Gemistus Pletho

Georgios Gemistos, known as Plethon, was a Byzantine humanist and philosopher working in the Neoplatonic tradition. He lived from the late fourteenth century to the mid-fifteenth, in the final years of the Byzantine Empire, and his role in bringing the study of Plato back to Italy has earned him a place among the precursors of the Renaissance.

He was probably born in Constantinople and studied there and in Adrianople, where he encountered Plato's work. He admired Plato so much that he took a name of similar sound, which also means “full”. After travelling to Palestine and Cyprus, he settled in Mystras in the Peloponnese, where he taught philosophy, astronomy, history and geography and compiled digests of classical authors. His pupils included Bessarion and George Scholarius, who later became Patriarch of Constantinople and his main opponent.

His political writings, addressed in 1415 and 1418 to the emperors Theodore and Manuel, proposed reorganising the Peloponnese along the lines of Plato's Republic: a centralised monarchy, a regulated economy and a reformed legal system. His religious views were unorthodox. In De Differentiis he compared Plato's and Aristotle's conceptions of God, and in his final work, the Nomoi, he argued for a return to Greek polytheism mixed with the wisdom attributed to Zoroaster.

In 1438 and 1439 he attended the Council of Ferrara-Florence as an adviser to Emperor John VIII. There he gave lectures on the differences between Plato and Aristotle which, according to tradition, inspired Cosimo de' Medici to found the Platonic Academy in Florence, although modern scholars qualify that connection. Marsilio Ficino called him “the second Plato”. He died in Mystras around 1452 or 1454, and his influence on Italian humanism remains a subject of study.