Sailing from Byzantium

by Colin Wells

  Barlaam, Boccaccio, and Petrarch

  At that point, perhaps partly to defuse a touchy situation, the emperor Andronicus III sent Barlaam on his first diplomatic mission west. The emperor's goal was military aid against the Turks, not a new Crusade (by this time, the Byzantines had had quite enough of Crusades) but an expedition of professional soldiers from the West. Barlaam's first stop was Naples, where he got on well at the humanist court of the Neapolitan king Robert the Wise, a curious and intelligent patron of culture whose entourage included the Florentine expatriate writer Boccaccio. Arriving toward the end of spring, Barlaam stayed for a few weeks before moving on to Paris and the French court, and finally to the papal curia at Avignon, where the pope kept his shaky grip on power with French support.∗

  The price the Greeks wished to avoid paying for aid was submission to the pope. Union, possibly; outright submission was out of the question. But how one without the other?

  Barlaam brought his own plan for resolving this dilemma. A long address to the pope in Latin, it aptly summarized the whole intractable situation. The Orthodox position was (and still is, for that matter) that the pope may be first in prestige among Christian bishops, but he is not the final authority: they allow him primacy, in other words, but not supremacy. The Orthodox have always held that important issues must be decided by a council of bishops, like those held in the early centuries of the Christian era. But by the fourteenth century that era was long over, and the popes were accustomed to unchallenged rule in the Western church.

  Barlaam's proposal was to call a joint church council in the East, in Greek territory, with representation by the Orthodox patriarchs and papal envoys. There was no other way, Barlaam argued, that the Greek populace would accept a unionist decree. And before anything else the pope must press for an expedition to clear the Turks from Asia Minor. Yet, constrained by his own dicey political situation, the pope could never make the first concession—as Barlaam must have known. In one form or another, over the rest of Byzantium's life this same spin cycle would make the issue of Western aid into an ongoing farce: neither side would deliver what the other demanded before being promised what the other side couldn't deliver anyway.

  So it's hardly surprising that nothing concrete came of Barlaam's negotiations, and that in diplomatic terms the trip was a failure. On top ofthat, Palamas had taken advantage of Barlaam's absence to strengthen his position. Ever rash, on returning Barlaam accused Palamas of heresy. But at the resulting church council, on June 10, 1341, with the patriarch, the heavy-hitting monks of Mt. Athos, and the loudly anti-Western populace lined up carefully behind him, Palamas had no trouble defending himself. Barlaam was not the only anti-Hesychast around, as events would prove shortly thereafter, but as a south Italian Greek he was suspect. Anti-Western feelings saturated the city; the council ended up condemning Barlaam himself.

  A mere five days later, Andronicus III died, leaving a nine-year-old son, John V, plus a number of intimates and other rivals who wished to claim the powerful role of regent until the young emperor came of age.

  Barlaam protested briefly against the council's ruling, but he soon realized that it had ended his prospects in the East. His trip two years earlier, however, had won him real friends in the West. In late summer he returned to Italy, stopping in Calabria and then Naples, where once more he was welcomed by King Robert and the humanist circle at the Neapolitan court. The Kingdom of Naples, which included Sicily, was a fascinating melange of Byzantine, Arab, Italian, and Norman influences. Its Norman rulers liked to keep the pot bubbling; Robert the Wise was merely one in a long line of enlightened kings.

  Boccaccio, reclaimed by his family after his father's death, had moved back to his native Florence, but Barlaam renewed his relationship with Robert's court librarian, Paul of Perugia. Barlaam helped Paul arrange the Greek manuscripts in Robert's growing library. He also assisted with the Greek parts of Paul's own book on classical mythology, The Collections. The two were rough contemporaries. Paul, Boccaccio wrote, “enjoyed peculiar friendship with Barlaam, and though it could not be based on common interests in Latin culture, it was a means by which Paul drank deeply of Greek lore.” Barlaam stayed in Naples from late summer 1341 to early 1342, and sometime during his stay he converted. It was as a Roman Catholic that he journeyed to Avignon in the spring of 1342.

  In Avignon waited Petrarch, who worked in close association with the Avignonese papacy, and whose beloved villa was nearby at Vaucluse. It's unclear whether he and Barlaam had met on Barlaam's earlier visit, but they became friends this time at least. Petrarch had managed to get his hands on a Greek manuscript of Homer from a Byzantine diplomat in Avignon. His letters show it to be one of his most prized possessions; he was dying to be able to read it.

  Paul of Perugia, Boccaccio, Petrarch—these pioneering humanists were just starting to rediscover the glorious Roman past, along with the Latin authors who had memorialized it. However, it is impossible to read those authors for long without realizing that reading classical Latin literature with any sensitivity requires familiarity with ancient Greek literature.

  This goes further than mere influence or inspiration: in self-consciously forging a national literature, classical Latin authors based virtually all their works on Greek models. Virgil is the most commonly cited example, and one obviously of great relevance to Petrarch and Boccaccio. The Aeneid (imitating Homer's Iliad) was only the last such work Virgil wrote; in his two earlier works, the Eclogues and the Georgics, Virgil imitated the Greek authors Theocritus and Hesiod, respectively. In his letters and speeches, Cicero, too, whom Petrarch and many of his successors idolized above all, constantly refers to his own Greek models and sources (an important one being, for example, the Athenian orator Demosthenes).

  Because these Greek texts survived only in Byzantium, the Italians found themselves cut off from the works that had not only inspired but almost dictated the Latin literature they were in the process of rediscovering. Learned Byzantines such as Barlaam offered the only access. “Not infrequently I quote Barlaam,” Boccaccio wrote later in The Genealogy of the Gods. “Though his body was slight, he stood higher than others in learning. Shall I not do well to trust him, particularly in all that pertains to Greek?”

  Barlaam stayed in Avignon from mid-May to mid-November 1342. He went on the curia's payroll in August, receiving fifty-three florins and twenty shillings for eighty-one days’ “lecturing in Greek in the curia.” This probably refers to the famous lessons he gave Petrarch. However, it turned out there was little time, for at Petrarch's own request, Barlaam was given a bishopric in Gerace in Calabria, far to the south.

  Time wasn't the only factor. Lectures in Eastern languages were not unknown at the curia, but ancient Greek is difficult. Without the teaching aids that eventually became common, such as grammar books, exercises, vocabulary lists, and above all bilingual Greek and Latin texts (which later humanists would particularly come to favor), the odds were stacked against Petrarch. “I wasn't so lucky as to learn Greek,” he wrote. “I'd thrown myself into the work with eager hope and keen desire, but the newness of a strange tongue and the early departure of my teacher frustrated me in my purpose.”

  After several unhappy years in Gerace and a brief and even more unhappy visit to Constantinople on behalf of the pope, Barlaam returned for a third time to Avignon in 1347.

  He gave more lessons to Petrarch, but this visit, again of only six months’ duration, was also too short to be productive. Boccaccio, urged on by Petrarch, would have slightly better luck in the 1350s, under the tutelage of Barlaam's student Leonzio Pilato, who had also briefly tutored Petrarch. Pilato, like Barlaam a Calabrian Greek who had sojourned in Constantinople and Thessalonica, was a less than ideal teacher— in Boccaccio's words, “a man of uncouth appearance, ugly features, long beard, and black hair, forever lost in thought, rough in manners and behavior.”

  For almost three years, according to an impressively game Boccaccio, they stumbled through Homer toget
her in Greek. Boccaccio even secured for Pilato a position teaching Greek in Florence in the early 1360s, but nothing came of it. It was simply too early for interest to have spread from standouts such as Petrarch and Boccaccio, Renaissance humanism's founders, after all, to their followers. The Italian humanists needed the pressure of greater numbers—and they needed, too, a teacher of Greek who could supply real teaching and the deep inspiration that goes with it. Both were coming, but not for a while yet.

  Cydones Translates Thomas Aquinas

  Barlaam, despite his abrasiveness, was missed by Byzantium's younger intellectuals. In 1347, the year that he made his second attempt with Petrarch, Barlaam entered into a brief correspondence on theological matters with a talented young Byzantine named Demetrius Cydones, whom he had met on his last visit to Constantinople.

  When he met Barlaam, Cydones had recently arrived in Constantinople to seek his fortune. In his early twenties, he had been born to a noble and recently impoverished family in Thessalonica, the empire's second city. His father, an ally of Andronicus III, had undertaken several sensitive diplomatic missions for the emperor, but Andronicus had died only days after the council condemning Barlaam had adjourned. A bloody and exhausting six-year civil war ensued between Andronicus’ best friend and prime minister, John Cantacuzenos, and an alliance between the patriarch and Andronicus’ widow, Anne of Savoy, an unpopular Western princess who managed to hold power in Constantinople for much of the war's duration. Cantacuzenos eventually won the war, although the political infighting festered for decades. Cydones’ family had supported Cantacuzenos but lost everything in violent riots in Thessalonica against Cantacuzenos’ side.

  Cydones was a master of the flowery classical rhetoric prized by the aristocratic Byzantine literati, and in a letter to Barlaam after Barlaam's departure he laments the void it left in Constantinople's intellectual circles. There follow pages and pages of detailed theological discussion; Cydones is clearly eager for Barlaam's reply. Barlaam, still arguing passionately for union between the two churches, died in spring 1348, shortly after writing it. By that time Cydones had entered the service of the victorious Cantacuzenos, who had had himself crowned as John VI soon after winning the civil war.

  The new emperor was a complex and subtle man whose career embraced a bundle of contradictions. Grimly realistic politician, brilliant statesman, able general, aristocratic magnate, devout Hesychast, accomplished man of letters— Cantacuzenos was immune to the obscurantism that so often attached itself to Hesychast beliefs, as his earlier patronage of Barlaam shows. A book lover, Cantacuzenos opened himself wide to theological speculation, even searched it out. When forced from office less than a decade later, he would become a monk and devote himself to literature in the classical mode, writing a history of his times in the style of Thucydides. The Hesychasts’ suspicions notwithstanding, imitation of classical Greek authors was always the height of literary aspiration for educated Byzantines, and Cydones, too, would win great fame for his mastery of it.

  Cydones began his employment as the emperor's chief secretary in charge of appointments, and rapidly made himself indispensable as both secretary and friend. Brilliant and prolific (his surviving letters, some 450 of them, take up three volumes of Greek and are a major historical source for late-fourteenth-century Byzantium), Cydones would walk in Barlaam's anti-Hesychast footsteps. In contrast with Barlaam's heavy tread, Cydones’ humanist slippers rustled softly through the corridors of power, even in the palace of a confirmed Hesychast such as Cantacuzenos. In a fifty-odd-year political career, Demetrius Cydones stayed light on his feet and nimble in dodging blows from the shadows.

  Not all would be so lucky, and there were many others in the humanist camp who shared fates similar to Barlaam's. The Hesychasts had another friend of Barlaam's excommunicated, the erudite Simon Atumano, who made his way west and converted to Catholicism in time to succeed his friend as bishop of Gerace; also like Barlaam, he briefly but unsuccessfully tutored some Italians in ancient Greek. The theologian Gregory Akindynos, a friend of both Barlaam and Palamas, began by trying to mediate between them but was soon persuaded on purely theological grounds to support Barlaam.

  Akindynos was more typical of the early anti-Hesychasts than Barlaam and Atumano, in that his wide classical learning did not instill in him any affinity for the Latins. Condemned with Barlaam in 1341 and excommunicated by another church council in 1347, Akindynos went into exile in the East and died soon afterward. Leadership of the anti-Hesychast group then fell to the polymath and historian Nicephoras Gregoras, also no friend of the Latins, who was condemned by a church council in 1351 and placed under house arrest in Constantinople.

  It was at this point—with the civil war over, Cantacuzenos still in power, and Palamas’ orthodoxy confirmed by several church councils—that Palamas can be considered to have won the controversy. From now on Hesychasts dominated the official structure of the Byzantine Orthodox Church. When Palamas died in 1358, he was widely mourned and quickly canonized; when Gregoras died sometime around 1360, his corpse was dragged through the city's streets to be jeered at by the devout populace.

  Byzantium had now made its choice. After long centuries, it had rejected the Outside Wisdom. Palamas’ victory had turned Barlaam away from Byzantium and toward the West, where his humanism was welcomed, not condemned. The pattern would repeat itself in coming decades, as Byzantine humanists found themselves less and less in sympathy with the direction Byzantium had chosen.

  Only after Hesychasm's victory was secure and it rose to control the church did humanistic opposition to it become more firmly associated with Western sympathies. Demetrius Cydones illustrates this, for his anti-Hesychasm—already clear in his letters to Barlaam in the 1340s—preceded his interest in the West, which arose after the church council that endorsed Hesychasm in 1351.

  His “Defense of His Own Faith,” written later, after his conversion to Catholicism, tells the story. In conducting the emperor's affairs, Cydones found himself encountering the Westerners on a daily basis. Merchants especially, but also diplomats, papal legates, mercenaries, even the odd touring noble—the West's presence at the imperial court had grown insistent. Deluged by petitions for this or that imperial favor, each of which had to be translated from Latin, Cydones soon grew frustrated with the lame attempts of the court translators to keep up with it all. He realized he had little choice but to learn Latin himself. Among the Western presence in Constantinople were Franciscan and Dominican friars, and it was a Dominican whom he knew from the Genoese quarter at Pera, across the Golden Horn, that Cydones found to instruct him.

  Despite his heavy workload, Cydones tells us, he made rapid progress (like Barlaam, he didn't suffer from false modesty), and soon he was as fluent “as if trained by my parents from childhood.” So to give him something he could really get his teeth into, his delighted teacher presented him with “a little book” to work on, the Summa Contra Gentiles of Thomas Aquinas, one of two works in which Aquinas lays out his plan for reconciling the faith of the theologians with the reason of the philosophers.∗ Reading the West's Angelic Doctor was like coming home, Cydones tells us, and it ultimately set him on the path to conversion. “Having tasted the lotus,” he says, he couldn't hold back; Aquinas came as a progressive revelation as he read and translated further. As he stacked the Latins up against the Greeks who attempted to refute them, it was the Greeks who seemed to come up short, blindly parroting old arguments that didn't address the detailed and sophisticated reasoning of a writer such as Aquinas.

  In 1353, by which time he himself had been elevated to the position of prime minister, Cydones decided to write out a translation of the whole book. In doing so he caused quite a stir, for he made no secret of his new fascination. The emperor himself took an interest, supporting Cydones’ efforts as beneficial to Byzantine culture—and of course to Cantacuzenos’ own avid theological curiosity.

  The last part of Cydones’ manuscript of the translation, written out by his
secretary with notes in Cydones’ own hand, survives in the Vatican library. At the end, Cydones left a celebratory note in Latin, no less. Its immediacy (not to mention its sentiment, familiar to any classics student) spans centuries: “The book is finished, may praise and glory be to Christ. Demetrius of Thessalonika, servant of Christ, translated this book from Latin into Greek. He worked at it for one year, finishing at 3 P.M., December 24, 1354.”

  Only a month before, Cantacuzenos had abdicated in favor of John V, now in his early twenties and married to Cantacuzenos’ daughter Helena. With time on his hands now, Cydones says, Cantacuzenos copied out the manuscript himself, which certainly must have taken some effort. He also passed it on to others, creating a most unexpected ripple of Thomism in the highest circles of Byzantine power.

  In conjunction with his younger brother Prochorus, whom (though he doesn't say) it seems likely he may have tutored in Latin himself, Cydones went on to make Greek translations of many of Aquinas’ works, as well as works of various other Latin theologians. Both made translations of St. Augustine, and Prochorus also translated some of Boethius’ theological writings. Of the two, Prochorus Cydones was the more strident anti-Hesychast, although he himself was a monk in one of the monasteries of Mt. Athos and (unlike Demetrius) never converted to Catholicism. Demetrius would not always be able to shield him from persecution, and the Hesychasts succeeded in having Prochorus anathematized in 1368. He went into exile and died shortly thereafter. Demetrius himself would be similarly anathematized, but only after his own death.