The history of the Morea is a late Byzantine success story, which also illustrates
the dilemmas faced by Roman orthodox leaders caught between the
west and the Ottomans in the fifteenth century. From 1262 the Peloponnese
was steadily recovered from the south by the Byzantines, who shared
it with the shrinking Frankish principality of Achaia, based on Andravida
in the north-west, until the Latins were finally ejected in 1429 (on this
principality, also known as the Frankish principality of Morea, see above
p. 767). From 1349 the Morea was an autonomous despotate, an appanage
of Constantinople usually ruled, like Thessaloniki, by a younger member of
the imperial dynasty. The despots’ capital was at Mistra, below a crusader
castle which overlooks ancient Sparta and its plain. Unlike Thessaloniki,
Mistra was new, without strong-minded bishops. As the Frankish Chronicle
of the Morea helpfully put it in 1249: ‘. . . and they named itMyzethras, for
that was how they called it.’14 The steep streets of Mistra, which cannot
take wheeled traffic, still tumble past monastic enclosures, domed churches
and balconied houses down to the only square and stabling, which is the
courtyard of the despots’ palace. Here on 6 January 1449 the despot was
invested, but not crowned, as last Roman orthodox emperor, Constantine
XI Palaiologos. As despot he had been a tributary of the Ottomans since
1447; as emperor he died fighting for Constantinople on 29 May 1453, but
it was not until 29 May 1460 that Mehmed II took Mistra.15
The Morean economy was pastoral and transhumant in the highlands,
with lowland agriculture, which included exports to Venice of Kalamata
olives, along with silk and salt. Monemvasia gave its name to exports of
malmsey wine and Corinth to currants. The archives of the despotate are
largely lost, but it seems to have been run efficiently on late Byzantine fiscal
and feudal lines, financing its defence principally through agriculture.16
The peoples of theMorea were not as exotic as those of the Crimea, but
since the seventh century had included Slav settlers (see above, pp. 257–8).
Despite evangelisation as Roman orthodox from the tenth century, Slavs
were still evident in Tsakonia, the wild east of the peninsula, while the
Maniots in the south had a quite undeserved reputation as the last pagans
in Byzantium. Frankish rulers had faced the same problems of manpower as
would the Ottomans, who did not settle much either. The Franks left halfcastes
(gasmouloi), great castles, impeccable Cistercian monasteries and, in
towns, now forlornGothic churches. But they did not take root as deeply as
other Latins in the Aegean and Ionian islands. In fact the most substantial
demographic introduction in the Morea since the Slavs was Albanian.
However called, Albanians had been moving south before the Ottomans
used them to police the Balkans. The Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs had
thrived in the shade of the Byzantine empire. The Albanians seized their
turn underOttoman patronage. They were eager, if sometimes casual, converts
to Islam. For example, George, last Roman orthodox mayor (kephal¯e)
of Kanina, close to Avlona in southern Albania, turned Turk in 1398, with
the result that his family kept that office until 1943, incidentally supplying
the Ottomans with thirty-one successive local sandjakbeys, thirteen beylerbeys
(of Rumelia, Anatolia and Syria), four field marshals (two Ottoman,
one Egyptian, one Greek) and a grand vizier on the way.Muslim members
of the Vlora family patronised local Roman orthodox monasteries and died
fighting the Latins at Rhodes (1522),Naupaktos (1571) and Candia (1668).17
The Vlora dynasty, however, was unusual in keeping its identity; Ottoman
policy was at best to pension off local ruling families.
Incomplete Ottoman registers show a growth of taxable population in
theMorea from about 20,000 to 50,000 non-Muslim households between
1461 and 1512, figures surely too low even if shepherds could not be tracked
down over a land mass of 20,000 square kilometres. Yet the indications are
clear: the Latin and Muslim population was slight, and of the orthodox
over one third was Albanian.18
Fifteenth-century Mistra was, however, unmistakably not just Roman
orthodox, but Hellene – in the person of Byzantium’s last great original
thinker:GeorgeGemistos Plethon.Asort ofNeoplatonist, Plethon adopted
his last name in allusion to Plato and probably inspired Cosimo de’Medici’s
foundation of a Platonic Academy in Florence. If there was a Byzantine
‘Renaissance man’, he was Plethon, a maverick who had already dabbled
in turn with Zoroastrianism and Judaism (perhaps at the Ottoman court)
and whose last autograph fragments of a Book of laws exalt Zeus as supreme
God. He was an awkward nonconformist to handle in Roman orthodox
Constantinople. It was perhaps for his own safety thatManuel II exiled him
toMistra c. 1410. But Plethon was soon addressing treatises toManuel and
his son, Despot Theodore II Palaiologos (1407–43) on Platonic Republican
lines, urging the division of the citizenry into three classes (of which the
most important was its military) and the revival of ancientHellenic virtues:
not those of identity of faith or ethnicity, but of patriotism. He had little
time for monks, whose lands threatened to turn Byzantium into a monastic
economy of almost Tibetan proportions. Such rhetoric may have been
utopian, but Plethon held judicial office at Mistra and was rewarded with
estates in the Morea. Perhaps on the principle that patriotism is more
important than faith, Plethon was in his old age invited to represent the
Roman orthodox church as a lay member of its delegation to the conference
with the western church held at Ferrara and Florence in 1438–9.19
Like other conferences held under duress, the Council of Florence was
soon overtaken by military and political events. The crusade promised
by Pope Eugenius IV (1431–47) to save the Constantinople of John VIII
Palaiologos from the Ottomans, which the emperor sought in reward for
union, got as far as the Bulgarian shore of the Black Sea, but came to grief
at Varna in 1444. Ostensibly, however, the council considered theological
innovations and terms developed in the western church for which the
Roman orthodox had no useful equivalent, or sometimes even definition:
the addition of filioque to the creed; the notion of purgatory; and the
question of unleavened bread – matters which hardly bothered mostRoman
orthodox unless they lived (as inCrete orCyprus) alongside westerners. But
the essential issue was that of authority, and the way that it had developed
in Old and New Romes: the primacy of the pope, archbishop of Old
Rome and patriarch of the west, over that of the ecumenical patriarch,
archbishop of New Rome, to which the orthodox subscribed in 1439; they
could at least agree to be ‘Roman’. But besides the Ottoman threat, the
orthodox delegation was under the additional duress that the agenda and
dialectical rules of the great debate were chosen by western scholastics, who
ran rings round them. For westerners the union was a matter of discipline:
the reincorporation of the wayward orthodox under the authority of a single
pope. But for the Roman orthodox it touched their very identity – hence
the inclusion of pundits such as Plethon at the Council.20
Patriarch Michael III of Anchialos (1170–8) is first credited with identifying
the crux of the matter, when he told his emperor: ‘Let the Muslim
be my material ruler, rather than the Latin my spiritual master. If I am
subject to the former, at least he will not force me to share his faith. But
if I have to be united in religion with the latter, under his control, I may
have to separate myself from God.’21 His view was to be put more bluntly
in words attributed to megas doux Luke Notaras on the eve of the fall of
Constantinople in 1453: ‘Better the turban of the Turk than the tiara of the
Latin [pope].’22 Between 1439 and 1453 lines were drawn which were to dictate
Roman orthodox politics thereafter. Spiritual authority in the east had
never been focused on a single see, as in the west, but was in effect dispersed
among the whole body of the faithful, including the departed. While those
alive soon made it clear that they did not accept union, the Byzantine government
remained faithful to the expediency of Florence until the bitter
end. After 1453 there could be no going back – or forward. What individual
delegates did at Florence in 1439 is therefore vital to explaining not just
their own fate, but that of the Roman orthodox under the Ottomans.
TheRoman orthodox delegation which John VIII and his dying patriarch
took to Florence was a final assembly of the Byzantine intelligentsia, a
network of patriotic, family and wandering scholarly contacts, in that order,
which somehow survived later party politics.We have already met Plethon
(who soon got bored), but to take the link of patris, a remarkable number of
the delegates had a connection with Trebizond in the Pontos. For instance
the Aristotelian scholar George of Trebizond (1395–c. 1472) was already a
convinced unionist and attended the council as a lay member of the papal
curia. His reaction to the events of 1453 was to inviteMehmed II to convert
to Rome; but he reported so fulsomely on the sultan when they met in
Constantinople in 1465, that he found himself in a papal prison. The family
of John Eugenikos (1394–c. 1455) also came from Trebizond, on which he
wrote patriotic encomia; however, he left Florence before the end of the
council, to castigate the union. Otherwise, most Roman orthodox signed
the decree of union along with their emperor. Some recanted. Others,
convinced by the argument at Florence, entered the western hierarchy
itself.
However,Mark Eugenikos, brother of John and bishop of Ephesos (1437–
45), refused to sign in 1439. A Palamite, but nevertheless pupil of Plethon, he
was in 1456 canonised as a saint by Patriarch Gennadios II, who, as George
Scholarios, had attended the council, along with George Amiroutzes from
Trebizond and Plethon, as one of a remarkable trio of laymen. Bessarion
of Trebizond, bishop of Nicaea (1437–9), had studied with Plethon and
Amiroutzes and stayed on in Italy as a cardinal (1439–72). GregoryMamme
attended the council as abbot of the great Constantinopolitan monastery of
the Pantokrator. He served as ecumenical patriarch (Gregory III) between
1443 and 1450, before returning west to be made titular Latin patriarch of
Constantinople (1451–9). Isidore, fromMonemvasia in theMorea, attended
as Roman orthodox bishop of Kiev and All Rus (1436–9). Also made a cardinal,
he was sent to Moscow as papal legate to Grand Prince Vasilii II
(1425–62), who promptly imprisoned him as a unionist. Isidore persisted.
He proclaimed the union in Constantinople for Mamme on 12 December
1452, and escaped its fall to become Latin patriarch from 1459 to 1463 –
to be succeeded in that office by none other than Bessarion.23 In the
face of so many lures and pressures it was patris that held this network
together.
Plethon was the first to die, in his nineties, at home in his patris ofMistra
on 26 June 1452. The last local decree of Constantine Palaiologos as despot
was to confirm Plethon’s sons on his Laconic lands. But after 1453 Plethon’s
last work, the Book of laws, was forwarded to Patriarch Gennadios, who
could do no other than burn it. The book was not just heretical: it was plain
pagan. In Mistra another of Plethon’s circle had been Cleopa Malatesta,
wife of the despot Theodore II Palaiologos, younger brother of John VIII. In
1465 Sigismondo PandolfoMalatesta (1417–68) penetratedOttomanMistra
with a Venetian force, and retreated with Plethon’s body. He installed the
remains in a sarcophagus in the south arcade of his extraordinaryMalatesta
Temple in Rimini, part-church, part-pantheon, with an epitaph to ‘the
greatest philosopher of his time’.
World History
