endowment studies 1 (2017) 173-197 brill.com/ends Founding a Monastery on Athos under Early Ottoman Rule: The typikon of Stauroniketa Zachary Chitwood Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, FB 07, Historical Seminar, Byzantine Studies, Jakob-Welder Weg 18, 55099 Mainz, Germany [email protected] Abstract The best-attested and most important endowments of Orthodox Christians in the medieval world were created by means of foundation charters (ktetorika typika). Via a typikon, a founder or ktetor was able to regulate the present and future functioning of his (invariably monastic) endowment, often in minute and voluminous detail. Of particular interest for the topic of this special issue of ENDS are some post-Byzantine monastic foundation charters, which hitherto have received almost no scholarly scrutiny. Among these charters is the testament of the patriarch Jeremiah i for the Stauroniketa Monastery on Mount Athos. His monastic charter demonstrates the con- tinuity of Byzantine endowment practices in the first centuries of Ottoman rule, yet also underlines new difficulties for monastic founders attempting to adapt the quint- essentially medieval Christian practice of composing typika to the strictures of an Is- lamic legal regime. Keywords Ottoman Empire – monasticism – patriarch – Orthodox Christianity – Mount Athos – typika In this article some of the strands of continuity and change which character- ize Greek Orthodox foundation practice in the transitional period from the last phase of the Byzantine Empire to the first centuries of Ottoman rule will © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/24685968-00102004Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 04:44:22AM via free access <UN> 174 Chitwood be explored.1 In doing so, first an overview of some general characteristics of Byzantine endowment culture will be given, before moving into the period of the first century and a half after the fall of Constantinople. Finally, an English translation of the founding charter (typikon / τυπικόν) of the Athonite monas- tery of Stauroniketa, the first translation ever of the document, is appended to the end of the article. A question worth posing at the start of this essay is what exactly consti- tutes a foundation. There is no way to tailor a definition of endowments which would satisfy every historical context, but at a most basic level a foundation or endowment is a sum of capital dedicated by its founder for a particular pur- pose, whose functioning is financed by the revenues produced by the endow- ment.2 Unlike a donation, a foundation is not a one-time immediate act, but rather an endeavor meant to last over the long term, if not forever. The deed of founding is replayed continuously between the founder and beneficiaries, in the Christian context usually in the form of liturgical commemoration of the former.3 For the East Romans or Byzantines, the main types of endowments were churches, philanthropic institutions and monasteries, though the last of these proved a much more durable form of foundation and, especially after the turn of the first millennium ce, completely predominates in the surviv- ing source material.4 While churches and piae causae were often subjected to 1 This article is a revised form of a presentation given at the conference “Imperial Subjects and Social Commitment: An Endowment History from 1750 to 1918” (Nov. 16th–18th, 2016) at the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Vienna. I would like to thank the organizers (Stefano Saracino, Nathalie Soursos and Maria Stassinopoulou) for inviting me to present and to submit my contribution to this special issue. I presented the content of this paper a second time at the biennial meeting of the Deutsche Arbeitsgemein- schaft für die Förderung Byzantinischer Studien (Mainz, Feb. 16th–18th, 2017). I profited a great deal from comments and questions from both venues, as well as from the suggestions of the two anonymous reviewers. 2 For recent attempts at defining foundations in an intercultural context, see in particular Bor- golte 2014; Borgolte 2017: 2–3. 3 All Byzantine foundations fell under the category of “foundations for the salvation of the soul”, in which the founder expected that his endowment of material goods would contribute to the salvation of his own soul. Borgolte 2015 has recently argued that the first foundations of this sort arose not in a Christian context, as has long been assumed, but in a Zoroastrian one. 4 Chitwood 2014a: 215. Regarding the various forms of Byzantine endowments or foundations (with references to the broader scholarly literature on the subject), see Chitwood 2014d. The closest thing to a complete listing of archival documents stemming from Middle and Late endowmentDownloaded studies from Brill.com10/02/20211 (2017) 173-197 04:44:22AM via free access <UN> Founding a Monastery on Athos under Early Ottoman Rule 175 the authority of the official church, and in particular of the local bishop, mon- asteries, with their self-perpetuating communities of monks, were naturally inclined to assert their independence against local hierarchs. This indepen- dence was achieved in two principal ways: firstly, by subordinating a monas- tery to the theoretical, though it seems in practice mostly pro forma, control of another ecclesiastical figure, especially the patriarch of Constantinople. So- called “stauropegial” (so-called because the patriarch claimed jurisdiction over the institution through his “fixing of a cross” [stauropegion / σταυροπήγιον]) monasteries are attested as early as the end of the ninth century.5 Secondly, a monastery could also attain self-governing status, whereby it claimed inde- pendence from all ecclesiastical and temporal authorities.6 This second type of independent status first appears with the Great Lavra on Mount Athos in the middle of the tenth century, and was claimed with increasing frequency thereafter. The peculiarities of Byzantine monasticism, which knew no monastic or- ders comparable to those from the Medieval West, as well as the propensity of Eastern Roman founders to minutely regulate the administrative and financial aspects of their foundations, both contributed to creating a context in which a uniquely Byzantine genre of foundation document, the so-called ktetorikon typikon (κτητορικὸν τυπικόν), arose. A ktetorikon typikon, which one can rough- ly translate as a “founder’s charter”, was a text in which the founder or ktetor (κτήτωρ) laid out, often down to the most mundane of minutiae, not only the regulations of the monastic life which the monks or nuns of the foundation were to follow, but much else besides.7 It is one of the great achievements of Byzantine Studies of the last quarter-century that the major Byzantine Byzantine monasteries is Smyrlis 2006: 23–31. For the Athonite material in particular, see Morris 2008. The much sparser documentation for churches and piae causae is not compre- hensively collected within any one publication, but one can consult the general overview of charitable institutions in Miller 2008, as well as the more general history of Byzantine foun- dations in Thomas 1987. 5 Kazhdan and Talbot 1991; Chitwood 2016c: 562. 6 The phenomenon of “free” or “self-governing” monasteries is well-studied in the various publications of John Thomas, in particular Thomas 1985 and 1987: 214–243. The more recent scholarship on the subject is listed in greater detail in Chitwood 2016c: 563–564. 7 Including: the administration of the monastery; the relationship of the foundation to the founder’s family and heirs; regulations concerning the oversight of the endowment, the pre- cise contents of which were sometimes listed in a separate inventory or brebeion (βρέβειον); and the status of the monastery to the relevant ecclesiastical and state authorities. The best analysis of this “genre” remains Galatariotou 1987, even though her binary classification endowment studies 1 (2017) 173-197 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 04:44:22AM via free access <UN> 176 Chitwood ktetorika typika were translated and provided with a historical commentary by John Philip Thomas and Angela Constantides Hero in Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents, a work which spans five volumes and 61 such founders’ charters.8 Yet typika were not a strictly Byzantine phenomenon: there were also numerous typika composed for Orthodox monastic foundations during the Ottoman Empire. The most prominent examples include: most of the typika surviving for the monasteries of the monastic federation of Meteora in Thes- saly; the founding charter for the Leimonos monastery on the island of Lesbos; and the founder’s rule and testament for the Athonite monastery of Stauronik- eta, the only one of the twenty foremost monasteries today on the Holy Moun- tain which was founded after 1500.9 In fact, even medieval typika continued to be of great value in Ottoman society: they were accepted as valid documentation in the Islamic judge’s or qadi’s court, for instance in property disputes.10 Though the end goal of using a medieval typikon as a claim to property in legal cases seems to have always of these documents into “aristocratic” and “non-aristocratic” categories is not universally shared: see Chitwood 2014b: 401–403. 8 Though there are important medieval founders’ charters stemming from the Byzantine world, even in Greek, which did not find their way into the corpus. Thomas’ and Hero’s Herculean labor, completed under very trying circumstances over almost fifteen years, was nonetheless a seminal achievement: see bmfd vol. 1, 1–20. Medieval Greek typika not found in the corpus include the charter of George of Antioch for his church of St. Mary’s of the Admiral in Palermo (which includes some Arabic as well; George of Antioch, Char- ter for St. Mary’s of the Admrial), or the Chrysobull of Alexis iv and John iv of the Grand Komnenoi for the Pontic Monastery of the Pharos (dated to the year 1432).