May 29

The Tower: The Fall of Constantinople

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The Final emperor of the Byzantine Era, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died fighting in the final assault, but amid the chaos and mass of bodies, his own was never specifically found.

On today’s date in 1453, following a fifty-three-day siege, the walls of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman army of Sultan Mehmed II. At the time, the very concept of such a defeat was unimaginable; the dynamic central city had the greatest defensive fortification within the entire medieval world, and thought to be impenetrable. Built by Theodosius II in the fifth century, it had remained unbreachable for over a thousand years. And then finally, the capital of Christendom’s eastern half—and repository of the classical world’s accumulated knowledge—fell in a single catastrophic day.

What burned in those labyrinthian libraries were volumes of irreplaceable wisdom, mathematics, philosophy, and nature sciences, making what was salvageable all the more precious to scholars and leaders. And with those surviving Greek scholars as they boarded ships for Venice, Florence, and Rome, stuffed into saddle bags and large chests crafts solely for crucial manuscript, were the remnants of Constantinople’s once-vast collection.

But the fall of Constantinople was not only a political and military catastrophe; it also planted the seeds for what would become the seed of the Renaissance occult revival.

What Was In Constantinople’s the Library?

For over a thousand years, Constantinople contained the greatest library in the known world. The Imperial Library had collected texts from all across the ancient Mediterranean—the Greek philosophical tradition, Neoplatonic commentators, early Christian theologians, and of course the astronomical and mathematical works left of Alexandria, the literary heritage of Athens.

The sheer size of the collection was more than enviable, and Constantinople had had its fair share of enemies through the years. The library had survived the Fourth Crusade of 1204, as Latin Christian armies sacked the city with a brutalness usually unleashed upon pagans—looting the great churches, melting the bronze horses of the Hippodrome, and carrying off treasures never to be seen again. That could have ended the empire than and there. However, the Palaiologan dynasty—which recovered the city in 1261 and ruled until the city’s bitter final day—had been responsible for “Palaiologan Renaissance,” during which Byzantine scholars had labored to copy and preserve every ancient text in their possession.

When Mehmed’s cannons finally brought down their walls in 1453, the race to save the collected knowledge had already been underway for many decades, and much of it was completed. (Greek scholars had been immigrating west since the early fifteenth century; by the time the city fell, the many of the most renowned of those scholars—and their book collections with them—had already arrived in Italy, setting in motion a major shifts in esoteric and occult philosophies.

The Last Pagan

One of the most fascinating players in Constantinople’s eventual end had arrived fourteen years earlier. We was, by the standards of the time, a bonafide heretic.

Georgios Gemistos Plethon had spent his adult years at the Ottoman court in Adrianople, studying Zoroastrianism and occult philosophy under a Jewish mystic named Eliseus. When he eventually completed his occult education and returned to Byzantium, he founded a school of esoteric philosophy at Mistra in the Peloponnese, in an attempt to bring all he’d learned back home to the Court. He was swiftly accused of heresy by the emperor, who was only one among many who found Plethon’s teachings overtly-radical and dangerous: nothing less than a conscious attempt to overthrow both Christianity and Islam and restore the Olympian gods to their proper place. His core teachings included a an entirely new Neoplatonic and esoteric school, drawn from Plato, Zoroaster, and the Chaldean Oracles. He was lucky to remain breathing.

Despite his less-than stellar reputation, In 1438, Plethon was included in the Byzantine delegation to the Council of Ferrara-Florence—convened to negotiate the union of the Eastern and Western churches in the face of the advancing Ottoman threat. Cosimo de’ Medici, the patriarch of Florence’s ruling banking dynasty, was present at the proceedings and was immediately drawn to Plethon’s philosophies. While their fellow theologians argued over the filioque clause, Plethon gave informal lectures on Plato and Zoroaster, shocking the Italian audience with what must have seemed like revelations from another world. He proposed that there existed a prisca theologia—an “ancient theology,” or single primordial wisdom—that ran in an unbroken thread from Zoroaster through Hermes Trismegistus through Orpheus through Pythagoras through Plato. According to Plethon, all of these figures were transmitters of perennial divine knowledge—a common magical system; Christianity was not the source, he argued, it a late tributary to the existing lineage.

When Cosimo de’ Medici returned to Florence, he commissioned Marsilio Ficino to learn Greek and translate all of Plato for him to read.

Plethon died one year before Constantinople fell, leaving his magnum opus unpublished. Entitled The Laws, the enormous treatise worked as a complete manual for reconstructing the pagan religion in its entirety. It had taken years to write, and included original rituals, hymns, and Plethon’s own commentary sections. Within a year of Plethon’s death, the new Patriarch of Constantinople, Gennadios Scholarios, obtained a copy and burned it.

Twelve years after his death, Plethon’s body was secretly exhumed by Sigismondo Malatesta, the ruler of Rimini (and closeted patron of Renaissance pagan art). He was reburied in the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, a church so thoroughly redesigned as a pagan temple that the Pope called it a “shrine of devils.” The inscription on Plethon’s tomb reads in Latin: “so that the great Teacher may be among free men.”

What had survived of The Laws the mere fragments Plethon’s disciples had already copied.

The Corpus Hermeticum, and Co.

Seven years following Constantinople’s fall, a monk named Leonardo da Pistoia arrived in Florence carrying a manuscript he’d obtained in Macedonia. It contained fourteen treatises in Greek, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, or, the “Thrice-Great Hermes,”and identified with the Egyptian god Thoth. The texts themselves—a collection of mystical dialogues, cosmological treatises, and philosophical meditations describing the nature of God, the soul, and the cosmos, was called the Corpus Hermeticum.

Cosimo de’ Medici, then seventy years old and dying, knew precisely what he held in his hands. He, at once, summoned Marsilio Ficino—who was still in the middle of translating Plato—and gave him a direct instruction: stop immediately and translate this first. The complete works of Plato could wait, he told him. The Corpus Hermeticum could not. Ficino completed his Latin translation in April, 1463. Cosimo died in in August the following year, giving him mere months to read the final version.

Without Ficino’s permission, his translation was published in 1471; within a century, more than twenty editions had appeared, making the Corpus Hermeticum the most widely read philosophical text in Renaissance Europe, second only to the Bible. (But it wasn’t the only influential text that made its way around Europe. In 1468, a Byzantine nobleman who had converted to Catholicism and since risen to one of the most powerful positions within the Church named Cardinal Bessarion, gifted his personal library of 482 Greek manuscripts to Venice; the donation would eventually become the Biblioteca Marciana, one of the great libraries of Europe.)

From his personal collection, Ficino translated many crucial texts himself, including works by Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus—the complete Neoplatonic tradition that had been essentially inaccessible in the West for a thousand years. His Theologia Platonica (1469–1474) synthesized all of it into a comprehensive philosophical system that placed the human soul at the center of the cosmos—capable of ascending through the planetary spheres, communicating with divine intelligences, and performing the theurgy (divine magic) that Iamblichus had described. And from Ficino’s Florentine Academy, the current ran directly to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola—who added Kabbalah to the mix, writing his Oration on the Dignity of Man and his Conclusions (condemned by Pope Innocent VIII in 1487). And from Pico, the current ran to Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, whose Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1531) became the foundational encyclopedia of the Western magical tradition.

For the modern occultist, Constantinople’s fall marks something momentous: the moment when the accumulated esoteric learning of the classical world—preserved in Constantinople’s libraries through the long centuries when it had been unavailable in the West—was finally accessible to the world and to future generations.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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