Episode 16: How Cosimo United the Orthodox and Catholic Churches

With a combination of patience and political maneuvering, Cosimo turns the tables on his enemies and returns to Florence in triumph. His first major act is to host an attempt to reunify the long-divided Greek and Latin churches. It has rather mixed results, but it does make something clear to the rulers of Europe: Cosimo is no longer just a banker.  

Transcript

Rinaldo may not have gotten away with killing his greatest threat, Cosimo de’ Medici, but he had seemingly neutralized him by exiling him and his biggest supporters in the fall of 1433. With two of the leading populist families, the Medici and the Alberti, cut down, the conservative regime was secure. At least, for the time being.

Whether or not Rinaldo was truly aware of it, the problem was that Cosimo de’ Medici was not just a man or even the head of an affluent family. Cosimo was an international institution in of himself. He was, in modern terms, a corporation. In addition to offices all around Italy and in England and France, the Medici Bank had political connections, and these connections weren’t going to abandon Cosimo just because he was locked up for a while. That was where Rinaldo had badly miscalculated.

Although Cosimo was originally supposed to spend his sentence of exile in Padua, eventually he was given permission to spend the rest of his exile in Venice. There, according to a modern biographer of Cosimo, K. Gutkind, “Cosimo did not arrive at his place of banishment like a hunted exile, but rather like a great lord on his travels.” While in Venice, Cosimo acted something like the wronged rightful king of some kingdom, setting up a sort of court in exile. His fellow exiles, his political supporters, his clients, and even scholars and artists came to visit him. One devoted admirer of Cosimo in this time was the Florentine architect Michelozzo. One day, he would start work on the Medici’s exquisite home, the Palazzo Medici. For the time being, though, Cosimo commissioned him to design a new library for the Republic of Venice, as thanks for giving him refuge.

Back home in Florence, things were going badly for the supposed victors. Cosimo de’ Medici’s exile also meant cutting Florence off from the Medici Bank, which had become so fat with funds its absence alone actually dealt a blow to the Florentine economy. Just as Venice backed Cosimo, Rinaldo came to increasingly rely on support from Venice’s current rival Milan, support he secured by pledging to keep Florence neutral in a war between Venice and Milan.  Of course, relying on the city that had been Florence’s enemy for generations was not good PR for the regime. Rinaldo cozying up to Duke Filippo Maria de Visconti justified rumors that Rinaldo was scheming to make himself signore of Florence with the backing of Milanese troops.

Popular support for Cosimo swelled. As Caravaggio put it in his history, “The people sought and encouraged Cosimo’s return. Before they did not reveal they ever thought such a return was possible, but now like how you can see that many small rivers make a huge lake, so many citizens with their demands induced the Signoria to make the just decision to recall Cosimo.” In fact, the Signoria considered a proposal to end the exile of the Medici and their supporters. Rinaldo reacted by not just pulling every string he had, but by marching before the meeting of the Signoria at the head of a mob of armed supporters. Like I talked about last time, bribes, political favors, and even banishing your political enemies were more or less business as usual. Threatening elected officials with mob violence, though, was something else entirely, even if nothing came of it…at least not this time.

Although he warded off an early threat, as the year 1434 began to unfold more cracks began to show. One of Rinaldo’s most important supporters, Donato Velluti, had been accused of embezzling state funds during his term of office as gonfaloniere. He was judged guilty and imprisoned until he could raise enough money to repay what he stole. Meanwhile, a group of Florence’s leading citizens had been secretly corresponding with Cosimo, promising that if he returned to Florence they would lead an armed revolt to force the government to overturn his exile. One of the people involved in this conspiracy was another key conservative politician, Agnolo Acciaiuoli, who turned against Rinaldo precisely because he had threatened mob violence against the republic. Agnolo was caught and banished.

As for Cosimo, he was too shrewd and cautious to take the conspirators up on their offer. In fact, he was probably well aware that it was just a matter of time, and being involved in an armed coup would only hurt his cause. Instead, he wrote back, saying that he would respect the law and only return if he received an official invitation from the majority of the Signoria. By that fall, the Signoria defied Rinaldo by voting to accept Cosimo’s request and allowing him and the other exiles to return. On September 29, accompanied by a contingent of 300 Venetian soldiers, Cosimo, his brother Lorenzo, and the other exiles made their way south to Florence.

Rinaldo decided to use the only card he had left to play: old-fashioned violence. He tried to raise the same type of mob he threatened the government with the first time the Signoria seriously considered recalling the Medici. The plan was that Rinaldo and the mob would storm the Palazzo de Signoria on September 26 and violently seize control of the government before the Medici returned with the Venetian soldiers. Like with Agnolo, though, this proved too much for Palla Strozzi, the well-respected head of one of Florence’s top families and an important backer of the conservatives. Palla publicly refused Rinaldo’s plea that he give him moral support. Another blow came from no one other than the Pope. Pope Eugenius IV just happened to be in town because he was driven out of Rome – with the citizens literally throwing stones at him while he sailed down the Tiber River – and he urged Rinaldo to have his supporters lay down their arms. After the Pope promised that he would intercede with the government to spare Rinaldo from the sure to be inevitable attempt to exile him, Rinaldo reluctantly relented.

In what had to have been a contrived coincidence, Cosimo returned to the city of Florence on September 27, his birthday and the feast day of the saints he and his deceased twin were named after. The sources all praise Cosimo for his generosity and his humanity, but they also at least suggest that he had learned some hard lessons from the attempt to kill him and from his exile. His only crime was that his wealth had made him a potential threat, and he almost died because of it. So when Cosimo and his supporters in government came back by punching harder than they were punched, it’s pretty understandable why.

Cosimo did not retaliate by imprisoning Rinaldo, much less attempting to secure his execution. Instead, Rinaldo, the Albizzi family, and nearly all of their major supporters were purged. Rinaldo and several important supporters were exiled and the entire Albizzi family were declared nobles and thus barred from politics, except for Rinaldo’s brother Luca, who remained a Medici supporter and was a personal friend of Cosimo’s. Rinaldo’s main supporters and their children were banned from political office for all time. Allegedly, Rinaldo got one last meeting with the Pope before his exile. The Pope apologized profusely, and Rinaldo only bitterly replied, “But who can I blame but myself for believing that you, who had been exiled from your own homeland, would be able to keep me in my own?” At the same time, the government recalled the Medici exiles as well as the long-banished Alberti family. One imagines that while Cosimo must have savored this reversal of fortune, he may have paced the floors in the evening hours after his victory celebration, wondering if the fates could turn against him again and once more he would be fighting for his life. With hindsight, though, we can assure Cosimo that he did indeed win. So much so, in fact, that from this point on I think it’s more accurate to stop talking about the populist and conservative factions, and instead talk about the Medici and anti-Medici factions.

For now, though, let’s wrap up with Cosimo’s first big achievement, which took place about five years after the end of his exile. I’m referring to the Council of Florence, a.k.a. the time when Cosimo reunited the Catholic and Orthodox Churches (but not really).

Talking about something as complex as how the Orthodox and Catholic Churches split is definitely beyond the scope of this podcast, but I’ll try to give a quick crash course. Arguably the split can be traced as far back as the fall of the Western Roman Empire. With western and central Europe splintering into various rival monarchies and republics, the bishop of Rome – meaning the Pope – claimed an authority that had no parallel in the east. That’s not to say that the patriarchs of the eastern Church especially the Patriarch of Constantinople weren’t powerful in their own right, but in general the emperors of the eastern Roman Empire retained an authority over church matters that would have been at best highly contested for kings and even the Holy Roman Emperors in the west. Also by the early seventh century, Greek officially became the language of both the administration and the church while Latin kept being used in the west. This is a bigger deal than you might expect for reasons I’ll get into later. And of course, under the pressures of just distance and time, the eastern churches developed practices and interpretations that were simply foreign to their western counterparts, and vice versa.

As the Popes became more powerful and the Byzantine Empire began to lose its last footholds in Italy, the tensions rose. There were mutual threats of excommunications and one Pope, Martin I, was even arrested and exiled at the orders of the Byzantine Emperor Constans II in 653. But the official break was the Great Schism of 1054, the culmination of a long series of bitter disputes over ritual and theology, from the Catholic concept of Purgatory to whether or not the Pope in Rome was the head of the entire church. The eastern and western churches ended up banning each other’s rites in their respective territories and practically excommunicating or at least refusing recognition of each other’s leaders, although admittedly the specifics are pretty complicated and still debated by historians. But effectively, even just in hindsight, the leaders of both churches had declared each other anathema, something that was not fully reversed until 1964.

The consequences of this were more serious than just spawning endless debates over leavened versus unleavened bread. In 1204, Latin crusaders who originally set out to conquer the Egyptian coast were instead manipulated into pillaging and taking over Constantinople by the doge of Venice. The crusaders immediately set up a new regime observing the western rites, as much of the old Byzantine Empire crumbled into petty states run by other crusaders or rival Orthodox claimants to the imperial throne. Even after Constantinople was retaken fifty years later for the Orthodox by the Palaiologoi dynasty, the Byzantine Empire never recovered. Its borders would only keep receding, and even the city of Constantinople was just a burnt out husk of its former self with even the old Great Palace of the emperors barely inhabitable. No longer the Queen of Cities that inspired awe and envy from outsiders, it was now just an object of pity.

By Cosimo’s time, much of the former heartlands of the Byzantine Empire had been gobbled up by the rising power of the Ottoman Turks. All that was left of the Byzantine lands were southern Greece, a few tiny islands around the Aegean, and Constantinople and the strips of territory immediately around it. The Byzantines had no choice but to beg for military aid from the Pope in the form of a new crusade. However, there would be a price tag: the reunification of the Orthodox and Catholic churches.  

Even when the Byzantine emperors started showing some interest in a reconciliation, even if it was just because they thought it would come with military aid, the popes stayed stubborn.  There was enough hatred on both sides to make any lasting truce a daunting prospect. However, luckily the Byzantines stumbled across one weird trick to get the Pope to pay attention to their pleas. They sent ambassadors to the Council of Basil, a church council that was called to promote conciliarism, the idea that church councils, not the Pope, should be the top authority in the Catholic Church. To take some steam out of the Council of Basil and this obnoxious conciliarist movement, Pope Eugenius IV, who had been installed back in Rome, announced he was opening up his own council at Ferrara which would finally discuss the reunification of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches and the possibility of a crusade to save Constantinople.

This Council of Ferrara began on January 10, 1438. Attending were Greek and Latin theologians and bishops, including the elderly Patriarch of Constantinople, Joseph II. The real celebrity guest, though, was Emperor John VIII of the Byzantine Empire himself, who became the first Byzantine emperor to step on Italian soil in over 700 years. He would also be the last. Despite the poverty of his government, he arrived in style with a large retinue and a bejeweled crown. Artists in Italy would depict him as a handsome man, with a full red beard and hair and green eyes.

An outbreak of the plague in Ferrara, and perhaps more importantly the Pope going into debt just to pay for the whole thing, made everyone reconsider the venue. This is where Cosimo de’ Medici generously stepped in, offering to let the entire council relocate to Florence. Cosimo entrusted his brother Lorenzo with the task of negotiating the relocation. A letter Cosimo wrote to Lorenzo instructing him how to handle the Pope survives, and it provides a rare look at just how much of a clever businessman Cosimo really was:

“Should His Sanctity ask anything special for you will answer that we shall willingly provide houses for them gratis, without demanding any rent, and that we shall strive to render the houses suitable for their various degrees of nobility. If money for the maintenance of the Greeks is mentioned, which we hear amounts to 1500 florins a month, you are to say that our Commune is very short of money on account of the long war, et cetera., and for this reason our Commune would be most grateful not to be burdened, but nevertheless if absolutely necessary we are ready to lend H.H. the said amount 1500 florins, or of ducats, every month, on receipt of a promise and valid security as to repayment at a given date, to be agreed upon by both parties. For as the Greeks come on business of the Church, it is only reasonable that the Church should pay and bear the burden.”

There’s no doubt that to most people the proceedings of the Council were dreadfully dull. Here’s the modern Byzantine historian Donald M. Nicol’s assessment: “The Council was a long and tedious exercise in theological hairsplitting. It is not unfair to say that it was conceived and conducted very largely for the gratification of the Roman Church, to prove the point that the popes had labored so consistently that the Greeks must accept the supremacy and the authority of the See of Rome before there could be any question of a material move to save them from the infidel.” The radical scholar Plethon, who I talked about before and who would befriend Cosimo at the Council, skipped most of the sessions and instead focused on hobnobbing with the Italian humanists. Given that many sessions were dedicated to hashing out the theological controversy over the Latin view that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as the Father, instead of proceeding just from the Father. It was a dispute boiling down to one Latin word, “filioque”, meaning “and the son”, that was later added by Catholic theologians to Latin translations of that foundational statement of Christian belief, the Nicene Creed.  

Personally I’ve seen the controversy over the filioque clause to justify the stereotype of pre-modern people as irrational a few times. But there really were subtle differences between Latin and Greek that made these types of debates inevitable and difficult to parse through. Latin was a language known for its legalistic precision while the vocabulary of Greek just did a better job at catching the nuances of metaphysical and philosophical concepts, like I talked about before. But it’s also worth pointing out that even some of the people invested in the Council’s goals thought such controversies were petty and pointless. Finally, it was a matter of fairly justified national pride. As they saw it, why did the Greeks always have to bend the knee while the Latins didn’t even have to surrender any ground on an issue as minor and cryptic as the filioque clause?

Regardless, on July 6 the churches were unified with the Union of Florence…at least on a sheet of paper. A celebration was held, with the proclamation of unity read, first in Latin and then in Greek. But it quickly proved to be a hollow victory. Back in Constantinople, clergy who genuinely supported the union with more than lukewarm resignation were hard to find while those who opposed the union at the Council were praised as heroes resisting the arrogance of the Latins to the bitter end. Emperor John’s brother Demetrios even tried to leverage the outrage over the Union to usurp the imperial throne. The Pope did fulfill his end of the bargain and cobbled together a crusade, though. Hungary, Poland, Wallachia (Val-lock-ea) (which is today part of Romania), and Serbia with a navy provided by the Duke of Burgundy, the Republics of Venice and Ragusa, and the Pope launched in October of 1443 what would become known as the Crusade of Varna against the Ottoman Sultan Murad II. The crusaders actually enjoyed some early successes, but after breaking a ten-year truce with the Ottomans they were soundly defeated despite massive Ottoman casualties at the Battle of Varna in Bulgaria, fought on November 10, 1444. It had become a very personal affair for Sultan Murad II, who went into the battle with a copy of the broken truce pinned to his military standard. One of the crusade’s biggest leaders and supporters, King Laudislaus III of Poland and Hungary, was killed in the fighting and shut up talk of further crusades against the Ottomans for over a generation. Emperor John VIII himself was forced to meet Sultan Murad personally to congratulate him on his victory.

As for Emperor John VIII of the Byzantine Empire, he died a broken, embittered man on October 31, 1448, thinking or perhaps knowing that the westerners he pinned all his hopes on and tried to surrender the independence of his church to had absolutely no idea what they were doing. Since John VIII died childless, the imperial crown went to one of his surviving brothers who became Constantine XI. By that point, the empire was so poor that Constantine had to beg for a lift from a Spanish merchant ship to transport him from mainland Greece to his own coronation in Constantinople. The crown Constantine was crowned with carried substitute gems and precious stones, since the real crown jewels of the Byzantine Empire had been pawned off to the Venetians a century ago. Constantine XI had a reign of just four years before he died fighting in the siege of Constantinople against Murad’s son and successor, Mehmed II, also known as Mehmed the Conqueror. No western government bothered coming to Constantinople’s defense, only volunteers from Venice and Genoa. At least in the end Constantinople did become a glorious capital once again. It was just as a new capital for the Ottoman Empire renamed as Istanbul.  

But there was one person who ultimately came out of the Council of Florence a winner: Cosimo de’ Medici. He befriended two Greek intellectual heavyweights, Bessarion and Plethon, and with their influence Cosimo established a new Platonic Academy that would help make Florence a leading light in the Renaissance. It was also because of Cosimo and his bank that the Pope and an emperor from a line stretching all the way back to the glorious Emperor Augustus of antiquity came to Florence. The year the Council concluded, the Medici Bank made an unprecedented profit of 14,400 florins. For Cosimo himself, though, the prestige of being the host of such a historic (albeit in the end pointless) Council was tremendous. It would be commemorated by a portrait of Emperor John VIII as one of the Magi visiting the birth of Christ placed in the Magi Chapel of the Medici palace. This was the point where foreign leaders began to recognize Cosimo as not just the head of a powerful faction in a republic, but as the unofficial and uncrowned yet unchallenged ruler of Florence itself.