Sailing from Byzantium (21 page)

Photius may have been taught by the man known variously as Leo the Mathematician and Leo the Wise. Along with other shadowy figures active in the early ninth century (we have names, such as John the Grammarian and Ignatius the Deacon, but little hard information about them), Leo often gets credit for pioneering the resurgence of interest in ancient Greek learning that came with the recovery. All of these men held high office in the church. A proponent of mathematical studies especially, Leo constructed a series of beacon lights to send warning of Arab raids from the border near Syria all the way to Constantinople. Even the caliph al-Mamun, legend had it, tried to hire Leo away from the emperor, though as modern scholars point out, the Arabs were so far ahead of the Byzantines in science at this point that they would have been unlikely to require the services of even a Leo, and so the story is probably false. Yet, possibly because of it, when the emperor Theophilus established a new school of secular studies at the Magnaura Palace, he chose Leo as its head. Leo was also widely reputed to have magical powers.

Photius, too, was linked by rumor with the occult, and
one story held that, Faust-like, he gained his knowledge through a pact with a Jewish magician. Like so many Byzantine humanists, Photius was not at all a modest man, and in spreading such rumors his enemies perhaps felt sorely provoked. But magical forces permeated everything like an electrical field. Demons and other malevolent sprites worked constantly in daily life, and were blamed for small misfortunes from colds to crop failures. Even by Byzantine standards, this was a superstitious age, one in which any and all knowledge was mysterious and potentially suspect. It wasn't just the ignorant but also the erudite who conflated the arcane learning of the ancients with the occult.

Though Photius’ literary appetite was wide, he favored history, poetry, rhetoric, and novels. His own writings (the secular ones, at least) are largely compilatory in nature. He's best known for his
Bibliotheca,
a randomly organized collection of notes on nearly three hundred secular works spanning the classical age to his own times that runs to some 1,600 pages in the modern printed edition. Since about half of these works no longer survive, modern scholars have found the
Bibliotheca
invaluable as a guide to what was still available at the time, and what has since been lost.

Photius began his career in the civil service and rose quickly through the ranks. He is known to have taken part in an embassy to the Arabs, perhaps sometime in the mid-850s. If this entailed a journey to Baghdad, as is likely, Photius might have met his contemporary, Hunayn ibn Ishaq. It's intriguing to picture them enjoying a quiet conversation of a Baghdad evening, comparing insights into Greek literature— Photius with his broad encyclopedic interests, Hunayn with his narrow focus on the useful.

Renowned for both his secular and religious learning, Photius had held no official position in the church, nor was he a monk. Never one to suffer fools gladly, he had incurred the hostility of the patriarch Ignatius by deriding him as an ignoramus. So it was unusual and provocative when, as part of a political and personal dispute, the emperor Michael III deposed Ignatius and nominated Photius to be his replacement. On the emperor's orders, Photius was rushed through the ranks of the church in less than a week.

Ignatius had his own supporters, and they eventually enlisted the pope, Nicholas I, on their side. Nicholas refused to recognize Photius and decreed that Ignatius had been wrongfully deposed; Photius in his turn declared the pope deposed. The resulting Photian Schism was brief, though much has been made of it by Western scholars, who in the nineteenth century portrayed Photius as an archvillain out to ruin the papacy and divide the church.

By the time Photius struck back against the pope, other events had made it clear that more was at issue in the Photian Schism than just the fate of Ignatius. Bulgaria, under its vigorous ruler Boris, was on the brink of converting to Christianity. Boris himself had already converted, and he made it clear that he wished to bring his country along with him. A century and a half earlier, the Iconoclast emperor Leo III, reacting against papal condemnation of Iconoclasm, had removed the Roman province of Illyria from papal jurisdiction. At that time Illyria was strategically insignificant, and the papacy didn't object much. But included in the territory of Illyria were most of the lands that in the late ninth century made up Bulgaria, which had become a powerful state on
Byzantium's very border, and thus one that both parties saw advantages in controlling.

Pope Nicholas now made the return of Illyria to papal jurisdiction a condition for his recognizing Photius, and so the struggle between pope and patriarch escalated into a contest over who would control the strategically important Bulgarian church. Boris, for his part, wishing above all to maintain Bulgaria's independence, proved adept at playing both sides against each other.

Nor was it just Bulgaria that was at stake. The Russian attack on Constantinople in 860 underscored Byzantium's need for a Slavic buffer in the Balkans, and awakened the Byzantines to the desirability of getting an Orthodox foot in the Slavic doorway. As Photius realized, Roman efforts in that direction had already begun.

The resulting race to convert the Slavs would initially play itself out not in Bulgaria but in another Slavic land, Moravia, whose prince had sent a request for a Byzantine mission to his country. Moravia would be the first battleground between the Roman and the Byzantine versions of Christianity. And while Moravia is now largely forgotten by history, the two missionaries that Photius sent there are not.

he two men that Photius chose for the mission to Moravia were brothers. They had grown up in Thessalonica, the empire's second city, which although still a Greek city had been surrounded by Slavic settlers. Slavic was heard in Thessalonica as often as Byzantine Greek. “You are both Thessalonicans, and all Thessalonicans speak pure Slav,” the emperor is reported to have told them in encouraging them to accept the assignment. The dialects that would eventually resolve themselves into the various Slavic languages had not yet done so. Slavs could still understand each other wherever they had settled, and so the brothers would be able to communicate effectively in Moravia.

The younger of the two, whose given name was Con-stantine but who is known to history by his later monastic name of Cyril, had been born around 825. He had come to Constantinople as a young man, where he became a student and protégé of Photius. Known to his contemporaries as Constantine the Philosopher, he was very much a product of
the First Byzantine Renaissance and rapidly became one of its leading lights.

The other brother, whose given name may have been Michael but who took the monastic name of Methodius, was older by about a decade. He would be Cyril's devoted helper and, after Cyril's early death, the faithful executive of his plans. Methodius began his career as a high imperial official in a Slavic area in Macedonia but had abandoned his government career to take monastic vows, joining the important monastery of Mount Olympus in Asia Minor.

The brothers—one a humanist scholar, the other a monk—also established reputations as resourceful and efficient missionary-diplomats. Cyril's biographer states that he participated in an embassy to the Arabs. Michael III and Photius had also tapped both brothers for a mission to the Khazars, a group of Turkic nomads who had settled north of the Caucasus Mountains. Long among the Byzantines’ most faithful allies, the Khazars had already adopted Judaism, which helped them stay independent of both the Byzantines and Arabs. Their strategic importance to the Byzantines lay in blocking Arab attempts to thrust through the Caucasus, which would have allowed the Arabs to outflank the Byzantines by circling north of the Black Sea. The mission was counted a diplomatic success, even though the brothers were unable to convert the Khazars. So when the Moravian request came, Cyril and Methodius seemed tailor-made for the job, with their proficiency in both missionary work and Slavic language and culture.

Cyril and Methodius accepted the mission, but they didn't leave for Moravia right away. Cyril spent the winter preparing for the assignment by inventing an alphabet that could be used to spread the Gospels in Slavic. The new alphabet, called Glagolitic, contained forty letters. Many were
based loosely on either Greek or Hebrew letters, but many also appear invented from scratch. By the time they left Byzantium in the spring of 863, the brothers had used Cyril's new alphabet to translate a selection from the Gospels for use in a Slavic liturgy. This new written language would be called Old Church Slavonic.

Like the Glagolitic alphabet in which it was first written, Old Church Slavonic is considered to be largely Cyril's work. But to say that he “translated” the Gospels and other Greek Christian works is perhaps a bit misleading. It wasn't a matter of just sitting down for a few hours and rendering a passage from the original Greek into a Slavic tongue that was ready and waiting for it. Cyril faced a problem similar to the one that had faced the translators in Baghdad a few decades earlier with regard to Arabic: the language into which these texts were to be rendered didn't yet possess the vocabulary adequate to the task. The Syrian translators had one advantage, though. Arabic was already a written language, with an established if not quite yet “classical” literary tradition. Slavic had never been written down before, and so in addition to lacking vocabulary it also lacked the syntactic sophistication that comes only when thoughts are recorded in writing.

To appreciate Cyril's achievement it's necessary to grasp that oral languages have simpler sentence structures than languages that are both written and spoken, which goes beyond the relatively straightforward recognition that even with languages of the latter kind, no one talks the way they write. If the language is one that regularly gets written down, complexities filter their way into the spoken language, the possibilities of which become measurably more sophisticated. For a purely oral language, this “reservoir” of complexity is never available, and so the language stays relatively limited in the menu of syntactic and other options it offers.

With a deft touch, Cyril expanded the Slavs’ language with Greek loanwords,
caiques
(loan translations), and phraseology.

Moravia originally lay where incoming Slavs had displaced Celts and others along the Morava River, in roughly the area now comprising the Czech Republic. But by the 860s, the Moravian warrior-prince Rastislav had expanded his lands southward to the Danube, making Moravia the northern neighbor of Bulgaria. To the west Moravia's neighbor was the powerful Carolingian empire of Charlemagne's Frankish successors, to whom Moravia's princes owed fealty. The Franks were the dominant power in Moravia, and it was in an attempt to lessen their influence that Rastislav, who like Boris was interested in accepting Christianity, had dispatched an embassy to Constantinople asking for missionaries to be sent to his land. He was hoping they could displace the Frankish missionaries already active there.

Prince Rastislav welcomed the brothers warmly. They got busy recruiting and training a Slavic clergy and making further liturgical translations into Old Church Slavonic. But the situation in Moravia was less than propitious over the long term. Rastislav was opposed by a strong pro-Frankish faction among the Moravian nobility, and Frankish church officials back in Freising, Salzburg, and Passau, who had been working hard to convert the Moravians for a century, were naturally incensed at the Byzantines’ arrival. They were also affronted at the brothers’ use of Slavonic in the liturgy, since the Frankish missionaries had stuck to Latin, as was standard practice in the West.

Eventually, this would be yet another point of divergence between Catholic and Orthodox doctrine. Though it hadn't yet hardened, precedent already hinted at the future. From Ireland to Spain to Germany, Western Christians had
generally used Latin. Meanwhile, Eastern Christians including the Armenians, Egyptians (Copts), and Syrians had developed strong liturgical traditions in their own languages. As with the
filioque,
it was the Frankish church that would eventually determine the Catholic line, lobbying to fix a practical difference into a doctrinal one. At this time, though, despite the Photian Schism, Rome and Constantinople still felt they had a church in common, and besides, Nicholas quite correctly harbored suspicions against the ambitions of the Frankish bishops for a powerful independent church in central Europe. Still, in 867, when the Frankish authorities complained to Rome about the activities of Cyril and Methodius in Moravia, Pope Nicholas I summoned the two Byzantine missionaries to Rome.

They got the summons in Venice, where they'd gone to ordain some of their followers as priests. There they also met and disputed with some other Latin priests who were hostile to the Slavonic liturgy. These critics argued that the holy rites might properly be celebrated in only three languages: Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. In response Cyril articulated an impassioned defense of the idea that a people ought to be able to celebrate the liturgy in their own language.

As a scriptural basis for this practice he quoted St. Paul, from 1 Corinthians 14: “In the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue.” In years to come, this passage would offer the Orthodox their strongest scriptural authority for linguistic diversity in the various national churches, in staunch opposition to the Catholics, who clung to Latin right up to the 1960s.

Having summoned Cyril and Methodius to Rome, Nicholas died before they arrived, but the new pope, Adrian II,
gave his official approval to their use of the Slavonic liturgy, rebuffing the Frankish representatives who also came to Rome.

The brothers were still in Rome when Cyril fell ill in early 869. He knew he was dying, and it was now that he took monastic vows under the name Cyril. He also urged Methodius to carry on their work in Moravia rather than returning to the monastery at Mount Olympus, as Methodius seems to have been thinking of doing. Cyril died on February 14, and was buried in Rome at the church of San Clemente.

Methodius held true to his brother's dying request. He returned to Moravia, though he must have supected the balance of power there lay with the Franks. Indeed, Methodius had not been back more than a year or so when Rastislav's nephew Svatopluk, backed by the sizeable pro-Frankish faction among the nobility, overthrew Rastislav and imprisoned him. Svatopluk's new government invited the Frankish missionaries back, and they wasted no time in having Methodius arrested and thrown in prison. There he stayed for nearly three years, until the pope, Adrian's successor John VIII, learned of Methodius’ incarceration and intervened to have him released.

Undeterred, Methodius turned back once again to his missionary work. He kept it up, as well as continuing to translate many more religious works, for more than a decade after his release from prison. During that time the Franks constantly harassed him and his followers. Adrian II and John VIII had upheld Nicholas I's support for the brothers’ Moravian mission, but after John's death in 882 the papacy caved to Frankish pressure, abandoning the Slavonic liturgy and lining up behind the Franks in Moravia and elsewhere.

Methodius himself died in 885. The Slavic disciples he had trained with such determination were arrested, deported
to Bulgaria, or sold into slavery, and the Franks were left with an open field in Moravia. The life's work of Cyril and Methodius, it seemed, had come to nothing.

In Byzantium and Bulgaria, events had unfolded with equal speed and complexity. In Byzantium, Michael III had been assassinated and replaced by Basil I, a supremely opportunistic former stable boy whom Michael had elevated to the role of advisor and confidant, and then dangerously alienated. Having taken this devious and unlikely road to power, Basil went on to found Byzantium's greatest ruling house, the Macedonian dynasty, which for two centuries would preside over the medieval empire at the height of its strength and prosperity.

In Bulgaria, the khan Boris, who had already converted to Christianity, wanted to Christianize his country, but at the same time he sought to maintain Bulgaria's independence from Byzantium. Accordingly, he asked Photius to appoint a patriarch for Bulgaria, which would establish a national Bulgarian Orthodox church on an equal footing with the Byzantine church, with full autonomy. When Photius refused to allow this, Boris turned to Rome and invited in a contingent of Frankish missionaries.

That was in the summer of 867. In the fall, Basil I reversed many of Michael's religious policies. In one of his first acts as emperor, Basil removed Photius from the patriarchate and reinstated Ignatius. This amounted to a victory for Nicholas I, who had opposed Photius. So, during the winter of 867-68, when Adrian II succeeded Nicholas I as pope, the papacy seemed poised on the edge of dominance. The Slavic
world for all appearances lay ripe for the plucking before the Vatican, which with the deposition of Photius had seemingly imposed its will on the Byzantines as well.

But Adrian overplayed his hand. He angered Boris by rejecting Boris’ nominee for archbishop of Bulgaria, and then he convened a council in Rome that not only condemned the deposed Photius but further declared that all bishops appointed by Photius during his tenure as patriarch were now themselves deposed. This high-handed attitude irked both Basil and Ignatius, who up till then had been favorably disposed toward Rome. By 870, Boris had turned back toward Constantinople, while in Byzantium Photius and Ignatius had taken steps to patch up their quarrel.

In returning to the Byzantine fold, Boris was only acknowledging the logic of his and his country's situation, which was strategically the reverse of Rastislav's and Moravia's. Both leaders had kicked against a powerful neighbor by appealing to a more distant power, but just as Moravia was ultimately sealed within its Frankish orbit, so was Bulgaria trapped by Byzantium's gravitational pull.

When Ignatius died in 877, the old tensions in Byzantium had been smoothed to the extent that Basil reappointed Photius back to the patriarchate, but this time in a much calmer political atmosphere. A few years later, a church council in Constantinople saw Photius reconciled with the papacy, ending the Photian Schism.

In Bulgaria, fate now presented Boris with a rare opportunity. Personally devout, he was also politically astute. From the start, he consciously used Christianity both to consolidate his own power and to further unify Bulgarian society. His main opponents in both endeavors were the remaining pagan and Turkic boyars, who had revolted immediately after Boris’ conversion in the mid-860s. Boris put down that
revolt without too much trouble, but for the time being the boyars remained a stubborn force opposing Boris’ pro-Byzantine policies, including Christianization, and resisting as well the progressive Slavicization of the Bulgar ruling class.
^∗