Download PDF | (Manchester Medieval Sources) Janet Hamilton_ Bernard Hamilton (editors) - Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine World, c. 650-c. 1450-Manchester University Press (2013).
344 Pages
FOREWORD
Religious dualism, founded on belief in two cosmic principles, has a more venerable, varied and influential history than adherents of the major world religions have usually acknowledged. In recent decades, dualist belief and organization in the Byzantine world has attracted growing interest from historians and theologians alike. Documented by rich but difficult and diverse materials, it has generally been studied piecemeal; and very little has been available in English. Janet and Bernard Hamilton in this path-breaking work present a goodly selection of this evidence, some of it never previously published. The introduction supplies the historical context, and a comprehensive commentary is supplied for each text.
In line with the goals of the Manchester Medieval Sources series, the Hamiltons thus make important material accessible to a wider audience than ever before. ‘They allow English-speaking students to grasp for the first time the scale and significance of dualism in the eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans: for some eight hundred years, varieties of dualist religion existed and flourished, some not too far from orthodoxy, others quite distant, mostly within the lands ruled from Constantinople but sometimes beyond Byzantine frontiers. Eastern dualism thus amply deserves study in itself. Equally, it deserves attention from all those interested in western medieval heresy; for the Hamiltons also show that contacts between eastern and western dualists were close, and that western Catharism was strongly influenced from the Balkans. This book transforms our understanding of religious traditions throughout the medieval Christian world, showing their interconnectedness as well as their differences.
Janet L. Nelson, King’s College London
PREFACE
This book is about the rise of Christian dualism and its influence in the Byzantine world. Before the seventh century there had been dualist religions like Gnosticism and Manichaeism which contained Christian elements, but they were theosophical movements, based on myths which were not Christian, although they could be interpreted in a Christian sense. ‘The Christian dualism preached by Constantine of Mananalis in the mid-seventh century was truly Christian because it was based on the authority of the New Testament alone. This way of understanding Christianity later took various forms, and proved attractive to large numbers of people for some 800 years. In the central Middle Ages it spread to Western Europe, where its adherents were known as Cathars (or in Italy as Patarenes).
Ever since the publication of Sir Steven Runciman’s The Medieval Manichee in 1947 and Sir Dmitri Obolensky’s The Bogomils in 1948 coherent accounts of eastern Christian dualism have been available in English. Indeed, we trace our own initial interest in this field to the work of these two scholars to whom we should like to express our thanks. But very few of the sources for the history of the Paulicians and Bogomils have been translated into English. Although rather more have been translated into French, thanks to the efforts of scholars at the Centre de Recherche d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance in Paris, this work is found in journals which are not widely available in British academic libraries, while it is a sad truth that few students reading history degrees in British universities have a good enough knowledge of French to be willing to read these texts.
So the situation has arisen that many students become interested in the history of Catharism, the most important sources for which are available in English translation in W.L. Wakefield and A.P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages, but when they wish to learn more about its origins in the Byzantine world they are frustrated by their inability to read the sources. This has certainly been our experience. Bernard Hamilton has been teaching a course on Cathar History to third-year undergraduates for more than twenty-five years, and in order to cope with this problem Janet Hamilton has translated some of the key texts about Bogomilism for the use of his students. It was the success of this experiment which has led us to undertake the present work in the hope that colleagues throughout the English-speaking world, faced with similar problems, may find this collection of translated sources helpful.
The chronological limits of this book have been determined by the material. Christian dualism began with Constantine of Mananalis who lived in the reign of Constans II (641-68), and the Byzantine Empire ended with the conquest of Constantinople by the Sultan Mehmet II in 1453. Although it is possible and indeed likely that Christian dualist movements persisted after that date, not enough work has yet been done on the early Ottoman records to make it possible to reach any firm conclusions about this. The geographical limits of the work have been less easy to determine. We have defined them as those of the Byzantine world rather than of the Byzantine Empire, because the political frontiers of that Empire fluctuated a great deal in the 800 years with which we are concerned, whereas the area affected by Byzantine civilization remained relatively constant. The Byzantine world comprised those lands which were influenced by the religion and culture of Orthodox Byzantium, and included the whole of Greece and of the Balkans south of the Danube, and extended eastwards through Anatolia to the Christian states of the Caucasus and Caspian regions. In addition, we have included a brief section on the Bogomil missions to Western Europe which influenced the way in which the Cathar churches there developed, but otherwise we have only used Western sources when they provide direct information about Byzantine dualism.
There are two areas of Christian dualism which we have decided not to deal with in any detail. The first is the ondrakian movement in Armenia, which appears to us to be cognate with, but not identical to, Paulicianism. The Tondrakians need to be interpreted in the context of Armenian history of the ninth to twelfth centuries but we lack the linguistic expertise to make such a study. We have therefore merely pointed out in an Appendix what we consider to be the main problems relating to this movement. The second area which we have only dealt with in a limited way is Bosnia, which though on the frontiers of the Byzantine world was not part of it. Ecclesiastically it was a diocese of the Western Church, and politically the kings of Hungary claimed suzerainty over it. But Bosnia was infiltrated by Bogomil missions in the twelfth century and developed links with the Cathar churches of Italy, and so we have included a selection of sources dealing with the early history of dualism there. We have not attempted to include the later history of Bosnian dualism because the sources are too prolific: the papal archives from the thirteenth century onwards contain a great deal of material relating to Bosnia which would need to be reviewed if this highly controversial subject were to be satisfactorily discussed, and such treatment would not be compatible with our word limit.
All but one of the texts we have translated are already in print. The exception is the Treatise against the Patarenes of Constantinople by Hugh Eteriano [36]. Our translation is based on a collation of the two manuscripts known to us, one in the Biblioteca Colombina at Seville, and the other in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. We wish to thank both libraries for supplying us with photocopies of these manuscripts and allowing us to use them, and we are preparing an edition of the Latin text for publication in the near future.
It would not have been possible for us to produce satisfactory translations of the Old Slavonic texts without the help of Yuri Stoyanoy, who has collated our translations with the most recent editions of the texts and has amended them where necessary. We are very grateful to him for the time and assistance which he has so readily given to us.
A special word of thanks is due to Janet Nelson who encouraged us to write this book and has made many valuable suggestions about the ways in which the text might be improved. Our thanks also to Rosemary Horrox who read the final draft and gave us useful advice about it. In the years which we have spent collecting and writing this material we have received help about specific points from a number of friends and we should particularly like to mention George Every, Bob Moore, Graham Loud and Mary Cunningham-Curran. Bernard Hamilton would like to express his special thanks to Professor J.M. Hussey who, although she has not been directly involved in this work, may nevertheless in his case be regarded as its ultimate inspirer, as he first introduced him to the Byzantine world when he was an undergraduate.
Our work has been made possible by the cooperation of the staff of those libraries in which we have worked, and we should therefore like to express our thanks to the following institutions: the British Library, the Warburg Institute of the University of London, the London Library and Dr Williams’s Library. But our thanks are specially due to the staff of the Library of the University of Nottingham, where most of our work has been done, and particularly to those who have dealt with our many requests for inter-library loans.
We should like to say a special word of thanks to the efficient and genial staff of Manchester University Press who have given us every encouragement and support, in particular to Vanessa Graham, Carolyn Hand and Gemma Marren; and also to Richard Wilson who did a remarkable job in standardizing a manuscript which contained many unintended variant readings. We of course take full responsibility for any inconsistencies which remain.
The writing of books is an activity which impinges, seldom benevolently, on one’s family and friends. We are grateful to all our friends and kin for their support, but we would particularly like to thank our daughters, Sarah and Alice, for all their practical help and good humour. We have dedicated this book affectionately to them.
Bernard and Janet Hamilton, Nottingham
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