The Tale of the Prophet Isaiah East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450
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The Tale of the Prophet Isaiah East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450 General Editor Florin Curta VOLUME 23 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ecee The Tale of the Prophet Isaiah The Destiny and Meanings of an Apocryphal Text By Ivan Biliarsky LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013 Cover illustration: Mural depicting the Kladnitsa monastery “St. Nicholas, the Wondermaker”, Bulgaria. With kind permission of the Monastry “St. Nicholas, the Wondermaker”, Kladnitsa, Bulgaria. This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1872-8103 ISBN 978-90-04-21153-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-25438-1 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. 1 In Judah is God known: his name is great in Israel. 2 In Salem also is his tabernacle, and his dwelling place in Zion. 12 He shall cut off the spirit of princes: he is terrible to the kings of the earth. (Psalms, 76:1–2, 12) Γνωστὸς ἐν τῇ Ἰουδαίᾳ ὁ Θεὸς, ἐν τῷ Ἰσραὴλ μέ- γα τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ. καὶ ἐγενήθη ἐν εἰρήνῃ ὁ τόπος αὐτοῦ, καὶ τὸ κατοικητήριον αὐτοῦ ἐν Σιών. τῷ φοβερῷ καὶ ἀφαιρουμένῳ πνεύματα ἀρχόντων, φοβερῷ παρὰ τοῖς βασιλεῦσι τῆς γῆς. (Ψάλμοι 75 :2–3, 13) Cognoscetur in Iudaea Deus in Israhel mag- num nomen eius et factus est in pace locus eius et habitatio eius in Sion … et ei qui aufert spiritus principum terribili apud reges terrae (Ps. 75:2–3, 13) CONTENTS List of Illustrations . ix Preface.................................................................. xi Introduction . 1 1. The Text of the Literary Work and Its Manuscript Tradition. 7 The Variable Destiny of the Kichevo Manuscript and the Place of Tale of the Prophet Isaiah in It . 7 The Text of the Tale of the Prophet Isaiah ....................... 10 2. Tale of the Prophet Isaiah in the Context of Mediaeval Literature and Modern Researches . 29 Historiography . 29 Publications of the text of Tale of the Prophet Isaiah . 30 Character of the Text . 49 Authorship . 51 Localisation . 52 Dating of the Text . 54 3. The Chosen People and the Promised Land . 65 The Prophet Isaiah and the New Israel . 65 Geographical Features of Religious Identity. 84 Cities and Founding of Cities. 98 4. The Divinely Chosen King, Humble to God: Tsar Izot, or Davidic Royalty .............................................................129 Tsar Izot and His Reign . 132 The Antagonists . 135 Goliath, the Sea Frank . 136 Ozia, the King of the East . 139 The Davidic Paradigm of Power and Tsar Izot: The Bagrationi Dynasty and the Idea of the Davidic Royalty in the Causcasus . 150 viii contents 5. The Renovator King: Tsar Ispor and the Mosaic Royalty: Constantine and the Royalty of the Ruler-Converter to Christianity . 163 The Moses-Constantine Typology in the Mediaeval World . 165 Moses-Constantine in Bulgaria. 179 Moses-Constantine in the Tale .................................189 6. Kings and Their Names . 205 Arev............................................................206 Basil . 210 Cometopouloi . 213 Constantine . 218 Nicephorus . 221 Roman .........................................................225 Seleukia Simeklit . 226 Slav.............................................................232 Symeon . 234 Theodora and Her Son the Tsar . 237 Turgius . 239 Conclusion . 243 Excursus One: The List of Names of the Bulgar Princes: Between Myth and History . 249 Excursus Two: The Birth of the Founding Kings . 261 Excursus Three: The Tabernacle of the Empire or the State-Church . 269 Bibliography . 279 Index ...................................................................297 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. GIM 86795, Kludov. 123, f. 400v. With kind permission of the State Historical Museum of Moscow. 22 2. GIM 86795, Kludov. 123, f. 401r. With kind permission of the State Historical Museum of Moscow. 23 3. GIM 86795, Kludov. 123, f. 401v. With kind permission of the State Historical Museum of Moscow. 24 4. GIM 86795, Kludov. 123, f. 402r. With kind permission of the State Historical Museum of Moscow. 25 5. GIM 86795, Kludov. 123, f. 402v. With kind permission of the State Historical Museum of Moscow. 26 6. GIM 86795, Kludov. 123, f. 403r. With kind permission of the State Historical Museum of Moscow. 27 PREFACE This book is a translation of my monograph, Skazanie na Isaiah proroka i formiraneto na politicheskata ideologija na rannosrednovekovna Bulgaria (= TaleoftheProphetIsaiahandtheFormationofthePoliticalIdeologyofEarly Mediaeval Bulgaria), which was published in 2011 in Sofia. I had almost one year after the publication of the Bulgarian text to take into consideration all the suggestions of my colleagues, and now the reader has in his hands a noticeably modified book. It is significantly enlarged and enriched with ideas, some of which are new, others have been neglected in the Bulgarian version. I strongly hope that my new study is more consistent and clear and I would like to thank to all my colleagues who helped me achieve this result. I would like as well to thank Vladimir Vladov for the translation of the text and to express my special gratitude to Christopher Bonura for editing manuscript and improving the English. Without his help, the book would not be the same. Following the common practice, the titles of books and articles published in other alphabets are transliterated in Latin characters. With Greek, I used the classical transliteration, while for Cyrillic, I have employed the general rules in use for the Library of Congress system. However, I have preferred the common English spelling wherever that would help a reader unfamiliar with Bulgarian, Serbian, or Russian. For example, I preferred “archiepiskopia” (archbishopric) to “arkhiepiskopija” or “arkhiepiskopiia,” and “Sofia” (the capital of Bulgaria) to either “Sofija” or “Sofiia”. Several other points of clarification are given in the text itself. The book was shaped by recommendations from the readers, Christopher Bonura, Florin Curta (the editor of the series), and Marcella Mulder (assistant editor at Brill). I assume responsibility for any error or absence. Sofia, June 11, 2012 The day of Sts Apostles Bartholomew and Barnabas Mother of God Axion Estin INTRODUCTION A book is conceived gradually, even though in the beginning there is always a sudden spark that rouses the author’s interest in a certain theme, a certain source, in certain figures and events. The spark might come on some con- crete occasion, at times an insignificant one, perhaps even unrelated to the author’s research. Afterwards, the spark might ignite a short-lived interest, or be the initial cause of concrete research that will subsequently be left off and never resumed, or else resumed much later, rekindled by some other spark. However, another course is also possible: the author might proceed towards his goal at a regular pace, moved by a lasting interest in the problem; or by the fact that the work has been ordered—and this is an incitement to which all, or nearly all, intellectuals submit. This book is the result of such momentary gleams that eventually led to the idea of a new reading of a mediaeval treatise, and along with this, a new examination of many stereotypes that have been imposed for more than a century and are now ingrained in society—and from there in historical sci- ence. The first steps on the path that led to this book were taken in Rome in the second half of the 1990s, incited by the seminars organised by Professor Pierangelo Catalano and Professor Paolo Siniscalco, and entitled “Da Roma alla Terza Roma”. Dealing with the idea of Empire, of the City and citizen- ship, and of the religious foundations of state power and law, these seminars provided me with the environment I had long been seeking in my desire to fill my researches with a deeper meaning, to give them a greater com- pleteness, integrity, that would go beyond the concrete work with sources or with amassed literature; to situate my writing in the context of History viewed not only as a chain of events but as a road to a destination, a pur- pose, a meaning. The second stage of conception developed in Bucharest during my stay in New Europe College, where a group was formed, a group of people with shared interests in the problem area related to translating theological terms into the vocabulary, conceptual framework, and essence of political and legal thought. This is an area of study that Carl Schmitt desig- nated as “political theology”,and that was subsequently taken up and further developed by various Catholic, Protestant, and, more recently (though not very systematically) by Orthodox authors. I will not enumerate here the friends who are part of this basically informal group, for they know very well who they are, and I wish to avoid the risk that someone might be omitted 2 introduction from this enumeration and hence feel unjustly offended. And the last step towards defining the direction of my work was taken in Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D.C., in the course of very interesting, indeed, unforgettable, talks with Professor Irfan Shahîd. The result of that stay was not only my research about Tsar Arev (its idea sprang from a remote childhood memory of my father relating to me events that had taken place in Iraq) but also the general orientation to search for the Near Eastern roots of the literary work I purposed to study.