Sailing from Byzantium

by Colin Wells

  Chrysoloras and Manuel II probably saw the Florentine invitation as another opening for this ongoing effort. Chrysoloras’ motives would likely have been common knowledge to his Italian friends, which would explain why they felt no resentment against him for leaving. If Chrysoloras’ main interest had been to teach ancient Greek to young Florentines, he would have stayed out his contract. But his diplomatic aims came first. When after three years it became clear that the Florentines (like so many later Westerners) were more interested in ancient Greeks than in contempory ones, Chrysoloras moved on to what he no doubt hoped would be greener pastures with no real hard feelings on either side. Hence the attraction of Milan, a major military power under Visconti. Hence also Chrysoloras’ departure from Milan, and Italy, soon after Visconti's sudden and unexpected death in 1402 temporarily plunged the city's power into decline.

  A slew of details supports this interpretation, which in retrospect seems an almost obvious one.∗ It explains the movements not just of Chrysoloras himself but also those of his friend Manuel II. For during this same period—that is, from 1400 to 1403—the Byzantine emperor himself was touring the power centers of the West in hopes of drumming up money and support against the Turks.

  In fact, he arrived in Venice in April 1400, shortly after Chrysoloras had left Florence. From there Manuel II went to Padua, Vicenza, Pavia, and Milan, where he and Chrysoloras celebrated their reunion as the fêted guests of Gian Galeazzo Visconti. Manuel II would continue on to Paris, living there as the guest of King Charles VI for over a year, and London. He was a big hit in the English capital, where King Henry IV and his subjects gave him a magnificent reception and were for their part deeply impressed by the emperor's regal presence. Significantly, Manuel II did not visit Florence. It's hard not to see some degree of coordination at work between the two Byzantines, especially when you consider that the rest of Chrysoloras’ own career would be taken up with similar diplomatic journeys in the ongoing quest to stave off the Turkish advance.

  Schooling the Schoolmasters

  Interwoven with these diplomatic initiatives in the years after Florence was Chrysoloras’ burgeoning relationship with a new Italian pupil, Guarino of Verona. Born in that northern Italian city in 1374, the son of a metalworker who died when he was 12, Guarino was educated there as a boy. As a promising young humanist he had gone on during the 1390s to nearby Padua, studying there under Pier Paolo Vergerio, the Paduan teacher (four years Guarino's senior) who joined Chrysoloras’ classes in Florence. Unable to go to Florence himself, Guarino heard about the Byzantine's teaching from Vergerio, who by the early 1400s was conceiving and writing his pioneer educational work, On Gentlemanly Manners and Liberal Studies for Youth.

  Vergerio's ideas, backed once again by Chrysoloras’ instruction and personal example, would inspire Guarino's own coming achievements. Over the next several decades Guarino would rise to become the quattrocento's most prominent humanist educator, and thus ultimately Chrysoloras’ most influential student. All that lay in the future in 1403, when the young Guarino found himself in Venice, for which its smaller neighbor Padua acted as university town (Venice would officially absorb Padua in 1405). Chrysoloras, having quit Milan the previous year, had just accompanied the emperor Manuel II back to Constantinople. Like Angeli nearly a decade earlier, Guarino—who had still not met Chrysoloras— now decided to journey to the Byzantine capital, to seek Chrysoloras out and to study Greek with him. He traveled with a wealthy Venetian merchant named Paolo Zane, who made his trip possible by offering Guarino employment, along with generous encouragement and advice.

  Welcomed into Chrysoloras’ household, Guarino stayed in Constantinople for more than two years, mastering Greek and acquiring a good number of manuscripts. He then spent some time traveling around the Aegean, perhaps as Zane's secretary, visiting Rhodes and Chios and possibly the Greek mainland as well. Guarino's main teacher during his enviable Constantinopolitan sojourn was not Chrysoloras himself but Chrysoloras’ nephew John, who was much sought after as a tutor to aristocratic young Byzantines. Manuel remained busy with diplomatic missions, traveling back and forth between Constantinople and Italy, though he spent most of 1405 in the Byzantine capital and kept close tabs on Guarino's studies throughout.

  Chrysoloras was in Constantinople when he followed his intellectual forebears Barlaam and Cydones in converting to Catholicism. Shortly after that he left on a mission to Italy, though he was back again by the end of 1406. Before another year was out, however, Chrysoloras left Constantinople for the last time, moving permanently to the West. He spent the next few years trekking around Europe trying to drum up aid against the Turks and working, like Barlaam and Cydones before him, toward reuniting the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

  By this time, Catholic leaders had succeeded in their push for church councils to heal the decades-long Western schism between the rival popes in Avignon and Rome.∗ Chrysoloras, now one of the most famous and revered men in Italy, took part in this process, which also included an effort to reunite Catholic and Orthodox Christians. Indeed, when Chrysoloras died in 1415, he was representing the Orthodox in these negotiations, at Constance, Switzerland. At the time of his death, Vergerio tells us in his epitaph for Chrysoloras, everyone considered him a leading contender for election as pope, no less.

  Guarino, meanwhile, had returned to Italy, though he continued to keep in touch with Chrysoloras until his master's death. Teaching in Florence, Bologna, Venice, Verona, and during the last three decades of his life for the ruling Este family in Ferrara, Guarino acted with Vergerio as the pipeline through which Chrysoloras’ teaching changed the face of Italian and then European education. To take but a single example, their most successful protégé, Vittorino da Feltre, applied their ideas in establishing what seems to have been the first European boarding school, La Casa Giocosa—the House of Laughter—at the humanist court of the Gonzaga dynasty in Mantua.

  At the heart of this education revolution lay the revival of the encyclios paidea, the “all-round education” of the ancient Greeks. Combining a broad academic curriculum with music, physical fitness, and moral instruction to produce a fully rounded individual, encyclios paidea was the Greek model that inspired the Roman ideal of humanitas. Resurrecting it was the most important step forward in education since the invention of universities, and the values that Chrysoloras ushered in at the beginning of the quattrocento still profoundly shape the way we think about such matters today.

  Chrysoloriana and Beyond

  Of all Chrysoloras’ students, Guarino had stood closest to Chrysoloras emotionally, as well as being his most enthusiastic and devoted admirer among the Italians. It was primarily through passionate tributes by Guarino and his son Battista, written long decades after Chrysoloras’ death, that Chrysoloras would take on the golden aura of a legendary figure. A body of literature, the so-called Chrysoloriana, arose among later generations of humanist scholars, celebrating Chrysoloras and his achievements in Italy.

  In modern times, too, Chrysoloras has exerted a seemingly irresistible fascination on Renaissance historians, who have vied with each other to credit him with the most glamorous developments of the Italian Renaissance. One scholarly book suggests that his broad-based teaching gave rise to the idea of the Renaissance man; another that his aesthetic sophistication stimulated the invention of linear perspective and pictorial composition in painting; still another that his inspiring classicism introduced the first glimmerings of a secular outlook in the West. Such speculations are attractive and must of course be taken seriously—but perhaps not too much so. It is enough that so many have seen so much in the man.

  *After Hans Baron, in The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance.

  *Some recent scholars have defended the Scholastic translations as being better than the humanists maintained (and even better than the humanists’ translations). Regardless of who was better, the humanists had very different aims and interests. The differing aims of the two groups are probably mor
e revealing than a subjective comparison of their skills.

  *Through Bruni's writings, civic humanism has been credited with influencing the English, American, and French revolutions, among other epoch-making events of the modern world.

  *The “all-round education” of the ancient Greeks, stressing the development of the whole person, and including subjects such as sports and music.

  *Manuel II, who ruled from 1391 to 1425, was the son of John V Paleologos and John VI Cantacuzenos’ daughter Helena. He was the same highly literate emperor whom the reader will recall Demetrius Cydones praising as a Platonic “philosopher king” at the end of the last chapter.

  *First argued by Ian Thomson in 1966, it has been widely accepted by other scholars.

  *The schism between rival popes began in 1378 and was healed by the Council of Constance, 1414–18.

  Chapter Five

  Byzantine Émigrés

  in the Quattrocento

  amerlane's devastating defeat of the Ottomans at Ankara in 1402 offered a last reprieve for the beleaguered Byzantine empire, as the sons of the fallen sultan Bayezid fought each other for control of the shattered Ottoman state. The eventual winner of that contest, Mehmed I, owed his victory to the adroit assistance of Manuel II, who—in the best Byzantine tradition—took full advantage of the Ottomans’ disarray to play the diplomatic odds. When Mehmed finally dispatched his brother Musa in 1413, it was with the backing of Byzantine and Serbian troops. From that day forward, Mehmed swore gratefully, he would be like a son and obedient subject to his father the emperor. He was true to his word. Mehmed's gratitude, and his apparently genuine friendship with Manuel, lasted as long as Mehmed lived.

  Aware that the obligation was personal and temporary, Manuel used the opportunity to prepare as best he could for the onslaught that he knew would be renewed after Mehmed's death. Leaving aside defenses in Constantinople itself for the moment, Manuel focused on the southern part of the Greek mainland, which had become one of the most vital outposts of Byzantine culture during the Paleologan Renaissance.

  This broad peninsula, connected to the rest of the mainland by the narrow isthmus of Corinth, was called the Peloponnesus in ancient times, but Byzantines knew it as the Morea. Administered from the city of Mistra, near ancient Sparta, the Despotate of the Morea was ruled by a close relative of the emperor, usually a son or younger brother. Now Manuel rebuilt the ancient wall called the Hexamilion, across the narrow isthmus of Corinth, fortifying it with 153 towers and a castle at either end. Manuel's rebuilt Hexamilion protected the Morea against a land invasion from the north and was said to have been completed in less than a month.∗

  Pletho and His Students

  The Morea was home to the man who was one of the most eccentric and original thinkers in the Byzantine humanist tradition, George Gemistos Pletho. Philosopher, lay theologian, and advisor to both Manuel II and his son and successor John VIII, Pletho had been born simply George Gemistos. Later, during his pivotal visit to Florence in 1439, he would take the surname Pletho (a synonym for Gemistos, meaning “abundant”) because it sounded like the name of the philosopher he most revered, Plato.

  Born and educated in Constantinople, Pletho taught there for many years, but eventually got in trouble for promoting pagan beliefs. Sometime around 1410, when Pletho was about 50, Manuel II felt compelled to exile Pletho to Mistra, where he promptly founded a philosophical academy, a commune essentially, that continued to promote those same heretical beliefs.

  As Manuel had no doubt seen, Pletho's unusual, even unique approach fit better in Mistra's esoteric intellectual climate than in Constantinople's more conservative religious one. Using Platonic doctrine as a springboard, Pletho eventually turned his back on Christianity altogether, calling on his compatriots to reinstate Zeus and the Olympian pantheon, and conceiving a comprehensive program of organized paganism that recalled the emperor Julian's more than a millennium earlier.∗ Unlike Julian's, however, Pletho's pagan system incorporated a strong element of Greek patriotism, easier now that the empire had been shorn of all its former non-Greek lands (and most of its Greek lands, too, for that matter).

  Harkening back to Hellenic Outside Wisdom and to glorious martial traditions such as those of ancient Sparta, Pletho proposed social and military reforms that he hoped would strengthen Byzantine society and the Byzantine army against the Turks. Pletho went so far as to denounce the very institution of monasticism, painting the monks as useless parasites who contributed nothing to society. However, Pletho would not make these views public until very near the end of his life, after his visit to the West, publishing them in his Book of Laws.

  In so flagrantly abandoning Orthodox Byzantium for ancient Greece, Pletho represents an extreme version of the classicizing tendency that had helped drive the humanists further and further from the Byzantine mainstream. Most Byzantines had already paid their money and taken their choice, and that choice was not Pletho's. Their most urgent priority was to save their immortal souls, not to preserve what was now an essentially Greek state. Imbued with Hesy-chasm's somber, otherworldly tones, the mainstream of Byzantine civilization had already turned toward a better life in the next world while resigning itself to Turkish captivity in this one. For his self-reliant stand against the Turks Pletho has been called the first Greek nationalist—so ardent was he, in fact, that he argued against church union not for religious reasons but for patriotic ones, preferring to find strength from within.

  Surprisingly, Pletho numbered among his students and friends not only the humanists but also the Hesychast leaders who would later figure most prominently in Byzantium's short future. While those who became Hesychasts ultimately rejected his values, among the Byzantine humanists he stimulated a new interest in the works of Plato. Not that any of them endorsed his wilder fantasies, but they all respected him immensely. Like those of Cantacuzenos a century earlier, Pletho's relations with both sides reflect the complexities of the cultural gulf still dividing the Byzantines as they sank slowly beneath the quicksand of history.

  The Council of Florence

  Hellenic patriotism could hold only limited interest for the Florentines, sympathetic though they might be. Plato, however, proved a different story. Once exposed to Pletho's enthusiasm, Florence, like Byzantium, answered with a zeal of its own. In this new incarnation of Florentine humanism, Plato, an ancient Greek, replaced Cicero, an ancient Roman, as the Florentine humanists’ biggest hero.

  The event that triggered this shift came more than two decades after Chrysoloras’ death, when some of his brightest Florentine alumni took part in a momentous gathering that brought Pletho and other learned Byzantines to Italy. This was the Council of Florence, a full-scale church council called in Ferrara in 1438 to negotiate the union of the Eastern and Western churches, and moved early the following year to nearby Florence.

  Events meantime in both East and West had unfolded in such a way as to favor the old idea of union. By the 1430s Byzantium was clearly nearing the end of its rope. The previous decade had seen the deaths of Mehmed I and Manuel II, who were succeeded by their sons Murad II and John VIII Paleologos, respectively. Eager to resume the attack, in 1430 Murad captured Thessalonica. In desperation John VIII turned to Rome.

  On their side, the Catholics, too, had new reasons. For decades, rivalry between the papacy and the conciliarist movement had split the Western church.∗ The conciliarists believed that church doctrine should be decided by church councils rather than dictated by the pope, and in 1431 the rebellious Council of Basel repudiated the newly elected pope, Eugenius IV Eugenius was driven from Rome by hostile mobs and forced to take refuge in Florence, where he stayed with his court for nearly a decade. Acknowledgment of papal supremacy by the Orthodox would be just the thing to subdue the conciliarist rebels.

  As far back as Barlaam, a council had been seen as essential by Byzantine pro-unionists if any union were to win real support among the Byzantine public. Ideally it would be held in the East—Eugenius offered
to come to Constantinople— but the Turkish presence obviously made that impossible, and the Byzantines in turn accepted the need to go to the West. As it was, Eugenius agreed to foot the bill for everything, including travel and accommodations for the Byzantines.

  In November 1437, on ships supplied by Eugenius, the Byzantine delegation of some seven hundred church and lay dignitaries embarked for Italy. Led by the emperor himself, John VIII, and by the elderly patriarch of Constantinople, Joseph II, it included twenty metropolitans along with numerous other bishops, monks, and learned scholars.∗ Most of the prelates oversaw flocks who now lived outside of Byzantine control, which took some of the edge off their luster. Still, never before had emperor and patriarch journeyed to the West together in this way, much less with such a substantial and distinguished retinue.

  After a long and uncomfortable voyage (both John and Joseph were ill for much of it), the Byzantines anchored off the Lido at Venice on the morning of February 8,1438. Carefully negotiating the tricky shoals of protocol—compared to which any actual shoals dwindled to insignificance—the emperor, the patriarch, and the Venetian doge greeted each other amid the greatest pomp and pageantry the Venetians could lay on. This was considerable, since the Venetians, whose commercial empire was then close to the height of its power, had learned pomp and pageantry from the Byzantines. The climax came late the next morning, when the doge's magnificent state barge Bucentaur approached the emperor's ship so that the doge might present himself and his son to the emperor.