Ronchey, S. “Orthodoxy on Sale: the Last Byzantine and the Lost Crusade.” Proceedings of the 21st International Congress in Byzantine Studies. I. (London, 21-26 August 2006.) Ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. 313-44.

This conference paper reconstructs and summarises the various aspects and stages of the plan to “save Byzantium in the West,” of which Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Bessarion, and Thomas Palaeologus were protagonists, underscoring with particular attention the doctrinal and ideological implications. Thomas, sovereign in pectore of the New Byzantium to be founded on the Peloponnese once delivered from the Turks by the crusade called by Pius II at the Council of Mantua in 1459, brought the head of St. Andrew, missionary on the Peloponnese and patron of the Eastern Church, with him to Italy soon after – probably at Bessarion’s suggestion. The transfer of St. Andrew’s head was a solemn event, filled with symbolism and commemorated in important artistic commissions. The idea of a crusade against the Turks by the Western powers under the aegis of the papacy had been planned for the first time soon after the Council of Ferrara and Florence, Bessarion’s move to the unionist faction, and the subsequent, though virtual and realpolitiker, union of the churches.  After the failure of the Varna Crusade, however, the pope continued to promote the plan to found a “New Byzantium” in Morea, based on the realistic political proposals laid down by Georgius Gemistus Pletho and the school of Mystras.  The project was supported by a clan of pro-Byzantine signorie, related through the Malatesta to the Palaeologi, but the greater objective was the reunification of the First and Second Rome into one legal entity under the primary influence of the papacy.  The expectations and the crucial political, ideological, and religious connections are to be found mirrored allegorically in Benozzo Gozzoli’s Cavalcata dei Magi and Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation. However, after Pius II’s announcement at Mantua, international support for his expedition against the Turks began to wane quickly and the plan reached its epilogue with the death of the pontiff, the staunchest supporter until his end in Ancona. Lost in the West, inheritance of the Byzantine imperial title passed to Russia, thanks to the marriage – orchestrated with Machiavellian skill by Bessarion – between the last Palaeologian princess, Zoe, and Ivan III (the Great) Vasilyevich of Moscow. The divine right of the basileia and the concomitant bequest of orthodoxy, manipulated for decades, came to be absorbed into the Empire of the Third Rome.

 

CITED BY

E. Negrau, Cultul suveranului sud-est european si cazul Tarii Romanesti. O perspectiva artistica, Iasi, Lumen, 2011, p. 100, n. 321