Volume 111, Issue 3

The information in letters 3.61 and 3.64 of Pope Gregory the Great that Emperor Julian had released a law, according to which soldiers were not allowed to become monks, is a confusion with Valens who is accredited to have forced the monks by law to do military service. This hypothesis is based on the church historians’ reports that Julian wanted to remove the Christians from his army by conversion and dismissal, and on the fact that Julian and Valens are parallelised by Theophanes and other Byzantine texts.

The cardinal Bessarion was a foremost figure of the Italian Renaissance and late Byzantium. However, some of the details of his life are not yet securely established, especially his date of birth. Over the last century, scholars have proposed dates ranging from 1400 to 1408. In this study, I critically interrogate the two most commonly accepted dates (1400 and 1408). In the past, scholars have relied on the age requirements of canon law or the testimony of Italian observers to determine Bessarion’s age. By critically examining the validity of these two assumptions, I reprioritize the evidence, approximating the cardinal’s year of birth as 1403.

The paper discusses John Italos’ (d. after 1082) position on the eternity of the world. Italos was condemned for a series of heretical views including the thesis that the visible world was eternal. However, a treatise of Italos has been transmitted, in which he refutes the idea of an eternal kosmos and argues for its createdness in the beginning of time. The present study provides a critical edition of the Greek text of Italos’ treatise (Quaestio 71 of his Quaestiones quodlibetales), provided with a first English translation and followed by a commentary that develops Italos’ main arguments and identifies some of his sources. It is argued that Italos sincerely defended an anti-eternalist standpoint by adopting arguments, first and foremost, of the sixth-century philosopher John Philoponos. Moreover, Italos seems to react in Quaestio 71 to specific charges that had been brought up against him during his repeated synodal investigations in 1076/77 and 1082. His treatise against the eternity of the world appears to be a comprehensive apology of his orthodoxy.

Some aspects of the life of John Mauropous are still unclear. It is often assumed that his nomination as metropolitan bishop of Euchaita was a disguised exile from the imperial Court. However, it took him more than twenty years to come back to Constantinople after quitting his bishopric. The close analysis of the relationship between Mauropous and Psellos, another exile from Constantine Monomachos’ Court, will lead us to reconsider the conditions of the departure and the return of Mauropous. If his nomination was not the described exile, his resignation was conditioned with the willing of Psellos, who was his main support in the capital but was not as reliable friend as he seemed to.

The imperial charter on behalf of the Monastery of Panagia Soumela, currently at the Ayasofya Müzesi (no. 12901) in Istanbul, long considered a mere copy, is shown to be an original chrysobullos logos issued by the imperial chancery of Alexios III Megas Komnenos in 1364.

This paper offers an editio princeps, an English translation and a commentary of an interesting epigram on Porphyry, the commentator of Aristotle. The epigram was transcribed in Vat. Reg. 166 by Ioannes Malaxos (16th c.) and is ascribed to Petros Servilos, a poet unknown from other sources. The paper discusses the poem’s manuscript context, as well as its authorship, genre, content and function. Further, it attempts to shed light on the poem’s relation to Porphyry’s philosophy and his reception in Byzantine poetry.

The literary sophistication of John Climacus has been the subject of recent scholarly discussion, and forms part of a larger trend that seeks to recover the pivotal importance of paideia in early Byzantine monasticism. In dialogue with this ongoing interest in text and book culture, the present article outlines John Climacus’ nuanced position on the matter of sacred text. In Climacus’ oeuvre we discover a tension between his reverence for sacred text, which includes the written word’s role in bringing about spiritual health, and the need to recognize all text and every book, however holy, as something ultimately dispensable in light of the ascetic ideal. The setting aside of holy texts, however, does not indicate the superfluity of these texts for Climacus so much as the need to transpose them from the dead and external letter of the page to the living and embodied book of the heart.