks in a much stronger position than before.
One strange element of the story is the sudden discovery of the two supposedly centenarian janissaries, whose testimony was accepted though it had to be paid for and was clearly false. The other oddity is that Suleyman and his officials went along with this charade. The probable truth is that Suleyman had no wish to antagonise the Greeks, but that conservative Turkish clerics – perhaps those who had the cross on the Pammakáristos removed – wanted a harder line. Suleyman could not simply rescind or ignore a fatwa, and needed legal grounds to overturn it. So he and his grand vizier were content to accept the obviously false testimony of the old janissaries, who would hardly have dared to perjure themselves unless the Sultan approved. Thus Suleyman got his justification in law for his moderate policy.
However, some Orthodox churches fell into decay and were abandoned, being put to use as armouries or warehouses. Some were indeed converted to mosques, though recorded instances are few. But Selim I (1512–20) reopened some of the churches that his father Bayezid II had closed, and during his reign the buildings round the patriarchal church of Pammakáristos were repaired and extended, so that it was said to look like a magnificent fortified castle. In the reign of his grandson Selim II (1566–74) the Pammakáristos church itself was splendidly renovated and adorned with gold and silver images and candelabra, so that even at night it was bathed in reflected light. Official permission was needed for building or rebuilding churches, but it seems that this was readily granted provided that the church was in a predominantly Christian area. By 1547 there were 67 churches in Constantinople itself and another ten in Galata.
