Conversion and Empire: Byzantine Missionaries, Foreign Rulers, and Christian Narratives (ca. 300-900) by Alexander Borislavov Angelov A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (History) in The University of Michigan 2011 Doctoral Committee: Professor John V.A. Fine, Jr., Chair Professor Emeritus H. Don Cameron Professor Paul Christopher Johnson Professor Raymond H. Van Dam Associate Professor Diane Owen Hughes © Alexander Borislavov Angelov 2011 To my mother Irina with all my love and gratitude ii Acknowledgements To put in words deepest feelings of gratitude to so many people and for so many things is to reflect on various encounters and influences. In a sense, it is to sketch out a singular narrative but of many personal “conversions.” So now, being here, I am looking back, and it all seems so clear and obvious. But, it is the historian in me that realizes best the numerous situations, emotions, and dilemmas that brought me where I am. I feel so profoundly thankful for a journey that even I, obsessed with planning, could not have fully anticipated. In a final analysis, as my dissertation grew so did I, but neither could have become better without the presence of the people or the institutions that I feel so fortunate to be able to acknowledge here. At the University of Michigan, I first thank my mentor John Fine for his tremendous academic support over the years, for his friendship always present when most needed, and for best illustrating to me how true knowledge does in fact produce better humanity. To John’s wife, Gena Fine, I express deepest gratitude for the warmest hugs of encouragement and for never letting me forget that being a graduate student should not exclude enjoying non-academic aspects of life. I thank Ray Van Dam for first showing me and then guiding me through “the world of the immortals” and for divinizing the magic of writing for me. I thank Diane Owen Hughes for her ever-present support, her directness, and firm guidance in all things academic, but especially for her invaluable advice during times of grant proposal writing. I could not have conducted the research as iii easily and comfortably as I did without Diane’s mastery in project design and description. I also thank Diane and her husband Peter for some of the most delicious meals I have ever had. To Paul Johnson I owe much for his warm welcoming into anthropological studies and social theory and for illustrating best how induction and deduction could work together to result in clarity and more critical argumentation. I thank Paul for writing numerous recommendations on my behalf and for asking me wonderfully interesting questions whose answers I am still trying to find out. At the Classics Department, I thank H.D. Cameron above all for giving me almost single-handedly the greatest gift that a Byzantinist could ask for. Professor Cameron’s Greek lessons with me for many hours and over several years are an example of a selfless commitment to teaching and to personal integration of the most beautiful ideas of the Ancients. From his familiar Homer and Plato to the more “byzantine” Photius and Arethas, Professor Cameron made my philology so much stronger and my appreciation for Greek everlasting. I thank him for his pedagogy, for our numerous conversations over meals or after concerts and theater plays, and for his unfailing belief that I could learn the Ancient Greats, too. I owe to him the intellectual path to the truest philological understanding of some of the most exciting, but labyrinthine passages in literature that I have ever read. It is a gift that I know I could never repay directly to him. I thank Jay Reed for helping me prepare and organize my Greek Masters exam and for giving me a complementary method of reading ancient texts. I am also grateful to him for teaching me how to find the important more readily in a literature that could sometimes seem so foreign to a contemporary reader. To Richard Janko I owe the realization that even extremely busy scholars could be patient and understanding. I thank him for accepting iv me in his class on the history of Greek literature in a period when I wanted to learn much, but had little time and had to pack my schedule tightly and reasonably. Outside of my committee at Michigan, I thank Valerie Kivelson for being the first to introduce me to the University in a winter day so cold that only the excitement to begin studies here, which she planted, could make me endure. I thank Val for her belief in me, for convincing me so very rightly that Michigan is the perfect place for me, and for making my first year at graduate school less stressful than it otherwise would have been. Scott Spector I thank for making me realize that just because I have always read and liked philosophy does not mean that I understand all its intricacies. I thank him for patiently reading and correcting my theoretical ventures and making them less “cloudy.” Brian Porter I thank for steering me in the right direction when organizing my preliminary examination committee. He, more than any other, influenced my candidacy examinations’ reading list to become so multi-varied and extreme that made sense only after I read it. To Rudi Paul Lindner I owe my decision to spend a year in Paris and to have discovered one of the greatest treasures of my life. At the History Department office, I thank Lorna Altstetter, Kathleen King, and Diana Denney for all their help with the most fundamental issues in the life of a graduate student and for solving the bizarre puzzles of bureaucracy that I seemed to be constantly facing. From my “alien” status through grant submissions or classes, I could have never moved through “Rackham” without them. Above all, however, I thank them for their real and most sincere friendship that I hope I would never take for granted. They have made my graduate “career” possible and have kept my life sane and healthy. v At the Near Eastern Studies, I thank Gabriele Boccaccini, Yaron Eliav, and Rachel Neis for taking me to some of the most exciting and informative summer studies programs I have had. My trip to Pompei and Herculanium with them and later my trip to Jerusalem and outside has much enriched my understanding of ancient Christianity, Judaism, and the Greco-Roman world in general. At the Ohio State University, I am indebted to Anthony Kaldellis for confirming and elucidating my choice of dissertation topic, for patiently answering all questions Byzantine since day one, and for the most honest and strong opinions I have found to this day in the American Academy. I thank Predrag Matejic at the Hilander Center and Library for teaching me everything I know about Slavic paleography, manuscript traditions, diplomatics, and codicology. At Columbia University, I thank John Anthony McGuckin for this so very important conversation in his apartment in New York City that convinced me for good that I should undertake the studying of Orthodoxy. Among my graduate student friends at Michigan, I thank Nathanael Andrade for serving as an example of hard work and commitment to me since my very first day at Michigan, for undertaking a “risky” trip to Rome, Naples through Venice and the Balkans with me when others did not dare, for his generosity and most helpful encouragement. With Daniel Hershenzon, I have shared all my plans and hopes more than once. I thank him for listening to my dreams and for helping me make them possible. He has led me to every relevant grant that I ever applied to and has explained to me more about the practical side of scholarship than any other. Stefan Stantchev I thank for pushing me forward, for helping me with the most essential aspects of life more times than he would care to remember. I thank Stefan also for having me over in Rome where I vi was treated as a member of his family. My trips with his father in the round-about streets of the Eternal City and its many surroundings preserve some of the best moments of my life. To Stefka Stantcheva, Stefan’s wife, I owe the delight of numerous fabulous non- academic conversations over some of the best baklava I have ever had. I thank Ian Mladjov for his encouragement, numerous lessons, and generous friendship, which displayed itself (among other things) with the wonderful maps that complement this dissertation and tell a rich story of their own. To Dimitri Krallis I owe the discovery of the Bibliothèque Byzantine in Paris. I am also grateful for his many important pieces of advice. I thank Alex Conison, Jason Parnell, and Raji Mittal for reminding me that there are more books to be read than those written in the Academy. I am especially grateful to Alex for the numerous conversations on the proper way of life. I thank Raji and Jason for our time together in Paris where we collected memories to last us a lifetime. I thank Jessica Stephens for coming into my life and for finding my idiosyncrasies funny and dear. I am grateful for her encouragement and support through some of the hardest moments of writing. I can only hope to be equally understanding and generous in supporting her own daring endeavors. I thank all the participants at the Boundary Crossing and Cultural Exchange workshop for several consecutive years of fruitful discussions and also the readers at the Reading the Pre-Modern for the many beneficial suggestions on my first dissertation chapter.