Gemistus Pletho

Georgios Gemistos Plethon was a Greek scholar and philosopher in the dying decades of Byzantium, born around 1355. He became a chief architect of the revival of Greek learning in Western Europe, and in 1438-1439 traveled to the Council of Florence where he reintroduced Plato's ideas to a West that had lost them - though the council's attempt to reconcile the East-West Schism failed. Throughout his life he laid out a political vision in speeches, once declaring "We are Hellenes by race and culture" and proposing a reborn Byzantine Empire run on a utopian Hellenic system centered in Mystras. His last work, the Nomoi or Book of Laws, revealed what he had kept from most: he had abandoned Christianity for the classical Hellenic gods, blended with Zoroastrian wisdom. He died around 1452, called both "the last Hellene" and "the first modern Greek."