Sylvester Syropoulos on Politics and Culture in the Fifteenth-Century Mediterranean

The contributors of this volume take the Memoirs of Sylvester Syropoulos, written by a Byzantine ecclesiastical official in the fifteenth century, as their starting point in reconstructing Mediterranean living conditions and artistic and commercial exchange in the late Middle Ages. Syropoulos’s text, a rare eye-witness account of the Council of Ferrara-Florence for the union of the Greek and Latin Churches (1438-1439), is discussed as an invaluable source for political affairs at that time, as a travel account, and as a literary work. An annotated translation of the text is included.