Download PDF | The Cult Of St Anna In Byzantium
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The Cult of St Anna in Byzantium is the first undertaking in Byzantine research to study the phenomenon of St Anna’s cult from the sixth to the fifteenth centuries. It was prompted by the need to enrich our knowledge of a female saint who had already been studied in the West but remained virtually unknown in Eastern Christendom. It focuses on a figure little-studied in scholarship and examines the formation, establishment and promotion of an apocryphal saint who made her way to the pantheon of Orthodox saints. Visual and material culture, relics and texts track the gradual social and ideological transformation of Byzantium from early Christianity until the fifteenth century. This book not only examines various aspects of early Christian and Byzantine civilisation, but also investigates how the cult of saints greatly influenced cultural changes in order to suit theological, social and political demands.
The cult of St Anna influenced many diverse elements of Christian life in Constantinople, including the creation of sacred spaces and the location of haghiasmata (fountains of holy water) in the city; imperial patronage; the social reception of St Anna’s story; and relic narratives. This monograph breaks new ground in explaining how and why Byzantium and the Orthodox Church attributed scriptural authority to a minor figure known only from a non-canonical work.
Dr. Eirini Panou studied art and archaeology at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens and earned her Ph.D. in Byzantine Studies from the University of Birmingham (2012). After the completion of her post-doctoral research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) in 2015, she became adjunct faculty at the Open University of Patras and Cyprus teaching Byzantine art and Byzantine public and private life. She is also research associate of the National Research Centre in Athens. She has produced articles on the cult of saints in Byzantium, on art, on female patronage, on magic, on theology, on the Protevagelion of James, and on Byzantine history.
Acknowledgements
This book, like any other one, would not have become reality without the contribution of a number of individuals and institutions. First of all, my academic mother, Leslie Brubaker, whose constant support, guidance and encouragement accompanied me through all the years of research in Birmingham.
The National Scholarship Foundation of Greece (I.K.Y.) with its financial help for the greatest part of my postgraduate studies at Birmingham University. My father George, my mother Angeliki, my brother Nick, my husband Bill for their support, and my friends in Greece for being by my side in all my years of virtual and physical absence.
Words are not enough to express my gratitude to Angeliki Lymberopoulou (Open University, Milton Keynes), who has trusted me with unpublished material of her own work and who has dedicated a lot of her valuable time in facilitating my work.
A very special thank you goes to my brother Panagiotis, who was extremely supportive and proud of all of my academic goals.
This book is dedicated to his memory.
Eirini Panou 2017
Introduction
The thirteenth-century court official Theodore Hyrtakenos, in his praise of The Paradise of St Anna, wonders who does not know the ‘pious’ and ‘full of grace’ Joachim and Anna, a ‘truly holy couple’.' In his fourteenth-century homily on the Entry of Mary into the temple, Gregory Palamas writes that ‘[s]he (= Mary) exalted her ancestors to such glory that through her they are acclaimed God’s ancestors’.* These two phrases highlight the widespread veneration of Mary’s parents, and the nature of that veneration, in Byzantium.’ Five centuries before Gregory Palamas’s homily was written, George of Nikomedia, on the feast of Mary’s conception by St Anna, tells his congregation the story of Mary’s parents in detail, examining the reasons why they should be honoured. By the fourteenth century, on the same occasion, their story had become so well known to his congregation that Gregory needed neither repeat it nor even mention Anna and Joachim’s names.
This study examines the conditions under which Mary’s parents, and St Anna in particular, rose from obscurity to being objects of veneration, and how an apocryphal story came to be included in the liturgical calendar. It aims to fill a scholarly gap acknowledged by Sharon Gerstel, who noted that no study has been made of St Anna’s place in Byzantium, unlike in the West.* Gerstel’s article appeared in 1998, six years after the publication of the revised edition of Lafontaine-Dosogne’s 1992 work on the iconography of the first three years of Mary’s life.* In her corpus, Lafontaine-Dosogne provides a good overview of the textual references pertaining to Mary’s parents, which have mainly to do with the introduction of the feasts related to Mary’s childhood, and then discusses the representations of Mary’s parents. Although Anna’s veneration is defined by that of her daughter, I do not wish to provide another study on Mary, but rather to address an aspect of her veneration that has rarely been considered, which is her parents.
In order to examine the veneration of Anna in Byzantium, in the first chapter I will look at topographical and textual evidence from Jerusalem and Constantinople which demonstrates the influence of the topography of the Holy City on the Byzantine capital in the sixth century. I will examine the way in which this influence was interpreted in the churches of St Anna in Constantinople and the importance of this development for the ideology that governed church construction in Byzantium. I will argue that the creation of sacred space is an important factor for the first ecclesiastical establishments of the saint in Constantinople, and is far from being a simple case of patronage.
In the second chapter, I will consider the texts. Using mainly hagiography and histories, I will explore the ideological significance attributed to women named Anna, the most common of which was Iconophilia, support for the veneration of icons in general. St Anna’s acknowledgment as the mother of the Virgin led to her being established as a protector of childbirth, a tendency reflected in the lives of saints whose mothers are named Anna and also in patronage stories about Byzantine empresses. Moreover, I will piece together the traditions around the relics of St Anna in Byzantium using textual evidence from the eighth to the seventeenth century. I will show that, even though the information provided in these sources is often unclear, I can name with certainty a number of locations where the relics of the saint actually appeared. Finally, I will examine the establishment of the feasts that celebrate the early life of Mary, and Mary’s parents in particular.
The third chapter is dedicated to pictorial evidence. Having set the chronological limits between the eighth and the fifteenth centuries, I will examine the depictions of St Anna and Joachim outside the Mariological cycle, since the Marian cycle does not always reflect veneration of Mary’s parents. The non-narrative portraits of Joachim and Anna do however, and they allow various associations to be made with them. The depictions are presented chronologically, but when the material in one location is extensive, a geographical or thematic categorization is made. This division has two aims: firstly, to highlight the alterations that depictions of the saints underwent over time, both in form and context, and secondly — in areas where the depictions are numerous and vary in nature, such as in Cappadocia and Greece — to place the depictions into a theological and social framework. As the role of this work is to understand the formation of the saint’s cult in Byzantium, I have selected images which are less well-known and, in most cases, published for the first time.®
This study is the first attempt in Byzantine scholarship to focus on St Anna in Byzantium on this scale. Despite the number of studies of Mary that have appeared, especially after the publication of the Mother of God exhibition catalogue at the Benaki Museum (Greece) in 2001, Mary’s parents have not become the subject of detailed treatment by students of Byzantine culture. The only large-scale attempt thus far was Kleinschmidt’s Die heilige Anne: ihre Verehrung in Geschichte, Kunst und Volkstum, published in 1930, but even this work deals primarily with the saint’s cult in the West. The aim of the present work is to demonstrate that although the spread of Anna and Joachim’s veneration was minor compared to that of their daughter, a thorough study on their cult offers important insight into the culture from which they emerged and in which they were established.
The emergence of the cult of St Anna in Jerusalem and Constantinople
After the empress Theodora, wife of Justinian I, had been cured in the church of ta Kyrou, the imperial couple thanked the Virgin ‘with luxurious offerings and, although they did not construct a new church in her honour, they dedicated a church next to it to St Anna, the grandmother of Christ’.' The twelfth-century addendum to the Constantinopolitan calendar of Iviron Monastery, which relates to the construction of the ta Kyrou church of the Virgin in Constantinople, reveals that a tradition created around Justinian I had by the twelfth century become associated with the cure of his wife by the Theotokos (Mother of God). It also informs us that the imperial couple dedicated a church to St Anna next to an existing church of Mary as an act of thanksgiving for the cure. How is one to deconstruct the elements of this tradition and how important is this testimony for the imperial patronage of the cult of St Anna in Constantinople at that time?
In this chapter it will be shown that the Virgin’s healing powers, combined with the promotion of her cult by Justinian I and with the sixth-century architectural trend of the Joumata (holy springs), created a model whereby a church of St Anna was placed in the proximity of a healing /ocus dedicated to the Virgin Mary. This trend is seen in church topography particularly after Justinian I and is the result of a parallel development in Jerusalem and Constantinople already noted in the sixth century. In Jerusalem and in particular at the Probatic Pool (in the modern Islamic quarter), a church had been dedicated to the Virgin Mary at the spot where in 570 the pilgrim Antonios located the place of her birth. In Constantinople, Justinian I built a church dedicated to St Anna in the quarter of the Deuteron and with this began the association of the Virgin’s mother with healing powers. But how do these developments contribute to the formation of the cult of St Anna in Byzantium?
The Probatike and fifth-century ecclesiastical politics in Jerusalem
A church by the Probatic Pool,” which dates to the fifth century,* was dedicated to the miracle of the Paralytic, the biblical narrative known from St John’s Gospel (John 5:2).4 However, the earliest textual evidence for the church dates to the sixth century, when John Rufos wrote his Plerophories (512—518).° In this work, John Rufos describes the sojourn of the fifth-century bishop of Maiouma,° Peter the Iberian,’ in the Holy Land.
The church is mentioned in the context of a dream that a cleric in the church of the Probatike had, in which Christ appeared to recall the name of Juvenal, Monophysite bishop of Jerusalem from 422,* who accepted the decrees of the council of Chalcedon in 451. This was the reason that the Monophysite monks in Palestine rebelled, causing his deposition.’ According to John Rufos, the cleric did not take care of the sanctuary of the Probatike (we are not told whether at that time the church was still dedicated to the Paralytic or elsewhere) and so Christ appeared in his dream saying:
What shall I do with these, with those upon whom I have bestowed such good things, both oil, wine, and the other necessities (of life)? Never are they in want of anything that thus they would have a reason to disregard and to neglect my service. Woe, Juvenal! He made my house a cave of robbers. He has filled it with fornicators, adulterers, and polluted ones.'°
The words ‘polluted’ and ‘adulterers’ allude to Juvenal’s conversion from Monophysitism to Chalcedonianism, since the Plerophories presents the Monophysitic point of view on fifth-century ecclesiastical politics. As Csepregi notes in her discussion of the ‘ritual of temple sleep’ (sleeping inside the sanctuary and encountering the healer in a dream) experienced by the priest of the Probatike, the central role of this direct contact with the sacred place resulted ‘in the adoption of ancient sites by the Christian healer saints’.'! In the Probatike, the appropriation of Christian sites is shown by the dedication to the Healing of the Paralytic of a building which, until then, had been used for pagan worship and Jewish purification practices. That the monument was associated with the inter-Christian conflict between the Monophysites and the Chalcedonians is shown in the following facts: firstly, that healer saints appear in dreams ‘lecturing’ the Monophysites;'? secondly, that in a dream the Monophysite John Rufos attributes to the Chalcedonians the neglect of healing sites associated with the life of Christ; and thirdly, in the reference to Patriarch Juvenal. Juvenal was well known to the Byzantine court. He reassumed his office with imperial support and shortly before his deposition in 451 the imperial couple Markianos and Pulcheria allegedly asked him to surrender the body of the Theotokos to the Byzantine capital, which was placed in the church of the Blachernai in Constantinople.
Mango considers the idea that Pulcheria made such a request to be completely unfounded because ‘[c]ould the pious Pulcheria have really wished to possess the Virgin Mary corporaliter? Was she ignorant of the absence of such a relic?’'* Similarly, Shoemaker accepts the story’s lack of historicity because ‘the royal couple might have had some knowledge of the traditions concerning the removal of Mary’s body from this world’.'* The story is included in the History of Euthymios, which dates back to the period 550—750'° and was preserved by John of Damaskos (675—753/4) in his second homily on Mary’s Dormition.
Juvenal’s link with Constantinople, his reputation as the Patriarch who surrendered the relics of Mary to the Byzantine emperor and his building activity in Jerusalem are the reasons he is included in this study. To be precise, he may have been associated either with the construction of the church of the Paralytic or with its dedication to the Virgin, which had taken place sometime before 530, as shown below. Juvenal’s intervention in the ecclesiastical affairs of Jerusalem before he became Patriarch is recorded in two post fifth-century sources, the already mentioned Chalcedonian History of Euthymios and the anti-Chalcedonian Panegyric of Bishop Makarios of Tkow composed by PseudoDioskoros, probably in the early sixth century.
The History of Euthymios refers to Juvenal’s attack with troops on the ‘shrine of the holy Mary in the valley of Josaphat’ (the tomb of the Virgin in Gethsemane).'? The Panegyric of Bishop Makarios of Tkow also refers to the same event.” Lourié asserts that it was between the alleged transfer of the relics in 453 and Pulcheria’s death later the same year that the story linking Pulcheria with the foundation of the Blachernai emerged as an aspect of Chalcedonian propaganda and both Pulcheria and Juvenal became Chalcedonian saints.*'! The account of the dream in the Plerophories indicates that Juvenal may have been involved in the construction of the church of the Paralytic or in its dedication to Mary, and in this context Rufos’s choice to use this monument as the location of his narrative was not accidental.
The Plerophories was written between 512 and 518, and a few years later the pilgrim Theodosios (530) wrote on the Probatike: ‘Next to the Sheeppool is the church of my Lady Mary’.” If for a minute we accept Juvenal’s church commission at the Probatike and place it in the Monophysite-Chalcedonian conflict, as the Plerophories do, then it is plausible that the construction of a church to honour the Theotokos served as a public demonstration of his Chalcedonian beliefs. Avner stresses Juvenal’s significant role in the development of the Marian cult in Jerusalem and sees the Kathisma (see below) as a victory over Nestorianism, upon the return of Juvenal from the Council of Ephesos.*? More specifically, the scholar believes that the
fact that his name is associated by Theodoros of Petra and Cyril of Skythopolis with the foundation of the Kathisma, the fact that the Kathisma church (like any other) must have been consecrated by a bishop, and the fact that his name is mentioned in association with the cult of the Virgin Mary in three unrelated sources (the Euthymian History, the Plerophoriae by John Rufos and a panegyric of Makarios, Bishop of Tk6éw) all indicate that Juvenal probably played a major role in the development of the Marian cult in Jerusalem. It also seems likely that he approved the growth in the number of sites and churches dedicated to her, including the Kathisma, a church near the Probatic Pool, and another church in her honour in Gethsemane.”
Lack of tangible evidence however prevents us from associating him with the original construction of Mary’s church at the Probatike, because the earliest testimony corroborating the existence of this church is older than Rufos’s story. Thus, although church politics and the growth of Marian piety, established in Mary’s Kathisma,”* could explain the construction of the church of Mary in the Probatike in the fifth century as being the result of Juvenal’s activity, Theodosios’s account shows that this was in fact a sixth-century development.
cleric, this time in Constantinople, with the same building. The fifth-century presbyter of Hagia Sophia, Markianos, seems, according to the tenth-century Codex Hierosolymitanus Sabaiticus 242 published by Papadopoulos-Kerameus, to have built a church associated with the cure of illness,” that of St Eirene in Constantinople, the porticoes of which had an arrangement similar to those of the Probatic Pool (four surrounding plus one in the middle creating two rectangulars), as the text says.” As to the importance of this Constantinopolitan church, Dagron considers the repeated references to St Eirene in the fifth-century Ecclesiastical History of Socrates an indication that the church was the principal one of the Christian community of Constantinople in the fourth century.
And since Socrates refers to the church of Hagia Sophia as being attached to that of St Eirene, it is probable that the tenth-century manuscript alludes to the ‘antique’ St Eirene in the second region and not to the “new one’ in the seventh region mentioned in the Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae.”*® This church is involved in the theological debate between the followers of Arian and the supporters of the canons of the Council of Nicaea (325).”? Markianos, a converted Novatian,* transferred — similarly to Juvenal’s relic transportation, which was however fictional — the relics of St Anastasia, a healer saint, to Constantinople.
Apart from this story, Markianos’s building activity in Constantinople is also recorded in another tenth-century work, the Patria of Constantinople.*' In both cases, a fifth-century priest constructs a church dedicated to a healer saint, where the Probatike stands in the background. The stories are similar but they reflect different traditions in each city. John Rufos recorded Juvenal’s activity in the context of fifth-century ecclesiastical politics in Jerusalem and Markianos’s story expresses Constantinople’s interest in healing sites in the tenth century, which had originated in the fifth century, and to which we will return when we discuss the emergence of haghiasmata in the Byzantine capital.
To summarize, the Probatic Pool was incorporated into the ecclesiastical debates of the fifth century and reveals not only the struggle of Christian communities to appropriate healing sites but also the importance of healing /oci. The dream of the cleric of the Probatike demonstrates that the adoption of healing sites had become part of the agenda of the Chalcedonian-Monophysite controversy, in which the figure of Juvenal featured prominently. His reputation as a Patriarch who promoted the cult of the Virgin in Jerusalem does not credit him with the dedication of the church of the Paralytic to the Virgin, which had taken place by the beginning of the sixth century, but certainly shows a change in the sacred map of holy sites in Jerusalem. This new map included two basic elements: the growing cult of the Virgin and its appropriation of healing sites.
The church of Mary at the Probatike as Mary’s birthplace
Pilgrims’ accounts allude to a new development at the site of the Probatike over the course of the sixth century: its emergence as Mary’s birthplace. The earliest testimony is that of Antonios (570), who refers to the Probatic pool and the basilica of Mary and adds that Mary was born in this location.” In modern times the spot is commemorated as the birthplace of the Virgin and the house of Joachim and Anna.
Before Antonios, and by the year 530, pilgrims had already referred to the church of Mary by the Probatic Pool. Theodosios, for example, writes: ‘Next to the Sheeppool is the church of my Lady Mary’.*? Interested in healing sites, the Piacenza pilgrim (circa 570) describes it as the ‘pool with five porticoes’ and writes that “to one of the porticoes a basilica dedicated to St Mary was attached in which many miracles take place’.*° The fact that Theodosios had not visited the sites he wrote about, but based his account on other sources or on the oral testimony provided by other travellers, as Avner has suggested,** is of importance here. He recorded not what he saw but a popular tradition of the time that associated Mary with the Probatike. Although Theodosios was not a first-hand witness, his account is revealing as we are not dealing here with actual sightseeing but with the perpetuation of an existing tradition about the nativity of Mary in sixth-century Jerusalem, reinforced by the testimonies of the Piacenza pilgrim and Antonios.*” Notwithstanding these references, the association of Mary with healing in the Probatike as a result of the construction of the church actually goes back earlier than the sixth century. A fifthcentury manuscript from Oxyrhynchus (P.Oxy.VIII 1151) refers to the prayer of a woman named Ioannina, who asks ‘the God of the probatic pool’ to cure her illness. Ioannina’s supplication is then addressed, apart from the archangels and saints, to the Virgin.*® Thus, already from the fifth century the Theotokos was considered a healer associated with this site. Much later, the homily of Pseudo-John of Damaskos on the Nativity of Mary connects the Virgin and healing with the Probatic Pool and repeats Piacenza’s report of Mary’s miracles in this place:
Once a year you received a visit by the angel of God, who troubled the water, strengthening and healing one man from the illness that paralyzed him, whereas now you contain a multitude of heavenly powers who sing hymns with us to the Mother of God, the source of miracles [and] spring of universal healing.*?
The association of Mary’s healing qualities with the Probatic Pool and the fact that her nativity was recorded in the second-century Protevangelion of James, a very popular narrative,*° not only facilitated Mary’s appropriation of the Probatike but were also in accordance with the growing tendency to accommodate next to churches water sources that were used for cures.*! Apart from the influence of the Protevangelion, the change in the sacred topography of the Marian monuments in the Holy Land is the result of a liturgical evolution. This is how Limor explains the fact that there were no sites associated with Mary in Jerusalem in the fourth century, but only after 530, with the report of the pilgrim Theodosios.” As for the Probatike in particular, it was in the seventh century that it became a station for liturgy on the Saturday of the sixth week of Lent,* and in the eighth century when Mary’s Nativity was celebrated on the spot.
The association of Mary with the Probatic Pool belongs to the wider practice of identifying the places where Mary had spent her life, initiated in the course of the fifth century. Pullan attributes this tendency to interest in Christ’s origins,* and Taylor notes that the tomb of Mary in Gethsemane was built in the fifth century to satisfy the expectations of pilgrims familiar with apocryphal stories about the Dormition of Mary.“ A further example of changes in the sacred map of the Holy City is the Kathisma church, which was built to commemorate the spot where the Virgin rested before giving birth to Christ, as the Protevangelion of James (17:2-3) records.*’ An incident from Mary’s life known from apocryphal sources shows that non-canonical literature is used to establish the sacred map of Mary in the Holy Land from the fifth century onwards.
Changes in the associations of sites from the sixth century onwards reveal conceptions of spiritual cleansing at that time, which in the case of the Theotokos were expressed by constructing churches dedicated to her next to healing waters, a tendency which, as we will see, was cultivated in the Byzantine capital from the sixth century onwards. The church constructed in the Probatike, the Kathisma and possibly her tomb were all designated as popular Marian sites and reinforced by early Christian literature as important stations from Mary’s life in the Holy Land.“ It is safe to argue that during the sixth century the cult of Mary made considerable progress in the Holy Land, while positing an earlier date leads to contradictory conclusions.”
Apart from the testimonies of pilgrims, there is no textual information from the sixth century relating to the basilica of Mary in the Probatike. It is only after the partial destruction of the church by the Persians in 614, and its subsequent reconstruction or renovation, that one finds textual references to it again.*° To be precise, in his Anakreontikon, Sophronios, Patriarch of Jerusalem (634—638/9),°! mentions the Probatike as the place where Anna gave birth to Mary: ‘I walk within the holy Probatike, where the most-famous Anna bore Mary’.** Following Sophronios, Pseudo-John of Damaskos exalts the Probatike and its role in the soteriological plan of God in his sermon on Mary’s Nativity:
Hail, sheep-pool, most holy precinct of the Mother of God! Hail, sheep-pool, ancestral abode of the queen! Hail, sheep-pool, which once was the enclosure for Joachim’s sheep but now is the heaven-imitating Church of Christ’s rational flock! Once a year you received a visit from the angel of God, who troubled the water, strengthening and healing one man from the illness that paralyzed him, whereas now you contain a multitude of heavenly powers who sing hymns with us to the Mother of God, the source of miracles [and] spring of universal healing.*
The words of Pseudo-John of Damaskos echo the healing qualities of the Probatic that were once attributed to its waters but were gradually incorporated into her cult, as the Oxyrhynchus manuscript reveals. In his Exposition of Faith, John of Damaskos includes a section On the genealogy of the Lord and on the Holy Theotokos, where he writes on the life of Joachim and Anna: ‘Joachim married Anna; but like the old barren Anna who gave birth to Samuel through prayer, she [Mary’s mother] gave birth to Mary through prayer’.
John of Damaskos continues: (Mary) ‘is born in the house of Joachim in the Probatike and she is taken to the temple’.* Finally, in his treatise How Many of the Venerated Buildings do we Find in the Scripture and in which Ways do we Venerate them (included in his Against Images), John of Damaskos writes that the church of Mary in the Probatike (among others) should be worshipped not only because ‘of its nature’ but because it constitutes a ‘holy vessel of holy energy, which God placed for the process of human salvation’.°° In other words the Probatike should be worshipped because it is the place where Anna and Joachim had Mary, who realized the soteriological plan for the salvation of humanity.
The sentence ‘of its nature’ used by John of Damaskos to describe the Probatike should be understood in connection with the theological importance attached to a monument mentioned in St John s Gospel and then associated with the mother of Christ. Certain characteristics of the ‘nature’ of Marian monuments include their sanctity underlined by an already existing source of water and were highlighted by the sixth-century historian Prokopios in his description of the church of the Pege (= source, fountain) in Constantinople.*’
These features are attested to both in Jerusalem and in Constantinople and constitute essential elements of the cult of the Virgin that from the sixth century onwards would be fully developed in the Byzantine capital. The accounts of Sophronios, John of Damaskos and Pseudo-John of Damaskos continue the tradition recorded by pilgrim Antonios (570), according to which Mary was born in the Probatike. The history of the church and the first testimonies to its association with the nativity of Mary shape to a great extent our understanding of the topography of Anna’s church in the Byzantine capital. This topography was largely influenced by Mary’s association with healing waters (haghiasmata).°*
The emerging cult of St Anna in Constantinople
The conditions under which a number of churches were dedicated to St Anna in the Byzantine capital shed light on the beliefs that formed her cult in Byzantium. And by encapsulating the formation of St Anna’s cult we distinguish the components of space creation in the Byzantine capital. Constantinopolitan topography has never been examined through the prism of St Anna’s cult, or vice-versa, and despite the emerging number of studies on the Virgin, these monuments, which are all documented in texts, have not attracted scholarly interest.
Five churches were built from the sixth century on, and at least one of them was still standing in the beginning of the twelfth century.” The only church which has received some attention is the chapel of St Anna, built by Leo VI (886-912) in the Great Palace, which is mentioned in the chronicle of the Continuator of Theophanes.® The other four are either free-standing, such as the church of St Anna built by Justinian I in the quarter of the Deuteron, or are incorporated as chapels into churches dedicated to Mary, such as the Pege, the Chalkoprateia and the Hodegetria.
It will be argued in this chapter that as early as the sixth century Justinian established a topographical model according to which churches were located next to constructions based around water, which he embellished by incorporating chapels dedicated to the Virgin and her mother. His interest in the creation of sacred spaces developed a topographical model in which St Anna in particular emerged as a healer saint, through her daughter’s association with healing waters. Nowhere in Byzantine texts or images are healing powers through water attributed to St Anna; it is only in the Constantinopolitan topography that her healing qualities are associated with water.
It was argued earlier that the Probatike was part of the sixth-century building activity related to the early life of the Virgin Mary in Jerusalem and a result of the influence of the Protevangelion of James. The same development took place in the Byzantine capital, after the Council of Ephesos (431), where Mary was proclaimed “Theotokos’ (God-bearer) and the first churches dedicated to her appeared in the city.°' However it was a century later that Justinian, who was particularly keen on promoting the veneration of Mary, dedicated numerous churches in her honour throughout the empire, including Constantinople,” Palestine,“ Egypt,“ Libya,® Antioch® and Asia Minor.
A further indication of the veneration that Justinian had for the Theotokos is the testimony of Prokopios, who writes, before proceeding to the enumeration of the churches of Mary built by the emperor in Constantinople: ‘We must begin with the churches of Mary the Mother of God. For we know that this is the wish of the Emperor himself, and true reason manifestly demands that from God one must proceed to the Mother of God’.® Justinian’s promotion of the cult of Mary is explained by his acknowledgment of Anna’s role in the divine soteriological plan, demonstrated in the construction of a church in her honour. Prokopios’s On Buildings is our earliest textual source regarding the commission of a church dedicated to St Anna in the Byzantine capital: ‘For God, being born a man as was His wish, is subjected to even a third generation, and His ancestry is traced back from His mother even as is that of a man’.
Prokopios’s reference reflects Justinian’s acknowledgement that Mary’s genealogy (‘third generation’) should be regarded as an integral part of the veneration of Christ, and an articulate expression of this notion is the emperor’s placing of St Anna’s church under his patronage, as he did many other buildings during his reign.”? What is crucial in this sentence, is that Mary’s apocryphal past is for the first time explicitly regarded as an important part of Christology, an idea that will be formulated from the eighth century onwards in homilies on Mary’s early life. In his On Buildings he writes that a ‘great church’ was built in the quarter of the Deuteron and was dedicated to the ‘so-called Mother of Mary’.’
Prokopios makes no mention of the church of St Anna in the Deuteron,” and neither does the tenth-century writer/editor of the Patria of Constantinople.” St Anna’s church must have been located in the vicinity of the Chora Monastery, between the church of Sts Bassianos and Matronas and near the Aetios and Aspar cisterns (modern Edirne Kapusi).” The location of the church of St Anna in this area is verified by the 7ypikon of the Kecharitomene Monastery (1110-1116), which is connected by road with the church under discussion.” As far as its dating is concerned, Mango sees ‘a trend of monastery building’ in the fifth century and especially in the sixth century in the area of the Deuteron, where, as he says, there were already twenty-one monasteries in 536.
It could be that the availability of space encouraged the construction of these churches in this part of the Byzantine capital. Since we know from Prokopios that Justinian was patron of this church, its dedication must date back to the period between Justinian’s rise to the throne in 527 and the publication of Prokopios’s Buildings in 554/5.”” The church of St Anna was built at a time when there were only seven monasteries dedicated to Mary in the capital,’ and Justinian’s patronage of Anna forms part of the slow rise of Marian devotion in the capital,” which was partly the result of his ‘personal devotion’, as well as religious trends.
It has been suggested that Justinian’s building activity was confined to maintaining existing monuments,*! but there is no evidence — either in textual or archaeological sources — that prior to the sixth century other Byzantine emperors commissioned the erection of a church dedicated to St Anna. Moreover, it was during Justinian’s era that the first liturgical piece on the Nativity of Mary appeared, which was possibly read on the consecration of the Deuteron church and was composed by Romanos the Melodist. This is an isolated attempt to place the life of Mary’s parents in a liturgical context; it will be resumed and completed after the eighth century.
Justinian instituted the first elements of the cult of St Anna by dedicating the first church in her honour in the Byzantine capital and through the hymn of the Melodist by associating it with the nativity of the Virgin, a development that also took place in sixth-century Jerusalem. What distinguishes his building activity from that in Jerusalem is the establishment of a topographical model which placed a church of Mary and of St Anna close to each other and next to a source of healing water, as will be shown below.
The Justinianic model of the Probatike in the post-sixthcentury topography of Constantinople: the Pege, the Chalkoprateia and the Hodegetria Except for the church in the Deuteron, Middle and Late Byzantine sources refer to three churches or chapels dedicated to St Anna in Constantinople that were integrated into churches dedicated to Mary: the Pege, the Hodegetria® and the Chalkoprateia.®
We are told about the chapel of St Anna at Pege by a tenth-century description of a miracle at the site.** Four centuries earlier, Prokopios had underlined the holiness of the location in his account of the construction of the Pege:
In that place there is a dense grove of cypresses and a meadow abounding in flowers in the midst of soft glebe, a park abounding in beautiful shrubs, and a spring bubbling silently forth with a gentle stream of sweet water — all especially appropriate to a sanctuary.*°
The site’s holiness is also emphasized in the fourteenth-century account of Nikephoros Kallistos (1256-1335), who describes the miracle of the spring’s foundation during the reign of Leo I (457-474).*° However unhistorical, Nikephoros’s account shows that, despite the eight centuries that elapsed between Prokopios and Nikephoros, the spring’s fame as a healing site never completely subsided, although it fell into disuse during the Latin domination (1204-1261).*’ Earlier in this book, John of Damaskos’s reference to the ‘nature’ of the Probatike was noted. The same concept was alluded to by Prokopios, who justified the sanctity of a church dedicated to Mary in Pege not only by the fact that it was dedicated to Christ’s mother, but also because the setting, the natural architecture, its flora and waters were in harmony with Mary’s sanctity, as the veneration of Christ’s mother necessitated appropriate natural surroundings. The tenth-century miracle account shows that by that time St Anna had become associated with two traditions which until then had been attributed to her daughter: healing powers and proximity to a haghiasma.
Also by the tenth century, St Anna had been connected in written sources with the healing site of Pege (as shown in the tenth-century miracle accounts mentioned earlier) and as with the Probatike, she appropriated another healing site thanks to the benevolent properties of its waters.** From the tenthcentury Synaxarion of Constantinople we are informed of a church or chapel of St Anna in the Chalkoprateia, where Anna’s Conception (of Mary) was celebrated.® Finally, we are told about the church of St Anna in the Hodegetria in a twelfth-century epigram by Theodore Balsamon: ‘To the tomb near the church of St Anna in the Hodegon monastery’.*® The paucity of information available on these three ecclesiastical buildings makes it very difficult to determine the date of their initial construction. Janin correctly points out that this sentence could signify either a chapel or church,”' but, if it were a chapel, then Theodore would have referred to the tomb in relation to the Hodegetria church, and not to one of its integrated chapels.
In the Hodegetria church, which is not mentioned before the ninth century,” there used to be a fountain which was said to possess miraculous qualities; this fountain — according to the texts — was the reason for its construction in this specific location as early as the ninth century and — according to pilgrims — was venerated at least until the fourteenth century.*? The miraculous fountain of the Hodegetria was compared to the pool in Siloam in Jerusalem,” where according to St John’s Gospel (9:1—7) a blind man was healed. Like the Siloam pool in Jerusalem, the Hodegetria was a well-known healing site for curing the blind.
The Constantinopolitan churches in which both St Anna and Mary are venerated follow the growing tendency of Byzantine religious architecture to connect churches with healing water. Mary, Anna and healing waters feature prominently and are interconnected through Mary’s healing qualities. Apart from the Pege, the Chalkoprateia and the Hodegetria, it could be that this evolution was already underway in the sixth century in the Deuteron church. The Synaxarion of Constantinople writes under September 6: ‘Consecration of (the church of) the Theotokos in the church of Anna in the Deuteron’.
The Synaxarion either gives us information missing in Prokopios, or else it marks a post-Justinianic evolution according to which a church of Mary was incorporated or attached to an existing church of St Anna. When it comes to healing, even when waters were not in the proximity of a church, then the choice of saints covers this need, as we can deduce from the arrangements of a chapel at the Sinai monastery built by Justinian. In the sixth-century basilica, which, as Prokopios tells us, was dedicated to Mary,”’ two chapels are contemporary with the sixth-century katholikon, and they are located on its southern side: one for Sts Anna and Joachim and one for Sts Kosmas and Damian, the famous healer saints.
Justinian was certainly not an innovator; he merely accelerated a process that had already begun, according to which water constructions and the cult of Mary were gradually emerging in the Byzantine capital and Jerusalem. Krueger correctly sees Justinian’s era as a time of ‘the rise of a piety focused on the ability of sacred places and material substances to contain and convey divine power’.”’ The topographical model in Constantinople explained above was based on the fact that from the sixth century onwards churches and baths had become ‘increasingly inseparable’.
This is the result of the freedom of the Constantinopolitan topography to adjust the sacred topography of Jerusalem to the demands of Constantinople’s religious architecture. Ousterhout has correctly put it as follows: ‘Within Constantinople we may witness the construction of a sacred topography in many different ways, but it was not the topography of Jerusalem. As a sacred city it could be likened to Jerusalem but it neither replicated nor replaced the prototype’.'°' He concludes, ‘The sanctity of Jerusalem was fixed, but Constantinople did not suffer the restrictions of a memorialized past and could free-associate’.'” Recent scholarship sees the sixth century as a period that witnessed conscious efforts in Constantinople to create sacred spaces:
Constantinople, the Second Rome, became the Second Jerusalem in the sixth century. In a process of reduplication and multiplication that is common during Late Antiquity, . . . Constantinople acquired the same religious value as Jerusalem in the Christian faith. This is due to the progressive creation of holy places within the capital and to the symbolic meaning they acquired.'”
In this context, Byzantine emperors and Justinian I in particular were engaged in creating sacred spaces, but this did not mean that the same concept is applied to model and ‘copy’.'™ Justinian, however, was innovative in creating a tradition of healing around St Anna which found expression only in church architecture, a reflection of which is attested in the twelfth-century calendar addendum of the Iviron Monastery, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Interested in healer saints and motivated by his respect for the Virgin, he built the first church in Constantinople dedicated to her mother and included her among healer saints in the Sinai monastery.
It should also be noted that, apart from the Deuteron, where there is no tangible evidence, all churches/chapels dedicated to St Anna in the Byzantine capital were in the proximity of a church of Mary and a fountain, following the model of the Probatike. Moreover, St Anna’s first church in the Byzantine capital was built to commemorate the nativity of Mary, which makes it even more likely that the Probatike had a greater influence on sixth-century Constantinopolitan topography than is generally thought.
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