Gennadius Scholarius - Patriarch

Patriarch

In the spring of 1454 he was consecrated by the metropolitan of Heraclea Pontica, but, since both the Church of Hagia Sophia and the palace of the patriarch were now in the hands of the Ottomans, he took up his residence successively in two monasteries of the city. While holding the episcopal office Gennadius drew up, apparently for the use of Mehmed, a confession or exposition of the Christian faith, which was translated into Turkish by Ahmed, judge of Beroea (and first printed by A. Brassicanus at Vienna in 1530).

Gennadius was unhappy as patriarch, and tried to abdicate his position at least twice, in 1456 he resigned. The full reason for this step commonly attributed to his disappointment at the sultan's treatment of Christians, though Mehmed seems to have kept the fairly tolerant conditions he had allowed to them; various writers hint darkly at other motives (see Michalcescu, op. cit. infra, 13). Eventually, he found the tensions between the Greeks and the Ottomans overwhelming.

He was later called two times to guide the Christian community as Patriarch during the turbulent period that followed the patriarchate of Isidore II. There is no consensus among scholars about the exact dates of his last two patriarchates: according to Kiminas (2009) he reigned again from April 1463 to c.June 1463 and from August 1464 to autumn 1465. Blanchet (2001) objects to the existence itself of these two additional terms.

Gennadius then, like so many of his successors, ended his days as an ex-patriarch and a monk. He lived in the monastery of John the Baptist near Serrae in Macedonia (north-east of Saloniki), where he wrote books until he died in about 1473.

Gennadius fills an important place in Byzantine history. He was the last of the old school of polemical writers and one of the greatest. Unlike most of his fellows he had an intimate acquaintance with Latin controversial literature, especially with St. Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics. He was as skilful an opponent of Catholic theology as Mark of Ephesus, and a more learned one. His writings show him to be a student not only of Western philosophy but of controversy with Jews and Muslims, of the great Hesychast question (he attacked Barlaam and defended the monks; naturally, the Barlaamites were latinophrones, in short, of all the questions that were important in his time. He has another kind of importance as the first Patriarch of Constantinople under the Turks. From this point of view he stands at the head of a new period in the history of his Church; the principles that regulated the condition of Orthodox Christians in the Turkish Empire are the result of Mehmed II's arrangement with him.