ABSTRACT
The part of George Gemistos’ philosophy that was openly presented as his own thought to a larger public consists of some texts containing several more or less general philosophical arguments and reasoning. The earliest of the political texts is Gemistos’ letter to Manuel II, usually cited as On the Isthmus, which informs the Emperor about the situation in the Peloponnese, where Gemistos had moved probably not long before and proposes some basic reforms to improve the unfavourable situation there. According to what Gemistos says in On the Isthmus, the main reason why it is not possible to defend the Peloponnese against the incursions of ‘barbarians’, that is, the Ottoman Turks together with the Italians and other Latins, is its bad political organization. Gemistos then gives a series of examples from ancient mythology and history to support this claim. According to Gemistos, the ancient Greeks and Romans are closely related because of their origin and cultural continuity.
