John VIII Palaiologos
John VIII went to Italy in person to unite the churches and came home to a city that would not accept it. He succeeded his father Manuel II in 1425 with an empire consisting of Constantinople, a strip of coast, Thessalonica and the Morea, entirely surrounded by Ottoman territory and paying tribute. His father's advice had been to negotiate union with Rome perpetually and never conclude it, because the negotiation frightened the Turks and the conclusion would divide his own people. John concluded it. He travelled to Ferrara and then Florence in 1438 with the patriarch and some 700 clergy and scholars, stayed for over a year of theological debate about the procession of the Holy Spirit, purgatory, unleavened bread and papal primacy, and signed the decree of union in July 1439. Only Mark of Ephesus refused to sign. The delegation came home to riots. The union was rejected by the monks, by most of the clergy, by the Slavic churches and by the population, and the phrase attributed to a leading official — that he would rather see the sultan's turban in the city than the cardinal's hat — is the standard summary of what the argument had come to. The help it bought was the crusade of Varna in 1444, which was destroyed by Murad II. John died in 1448, and his brother Constantine XI died on the walls five years later. The scholars who went to Florence stayed and taught Greek. The union was formally repudiated in Constantinople only after the city fell. Its most durable result was the movement of Greek manuscripts and Greek teachers into Italy, which is a substantial part of what the Renaissance was reading.
- Lived: 1392 CE – 1448 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, diplomat
