Authors: David Brewer
Tags: #History / Ancient
Christians and Jews were so-called people of the book, that is they had received a revelation, albeit incomplete, which was recorded in a text. The people of the book were classified as zimmi, protected persons. There were three categories of such people under Muslim rule: Orthodox Christians, Jews and Armenian Christians, the last being known as Gregorians after their third-century founder Gregory the Illuminator. Each formed a partly self-governing community, a millet. Each had a spiritual head who was also to some extent the political leader: for the Jews it was the chief rabbi, for the Armenians the Gregorian patriarch, and for the Orthodox the Orthodox patriarch.
This tolerant treatment by Muslims of Christians and others was not something newly introduced by Sultan Mehmed, but had a long history. According to tradition, as early as ad 638 Caliph Omar, about to take possession of Jerusalem, promised not to interfere with the Christians’ religious practices or their management of their own affairs. More recently in 1430 Sinan Pasha, the conqueror of Iánnina, had promised the Orthodox Christians: ‘Have no fear, there will be no captivity, no abduction of children, no destruction of churches; we shall not change them into mosques, but your church bells will ring as is your custom. The metropolitan bishop will have charge of justice over the Greeks and all the ecclesiastical rights. The lords who have feudal estates will continue to hold them.’
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Clearly the traditional view of permanent and irreconcilable conflict between Muslim and Christian is something of a fiction. It was given currency by the early chroniclers on both sides, keen to invoke militant piety to justify, as crusade or as jihad, struggles to win territory, wealth and power. ‘Modern historians’, writes one of their number severely, ‘have too often been willing accomplices in accepting the chroniclers’ version.’
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Apart from considerations of the Muslim faith and the tradition of tolerance, there were practical reasons for Mehmed’s policy. He had by now many more non-Muslim subjects than Muslim. There was no point in taking over the administration of what the subjects could perfectly well manage for themselves, or in antagonising them unnecessarily, provoking rebellion that it would be troublesome to quell. Their service to the Ottoman state would be their productivity, their payment of taxes and their contribution of skills – as Greek sailors and traders, for example, or Jewish financiers – which the state lacked. Also, if Constantinople was to recover from devastation and become a worthy capital of Ottoman
rule, it would have to be repopulated. Many of the new arrivals would inevitably be Christians, who would need to be treated tolerantly.
Finally, there were Mehmed’s personal inclinations. He could be ruthless in war and vicious in revenge, but he also had a respect for Byzantine achievements and a regard for Christians. His beloved stepmother, Mara, his father’s widow, was the daughter of the Christian ruler of Serbia and his Christian Greek wife. And Mehmed was, it seems, genuinely interested in the doctrines of Christianity, an interest shown in his relationship with the first post-Byzantine Orthodox patriarch Georgios Scholários Yennádhios.
Yennádhios was born Georgios Kourtésis in Constantinople around 1405, and received a good education in philosophy and theology. Among his teachers was Márkos Evyenikós, bishop of Ephesus, a strong opponent of the union of the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Yennádhios, however, initially supported the union, and accompanied the pro-union Emperor John VIII Palaiologos to the council on union held at Ferrara and then Florence in 1438–9. Yennádhios was the Emperor’s private secretary, a post from which he acquired the name Scholários. When union was finally accepted by the Greek delegation the anti-union bishop Márkos Evyenikós, who was also a member of it, refused to sign the agreement. Yennádhios gave his written consent to it, though he had returned home before the formal signing.
Yennádhios’ final conversion to the anti-union cause came four years later in a dramatic scene at the deathbed of his old tutor Márkos Evyenikós. ‘No one knows better than you’, said Yennádhios to the dying Evyenikós, ‘that formerly I did not join openly in the struggles which Your Holiness led, but let them pass in silence. Now, with God’s help, I have altogether changed my mind, and stand with you as a complete and avowed fighter for the truth. I will act for you and speak for you, with my life blood and with my life itself.’
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In 1450 he became a monk at the monastery of the Pantokrator in Constantinople, taking the monastic name Yennádhios. From there he continued to issue fierce denunciations of the union of the churches up to the time when the city fell. He was then captured and for a few months became the house servant of a wealthy Turk in Edirne. He was released, apparently on the orders of the Sultan, in September 1453 and returned to Constantinople.
At that time there was no patriarch, as the previous incumbent, the pro-union Grigórios III Mámmas, had fled to Italy two years before. Mehmed was surprised that there was no patriarch to greet him as the new ruler. He needed a patriarch, someone to deal with as the political
leader of the Orthodox. He also needed an anti-unionist patriarch, as being least likely to invoke a sympathetic crusade from the Catholic west. The Sultan clearly favoured Yennádhios, but left the nomination of patriarch to the traditional synod of the Orthodox clergy, only reserving the final approval for himself.
Yennádhios at first refused the office, but was pressed to accept by both the clergy and the people as a whole. He finally yielded. ‘As there was nobody else,’ he wrote, ‘I took the role of teacher. Though sick myself, in the absence of a doctor I cared for those suffering even worse.’
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The Holy Synod promoted him successively from humble monk to deacon, priest, bishop and patriarch, and on 6 January 1454 the Sultan presented him with a new patriarchal cross – the original one having disappeared – with the words: ‘Be Patriarch, with good fortune, and be assured of our friendship, keeping all the privileges that the patriarchs before you enjoyed.’
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Everything was done according to tradition; the Sultan was not only honouring Yennádhios but was also taking for himself the role of the Byzantine Emperors.
Patriarch and Sultan had great respect for each other. Yennádhios wrote of Mehmed: ‘His understanding and benevolence have been a comfort to us; he has supported our Church and also, by the grace of God, has saved many of us from being killed.’
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And he told his flock, in a pastoral letter, that they could live aright ‘only by obedience and submission to the church and its protector’, that is the Sultan.
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For his part, Mehmed spent many hours in visits to Yennádhios, who at Mehmed’s request wrote for him an extended statement of the Christian faith, a summary of which Mehmed ordered to be translated into Turkish. Interestingly, there is no record of Yennádhios having asked for a reciprocal explanation of Muslim beliefs.
Yennádhios had agreed to become patriarch only reluctantly, and initially said that he would serve for no more than nine months, until October 1454. But he was persuaded to stay on, first for a further three months to January 1455 and then for another year until January 1456, when his patriarchate finally ended. His two years in office had been troubled ones. The clergy resisted any reform, the monks, he said, were ‘evil and turbulent’ and the people were deserting the Church. But Yennádhios gave, as his main reason for retiring, his poor health, and said that he had often been in danger of falling down in a faint while conducting a service.
He returned to monastic life, first on Mt Athos, where he had long wanted to retire. ‘If I do not live out the rest of my days on the Holy Mountain of Athos,’ he had written, ‘may I not see the face of God.’
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In fact he soon moved to another monastery near Sérres some 60 miles north of Mt Athos, and died there in 1472. In his last years he twice returned to Constantinople for a few months, some historians claim as an interim patriarch while others believe only as a private visitor. He is still remembered, in the Sunday liturgy of the Orthodox Church, as ‘a shining champion, in all his preaching and writing, of the Orthodox faith’.
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Yennádhios was, of course, a much more complex character than this reverential description suggests. He was indeed a champion of the Orthodox faith, but was an outspoken critic of the Orthodox Church. The clergy, he wrote, were corrupted by simony (the buying of church offices), and the people were drifting away through indifference, a drift that Yennádhios tried to stem by threatening to excommunicate anyone who missed three successive Sunday services. He was a man of genuine humility but a ferocious polemicist, attacking Plíthon the neo-Platonist as an enemy of religion, even burning one of Plíthon’s books. This profoundly serious man occasionally showed a lighter side: one of his poems is an acrostic in which the first letters of the lines spell out ‘Scholários, all his own work.’
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But it was on the question of the union of the Orthodox and Catholic churches that Yennádhios’ complexities were most apparent. As a young man he was a supporter of the union. He had translated and written commentaries on the works of the Catholic Thomas Aquinas and had studied other Catholic theologians. He found no difficulty with the Catholic belief that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father
and
the Son, the subject of the
filioque
controversy. The Holy Spirit, he argued, was like the fruit of a tree, and can be said to proceed ultimately from the root, the Father, but also, in an intermediate sense, from the branch, the Son. When he became anti-unionist, it was not on theological grounds but for two quite different reasons. One was tradition: ‘I have returned to the doctrine of the Church Fathers.’
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The other was simply practicality: ‘God in his mercy may bring the union to fruition,’ he wrote, ‘but I believe it is difficult and almost impossible to achieve in human terms.’
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For much of our information about Yennádhios, and his successors as patriarch over the next century or so, we are indebted to a German professor Martin Kraus, usually Latinised as Crusius. Crusius became professor of Latin and Greek at the university of Tübingen in 1559, holding the post till his death 48 years later, and was fascinated by every aspect of Greece, especially the Greece of his time. ‘From my childhood onward,’ he wrote, ‘I have loved Greece.’
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Crusius never visited Greece or Constantinople, but Tübingen had links with Constantinople through a proposal that the German Lutheran and the Greek Orthodox churches should come together, both being anti-Catholic. The man charged with exploring this possibility, which ultimately came to nothing, was a friend of Crusius, Stephen Gerlach, who was in Constantinople as chaplain to the Habsburg ambassador throughout most of the 1570s. Gerlach in turn became friendly with two senior Orthodox clerics and with the patriarch Ieremías II himself. Thanks to these contacts, Crusius began a copious correspondence with Gerlach, the Greek clerics and the patriarch, and the letters ranged over a great variety of subjects, such as vignettes of life in Constantinople, details of the circumcision ceremony and the Greek language of the day.
Perhaps most importantly, Gerlach bought and sent to Crusius a copy of a book in Greek by an unknown author giving the history of Constantinople, both political and patriarchal, from 1453 up to 1578. The copyist was Manuel Malaxós, an old teacher who taught in a hut festooned with dried fish, which provided his food. He made copies for a fee, and spent whatever he earned on drink. One can perhaps imagine Gerlach and Malaxós negotiating a price for the document in this malodorous cabin and both departing well pleased, Gerlach with his book to the embassy and Malaxós with his money to the vintner’s. Crusius published the book in 1584, with his own parallel translation from Greek to Latin, and included as annotations many extracts from his correspondence. Thus our knowledge of the period is largely thanks to a failed ecclesiastical project, an inquisitive and acquisitive chaplain, a German professor who never saw Greece and an elderly drunken Greek copyist. It is a reminder of how chancy and how fragile are our links with the past.
After Yennádhios seven other men held the office of patriarch in Mehmed’s reign, which ended with his death in 1481. Elections were all by a synod, whose membership was steadily widened: initially only senior clerics were members, but by the last election of Mehmed’s reign the synod apparently included ‘metropolitan bishops, archbishops, subsidiary bishops, deans, other priests, officials, prominent citizens and representatives of the people’.
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The influence of the common people, known to their detractors as the mob, had long been a feature of Byzantine Constantinople.
Removal of the patriarch, when necessary, was also done by a synod, with one exception in this period. Ioásaph, patriarch in the 1460s,
refused to sanction the remarriage of a leading Greek of Trebizond who was already married with children. The Greek was cousin of a powerful pasha, who induced Mehmed to remove the patriarch, the Sultan using the power exercised by Byzantine Emperors before him.
These early patriarchs also suffered attacks from their own people. Ioásaph, before his removal by the Sultan, was so fiercely slandered by his own clerics that he tried unsuccessfully to drown himself in a well. Opponents of his successor, Márkos II Xilokarávis, stoned him in the streets. A later patriarch, Dhionísios I, under whom the Church generally enjoyed tranquillity, was falsely accused of being circumcised, and refuted the charge quite simply by raising his lower garments in a public meeting. One patriarch in particular deserved censure. If Crusius’ book is to be believed, Rapha?l I, a Serbian abbot who spoke no Greek, was always drunk, never attended the daily services, and at the service on Good Friday was so incapable that he dropped the holy sceptre, fell over and had to be removed. But most of the patriarchs under Mehmed were much better men than Rapha?l: for example, the principled Ioásaph; his predecessor Isídhoros, described as holy, virtuous and blameless; and Máximos, patriarch at the end of Mehmed’s reign, a learned and effective preacher under whom church affairs proceeded peacefully and without scandal. Nevertheless, for much of this period the Church was far from being a serene and united body of the pious. It was more like a feuding political party, racked by accusations both true and false, and consumed by internal strife.