Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (69 page)

Apart from his year in Italy - to be described later in this chapter -
Plethon remained for the rest of his life at Mistra. There he was a member of the Senate and a senior magistrate; but he saw himself primarily as the official court philosopher of the Despotate, in the old tradition of Plato at Syracuse or even of Socrates himself, strolling up and down the local
agora
with his disciples and — always inspired by the Spartan ethos - endlessly developing an elaborate scheme for the reform, the defence and ultimately the salvation of the Morea. This involved reliance on a standing army of citizen Greeks rather than on foreign mercenaries, on strict sumptuary laws and on rigorous standards of temperance and dedication. Land would be held in common; the import and export trades would be closely regulated; monks would be forced to work and make a proper contribution to society. All these reforms were formally proposed by Plethon in a whole series of memoranda, addressed to the Emperor Manuel and his son the Despot Theodore between
141
5
and
141
8,
but it was no use: even at this critical moment in their history, the regime he advocated was too authoritarian, too socialist — in a word, too Spartan - for the Byzantines. They pr
eferred, as they always had, to
put their trust in God and the Holy Virgin; if any reforms were necessary, they must be achieved not in the political or social fields but in the hearts of men.

They would have been even more wary of Plethon had they known the directions his thought was taking him. His last work,
On the Laws
,
completed only towards the end of his life - he was not to die till
1452,
when he was ninety - seems to have proposed a new and extremely idiosyncratic religion, based partly on Persian Zoroastrianism and partly on the old Greek pantheon, where the ancient deities were revived -though more as symbols than anything else - and subordinated to an almighty Zeus. Sad to say, we know this curious composition only from its table of contents; virtually all the rest was destroyed after the author's death by his horrified friend George Scholarius, the future Patriarch. But though George Gemistos Plethon may have died a prophet with relatively little honour in his own country, in Europe - and above all in Renaissance Italy - he was deeply venerated. Not only was Cosimo de' Medici to found the Academy at Florence in his honour; in
1465,
when that most cultivated of
condottieri,
Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini, entered Mistra at the head of a Venetian army, he removed Plethon's body from its simple grave and took it back with him to his native city. There it still lies, in the magnificent tomb he built for it in the cathedral church of S. Francesco, a proud inscription paying tribute to 'the greatest Philosopher of his time'.

During the first five years of the new reign, things went well for the Despotate of the Morea. In
1427
John VIII, accompanied by his brother Constantine and George Sphrantzes, personally led a campaign which destroyed the fleet of Carlo Tocco, Lord of Cephalonia and Epirus, at the mouth of the Gulf of Patras. By the terms of the resulting treaty Tocco gave his niece Maddalena in marriage to Constantine, together with the region of Elis and the port of Clarenza (the modern Killini) in the north-western Peloponnese. Two years later Constantine wrested Patras itself from the control of its Latin Archbishop, even gaining recognition from Sultan Murad of its return to the Despotate; and by
1430
most of the Morea - with the important exceptions of the Venetian-held harbours of Corone, Modone and Nauplia - was back in Greek hands.

Progress in the south, however, was outweighed by disaster further north; for in March
1430
the city of Thessalonica fell once again to the Sultan. Its seven years under the banner of St Mark had not been a success. The Turks had maintained their blockade; meanwhile, as the Venetian governors persisted in ignoring the formal undertakings made at the time of the transfer of power, local resentment had steadily increased to the point where many of the inhabitants were shamelessly in favour of opening the gates to the infidel. Before long the Venetians, far from turning Thessalonica into a second Venice as they had promised, were heartily regretting that they had ever accepted the Despot's offer which, they complained - since the Sultan was forcing them to pay an annual tribute - was costing them some
60,000
ducats a year. On the other hand, they still had their pride; and when Murad himself arrived on
26
March with an army estimated - surely with wild exaggeration -at one hundred and ninety thousand men to demand the immediate surrender of the city, he was answered with a hail of arrows.

On the following day the monks of the monastery of the Vlataion (which still stands just inside the northern walls) are said to have sent a message to the Sultan advising him to cut the pipes that brought water into the city. Whether or not they were actually guilty of such treachery we shall never know, though it seems extremely unlikely - and unlikelier still that he acted upon their advice. This time he was putting his trust in brute strength; he had collected and equipped a huge army, and he was determined to use it. The attack began at dawn on
29
March, Murad himself taking command of the units drawn up along the eastern section of the walls which seemed to him to be the weakest. For some three hours his catapults, mangonels and battering rams did their worst, while his archers loosed further volleys of arrows every time a defender showed himself above the bastion. Gradually the Thessalonians, realizing that the situation was hopeless, grew more and more discouraged; many of them deserted their posts; and soon after nine o'clock in the morning the Sultan's men managed to bring the first scaling-ladder into place against the wall. A moment later a Turkish soldier was up and over the parapet, triumphantly throwing the severed head of a Venetian guard down to his comrades below as a sign that they should follow.

The people of Thessalonica were only too well aware of the fate that a-waited any city that resisted conquest, and that the Turks were consequently obliged to take by storm; but for many of them the events of the next seventy-two hours must have exceeded their worst fears. A Greek eye-witness, John Anagnostes, describes how the streets were loud with the war-cries of the Turks as they charged through the city in a frenzy of murder and pillage, and how these dreadful sounds mingled with the screams of children torn from the
ir mothers and wives from their
husbands. All the churches were looted, and many of them destroyed; the palaces of the nobility were ransacked, then either requisitioned or put to the torch. The number of victims of the massacre is unknown, but Anagnostes estimates that not less than seven thousand - mostly women and children - were carried off into slavery.

After the statutory three days, Murad called a halt. Thessalonica was the second city of the Byzantine Empire; he had no wish to reduce it to a smoking ruin. Its inhabitants had been taught the traditional lesson; those who had survived it had been punished enough. A general amnesty was declared; a number of distinguished citizens who had been imprisoned were immediately released; rich and poor alike were invited to return to their homes, with a guarantee that they would suffer no more ill-treatment. The Christian religion would everywhere be respected, apart from the conversion of certain churches into mosques -including the most venerable Panaghia Acheiropoietos ('not made with hands'), which had stood for almost a thousand years.
1

And what, it may be asked, of the Venetian governors of the city -those who had boasted that they would turn it into a second Venice and whose determined resistance had been the cause of all the misery and bloodshed? Somehow, in the general chaos, they had managed to make their way down to the harbour, where a ship was waiting to bear them off to the nearest Venetian soil, the colony of Euboea. When they finally returned to their lagoon, it was to find the Doge and Senate extremely displeased with their performance: accused of having neglected the protection of the city that they had been charged to defend, they were thrown into prison. They were lucky to have escaped so lightly; their crimes were greater than their masters ever knew.

Away in the West, the Roman Catholic Church was still in confusion. The Council of Constance had failed to effect any real reforms; indeed, in at least one respect it had done more harm than good, since it had declared itself to be a General Council, with an authority that derived directly from God and was consequently superior to that of the Pope himself. This had dangerously intensified the already existing dispute between those who supported such a view and those who believed in

1
The church took its name from a celebrated icon it once contained, which was said to have been miraculously painted. It remained under Muslim control until early this century (the city was Turkish until
1913)
and has unfortunately suffered more damage since - in
1923
when it was occupied by Greek refugees from Asia Minor, and more recently as a result of the severe earthquake of June
1978.

absolute papal supremacy, to a point where it began to present a serious threat to Church discipline; and it was largely in an attempt to settle the matter once and for all that Pope Martin V summoned a new council, to meet at Basel in
1431.

To John Palaeologus, this council seemed to offer a ray of hope. Once again as at Constance, representatives of all the Christian nations of the West would be present; and although their reactions on the previous occasion had been disappointing to say the least, much had happened in the past fifteen years to make them change their minds. Venice in particular had been brought face to face with Turkish arms at Thessalonica, and had suffered serious damage not only to her financial and strategic interests but - far more important - to her international prestige. Sigismund of Hungary, too, had watched powerless during the previous summer as the Sultan marched from Thessalonica right across the Balkan peninsula to Epirus, accepted the surrender of Ioannina without a struggle and then pressed on through Albania, pushing the frontiers of his Empire further and further back towards Sigismund's own. This time, perhaps, a Byzantine appeal might fall on more receptive ears; and where Venice and Hungary led, others would surely follow. John was also intrigued by the conflict over the authority of General Councils. Virtually all recent attempts at Church union had foundered on a similar issue, the Byzantines insisting on a council to be held at Constantinople, the Latins refusing to consider such a proposal; might there not be potential allies among the conciliarists, capable at last of swinging opinion in his favour?

The imperial ambassadors, arriving at the papal court in the late summer of
1431,
found tensions running high. Pope Martin had died in February and his successor, Eugenius IV, in a desperate attempt to assert his authority, had ordered the council to leave Basel and to hold all future sessions in Italy where he could exercise a firmer control; the delegates, however, had announced that they were staying where they were. On
18
December Eugenius issued a bull dissolving the entire gathering and declaring its deliberations null and void; this time the delegates simply reaffirmed the decrees issued at Constance, pointing out that they too constituted a General Council - although at that time they numbered only fourteen of the senior clergy - and that their own authority was consequently paramount. For the next two years the dispute continued, and as it did so John found himself wooed ever more assiduously by both parties: the council pressing him to send an official delegation to Basel, the Pope equally an
xious that he should do nothing
of the kind. Finally in
1433
the Emperor took his decision, nominating three ambassadors to represent him at the council; when a papal legation arrived to remonstrate he sent another delegation, this time to Eugenius; and so he continued, playing one side off against the other, until in the summer of
1437
matters came finally to a head.

By this time the Pope had been obliged to revoke his former decision and to recognize the council after all; more important for John VIII, he had also reluctantly accepted what the Byzantines had never ceased to maintain: that true union could be achieved only by means of a council of the whole Church, to be attended by representatives of both East and West. To the vast majority of those concerned, however, it was now obvious that Basel was not the place. The past six years had seen too much ill feeling and bitterness; if the proposed council were to have any chance of success, a fresh start was essential. The more hidebound of the conciliarists objected - in
1439
g
oin
g
so
f
ar
as
to
declare the Pope deposed and to elect an anti-Pope in his stead - but this arbitrary renewal of the papal schism cost them what little prestige they had left, and one by one the Christian nations submitted to the authority of Eugenius.

Ideally, the Emperor would have wished the new council to be held in Constantinople; but he was obliged to admit that in the circumstances now prevailing this was no longer practicable. He therefore willingly accepted the Pope's choice of Ferrara, confirming that he personally, together with his Patriarch, would head the imperial delegation. Eugenius, hearing this welcome news, lost no time. By September his legates were already in Constantinople to work out the details, while others were negotiating with the Venetians for the hiring of a fleet to bring the Byzantine delegation in proper state to Ferrara. Thus it was that John Palaeologus once again left his brother Constantine as Regent in Constantinople and on Wednesday,
27
November
1437
embarked on his historic journey, taking with him a party some seven hundred strong, among them the most distinguished group of Eastern churchmen ever to visit the West. There was the Patriarch himself, Joseph II - nearly eighty years old, crippled by heart disease but beloved of all who met him; eighteen Metropolitans, some of them representing his fellow-Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, and also including the brilliant young Metropolitan Bessarion of Nicaea; Isidore, Abbot of the monastery of St Demetrius in Constantinople, who had attended the Council of Basel and had been promoted in the previous year to be Bishop of Kiev and All Russia; and some twelve other bishops. Among the laymen were