by Cyril Mango
The emperor’s self-proclaimed role as ‘apostle’ was not, therefore, tantamount to an urge to convert entire peoples far and wide and it was to a large extent geared towards individuals or communities resident within the empire’s borders, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, or directed against rival religious leaders. Thus at certain feasts in the palace Muslim prisoners-of-war attended, dressed in white beltless garments. Such was the garb worn by catechumens prior to their baptism and the choice of this outfit for the prisoners was probably meant to highlight the emperor’s ability to make even Saracens change their spots. Rivalry with the Muslims, especially with the Baghdad caliphate, was one of the driving forces behind the emperor’s stance as evangelist in the ninth and tenth centuries. As the world’s premier Christian ruler he needed to offer a refutation of the critiques of Christianity which Muslim preachers were putting forward, and to be seen to be holding the line intellectually as well as militarily. According to a mid-ninth-century treatise entitled ‘The Refutation of Muhammad’, the emperor ‘calls even the Arabs to piety, shooting down their preposterous and erroneous impiety by means of refutation through the truth of words’. One of the functions of scholars and churchmen sent on embassies to Baghdad was to deal with criticisms of the faith in an authoritative fashion, and to engage in disputations with Muslim sages at the Abbasid court. Their brief was to uphold the emperor’s intellectual credentials as champion of Christians: they were not really in the business of converting individuals to Christianity and there can have been no serious expectation of converting the caliph or other Muslim rulers. In the mid-ninth century, young intellectuals such as Photios and Constantine took part in these embassies. It was to them that the emperor turned when he decided to respond to initiatives from Slav and other northern potentates in the 860s; he did not have at court any other pool of persons experienced in expounding the faith. This helps explain the rather cerebral tone of the surviving texts addressed to such potentates. Photios, now patriarch of Constantinople, sent a long letter to Boris of Bulgaria soon after his conversion, making no allowances for his newcomer status: doctrine as determined by the Church Councils is set out in detail and Boris’ duties are spelled out in edifying terms which owed much to the classical Greek writings on rulership with which Photios was familiar. A sermon in Church Slavonic attributed to Methodius is no less stringent in the moral demands which it makes of the Moravian ruler. This suggests that the high-minded, austere tones in which the Lives of Methodios and Constantine depict their evangelizing are an accurate register of their labours. A hint of what Ihor Sevcenko has called ‘the overly complicated didactic material’ used for missionary work is also preserved in the Russian Primary Chronicle’s version of the ‘speech’ which a Byzantine ‘philosopher’ reportedly delivered before Prince Vladimir of Kiev in the late 980s. Vladimir was then making serious enquiries about various brands of monotheistic religion, Judaism and Islam among them, and his eventual choice of Byzantine-style Christianity was not inevitable. Early in the tenth century the Volga Bulgars’ ruler had adopted Islam and the imperial establishment could not have contemplated the spread of Islam north of the Black Sea with equanimity. Thus missionary activity was, to a great extent, conceived of in Constantinople in terms of rivalry with the other ‘Religions of the Book’ and of upholding the emperor’s reputation for piety and superior wisdom. To carry out these tasks, the earlier missionary leaders needed to be able to address questions of governance and justice in lofty moral tones in their written works and, probably, also by word of mouth.
In some respects the Byzantine establishment’s part in the spreading of the Word is reminiscent of its stance in other spheres, such as commerce: the abiding assumption was that foreigners would come to Constantinople, rather than that it was expedient or fitting to reach out and submit all mankind to the Gospel. There is no firm evidence of a ‘seminary’ for missionaries in Constantinople or that specialized training in, for example, the relevant language was provided for those sent out; nor was the literary culture particularly favourable towards outward-bound ventures to save souls. The lamentations of lettered bishops upon their exile from ‘the God-protected City’ and its court circles to provincial sees were not mere literary stereotypes. Nonetheless, the inward-looking ‘reactive’ stance of the establishment contained a measure of realism and paradoxically could serve as an attraction to foreign potentates. And his intellectuals could set out for the ruler elaborate ideals of governance, for which the template was the basileus.
To have taken the initiative more overtly might have gained the Middle Byzantine Church more martyrs for the faith, but it would not necessarily have brought about a wave of conversions. In the case of any political structure enjoying a fair degree of cohesiveness, the permission of the local leadership was needed before mission work could begin. And in practice the active co-operation of those having status, influence, and resources in their communities was more or less indispensable if ordinary people were to be induced to give up their ‘old ways’ for good. Awareness of the key role of members of the elite is shown in a letter of the patriarch Nicholas Mystikos to the archbishop of Alania: he is urged to be lenient towards the Alans’ practice of polygamy, particularly when dealing with members of the ‘upper class’, ‘who have great power to counteract the salvation of the whole nation’. One must remember that there was often a conflict of opinions within the elite about the new religion. Boris of Bulgaria encountered violent opposition to conversion from many of the ‘leading men’, while Olga of Kiev’s son, Sviatoslav, rejected her attempts to convert him. He maintained that, were he to agree, ‘my retainers will start to laugh at this’. From the emperor’s point of view, it made sense to reap such practical benefits as were to be had from the presence of Christians in the upper echelons of northern peoples, and to wait upon events—in particular, for such initiatives as might be taken by the leaders of the more stable structures. If a ruler showed interest in personally adopting Christianity from Byzantium or, more ominously, was shopping around among the various forms of monotheism, the emperor could make a move.
The so-called Assemani Gospel Lectionary (Cod. Vat. Slav. 3) was probably written in western Bulgaria in the late 10th or early 11th century. It is one of the earliest specimens of the Glagolitic script, believed to have been invented by Sts Cyril and Methodios.
Facing, above: Ivory triptych featuring the Deisis (Christ receiving the intercession of John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary), apostles, Church Fathers, and martyrs. The dedicatory inscription names an emperor Constantine, presumably Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, as having commissioned this object.
Facing, below: Chalice in the Treasury of St Mark’s, Venice. An antique sardonyx cup of the first century BC/AD, reused in a chalice by the emperor Romanos II (959–63), has cloisonné enamel plaques with busts of various saints. It was part of the booty removed from Constantinople to Venice at the time of the Fourth Crusade.
Paradoxically, the very aloofness of the imperial establishment and its lack of obvious zeal to follow up every ‘conversion opportunity’ with teams of trained cadres may have rendered its cult more attractive to foreign potentates. This was partly a matter of scarcity value and snobisme, as with the palace’s robes and princesses, but also of the broader scope which these very deficiencies opened up for a strong-minded ruler. He could, if a written form of the vernacular language was available, seize the chance to create not only a corps of educated nobles and potential subordinates, but also a sizeable home-grown priesthood and thus a tighter, more sophisticated culturo-religious framework over which to preside. Such an option was available to the Slavs, in the form of an alphabet catering for the particular sounds of the Slavic tongue and also of a lucid, flexible literary language into which the Greek Scriptures, the liturgical offices, and also the Church Fathers’ guidelines on the Faith could be translated. The alphabet was the invention of Constantine-Cyril, and his brother Methodios joined him in the task of translation, carrying
this on and composing or commissioning a number of new works after the death of Constantine-Cyril in 867; among them was a Life of Constantine-Cyril himself. There is no firm evidence that the Byzantine establishment had envisaged translation-work on such a scale when the mission was dispatched to Moravia. The initiative seems to have been taken by the brothers in Central Europe, far from the glare of the imperial court whose denizens might reasonably doubt the desirability of giving mere Slav archontes tools for creating a distinctive political culture. A few gifted pupils of Methodius and also, apparently, some translated texts became available to Boris of Bulgaria soon after Methodios’ death in 885. Boris appreciated the potential of the newly translated pious literature for furthering pastoral work and raising his own status, but it was his son Symeon who developed it fully, encouraging the translation of Church Fathers’ treatises on doctrine and sermons and setting himself up as a direct educator of his nobility and as the enlightener of his subjects in general. He proved himself ready from the start of his reign to use force majeure to back up his insistence on self-determination and respectful treatment by the emperor. This and his subsequent demand to be recognized as an emperor made him the bête noire of the imperial establishment and his incursions and devastation of the empire’s European provinces from 918 made him a ‘man guilty of the shedding of much Christian blood’ in the eyes of ordinary Byzantines. The spectre of Symeon and the substance of the self-confident Christian polity which he had helped form may well have hardened the reservations which emperors such as Constantine VII harboured as to missionary initiatives towards the rulers of entire peoples.
Right: An early example of the Cyrillic script, this inscription, carved in 1016, commemorates the refurbishment of the fortress of Bitolja (Macedonia) by John Vladislav, brother of the Bulgarian king Samuel, after the latter had been decisively defeated by Basil II. The inscription was discovered in 1956 in the ruins of a mosque at Bitolja.
It is tempting to conclude that the Byzantines’ missionary ‘Commonwealth’ was gained in an absence of mind. But to do so would be to overlook the scale of the problems faced by anyone attempting to change by peaceful means social and cultural mores in the early medieval Balkans and Eurasia as well as to ignore the role of monks and churches on the empire’s outer fringes. The importance of such outriders did not go unrecognized by statesmen at the centre of things in Constantinople, who sometimes tried to harness or liaise with them. Appreciation of the desirability of instructors in the faith being able to communicate directly with their hearers was shown by Michael III when he chose Constantine-Cyril and Methodius in response to Rastislav of Moravia’s request. According to the Life of Methodius, he said to them: ‘You are Thessalonicans and all Thessalonicans speak excellent Slavic.’ The brothers were probably exceptional in being highly educated members of the metropolitan establishment who nonetheless retained traces of their origins in an ‘ethnic’ borderland, and who had language skills of specific use to Michael’s project. But other imperial decision-makers showed general awareness of the value to mission work of persons from outside the metropolitan scene. The Life of Basil I commissioned by his grandson praised his dispatch to the Bulgarians not only of prelates but also of ‘the pious monks, summoned from the mountains and from the caves of the earth’. Self-reliance, asceticism, and the graphic embodiment of other Christian virtues were presumably their credentials for mission work, rather than any ability to preach or teach in Slavic.
Much of the work of spreading the word about Christianity was done unofficially, even unwittingly, by communities of monks established on or far beyond the empire’s periphery. The evidence for the monasteries’ existence is mainly archaeological and the dating of the sites and interpretation of the occupants’ precise origins and activities are often highly speculative. But there is little doubt that eastern Orthodox monasteries and nunneries were functioning in Bulgaria before Boris’ conversion. They may mostly have lain in former Byzantine territory which Bulgar khans had brought beneath their sway earlier in the ninth century. But there is some evidence of foundations farther north, notably the small cave-chapels at Murfatlar, in the Dobroudja. Some monks possessed spectacular skills which were not usually available even at the higher echelons of barbarian society: the monk who so alarmed Boris with a painting of the Last Judgement had been commissioned by him to come up with an awesome and arresting composition to decorate a hunting lodge. This tale cannot be taken literally, but there is significance in its assumption that monks could be at large and valued for their technical services in a pagan-led society. A type of small church similar to the Murfatlar chapels, although above-ground, is to be found in various areas on the fringes of the Byzantine world and it has been plausibly suggested that these churches have some connection with Byzantine missions. Several examples of these simple, single-nave buildings with elongated semicircular apses and a measuring scheme which made them easy and cheap enough to construct occur in Moravia. Others have been found at Cherson on the Crimea and in the northern Caucasus, where monks played an important role in the ‘official’ mission to the Alans of the tenth century and beyond. It may be that these small churches often register the presence of monks, whether spontaneous or on assignment from the central authorities. That teams of monks were sent on missions for finite periods is suggested by a letter of Nicholas Mysticus addressed to ‘our spiritual sons’ labouring to strengthen the faith in a ‘desolate’ land which may be identifiable with Alania.
Facing: The scene of Pentecost symbolized the preaching of the Gospel to all the nations. Mosaic in the pilgrimage church of Hosios Loukas in Phokis (Greece) showing the descent of the Holy Spirit on the assembled apostles and, in the pendentives, groups of ‘Nations’ and ‘Tongues’. Early eleventh century.
With the easing of Bulgaro-Byzantine tensions after 927 and in particular the foundation of the Great Lavra on Mount Athos in 962/3, the journeys to the Balkans and other northern lands of Byzantine-trained monks, as individuals or organized groups, became more common. The rulers of the Poles, the Hungarians, and the Rus all accepted baptism in the final third of the tenth century, but their powers of propaganda and coercion were not such as to instil the new faith and its concomitant rites and normative values into their subjects at a stroke. Nor did the allegiance of the Polish and Hungarian rulers to the Roman papacy necessarily close the door to Orthodox monks and ministers. An Athonite monk who was also a priest was at large in Poland in the 1020s. Furthermore, monastic houses containing ‘Greeks’ and allowing for Orthodox styles of asceticism were founded by King Andrew I near Višegrad and on an Athos-like peninsula jutting into Lake Balaton. These sites lay beyond the lands in southern Hungary where Orthodox priests and churches were particularly prominent in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The visibility of Orthodox rites in the south is most probably due to the labours of the monk Hierotheos and his successors, whose status was raised to that of ‘metropolitan of Tourkia’. Within a generation of Prince Vladimir of Kiev’s conversion, there were Rus monks residing on Mount Athos. One of them, named Anthony, came under pressure from his spiritual father— presumably a Byzantine—to return to the north: ‘Go back to Rus and let the blessing of the Holy Mount be upon you, for from you there shall come to be many monks.’ The prime objective of the spiritual father, as interpreted by Anthony, seems to have been the practice of rigorous monasticism rather than the preaching of the Word and, upon returning to Kiev, Anthony occupied a hollow in a bluff overlooking the Dnieper, living as a recluse. But ‘good people’ learnt of his way of life quite soon and brought him food. Brethren ‘to the number of twelve’ gathered round him and in practice the monks (whose numbers rose further still) performed a pastoral role for the inhabitants of Kiev nearby. Their abbots acted as counsellors and consciences to the princes and new houses in the distant north-east were founded by alumni of the Cave Monastery. One of them, Kuksha, suffered martyrdom while preaching the Word to a pagan people, the Viatichi. The Cave Monastery was of uniqu
e importance in fostering Christian observance and a sense of manifest destiny among the Rus. The Athonite monks’ aim may have been the narrow one of disseminating ascetic values and the number of returnees was probably small, but their effect on Christian life in the north was much more immediate than that of the mostly monoglot metropolitans sent out from Constantinople.
Athos was, like Thessalonica, perched on the edge of the predominantly Slav-speaking Balkan hinterland, and yet its monasteries enjoyed very close connections with the emperor. A rather different mode of linking a peripheral area with both evangelization and the earthly centre of things was to be found at Cherson. This Crimean port was in one sense a provincial backwater while the towns and small settlements strung along the southern Crimean coastline were even more secluded, and only loosely under the authority of the emperor. For that very reason, iconodule monks sought refuge in the region in the late eighth and earlier ninth centuries, adding to what seems already to have been a sizeable number of cells and monastic communities reaching well into the mountainous interior of the southern part of the peninsula. Chapels and cells were cut out of the cliff-rock at such places as Inkerman (not far from Cherson) and Tepe Kermen, further inland. There are hints that the monks had some impact on the local inhabitants; for example, at the Bakla fortress has been found a burial-vault which seems to have belonged to persons of rank and substance bearing Turkic as well as Christian names, which are inscribed on its side in Greek. Cherson itself contains probable traces of conversion work, in the form of finds of shallow cups of white clay with black crosses on their base. They are datable to the ninth to tenth centuries and the other examples of this type have mostly been found on or far beyond the empire’s territorial frontiers: on the Lower Danube, at Preslav, Thessalonica, the Straits of Kerch, and at Novgorod in a stratum datable, significantly, to 972-89, the era of the Rus’ conversion to Christianity. They have been interpreted as ‘liturgical bowls’ from which newly converted adults would drink milk and honey symbolizing the fact that they had been born again and now had access to paradise.
