Sailing from Byzantium (12 page)

Several years later, the resulting effort, called the Crusade of Varna, set out from Hungary with an army of twenty-five thousand to relieve the Byzantine capital. After some success in the Balkans, the Crusaders’ army was shattered by a much larger Ottoman force at Varna in Bulgaria in November 1444.

Strategically, this was Byzantium's last hope, and it proved a forlorn one. In ecclesiastical terms, too, the council failed utterly, since the carefully negotiated reunion that it proclaimed was even then in the process of being rejected by the intractable Byzantines, who pilloried their own returning delegates as having sold them down the river. Most of the prelates who had signed ended up recanting.

The most dramatic reversal was that of George Scholarios, a humanist who had supported union in Florence but ended up inheriting Mark's role as leading anti-unionist after the latter's death. First a friend of Pletho's, later a Hesychast leader and Pletho's bitter enemy, Scholarios underwent a “conversion” in the opposite direction from those of Barlaam,
Cydones, Chrysoloras, Bessarion, and the others. As the monk Gennadios, he would eventually be chosen as the first patriarch of Constantinople to serve under an Ottoman sultan.

The council's official sessions had been taken up with endless bickering over questions such as papal supremacy, the procession of the Holy Spirit, and the leavening of bread. Between those sessions, though, the council turned into an ongoing, informal colloquium on ancient Greek civilization, literature, and especially philosophy, a dialogue in which the flattered Byzantine humanists were the teachers and the avid Italians the students. The hottest speaker—though taking only a minor role in the official negotiations—was George Gemistos Pletho, now around eighty years old, whose talks on Plato absolutely electrified the Florentines.

Since Pletho likely knew no Latin, it was probably Bruni who served as his interpreter during these salons, which remain rather mysterious owing to a tantalizing lack of specific information about them. Though many Italians later referred to Pletho's lectures in gushing general terms, we know only two names for sure of those who actually attended them. One was a relative unknown named Grigorio Tifernate. The other, however, was Cosimo de Medici.

Like Chrysoloras, Pletho came to Florence at exactly the right time. The generation of Bruni and Poggio was passing away and with it the concerns of civic humanism. A new era was emerging, peopled by a new generation with a new set of interests.

Bruni and the others had looked askance at philosophy,
seeing Aristotle and Plato as a sideline and focusing on them primarily for what they had to say on subjects such as the state or ethics. They thought Aristotle was passé, the standard authority of the old school, while the often mystical Plato, relatively unknown, hardly appeared central to the concerns of civic humanism.

The new generation, apolitical but comparatively devout, would see esoteric philosophy as the main attraction, and would mine Plato especially for what he had to say about the soul. The Florentine humanist ideal was turning from the
vita activa
to the
vita contemplativa,
from the active life to the contemplative, and Cicero the striving republican orator was about to give way to Plato the metaphysical theorist. Nor was it entirely coincidental that Plato's anti-democratic political views (which had dismayed Bruni) were much more in line with the emerging system of one-man rule in Florence. No doubt much of the attraction for Cosimo stemmed from his own aspirations in the way of being a Platonic philosopher king or some other such enlightened despot.

As a young man of broad humanist interests, Cosimo had been tutored in Greek by Roberto Rossi, who had played such a big role in bringing Chrysoloras to Florence. Then, during the Council of Constance in the 1410s, Cosimo had wandered the monasteries of northern Europe with the great Poggio, searching out classical Latin manuscripts. His family's immense wealth had been founded by Cosimo's father, Giovanni, and was based on banking. Giovanni died in 1429, and it was Cosimo who consolidated the family's political power thereafter, ending the Florentine republic in fact if not in name. This watershed in Florence's history was coming precisely in the years before, during, and after the council. Exiled by his oligarchic rivals in 1433, Cosimo had returned in triumph the following year, establishing a dynastic rule
that was populist in flavor and preserved republican appearances, but soon concentrated power in Medici hands.

Of course, political status in Renaissance Florence demanded patronage of the arts and culture, and Cosimo— energetic, inquisitive, thrusting—prided himself in being on the cutting edge. He knew everybody. Cosimo hosted lavish banquets during the council at which the luminaries on both sides mingled, and these congenial gatherings provided a venue in which Pletho held forth on his favorite subject. Though we only have two names for sure, it's likely that Cosimo's large humanist circle was involved as well.

With fewer opportunities for Florentine humanists to exercise political influence, Florentine humanism itself became more academic—literally as well as figuratively. More than two decades after the fact, the great Florentine Neo-platonist Marsilio Ficino would recall how Pletho's lectures fired Cosimo de Medici with enthusiasm. “At the time of the council between the Greeks and the Latins at Florence,” Ficino recounts, Cosimo “frequently heard a Greek philosopher Gemistus Pletho disputing about the Platonic mysteries. He was so inspired by his fervent utterance that he conceived the idea of an Academy.”

The nature of Cosimo's famous Platonic Academy has aroused great interest among modern scholars. It used to be thought that Cosimo founded a formal institution, located at the magnificent Medici villa in Careggi, near Florence, and staffed by the most learned Greek scholars he could find. More recent historians have described the Academy as more of an informal circle of friends around Marsilio Ficino. It began around 1460, when Cosimo gave Ficino a villa near his own at Careggi and commissioned him to translate the entire corpus of Plato, along with many Neoplatonic writings, which Ficino proceeded to do with extreme competence.

Moving in the opposite direction from the secularism of Bruni's generation, Ficino's mystical philosophy fused Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas with Christianity. The result would have a huge impact not just on European philosophy but also on arts and literature, from paintings such as Botticelli's
Birth of Venus
(depicted according to Neoplatonic iconography) to the resounding concept of Platonic love.

Yet, by Ficino's own account, when Cosimo first “conceived the idea of an Academy” Ficino himself was a boy of about six or seven. Twenty-odd years lay between the conception and the execution—a gap that can be explained only by considering the last and most controversial stage of George Gemistos Pletho's already long and controversial career.

Immediately following the Council of Florence, Pletho returned to Mistra, where for the Italians’ benefit he wrote a summary of his lectures entitled
On the Differences of Aristotle from Plato.
However, in composing this helpful explanation Pletho also revived a long-standing controversy among Byzantine philosophers over which of the two ancients was the greater philosopher. With his summary for the Italians, Pletho was seen by the others as getting in a sneaky blow in this old grudge match, which was as ancient as Byzantium itself.

Virtually the whole community of Byzantine émigré scholars in Italy eventually got involved in the celebrated, spectacular—and at times spectacularly stupid—proxy battle that ensued. At first the Italians could only look on in uncomprehending amazement. By the end, however, the best of them could follow the arcane and nuanced disputation, and a few even contributed competently themselves.

More telling were the contributions of the most respected of the Byzantine émigrés, Pletho's former student
Cardinal Bessarion. In 1459, Bessarion responded to one of the Byzantine Aristotelians’ vituperative blasts with a masterful book-length essay called
Against the Calumniator of Plato.
Balanced, judicious, authoritative, insightful, the book aimed less at tearing down Aristotle than at providing a clear and systematic exposition of Platonic and Neoplatonic thought, and at showing how, in Bessarion's view, Plato had much (though certainly not everything) in common with Christianity. Coming a decade after Pletho's book, Bessarion's further stimulated the Florentines in their Platonic studies.

Influential though it was, Bessarion's
Against the Calumniator of Plato
didn't extinguish the controversy, which sputtered on for a decade or so before blowing itself out in the early 1470s. By then it had served the useful purpose of focusing the Italians’ attention on the original Greek texts of both philosophers, as an essential first step toward understanding their ideas. Only then were they finally brought into the humanistic mainstream. By then, indeed, with the help of a growing crowd of Byzantine teachers, the Italians were up to speed, most of them choosing to align themselves with Plato.

Aristotle had been the philosopher par excellence of the Scholastics; Plato now became the philosopher par excellence of the humanists. Yet, Plato didn't fully dislodge Aristotle (just as humanism didn't fully dislodge Scholasticism). Aristotle, too, was rediscovered, in the sense that while sharing the stage now with Plato, he still retained much of his old prestige, but was read more fully and in more authentic versions than during medieval times.

Those authentic Greek texts—along with the ability to read, translate, and comment on them—also came courtesy of the Byzantine humanists. In reclaiming the two great philosophers of antiquity, and in mastering the ability to
read them in the original Greek, the Italians opened up for themselves a new chapter in Western philosophy.

A new generation of Byzantine humanists was arriving to carry on the teaching that Chrysoloras had begun, and to take it in the fresh directions dictated by the Italians’ curiosity. This wave of émigré scholars was further boosted by the fall of Constantinople in 1453, an event of such consequence for humanism that at one time it was widely held to have started the Renaissance itself. Settling not just in Florence but elsewhere as well, the Byzantine émigrés enabled other cities—first Rome, then Venice, with its university at Padua—successfully to challenge Florence for leadership of the humanist world.

One of the first after Chrysoloras was George of Trebizond, who had emigrated as a young man in 1417, studying Latin with Guarino and Vittorino da Feltre, and converting to Catholicism before attending the Council of Florence. A quarrelsome man, he had been the “calumniator of Plato” whom Bessarion had addressed in his book.

Another Byzantine Aristotelian, George's rival Theodore Gaza, was at least as good a scholar and was more easygoing to boot. Theodore had come to Italy in the mid-1430s, a few years before the Council of Florence, and had also studied Latin with Vittorino da Feltre in Mantua, exchanging Latin lessons for tutelage of Vittorino in Greek. Theodore would turn out to be one of the more influential Byzantine teachers, and with Bessarion and George of Trebizond one of the few to learn Latin really well. Theodore attended the Council of Florence, afterward teaching Greek in
Ferrara. In 1447, he declined an invitation from Cosimo to assume Chrysoloras’ old chair in Florence, but a couple of years later he moved to Rome, joining a circle of humanists, Byzantine and Italian, that arose around Bessarion at the papal curia. A warm personal and intellectual friendship arose between Theodore, the moderate Aristotelian, and Bessarion, the moderate Platonist.

John Argyropoulos, who also learned Latin, was another of Pletho's and Bessarion's younger émigré friends. A native Constantinopolitan still only in his twenties when he attended the Council of Florence, Argyropoulos studied Latin and medicine in Padua in the early 1440s before returning to Constantinople, where he converted to Catholicism. He was there when the city fell, losing everything— including, temporarily, his wife and children, who were captured by the Turks. Only after several years of unstinting effort did Argyropoulos succeed in ransoming them from captivity. He then returned to Florence for more than a decade, where he accepted from Cosimo de Medici the prestigious post that Theodore Gaza had turned down, occupying Chrysoloras’ old chair in Greek studies at the Florentine
studio.

Born the year Chrysoloras died, Argyropoulos proved a worthy successor, and he played a comparable role in the ongoing development of Florentine humanism. Like Chrysoloras, he was a strong classroom performer who energized his students. He taught Aristotle by day but, responding to the Italians’ curiosity, offered private lessons in Plato in the evenings. Ultimately, it was Argyropoulos who fulfilled the hunger for Platonic knowledge that Pletho had aroused during the Council of Florence.

It's not known for sure whether Argyropoulos formally taught the young Marsilio Ficino, though it seems likely.

Certainly his teaching and his magnetic presence did much to influence Ficino and his circle, the group that would become the Platonic Academy. But unlike many of his fellow émigrés, Argyropoulos steered clear of the controversy over Plato and Aristotle. He taught both and sought to reconcile the two sides in the dispute. His students included Cosimo's grandson Lorenzo de Medici (“the Magnificent”), the young aristocrat Donato Acciaiuoli (who with Cosimo had helped bring Argyropoulos to Florence, and whose family ruled the Florentine Duchy of Athens), and the prodigious Angelo Poliziano, known in English as Politian, a talented linguist associated with Ficino's circle but whose interests ran more to philology and poetry than to Neoplatonism.

Unchallenged leadership of the humanistic world had passed away from Florence by the middle of the quattrocento. There were two main reasons for this: the return to Rome from Florence of a newly independent and influential papacy, and the Byzantine humanist diaspora to other places in Italy after the Council of Florence and the fall of Constantinople. Most cities in northern Italy worth their salt had humanist schools of some description by mid-century, headed by Byzantine-trained Italian humanists. We've seen such schools, for example, in Milan, Ferrara, and Mantua.