The Imperial Administration and the Church in Byzantine Africa

1967 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. Markus
Keyword(s):  
Seventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Middle Years ◽  
Byzantine Era ◽  
The Church

There are only two moments during the Byzantine era at which the African Church emerges into something like daylight: on the morrow of the reconquest, in the middle years of the sixth century, and again almost a century later, under the emperors Heraclius and Constans II. Both in the controversies over the ‘three chapters’ under Justinian, and in those over monothelitism in the seventh century, the African Church took the lead in resisting what seemed, in the eyes of its leading churchmen, attempts by the Court to subvert the Chalcedonian orthodoxy.

The Caucasian Territorial Churches and the Sāsānid Commonwealth

2021 ◽  
pp. 82
Author(s):  
Frank Schleicher
Keyword(s):  
Power Factor ◽  
The State ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Financial Resources ◽  
Local Power ◽  
Central Administration ◽  
Contact Person ◽  
Church Structure ◽  
The Church

At the beginning of the sixth century, the kingships in Caucasian Iberia and Albania were eliminated by the Sāsānids. Thus, the system of vassal kings that served well for centuries was suddenly replaced by direct rule across the board. In this study, we want to ask why this change suddenly became possible. For the Sāsānian administration always needed a central contact person in the countries who could control the local nobility. It is striking that the establishment of a strong church structure always preceded the end of kingship. This can be seen particularly well in the example of Armenia, whose kingship had already been eliminated a century earlier. It is therefore reasonable to assume that after the end of kingship in Armenia as well as in Iberia and Albania, the regional churches took over its central functions of cooperation with the Sāsānian central administration. Now the church served the administration as an important local power factor, and allowed it he control of the powerful dynastic clans. Despite occasional conflicts, the churches cooperated with the Sāsānids and they were able to benefit greatly from this cooperation. Their advantages consisted in access to financial resources and, above all, in strengthening their position of power vis-à-vis the leaders of the local noble clans. Ecclesiastical power reached its peak when the Katholikoi finally also led their countries politically, as Kiwrion did in the case of Iberia at the beginning of the seventh century. Thus, the church became the state-forming institution in the Caucasian countries.

Late Visigothic Bishops, Their Schools and the Transmission of Culture

Traditio ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 435-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Consuelo Maria Aherne
Keyword(s):  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
Isidore Of Seville ◽  
The Church

A galaxy of enlightened bishops, inheritors and transmitters of the highly developed Hispano-Roman intellectual tradition, graced the Church in seventh-century Spain. Braulio, Taio, Ildefonsus, Eugene I, Eugene II and Julian, all depend more or less directly upon the great St. Isidore of Seville (600–636). He in turn was educated by his brother, Leander, in the last quarter of the sixth century. Lynch emphasizes the uniqueness of the system by which these men were formed in what he calls a ‘bishop's school,’ an expression which underlines the very intimate relationship which incorporated the students into the bishop's familia in contrast to the more formal cathedral school, especially as it developed in Carolingian times.

Secular Monograms, Social Status, and Authority in the Late Roman World and Early Byzantium

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Imperial Authority ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
Noble Identity ◽  
Late Roman

This chapter examines the use of monograms as graphic signs of imperial authority in the late Roman and early Byzantine empire, from its appropriation on imperial coinage in the mid-fifth century to its employment in other material media in the following centuries. It also overviews the use of monograms by imperial officials and aristocrats as visible signs of social power and noble identity on mass-produced objects, dress accessories, and luxury items. The concluding section discusses a new social function for late antique monograms as visible tokens of a new Christian paideia and of elevated social status, related to ennobling calligraphic skills. This transformation of monograms into an attribute of visual Christian culture became especially apparent in sixth-century Byzantium, with the cruciform monograms appearing in the second quarter of the sixth century and becoming a default monogrammatic form from the seventh century onwards.

The Roman Martyrs

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lapidge
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Roman Society ◽  
Christian Literature ◽  
The Church

The Roman Martyrs contains translations of forty Latin passiones of saints who were martyred in Rome or its near environs, during the period before the ‘peace of the Church’ (c. 312). Some of these Roman martyrs are universally known — SS. Agnes, Sebastian or Laurence, for example — but others are scarcely known outside the ecclesiastical landscape of Rome itself. Each of the translated passiones, which vary in length from a few paragraphs to over ninety, is accompanied by an individual introduction and commentary; the translations are preceded by an Introduction which describes the principal features of this little-known genre of Christian literature. The Roman passiones martyrum have never previously been collected together, and have never been translated into a modern language. They were mostly composed during the period 425 x 675, by anonymous authors who who were presumably clerics of the Roman churches or cemeteries which housed the martyrs’ remains. It is clear that they were composed in response to the huge explosion of pilgrim traffic to martyrial shrines from the late fourth century onwards, at a time when authentic records (protocols) of their trials and executions had long since vanished, and the authors of the passiones were obliged to imagine the circumstances in which martyrs were tried and executed. The passiones are works of pure fiction; and because they abound in ludicrous errors of chronology, they have been largely ignored by historians of the early Church. But although they cannot be used as evidence for the original martyrdoms, they nevertheless allow a fascinating glimpse of the concerns which animated Christians during the period in question: for example, the preservation of virginity, or the ever-present threat posed by pagan practices. And because certain aspects of Roman life will have changed little between (say) the second century and the fifth, the passiones throw valuable light on many aspects of Roman society, not least the nature of a trial before an urban prefect, and the horrendous tortures which were a central feature of such trials. Above all, perhaps, the passiones are an indispensable resource for understanding the topography of late antique Rome and its environs, since they characteristically contain detailed reference to the places where the martyrs were tried, executed, and buried. The book contains five Appendices containing translations of texts relevant to the study of Roman martyrs: the Depositio martyrum of A.D. 354 (Appendix I); the epigrammata of Pope Damasus d. 384) which pertain to Roman martyrs treated in the passiones (II); entries pertaining to Roman martyrs in the Martyrologium Hieronymianum (III); entries in seventh-century pilgrim itineraries pertaining to shrines of Roman martyrs in suburban cemeteries (IV); and entries commemorating these martyrs in early Roman liturgical books (V).

The Jewish Community of Late Byzantine Thessalonica: the Problem of Determining Its Status

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7 (105)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Natalia Zhigalova
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Financial Resources ◽  
The Status ◽  
Byzantine Period ◽  
Byzantine Era ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church

In this article, the author turns to an examination of the status of the Jewish community in Thessalonica in the late Byzantine period. The author concludes that both in the Byzantine era and during the Venetian rule in Thessalonica, the Jewish community of the city was subjected to numerous restrictions and prohibitions on the part of the official authorities. The reason for this was the initial isolation of the community, as well as the fact that the Jews, in contrast to the rest of the townspeople, owned vast financial resources and rented trading floors, ousting local entrepreneurs from there. The Jewish community in Thessalonica, quite numerous by the standards of contemporaries, in the XIV and XV centuries was in a state of permanent conflict with the church authorities of the city and, probably, had some influence on the communities of Judaizing Christians.

Remembering Pope Gregory VII: Cardinal Boso and Alexander III

2013 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 87-98
Author(s):  
John Doran
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Gregory The Great ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
Near Future ◽  
The Church

In the conclusion to his masterly biography of Pope Gregory VII (1073–85), H. E. John Cowdrey notes the paradox that the pope so lionized by modern historians, to the extent that the age of reform bears his name, was largely forgotten in the twelfth century and made little impact on Christian thought, spirituality or canon law. Cowdrey is not alone in his observation that Gregory ‘receded from memory with remarkable speed and completeness’; when he was remembered, it was as a failure and as one who brought decline upon the church. For Cowdrey, the answer to this conundrum lay in the fact that Gregory VII was in fact far closer to the ideals of the sixth century than of the twelfth; he was a Benedictine monk and shared the worldview and oudook of Gregory the Great (590–604) rather than those of the so-called lawyer popes Alexander III (1159–81) and Innocent III (1198–1216). Yet within a century of Gregory’s death he was presented by Cardinal Boso as a model pope, who had overcome a schismatic emperor and the problems which his interference had precipitated in Rome. For Boso, writing for the instruction of the officials of the papal chamber, the very policies set out by Gregory VII were to be pursued and emulated. Far from being a peripheral and contradictory figure, with more in common with the distant past than the near future, Gregory was the perfect guide to the beleaguered Pope Alexander III, who was also struggling against a hostile emperor and his antipope.

scholarly journals New perspectives on Byzantine Spain: the Discriptio Hispaniae

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-308
Author(s):  
Oriol Olesti Vila ◽  
Ricard Andreu Expósito ◽  
Jamie Wood
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Southern Spain ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Territorial Division ◽  
Short Section

AbstractThe Discriptio Hispaniae is a passage from the Geometry of Gisemundus, also entitled Ars Gromatica Gisemundi (AGG), a medieval treatise of agrimensura written by an unknown author, probably a monk known as Gisemundus who had some agrimensorial experience. The work was compiled around AD 800 by collecting passages of a range of sizes, from just a few words to several pages, extracted from ancient and medieval sources. Although modern research into Roman agrimensorial texts has admitted the importance of the AGG, its corrupt condition has not invited sustained analysis. The passage now known as the Discriptio Hispaniae, a short section from chapter three of the second book of the AGG entitled III De segregatione provinciarum ab Augustalibus terminis, is particularly interesting for the information that it provides concerning the territorial division of Hispania in Late Antiquity. This article presents an edition and English translation of the Discriptio Hispaniae and argues that the most likely point of origin for the Discriptio Hispaniae is during the Byzantine occupation of parts of southern Spain during the second half of the sixth century and the first quarter of the seventh century. We suggest that the Discriptio Hispaniae was preserved because the Byzantine authorities were keen to keep on record information about the borders of the province of Carthaginensis, perhaps the main theme in the text.

THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS AS A SOCIOCULTURAL TRIGGER FOR THE MEROVINGIAN POLITICS

2021 ◽  
pp. 255-281
Author(s):  
А.А. САЗОНОВА
Keyword(s):  
Sixth Century ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Marital Relations ◽  
Modus Vivendi ◽  
The Church

В статье исследуется расхождение между modus vivendi меровингских королей и нормами светских и церковных законов в области внутрисемейных и брачных отношений в VI веке в условиях подчинения идеологической сферы церковному институту. Крещение Хлодвига и христианизация франкского общества были пристрастно изображены Григорием Турским в его труде с многочисленными умолчаниями и искажениями. Выдвигается гипотеза о связи умолчания в «Истории франков» о дате крещения Хлодвига с регентским правлением Хродехильды при несовершеннолетних сыновьях. За брачными одеждами запрещенных союзов (с вдовой брата и сестрой жены, с мачехой и близкой родственницей) у Меровингов скрывались политические заговоры (дело Претекстата, обвинение Григория Турского в клевете на Фредегонду) и ожесточенная борьба за власть. Предлагаются новые интерпретации спорных исторических событий. The article examines the discrepancy between the modus vivendi of the Merovingian kings and the norms of secular and ecclesiastical laws in the field of family and marital relations in the sixth century in the conditions of subordination of the ideological sphere to the church institution. Gregory of Tours represented with prejudice the Christianization of Frankish society in his historical work with numerous eliminations and distortions. My hypothesis discloses the connection between the concealment about the date of Clovis’s baptism in the Decem Libri Historiarum and Clothild’s regency with minor sons. Behind the wedding clothes of incestuous marriages (including brother’s widow, wife’s sister, stepmother, cousin) the Merovingians were hiding political conspiracies (the trial of Bishop Praetextatus, the accusation of Gregory of Tours the spreading rumours about Fredegund) and a fierce struggle for power. New interpretations of controversial historical events are proposed.

Sailing to the Britannic Isles: Some Mediterranean Perspectives on the Remote Northwest from the Sixth Century bc to the Seventh Century AD

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wilkes
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Astronomical Observations ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
A Minor

If you were training to be an athlete you would not spend all your time doing exercises: you would also have to learn when and how to relax, for relaxation is generally regarded as one of the most important elements in physical training. To my mind it is equally important for scholars. When you have been doing a lot of serious reading, it is a good idea to give your mind a rest and so build up energy for another bout of hard labour. For this purpose the best sort of book to read is not merely one that is witty and entertaining but also has something interesting to say. This advice from the satirist Lucian, sometime itinerant lecturer and at other times a minor government official, seems as valid today as it was in the second century AD. For students engaged in the history and archaeology of Europe in the first millennia BC and ad, I can currently think of no better respite from the structures, models and databases, that are the currencies of modern research, than Barry Cunliffie’s monograph on the explorer Pytheas published in 2001. Unencumbered with footnotes and with minimal bibliography, a text of barely 170 pages introduces one of the great mysteries of antiquity, the fantastic voyage of exploration by a citizen of Massalia, the Greek ancestor of modern Marseilles, to the British Isles and beyond to Iceland and the Arctic Circle and then in the direction of the Baltic (Cunliffe 2001). Nothing is known of Pytheas himself and the only reasonably certain fact we have concerning the voyage is that it was undertaken around the time of Alexander the Great (d. 323 BC). No less remarkable is that all we know of Pytheas’ own account of his travels is preserved in later writers, who at the least denigrated his achievement and often branded him a downright liar with considerable vehemence, while still exploiting his detailed account of the lands and seas he saw. Despite this the value of his astronomical observations was recognized by some of the greatest minds of antiquity and as a result his place in the development of the geographical sciences is assured.

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