The Xylinitai on the Service to Byzantine Emperors: A Seal of Niketas Xylinites, Protospatharios and epi tou koitonos

Introduction. Among the most ancient and noble Byzantine families there were the Xylinitai, who belonged to the first rank of “pure” civil nobility. Nevertheless, only restricted information of this family members survived. Therefore, any new account is of importance not only for the Byzantine prosopography but also for the Byzantine history in general. In this connection, interesting is one sigillographic find which uncovers a new page in the life of one of this family members. According to the seal legend, its owner Niketas Xylinites held the second-class rank of protospatharios and was engaged in the court service at the emperor’s bedchamber, the koiton. There is no doubt that the stylistic features date the molybdoboullon in question to the eleventh century. Analysis and Results. The sources in possession supply information on a few persons bearing this name and belonging to the family in question, who left their footprint in the annals of history in this or that way. All of them were high-ranked courtiers and persons of importance, whose career stages were reflected in different periods of Byzantine history. The comparison of the seal data with other sources allows us to suppose that the owner of the seal was Niketas Xylinites, a member of the milieu of Empress Theodora, related to her ascension to the Byzantine throne following the death of Constantine IX. The sources only inform of his career that he got from the Empress of one of the highest civil offices (logothetes tou dromou) and a high court title of proedros. According to the seal under study, it reflects the earliest stage in Niketas’ career at the court, when he was selected to serve at the emperor’s bedchamber and got the rank of protospatharios. The Seal of Niketas Xylinites probably dates to the late 1030s – very early 1040s, the period before he got the title of patrikios, his works in the Iveron monastery, and Theodora’s ascension to the throne.

Dogmatyka prawa wobec politycznej opresji. Czy historia myśli prawnej może nas czegoś nauczyć?

One of the contemporary views formulated and popularized mainly by authors from the socalled critical theory of law is the belief in the inevitable, mutual relationship of law (theory of law and dogmatics of law) and legal practice (adjudication) with politics and the political. This position is strengthened by the observation of contemporary disputes — especially visible in Poland — with the participation of politicians and lawyers: politicians accuse lawyers of political motivation of actions taken to defend the judiciary and the rule of law, while lawyers defend themselves by arguing the need for autonomy of their professional practice, including its apolitical nature. In this text, I explain the arguments of the latter party to the dispute. I choose the dogmatics of law as the field of illustrating the issues raised, since it occupies a special place in the continental legal scholarship, acting as an intermediary between the jurisprudence and legal decision-making practice. I am trying to show — by referring to two examples from general history, i.e. the eleventh-century investiture controversy and the nineteenth-century debate in the background of the German reunification idea — that law and politics (lawyers and politicians) have always been forced to compete and cooperate with each other. Thus, it confirms the thesis of the critical theory of law. At the same time, however, I try to show that the legal community had the ability to “learn” from the political disputes of the past, which led to the formation of independent jurisprudence and legal practice in the face of current politics, and thus also to apoliticality. What is more, I argue that such an apolitical nature is a condition for the survival of legal culture in its present shape — and here, my path diverges from the critical legal theory claims. However, in my opinion, the contemporary arguments made within this theory about the political science of law and jurisprudence should be treated with all seriousness — as another experience from which our community, as one can hope, will be able to draw informative conclusions.

Inter-Confessional Church History: East Syrian Christian Identity and Islam in the Ecclesiastical History of Kitāb al-Maǧdal

Kitāb al-Maǧdal is a large East Syrian theological treatise that was composed in Arabic, probably in the late tenth or early eleventh century CE. One section of the work is an ecclesiastical history of the Church of the East. This essay argues that close analysis of this section reveals that elite East Syrian identity in the period overlapped to a significant extent with contemporary Muslim identity, at the level of vocabulary and conceptions of revelation and communal history. In this sense, the work represents a kind of “inter-confessional” history writing. The essay aims to contribute to recent studies of Middle Eastern Christian identity and historiography, which have focused of Syriac sources and/or late antiquity rather than Arabic sources for the Islamic middle periods.

Publication and the Papacy in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

This Element explores the papacy's engagement in authorial publishing in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The opening discussion demonstrates that throughout the medieval period, papal involvement in the publication of new works was a phenomenon, which surged in the eleventh century. The efforts by four authors to use their papal connexions in the interests of publicity are examined as case studies. The first two are St Jerome and Arator, late antique writers who became highly influential partly due to their declaration that their literary projects enjoyed papal sanction. Appreciation of their publication strategies sets the scene for a comparison with two eleventh-century authors, Fulcoius of Beauvais and St Anselm. This Element argues that papal involvement in publication constituted a powerful promotional technique. It is a hermeneutic that brings insights into both the aspirations and concerns of medieval authors. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

LITERARY AND THEOLOGICAL BACKGROUND OF THE SERMON ON LAW AND GRACE

This article studies the literary and theological background of the Sermon on Law and Grace, a famous oration by Ilarion, the (future) Metropolitan of Kyiv, from the mid-eleventh century. The author of this article focuses also on potential patristic models for Ilarion’s theological and patriotic reflection on the recent East Slavic history in the light of the official adoption of Christianity under Volodymyr Sviatoslavich, Prince of Kyiv. The main feature of the mentioned (self-)reflection, relying on the notion of history as the history of salvation, is disregarding the Byzantine political and cultural superiority and, simultaneously, emphasizing the justice of God, who brings his grace equally to all peoples, thus positioning them on the same spiritual level. This kind of reasoning was not a peculiarity of the Rus’ culture but formed a wider phenomenon defined by apologetic attitu­de and was characteristic of the entire religious-literary tradition of the East Orthodox Slavs between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. While trying to construct a theological justification of the historical value of Kyivan Rus’, Ilarion adapted patristic patterns coming from Byzantium, for example, the explanation of (dis)continuity between the Law of Moses and Christ’s mercy, particularly following Gregory Nazianzen and Patriarch Nicephorus I, or perception of a polity led by a Christian ruler, particularly following Eusebius of Caesarea. Keywords: Sermon on Law and Grace, Ilarion, Rus’ literature, history of salvation, patristic models