Demetrius Cydones

Demetrius Cydones (born c. 1324, Thessalonica, Byzantine Empire [now in Greece]—died c. 1398, Crete) was a Byzantine humanist scholar, statesman, and theologian who introduced the study of the Greek language and culture to the Italian Renaissance.

Cydones was a student of the Greek classical scholar and philosopher Nilus Cabasilas. In 1354 he went to Italy, where he studied the writings of the leading medieval philosophical theologians. Attracted to Latin Scholasticism, he made Greek translations of the major works of Western writers, including tracts by St. Augustine of Hippo (5th century) and St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. By 1365 he had made a profession of faith in the Latin church.

Returning to Constantinople, Cydones was named prime minister by Emperor John V Palaeologus (1369). With the weakening of Byzantine resistance to the Arabs, he retired to private life about 1383. In 1390 Cydones returned to Italy and opened an academy of Greek culture in Venice. Attracting Venetian and Florentine students, he effected a cultural exchange that diffused Greek language and thought throughout Italy and served as a stimulus for the Italian Renaissance. He formed, moreover, the nucleus of a group of Byzantine intellectuals that strove for Christian unity between East and West. Recalled to Constantinople in 1391 by his former pupil Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, Cydones resumed his ministerial post, resigning in 1396, when hostility to his Latin Catholicism ultimately compelled him to retire permanently to the island of Crete.

With the support of his brother Prochorus, Demetrius opposed Hesychasm, the belief in a life of contemplation and uninterrupted prayer taught by the Eastern Orthodox monks of Mount Athos and articulated by the 14th-century ascetic-theologian St. Gregory Palamas. Applying Aristotelian logic to the Neoplatonic character of Hesychasm, the Cydones brothers accused Palamas of pantheism, only to be condemned themselves by the Orthodox Synod of 1368 that canonized Palamas.

Cydones is the author of the moral philosophical essay De contemnenda morte (“On Despising Death”), an apology for his conversion to Latin Catholicism, and a voluminous collection of 447 letters, valuable for the history of Byzantine relations with the West. The principal documentary sources for Byzantium’s gradual submission to the Turks are his Symbouleutikoi (“Exhortations”), vainly urging the Byzantine people to unite with the Latins in order to resist the Turkish onslaught; these fervent appeals give a clear picture of the hopeless position of the Byzantine Empire in about the year 1370.