Gemistus Plethon

Georgios Gemistos was born in Constantinople around 1355, into a family connected with the educated civil and ecclesiastical circles of the Byzantine capital ^[1]. His father is believed to have held a position in the administration of the patriarchate, which gave the boy access to the kind of literary schooling that only a small elite in the shrinking empire could still obtain. He received a thorough training in Greek grammar, rhetoric, and the classical authors, the standard curriculum for ambitious young men in the capital ^[2].

The empire of his youth was a shadow of its former self. Constantinople in the second half of the fourteenth century was hemmed in by the expanding Ottoman state, impoverished by civil wars, and still recovering from the Black Death. For a student of Gemistos's talents, the contrast between the glories of ancient Greek literature and the weakness of the contemporary state was impossible to ignore, and it shaped his lifelong conviction that the Greeks needed to recover the wisdom of their ancestors ^[1].

A persistent tradition, reported by his later opponent George Scholarios, holds that Gemistos spent part of his early adulthood at the Ottoman court in Adrianople, where he is said to have studied with a Jewish scholar named Elissaeus who introduced him to non-Christian philosophical and religious ideas, possibly including Zoroastrian material ^[3]. Scholarios wrote as a hostile witness decades later, so historians treat the details with caution, but most accept that Gemistos acquired unusual learning outside the normal Byzantine channels during these obscure years ^[3]. By the 1380s or 1390s he was back in Constantinople, teaching philosophy and building a reputation for formidable erudition.

In Constantinople, Gemistos taught philosophy to students who would later count among the most influential Greek scholars of the age. His enthusiasm for Plato, however, made him suspect in a society where higher education was closely tied to the Orthodox Church and where Aristotle, filtered through Christian commentary, dominated the schools ^[2]. According to later accounts, church authorities grew uneasy about his teaching, and around the first decade of the fifteenth century Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos resolved the tension by sending him away from the capital ^[1].

The move proved to be the making of him. Gemistos settled in Mystras, the fortified hill town near ancient Sparta that served as capital of the Despotate of the Morea, the Byzantine province covering much of the Peloponnese ^[4]. There he served as a magistrate and adviser to the ruling despots of the Palaiologos family, received grants of land, and opened a school that drew students from across the Greek world. His pupils included Bessarion, the future cardinal of the Roman Church, and the historian Laonikos Chalkokondyles, both of whom carried his influence far beyond the Peloponnese ^[2].

From Mystras, Gemistos also turned to political writing. Between roughly 1415 and 1418 he addressed memoranda to Emperor Manuel II and to Despot Theodore II, arguing that the Peloponnese could be saved from conquest only through sweeping reform ^[4]. He proposed a native standing army in place of unreliable foreign mercenaries, a reorganization of taxation, restrictions on the export of raw materials, and a division of society into soldiers, laborers, and a governing class, a scheme that owed an obvious debt to Plato's Republic ^[5]. The emperors did not enact his program, but the memoranda survive as some of the most original political thought produced in late Byzantium.

The event that made Gemistos famous in western Europe came late in his life. In 1438, already in his eighties, he traveled with the Byzantine delegation led by Emperor John VIII Palaiologos to the Council of Ferrara, later moved to Florence, which sought to reunite the Orthodox and Catholic churches in the hope of securing western military aid against the Ottomans ^[1]. Gemistos attended as a lay expert, valued for his learning even though he had little enthusiasm for the union itself.

During the council's idle stretches he lectured to Florentine humanists on the differences between Plato and Aristotle. Those lectures became the short treatise usually known as On the Differences of Aristotle from Plato, which argued that Plato's conception of God and the cosmos was superior to Aristotle's and touched off a long controversy among Greek scholars that continued for decades ^[6]. For an Italian audience that knew Aristotle thoroughly but Plato hardly at all, the effect was electric. A durable tradition, recorded by Marsilio Ficino himself, credits Gemistos's presence in Florence with inspiring Cosimo de' Medici's interest in Platonism, which eventually bore fruit in Ficino's Latin translations of the complete Platonic dialogues ^[7].

It was around this period that he adopted the name Plethon, meaning "the full one," a near synonym of Gemistos that also echoed the name of Plato. The choice advertised exactly how he wished to be seen: as the philosopher who would restore Plato to his rightful place ^[2]. When the council concluded with a union decree in 1439, Plethon returned home to Mystras. The union was rejected by most of the Orthodox clergy and populace, and no effective western aid ever arrived.

Plethon's mature philosophy went far beyond academic preference for one ancient author over another. In his final years at Mystras he worked on the Nomon Syngraphe, the Book of Laws, a comprehensive treatise setting out a philosophical religion and legal order for a reformed Greek state ^[5]. The work presented a theology built around Zeus as the supreme first principle, with a hierarchy of subordinate gods understood as philosophical symbols of the structure of reality. It included liturgical calendars, hymns, and prayers, alongside doctrines of fate, the eternity of the world, and the immortality of the soul drawn from Platonic and Neoplatonic sources ^[3].

Scholars continue to debate what Plethon actually believed. Some read the Laws as evidence that he had privately abandoned Christianity for a form of Neoplatonic paganism; others see the divine names as deliberate philosophical allegory, a thought experiment about the best possible rational religion ^[3]. What is not in doubt is that he kept the full text closely guarded during his lifetime, sharing it only with a small circle of trusted students at Mystras. Publicly he continued to function within a Christian society, and he was buried by Christian rite ^[1].

He also compiled and commented on the Chaldean Oracles, which he attributed to Zoroaster, and wrote treatises on fate, on virtues, and a compact summary of his religious system known as the Summary of the Doctrines of Zoroaster and Plato ^[6]. Taken together, these writings made him the most daring speculative thinker Byzantium produced in its final century, a man willing to ask whether Greek civilization might survive the empire's fall by returning to sources older than the empire itself.

Plethon spent his last decades at Mystras in scholarly retirement, honored by the despots of the Morea and surrounded by students. He continued writing into extreme old age, revising the Book of Laws and defending his critique of Aristotle against George Scholarios, who had answered his Florentine treatise with a lengthy rebuttal ^[6]. The exchange between the two men, one a champion of Plato and the other of Aristotle, framed an argument that Greek emigres would carry on in Italy long after both were dead.

He died at Mystras on June 26, 1452, reportedly nearing a hundred years old, and was buried there ^[1]. He was spared by less than a year the catastrophe he had spent a lifetime warning against: Constantinople fell to Sultan Mehmed II on May 29, 1453, and the Morea followed by 1460.

After the Ottoman conquest, the manuscript of the Book of Laws passed to Princess Theodora, wife of Despot Demetrios Palaiologos, who sent it to George Scholarios, by then serving as Gennadios II, the first patriarch of Constantinople under Ottoman rule ^[3]. Scholarios examined the work, judged it pagan and dangerous, and ordered it burned around 1460, preserving only the table of contents and selected chapters so that posterity would understand why he had destroyed it. Those surviving fragments are the main source for Plethon's religious system today ^[5].

Plethon's clearest legacy runs through Renaissance Italy. His Florence lectures and his students, above all Cardinal Bessarion, fed the revival of Platonic studies that culminated in Ficino's Platonic translations and commentaries under Medici patronage ^[7]. Bessarion's own library of Greek manuscripts, donated to Venice in 1468, became the core of the Biblioteca Marciana and preserved much of the textual heritage his teacher had prized. The Plato-Aristotle controversy Plethon ignited occupied Greek and Italian scholars for two generations and helped define the philosophical agenda of the early Renaissance ^[6].

His memory was cherished by Italian admirers in a strikingly literal way. In 1465 the condottiere Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, campaigning in the Peloponnese for Venice, removed Plethon's remains from Mystras and reinterred them in a sarcophagus set into an outer wall of the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, where they still rest, with an inscription honoring the greatest philosopher of his time ^[4].

Modern assessments of who Gemistus Plethon was range widely, from the last Hellene, a secret pagan plotting the rebirth of ancient Greece, to a loyal if eccentric Byzantine reformer. Studies by scholars such as C. M. Woodhouse, who called him the last of the Hellenes, and more recent work by Niketas Siniossoglou and Vojtech Hladky have kept the debate alive ^[3]. Among the facts about which there is no dispute: he was the most learned Platonist of his century, a political thinker of genuine originality, and a bridge between the closing chapter of Byzantium and the opening chapter of the Renaissance. Any Gemistus Plethon biography is, in the end, a story about how ideas outlive the states that produce them ^[2].