The Byzantine Church, Palaiologan Era

In its last century and a half the Byzantine church governed the shrinking remnant of an empire and still did some of its most consequential work. Synods at Constantinople in 1341, 1347 and 1351 ruled in favour of the hesychast monks and made Gregory Palamas's theology the standard of Orthodoxy. Then came the harder question. With the Ottomans closing in, the emperor and the patriarch went to Italy and in 1439 signed a union with Rome at the Council of Florence, in exchange for military help that never adequately came. Mark of Ephesus refused to sign. At home the union was rejected by monks, by much of the clergy and by the city, and when it was finally proclaimed in Hagia Sophia in December 1452 it was met with open hostility. Five months later, on 29 May 1453, Constantinople fell. The same era produced the Palaiologan revival in art — the mosaics of the Chora church, the painted churches of Mystras. Some of the finest work Byzantium ever did, made while the state around it was collapsing.