Download PDF | Marios Philippides_ Walter K. Hanak - Cardinal Isidore, c. 1390-1462_ A Late Byzantine Scholar, Warlord and Prelate-Routledge (2020).
434 Pages
Cardinal Isidore, c. 1390–1462 A member of the imperial Palaiologan family, albeit most probably illegitimate, Isidore became a scholar at a young age and began his rise in the Byzantine ecclesiastical ranks. He was an active advocate of the union of the Orthodox and Catholic churches in Constantinople. His military exploits, including his participation in the defense of Constantinople in 1453, provide us with eyewitness accounts. Without doubt he traveled widely, perhaps more so than any other individual in the annals of Byzantine history: Greece, Asia Minor, Sicily, Russia, Poland, Lithuania, and Italy.
His roles included diplomat, high ecclesiastic in both the Orthodox and Catholic churches, theologian, soldier, papal emissary to the Constantinopolitan court, delegate to the Council of Florence, advisor to the last Byzantine emperors, metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia, and member of the Vatican curia. This is an original work based on new archival research and the first monograph to study Cardinal Isidore in his many diverse roles. His contributions to the events of the first six decades of the quattrocento are important for the study of major Church councils and the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. Isidore played a crucial role in each of these events.
Marios Philippides is Professor of Classics, Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. He has published numerous articles on the fall of Constantinople, 1453, on late Byzantine and early post-Byzantine historiography, and on the Palaiologan era. He has authored numerous books and two books with Walter K. Hanak. Walter K. Hanak was Professor of History, Emeritus at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, West Virginia, USA. He was the editor and publisher of the scholarly journal Byzantine Studies/Etudes Byzantines for many decades. He has published numerous articles on medieval Greece, Russia, and the Slavonic word. He was the author of a number of books and collaborated with Marios Philippides in the publication of two books.
Preface
In contemporary academic scholarship, the field of history is often viewed as a branch of literary studies. To a certain degree, this is true. However, our approach in this study is to treat each of these disciplines as co-partners, for both disciplines are dependent upon original source materials that we employ extensively in our research topic. It is true that each of the fields of study scrutinizes the materials, one from the perspective of literary analysis, and the other from a search for internal evidence illuminating the role of individuals in diverse encounters and revealing evidentiary information for its historical significance.
To cite the importance of the historical process, we quote James Howard-Johnston, who elaborates:1 History is not a social science. Historians handle data – gathering, sorting, patterning – rather than constructing theories. They deal with a bewildering array of particulars – individuals and groups, places of every conceivable sort (from the smallest of localities to whole continents), times, actions and processes (slow- or fast-moving, gentle or violent), structures (whether the built environment in town and country or the institutions developed by human societies for the ordering of life), thoughts passing in and out of minds (only to be grasped if articulated in words), thought worlds (the immaterial structures of minds linked together in social networks) etc. etc. There is no question of exactitude in history.
If calculation of the effects of a single wave in the sea or a slight breadth of wind in the air is beyond the capacity of the swiftest and most capacious of computers, it is inconceivable that useful general laws of human behavior in social aggregates can ever be formulated, when thoughts are continually bubbling to the surface in billions of minds, when gestures and actions are continually setting in motion causal chains which have no end. No, the historian is, first and foremost, a sleuth, seeking out data and clues to data, trying to understand the surrounding world. It is in this context that we approach the study of a significant individual, Cardinal Isidore, who contributed much to his age, but also added to the inconclusive circumspections of that period. And yet, we employ throughout this work literary analysis in our examination of original texts, without which there would exist a vacuum in this study.
Isidore over a span of a half century demonstrated that he was a complex individual, involving himself in sundry activities (literary happenings, writing, textual transmission, and manuscript copying; diplomat, high ecclesiastic, theologian, and soldier, among other undertakings) and significant historical events (to cite at this moment but two from among many, especially the Council of Ferrara-Florence and the fall of Constantinople in 1453). It is not our intention to evaluate his personality from the perspective of psychohistory, for this would lead us through endless mazes from which we could not extricate ourselves. Rather, we see Isidore from the perspective of his actions and accomplishments, his successes and failures, and numerous other activities.
To say that he was an enigmatic figure with a strange personality would be a misstatement of the evidence at hand. He did influence prominent people, both lay and ecclesiastic, and was involved, even if minimally, in the main intellectual movement of his age – the Renaissance. We have attempted, then, to reconstruct a picture of him that exemplifies all his strengths, accomplishments, and even shortcomings. This study is based upon extracting significant information from primary sources, since the extant secondary literature is at time erroneous, lacks meticulousness in providing historical information, and advances interpretations that cannot be supported by the primary sources.
This is not to say that the primary sources themselves do not also contain erroneous and contradictory information, for indeed they do. Our approach has been to carefully weigh all source materials for relevancy, historical accuracy, and literary achievement. The primary sources were obtained from leading depositories, whose archival holdings are extensive. Our leading source for manuscripts was the Vatican Library, which provided us reproductions of countless materials, including documents and letters, among other texts. We were fortunate to avail ourselves of printed sources, some of questionable editorial quality, but nonetheless useful. As our bibliography demonstrates, our secondary source list is extensive.
We had to garner every conceivable tidbit of information to understand the role that Isidore, in his many capacities, played in his time that indeed was an eventful age. To support our study of this high churchman, we have provided quotations from the primary source materials in their original languages with accompanying English translation. What emerges in our study is a fresh and perhaps a new critical understanding of the contributions of Cardinal Isidore to the historical record and the literary world of the fifteenth century.
Walter K. Hanak and Marios Philippides † Walter K. Hanak, a close friend and a scholarly collaborator for over three decades, died on January 28, 2016. By that time we had compiled an early draft of this study. It fell upon me to complete the research, the text of the book, and see it through publication. Our project could not have been completed without his detailed knowledge and command of Slavonic material. He is greatly missed by his family, by his former students, and by the scholarly community. Marios Philippides.
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