It had been with difficulty that the emperor and the court party in Constantinople had persuaded the Churchmen to go to the West. While the former were willing to make many sacrifices, even perhaps to accept the pope’s supremacy, in the hope of obtaining aid against the Turks, when they recognised that the influence of Eugenius was not what they had believed it to be, they were less urgent, and certainly less able, to coerce the distinguished ecclesiastics who had been persuaded to accompany them. All were, indeed, miserably disappointed and disillusionised. Though the emperor never wavered in his determination to come to an agreement which would aid in the preservation of his empire, his own brother, Demetrius, refused to sign the Act of Union. Mark of Ephesus would not attend at the solemn proclamation, nor were George Scholarius or Gemistes or any of the bishops from Georgia present. The bishop of Heraclia, on his return to Venice, was required to recite the Creed in St. Mark’s, but he did so with the omission of the _Filioque_ clause. The same bishop declared on his return to Constantinople, that he would rather his right hand had been cut off than that it should have subscribed the Union. In order to avoid the scandal of an open rupture, the four copies of the decree did not mention the supremacy of the pope. Other copies signed only by the Latin bishops were not recognised as authentic by the Greeks.[110] The patriarch, a man of eighty, died just before the decree of the Union was signed, and was buried in the Baptistery of Florence. Religious animosity dogmatised over his grave about his opinions. Some of the Greeks subsequently pretended that his death was one of the several causes which rendered the Council illegal. Some of the Latins maintained that he had left a declaration of his acceptance of the Roman doctrine, and even of the supremacy of the pope. [Sidenote: John returns to Constantinople, August 1439.] The two persons who had shown themselves sincerely desirous of accomplishing a Union were the pope and the emperor. The former, who had paid the expenses of the Greek mission, now urged foreign states to prepare and send forth armies in aid of the Greeks. On the departure of John, in August 1439, for his capital, the pontiff not merely promised all the aid he could furnish, but undertook to maintain, at his own expense as long as he lived, three hundred men in the imperial service. He at once sent two well-armed galleys, and declared that he would furnish twenty ships of war during a period of six months. Eugenius and John had loyally stood by each other, and so far as depended upon them the Union had been accomplished.