Oh best and wisest of friends, or George and the wolves

The best and wisest of friends, Nikeforos Prinkeps Cheilas, is one of the small group of intellectuals of mid-century Mistra, and probably the most enigmatic. Cheilas first appears in 1433, when he gave a monody at the memnosyne for Cleofe. It is an extraordinary work, highly emotional, and full of powerful metaphors, but it is his only surviving writing.  A number of letters to him have survived, which collectively give a strikingly detailed portrait of a complicated but valued personality. No letters of his survive. As Eugenikos wrote him in 1455:

Your letters are double treasures, O best of men, winged reminders of your dear countenance and our association, among us even when we have received nothing whatsoever.

It seems that Cheilas left Mistra with Theodoros in 1443 when he became Despot at Selymbria. This put Theodoros in Constantinople most of the time where he intended to pick up the throne from John. In the summer of 1448, John, seriously ill,  still had not named an heir. Theodoros had been quarrelling with him over money, and it appears that with the aid of family members and aristocrats in Constantinople, and his entourage, plus the prospects of foreign troops and the promise of a foreign bride, Theodoros was ready to attack Constantinople and seize the throne.  But there was a major epidemic of plague, he delayed his attack, contracted plague and died. His body was taken to Constantinople and buried at night in the Pantokrator. His friends and entourage – including Cheilas – sat by the tomb for seven days and nights in the traditional homage, in terror of what might happen to them.

Nothing happened. Too many important people had been involved, and details were covered over, except that everyone knew about it. Cheilas must have written a mound of mea culpas to everyone he had ever corresponded with. Bessarion received one, and responded with generosity in considering why Cheilas might have decided as he did.

You thought you were doing the right thing in deceiving us, having other considerations, and saying what was not the case, but you did not escape us in your attempt to conceal the truth in your concern for loyalty and good will toward our leader and despot, for his sake keeping his secrets truly secret. . . . It is no ordinary virtue for those who consort with dynasts to understand that they must hide the mysteries of those in power . . .Why would one not speak the truth to you and not praise acts worthy of admiration? Why would he not spare a friend from accusations or not supply the defense of one most dear to him. . . . We clearly do not blame you and we have acquitted you of any crimes already. Do not write your defense to us and give no thought to supplication. . . .

For you should view it as I do, that we were harmed by the loss of a brother and a wise friend, while we hoped that you would fare well, for by doing so you would clear away our dismay and comfort us that you were together with better companions. Or, if you willingly endured because you did not accept a division and separation from your benefactor, and were overwhelmed by love, that in itself was the better, and something for which--if you had not felt it--then you might need an apology, such as is not needed now, since you did feel it.

May you be in the midst of all good things, oh best and wisest of friends, and may you overcome all your griefs and, with the support of God, enjoy all the best of the great city. For the present, we wish you to cheer us with the occasion and beauty of your correspondence, and with better words about yourself. In the future, your brilliance will be seen brightly by us who love you. For they are well whenever and wherever your situation is better and pleasanter.

Scholarios was a man of many faces. Without revealing his support of Theodoros, and using language in keeping with his role as a judge, he wrote Cheilas:

Such is your case. We shall not believe you, and forget the evidence of your actions, and we shall not listen to you belittling your state when we have many fine witnesses who honor it, and justly so.

A good bit of the Scholarios letter to Cheilas comments on letters from him, overwritten and somewhat hysterical as was his style in distress (τοῖς γράμμασιν ἦν μετ´ὑπερβολῆς), but it also dryly indicates that their situations under Constantine had changed from what they previously had been under John:

You are abandoning us who have no wish to show contempt, and who respect the eagerness of a friend . . . Let this suffice us then. We share your happiness in the good will of our best leaders as we ourselves often enjoyed it in splendor, but now let us abandon and be free of it, thinking that we and you together with us are fortunate. We are enjoying this opinion equitably, and taking pleasure in a reputation for virtue in place of our former splendor. For we, along with them, shall celebrate the brother for his praiseworthy clemency -- don't you think? -- for through that all the best will come from both God and men.

Eugenikos wrote:

You are prevented from writing frequently by the crowd of problems that surround you . . . Write, then, whenever you find it easier for you. . . . Write something short: that will be dearer and more precious than the longer effusions of others, and show by this your longing and purest feeling toward us as from the beginning.

Cheilas eventually returned to Mistra where he then became mesazon for Demetrios. In a letter to the Gemistos brothers, when their father died, Bessarion concluded:

Be well, and speak to Nikephoros Prinkeps Cheilas for me, telling him to know that he is loved by me for his goodness more than ever before.

There is much evidence for the emotionality of Cheilas' personality, and when hostile gossip produced hurt feelings , Eugenikos had written:

I learned from one of your countrymen here, a warm supporter of yours, and the good son of one of my associates, that certain ill-wishers here have corrupted the good and wise information that you receive, announcing complete untruths and have claimed that I have condemned you frequently and to many people when, by the grace of God, what I do is just the opposite, fervently and continuously. You are, with the aid of God one of those we praise, and we are not given to slandering.

John Eugenikos left his estate in Cheilas' care during his trip to Trebizond in 1454-55. Then he had a letter from his son George (the deaths of his younger brothers were discussed in the previous entry). Eugenikos wrote Cheilas with such graciousness that it becomes difficult to discover that Cheilas had been negligent.  The wolves are a puzzlement: they are generally taken as raiding neighbors, but a mountain village on the slopes of the Taygetos range is likely to be a sheep-herding village and I suspect these are real wolves.

Not but that if you stood aside for a while from our common understanding and firm resolve for the better, something that happens to people who are distracted by many important things, as nature has it though it may be against their will, nonetheless keeping in mind the letter of warm mutual affection, and those bright hopes of ours for those around you, and what we set up for my son when I left, and you promised, what I begged from you in earlier letters for yourself and those under your care, a grant to us concerning everything where you are and whatever or ours there is. My son George needs help frequently, and the village along with him, which will provide for his and my survival when I, God willing, shall return. The village is frequently besieged, and excavations are dug under the fences by the wolves nearby, and who could be a better manager and a greater assistance for us than you, when you are led by God.  




Again, thanks to Pierre MacKay for his translations.

Pavane for a Dead Princess: Part Ten

Text of the 1433 poem to Cleofe, in Marciana Gr Z 533 (coll. 778) f. 48b,
a collection of personal documents put together by Bessarion.  Photo, John Burke.

I have written about this poem in the past, and for a few this entry may be repetitive, but it is an important poem to me and, I think, important historically. When Cleofe Malatesta Palaiologina died in childbirth "the shattering of a precious crystal," said Cheilas, on Good Friday of 1433, her husband Theodoros was devastated. Testimony from his friends -- Gemistos, Bessarion, Pepagomenos -- gives a portrait of a man completely incapacitated by grief. But at some time in that first month of her absence, he constructed a love poem to her, bringing together passion and loss in a structure informed by his own scholarship, and by the new world she had opened to him.

Although, my dearest, we were once united,
being one flesh, the word of God claims
that it is better now to be together in the spirit,
you, living in thought, looking down from Heaven
upon my life, my words, my ways, and thought,

seeing all clearly as it is your right,
I, alas, torn apart, living in pain,
calling out for you with scalding tears,
for me, one thing is left, one good thing, song.

And so, portraying you in this image,

I have put myself beside you in every sense
wishing to be united in a third form of union.
so as to quench the terrible fire of longing
and to empty out the agony from my soul.

But, you who have died but live with God, deservedly,
when in the same tomb necessity brings
my bones together with yours in the fourth way
then, showing me what lies beyond the five senses
unite with me in the fifth and greater way
to share in delight and in the sight of God
my courage lies with you, who possess and indeed
give me, as my fellow-poet, this song.

Cleofe, his fellow-poet, made it possible for him to write. Before he was able to work, he was driven back in his grief to a poem she had showed him, one her father had written when her own mother died in childbirth.  It is written in the tradition of the family friend Petrarch:

The holy lady is dead, who used to hold
my spirit with hers, quiet and content;
Now she lives in heaven, and I in torment
am left, another man from what I was:

     not man, but brute, so that I should have
followed her body, life extinguished,
never to leave the side of her tomb
but burned myself where her heart lies.

     Then perhaps my soul might follow her
in celestial triumph, where all live
eternally by divine power.

    Yet if I with all my force were to be kept
from following her, at least
my body would be buried with her sacred bones

The fifth line -- "non huom ma bruto" -- and its verse described his condition to himself. Pepagomenos may have given him opium to calm him, and the ideas of "brute" and "drug" may have driven his tangles of thought to the Theocritean idyll about the brute, Cyclops, grieving for the loss of a lady:

There is no other drug for love . . . nor salve, nor poultice,

except the Muses, and this is something sweet and gentle

for men, yet it is not easy to discover it.

And this was then the crystal about which his poem grew.   Several things are happening in his poem.  The first, perhaps the least important is that there are two bits of information about imperial lives in Mistra.  For one, he expected to be buried in the same tomb with her at the palace chapel of Ag. Sophia.  For another, he had arranged for a double portrait to be painted over the tomb.

Theodoros may originally have set out to structure the poem on the five senses, a reasonable Byzantine and Renaissance approach, paralleling the senses to five ways in which he and Cleofe might achieve union.  He managed Touch, Sight, and Hearing, before he wisely gave up on Taste and Smell, and realized that he had to go beyond the senses, yet, if this what what he had planned, there is no sense of incompleteness of intent.

He enumerates forms of union, beginning with the union of one flesh, a union of which he had been frighted for the first six years of legal marriage, and a union which had clearly brought him joy.  He tests the idea that God's will for a spiritual union might be better, a second form of union, but the great distance between Cleofe in Heaven and him on earth reduces him to scalding tears -- tears only too familiar to those of us who have survived the loss of a partner.  But the idea of song, of poetry, remains.

He now has a portrait of her, of the two of them together, a third form of union which has not brought the comfort he expected, and he does anticipate an eventual burial with her, a forth form which he knows is beyond their senses.

There is a fifth way to find union, the ultimate union in a shared delight in the presence of God, a Dantean expression of the beatific vision, to which Cleofe must have introduced him in their shared examination of poetry.  It is a rare poet who can bring the Cyclops into the Paradisio, but Theodoros concludes with Cleofe as sharer and Muse -- ξυνεργὸς -- in this work of song -- μέλος

The original languages of these poems will be found here.  The translations from the Greek are by Pierre A. MacKay.

George Gemistos Plethon at Mistra

Holograph manuscript of George Gemistos Plethon, Marciana, Venice.

A great deal of twaddle has been written about Mistra and Plethon (a name he never used) by people who ought to have known better:

. . . the imagination offers a splendid choice, whether it be of warriors or artists, of gracious ladies or learned philosophers, of the Villehardouin lords revelling in the loveliness of the countryside, of the dark-bearded Despots in their ceremonial robes discussing with their architects and artists how to add to the city's glories, or of the great philosopher Plethon himself talking to his pupils, while the Lady Cleope leaned from her litter to greet him as she passed . . .

Here strolled Plethon, the famous philosopher, surrounded by students who had journeyed from the four corners of the Byzantine world to listen to his teachings.

In fact, most of the scholars, theologians, philosophers, artists, and architects melt away with the snows of Taygetos if you attempt to find out who they were, or how many.  Consider Plethon's "students from the four corners of the world." We have, in fact, evidence for only two individuals as his students -- Bessarion and Mark Eugenikos, and possibly Scholarios. Some claim Laionikos Chalcokondyles was a student, but the source used to prove that comes from Cyriaco of Ancona who merely used both names in the same paragraph. Undoubtedly most of those who encountered Gemistos took away ideas and learning, but this is something that happens in serious conversation, and serious conversations in themselves are not normally considered school. 

We have no evidence that Gemistos was Theodoros' tutor and we have no evidence that he led any kind of pagan cell: given the intense religiosity of Theodoros II and his closest associates, it is difficult to imagine how such a deviant organization could have been maintained. That was invented by Scholarios who seems to have come to despise Gemistos, despite both being anti-Union.  Scholarios, ever the opportunist, likely resented Gemistos for being so honored in Mistra. He had wanted a position at Mistra himself, feeling inadequately valued in Constantinople, and had written a whining letter to Theodoros begging for an invitation.  Even Demetrios honored Gemistos, despite his political alignment with Scholarios, and Scholarios' correspondence with his wife.

When Gemistos arrived in the Morea is unknown. His introduction to Manuel’s funeral oration is an indication of a close relationship to Manuel, not of residence in the Morea. Gemistos may well have traveled with Manuel in 1407-8 and 1415, at which time he is identified as one of the four καθολικοὶ κριταί, the members of the highest court of Constantinople. His letters to Theodoros, between 1416 and 1418, and Manuel in 1418, about the reorganization of the Morea, do suggest that he had been in the Morea, at least for a while, but they are no proof of residence: he could well have studied the situation on trips and from documents. That Doukas identifies him as a member of the Senate in Constantinople in 1438 means little beyond the survival of the title: there was no Senate, and no action recorded for it since 1204, and in 1438 Gemistos was in Florence at the Council of Union.

A great many writers put him in Mistra by 1410, based on the theory that since he was judged dangerously influential in Constantinople, Manuel sent him to Mistra where he could contaminate the adolescent Theodoros.  This too is twaddle, if you stop to think about it.

While we have manuscripts from Gemistos, all we know that he actually did at Mistra was to speak at Cleofe's memorial service, and have a conversation with John.

The source that comes closest to indicating a date for Gemistos' arrival is Theodoros' statement in 1433, after Cleofe died, that George Gemistos had been sent by Manuel a few years earlier "to be in our service" and "our" would then have made his arrival after early 1421 when Theodoros and Cleofe were married. Manuel died in late July 1425, which would be the latest possibility for Gemistos’ arrival in the Morea. He was clearly at Mistra in 1427, as the 1433 statement confirmed and extended the gift of land Theodoros had made Gemistos in November 1427, in which he was"to serve our rule."

The problem here with this as evidence is the use of the first-person plural. Is this the royal "we" or does it have a more personal meaning? These grants to Gemistos are the only two extant Greek documents from Theodoros I have found (please let me know if there is another), and both speak of "our" service, one use of the plural in each where the singular -- τὴν βασιλείαν μου/my rule ‒ is otherwise the norm. Both John and Demetrios adjusted the land grant: neither used the plural. In the four personal grants Constantine made in the Morea, there are twenty singulars and five plurals. In the grant to Demetrios Mamonas Gregoras, which survives in a seventeenth-century copy, there are four singulars and three plurals, one of them "in our service," and all four include Theodoros in "our." The fourth grant, for Gemistos -- there are five different Palaiologos documents for the same land -- uses two plurals where it refers to Constantine and Theodoros. The evidence indicates a strong tendency towards a use of the plural to indicate more than one person and, on that basis, provides a reason for thinking Gemistos took up permanent residence at Mistra after Theodoros and Cleofe were married.

Gemistos' writings allow the idea that some of the service he provided Theodoros and Cleofe had to do with gently educating Theodoros regarding the matter of sex  (he denied Cleofe a sexual relationship for the first six years of their marriage) and it may be important that the first land grant to Gemistos was made shortly before the birth of their first child. Even if the written text comes from the Laws, considered a late work, there is no reason the ideas could not have been discussed years earlier.  Ironically, when Scholarios praised Theodoros as a ruler, speaking at his memorial in 1448, he described him as guided by ideas of justice which can also be found in the Laws.

To judge from the survivals of documents from Mistra concerning Gemistos and his family, we  assume a particular closeness to the Palaiologos family. Had other documents survived for other families, perhaps they would be seen as equally close, or closer, but there are fewer than ten survivals for other individuals in comparison with five for the Gemistos family. These five documents record gifts of land, first to Gemistos, and then to his sons. The first, from Theodoros in late 1427, two months before Cleofe gave birth, gave Gemistos a kastro and village at Phanari, making him the governor of a small territory for life, which could be passed on to his legitimate sons (γνήσιοι παῖδες) Demetrios and Andronikos.

A year later, John VIII confirmed this gift and added to it a property at Bryse, possibly considering that Gemistos had two sons who should each have his own inheritance, and probably as a gift of appreciation for the practical advice John had received from Gemistos on the annoying question of Church Union while he was at Mistra.  (In Florence Gemistos recalled that when he discussed the council with John during his trip to the Morea in 1428, he warned that "your visit will accomplish nothing and get nothing for us.")

The Gemistos family, like the Sphrantzes family, was intertwined with the Palaiologos family over at least two generations: Theodoros, John, and Constantine use οἰκεῖος (member of the household) for George Gemistos, and Demetrios uses οἰκεῖοι for his sons.  There may be a slight hint that Demetrios and Andronikos Gemistos were young at the time of the first gift of land in 1427, and that they were both of age by 1433, as that year, after Cleofe’s death, Theodoros issued another document in which he made Demetrios governor of Phanari, and Andronikos governor of Bryse and a place called Kastri.  In early 1449, just before leaving Mistra for Constantinople, Constantine issued an argyrobull confirming Theodoros’ gift of lands, quoting heavily from the 1433 text. Finally, in July 1450, Demetrios Palaiologos -- conventionally assumed to have been antagonistic to Gemistos -- issued an argyrobull to Demetrios and Andronikos again confirming that of Theodoros.  Gemistos was over 90 at this point: does this document indirectly suggest that he was failing severely?

The Spanish princess marriages

 Alfonso V.

"Spanish Princess" came into the United States by the 19th century as the name of a scam, and it would be difficult to prove that it was not a scam used on the Palaiologues in the 1440s.  The phrase may derive from the "Spanish prisoner" scam of 1588 in which money was sought to free a high-ranking prisoner. A high-ranking lady was offered as part of the reward in that one.

From 1442 to 1458, Alfonso V of Aragon, Barcelona, and Mallorca, was also king of Naples and Sicily.  Many of the Catalan ships that turn up in Moreote history were his -- it was one of his ships that took Constantine to Constantinople to be Emperor. When Constantine briefly held Athens between 1444 and 1446, Alfonso asked for Constantine to give it to him so he could renew Catalan Greece. For at least a decade, Alfonso held out promises -- to Constantinople, to Constantine, to Theodoros, to Thomas, to Demetrios -- of financial aid, of ships and troops, of brides.  Brides were of some concern: there were no male heirs after their generation to the throne of the Eastern Empire, and Constantine and Theodoros were currently unmarried.

The story of Alfonso V is much too involved to relate here but some very slight details from the Spanish-princess promises have survived.

The summer of 1443 the Neapolitan consul to Constantinople, Pere Rocafort, had taken the new King Alfonso a series of proposals he had worked out with John: in exchange for the support of twenty to twenty-five galleys, Alfonso could have his choice of Imbros, Lemnos, or Skiros. John's brothers in the Morea could produce 40,000 horsemen and 20,000 archers (again, the epenthetic zero appears). Alfonso was to have a consul at Patras.  Thomas was asked for a coastal castle, while Constantine was to give Alfonso the fief of Chalandritza, inland from Patras, for a colony.  Bessarion thought this would be a great help for the Morea and wrote Constantine, "It will be of great benefit to our power and our future hopes to give an enthusiastic welcome to volunteers from whatever part of the external world who wish to dwell in Peloponnesus."

In addition, Alfonso was to arrange marriages for Constantine and Theodoros to two Spanish ladies related to him: "la una, jermana de don Pedro de Cardona, l'altra, filla del comte Gilabert dels Exovars."  The one for Theodoros was Beatriu Coloira Caterina de Cardona i de Villena, daughter of the Catalan Count of Collesano in Sicily, but whatever happend, she was married to two other people.

From 1443 through the summer of 1448, Theodoros was Despot of Selybria, a two-day ride from Constantinople, and a position that allowed him to obsess about becoming Emperor himself. He must have been conducting his own negotiations as in 1444, the Prince of Taranto had contracted to give him his niece and heir, Isabella of Claramonte, as a bride. 

Isabella was heiress to much of southern Italy, and the titles of Prince of Achaia and Latin Emperor of Constantinople had belonged to several direct ancestors. Probably no heiress in western Europe was more suitable for marriage to an heir to the throne of Constantinople.  Unfortunately for Theodoros, Taranto's overlord, Alfonso V of Naples, stepped in very quickly and married her to his (bastard) son and heir, Ferdinand. Ferdinand had six children by her, eight by other women. 

Theodoros apparently continued to negotiate for a Spanish bride, but he died abruptly of plague at the end of July 1448, before anything could happen.  One of the eulogies for him says: 

O most holy despot, you sent out envoys to Iberia suggesting a most advantageous course for yourself, but time had different ideas and wedded you to a tomb. The returning messenger will carry a fine message, that you are dead, you have been committed to burial and that you have no further concern with life. How your betrothed will cry out, as instead of being surrounded by brilliance and splendor, she becomes dark and downcast. No wedding hymn will be sung for her, nor will the bridal lamps be lit; there will be only sad music, the shearing of her hair in mourning and wailing, prophetic of many evils, All this she has unhappily come to through your death.

That is all we know about that one. 

My great appreciation to Daniel Duran y Duelt for introducing me to this topic.

Misunderstanding Mistra, Part Three

Angel, Pantanassa, Mistra.

I have, for some time, been offended by the omission of Cleofe's name from an inscription in the Pantanassa copied by Michel Fourmont in 1730. The inscription mentions Lord Neilos as Metropolitan of Lakedaimon and the Patriarch Lord Dionysos, and then says:

ἐπὶ βασιλείας τῶν εὐσεβεστάτων / βασιλειῶν ἡμῶν κῦρ Θεοδώρου Παλαιολόγου τοῦ πορφυρογενήτου / κατα μηνα σεπτεμβριους του 6937 ‒ "in the reign of our most devout rulers, Lord Theodoros Palaiologos in September 1428." 

To mention "our rulers" and then give only one name suggested that Fourmont had copied carelessly. But this inscription has been the foundation of the conviction that the Pantanassa can be dated to 1428.

A recent article by the wonderful art historian, Tito Papamastorakis (citation below) addresses problems of this inscription, as well as a number of other Mistra issues, and I am lifting from him for this entry.    It was already known that Neilos and Dionysos did not co-exist in the same year, as an inscription from Gortynia has a Matthaios as Metropolitan in 1427-28.  Papamastorakis translates εὐσεβεστάτων βασιλειων as "pious emperors" and believes John VIII and Maria of Trebizond should be named, as well as Theodoros and Cleofe.  But various contemporary writings from Mistra refer to the Despot as βασιλειος and his wife as βασιλισσα, so I don't worry about John and Maria.

Papamastorakis went hunting in the Mistra museum storerooms and found a slab of marble with an early Christian cross on one side, and on the surviving border the part of the inscription that mentions Lord Neilos.

 τῆς ἀγιωτάτης μ(ητ)ροπόλεως Λακεδαιμονίας

Papamastorakis finds that the mixing of Σ with C for sigma, and also the Ω indicate a late date for the inscription, after the 16th century and before 1730.  This altar inscription is, then, a fake, and the date of 1428 is quite useless for dating either the founding of the Pantanassa or its paintings.

Still, I wonder -- were there so many travellers in the 17th century that it was thought worthwhile to forge an altar?  Might the monks have been trying to recreate an altar they thought they knew something about?  Or was the creation of the altar intended to support the Pantanassa's side in an argument between monasteries over authority?

Nevertheless, the Pantanassa angel above is a small miracle.

 

            Tito Papamastorakis, "Myzithras of the Byzantines / Mistra to Byzantinists," in T. Kiousopoulou> Οἱ Βυζαντίνες Πόλεις (8ος-15ος Αιωνας). Rethymon 2012: 277- 296.  I am glad to make a copy of this available if needed.

 

When your father is the Emperor

  The Palaiologos family, 1408.  

[Note: I have obtained new information which has changed my mind somewhat about Manuel as a father. I no longer agree with what I have written here.]

I have lately been writing a chapter on the brothers Palaiologos, one that has made me quite sad.  It is clear that John, Theodoros, Andronikos, Constantine, Demetrios, and Thomas have to be examined both in parallel -- they are always written about in isolation -- and they have to be considered within the atmosphere created by their father, Manuel II. Manuel was fundamentally a good man.  He had remarkable endurance and courage. He was an outstanding emperor. He loved his sons -- and in the addresses to John (below) he calls him φίλτατε, dearest, but he often demonstrated it in ways that must have often been imperceptible to them. I could write another chapter analyzing aspects of Manuel's life and how it might have affected his attitudes towards his sons, but that does not belong in this book.

Sphrantzes' account of his own relationship with Manuel, one he considered generous and loving, and one of which he was intensely proud, is instructive.  If, perhaps, not taken completely as gospel, it still reflects a teenager's perspective. He wrote, "When I became a personal minister to [the Emperor], [Constantine] was able to obtain through me many favors he needed from his father." Manuel could be indulgent to his young attendant where he could not be indulgent directly to his son. 

An example of Manuel's attitude as a father comes from his commentary he wrote to his compilation of dream interpretation. In a completely gratuitous comment he says, "The affection [for a small child] will be short because (as I have observed) Greek children are especially prone to lose their charm after two or three years of age."

This is the age, as parents will recognize, when children discover the use of the word, "No"; the age when they sometimes strive fiercely for the independence they are not yet capable of using. They tend to fall a lot, have tantrums, be more difficult to manage than a month or so ago when they were perfectly loveable.  This is the age when they leave babyhood and begin to become human beings.This is clearly not the first time Manuel has expressed this view, as he says, and although there is no hint as to the date of the composition of this book, or of the manuscript, the totally extraneous nature of the comment in its location supports the idea that this was in fact his view of small children.

 In his recent dissertation, Florin Leonte has made abundantly clear Manuel's style of fatherhood, although Leonte's  primary concern is with the rhetorical devices and genre to be found in Manuel's various orations and philosophical treatises. I am basing these next comments on my understanding of Leonte.

About the time the family portrait above was painted -- John would have been 16 or so and had been made co-ruler, as you can tell by his dress which is just like his father's, Manuel addressed to him a long essay, Ὑποθῆκαι βασιλικῆς ἀγωγῆς, or Foundations of Imperial Conduct. In this he referred to John as a μειράκιον, a boy, who spent more time hunting and playing than he did studying. It is striking to learn that John, whom we can see as nearly obsessive about hunting in 1438 and 1439, had already become so attached to this physical and emotional outlet.  (I should add that by 16, John had already mastered the byways of extremely complex and formal Byzantine Greek, however much playing he had been doing.) Or that his father thought him so attached.  But then, Manuel mentions that he has given John a horse and an eagle -- wonderful presents for any boy -- and that now he is giving him more formal training. 

 

Then by 1410 when John was 18 and thus of age, Manuel followed the Foundations with seven Orations. Leonte thinks these orations were delivered in public, before an audience focused on John. In the sixth Manuel criticized John for mistakes, in the seventh for rudeness and being critical, never complimenting John or pointing out any strengths. (This from a man commonly known to have a violent temper.) However much John needed correction, it is painful to think of what must have been the effect of hearing himself publicly lectured and criticized by his father. There is evidence from later in his life that criticism, and conflict, would intensify an already chronic illness, while the pattern of humiliation set so early accompanied John even after death. Consider the incidents of his forced marriage to a woman extremely unattractive to him, his having to take jewels to pawn in Venice, his having to be carried in to the first session of the Council of Union, his rejection by the clergy and people of Constantinople after his return from the Council, his long illness, and the church’s refusal of Christian burial to his body -- all of them public demonstrations of inadequacy. 

 

Speaking both as father and as emperor, Manuel addressed the Orations to ethical concerns -- pleasure in the fifth, courtesy to courtiers in the seventh, and there is much internal evidence that these are statements about previous conversations between father and son. Manuel used Plato, Aristotle, and the Bible as his authorities, arguing that true happiness could only be found by right action and education, and humility was the highest virtue a person could attain. Despair (ἀπόγνοσις) and judgment of others’ conduct led the list of sins. There is much that is interesting in these Orations, but my concern here is the unconscious cruelty in the humiliation of a bright and sensitive boy, young man, any boy or young man, in public.

It is difficult to think that these texts, or similar letters, would not have been urged on the younger sons for study in their roles as rulers -- the second says, "it is necessary for us to say what we think about this issue for your pleasure and equally for the benefit of those who would come across this work" -- and that Manuel, when visiting Theodoros and Andronikos in their despotates, would not have spent considerable time repeating many of the points he had directed to John.

Constantine well-internalized his father's remarks on duty, not from these Orations but from the Dialogue on Marriage: "But a ruler’s and an emperor's duty is to accept any risk in order to save his people, and to regard dying a light burden, whenever freedom is at stake and whenever the risk concerns . . . Faith." Typically, John Barker in his biography of Manuel gives great attention to the manuscript provenances of these Orations but says nothing about their contents, and certainly nothing about Manuel as a father, even while criticizing John as "mediocre."

We know nothing of the attitude of Helena towards the children at any age -- she bore ten, and saw seven of them die, five of them as children. The only clue of her feelings towards any of them comes when John returned to Constantinople, emotionally ravaged and physically ill from the Council of Union, the dangerous winter voyage, and the death of his wife -- his mother refused to pray for him as emperor because of his support of Union. Constantine has always been considered particularly close to their mother -- he was named for her father, the second child to be so named, and he seemed to have used the Dragaś name -- but she also refused to pray for him in turn as emperor because of his support of Union. 

This family isolated its children, even from each other. The boys appear to have had their own households, tutors, and staffs, at about the age of seven.  Andronikos was sent off to Thessaloniki as Despot at the age of 8, Theodoros to Mistra at the age of 8 or 10.

It is not enough to say that such treatment was typical of the upper-class late Byzantine family, or normal within the Palaiologos family.  It still created lonely children.

The Pepagomenos Problem

Formally-dressed 15th C Byzantines.

When Manuel Palaiologos came to the Morea in 1415, he brought with him a doctor, Demetrios Pepagomenos who served as a secretary. This Pepagomenos, a correspondent of John Chortasmenos, is said to have also been a correspondent of John Eugenikos and Bessarion. This Pepagomenos is further identified as the Demetrios Pepagomenos who delivered a monody on the death of Cleofe Malatesta, the wife of Theodoros II, and an author of at least four medical treatises. I resist the idea that these are all the same individual. I cannot definitively prove otherwise, although I can try.

In Mazaris' Journey to Hades, composed in 1414-1415, Mazaris encounters a Dr. Pepagomenos in Hades and has a long conversation in which Pepagomenos mentions two of his his sons -- Demetrios ("Lizard-Eyes"), also a doctor, and the highly ambitious Theodosios ("Little Shit"). Mazaris makes a good deal of humor out of Pepagomenos once poisoning himself, and refers to his stopping bleeding with the herb ox-eye (βοόφθαλμον). The significance of its being mentioned at all lies in the fact that a Demetrios Pepagomenos made a collection of "folk" remedies.

Mazaris' Pepagomenos is sometimes identified with the first Demetrios Pepagomenos here, though that is a problem if Mazaris' Pepagomenos is actually dead. If the death is a literary device, there is no problem. But the Pepagomenos of interest to me is the Pepagomenos who was a friend of Bessarion and Eugenikos, and spoke at the death of Cleofe, who is more often identified as the son of Pepagomenos-in-Hades, Demetrios "Lizard-Eyes" Pepagomenos. (You can see the kind of eyes that were probably meant in Piero della Francesca's King Solomon.)

The Pepagomenos of my interest was a man of wide-ranging curiosity and great empathy, loving, and much-loved by his friends. He wrote a famous treatise on the treatment for gout, which was translated into Latin and printed in 1517 and reprinted as late as 1743. He is an easy writer, concerned for his patient's pain (he used opium, and colchicine, still the drug of choice for gout pain), frequently writing, "Δοκεῖ μοι" -- "it seems to me." He also made a collection of folk remedies, wrote treatises on the feeding and medication of hawks, and on dogs. He seems to have become the court doctor, and to have attended Cleofe's childbirths.

Chortasmenos' letters can be clearly dated to 1414-1415, when their addressee was in the Morea with Manuel II. One of the letters comments on problems that Pepagomenos had had with a patient. Dating the Eugenikos and Bessarion letters is a little more chancy. Their addressee, the doctor and writer Pepagomenos, was most likely to have met Bessarion at Mistra, where Bessarion was only between 1433 and 1437.  At the time of the letter from Bessarion, Pepagomenos' wife has given birth while they were away. It is  possible that this absence, or the first absence, can be identified with some specificity.

On March 25, 1436, the despot Theodoros II arrived in Constantinople on the ship with the bride for his brother Demetrios. Theodoros had come to Constantinople with the intent of remaining as successor to the throne. Four years earlier, his brother, the emperor John, had had a long period of extremely painful and paralyzing illness, possibly an aggravated chronic rheumatism, with extreme muscle weakness, if not actual paralysis.

Accounts from 1437 through 1440 give similar descriptions of a fugitive illness which was diagnosed as gout. I suggest that John had had another grave episode, and of course Theodoros had great familiarity with the family gout, having watched his uncle Theodoros I in his illness and death. A letter from Bessarion to Theodoros while he was in Constantinople remarks on the grand procession with which John had honored Theodoros, and acknowledges that Constantinople had made a great deal of him. Theodoros had found himself quite popular. Bessarion and Scholarios both comment on what a good talker he was -- they seem to suggest discourse rather than conversation -- and, of course, perceived proximity to the throne contributes greatly to popularity.

Theodoros had taken with him an elaborate epitaphios for the tomb of his parents (though his mother was still living) with double portraits of both and sixty-some lines of poetry, all embroidered in gold. I believe he took another present. He took Pepagomenos, the great specialist in gout and treatment of pain. Pepagomenos' treatise on gout is dedicated to "the emperor," and although the emperor is unnamed and the dedication gives no hint of identity or of illness, I suggest that Pepagomenos dedicated his treatise to John. There is no evidence of this, only coincidence, but a great deal of Byzantine history is written on coincidence. I also believe that Pepagomenos was unwilling to leave his pregnant wife in Mistra without good medical care and took her with him to Constantinople where his skill did save her life and that of their child. It was a boy: Bessarion's letter tells of the delight when they learned about it in Mistra.

Bessarion's moving letter compliments him on the survival of his wife and son: Pepagomenos had written Bessarion about his concerns, and then Bessarion praises the exceptional -- equal -- relationship between husband and wife. But there is another aspect to Pepagomenos writing Bessarion about those lives saved from a dangerous childbirth. They had both spoken at the memorial for Theodoros' wife, Cleofe, who died in childbirth, together with her child -- in Pepagomenos' care. Both friends had shared a specific and terrible loss, which could not have been away from their minds with this new pregnancy. 

And the warmth and affection of Bessarion and later of Eugenikos for Kyria Pepagomeni and the boys contrasts strikingly with the fact that Theodoros has left in Mistra his eight-year old daughter, Helena, and has no intention of returning. Perhaps he thought John would die soon, he would become Emperor, and he could then send for her, but her later life was not the life of a person who had received much affection as a child.  

It fits with what we learn of Pepagomenos from these letters that it was he who gave Helena, "your dear child who weeps for you bitterly," more than a bare mention at her mother's memorial -- "Your beloved daughter mourns you, bereaved of her dear mother at so young an age, at a time when she most needed you, and required your instruction and advice, who have left her with no maternal consolation."  He was the one who described the quality of companionship in marriage that Theodoros and Cleofe had achieved, who described Cleofe  visiting the poor, taking firewood, and fixing food for them -- "taking no account of the heat of the fire, the intense burden of the smoke, and the inescapable duration of this service," giving assistance to widows and strangers. He was the one who noted that Cleofe made marriages possible for women of the court.

While Papagomenos was away on another trip, he left his sons with the Eugenikos family.  John Eugenikos is said to have been at Mistra between 1439 and 1447, which somewhat suggests a date for the trip. (Cleofe and Bessarion were gone when Eugenikos arrived: his presence must have been a great joy to Pepagomenos and Theodoros.) A manuscript in Pepagomenos' handwriting, containing his own writings and others that he copied -- surely in Constantinople -- can be dated by the watermarks on the paper between 1437 and 1444, which focuses the date a little more.  His wife was with him on this trip, too.

John Eugenikos compliments the excellence of two boys, calling them "that pair of ours, and especially Nicholaos" (there was a remarkable and brilliant Nicholaos Pepagomenos in Constantinople in the 14th century), and then he compliments their mother's excellence and intelligence, and again, the relationship between husband and wife. In another letter, Eugenikos describes a group that he had invited to hear a new letter from Pepagomenos that had brought spring to their winter. (This is a topos in Byzantine letters, but that does not mean that it was not winter.)  He included "our good Nicholaos" and his friends in the audience -- it looks as if Nicholaos was the older son. (I think -- can't prove -- that the younger was Giorgos.) 

Everyone was tremendously enthusiastic about the letter (this is a topos in Byzantine letters, too),  then Nicholaos and his friends took the letter, "treating it lovingly," and tried to work it out for themselves. Their Greek had not yet become Byzantine. It is an appealing glimpse of Mistra life, the circle of friends including the boys in their reading. All three of these letters reveal a warmth in relationships that -- if it existed -- is concealed in the pompous oratory and discourses on Athenian history and the Muses in the letters of Chortasmenos. These are letters from different generations, from different cultures. (Chortasmenos taught Bessarion in Constantinople: the generation difference is clear.)

[LATE NOTE: I have learned that Eugenikos was not in the Morea between 1430 and 1440, so if Theodoros took Pepagomenos to Constantinople in 1436, the boys were not with Eugenikos that year.]
 

Unusual for a name that shows up over and over, Pepagomenos seems not to have been a name involved in political matters, or representing one court or another in the West, and mercifully he left no letters of advice to emperors or disquisitions on the Procession of the Holy Spirit.  He hasn't left any letters at all, which is only to be regretted. He seems to have died about 1450.

Possibly the doctor and writer Pepagomenos who interests me is the same individual who accompanied Manuel and corresponded with Chortasmenos. If the sons of Mazaris' Pepagomenos-in-Hades were adult in 1415, the older son Demetrios is a much more reasonable candidate. However, other than the coincidence of name, there is no positive evidence. That a Demetrios Pepagomenos corresponded with Chortasmenos, and a Demetrios Pepagomenos corresponded with Bessarion and Eugenikos, does not require belief that they were the same Demetrios Pepagomenos. 

I have several publications on my desk on Demetrios Pepagomenos.  I have the PLP and the ODB which give the bones.  I have four articles that discuss the manuscripts associated with the medical writer Demetrios Pepagomenos, and I needed those articles, particularly the splendid one by Lazaris,* to overcome my unhappiness at finding an important source described as "oral tradition." I have the Greek, Latin, and French versions of his book on gout, and the Greek of his collection of medical cures.  Assorted texts mention him as one of the intellectuals at Mistra. Nothing considers him as a human being and an exceptionally humane one.  But if you look at the character of Demetrios Pepagomenos, Bessarion, and Cleofe, you could really believe that for a brief shining hour, Mistra lived an ideal.

*  S. Lazaris. "La Production nouvelle en médecine vétérinaire sous les Paléologues et l’oeuvre cynégétique de Dèmètrios Pépagôménos," in M. Cacouros & M.-H. Congourdeau, eds., Philogophie et Scences à Byzance de 1204 à 1453. Actes de la Table Ronde organisée au XXe Congrès International d’Études Byzantines. Leuven 2006: 225-267.