Graham Jones

Ni{ i Vizantija X 481 Graham Jones CONSTANTINE AND HIS MOTHER BUILD A CITY: HELEN OF EDESSA AND MARTYROPOLIS Imperial cities, by definition, intimately connect with imperial rulers. Some, like Niš, grew famous as their birthplaces. Many were renamed to honour the reigning emperor or a member of his family. Others gloried in the walls and monuments with which particular emperors adorned them. With Constantine these imperial gifts began to include churches rather than temples, and the depo- sition of the relics of saints, whose shrines radiated the city’s fame and by ex- tension its benefactor. Imperial munificence was vindicated through the glory of the saints’ lives, their deaths, and the reputed wonder of their miracles. Saint and ruler magnified one another. ‘Augustopolis’ and cities named for saints, for example Sanctos, Xanten on the Rhine, were two expressions of a single idea, the imperial city as personification of majesty and divine approbation. To the studies of Niš as a provincial capital, Constantine’s creation of Constantinople, and the Constantinian devotional and monumental remod- elling of Jerusalem, this paper adds a case-study from the imperial frontier: Martyropolis on the headwaters of the Tigris. Today it is Silvan, a town of south- eastern Turkey, called Mayâfârqîn or plain Fârqîn by its Aramaic-speakers, Muhargin by Kurds, and in Syriac anciently known as Maipherqat. Tradition declared that Constantine and Helena fortified the city, built its Great Church, and safeguarded its water supply; their names were inscribed on its walls. In ad- dressing the issues of the symposium and providing a first unified overview of Silvan’s related archaeology, this article also explores further the presentation of Constantine’s mother Helena as a native of Mesopotamia, not Bithynia as customarily accepted.1 That image adds interest to a wider theme across earlier essays: the likely resonance of her name in Helena’s lifetime. Was her reputation enhanced, then or posthumously, by awareness of the heroic and divine aspects of the Greek Helen?2 What of further comparisons available to Eastern Christians? There 1 Graham Jones, ‘Helen of Mesopotamia: The view from Edessa’, in Miša Rakocija (ed.), Niš and Byzantium. Ninth Symposium, Niš, 3-5 June 2010. The Collection of Scientific Works IX (Niš, University of Niš, 2011), pp. 427-46, hereafter Jones, ‘Edessa’. 2 �� Graham Jones, ‘The power of Helen’s name: Heritage and legacy, myth and real- ity’, in Miša Rakocija (ed.), Niš and Byzantium. Seventh Symposium, Niš, 3-5 June 2008. The 482 Graham Jones was Queen Helena of Adiabene, east of the Tigris, whose career, three centuries before that of her namesake, resembles it closely, probably influencing her son’s religious conversion, building public monuments in the Holy City, and long re- membered for her piety.3 Helena’s name also appears to have been borne by, or assigned by tradition to a queen of Abgar V of Edessa, capital of neighbouring Osrhoene between the Tigris and the Euphrates, and an Edessan ��princess, men- tioned in tenth- and twelfth-century texts which made Constantine her son.4 Like Adiabene, Osrhoene experienced early conversion to Christianity and took Constantine’s mother into its historiography in a further scenario which reinvented her as a first-century empress Protonike, ‘First Victory’. This idea, and the inter-linking of Protonike, the Herodian Berenice, and the composite bi- blical figure of Veronica, fed anti-Jewish sentiment.5 The figure of Helen/a be- gins to emerge as a bridge between the ancient and Christianised worlds of the Mediterranean and Near East. The case of Martyropolis is further testimony, in- volving a third Mesopotamian kingdom, Sophanene, and bringing Constantine and Helen/a together in a pseudo-historical act of imperial city-building. Marūthā, his city, and its history Helen of Edessa, the subject of a report dated by one scholar to the mid-fifth century but attributed to the slightly earlier Marūthā, bishop of Maipherqat,6 appears again in a text describing Marūthā’s city.7 A physician, Marūthā famously mediated with the Sassanid Persian king Yazdegerd I on behalf of emperors Arcadius in 399 and Theodosius II in 408, also healing the king’s headaches and his son’s ‘demons’.8 A mass of relics which Marūthā brought back from his Collection of Scientific Works VII (Niš, University of Niš, 2009), pp. 351-70. 3 Graham Jones, ‘Helena of the Cross, the Queen of Adiabene, and royal myth- making in the Holy City’, in Miša Rakocija (ed.), Niš and Byzantium. Eighth Symposium, Niš, 3-5 June 2009. The Collection of Scientific Works VIII (Niš, University of Niš, 2010), pp. 447-70. 4 Jones, ‘Edessa’, pp. 428-35. 5 Jones, ‘Edessa’, pp. 439-45. 6 Jones, ‘Edessa’, pp. 428-35. 7 On Silvan’s history, Vladimir Minorsky and Carole Hillenbrand, ‘Mayyāfāriķīn’, in P. Bearman et al (eds), The Encyclopaedia of Islam. A Dictionary of the Geography, Eth- nography and Biography of the Muhammadan Peoples (2nd edn, Leiden, E. J. Brill, 2011), 6, p. 928, hereafter EI. 8 In later accounts, Yazdegerd’s daughter. Socrates Scholasticus, The Ecclesiastical History, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd Series, 2 (Buffalo, Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890), 7, ch. 8. For career summaries, Elizabeth Key Fowden, The Barbarian Plain: Saint Sergius between Rome and Iran (Berkeley, Univer- sity of California Press, 1999), Ch. 2, ‘Martyr Cult on the Frontier: The Case of Mayperqat’, Ni{ i Vizantija X 483 first mission – representating the victims of Sapor II’s persecution (341), 1,150, mostly Assyrian, and Bahram IV’s (388-399)9 – led to the city’s renaming as Martyrolopolis. The earliest record of these remarks about Helen comes seven centuries after Marūthā’s lifetime, in 1177, when a locally born scholar, Ibn al-Azraq al-Fariki (‘the Farikene’), copied material from a Syriac tash’ita (‘ac- count’ or ‘history’) preserved in a Melkite church.10 Convinced of its authen- ticity, he had it translated into Arabic by a Christian.11 Circa 1223 Al-Azraq’s hereafter Fowden, ‘Plain’, pp. 45-59, esp. pp. 48ff.; Francis Mershman, ‘St. Maruthas’, in The Catholic Encylopedia (16 vols, New York, Robert Appleton, 1907-14), hereafter ‘Catho- lic Encyclopedia’, 9 (1913); Eugène Tisserant, ‘Marouta de Maypherqat (Saint)’, Diction- naire de théologie catholique, 10 (Paris, Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1928), pp. 142-49, hereafter Tisserant, ‘Marouta’; David Bundy, ‘Marutha of Maipherqat’, Encyclopedia of Early Christianity (2nd edn, New York/London, 1997), pp. 732-33. Hagiography: Acta Sanctorum (Brussels, Société des Bollandistes), 4 Dec., pp. 565-66; Bibliotheca hagiographica graeca [BHG], ed. F. Halkin (3 vols in 1, Brussels, Société des Bollandistes [1957]) = Subsidia Hagiographica 8a, 2265 [Greek, ?early fifth century] and 2266 [eleventh century, based on 2265] (both trs. with commentary by Jacques Noret, ‘La vie grecque ancienne de S. Marūtā de Mayferqat’, Analecta Bollandiana 91 (1973), pp. 77-103, hereafter Noret, ‘Vie greque’); a twelfth-century copy of an Armenian translation of a Syriac Life, seventh century or later, printed in Vark‘ ew Vkayabanout‘iunk‘ Srboc [‘Lives and Passions of the Saints’] (Venice, 1874), 2, pp. 17-32, is trs by Ralph Marcus, ‘The Armenian Life of Marutha of Maipherkat’, The Harvard Theological Review 25 (1932), pp. 47-71, hereafter Marcus, ‘Marutha’. Its pre- cursor may be shadowed in MS Sinai, Syr. 24, fol. 200: Sebastian P. Brock, ‘A fragment from a Syriac Life of Marutha of Martyropolis’, Analecta Bollandiana 128:2 (2010), pp. 306-11, hereafter Brock, ‘Life’. 9 Brock, ‘Life’. 10 Abd Allah bin al-Azraq al-Fariqi, Tarih Mayyafariqin, MSS BL Or. 5803, hereafter Al-Azraq, ‘MS 5803’, and 6310 (at fol. 7b et seq. in MS 5803), hereafter ‘Al-Azraq’, summarised and discussed by H[enry] F. Amedroz, ‘Three Arabic MSS. on the history of the city of Mayyāfāriqīn’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1902, pp. 785-812, hereafter Amedroz, ‘MSS’, p. 796, and Chase F. Robinson, ‘Ibn al-Azraq, his Ta’rīkh Mayyāfāriqīn, and early Islam’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (Third Series), 1996, 6, pp. 7-27, hereafter Robinson, ‘Ibn al-Azraq’. The synoptic version is in Yâqût, 4, 703-7 (see below) and Abu Yahya al-Qazwini, Kitab Athar al-bilad wa-akhbar al-‘ibad (‘Monument of Places and History of God’s Bondsmen’), ed. Ferdinand Wüstenfeld (Göttingen, Dieter, 1848), 2, pp. 379-80, hereafter Al-Qazwini, ‘Kitab’, and trs. with notes by Joseph Marquart [a.k.a. Josef Markwart], ‘Mipherqet und Tigranokerta’, Handes Amsorya [organ of the Mekhitarists of Vienna], 1916, hereafter Markwart, ‘Handes’, cols 125-35, and Sudarmenien und die Tigrisquellen nachgriechischen und arabischen Geographen (Vienna, Mechitharisten-Buchdruckerei, 1930), pp. 184-202, hereafter Markwart, ‘Sudarmenien’. Mi- norsky, EI, mistakenly called the church Jacobite. 11 Jean-Maurice Fiey, ‘Mārūthā de Martyropolis d’après Ibn al Azraq’, Analecta Bol- landiana 94 (1976), pp. 35-45, hereafter Fiey, ‘Marutha’, p. 36; ‘Martyropolis syriaque’, Le Muséon 89:1-2 (1976), pp. 5-38, hereafter Fiey, ‘Muséon’. For Al-Azraq as historian, Carole Hillenbrand, ‘The History of the Jazira 1100-1150: The Contribution of Ibn al-Azraq al-Fariki’, unpub. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1979, and Harry Munt, ‘Ibn al-Azraq, Saint Marūthā, and the Foundation of Mayyāfāriqīn (Martyropolis)’, in Arietta Pa- paconstantinou, Muriel Debié, and Hugh Kennedy (eds), Writing ‘True Stories’: Historians and Hagiographers in the Late Antique and Medieval Near East. Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 9 (Turnhout, Brepols, 2010), pp. 149-74, hereafter Munt, ‘Al- 484 Graham Jones Fig.1. Silvan/Martyropolis in the wider setting. Сл.1. Силван/ Мартирополис у ширем окружењу. material was embedded by the Greek-Syrian biographer and geographer Yâqût al-Hamawi (1179-1229) in his ‘Dictionary of Nations’,12 detectable through signposting phrases like ‘until our days’.13 Silvan lies 70km north-east of Diyarbakir (ancient Amida) and 115km south-west of Lake Van (Fig.

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