Georgios Scholarios (c. 1400-c.1472) is one of the most influential political and religious actors of the late Byzantine Empire. Under the name Gennadios II, he served as the first Patriarch of Constantinople after the fall of the city to the Ottomans. Tradition has Scholarios as a staunch anti-unionist and the very champion of the orthodoxy against the Catholicism. However, some documents that have come down to us under his name would show a different image: as a layman in the 1430s, Georgios Scholarios would have sympathized with the Pope and may have even supported the union of the Greek and Latin Churches. Allegedly, the most relevant source for such part of Scholarios’ biography is a collection of eighteen letters attributed to him and mostly preserved in the codex Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 74.13. As important as they are, the contents of the letters have not been hitherto fully appraised, mainly because scholars do not agree on their authenticity. Over the last decades, scholars have attacked or defended the validity of the letters mainly on prosopographical and linguistic grounds. Our paper tackles the issue focusing on hitherto fully neglected or deficiently assessed aspects of the collection: the scribe who compiled it and the material side of the manuscript that transmits it.
Looking into the Material Side: Neglected Evidence on Georgios Scholarios' Corpus of Letters in the Ms. Firenze, BML, Plut. 74.13
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Abstract
Georgios Scholarios (c. 1400-c.1472) is one of the most influential political and religious actors of the late Byzantine Empire. Under the name Gennadios II, he served as the first Patriarch of Constantinople after the fall of the city to the Ottomans. Tradition has Scholarios as a staunch anti-unionist and the very champion of the orthodoxy against the Catholicism. However, some documents that have come down to us under his name would show a different image: as a layman in the 1430s, Georgios Scholarios would have sympathized with the Pope and may have even supported the union of the Greek and Latin Churches. Allegedly, the most relevant source for such part of Scholarios’ biography is a collection of eighteen letters attributed to him and mostly preserved in the codex Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 74.13. As important as they are, the contents of the letters have not been hitherto fully appraised, mainly because scholars do not agree on their authenticity. Over the last decades, scholars have attacked or defended the validity of the letters mainly on prosopographical and linguistic grounds. Our paper tackles the issue focusing on hitherto fully neglected or deficiently assessed aspects of the collection: the scribe who compiled it and the material side of the manuscript that transmits it.
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