Basilios Bessarion

The future cardinal was born on January 2, 1403, in Trebizond (modern Trabzon on the Black Sea coast of Turkey), then the capital of a small Greek empire ruled by the Komnenos dynasty ^[1]. His baptismal name is usually given as Basil, and he came from a family of modest means, reportedly artisans or laborers. The metropolitan of Trebizond, Dositheos, noticed the boy's ability and arranged for his education, a common route of advancement for talented children in the Byzantine world ^[2].

Around 1416 or 1417 he was sent to Constantinople, where he studied rhetoric, philosophy, and the classical Greek curriculum under teachers including George Chrysococces. Fellow students of his generation included Francesco Filelfo, the Italian humanist who later carried Greek texts to Italy ^[2]. In 1423 the young man entered monastic life, taking the name Bessarion after an Egyptian desert hermit venerated in the Orthodox Church. He was ordained deacon in 1425 and priest in 1431 ^[1].

The most formative episode of his education came at Mistra in the Peloponnese, where between roughly 1431 and 1436 he studied under George Gemistos Plethon, the most original Greek philosopher of the age and a devoted Platonist ^[3]. Plethon's teaching gave Bessarion a lifelong commitment to Plato, mathematics, and the idea that Greek learning was a heritage worth defending. Anyone asking who was Basilios Bessarion has to begin here: he was a monk shaped equally by Orthodox spirituality and by the pagan philosophy of antiquity.

By the 1430s the Byzantine Empire had shrunk to little more than Constantinople and scattered territories, ringed by Ottoman power. Emperor John VIII Palaiologos pursued union with the Roman Church as the price of Western military help, and he needed learned churchmen to argue the Greek case. Bessarion, already known for his intellect, was made abbot of the monastery of St. Basil in Constantinople and then, in 1437, metropolitan of Nicaea ^[1]. That title, historically resonant because of the ecumenical councils held at Nicaea, is why he is often called Bessarion of Nicaea.

He sailed with the imperial delegation to Italy and took a leading role at the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-1439), the great attempt to end the schism of 1054 ^[4]. The central doctrinal dispute concerned the filioque, the Latin addition to the creed stating that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Bessarion began as a defender of the Greek position, but close study of the church fathers convinced him that the difference was one of wording rather than substance, and he emerged as the most persuasive Greek advocate of union ^[4].

On July 6, 1439, the decree of union, Laetentur Caeli, was read in Florence cathedral, with Bessarion pronouncing the Greek text ^[4]. It was a personal triumph and a political failure. Back in Constantinople the union was rejected by most clergy and people, and his colleague Mark of Ephesus, who had refused to sign, became the hero of the anti-unionist party. Bessarion found his position at home untenable.

Pope Eugenius IV rewarded Bessarion's labors by naming him a cardinal in December 1439 ^[1]. From about 1440 onward he settled permanently in Italy, mastering Latin thoroughly enough to write elegant treatises in it, an achievement few Byzantine emigres matched. His household in Rome became a meeting place for scholars, Greek refugees, and humanists, sometimes described by contemporaries as a new academy ^[3].

The papacy employed him in a long series of offices and missions. He served as papal legate at Bologna from 1450 to 1455, restoring order and reviving the university in a city notorious for factional violence ^[2]. He held the sees of Sabina and then Tusculum as cardinal bishop, and he administered the Basilian monasteries of southern Italy, reforming the Greek-rite communities that survived under Roman obedience ^[1]. In 1463 Pope Pius II appointed him Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, by then a title of honor and jurisdiction over Greek Catholics rather than a residential see, since the city had fallen to the Ottomans a decade earlier ^[1].

At two papal conclaves, in 1455 and again in 1471, Bessarion was seriously considered for the papacy itself ^[2]. Later anecdote blamed his beard and Greek origins for his failure, though the politics of the college of cardinals were surely more decisive. That a Trebizond-born monk came within reach of the throne of St. Peter remains one of the more striking Basilios Bessarion facts.

The fall of Constantinople on May 29, 1453, transformed Bessarion's later life into a single sustained campaign: persuading the princes of Europe to recover the Greek East. He wrote urgent letters to the doge of Venice within weeks of the catastrophe, warning that Ottoman power would not stop at the Bosporus ^[5].

He backed Pope Pius II's crusade project of the early 1460s, and after that effort collapsed with the pope's death at Ancona in 1464, he kept pressing. In 1463 he traveled to Venice as legate to negotiate the republic's entry into war against the Ottomans ^[5]. His Orations against the Turks, addressed to the Italian states and later printed and circulated north of the Alps, combined classical rhetoric with hard strategic argument ^[5]. In 1472, though old and ill, he accepted a final legation to France to reconcile King Louis XI with Burgundy and rally support for the eastern cause. The mission accomplished little, and the journey broke his health ^[2].

No crusade sailed. Yet Bessarion's advocacy shaped how educated Europeans understood the Ottoman advance, and his patronage of exiled Greeks gave the refugee community a center of gravity in Italy for three decades.

Bessarion's intellectual output ranks among the chief Basilios Bessarion achievements. His most influential book, In Calumniatorem Platonis (Against the Slanderer of Plato), appeared in print in Rome in 1469 ^[3]. It answered George of Trebizond, a fellow Greek emigre who had attacked Plato as morally corrupt and incompatible with Christianity. Bessarion replied not by disparaging Aristotle, whom he also translated and admired, but by presenting Plato fairly and arguing that both philosophers could serve Christian thought. The work was the first extensive account of Platonic philosophy printed in Western Europe and prepared the ground for Marsilio Ficino's Florentine Platonism ^[3].

He translated Aristotle's Metaphysics and Xenophon's Memorabilia into Latin, wrote theological treatises defending the Florentine union, and composed a funeral encomium for his teacher Plethon, whose unorthodox religious views he tactfully passed over ^[3]. His circle supported the scientific revival as well: he encouraged the astronomers Georg Peurbach and Regiomontanus to produce a new abridgement of Ptolemy's Almagest, a project that fed directly into the astronomy of the following century ^[6].

His patronage extended to the first printers in Italy. Editions produced at Rome in the late 1460s, including his own works, made him one of the earliest authors to see the press as an instrument of scholarship ^[6].

For decades Bessarion collected Greek manuscripts with a stated purpose: to save the literature of his people from the wreck of the empire. He bought books, commissioned copies, and sent agents to hunt for texts in Greek lands under Ottoman rule ^[7]. By the late 1460s his collection numbered roughly 750 codices, nearly 500 of them Greek, the finest library of Greek literature then existing anywhere ^[7].

In 1468 he donated the entire collection to the Republic of Venice, choosing that city because of its close ties with the Greek world and its large Greek community, calling it almost another Byzantium in his deed of gift ^[7]. The donation became the founding core of the Biblioteca Marciana, the library of St. Mark, which still preserves his manuscripts today ^[7]. Homer, Plato, and hundreds of other ancient and Byzantine authors reached Renaissance readers, and eventually the printing press, through copies Bessarion had gathered.

Any Basilios Bessarion biography must weigh this act heavily. Armies never retook Constantinople, but the books survived, and through them a large share of Greek civilization passed intact into the modern world.

Returning from the failed French legation, Bessarion died at Ravenna on November 18, 1472 ^[1]. His body was carried to Rome and buried in the church of Santi Apostoli, where he had earlier prepared a funerary chapel; Pope Sixtus IV attended the funeral, an unusual honor ^[2].

His reputation has grown with time. Contemporaries already saw him as the most Latin of the Greeks and the most Greek of the Latins, a formulation attributed to the humanist Lorenzo Valla's circle and repeated ever since ^[2]. Historians of the Renaissance credit him, alongside Manuel Chrysoloras and Plethon, with transplanting Greek studies into Italy, and historians of the church remember him as the ablest advocate the cause of Christian reunion ever had ^[4].

The verdict of scholarship is unusually consistent: a man caught between two civilizations who refused to let either half of his identity go. His union failed, his crusade never sailed, and he never became pope. What endured were the arguments, the students, and above all the manuscripts on the shelves of the Marciana, still consulted six centuries after a metropolitan's charity sent a poor boy from Trebizond to school ^[7].