ABSTRACT
Scholars have long tended to stress Pletho’s beneficial contacts with Latins and the Latin West. Nicholas of Cusa, the greatest Latin Neoplatonist of the fifteenth century before Marsilio Ficino, had considerable opportunity to interact with Pletho. Promoters of the Plethonian influence in the Latin West like to point to John Argyropoulos, the great Greek professor in Florence after the fall of Constantinople. George’s attack was nothing less than the culmination and purpose of his famous Comparatio Philosophorum Platonis et Aristotelis, which transferred to the Latin West the Byzantine Plato-Aristotle controversy. The despoina Theodora was the driving figure in the events that culminated in Pletho’s master work, the Laws, being burnt in 1460 at the monastery of the Prodomos by George Scholarios, now the monk Gennadios.
