1 the Chronicle of John of Nikiu: Historical Writing in Post-Roman

Home , 526 Antioch earthquake, Basilides (patricius), Basiliscus (Caesar), Blemmyes, Christian Topography, Chronicle

The Chronicle of John of Nikiu: Historical Writing in Post-Roman Egypt

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Felege-Selam Solomon Yirga

Graduate Program in History

The Ohio State University

2020

Dissertation Committee

David Bernhard Brakke, Advisor

Anthony Kaldellis

Kristina Marie Sessa

Copyrighted by

Felege-Selam Solomon Yirga

2020

Abstract

While there has been a great deal of work on the late seventh-century Chronicle of John, the anti-Chalcedonian Bishop of Nikiu, since its 1883 publication and French translation by Hermann Zotenberg, there have been few modern studies devoted exclusively to the author and his work. What is more, these modern studies primarily engage with the text as a source of data for the reign of Emperor Herakleios, and the Arab conquest of Egypt, meaning that modern historians often read past the author to a layer of sources beneath them. This positivist utilitarian view of the Chornicle often involves reducing John’s worldview to that of a monophysite historian and a Coptic proto-nationalist, and as such interprets the relevant data through this framework. Modern scholarship has further transposed this world view onto the author’s world, creating the impression that the

Chronicle presents a narrative which reflects the development of a Coptic identity characterized primarily by hostility towards the Chalcedonian church, and the Roman state which had previously supported it. Anything in the text which challenges this view is dismissed as the product of John of Nikiu’s method of compiling sources and inverting pro-Chalcedonian and pro-Roman sentiments where they appear.

This dissertation moves beyond the heretofore utilitarian-positivist approaches. It instead argues that the entire Chronicle must be viewed as a complete work which, while compiled from a variety of identifiable and unidentifiable sources, still reveals a coherent

ii and distinct historical narrative and theory of history, and one that does not neatly align with the theological and historical positions of the Egyptian Severan Church.

This dissertation examines John of Nikiu’s theory of history and prescriptive guidelines through a series of challenges to established scholarly views of the Chronicle.

The first chapter challenges the notion that the Chronicle reflects a parochial view of world history centered primarily on Egypt and its monophysite Christian population and as such represents a break from the Byzantine world, which had left an indelible mark on the education and worldview of the bishop of Nikiu. It argues that John’s theory of history, as it applies to the realm of politics, focuses primarily on the effects of individual actors on the broader safety and stability of the entire Christian oikoumene, rather than the Egyptian Christian population alone.

The third and fourth chapters challenge the image of John as a mere compiler of data. Chapter 3reveals one dimension of his theory of history by demonstrating the presence of a coherent mechanism of God’s interaction with humanity in human history.

iii demonic army. The outsized role of demonic forces on the plot of the narrative reveals the text’s monastic outlook, which ultimately serves to further highlight the way in which lapses in moral and religious discipline invite the destructive influence of the demonic and diabolic forces that threaten the security of the Christian oikoumene.

The final chapter seeks to understand how John of Nikiu conceived of his own doctrinal and theological position.. The Chronicle provides a history of the Egyptian

Severan Church not as an independent institution, but as a community of true orthodox believers within a universal church that was besieged by heretics—Chalcedonians, pagans, Arians, and non-Severan anti-Chalcedonians—who used the state and Church to persecute the community of true believers.

Together the four chapters reveal that John used as his framework the Byzantine genre of the universal chronicle to present an ethically prescriptive metanarrative of world history, which explains the long-term consequences of the ethical successes and shortcomings of individual actors. This ethical approach enabled him to connect the community of Egyptian Christians to a long, and universal Christian tradition. In other words, John sought to remind his Coptic-reading audience that they were still part of a universal Christian community by showing how their own actions had a significant impact on the well-being of all Christians, despite the fact that by his own time, doctrinal disputes and half a century of alienation from the Roman empire had substantially separated Egypt from Rome.

Dedication

For my Mother and Father

Acknowledgments

This dissertation is the product of the input, advice, editing, and influence of many dear friends and mentors. First, my advisor, David Brakke, was infinitely patient with me for the duration of my time engaged in research and writing and acted as an endless source of references and kind, thoughtful, and productive comments on draft after draft. Anthony

Kaldellis’s depth of knowledge and brilliant insights while commenting on drafts of the present work can only be matched by his generosity: Anthony was the first person to contact me when my graduate studies began, and was endlessly supportive even when this project seemed hopelessly incoherent. Tina Sessa’s comments and encouragement through the later stages of the process were invaluable. Tina introduced me to the world of Late Antiquity as a young graduate student interested in the political history of

Byzantium and Aksum. Without her this dissertation could not have been conceived.

But beyond the members of my committee, many have been key influences to the articulation of ideas in this work. Chief among these is Kevin Van Bladel, who first introduced me to John of Nikiu, and whose language instruction truly opened my eyes to the world of Late Antiquity beyond the borders of the Byzantine Empire and its Greek- speakers. Eyob Derillo assisted me with access to Or. 818 at the British Library in

London, and Solomon Gebreyes Beyene’s comments and published writings have been most helpful to me in understanding Ethiopian historiography.

This dissertation was completed with the support of a Junior Fellowship from

Dumbarton Oaks Research Collection and Library, where I stayed for the academic year

2019-2020. The community of scholars I met there had a tremendous impact on me intellectually and personally, and I would like to thank in particular Anna

Stavrakopoulou, Dimiter Angelov, Elizabeth Bolman, Derek Krueger, Claudia Rapp,

Warren Woodfin, John Duffy, Savvas Kyriakides, Joshua Robinson, Alyson Williams,

Jakub Kabala, Arianna Gullo, Kostas Konstantinidis, Alisdair Grant, Flavia Vanni, and

Héléna Rochard.

To the above I must add those who sat with me either online or at cafes and bars throughout Columbus and Washington, D.C., to talk with me about my Egyptian bishop.

Chief among these are Verena Krebs, Michael Beshay, Kyle Shimoda, Isacar Bolanos,

Reyna Esquivel-King, Joel Dowlingsoka, Augustine Dickinson, Matthew Kinloch,

Mikael Muehlbauer, Sarah Porter, Ammanuel Gashaw, and Jonathan Hsieh, who shared the burden of talking me through emotional lows and highs through the writing processes, and were just as key to my intellectual development as my committee.

Finally, my sister Fanaye Solomon Yirga never shied away from lending me her considerable talents as a philologist and thinker. The main arguments of my research emerged in conversation with her, and she devoted much time to convincing me that not everything I had produced was totally irreparable. Kevin Diep and Nick Smith also bore more than their fair share of conversation about ancient historiography and in many ways this work is a response to the many insightful questions they posed to me about the ancient and medieval worlds since we first met in 2008. If the reader finds anything of

vii merit in this work, they may credit it to the good cheer, outstanding intellect, and endless patience of friends, mentors, and family, named and unnamed. The rest is my fault.

viii

Vita

2008: International Community School of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

2012: B.A. History, Minor in Classics and Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Brandeis

University

Autumn 2015: M.A., History, The Ohio State University

Autumn 2013 to present: Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of History, The Ohio

State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: History

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Dedication ...... v Acknowledgments...... vi Vita ...... ix Chapter 1. Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 2. Government, Ethics, and Memory in the Chronicle of John of Nikiu ...... 36 Chapter 3. The Wrath of God: Natural Disasters, Historical Causation, and the Ethical and Theological Arguments of the Chronicle...... 72 Chapter 4. Emperors, Demons, and the Moral Argument of the Chronicle ...... 100 Chapter 5. Compassionate Villains and Heretical Martyrs: John’s Approach to Ecclesiastical History and Theology ...... 140 Chapter 6. Conclusion ...... 186 Bibliography ...... 193

Chapter 1. Introduction

In 642 CE, Arab forces led by Amr ibn Al-As conquered Egypt and ended almost seven centuries of Roman hegemony. Not only did the empire lose one of the principal sees of

Christianity, which the government had spent a substantial portion of the sixth century pacifying, but a substantial part of its citizenry, whose predecessors had numbered among

Rome’s most notable theologians, philosophers, and poets. Economically, the Arab conquest deprived Constantinople of a substantial agrarian base and threatened to cut off the empire from the substantial luxury markets of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.

Despite the importance of the province of Egypt to the Roman world, there is no account among any of the surviving historiographical sources of this event with the chronological proximity and level of detailed offered by the Chronicle of John, the

Bishop of Nikiu in Egypt. Since the first publication of the full text and French translation by Hermann Zotenberg in 1883, historians have mined the Chronicle for data and treated it with a positivist-utilitarian approach. Because so many of John’s sources are readily available to modern scholars, primarily in Greek, modern scholars have assumed that the text is merely a compilation with sparse modification and little actual composition. They have considered the bishop of Nikiu a biased reporter of earlier sources, whose worldview can be easily reduced to that of a Coptic monophysite and whose hostilities and sympathies neatly reflect those of his church and society. This

1 perspective flattens the author into a one-dimensional avatar of his church’s interests and obscures the dense network of ecclesiastical, political, and theological conflicts that characterized the world of late seventh-century Egypt.

This study moves beyond the utilitarian-positivist approach and argues that the

Chronicle is a complete work with an intentional historical narrative and coherent theory of history, rather than a compilation of texts from which the modern historian can pluck points of data relevant to her particular study. John composed the Chronicle as a universal Christian history with a moral and ethical focus directed towards the Severan monastic communities of post-Roman Egypt. He presented a historical explanation for the current state of the world and offered a prescriptive ethical and moral behavioral guideline for these communities. John sought to shore up support for his Severan ecclesiastical network in a highly competitive religious milieu, particularly among

Egypt’s monastic communities and the lay communities that looked to them for religious guidance.

I shall examine John of Nikiu’s theory of history and prescriptive guidelines through a series of challenges to established scholarly views of the Chronicle. The first chapter (Chapter 2) challenges the notion that the Chronicle reflects a parochial view of world history centered primarily on Egypt and its monophysite Christian population and as such represents a break from the Byzantine world, which had left an indelible mark on the education and worldview of the bishop of Nikiu. It argues that John’s theory of history, as it applies to the realm of politics, focuses primarily on the effects of individual

2 actors on the broader safety and stability of the entire Christian oikoumene, rather than the Egyptian Christian population alone.

The second and third chapters challenge the image of John as a mere compiler of data. Chapter 3 reveals one dimension of his theory of history by demonstrating the presence of a coherent mechanism of God’s interaction with humanity in human history.

It studies God’s dynamic interactions with the Roman state, the Christian church, and the citizens of the empire more broadly, by focusing primarily on the depiction of natural disasters and floods. I argue that John used natural disasters as a narrative tool that demonstrated the precise mechanical outcomes of individual moral and ethical failures and successes. Rather than explaining how one ought to live a morally and ethically upright life (according to the guidelines prescribed by John himself), the Chronicle answers the question of why one ought to live in this manner. Chapter 4 reveals a second important dimension of the bishop of Nikiu’s theory of history, the role of Satan and his demonic army. The outsized role of demonic forces on the plot of the narrative reveals the text’s monastic outlook, which ultimately serves to further highlight the way in which lapses in moral and religious discipline invite the destructive influence of the demonic and diabolic forces that threaten the security of the Christian oikoumene.

The final chapter seeks to understand how John of Nikiu conceived of his own doctrinal and theological position. Because the text is often flatly referred to as a

“monophysite” history, there has been little serious inquiry into what particular theological positions John may have been defending in his text. Not only have historians taken John’s theological views for granted, they have also assumed that John’s Chronicle

3 is concerned with the rise and fall of the anti-Chalcedonian Severan church in Egypt as a distinct and separate institution. This chapter instead argues that John of Nikiu’s own theological positions did not always align neatly with those of his colleagues and superiors. The Chronicle provides a history of the Egyptian Severan Church not as an independent institution, but as a community of true orthodox believers within a universal church that was besieged by heretics—Chalcedonians, pagans, Arians, and non-Severan anti-Chalcedonians—who used the state and Church to persecute the community of true believers.

To this end, I wish to revive the long-dead genre of Mönchschronik as a category of analysis for this text. I do not which to revive it in the terms in which Krumbacher presented it, as a kind of titillating pop-literature reflecting a deterioration of education or a collapse of the refined stylistic niceties that characterized “high” history of the

Prokopian type.1 Nor do I wish to suggest that this was a widely practiced genre to which such diverse works as those of Malalas, John of Antioch, or George Synkellos can be easily assigned. I also wish to steer away from the notion of understanding it in Hunger’s terms as Trivialliteratur, characterized by simple language, broad popular appeal, and an emphasis on entertainment.2 Instead, this renewed category emphasizes the use of the

Chronicle as a tool by which monks could understand their identity and historical role in the Christian oikoumene, by providing historical arguments in favor of an ascetic life, or perhaps more specifically a monastic life under Severan-Theodosian oversight. It reflects an effort to secure support within a religious milieu where theology was frequently debated, and loyalty was far from guaranteed.

The remainder of the introduction will provide the basis for the investigations that follow. First I provide both a biography of John based on what is known of his life from the sparse indigenous sources and a history of the text’s preservation from its composition in the late seventh century to its final translation in the highlands of Ethiopia in 1602 CE. A survey of modern scholarship that has analyzed or made use of the

Chronicle, predominantly the former, will describe the positivist-utilitarian approach that has characterized scholarly use of the Chronicle so far. Finally, I will describe my theoretical approach to the study of the text, drawing primarily on the work of sociologist

Margaret Somers, who draws a vital connection between narrative and communal identity

1 Karl Krumbacher, Geschichte der Byzantinischen Literatur: von Justinian bis zum Ende des Oströmischen Riches, 527-1453 (Munich: Beck, 1897), 326.

2 Herbert Hunger Die Hochsprachliche Profane Literatur der Byzantiner 2 (Munich: Beck, 1978), 257-278. 5 formation. I will also include a brief discussion of my own approach to extracting John of

Nikiu’s voice and authorial intent from the sources from which he compiled his work.

John and his Chronicle

What little we know of John’s life and career is drawn from three texts. Two originally independent biographies of the Severan Patriarchs Isaac I (690-692 CE) and Simeon I

(692-700 CE) are now embedded in the History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of

Alexandria written by the Archdeacon George, a contemporary of John of Nikiu, in the early eighth century, and later translated into Arabic and continued by Severus ibn al-

Muqaffa in the tenth century. The Life of Isaac of Alexandria was written by Mena,

John’s successor as bishop of Nikiu, between 697 and 700 CE.3 John appears in these lives, even though he is not the primary subject of any of them. They tell us nothing of his early life. The Archdeacon George reports that John was familiar with monastic life and its regulations, and therefore Gianfranco Fiaccadori suggests that he must have been a monk at some point during his ecclesiastical career.4 John received an education along traditional Roman lines, for he explicitly directs his readers to the works of Prokopios and Agathias for more information on Justinian I’s military actions against the Vandals and tacitly demonstrates knowledge of a variety of Greek histories.5 This education

3 On the Life of Isaac’s date of composition, see Mena of Nikiou, The Life of Isaac of Alexandria and the Martyrdom of Saint Macrobius, trans. David Bell (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1988) 27 4 Severus ibn al-Muqaffa, History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, trans. Basil Evetts, Patrologia Orientalis 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1910), 31-32 (Hereafter, History of the Patriarchs, trans. Basil Evetts), 32-33; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, John of Nikiou, Christian Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, vol. 1, (600-900) (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 209. 5 Chronicle, 92.20-22. 6 suggests that he came from a fairly wealthy family, but we have no other evidence for his socio-economic background.

We may presume John was bilingual, and highly proficient in both Coptic and

Greek. It is now mostly agreed that the Chronicle was originally composed in Coptic, and that any signs of a Greek original can be attributed to the Coptic language’s heavy use of

Greek loanwords. Tito Orlandi, has argued for a Greek original that was subsequently translated into Coptic, and while this is plausible, this assessment has largely been ignored.6 It must be said that John’s process of composing and compiling the Chronicle technically makes Orlandi’s assessment true in some sense. Many of John’s sources which we can identify were Greek, and were not, as far as we are aware, ever translated into Coptic before. We may also presume that given his standing in the Coptic church, many of his ecclesiastical functions, or at least communication with his superiors, was conducted in Greek.7

He became bishop of the important see of Nikiu before the death of John III of

Samanud in 689 CE, because he is listed among the bishops present with John III at his death bed, and again among an assembly convened by Gregory, the bishop of Kais,

6 Tito Orlandi, Elementi di Lingua e Letteratura Copta: Corso di Lezinoi Universitarie (Milan: La Goliardica, 1970), 109 7 On the use of Greek among educated Egyptians in the early years of Arab occupation, see Maged Mikhail, From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt: Religion, Identity and Politics after the Arab Conquest (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 39-44. On the history of Coptic, Greek, and Arabic in the post-Conquest period, see Mikhail, From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt, 79-105; Arietta Papaconstantinou, “‘What Remains Behind’: Hellenism and Romanitas in Christian Egypt after the Arab Conquest,” in From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East eds Hannah Cotton, Robert Hoyland, Jonathan Price, David Wasserstein (Cambrdge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 447–66. For a counterexample from Abraham of Hermonthis, a sixth-century Egyptian bishop who could not read Greek and relied solely on Coptic, see Phil Booth, “A Circle of Egyptian Bishops at the End of Roman Rule,” Le Muséon 131 (2018): 49. 7 which sought to select John III’s successor.8 This assembly, which included a large group of bishops, clergy, and laity, apparently attempted to secure the election of a deacon named George from the town of Sakha to the patriarchy. Our sources disagree on the presence of John of Nikiu at the selection of George of Sakha. While Archdeacon George places John squarely in the inner-circle of influential bishops present at the death of John

III and the selection of Isaac I, Mena claims that John was present in Alexandria only for the enthronement of Isaac, acting as a representative (ⲁⲡⲟⲧⲣⲓⲧⲏⲥ) of all the bishops of

Upper Egypt.9 Mena, who later describes John as “a man wholly accomplished in the wisdom of God and of men,”10 may have wanted to minimize the role of his predecessor in a conspiracy to enthrone George of Sakha against John III’s wishes, while Archdeacon

George might have sought to implicate John of Nikiu and Gregory of Kais. The paucity of sources surrounding this vital period leaves room for little more than speculation, however. We do know that John maintained his position as bishop of Nikiu through the reign of Isaac I, and when the patriarch died three years after taking the throne, he was succeeded by Simeon I, a Syrian who hired the Archdeacon George as his scribe.11 It is during Simeon’s reign that John’s career reached both its zenith and nadir. Shortly after surviving an attempted assassination by poisoning, Simeon made John the mudabbir or administrator of the monasteries.12 It is unclear what exactly this position might have

8 History of the Patriarchs, trans. Basil Evetts, 20-22 9 Mena of Nikiou, The Life of Isaac of Alexandria, 64. On the term apotrites see Mena of Nikiou, The Life of Isaac of Alexandria, 89n96. Emile Amélineau, Histoire du Patriarche Copte Isaac: Étude Critique, Texte et Traduction (Paris: Ernest Leroux,1890) xxiv-xxv; Phil Booth, “Towards the Coptic Church: The Making of the Severan Episcopate,” Millennium 14, no 1 (2017): 186. 10 See Mena of Nikiou, The Life of Isaac of Alexandria, 64. 11 Johannes den Heijer, “History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria” Coptic Encyclopedia, 1240b. 12 The Ethiopic translation of his name preserves his title as መደብር (mädäbbər). Chronicle, 123.1. 8 entailed, but it likely involved overseeing the reconstruction of cells and regulating the behavior of the monks, but John was likely given the position because of his familiarity with monastic life.13

His appointment as mudabbir represented a significant promotion for John: while he had previously acted as a kind of representative of the bishops of Upper Egypt, he had now been given some degree of control over all of Egypt’s Severan monastic communities, a significant upgrade in terms not only of geographic scope, but also of influence. Egypt’s monasteries had served as the home of several notable anti-

Chalcedonian bishops, many of whom had been recruited from these monasteries by the patriarch Peter IV (577-606) to compete with the rapidly ballooning ranks of bishops who had allied themselves Chalcedonian patriarchate.14 What is more, many of these monasteries functioned as parish churches which were used by local communities.15 This meant that John’s position kept him in the front lines of the doctrinal disputes that characterized the landscape of early Islamic Egypt. In a land where doctrinal allegiance even within monastic communities was far from static, John’s oversight of the monasteries, particularly in a period in which many of the monasteries were being rebuilt, made him an important leader in the battle on the ground for Christian Egypt’s soul.16

At some point before the end of Simeon’s reign, John’s career as mudabbir and bishop ended relatively quickly. The Archdeacon George reports that shortly after taking

13 History of the Patriarchs, trans. Basil Evetts, 32-33 14 Booth, “Towards the Coptic Church,” 168-169. 15 Ewa Wipszycka, The Alexandrian Church: People and Institutions, (Warsaw: The University of Warsaw Foundation, 2015), 307 16 On the rebuilding of monasteries, see History of the Patriarchs, trans. Basil Evetts, 33 9 up this position, John was removed from it. Under his watch, a group of monks removed a nun from her cell in Wadi Habib and slept with her. Word quickly spread, and John was forced to act. He elected to have a monk beaten, presumably the ringleader of the group, and this was done so brutally that the monk died of his wounds some ten days afterwards.17 The brutality of the beating apparently did not sit well with a number of the

Severan bishops of Egypt, who assembled a secret meeting and summoned John to explain himself.18 This assembly decided to reduce him to the rank of brother monk and deprived him not only of his position of mudabbir, but of all ecclesiastical standing. The council of bishops who punished him handed his bishopric to Mena.

It is not entirely clear what George means by saying that the meeting was conducted in secret, but given that the final word on John’s fate was delivered by the monks collectively, this may have meant that the punishment was delivered without the knowledge of the patriarch, lower clergymen, and lay population. John’s successor,

Mena, did not view him as particularly objectionable, given his favorable cameo in the

Life of Isaac of Alexandria, but John’s life and works otherwise seemed to have disappeared from the written records of the church. His summary deposition by the bishops also reveals the great degree of common power that the bishops were apparently capable of exercising independent of their Syrian patriarch. Not only were they able to depose John, but they were also able to appoint another man to his position without protest from Simeon; this story is preceded by an account which emphasizes the

17 History of the Patriarchs, trans. Basil Evetts, 33 18 Ibid. 10 unpopularity of the patriarch among both the people of Alexandria and its clergy.19 The patriarch’s sensitive position and the relative unity of the Egyptian bishops below him may indicate that John had simply found himself on the wrong side of a poorly recorded power struggle within the ranks of the Severan episcopate.

George claims that John of Nikiu did not accept this demotion silently but responded by saying “Since you have deposed me unjustly, the Lord, the God whose name I know, shall make you all, O ye bishops, strangers to your sees until the end of the time during which you have condemned me.”20 This prophecy was fulfilled, according to

George, when the governor Abd al-Aziz gathered several Christian bishops of various doctrines together to ban the performance of all Christian liturgies.21

It is unclear when exactly John wrote his Chronicle, for the date of the text’s creation was not preserved. Robert Hoyland has suggested c. 650 CE as a date of composition for the text, against the later dates of composition proposed by others.22 This argument hinges on three key assertions: first, that the date of composition cannot be inferred from the fact that John is identified as a mudabbir in the final chapter of the

Chronicle; second, John tells us in his introduction that he has written about “events which we too have witnessed in the times to which we have come,” suggesting that he must have been alive during the early 640s;23 and third, there are no references to

19 George tells us that a number of clergymen conspired to slowly poison Simeon to death, a plot that was foiled only by the intervention of the governor ‘Abd al-Aziz. 20 History of the Patriarchs, trans. Basil Evetts, 33-34 21 History of the Patriarchs, trans. Basil Evetts, 34 22 Robert Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw it: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1997), 152-153. 23 Chronicle, preface 11 monastic activities in the text of the Chronicle. The first assertion is persuasive because it is impossible to determine how many hands were involved in the creation of this chapter; its summary nature suggests that it was not composed by John himself. The second assertion is also convincing, but less obviously so. On the one hand, it is difficult to dismiss John’s claim to have witnessed the events that transpired between 639 and 642

CE, but he provides no direct eyewitness accounts of the sort found in, for example, the

Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus. If the events had occurred during his childhood, or if the first-person plural was meant to refer to elder members of his audience, we might be left with a date of composition potentially later than the patriarchate of Simeon I.

The third assertion is misleading on two counts. First, it is demonstrably false.

There are several references to the activities of monks, both anti-Chalcedonian and

Chalcedonian, and though they do not dominate the narrative, several monks prove to be influential, whether as actors in various narratives or as prophetic voices heralding events which occur later on in the text. It is possible that Hoyland compares this to works such as John of Ephesos’s The Lives of Eastern Saints or the hagiographic works that were produced in late antique and medieval Egypt, in which monks and monasteries are highly prominent. But even if even if he is correct in asserting that monasticism plays no part in the Chronicle, or if he had simply conceded that the presence or absence of monastic activities in the text would not give us any indication of John’s position or lack thereof in the church hierarchy, monks are not incapable of writing secular materials. Furthermore, as I shall argue, there is much material that can be read as behaviorally prescriptive and as reflecting a monastic perspective. If we accept the first assertion as true, (i.e., that

John’s identification as mudabbir was given by his later translators regardless of his rank at the time of composition) then the exact date of composition must remain a mystery, with a terminus post quem of 642 CE.

To further complicate matters, there is evidence that John apparently edited the

Chronicle at least once and that the work of editing was left incomplete. Phillip Booth noted that the synopses available in the table of contents sometimes “refer to episodes absence from the main text. This suggests, therefore, that while the coverage of the rubrics is far from perfect, they nevertheless represent an earlier version of the

Chronicle…”24 While it is unclear whether John or another editor was responsible for this discrepancy, it nevertheless suggests that before the text was translated into Gə’əz (and possibly before it was translated into Arabic) some episodes were removed and, we can presume, some were inserted.

Although John composed it in Coptic, the Chronicle undoubtedly belongs to the

Byzantine chronographic tradition by virtue of its source material and the educational background of its author. At its broadest level, John wrote the Chronicle in the tradition of Christian history, and more specifically the tradition of the universal chronicle, which deals with the history of mankind, an approach to history in which “the broadest possible horizon is applied, i.e. history from the remotest beginnings (wherever they are supposed to be) up to the present (and maybe even beyond).”25 Other examples of this genre

24 Phil Booth, “The Last Years of Cyrus, Patriarch of Alexandria” in Mélanges Jean Gascou: Textes et Études Papyrologiques, eds. Jean-Luc Fournet and Arietta Papaconstantinou (Paris: Association des Amis du Centre d’Histoire et Civilization de Byzance, 2016), 530. 25 Martin Walraff, “The Beginnings of Christian Universal History from Tatian to Julius Africanus,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 14 (2010): 541 13 include John’s main source, the sixth-century Chronographia of John Malalas, and its predecessors, such as the fourth-century Pantodape Historia of Eusebius of Caesarea, and the third-century Chronographiai of Sextus Julius Africanus. A key feature of this genre is undoubtedly what Mariev referred to as its “typically Christian concept of linear

‘historical space’ which opens up at some point after the creation of the world,” and concludes with the author’s own time.26

The text apparently remained very obscure and was not subject to continuation or preservation, as were the works of Mena of Nikiu and the Archdeacon George. No Coptic manuscripts or fragments of the text have survived, and John himself does not appear in the papyri record. Because of the colophon, we can say with certainty that the text was selected for translation, and likely abbreviation, by a Copto-Arabic author. The date of this Arabic translation is unknown, and no Arabic copies of the Chronicle have survived.27 This murky process of transmission and abbreviation did significant damage to the text, and it is unclear what was removed in the process of abbreviation. The text did not seem to enjoy much popularity among a Coptic population eager to demonstrate bonds of solidarity between themselves and their Muslim Arab hegemons. The hostility of the final chapter towards the Arab invaders might be appropriate to the Bahri Mamluk period, when tension in relations between Copts and Muslims turned into mob violence in the early fourteenth century, and as a result one might speculate that the text might have

26 Sergei Mariev, “Byzantine World Chronicles: Identities of Genre,” in Shifting Genres in Late Antiquity, eds. Geoffrey Greatex, Hugh Elton (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 27 Emile Amélineau claimed to have discovered a manuscript that he believed to be the Arabic text of the Chronicle, but Butler, Charles, and others were unable to confirm its existence, and Amélineau himself does not mention this supposed Arabic manuscript in his subsequent work, “La conquête de l’Égypte par les Arabes,’ Revue Historique 119 (1915), 273-310. 14 seen new popularity among Copts in this period.28 Frantsouzoff suggests that the text was translated and abbreviated in the thirteenth century, on the basis of the use of a term for salary dating from the Ayyubid or early Mamluk period, although this can truly only provide a terminus post quem.29

Ultimately the Chronicle proved unpopular, and no Coptic histories written in

Arabic demonstrate a tacit or explicit awareness of it. The abbreviated history would pass into obscurity once more until its arrival in late sixteenth-century Ethiopia. It was brought to the country in the hands of an Egyptian deacon named Gabriel and with the assistance of Məḫərkä Dəngəl, an Ethiopian cleric who was later responsible for the composition of the first 23 chapters of the Chronicle of king Susnəyos in the in the mid-seventeenth century.30 The Chronicle was by no means Ethiopia’s first introduction to the genre of historiography. Indeed, by the time Coptic historiographies were translated into Gə’əz in the seventeenth century, Ethiopians in the court of the Solomonid kings were already

28 On Coptic history in the Mamluk period, see Donald Little, “Coptic Conversion to Islam under the Bahri Mamluks,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 39 no. 3 (1976): 552-569. For a history of the Copts under the Fatimids, Ayyubids, and Bahri Mamluks, see Kurt Werthmuller, Coptic Identity and Ayyubid Politics in Egypt: 1218-1250, (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2010), 29-53. 29 Jeremy Brown and Daria Elagina, “A New Witness to the Chronicle of John of Nikiu: EMML 7919,” Aethiopica 21 (2018): 125; Sergei Frantsouzoff, “The Chronicle of John of Nikiu: Some Peculiarities of its Languages and Contents,” Newsletter of St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University of the Humanities Series 3, Philology 4 (2010): 80 30 Maxime Rodinson, “Notes sur Le Texte de Jean de Nikiou,” in IV Congresso Internazionale di Studi Etiopici: (Roma, 10-15 Aprile 1972) ed Enrico Cerulli (Rome: Accademia Naazionale dei Lincei, 1974), 132 identified Məḫərkä Dəngəl as Gabriel’s collaborator using the only manuscript which mentioned him its colophon, BnF d’Abbadie 31. It should be noted that the absence of this name in the other colophons should perhaps generate suspicion about the legitimacy of this attribution, given the genealogical relationship between manuscripts. On the work of Məḫərkä Dəngəl, see Solomon Gebreyes Beyene,” in Time and History in Africa eds. Alessandro Bausi, Alberto Camplani, Stephen Emmel (Milan: Biblioteca Ambrosiana, 2019), 152 15 deeply enmeshed in a 300-year long tradition of written historiography.31 These texts were primarily royal chronicles which were dictated by the Solomonid king to a royal officials known as Ṣäḥafe Tǝʾǝzazat (the writers of orders).32

The colophon provides us with a wealth of information about the production of the text in a relatively brief amount of time. It was produced on the order of the queen regent Maryam Səna and of the Ras Atnatēwos of the province of Begēmdər in northern

Ethiopia.33 The colophon does not report the reason that they ordered the translation, and we learn nothing of the deacon Gabriel in Ethiopian or Coptic histories. The production of this text was indeed timely, however. The death of Ahmed Gragn, leader of the Adal sultanate, finally brought an end to the Muslim incursions that had nearly upended

Christian hegemony in Northern and Central Ethiopia. At the end of this conflict, the

Solomonid dynasty once again found itself mortally threatened by the incursion of

Oromos from the south, which, in addition to internal dissent among the Bētä Israel and

Ottoman backed Adal Sultante, would occupy the attention of Solomonid kings for the rest of the sixteenth century.34

By the end of the reign of king Sërsä Dəngəl in 1597, the toll these wars had taken on the kingdom’s manpower and resources would be further compounded by a succession crisis. The king had left no heirs and while he had initially decided that his nephew Zä

Dəngəl would follow him, the newly widowed queen Maryam Səna decided instead on

31 On the Ethiopian chronicling tradition, see James McCann, “Ethiopian Chronicles: An African Documentary Tradition,” Northeast African Studies 1, no.2 (1979): 47-62; Beyene, “The Tradition and Development of Ethiopic Chronicle Writing,” 145-157. 32 Beyene, “The Tradition and Development of Ethiopic Chronicle Writing,” 147 33 Chronicle, 123.9 34 Solomon Gebreyes Beyene, Chronicle of King Gälawdewos (Louvain: Peeters, 2019) v-vi. 16 the king’s seven year-old son Ya’qob, perhaps calculating that she could extend her hold on power by acting as regent. She was assisted by Ras Atnatēwos, who commanded a large body of troops as governor of Begēmdər and had become de facto ruler of the country.35 When Atnatēwos and Maryam Səna ordered the translation of the Chronicle of

John of Nikiu into Gə’əz, they controlled the kingdom, but found themselves threatened by two potential usurpers, Zä Dəngəl and Susənyos, both of whom would come to occupy the throne.

These problems were further compounded by the dangers created by the presence of Catholicism. While the first Jesuit mission to Ethiopia had recently seen the death of its last priest when Gabriel and Məḫərkä Dəngəl had finished their work, even rumors of

Catholic sympathies could upend a king’s control by angering the clergy, who could inform the populace and their raucous warlords and governors that they were no longer bound to obey the king. But Ya’qob perhaps believed that there was some benefit to inviting Catholic support. Ya’qob had begun to chafe under the control of Atnatēwos as he neared the end of his minority, and even invited the Spanish Jesuit Peter Paez to his court in 1602–0336 We must imagine the translation as having been completed in this period, for one of two reasons. It is possible that the translation was produced as a pedagogical tool for the young king, as a means of demonstrating to him the disastrous effects that Catholic theology had had on the Roman state.

35 Chronicle of Susenyos, Chapters 1-6; George Huntingford, The Historia Geography of Ethiopia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 151 36 Ernst Budge, A History of Ethiopia: Nubia and Abyssinia (London: Methuen and Co., 1928), 375-377 17

But it is equally possible that this translation was meant to convince the leading nobles at court of this very same point. The threat of excommunication had scared away some members of the nobility from Catholicism, but certainly not all of them, and frequent contact with Portuguese soldiers who had settled in Ethiopia in the sixteenth century, as well as the activities of the dwindling Jesuit mission, certainly convinced more than one ranking member of the Ethiopian court to convert in a relatively tolerant religious environment.37 It would be reasonable to assume that if the Jesuit influence reached a critical mass, it could damage the delicate balance of power that gave both the

Ethiopian church its influence, and undermine the power of the monarchy.

Although the Chronicle was not widely popular, it certainly enjoyed a more productive afterlife in Gə’əz than its Arabic and Coptic predecessors. The text was copied into at least five extant manuscripts throughout the eighteenth-twentieth centuries and was cited extensively in an indigenous Life of John Chrysostom.38 But the Ethiopian historiographic tradition would demonstrate no interest in replicating universal histories from Egypt. The indigenous chronicles were the products of a state apparatus and as such remained firmly focused on the Ethiopian state and its rulers well into the nineteenth century, whereas the Chronicle of John appeared to have been treated as a kind of religious text, lionizing and chastising figures whose mangled names were, for the most part, unrecognizable to Ethiopian intelligentsia and their patrons. What had begun as a

37 For example, Yaqob’s predecessor, Zä Dəngəl. Budge, A History of Ethiopia, 378-380 38 Witold Witakowski, “The Ethiopic Life of John Chrysostom,” in Chrosostomosbilder in 1600 Jahren: Facetten der Wirkungsgeschichte eines Kirchenvaters eds Martin Wallraff and Rudolf Brändle (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 223-235 esp. 230. 18

Roman history had by this point morphed into a speculum principum, which in turn morphed into a source of religious texts for Ethiopian scholars.

The Gə’əz text currently survives in the form of five manuscripts and two nineteenth-century Amharic translations of the Gə’əz text. Of the Ge’ez texts, two are related to each other and were critically edited and translated by Hermann Zotenberg: the seventeenth-century French BnF Éth. 123, and the British Museum’s Or. 818, produced

1700–50. A third, unrelated to the other two, is the French BnF d’Abaddie 31. The fourth,

EMML 7919 produced in the early eighteenth century, is currently housed in Addis

Ababa, Ethiopia, and is closely related to a twentieth-century manuscript ANL Conti-

Rossini 27, housed in the Biblioteca dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei e Corsiniana,

Fondo Carlo Conti Rossini. 39

Modern Scholarship on the Chronicle

Hermann Zotenberg first brought the Gə’əz text of the Chronicle to light in Western scholarship in a series of three articles published in the French Journal Asiatique.40 The first appeared in 1877, and in this article and the two that followed, Zotenberg, identified the author as the same bishop of Nikiu described in the History of the Archdeacon

39 The most complete study of these manuscripts is undoubtedly Jeremy Brown and Daria Elagina, “A New Witness to the Chronicle of John of Nikiu: EMML 7919,” Aethiopica 21 (2018): 120-136, esp. 121. 40 Hermann Zotenberg, “Mémoire sur la Chronique Byzantine de Jean, Évêque de Nikiou,” Journal Asiatique 7, no. 10 (1877): 451-517; Hermann Zotenberg, “Mémoire sur la Chronique Byzantine de Jean, Évêque de Nikiou,” Journal Asiatique 7, no. 12 (1878): 245-347; Hermann Zotenberg, “Mémoire sur la Chronique Byzantine de Jean, Évêque de Nikiou,” Journal Asiatique 7, no. 13 (1879): 291-386. He finally published a fully edited text based on Or. 818 and BnF Éth. 123, Chronique de Jean, Évêque de Nikou: Texte Éthiopien (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1883). 19

George.41 He argued that he could find no trace of Coptic, and concluded that the text was written in Greek, an assessment that would soon be undone by the reviews of Crum and Nöldeke in the years to come.42 He also managed to identify the main sources of the

Chronicle as the Chronographia of John Malalas, fragments of a Chronicle by John of

Antioch, and the Chronicon Paschale, further solidifying his belief that the text was written in Greek.43 After laying out these facts and what information about the author he could gather, he offered a synopsis of the Chronicle’s contents, which continues and ends in the remaining two articles, published in 1878 and 1879.

Zotenberg was not blind to the diversity of sources in the texts, and though he was not able to determine with an certainty the variety of sources available to John, he did note close relationships between certain episodes found both in the Chronicle and the works of Sokrates Scholastikos, perhaps via Theodoros Anagnostes.44 He also noticed strong correlations between events related by John and similar accounts in the works of

Evagrios, Victor of Tunnuna, Markellinos Comes, Liberatus of Carthage, Theophanes, and Leontios of Byzantium’s heresiological tracts.45 Whatever he could not trace to known works he simply chalked up to unidentifiable Egyptian sources, and he said very little about the text as a unified composition. Zotenberg, working as a philologist, treated

41 Hermann Zotenberg, “Mémoire sur la Chronique Byzantine de Jean, Évêque de Nikiou,” Journal Asiatique 7, no. 10 (1877): 455 42 Ibid., 451. Walter Crum, “Review of The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, Translated from Zotenberg’s Ethiopic Text,” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 4, no.1 (1917): 207-209; Theodor Nöldeke “Review of Chronique de Jean, Évêque de Nikiou: Texte Éthiopien, Extrait de Notices des Manuscrits, 24/1 (Paris: Imprimerie National, 1883),” Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen 2 (1883): 1367 43 Ibid., 461 44 Hermann Zotenberg, “Mémoire sur la Chronique Byzantine de Jean, Évêque de Nikiou,” Journal Asiatique 7, no. 12 (1878): 246 45 Ibid. 20 the work as a compilation, and he decided that the bishop of Nikiu was a relatively fair preserver of sources. While he acknowledged that the Chronicle hardly judged John’s adversaries fairly, Zotenberg concluded that “plusieuers de ses informations viennent completer, rectifier ou confirmer certaines données des autres chroniques byzantines…”46

Within Zotenberg’s treatment we find the seeds of later scholarly assessment of the Chronicle’s author. Zotenberg treated John not as as an author, but as a slightly imperfect compiler whose position as a monophysite bishop could tell the modern reader everything he or she needed to know about the argument of the text. We are not meant to read John as an author, but to mine him for data which can clarify the Byzantine sources already available to us. Further still, Zotenberg seems to implicitly reject the very notion that a theory of history undergirds the narrative structure, beyond one that the genre afforded, that is, a narrative history beginning with the creation of man and ending with the Arab conquest.

The text sparked the interest of Alfred Butler, allowing him to write The Arab

Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion, his magnum opus, on a topic for which historians heretofore had relied almost entirely on Islamic sources.47

Butler had by this point already established himself as Oxford’s eminent Coptic historian, producing a history of Coptic churches and a providing notes to a translation of of Abu

Salih’s The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt and Some Neighboring Countries.48

46 Ibid., 247 47 Alfred Butler, The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902) 48 Alfred Butler, The Ancient Coptic Churches of Egypt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884); Basil Evetts, The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt and Some Neighboring Countries, attributed to Abu Salih, al-Armani (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895) 21

Butler’s treatment of the Chronicle in The Arab Conquest of Egypt, although critical, treats the text in much the same way that Zotenberg had, although because of its utility as a control against Arab sources, he was more inclined to give John of Nikiu’s account pride of place in his monumental work, at times simply rehashing the bishop’s account in modern prose.49

R.H. Charles’s subsequent 1916 translation was in some ways a great improvement over the French translation of Zotenberg and served as the default means by which most Western scholars would approach the text for the next one hundred years, particularly in English publications.50 But we find in the introduction to his work a telling interpretation of John’s abilities as an historian that scholars would frequently echo in the following decades of scholarship: “John of Nikiu is merely an annalist, who records in the simplest language the facts at his disposal…”51 This view of the text as a flawed conveyor of historical evidence guided Charles’s translation process, in which he would read the accounts using the works of Kedrenos, George Synkellos, John Malalas,

Evagrios, Sokrates Scholastikos, Eusebios and John of Antioch as correctives from which he offered “more accurate accounts of events recorded in our author.”52 Charles dared to offer (at times incoherent) translations of difficult passages where Zotenberg had simply

49 Butler, The Arab Conquest of Egypt, viii-ix. 50 Robert Charles, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu: Translated from Zotenerg’s Ethiopic Text, (London: William and Norgate, 1916) 51 Charles, The Chronicle of John, xi 52 Ibid. It is important to note that in some instances, accounts found in the Chronicle have correlates with sources that are closer chronologically or even near-contemporary. For example, the account of the discover of two creatures discovered in the Nile is also found in the history of Theophylact of Simocatta 22 elected not to do so.53 There are certainly significant problems that render Charles’ translation inferior, most notably electing to read several references to the Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria, Cyrus (630-642 CE) as instead referring to the

Constantinopolitan patriarch Pyrrhus (638-641 and 654 CE), an error noted by Philip

Booth.54

Philological study of the Chronicle would see no progress until the landmark studies of Maxime Rodinson, and Frank Altheim and Ruth Steihl. When Zotenberg produced his edition and translation, he used the text found in the British Or. 818 and the

French BnF Éth. 123, suggesting that a third manuscript in the Bibliotheque Nationale,

BnF d’Abbadie 31, was insufficiently different from the former two to warrant inclusion in his own study. Rodinson determined that BnF d’Abbadie 31 was indeed different and in some instances offered clarity that overturned translations offered by both Charles and

Zotenberg.55 BnF d’Abbadie 31 was used to make various corrections to the text, most notably by the presence of certain key words which clarified the meanings of difficult passages, and also presented the name of Məhərkä Dəngəl for the first time in association with the text, whose name was left out of the colophon of Or. 818 and BnF Éth. 123.

Altheim and Steihl offered a new translation of the chapters on the Arab conquest which clarified the names of some individuals but overall differed little in content from the translations of Charles and Zotenberg.56

53 Zotenberg most notably elected not to translate the text’s incipit. Charles was very critical of Zotenberg amendments and translation of certain passages and further expressed frustration at his frequent paraphrasing. Charles, The Chronicle of John, ix-xi 54 Booth, “The Last Years of Cyrus,” 522 55 Maxime Rodinson, “Notes sur Le Texte de Jean de Nikiou,” 133-137. 56 Franz Altheim and Ruth Stiehl, Christentum am Roten Meer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971), 356-392. 23

Most recently, Jeremy Brown and Daria Elagina uncovered a new Gə’əz manuscript containing the Chronicle, EMML 7919. Brown and Elagina note that EMML

7919 either was a Vorlage for the twentieth-century Accademia Nazionale dei Linci manuscript or else derives from a common sub-archetype.57 They further suggest that it represents a separate branch of text transmission, distinct from both the related Or. 818 and BnF Éth. 123, or BnF d’Abbadie 31.58

Few modern scholars have dealt with the entire text as the sole object of study. Of these, the most critical are the assessments of Robert Hoyland, Antonio Carile, and Jean-

Michel Carrié. all mainstays of the secondary literature surrounding this text. Antonio

Carile’s work was the first study devoted exclusively to the Chronicle since its discovery by Zotenberg, and its most significant contribution was to suggest that a cultural- historical approach ought to be central to a study of the transmission of the text.59 In a lengthy article, Carile situated the Chronicle as the product of a society in the midst of an immediate contraction of Hellenization, urbanization, and the absence of a “middle class” which created “lowered levels of expression.”60 In line with what he clearly understood as a severe and sudden collapse of the Roman province, Carile confidently identified the text as a universal history of the type identified by Krumbacher as Mönchschronik, and

57 Brown and Elagina, “A New Witness to the Chronicle of John of Nikiu: EMML 7919,” 126 58 Ibid., 126-127. 59 Antonio Carile, “Giovanni di Nikious, Cronista Bizantino-Copto del VII Secolo,” Felix Ravenna 121 (1981): 110. Ewa Wipszycka, “Le Nationalisme a-t-il Existé en Egypte Byzantine, ” The Journal of Juristic Papyrology 22 (1992): 98 was critical of Carile’s approach, noting that while she agreed that the problem was indeed properly cultural-historical, the absence of any close analysis with surviving the bishop of Nikiou’s source material meant that Carile’s own approach fell short of his own standards, particularly in trying to answer the question of whether proto-Coptic nationalism or religious argument was more important. 60 Antonio Carile, “Giovanni di Nikious,” 104 24 which Herbert Hunger later identified as Trivialliteratur, emphasizing the deteriorating of style and a total disinterest in the classicizing style which reflected attempts to imitate classical historians such as Thucydides and Herodotus.61 Carile went on to suggest that, although John wrote the Chronicle as a moral work, with a metahistorical perspective preoccupied with explaining the consequences of renouncing the true religion,62 it was also deeply patriotic, refusing to note the paganism of Egyptian pharaohs while centering this paganism as an important problem for Roman emperors.63 He ultimately claims that the text reflected the “the pride in one’s national history, older than Roman history,” as an “unequivocal sign of the emergence, on a cultural level, of a separatist tension that actually manifested in the Coptic world in the last forty years of Byzantine rule.”64

The next important study came from Robert Hoyland, in his brief but dense treatment of the Chronicle, and particularly the Arab conquest narrative, in Seeing Islam as Others Saw it. While one must read Hoyland within the context of a larger work that examines all non-Arab sources of the Arab conquests, he makes a number of significant judgements based on a questionable reading of the Chronicle, which barely describes his contempt for it. He describes it as a “mediocre piece” which is interested in relating events rather than analyzing them, a reading that is demonstrably incorrect as we shall

61 Antonio Carile, “Giovanni di Nikious,” 115. See also Herbert Hunger Die Hochsprachliche Profane Literatur der Byzantiner 2 (Munich: Beck, 1978), 257-278; Karl Krumbacher, Geschichte der Byzantinischen Literatur: von Justinian bis zum Ende des Oströmischen Riches, 527-1453 (Munich: Beck, 1897), 326. 62 Antonio Carile, “Giovanni di Nikious,” 115 63 On Egypt: Antonio Carile, “Giovanni di Nikious,” 119-123, esp. 120. Carile goes on to suggest that this reflects an “anti-Roman mentality.” However, he later contradicts himself by explicitly rejecting the presence of a “Coptic anti-imperial animosity” in the text. Antonio Carile, “Giovanni di Nikious,” 127 64 Antonio Carile, “Giovanni di Nikious,” 122-123. 25 see throughout this dissertation.65 Despite that, he notes interesting discrepancies in the account of the Arab conquest that point to heavy interference by an Arabic translator offering frequent corrections and glosses. For example, the only mention of Muhammed appears as an explanation of the term “beast” and the description of the Arabs as

“Ishmaelites or Muslims,” an odd insertion given that “the latter appellation does not figure elsewhere in Christian texts until 775.”66

Jean-Michel Carrié characterized the text as more complex than Hoyland allowed, but nevertheless he also saw it as representative of a narrowing of horizons in late ancient

Egypt: He believed the text represented a provincialization of the genre of universal history, but argued against Carile that this did not reflect “national pride” produced by anti-Byzantine separatist tensions and perhaps even showed a profound indifference to the history of pharaonic Egypt.67 He instead pointed to the tension between, on the one hand, the nature of the work as an example of Mediterranean “universal history” and, on the other hand, a profound sense of “campanilisme,” a kind of parochialization of the historical vision which gives pride of place to one’s own city.68 According to Carrié, this yielded a quasi-national identity, rooted not in distant memories of past splendors, but in the battle to win the empire to the anti-Chalcedonian faith, which Carrié saw as the majority in Egypt.69 Although he provides one of the most sophisticated readings of the

65 Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 153 66 Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 156. 67 Jean-Michel Carrié, “Jean de Nikiou et sa Chronique: Une Écriture ‘Égyptienne’ de l’Histoire?” in Evénement, Récit, Histoire Officielle: L’Écriture de l’Histoire dans les Monarchies Antiques. Colloque du Collège de France, Amphitéâtre Margu (Paris: Cybele, 2003), 162 68 Carrié, “Jean de Nikiou et sa Chronique,”164-165 69 Carrié, “Jean de Nikiou et sa Chronique,” 166 26 text thus far, Carrié does not delve too deeply into the complexity of John’s world, even tacitly suggesting that the miaphysite faith, represented by the Severan-Theodosians, was the majority in Egypt. It also ignores the complexity of John’s treatment of Chalcedonian

Christians in Egypt, many of whom he approaches with indifference or even recognizes as merciful.

The most recent, and undoubtedly most sophisticated approach to the study of the

Chroniclestems from the work of Phillip Booth. His interest in the philological problems of the Gə’əz text reveals the extent of John’s interest in circus factions within the text by identifying mentions of Green and Blue factions where Zotenberg had previously determined none existed.70 Booth was also the first to treat the discrepancies between the text and its table of contents as the result of an iterative, editorial process of composition, rather than the result of an Arabic paraphrase or Ethiopic mistranslation, an approach which has been instructive in my own efforts to unearth John of Nikiu’s authorial voice.71

But his work abandons Carile’s call for a cultural-historical examination of the text and its author. Booth’s hunt for John’s sources returns once more to the positivist-utilitarian approach that seeks to uncover John’s sources, clarifying what exactly they said and where they may have come from, and what story they told, in order to paint a more coherent narrative of the Arab conquest of Egypt.72 As we dive further into how John

70 Phil Booth, “Shades of Blues and Greens in the Chronicle of John of Nikiou,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 104, no. 2 (2011): 555-601. 71 Booth, “The Last Years of Cyrus,” 531-533 uses a table to show the differences between the rubrics, the extant text, and a posited earlier scheme for chapters 116-122. 72 Phil Booth, “The Muslim Conquest of Egypt Reconsidered,” in Constructing the Seventh Century ed. Constantin Zuckerman (Paris: Association des Amis du Centre d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, 2013), 639-670, most clearly illustrates this approach in his enlightening study to argue against the notion 27 composed the Chronicle, we presume, a priori and as a basis of the study, why he wrote a

Chronicle at all.

When modern scholarship does engage with John as a narrator in his own right, authors come to similar conclusions about what motivated him, often fueled as much by his sparse biography as by the content of his work. The first tendency, typified by that of

Jean-Michel Carrié, treats the bishop of Nikiu as a kind of avatar of the Severan-

Theodosian monophysite church and his Chronicle as a text preoccupied first and foremost with presenting a “monophysite” view of history at the expense of his sources.

This view has not always been taken at face value, however, and Ewa Wipszycka correctly observes that despite the clear doctrinal stance taken by John against key

Chalcedonian texts and certain historical figures, John’s discussion of conflicts in the

Nile Delta itself is comfortable depicting the Chalcedonian patriarch Cyrus “in a matter- of-fact way, with perhaps even a hint of sympathy. In the eyes of this chronicler, doctrinal conflicts do not seem to be decisive for the destiny of Egypt,” especially when read against texts such as the Life of Samuel of Kalamun, in which Coptic identity rooted anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiments plays a significant role.73

Another tendency in modern scholarship, following Carile, has been to exaggerate the place of a nascent Coptic identity in opposition to Roman and later Arab dominion in the region. While modern scholarship now firmly rejects the existence of a repressed

of a Muslim invasion of Egypt moving “in a single direction and in a single coherent unit.” Booth, “The Muslim Conquest of Egypt Reconsidered,” 644 73 Ewa Wipszycka, “How Insurmountable was the Chasm between Monophysites and Chalcedonians?” in Beyond Conflicts: Cultural and Religious Cohabitations in Alexandria and Egypt between the 1st and the 6th Century CE ed. Luca Arcari (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 210. 28

Egyptian identity that stretched back to pharaonic times, some scholars continue to emphasize an element of Coptic nationalism, emerging as a product of monophysite

Christian identity formation, in the Severan-Theodosian ideology of the text.74 Antonio

Carile was the first to suggest a significant anti-Roman sentiment permeating the text, an argument that was taken up by Arietta Papaconstantinou among others, but firmly rejected by Ewa Wipszycka.75 As such, the text is frequently associated with hagiographic texts such as the Life of Samuel of Kalamun, with its explicit strident anti-

Arabism and lament at the erosion of Coptic.76 While this will be explored further in the course of this dissertation, it is important to note here that there is almost nothing in the

Chronicle to support this claim, and by volume the text is overwhelming concerned with the politics of the Roman Empire, in which Egypt is treated as a province, rather than as a separate and subject polity.

Yet, for all of the interest in the author among Copticists, historians of late antiquity more broadly, and those of the early Arab conquests, Antonio Carile’s study of

1981, Jean-Michel Carrié’s article of 2004, and Philip Booth’s 2011, 2013, and 2017 articles remain the only lengthy studies devoted entirely to the Chronicle and its author in the twentieth century. Furthermore, all these works fall within the paradigms outlined

74 For example, Samuel Moawad, “John of Shmoun and Coptic Identity,” in Christianity and Monasticism in Middle Egypt eds. Gawdat Gabra and Hany Takla (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2017), 91 argues that John demonstrated a sense of Coptic identity that was not rooted in Egypt’s pharaonic past, but rather in its Christian past, in “the Egypt of martyrs, saints, and monks.” Arietta Papaconstantinou, “Hagiography, Historiography, and the Making of the Coptic ‘Church of the Martyrs’ in Early Islamic Egypt” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 60 (2006): 72 75 Ewa Wipszycka, “Le Nationalisme a-t-il Existé en Egypte Byzantine,” The Journal of Juristic Papyrology 22 (1992): 98-99 76 For an excellent study of this text and the role of Arabic in Coptic literary production, see Arietta Papaconstantinou, “‘They Shall Speak the Arabic Language and Take Pride in it’: Reconsidering the Fate of Coptic after the Arab Conquest,” Le Muséon 120 (2007: 273-299) 29 above, identifying the text as distinctly parochial, an abrupt thematic shift from earlier

Byzantine chronicling tradition and its universal tendencies. It is only in the past few decades that scholarship has begun to treat him like an author, in a piecemeal fashion, rather than as a living encyclopedia. This study will do so in a more comprehensive sense by studying John as a narrator who was loyal, within limits, to the information at hand, but not beholden to their contents, a historian who produced narrative through compilation that functioned, whether he intended it or not, as composition. Furthermore, this study will answer Carile’s call for a cultural-historical approach to the problems of the text, making use of the philological insights of Philip Booth.

The approach of this study

In this work I seek to unearth the voice of the Chronicle’s author, that is, to reinterpret the text as an act of compilation and composition, or more properly by understanding compilation as an act of composition. But in order to properly engage with the text and its author in this fashion, it is imperative that we study the text with an eye towards its narrativity, as difficult as this might be given the tortured chain of transmission that preserved the text for us moderns. What follows is an account of the methodological framework that will inform the subsequent archaeology of the text.

Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing what the bishop of Nikiu’s contemporaries thought of his Chronicle or even whether it was consumed at all. We have only the author’s own words, that he wrote the Chronicle for instructive purposes, in order to “leave behind a good memorial for those who love virtuous deeds in this worldly

30 life.”77 While the state of preservation in the form of paraphrase makes it difficult to properly assess whether or not an overarching narrative might have existed, with clear development of plot, this dissertation will argue that there was an explicitly prescriptive and coherent narrative schema, a structure which informs and links the various episodic narratives that make up the body of the Chronicle.

The schema borrows from the genre of the world chronicle, the progenitor of which was his own primary source, the Chronographia of John Malalas. The schema does not present an account of a series of campaigns or the reign of a particular emperor, as one might find in the works of Prokopios of Caesarea or Theophylaktos of Simocatta.

Instead, the bishop of Nikiu presents a collection of smaller stories bound together by a forward progression of time marked first by a series of inventions and developments in the cultural, technological, and political spheres, which culminate in the birth of the

Roman empire under Romulus and Remus.78 From then on historical time is ordered by the succession of emperors.

Within this framework, John of Nikiu speaks with two types of authorial voice.

The first manifests itself through editorializing comments scattered throughout his account, a clear voice of judgement that sometimes interrupts but more often concludes a narrative. Although John’s commentary is usually ethical, at times it reveals the critical eye of a historian who is anything but a copyist. For example, when offering an alternative conclusion to a story borrowed in part from the Chronographia, John

77 Chronicle, incipit. 78 A schema similar to that outlined in Mariev, “Byzantine World Chronicles,” 309-310 31 concludes by referring to the version preserved by Malalas with the following comment:

“Deceitful chroniclers who very freely do not abide in righteousness report that Paulinos was killed on account of the queen Eudokia; [But] Queen Eudokia was wise and pure and spotless and perfect in all her conduct.”79 In another instance, John elects to comment on rumors of a demon in the Nile river, suggesting that those who offered alternative theories, such as an auto-generative river with two sexes, were “liars, and there was no evidence (ጥያቄ) in their accounts.”80

While the reader might initially discern two distinctly contrasting editorializing comments, one the voice of the dispassionate historian and the other the voice of the partisan, they both function to encourage in the audience what Fiona Mcintosh-

Varjabédian called “une volonté de croire,” a state parallel to the suspension of disbelief in the reader of fiction, in which the trust in the historian as narrator calls for active participation on the part of the reader, encouraged further by the intervention of the narrator in the form of direct speech directed at the audience.81 But the Chronicle makes use of a functionally different kind of volonté to that which Mcintosh-Varjabédian sees in the writers and audiences of eighteenth and nineteenth-century historians. The bishop of

Nikiu’s identity as a religious authority melds with his role as the historian, such that the truth he conveys and the trust he hopes to instill in his audience are just as much ethical and moral as they are epistemological.

79 Chronicle, 87.13. 80 Chronicle, 97.37. 81 Fiona Mcintosh-Varjabédian, Écriture de l’Histoire et Regard Rétrospectif: Clio et Épiméthée (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010), 237-239. 32

The second type of voice is commentary in which John makes use of the first- person plural, almost exclusively in theological contexts. In these moments the bishop- historian wields his position as a moral authority as a tool to enforce behavioral boundaries in a prescriptive fashion. After he discusses theological conflict, John likes to conclude by reminding the audience of what “we believers” acknowledge as orthodox and conveyed by the teachings of “our fathers.”82 Such reminders are further supplemented by numerous calls to prayer that emerge spontaneously throughout the text, perhaps hinting at an orally performed text. Such a prayer closes the original text, which further serves to delineate theological boundaries not in terms of specific theological claims, but in terms of social relation and ethical practice: He calls on his audience to

“glorify our Lord Jesus Christ and bless His holy name at all times; for unto this hour He hath preserved us Christians from the errors of the erring heathen, and from the transgressions of the apostate heretics.”83 In another instance, John praises Tiberius II’s lenient treatment of anti-Chalcedonian Christians, and then he calls on the audience to

“worship and give praise to Him who aids and empowers kings.”84

Therefore, while this work will argue that “monophysite” or “Egyptian Copt” are too broad or even anachronistic to be meaningful categories of analysis for the time when

John composed the Chronicle, nonetheless the narrative and authorial interjection are part

82 Chronicle, 90.83 “Now the memory of this disaster was preserved for us by our fathers”; Chronicle, 94.9 “Now the people of this city were strongly attached to the incorruptibility doctrine of our fathers…”; Chronicle, 120. 60 “When they rejected the orthodox faith, which is our faith….” We also see an instance of direct chastisement of the audience, Chronicle, 120.33, “But it is because of our sins that He has allowed [the Ishmaelites] to deal with us.” 83 Chronicle, 122.1 84 Chronicle, 94.20 33 of a discourse of identity. In order to reconstruct this discourse, this dissertation draws on the work of sociologist Margaret Somers. Somers argues that “it is through narrativity that we come to know, to understand, to make sense of the social world, and it is through narratives and narrativity that we constitute our social identities.”85 These narrative identities in turn constitute “contingent narratives of meaning,” which inform social action.86 In line with this narrative view of identity, this study posits that the composition of the Chronicle constituted a social act, in which the author constructed a public narrative in order to explain the state of the world around him and his audience. His vision of history and of the mechanisms that moved it constructed a “mainstream plot” about the state of the world in which he and his audience found themselves, and by doing so engaged his listeners (the “lovers of toil”87) in a process of forging (or reforging) their narrative identity.88

Because identity in this framework is always historically contingent and unfixed, the Chronicle can serve only as a snapshot of the ever-morphing communal identity of

John’s church on the one hand and those of his individual audience members on the other. It is a moment in the history of one individual’s pedagogical and scholarly efforts, but a moment which can ultimately reveal a great deal about the world in which this individual lived. The aim of the Chronicle was ultimately to reproduce a Christian monk

(or an individual seeking to emulate this lifestyle without totally abandoning the world)

85 Margaret Somers, “Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation,” Social Science History 16, no. 4 (1992): 600. 86 Margaret Somers, “The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach,” Theory and Society 23, no. 5 (1994): 629 87 Chronicle, preface 88 Somers, “The Narrative Constitution of Identity,” 619 34 who saw himself as an orthodox member of a universal church, rather than an embattled partisan subjected to foreign rule. He was meant to understand himself not as an Egyptian dhimmi, but as a citizen of a Christian nation which did not rely on genetic, national, or political loyalty, but adherence to a particular set of ethical and theological positions. The

Chronicle’s role then was to encourage the audience to maintain these positions by providing a total narrative of human history in which the successes and failures of humanity as a whole could more or less be reduced to how well individuals adhered to the bishop’s outlined theological and ethical positions. From this study emerges a distinct authorial voice, rather than the product of a social agent determined by social forces beyond his ability to control, rationalize, or resist.

Chapter 2. Government, Ethics, and Memory in the Chronicle of John of Nikiu

Was John of Nikiu an “Egyptian chronicler”? In a strictly geographic sense, the answer is obvious: As far as we know the bishop of Nikiu spent his entire life and career in Egypt and wrote in the native Egyptian language. Egypt appears frequently enough in the

Chronicle to show that a good deal of his source material was Egyptian in origin, and the narrative focuses on Egypt, especially at the end. But “Egyptian” has always been understood as something more than a geographic designation. Scholars studying the

Chronicle have used this ostensibly geographic designation, whether implicitly or explicitly, to mean that John’s Chronicle was reflective of an Egyptian ethnic identity.

Within this consensus, the arguments posited by these scholars reflect a spectrum of nuance regarding what Egyptian identity might have looked like some three generations after the end of Roman dominion in Egypt. At one end of the spectrum, this designation carries with it the connotation of a deep cultural continuity between the bishop of Nikiu and Egyptian historical and cultural traditions which predate even the Roman and

Hellenistic periods. At the other end of this spectrum, scholars have suggested that John’s history reflected an ethnic identity emerging in the wake of a new Arab hegemony .

This chapter challenges the notion that the Chronicle reflects any ethnic sentiments at all, much less the formation of an Egyptian identity. I explore John’s understanding of Egypt’s history using the Chronicle’s treatment of the persecution of

Christians and the reign of Diocletian (284–311), a historically significant period of identity-formation for Christians in general and Egyptian Christians in particular. This case-study highlights the ways in which John mobilizes diverse sources to tell a story not about Egyptians qua Egyptians and their relationship to their foreign rulers, but a story of provincial citizens in a Roman Empire.

The Case against a Coptic Chronicle

Instead of understanding John as the monastically inclined Roman historian that I have described, most scholars have argued that John’s history was reflective of Coptic nationalism. A single case study, John’s narrative of the reign of Diocletian and the other rulers who made up his tetrarchic government, demonstrates that, even in an episode that seems to highlight Egypt, John does not pursue a nationalistic or provincially Coptic agenda. By focusing on such an Egypt-centered narrative, I show that even in this account of a pivotal moment for the formation of Coptic identity in Islamic Egypt, John’s framework is far more interested in the broader Christian world than scholars have acknowledged.

Before I begin to examine the Chronicle and its sources, it is necessary to explain the state of research on this question up to this point. Modern scholars engaging with the

Chronicle have made the question of John of Nikiu’s “ethnic” or “national” identity a major point of focus in their study of the text. Antonio Carile, in the first study of the author and his world since Zotenberg’s nineteenth-century publication of the text, formulated many of the dismissive remarks that would be repeated in later

37 historiographic assessments.89 Carile argued that John used the narrative techniques of classical historiography to tell an Egyptian history from an Egyptian perspective, and that this was necessitated by the collapse of Roman control in Egypt, which Carile claims, without much evidence, reflected an immediate post-conquest contraction of

Hellenization in Egypt.90 He further suggested that John’s sympathetic treatment of pre-

Christian Egyptian pagans, compared with the derisive language used to describe Roman paganism, indicated some degree of anti-Roman sentiment coupled with a proto- nationalist Egyptian outlook; this, in turn, resulted from a rapidly contracting urban life that was disconnected from the intellectual and commercial networks of the Roman

Mediterranean and so could not support the once-flourishing intellectual life of provincial

Alexandria.91

There is no evidence in the text to support Carile’s argument, however. First,

Carile relies on the factually incorrect assessment that John was always sympathetic to

Egyptian pagans and hostile to Roman pagans. But we certainly find sympathetic treatments of Roman pagans in the Chronicle. Antoninus Pius’ reign is characterized by his virtue, generosity, and a campaign of civic construction throughout the empire; John not only ignores his paganism, but notes that the Roman citizens named him “the servant of God.”92 The bishop of Nikiu favorably describes Marcus Aurelius’ continuation of

89 For a representative example of such assessments, see Robert G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 2007), 153-156. 90 Scholars since Carile have argued strenuously against this notion of contraction, and there is very little evidence to support this claim for the late seventh and early eighth centuries. See 91 Antonio Carile, "Giovanni di Nikius, Cronista Bizantino-Copto Del VII Secolo," in Byzance: Hommage À André N. Stratos (Athens: 1986), 368. 92 Chronicle, 74.1 38 these policies and he ends the account by stating that “he did all things that were lawful and just, and died in his father’s religion.”93 This is at most a neutral discussion of the emperors’ religion, and while we do find hostility towards paganism, it is only when emperors persecute Christians that attention is drawn to their religion.94

Second, Carile exaggerates the speed and totality of the contraction of Hellenism in Egypt. We know for certain that John himself worked primarily from Greek histories of which no Coptic translations are extant or ever mentioned, suggesting that he was fluent in Greek. Furthermore, John’s intellectual milieu had not given up on the use of the

Greek language at all. Greek was still the language of civil and religious administration in the late seventh century, and was still very much an important language of religion, as paschal letters were composed in Greek well into the eighth century.95 If there is evidence that the Greek language and Greek learning still had currency among Egyptians in the spheres of religion, education, and administration, it is impossible to determine what had disappeared in the late seventh century, aside from the Roman state.

And yet, a more nuanced version of this argument continued to gain traction in subsequent studies of the Chronicle. Ewa Wipszycka correctly pointed out that, despite

Carile’s insistence on approaching the text from the standpoint of its modifications to

Malalas, he never clarified which ideas were held over from Malalas and which represent

93 Chronicle, 74.10 94 For example, the reigns of Decius, Chronicle, 75.1-2; Trajan, Chronicle 72.1-13, and the tetrarchs, . 95 On this subject see, Maged Mikhail, From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt: Religion, Identity and Politics after the Arab Conquest (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 79-91; Arietta Papaconstantinou, “’What Remains Behind’: Hellenism and Romanitas in Christian Egypt after the Arab Conquest” in From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East, eds. Hannah Cotton, Robert Hoyland, Jonathan Price, and David Wasserstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009),447-466. 39

John’s own supplementation and emendation. Expanding on this critique, Wipszycka abandoned Carile’s claims of the emergence of an Egyptian nationalism, but still held that the text reflected a kind of “Egyptocentrism,” understood as a narrowing of geographic horizons, “a phenomenon characteristic of the end of antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages.”96 But John’s frequently discussions of Egypt do not suffice to brand it as an Egyptocentric narrative, understood as a narrowing of the historian’s range of vision to Egypt and its immediate environs. This assertion would require the reader to ignore both John’s own understanding of the geographic range of his text and that of his Arabic and Ge’ez translators as described in the introduction, who identify the Chronicle as a compilation of texts about events from Adam to Heraclius—in other words, a history that is interested in human affairs far beyond the borders of

Egypt.97 Furthermore, most of the subject matter by volume deals with the entire Roman empire. To be sure, the empire’s Egyptian provinces do receive a good deal of attention, but one could just as easily point to Constantinople and Rome as key locations because

John devotes much of his work to their citizens’ relations with Roman emperors.

Jean-Michel Carrié also saw the Chronicle as a kind of Egyptian Christian history. Carrié did not ignore the grand scope of the text and resisted, to some degree, the readings of Carile and others who overemphasized the prominence of Egypt:

“Plus qu'une forme égyptisante ou égyptisee de la chronique, Jean de Nikiu represente la forme provincialisée (my emphasis) d'un genre traditionnel qui n'en revendique pas moins son appartenance au grand

96 Ewa Wipszycka, “Le Nationalisme a-t-il Existé dans L’Egypte Byzantine?” The Journal of Juristic Papyrology 22 (1992): 99 97 Chronicle, Preface. 40

courant historiographique universel - a l'echelle de la Mediterranee classique, s'entend.”98

In my view, this is closer to a correct reading of the Chronicle, especially when one takes into account the range of sources used by John and his familiarity with a large portion of the late antique Greek historical corpus. Even though Carrié did not read into the text some kind of Egyptian proto-nationalism, he nevertheless ultimately suggests something similar. He insists that John was deeply concerned about the effect of a Christian reading of human history on Egypt’s cultural primacy. Accordingly, the norms of Christian historiography forced John of Nikiu to reject any sort of praise of the pharaonic past

(contra Carile), given all the negative implications borne not only by pharaonic paganism but also by its association with the Exodus of the Hebrews.99

Carrié argued that John uses his Christian reading of history, which denied Egypt the cultural primacy that its pagan past might have offered, to rebuild a Christian primacy in the present, rooted in a history of pagan persecution. Carrié pointed to this as the beginning of a provincialization in the cultural and mental universe of Egyptians, which was not in itself nationalism but rather reflected an interest in creating a new Egyptian identity rooted in a mass commitment by Egyptians to a religious conflict between Egypt and imperial power, expressed through loyalty to correct (i.e. anti-Chalcedonian) theology.100 Though he claimed this had less to do with shaking an imperial yoke than winning a theological conflict within the empire, he did suggest that this provincialization

98 Jean-Michel Carrié, "Jean de Nikiou et Sa Chronique,” 157. 99 Carrié, “Jean de Nikiou et Sa Chronique,” 159 100 Carrié, “Jean de Nikou et sa Chronique,” 165-66. 41 of the author’s cultural and mental universe was not dissimilar to a process of nationalization, despite not being nationalism as we might understand it.101 It is unclear what Carrié meant exactly, and he made no effort to explain what happened to Egypt’s

Roman identity and its intellectual world in the two generations preceding John—a desideratum especially considering the text’s pan-Mediterranean focus and John’s heavy use of Byzantine sources. The specter of Carile’s reading perceptibly hangs over Carrié’s conclusions.

Most recently, Arietta Papaconstantinou extended this interpretation to make a far broader claim, which I quote at length. She writes that John of Nikiu (in addition to

George the Archdeacon, the seventh-century author of the early Coptic biographies contained in the tenth-century Arabic History of the Patriarchs),

introduced an ethnic and territorial element in what until then was a purely religious division: the Chalcedonians were identified with the Romans, and the Monophysites with the local Egyptians. As the story goes, the Romans left the country after their defeat, and the Christian community that remained in Egypt had a common ethnic origin, a privileged position in the landscape, and a common history of suffering at the hands of foreigners…Thus, the terms defining the group acquired a meaning that was simultaneously religious and ethnic. In parallel development, the Romans were gradually constructed as the imperial, foreign oppressors, whose theology was heretical and whose faith was corrupt. This was instrumental in bringing out more vividly the idea of an orthodox, local, suffering community.102 Papaconstantinou’s brief analysis is ultimately rooted in the context of a wider discussion of Coptic identity-formation in the wake of the Arab conquest of Egypt, but surprisingly it suggests a reading that emphasizes the formation of an religio-ethnic identity rooted in

101 Ibid. 166. 102 Arietta Papaconstantinou, “Hagiography, Historiography, and the Making of the Coptic ‘Church of the Martyrs’ in Early Islamic Egypt” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 60 (2006): 72. 42 anti-Roman sentiment, far beyond the suggestion of loose provincialization that Carrié had offered. Even Carile rejected the notion of an “animosità copta antiimperiale.”103

Further, Papaconstantinou’s analysis made no attempt to account for the generous treatment of even pagan Roman emperors and certain Roman military officers and politicians, as well as the career of Aristomachos, an Egyptian aristocrat who made substantial contributions to the physical infrastructure of Constantinople in the reign of

Maurice.104 John made little of his ethnic origins and most of his praise of Aristomachos is rooted in the contributions he made to the infrastructure of Constantinople.105

Furthermore, despite citing Carrié’s article in a footnote, Papaconstantinou’s analysis is content to jettison his more nuanced reading of the Chronicle with no explanation, settling instead on the idea that the Chronicle represented a “radically anti-

Byzantine discourse.”106 While Carrié’s notion of John’s Egyptocentrism mostly understood it as a reflection of the kind of regionalism pervasive throughout Roman historiography, some scholars have turned the Chronicle into a text reflecting an expression of ethnic identity. This ethnic expression, they argue, was rooted in a primordial ethno-religious identity entirely distinct from and hostile to Romanitas; John’s

Chronicle has morphed into an Egyptian text, setting out the history of a Christian nation in opposition to its Roman rivals (and their Melkite descendants), and ever in danger of persecution, now by their new Arab Muslim overlords.

103 Carile, “Giovanni di Nikius” 374. 104 Wipszycka, “Le Nationalisme,” 99. Chronicle 95.3-18. 105 Chronicle, 95.15-18 106 Papaconstantinou, “Historiography, Hagiography, and the Making of the Coptic ‘Church of the Martyrs,’” 70. 43

This assessment of the Chronicle’s outlook views John’s treatment of the pagan and Christian pasts of Egypt in light of the political situation in seventh-century Egypt: it suggests that this narrowing of horizons was rooted in Egypt’s alienation from the

Chalcedonian Christian Roman empire and its desire to articulate a new identity in an

Arab-Islamic polity, as well as a broader shift in Mediterranean historiography towards more local concerns in the early Middle Ages. This reading tacitly presumes that the empire was in some way distant and foreign to John because of his distance from the period in which Egypt was a Roman province. But few of these same scholars would disagree that the world around John still resembled that of his parents and grandparents in many ways; indeed, his education was evidently informed by the same Greek historical and religious texts with which his parents and grandparents might have engaged and which still retained a level of prestige among his contemporaries.107 John was a bishop who was just as comfortable recommending Prokopios and Agathias to his readers as he was telling them about the history of the pharaohs. While there is a memory of Egypt that plays a significant role in the narrative of the Chronicle, it is not foregrounded, and the text as a whole reflects no sense of a continuity of Egyptian identity prior to the presence of Rome.

Before I analyze the structure of the text and the sources upon which it relies, I will discuss its account of Diocletian’s reign in full, as it will be the focal point of the analysis to follow. I have presented R.H. Charles’s flawed translation with the intent of later highlighting what I perceive to be as errors, and also because it is through this

107 Papaconstantinou, “‘What Remains Behind’”, 462. 44 problematic text that most scholars of late antiquity access the work, pending the publication of the English translation and critical edition of the text by Daria Elagina108:

And when Diocletian the Egyptian became emperor, the army turned to give its help to this impious man and persecutor of the faithful and the most wicked of all men. 2. But the city of Alexandria and Egypt declared against him and refused to submit to him. And he made himself strong to war against them with a numerous force and army and with his three colleagues in the empire, Maximian of a wicked stock, Constantius, and Maximian (Galerius). 3. And he went down into Egypt and made it subject to him, and as for the city of Alexandria he destroyed it. 4. Now he built a fort on the east of the city and lay encamped there for a long time; for he was not able by these means to capture the city and bring it into his power. 5. And after a long time some people of the city came to him and showed him a means of ingress whereby he could enter. And so with much toil and trouble he stormed the city and he had with him an innumerable army. 6. And in the city also many thousand troops were assembled by reason of the war that was waged amongst them. And Diocletian set fire to the city and burnt it completely, and he established his authority over it. 7. And he was an idolater and offered sacrifices to impure demons and persecuted the Christians. He was indeed like a brute beast. 8. And he hated all good men and he resisted God; for all the power of Rome was in his hand. 9. And he put to death all the pastors, priests and monks, men, women and little children, and by the hands of his flesh-devouring agents whom he had appointed in every place, he shed without mercy or compassion the blood of innumerable saints. 10. And he destroyed churches and burnt with fire the Scriptures inspired by God. It was a persecution of all the Christians extending over nineteen years, beginning with the time of his accession to power and his conquest of the land of Egypt. 11. And at this time he sent men of Alexandria to cut off the head of the holy father Patriarch Peter, the last of the martyrs. 12. And he put to death all the bishops of Egypt whom he found attached to the orthodox faith and a pure course of life, till (at last) every one believed him to be the Antichrist, who had come to destroy all the world; for he was the home of evil and the lurking-place of wrong. 13. And his colleagues were like him in action and character, and these were Maximian, who had perpetrated many crimes, for his sovereignty was derived from him (i.e. Diocletian), and Maximian the second [Galerius], whose empire was in the east. He resembled a treacherous beast, and was

108 Chronicle, 77.1-22. Daria Elagina, “The Textual Tradition of the Chronicle of John of Nikiu: Towards the Critical Edition of the Ethiopic Version.” (University of Hamburg, 2019). Charles, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, 58-60 45

an enemy of God and the perpetrator of abominable crimes. 14. But Constantius, who was associated with him in the empire in Asia, had not committed any crimes, but he loved men and treated them kindly. 15. And he made also a proclamation by the voice of a herald to the Christians in all places under his sway that they should do the commands of the Lord, the one true God. 16. And furthermore he commanded that neither should violence be done to them nor persecution be stirred up against them, nor their property be plundered nor any evil inflicted upon them. 17. And he commanded likewise that no hindrance should be put to their worship in their holy churches in order that they might pray on behalf of him and his empire. 18. And in the third year after the close of the persecution which he had instituted against the Christians, the impious Diocletian in the midst of such enterprises fell sick of a grievous bodily disease and lost his mind and reason. 19. And in consequence thereof he was deposed and in accordance with a decree of the Roman senate sent in exile to the island named Waros, in which there were great forests, and it lay in the west. And he remained there alone. 20. And in that island there were some believers who had survived; these supplied him with daily food sufficient to sustain his body. And whilst he pursued this course of life in solitude, his reason returned to him, and he became ambitious (again) of empire, and besought the army and the Senate to come and take him from the fortress (where he was) and make him emperor as before. 21. But the officers, the army and senate refused, saying: 'This man, who has lost his reason and mind, whom also we have deposed, we will not receive back again. 22. And in consequence of this refusal this enemy of God and of the holy saints was deeply grieved and was not able to accomplish his desire. He wept and his eyes shed tears in abundance now that misfortune surrounded him on every side. And he lost his reason to a very great degree and became blind and his vigour departed and he died.

John’s account of the reign of Diocletian is the product of a careful blending of indigenous Coptic hagiographies and the account of Diocletian’s reign found in the

Chronographia of John Malalas; the result is puzzling and unique in Byzantine and

Christian historiography. John immediately and incorrectly identifies Diocletian as

Egyptian.109 He gives the emperor a portrait, not of the type found in Malalas, but in the

109Chronicle 77.1 46 form of a cutting character assessment, where John, in Charles’s translation, describes him as “an impious man and persecutor of the faithful and the most wicked of all men.”110 We shall see that this translation requires correction, as it obscures key features of John’s depiction of Diocletian.

Diocletian appears as an indigenous persecutor of the Christians, and John relates nothing about his reign that does not involve the victims of his persecution. His colleagues in the Tetrarchy fare no better: Maximian is a perpetrator of crimes who performed human sacrifice and invoked demons; Galerius “resembled a treacherous beast” and also participated in cannibalistic rituals.111 Only Constantius Chlorus is spared

John’s ill-treatment for the mercy that he showed in proclaiming that “Christians in all places under his sway…should do the commands of the Lord.”112

The people of Egypt and Alexandria respond to the rise of Diocletian and his colleagues by refusing to submit to him. While this seems to refer to the rebellion of

Domitianus, John’s account continues by asserting that the Egyptians collectively and the

Alexandrians in particular were responsible for the revolt against the Roman emperor, without mentioning any of their local leaders. Diocletian manages to break the city after a long siege, burning it to the ground and establishing his authority over it. But without any grammatical or narrative indication that time has moved forward, John then begins his discussion of the Christian persecution. What follows is a description of the murder of

Christian men, women, and children, without any specific indication of location until

110Chronicle 77.1; 77.23. 111Chronicle 77.13 112Chronicle 77.15 47

John writes that “it was a persecution of all the Christians extending over nineteen years, beginning with the time of his accession to power and his conquest of the land of

Egypt.”113

The inclusion of a pan-Roman Christian persecution creates the impression that

Egypt was a locus of resistance to this pan-Imperial persecution. In effect, John conflates the Christian persecution with the Alexandrian uprising, and this conflation in turn paints a picture of persistent abuse by an emperor whose legitimacy derived from military support despite his impiety and wickedness, as well as from the power of demonic forces.

In short, John portrays the emperor as at once anti-Christian and anti-Roman, and possibly sees no difference between the two. John considers Diocletian illegitimate because his reign was rejected by the citizen body and, by implication, its political institutions save the military. Standing against him are the Egyptians who, at least tacitly, seem to be Christians and Roman citizens by virtue of living within the empire and heretofore not rejecting Roman rule.

John’s Diocletian is eventually destroyed by an act of God, as are most of the enemies of the faithful depicted in the Chronicle. Three years after the persecutions had ended, and a full 22 years since his reign began, Diocletian loses his mind as the result of a “bodily disease.”114 The senate then sends him into exile on the island of Waros where a life of solitude, interrupted only by the Christians who supply him with food, brings

113Chronicle 77.10 114 Chronicle 77.18. John of Nikiou seems to suggest that the Egyptian uprising began as soon as his reign did. John then mentions the persecution of Christians, “extended over nineteen years, beginning with the time of his accession to power and his conquest of the land of Egypt.” Chronicle 77.10. 48 him back to his senses.115 When he attempts to return and have the army and Senate declare him emperor again, however, they refuse, claiming he has gone mad. This drives

Diocletian to a second mental collapse that ultimately leads to his blindness and death.

How, then, did John construct this narrative? One key formative source for this unique account is from the Chronographia of John Malalas. Malalas’s description of

Diocletian is notably even-keeled, even implicitly positive. Physically he is described as old and hunch-backed, but Malalas also gives him the epithets μεγαλόψυχος, "great- souled," and φιλοκτίστης, "one who loves building."116 This tone is immediately undercut by Malalas’s report that during his reign it became dark for a whole day upon his ascension, but beyond this there is little to be read as negative. Building projects abound in Malalas’s account of Diocletian’s reign, which focuses primarily on the improvements made to Syrian locales: baths, granaries, and a mint in Antioch; a stadium and temples to

Olympian Zeus and Nemesis at Daphne; and arms factories in Damascus and Edessa.117

In short, Diocletian is described as true to his epithets, particularly preoccupied with great building projects, and, much to the Syrian author’s interest, frequently present and participating in the public life of the Syrian provinces, going so far as to retire while acting as alytarch during an Olympic contest held in Antioch.

There are only two notices that can be read as critical of Diocletian, and only one of those unambiguously so. The first, more straightforward account comprises the three brief sentences devoted to Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians, although it must be

115 It is unclear to what island John of Nikiou was referring to originally. All we learn of the island was that it was in the “West,” heavily forested, and had some type of fortification. Chronicle 77.19-20 116John Malalas, Chronographia, 12.37 117John Malalas, Chronographia, 12.38 49 emphasized that what we have of Malalas is an abridgement that survives in fragmentary form. Malalas informs us that many suffered martyrdom, including St. Menas, that the churches were destroyed, and that many were afraid. While this may seem puzzlingly brief, especially from a sixth-century author of a Christian history able to access a wealth of contemporary sources for Diocletian's persecution, the account is in line with how

Malalas describes other persecutions; at any rate, the apparent brevity could be the result of the abridgement of the surviving text of the Chronographia which comes down to us.

The abridgement of Malalas's Chronographia contains notices for seven persecutions carried out by the Roman government.118 All follow the same meager pattern of description: the author tells us that during so-and-so's reign there was a great persecution of the Christians and many died. Sometimes he mentions particularly important martyrs, but the notices never go beyond two or three sentences, mere footnotes when compared to the pages devoted to building projects, wars, and anecdotes.

Malalas’s account of Diocletian's persecutions does not differ from the others, except perhaps that Malalas mentions the destruction of churches and a prevailing attitude of fear. But the brevity of the account indicates that Malalas treats Diocletian like any other emperor and does not attribute to him a pivotal role in the history of the

Christian Church or a significant impact on the Christian community, save that he destroyed some buildings and frightened people. This negative passage regarding

118 Vespasian:John Malalas, Chronographia, 10.44; Titus:John Malalas, Chronographia, 10.48; Trajan: John Malalas, Chronographia, 11.2; Numerian: John Malalas, Chronographia, 12.35; Diocletian:John Malalas, Chronographia, 12.43; Maximian:John Malalas, Chronographia, 12.45 50

Diocletian appears as little more than a formulaic gesture, perhaps aimed at an audience who would expect some mention of the persecution.

The brief notice of the persecution in the Chronographia follows a far more ambiguous, and, as far as I know, unique account of the brief rebellion of L. Domitius

Domitianus and Achilleus in 297/98 CE, which clearly stands as the inspiration for

John’s own account of Diocletian’s reign.119 Malalas never mentions Domitianus by name; he instead reports that Diocletian was responding to a rebellion by the Egyptians, who had killed their governors. For this crime, Diocletian besieged Alexandria, destroyed the aqueduct leading into the city, and finally burned the city to the ground; he let the soldiers kill citizens “until the blood of the slain came up to the knees of the horse on which he [Diocletian] was mounted.”120 While he constructs an undoubtedly brutal scene of violence, Malalas depicts this event as the fault of the city’s residents, and he seems to understand the conflict in terms of an imperial hegemon suppressing a local uprising. We find a scene in which a Roman emperor collectively punishes the citizens of a provincial city for killing agents of the government and rebelling against his authority. The serious

119 There are a great number of papyrological and numismatic studies dealing with this uprising, most preoccupied with the dating of this event, most of which have been catalogued in Jean Schwartz, L. Domitius Domitianus: Étude Numismatique et Payrologique (Brussels: Fondation Égyptologique Reine Elisabeth, 1976). Schwartz settled on a date of 296/97 for the revolt and despite compelling papyrological arguments for a date of 297/298 from J. David Thomas, “The Date of the Revolt of L. Domitius Domitianus,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 22 (1976): 253-279, and J. David Thomas, “A Family Dispute from Karanis and the Revolt of Domitius Domitianus,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 24 (1977): 233-240 as well as supplementary numismatic evidence in A. Geissen, “Numismatische Bemerkung zu dem Aufstand des L. Domitius Domitianus,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 22 (1976): 280-286, Schwartz defended it once more in Jean Schwartz, “L. Domitius Domitianus,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 25 (1977): 217-220. New papyrological evidence presented by Constantin Zuckerman, “Les Campagnes des Tétrarques, 296-298: Notes de Chronologie.” Antiquité Tardive, 2 (1994): 65-70, seems to put the matter to rest in favor of a 297/298 date, although one author maintains the 296/297 date, Frank Kolb, “Chronologie und Ideologie der Tetrarchie,” Antiquité Tardive, 3 (1995): 21-31. 120John Malalas, Chronographia, 12.41. Note some similarity to Revelation 14:19-20. 51 tone of the episode is then undercut in its conclusion in which Malalas informs the reader that as Diocletian’s horse trod on the bodies of the slain, it stumbled, stopping the killing and prompting the Alexandrians to erect a statue to the horse, as an offering of thanks to

God who, according to Malalas, caused the horse to stumble.121 Malalas erroneously identifies this as the first year of "the calendar of Egyptian Alexandria," presumably referring to the Era of the Martyrs calendar which began in 284 CE, more than a decade earlier. There are no more negative events attributed to the actions of Diocletian himself, and, following the account of an otherwise unknown and possibly invented writer

Domninos, Malalas says that Diocletian died in peace after overseeing the Olympics in

Antioch and distributing largesse. 122

Two aspects of this account are odd, especially considering what we know about

Diocletian's siege of Alexandria. First, Malalas's decision to describe Domitianus's rebellion as a popular rebellion of citizens against their governors places the blame for disobedience not just on the citizens of Alexandria, against whom Diocletian’s attack was directed, but against the Egyptians collectively, and depicts the whole affair as a provincial flare-up, with disastrous consequences for the indigenous population. But

Domitianus's rebellion was in reality an attempt to seize the entire Roman empire, and while there is a good deal of numismatic and papyrological evidence that the uprising was indeed successful for a few months, there is no indication in these sources that the

Egyptian populace or even the citizens of Alexandria were enthusiastic supporters of the

121John Malalas, Chronographia, 12.41 122 For more on Malalas’ sources, see Elizabeth Jeffereys, “Malalas’ Sources,” in Studies in John Malalas, eds Elizabeth Jeffreys, Brian Croke, and Roger Scott (Leiden: Brill, 1990) 167-216; Warren T. Treadgold, The Early Byzantine Historians (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 52 uprising. At least one literary account, that of Jerome via Eusebius, seems to support

Malalas’ account. Jerome credits the revolt to Domitianus’s successor, Achilleus. Jerome states that “Alexandria, along with the rest of Egypt, cut itself off from Roman authority through the leadership of Achilleus.”123 With this exception aside, the uprising was not generally understood by literary sources as a popular uprising, and even if there is evidence that many local people had joined Domitianus’ revolt and that he had managed to seize control of all of Egypt, it is difficult to say for certain how extensive his support actually was.124

Second, Malalas’s association of the beginning of the Alexandrian “Era of

Martyrs” with the rebellion of Domitianus is peculiar. He would likely have been familiar with Diocletian’s persecutions, and particularly its impact on Alexandria’s Christian community and its calendrical system. It is not clear why Malalas places the beginning of the Era of Alexandria, more commonly known as the Era of the Martyrs or the Era of

Diocletian, so late in the emperor’s reign, or why he would attach it to an event that had garnered so little attention from his predecessors and contemporaries, instead of tying it to the Diocletianic persecutions. Both Domitianus and Achilleus were ultimately

123 Eusebius via Jerome, Chronicle, 291. See also from “Lucius Domitius Domitianus 6,”PLRE I, 263: Aurelius Victor, De Caeseribus, 39.23. 38, Pseudo-Aurelius Victor, Epitome de Caeseribus, 39.3 (Both tell us little. Aurelius Victor simply states that “Furthermore at Alexandria in Egypt someone named Achilleus had donned the insignia of supreme power” and then later “But in Egypt Achilleus was easily put down by negotiations and paid the penalty.”) John of Antioch, Fr. 164; John Zonaras, Epitome Historion. 12.31, Jordanes. Getica. 110 (A brief notice which states that after Achilleus was defeated, the tetrarchs neglected the Goths), Panegyrici. Latini, 5.5; 5.21. It is important to note that according to “Lucius Domitius Domitianus 6,”PLRE I, 263, all literary sources ascribe the revolt to Achilleus, Domitianus’s successor, making Malalas and John of Nikiou totally unique in excluding Domitianus (and failing to mention any leaders at all). 124 Colin Adams, “Transition and Change in Diocletian’s Egypt: Province and Empire in the Late Third Century” in Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early to Late Empire, eds. Simon Swain and Mark Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 86 53 inconsequential characters in Roman history. This not only suggests that John believed, following Malalas, that the siege of Alexandria occurred in the first year of Diocletian’s reign, but that John understood the revolt as an indigenous uprising much as Malalas had.

There is a second, more enigmatic set of sources upon which John seems to rely, namely, Coptic martyrologies concerning the great persecutions of Diocletion. John of

Nikiu’s account of Diocletian is similar in many respects to a group of Coptic hagiographies that modern scholars have grouped into cycles.125 These accounts were based on what Arietta Papaconstantinou identifies as the “Antioch legend” or what Tito

Orlandi refers to as the “ancient Antiochene cycle.”126 These passion narratives deal with the same character or collection of characters who undergo martyrdom at the hands of

Diocletian’s court, erroneously situated in Antioch. In these texts the protagonists and the main antagonist are connected to each other through bonds of friendship or blood relation. Diocletian is often identified as a Christian shepherd named Akrippita, who lived as a Christian in Egypt along with several other stars of these martyrologies such as

Psote of Pshoi and Basilides. He becomes a soldier, and after falling in love with the

125 Diocletian’s blindness and abdication, appear also in the Passions of Claudius, Victor, and Macarius, and in the Passion of Macarius his blindness precedes his expulsion by the senate and army, and nowhere else.These similarities are not an indication of the brute combination of two different traditions, the Romano-Greek chronicle and the Coptic passion. Differences emerge between John and his source material and they are also significant. Details surrounding the emperor’s exile and death seem to be conflated in such a way as to allow for a first exile from which he planned to return, which is certainly unique to John’s account, but also hints at some familiarity with Diocletian’s retirement in 305 and subsequent second reign. Further, as Berg-Onstwedder notes, the Alexandrian uprising and the brutal siege that followed all appear to be unique to John of Nikiou’s account, at least as far as different texts of the Antioch legend are concerned. Gonnie Van Den Berg-Onstwedder, "Diocletian in the Coptic Tradition," Bulletin De La Société D'Archéologie Copte XXIX (1990): 111-112 126 Arietta Papaconstantinou, “Hagiography in Coptic” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2014), 332; For more on the grouping of related Coptic passions into cycles, see Tito Orlandi, Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (New York City, NY: Macmillan), s.v. "Cycle." 54 daughter of the Roman emperor at his court in Antioch, he eventually becomes emperor himself.127 As the narrative progresses in its various forms, Diocletian comes to mistrust his Christian friends and advisors who are sent to Egypt and subsequently tried and killed by the local governor.

The historical development of this legend and its attendant cycles is important for a clear understanding of John of Nikiu’s treatment of such a significant moment in

Egyptian Christian history. While Delehaye was the first to identify and group the hagiographies of the cycles related to the Antioch legend, it was not until Baumeister’s

Martyr Invictus that scholars began to recognize that the texts were not Greek translations, but as Papaconstantinou puts it, “essentially Egyptian in their conceptions and choice of literary motifs.”128 Tito Orlandi was the first to make a serious attempt at ordering and dating the appearance of these cycles. He suggested that the earliest of these texts was produced soon after Chalcedon and modeled on the epic Passions which had been produced by earlier Greek hagiographic schools.129 Indeed, Diocletian is not identified as Akrippita the Egyptian until the emergence of the Basilides Cycle—the final stage of development of the Antioch legend tradition—which focused primarily on the martyr Basilides and his close friends and family.130 Few historians have tried to explain

127 See Anna Rogozhina, "Antioch as 'The Holy City' in Coptic Hagiography," Journal of Ancient History 77, no. 2 (2017): 356-376. 128 Arietta Papaconstantinou, “Hagiography in Coptic,” 331; Hippolyte Delahaye, “Les Martyrs d’ Égypte” Annalecta Bollandiana 40 (1922), 149-154; Theofried Baumeister, Martyr Invictus: Der Martyrer Als Sinnbild Der Erlosung in Der Legende Und Im Kult Der Fruhen Koptischen Kirche ; Zur Kontinuitat Des Agyptischen Denkens (Munster: Verlag Regensberg, 1972), 93. 129 Tito Orlandi, Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (New York City, NY: Macmillan), s.v. "Hagiography, Coptic." 130 Tito Orlandi, Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (New York City, NY: Macmillan), s.v. "Cycle." 55 the late production of these texts, but Arietta Papaconstantinou has argued that the absence of the Roman government in the seventh century, and with it the end of

Chalcedonian political support in the region, spurred the creation of several texts, largely hagiographic or otherwise religious in nature, which sought to forge a new Egyptian

Christian identity through the appropriation and indigenization of both the first victims of

Diocletian’s persecutions and Diocletian himself, in order to demonstrate the

“institutional continuity” of the anti-Chalcedonian Coptic Church as the heir of the

Church that Diocletian persecuted.131

John’s retelling of this hagiographic tradition is reflected in more than his use of its Egyptian origin for Diocletian. Here is a point where we may take issue with the imprecision of Charles’s translation of the text, much improved as it was over

Zotenberg’s. The Ge’ez text does not use in the description of Diocletian a word that corresponds to “impious,” which suggests irreverence within an established religious framework. The word used by the Ge’ez translator is መናፍቅ, mänafəq meaning

“secessionist, schismatic, or hypocrite,” from the root verb ነፈቀ, nefeqe, meaning “to tear off, tear away, rend, divide,”132 i.e., to create a schism. The distinction is important here, because it suggests, in accordance with Coptic hagiographic sources, that Diocletian was not simply a foreign, pagan persecutor, but that he himself had been a Christian and later

131 Papaconstantinou, “Hagiography, Historiography, and the Making of the Coptic ‘Church of the Martyrs,’” 81. This dating strikes me as speculative, and ironically, the only firm dating we have of any Antioch Legend text is the account of the reign of Diocletian in the Chronicle of John of Nikiou. While it is impossible to say for certain whether or not John drew from 132 August Dillmann and Werner Munzinger, Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae Cum Indice Latino: Adjectum Est Vocabularium Tigre Dialecti Septentrionalis Compilatum a Werner Munzinger(New York: F. Ungar, 1955), 712. 56 renounced his faith—i.e., he was an apostate. Charles’ and Zotenberg’s translations muddles this important detail, which suggests, along with Diocletian’s Egyptian origin, that John drew on this very hagiographic tradition in constructing his account of the

Alexandrian uprising against Diocletian.

In line with this, it is relatively easy to point to John of Nikiu’s adoption and revision of elements of the Antioch legend as evidence for his attempt to ensure that the thread of his narration did not leave Egypt. Antioch, where Diocletian got his start in imperial government according to the Coptic hagiographies, is struck from the Chronicle entirely. The details of Diocletian’s early life in Egypt are also completely removed, although it is worth noting that this may be the result of an abridgement of a tale that, by the time of composition in John’s late seventh- to early eighth-century milieu, would have been familiar to the intellectual and ecclesiastical circles of post-Roman Egypt.

But there are also good reasons to read John’s account as an Egyptian myth interpreted within the framework of a history of a Christian Roman empire. The omission of the central saints, indeed a total disinterest in individual martyrdom altogether, could also be read as having the effect of collectivizing the suffering of the Christians and removing the individual narratives so key to the genre. While few texts of the Antioch legend seem concerned about the wider persecution outside of Egypt and Antioch, John of Nikiu does highlight the empire-wide scale of violence.133 Undoubtedly the most

133 Chronicle 77.9 notes Diocletian put Christians to death by means of “his flesh-eating officials, who he set in every place.” This, in line with the fears of the Christians that this man had come to destroy the “the entire world” (Chronicle 77.12) as well as the continuation of these persecutions by other tetrarchs throughout the chapter, seem to confirm that John understood the persecution as pan-imperial, save, of course, those parts under the control of Constantius. 57 telling addition on John’s part is the fact that his account highlights the uprising of

Domitianus, reimagined as an Alexandrian uprising in defense of the empire, ultimately producing a totally unique version of the Antioch legend buried within an account of the history of the Roman Empire. These moves, I argue, had the effect of “Romanizing” an

Egyptian hagiographic cycle by removing blatantly erroneous historical facts

(Diocletian’s court in Antioch), turning an Egyptian uprising into a Christian resistance to a tyrant, and highlighting this failed act of resistance as the beginning of an empire-wide persecution. John processed this indigenous source in order to reshape Egypt as a part of the Roman empire. What made it unique in the course of this persecution, its communal resistance to a tyrannical apostate emperor, was nothing that would have struck a Roman reader as foreign. In short, the very features which made this martyrdom cycle distinctly

Egyptian had been shorn away, and in its place was a text in which Egyptian Christians were read as distinctly Roman.

This in turn had the effect of transforming a tradition of local Christian stories of martyrdom into a pan-imperial political account of the population of a provincial city resisting the advances of a tyrant. As mentioned above, while Malalas claimed that

Diocletian came to Egypt to exact revenge on a wayward indigenous population that had killed their governor, John of Nikiu’s description does not mention the killing of any government officials, stating that the city collectively refused to submit to his authority because of his impiety and wickedness. Charles’s translation of John’s description of

Diocletian adds that he was the “most wicked of all men,” which appears in the Ge’ez text as “ወዐማፂ፡ዘየዐቢ፡እምኵሎሙ፡ዐማፅያን።” “wä-‘ämaṣ́i zä-yä‘äbi əm-kʷəllomu ‘ämaṣ́i’an.”

134 Dillmann, focusing primarily on biblical correspondences, notes that ዐማፂ—which he translates as “injustus, iniquus, improbus”—in the Ge’ez bible was most often used to translate the Greek words ἄδικον (nine instances), παράνομος (five instances), and

ἄνομος (four instances), with ἀσεβής, ὑβριστής, and δόλιος each accounting for one instance of the word in Ge’ez.135 In short, “wicked,” which strongly connotes inherent moral depravity, does not quite capture the nuance of the word in most instances of translation where we find clean correspondence with a Greek word. Instead the most important feature of the word stems from the idea that the person is in some way in violation of the law, be it human, divine, or natural. Diocletian was not just evil in the same way that the devil or pagan idolators are “wicked”; rather, John implies that he violated legal norms in some way.

But what sense of adikon is meant here? John in the preceding sentence accuses

Diocletian of taking power and securing the support of the army (ሐራ, ḥära), while not only mentioning the existence of senators (ሠራዊት, śärawit), but noting that it was their decree that exiled him to Waros in the first place, and it was the army, in addition to the senate and other urban notables (መኳንንት, mäkʷanənt), who later rejected his appeal to return to the throne.136 This implies that John had somehow viewed Diocletian’s rise to the throne as extralegal in some sense. This would be an odd criticism, as both John of

Nikiu and his sources seemed to understand that extra-legal action was a normal part of

134 R. H. Charles, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu Translated from Zotenbergs Ethiopic Text (London: Published for the Text and Translation Society by William & Norgate, 1916), 58. Chronicle, 77.1 135 Dillmann, Lexicon Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae, 958 136 Chronicle, 77.20 59 changes of leadership, and could often have good outcomes, as in the case of the murder of Julian by the holy martyr Mercurius.137

As Anthony Kaldellis has noted, Byzantine authors, including many contemporaries of Malalas and John’s other sources, wrote of the empire as being a lawful polity, an ἔννομος πολιτεία (ennomos politeia) well into the eleventh and twelfth century.138 There was little need to reconcile this ideal with the political reality that the

Byzantine emperor was a source of law and often exempt from it. It was simply more important that all actions taken by the state, legal or not, would serve the common good of the republic.139 But when the emperor acted as a tyrant, that is, took action that directly or indirectly harmed the citizenry, the populus, according to Kaldellis,

could act outside that law [of treason] (and any other law) when it so chose, because it ultimately was the source of all authority in the Byzantine political sphere. The authority of the people could trump the legal enactments of emperors…rebels too could appeal to the higher law of the common good of the republic when they set aside the laws of treason and their own oaths of loyalty.140

The citizens of Alexandria occupy this very role of the populus in John’s version of the

Alexandrian uprising, as the resisters of tyranny on behalf of the Roman populace. Again, there is no mention of the two rebels, nor are we told, as in Malalas, that the Egyptians had killed their governors. The populace resists not because Diocletian seized power using the army, over and against the standing authority of the senate and common law, but because he turned this extralegal authority against the well-being of the citizens of the

137 Chronicle, 80.22 138 Anthony Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2015), 68 139 Ibid., 77 140 Ibid., 88 60 state. Read in this light, John’ account of Diocletian yields a surprisingly traditional

Roman narrative beneath the surface of a very Egypto-centric event. The story is not one of apolitical and innocent martyrs dying at the hands of a persecutor, but a Christian

Roman popular uprising against a tyrant.

Let us turn to the ethical dimensions of what John believed made Diocletian’s seizure of power so unjust, and why the Egyptians rebelled against him in the first place.

In John’s late seventh- or early eighth-century worldview, as with his late antique predecessors, correct religion was also a key part of living in the Roman imperial republic, and here Diocletian’s status not only as a persecutor but also as a worshipper of idols and demons makes his reign a violation both of Rome’s republican past and of its fourth-century Christian present. Before discussing John’s account of Diocletian’s ethical failures, it would be useful to take stock of how Diocletian was portrayed in some texts of the Antioch Legend.

The narrative of the reign of Diocletian presented in the Chronicle bears a striking resemblance to those represented by the Antioch Legend, particularly the Cycle of the

Theodores, a later stage of development of the legend that may have emerged as early as the late sixth or early seventh century. In On Theodore the General, one of the numerous texts of the Cycle of the Theodores, the devil appears to the emperor Numerianus in a vision and identifies Diocletian as an ideal candidate to lead a campaign against the

Persians, although here the case for evil supernatural causation is not as clear cut: the archangel Michael later informs St. Theodore that God intended for Diocletian to become

61 emperor.141 Yet even in this cycle we hear nothing of the spells cast by Maximian or of demons. Instead, it is the devil himself who directs Diocletian’s actions. The devil appears to Diocletian in a vision, and referring to Diocletian as “my son,” he tells the emperor that Theodore and Claudius, two soldiers in Diocletian’s army, were planning to help the son of the king of the Persians escape captivity in collusion with the archbishop of Antioch.142

The devil then tells Diocletian that it was the emperor, not Theodore, who had captured the Persian prince with the help of his demonic army (whom he calls gods), prompting Diocletian to ask “Which of the gods shall we worship besides Jesus?”143 The devil rebuffs this attempt to incorporate Christ into a pantheon, telling Diocletian to worship his gods instead, the “multitudes of my soldiers.”144 Satan’s speech ends with a threat that will be fulfilled at the end of the narrative, telling Diocletian that just as he caused five nails to be driven into Christ, so the emperor would nail Theodore to a tree with 153 nails; as for Claudius, he would be killed with a spear to his side. Satan’s speech to Diocletian in On Theodore the General suggests that just as the saint acts as an intermediary for demonstrations of God’s divine power by performing miraculous feats of strength, so Diocletian acts as the intermediary for Satan and his demonic hosts, suggesting that supernatural conflict played out on earth through believers and heathen respectively.

141 E.A. Wallis Budge, Miscellaneous Coptic Texts in the Dialect of Upper Egypt. Edited, with English Translations (London, 1915), 609. 142 Ibid, 619 143 Ibid, 620. 144 Ibid. 62

But to the author of On Theodore the General, Diocletian’s role in the persecution is more uncertain. On the one hand, he makes it clear that Diocletian was predisposed to evil behavior, even while he lived as a Christian Egyptian. His violent abuse of Psote of

Pshoi’s sheep, both before and after receiving a military commission, leads Psote to remark to his scattered wards, “O flock of the nome of Pshoi, he who has reared you shall cease to slay beasts and shall slay men.”145 And yet Diocletian’s violent character in this text is undermined by his deferential behavior. He is easily influenced by the devil, who uses him as a vehicle for the killing of the Antiochene martyrs and, despite Psote’s prophetic line, it is difficult to reconcile this image with the fragile king depicted at his court at Antioch.146 Diocletian is portrayed as insecure in his position of power as a result of an abortive coup led by Theodore to put Claudius on the throne. Afterwards,

Diocletian daily asks Theodore and Claudius whether they would like to take up the throne which rightly belongs to them. This clearly differs from John of Nikiu’s assertion that “the army turned to give its help to this impious man,” portraying a Diolcetian who is too afraid to discipline his subordinates, let alone attack a city that resisted his rule.147 But the army did play a large role in Diocletian’s rise to power in On Theodore as well, by providing him with a career at which he excelled and with protection (albeit far from adequate) from Theodore’s attempted coup. The devil is able to compel Diocletian to challenge Theodore and Claudius from his fragile position only after he reveals an army

145 Ibid. However, in an encomium dedicated to Theodore the Anatolian, Diocletian/Agrippida is instead described as playing his flute to the delight of the flock. 146 This inconsistency is also pointed out in Gonnie Van Den Berg-Onstwedder, "Diocletian in the Coptic Tradition," Bulletin De La Société D'Archéologie Copte XXIX (1990): 111. 147Chronicle 77.1. 63 of “gods” and tells him, on several occasions, not to fear them.148 Diocletian is at once impotent and a source of widespread violence in the encomium, whereas the Chronicle sees no impotence at all in him until he is struck by illness.

John’s own disjointed discussion of the tetrarchic government suggests that

Maximian was responsible for Diocletian’s downfall, by casting enchantments on him and inviting the demonic possession which ultimately drove him mad.149 We find here

John making use of the same paradoxical narrative template. He elects to depict

Diocletian as a mad, blood-thirsty tyrant, but one who is ultimately powerless before the demonic forces on whose behalf he acts. The memory of Diocletian both as terrifyingly strong, insofar as he governs with the assistance of the army, and also helpless in the face of the demonic, not only points to the tradition from which John drew his text, but allows him to make one more move in service of his monastic history.

This move is John’s assertion that Diocletian was in fact briefly healed during his time of asceticism on the island of Waros, during his first exile. Diocletian’s health returns to him, not primarily because of the intervention of the local Christians, but rather because of the life of solitude he leads on Waros. The Christians who survived his persecution sustain only his body, and he is never depicted as praying or communicating with God. The reference to asceticism is unmistakable as an iteration of a type of story that appears often in John’s Chronicle, in which Christian ritual practice is proven to be efficacious, even if the practitioner is unaware of what he is doing or even when he is

148 Budge, Miscellaneous Coptic Texts, 609 149 Budge, Miscellaneous Coptic Texts, 609 64 actively mocking it. For example, the mime Gelasinos converts to Christianity after a performance in which he received a satirical Christian baptism.150 This type of story fulfills a specific function within the grand narrative of John’s Chronicle. One of the most important, if not the core narrative conflicts in John’s work is that between God and

Satan (or his demons), played out on earth between the faithful, theologically correct

Christians and the “enemies of God,” be they Jews, pagans, heretics, or generally dishonest or criminal individuals. While this usually plays out on battlefields, on the streets of major cities, or in the halls of government, the stories of ritual efficacy within the larger narrative allow the reader to consider this conflict also at the level of individual ethical or religious failures.

John’s narrative insertion transforms Diocletian’s body into yet another battleground for an ongoing supernatural war between God and Satan, in terms that would have been familiar to an Egyptian monastic and aristocratic audience that regularly consumed stories of monks resisting the temptations of demons while practicing asceticism in relative or total isolation. The efficacy of Diocletian’s imitative, agnostic monasticism is undercut soon afterwards, but its role should not be understated. In understanding why one ought to practice asceticism, there can be no stronger argument

150Chronicle 77.78. Ruth Webb, in her discussion of mimesis and magic with explicit reference to the episode of Gelasinos’ mimed baptism suggested that “the power attributed to the mock baptism in the tales of the actor-martyrs may reflect an understanding of mimesis itself as a form of agency, a way of harnessing the potency of whatever is imitated…Engaging in mimesis is therefore presented in these stories as rendering the person vulnerable to the influence of unseen powers, whether they be the Holy Spirit or curious demons.” Ruth Webb, Demons and Dancers: Performance in Late Antiquity, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2008), 159-160. On Gelasinos, see Werner Weismann “Gelasinos von Heliopolis: Ein Schauspieler-Märtyrer,” Analecta Bollandiana 93, 1-2 (1975): 39-66; For the theatrical aspects of his recorded martyrdom, see Costas Panayotakis, “Baptism and Crucifixion on the Mimic Stage,” Mnemosyne 50, 3 (1997): 302-319. 65 than the efficacy of this self-imposed isolation, absent of religious belief. The brief delay of Diocletian’s inevitable death acts as a kind of “control” by which the audience can see the substantial but limited efficacy of monastic practice. We might imagine that if

Diocletian had rediscovered his Christianity within the course of the narrative, he might have been spared his fate.

Diocletian’s death highlights an important feature of John of Nikiu’s historical argumentation. The type of story to which these two deaths belong presents an argument that is subtly but significantly different from that underlying tales of simple divine retribution, in which God kills or maims the killers of the Christians as punishment for their persecutions. Stories of simple divine retribution are vehicles for a historical argument that, just as God defended and avenged the Hebrews through agents of his will or by supernatural intervention, so God continues to protect his newly chosen nation, the nation of Christians.151 This argument appears frequently in John of Nikiu’s Chronicle, as when John informs us that after Galerius fell near-fatally ill “he recognized and learnt that his malady had befallen him through Christ the true God because he had afflicted the

Christians.”152 In the case of such causative explanations, God or Christ becomes an actant in the narrative, one whose retributive actions change the Roman government, protect Christians, and allow the Church to flourish.

By contrast, the death of Diocletian suggests that it is the idolatry and sorcery that bring on the demise of these figures, rather than divine comeuppance. John elaborates

151 David Woods “Late Antique Historiography” in A Companion to Late Antiquity (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 358 152 Chronicle 77.29 66 even further to explain how Diocletian and Maximian found themselves in such positions, although he never does so explicitly. Though this causative explanation is not presented in chronological order, John tells us not only that Maximian wrought enchantments on Diocletian, but also that he had a good reason for doing so, since “his sovereignty was derived from him [i.e., Diocletian].”153 John seems to suggest that the underlying cause of both Maximian’s and Diocletian’s deaths was Maximian’s lust for power, his desire to control the empire through its true ruler. Maximian’s own moral failings expose him to the trickery of the demon and lead to Diocletian’s and his own demise. One could imagine that God has nothing to do with their deaths directly.

Given the context of the production of this text, written as it was by a bishop who acted as a kind of administrative overseer of Egyptian monasteries in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, it is impossible to ignore the monastic tinge to John’s vision of historical causation. From the fourth century onward, Egyptian monastic literature showed persistent concern about the dangers of demons to monks both young and old.154

But while demonology in hagiography might warn readers of the dangers of demonic influence by showing how ascetic heroes recognized and overcame Satan and his agents, demonology in historiography argues something different altogether. If Diocletian was under the influence of enchantments, then it follows that one of the most brutal Christian persecutions was not a religiously and politically motivated decision made by the emperors and the Roman government, but the indirect result of the machinations of

153 Chronicle 77.13 154 David Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (Cambridge, 2006), 43. 67 demons on an individual and his own willingness to accept demonic assistance. The point of the story is not to remind the audience to abandon idols and to watch out for demons; behavioral correction of this sort could be much more effectively delivered by other genres of publicly performed work. The real concern of the text is to nuance the providential and salvific view of Christian history. While divine causes are still the only historical causes worth discerning, one cannot underestimate the personal moral and ethical failure of individuals in places of power, a prerequisite for the influence of demons.

Conclusion

This one case study can only do so much work to point out the deficiencies of modern scholarship’s effort to ethnicize—or more properly, Copticize—the Chronicle.

But it serves to emphasize that one does not find here the “Egyptianization” of historical events; on the contrary, we find the adaptation of indigenous Egyptian historical “facts,” meaning the narrative about the past with enough epistemic value within his intellectual milieu (the eighth-century Egyptian literary community, in this case) to be accepted as

“true.” These Egyptian “facts” are subordinated to an internationally established historiography of the genre of Christian universal history. This cannot be understood as the work of a parochializing or indigenizing text with narrow, local concerns. Egypt and

Alexandria are instead depicted as the locus of a Roman resistance to tyrannical government. But John’s truly novel move is to consciously borrow Malalas’ conflation of the siege of Alexandria without acknowledging it as such. I suggest that this conflation is intentional, and that John’s unique contribution is to suggest that resistance to tyranny,

68 understood as a military-backed violation of the safety and well-being of the populus, and resistance to compromise on issues of religion are one and the same struggle. Moreover, this kind of Roman history gave John a platform for his audience to understand their new world and their place in it, as a nation of Christians, by allowing them to associate and identify with just figures collectively.

John’s voice within the narrative appears clearly as a Christian and universal voice, steeped in the political norms of the Roman empire, while separated from it, and decidedly not an ethnic or national history. In John’s treatment of Diocletian, the bishop’s historical vision draws on Roman tropes of popular resistance to tyranny and

Christianizes them. John claims that Diocletian’s assent was illegitimate and backed by the army, borrowing from the Coptic tradition’s vision of a weak monarch with violent tendencies propelled to positions of power by happenstance and the support of demons.

Alexandrians and Egyptians, on the other hand, appear not only as vulnerable apolitical

Christian martyrs, or subjects of a foreign hegemon, but as Christian Romans resisting an unjust government on behalf of the whole empire (or at least the Christians within it) and not for the sake of their independence or distaste for Romans. If this was indeed composed in the seventh or early eighth century, it is an interesting memory of Rome, the product of an intellectual who felt compelled to uphold the memory of his predecessors as Christian Roman citizenry who stood against state injustice on behalf of all citizens of the empire, and perhaps on behalf of all Christians. John’s Chronicle might best be defined as post-Roman in its political outlook. It was undoubtedly informed by a

69 knowledge of Roman history and political norms, but not in a way that establishes continuity with the state or the imagined community of the contemporary Roman empire.

If this is indeed, as I suggest, a Roman history of a sort, or at least a Christian monastic history that foregrounds the Roman empire, why would John bother to write this? Why would an Egyptian in an ecclesiastical apparatus disengaged from the Roman polity and its church in the seventh century care about the emperors of old in any sense beyond the theological? It is easy enough to imagine Rome as the home of a heretical ideology, but what purpose could John possibly find in turning to memories of the

Roman empire as a source of inspiration?

Answering this question requires the historian to turn from imagining memory as competitive, and instead imagining it as multi-directional. This means abandoning the idea of the public sphere of memory as a finite space for which political and intellectual actors compete. Instead, understanding memory as “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross- referencing, and borrowing; as public and not private,” in the words of Michael Rothberg, gives us a window into understanding how John might have engaged with Egypt’s

Roman past.155 We cannot view public memory among Egyptian Christians of Early

Islamic Egypt as a scarce resource for which a variety of Egyptian doctrinaires sparred amongst themselves. Rather, in formulating a Christian history with monastic ethics that emphasizes the piety, humility, and orthodoxy of particular Roman emperors, John could make use of the memory of Rome in a way that allowed him to demonstrate how ethics

155 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009), 3. 70 informed politics and that enabled his audience to understand why one ought to live a monastic lifestyle (or as close as one could get to it), by explaining how their ethical choices affected their political reality.

Chapter 3. The Wrath of God: Natural Disasters, Historical Causation, and the Ethical and Theological Arguments of the Chronicle.

Introduction

While many historians of the late ancient world were fairly explicit about their reasons for composing their works, John’s reasoning, following his own introduction, is somewhat more enigmatic. At the end of his introductory passage, whose grammatical difficulties completely stumped Zotenberg, and left Charles to produce a translation that was hardly coherent, although as technically correct as one could be given the state of preservation, John tells the reader, after a perfunctory admission of his incompetence156:

ንወጥን ፡ ከመ ፡ ንግበር ፡ ዘንተ ፡ እምቀደምት ፡ መጻሕፍት ፡ ብዙኃት ፡ ዘለአዝማን ፡ ወዜና ፡ ዘርኢናሆሙ ፡ ዓዲ ፡ በጊዜያት ፡ እንተ ፡ በጻሕነ ፡ ኅቤሆሙ። ወኮንኩ ፡ በስፉሕ ፡ ከመ ፡ እንግር ፡ ወእኅድግ ፡ ተዝካረ ፡ ሠናየ ፡ ለመፍቅርያነ ፡ ትሩፋት ፡ በዝንቱ ፡ ሕይወተ ፡ ዓለም። ወንሕነ ፡ ኅደግነ ፡ ዘንተ ፡ ቃለ ፡ ዘጽሑፍ ፡ በሥርዐት ፡ ሠናይ ፡ ወበተርጓሜ ፡ ልዑል፣ ወውእቱ ፡ ይትሌዐል ፡ እምኵሉ ፡ ዘኮነ ፡ በፍካሬ ፡ መተርጕም ፡ ከመ ፡ ኢይኩኑ ፡ ዘእንበለ ፡ ረባሕ ፡ ዘኮነ ፡ ወዘሀለወ ፡ ወዘእንበለ ፡ መክፈልት ፡ ወኢርስት ፡ እለ ፡ ይረክብዎ። We will begin to compose this work from many ancient books, which deal with the (various) periods and the historical events, which we have witnessed also in the times to which we have come. And I have been honest in order to recount and leave a noble memorial to the lovers of virtue in this present life. And we have left this narrative which is written in good order and in an exalted translation. Yea it is exalted beyond everything that has been, by the interpretation of the translator, so that those who find it may not be without past and present gain, without portion or inheritance. 157

156 On the literary performance of humility in historical writing, see Derek Krueger, “Early Byzantine Historiography and Hagiography as Different Modes of Christian Practice” in History and Historians in Late Antiquity, ed. 157 Chronicle, 1.1 72

In sum, John tells us that he composed the work so that future generations might have access to it, for their benefit. But this tells us very little about how he intended to convey this message. The Ge’ez translators of the Chronicle add that John composed the

Chronicle, in part as an exploration of “the divine mysteries and heavenly marvels which have befallen apostates from the faith.”158 Most telling is their synopsis of the Chronicle which follows their explanation:

በጊዜ አድለቅለቀት ምድር በእንተ ምክኛተ ክሕደቱ ወማሰነት ኔቅያ ሀገር ዐብይ፤ ወበጊዜ ዘንመ እሳት እምሰማይ፤ ወበጊዜ ጸልመ ፀሓይ እምሰዓተ ጽባሕ እስከ ምሴት። ቦጊዜ ዐርጉ አፍላጋት ወአስጠመ ብዙኃተ አህጉራት፤ ወቦ ጊዜ ንሀሉ አብያት ወኀልቁ ብዙኃን ሰብእ ወወረዱ ውስተ ዕመቀ መድር። ወዝኵሉ ኮነ በእንተ ዘከፈልዎ ለክርስቶስ ኀበ ፪ ጠባይዕ፤ ወመንፈቆሙ ረሰይዎ ፈጡረ። ወእምነገሥታተ ሮምሂ ተአተተ አክሊለ መንግሥት ወተሠለጡ ላዕሌሆሙ እስማኤላውያን ወቊዛውያን በእንተ ዘኢሖሩ በሃይማኖት ርትዕት ዘለእግዚእነ ኤየሱስ ክርስቶስ ወከፈልዎ ለዘኢይትከፈል። At the time the earth quaked on account of the denial (of the faith), and the great city of Nicaea was destroyed, and it rained fire from heaven and the sun was darkened from the hour of dawn till evening. At one time the rivers rose and submerged many cities, and at another time houses were ruined, and many men perished and fell into the chasm of the earth. And all this happened because they divided Christ into two natures; and some of them made Him a created being. Also, the emperors of Rome lost the crown, and the Ishmaelites and Chuzaeans won the mastery over them, because they did not walk in the orthodox faith of our Lord Jesus Christ and divided the indivisible.159 What is most notable about the translators’ insight into John’s theory is the preoccupation with natural disasters. John of Nikiu’s accounts of natural disasters in the Chronicle offer the clearest cases of God’s reaction to human affairs and his interference in them. As such, they offer a solid foundation from which to begin exploring how John understood the movement of history. These disasters range from recurring floods and earthquakes, to more cataclysmic destruction, such as fire raining from the sky and ominous eclipses portending future evils. Such occurrences were a common feature of both Christian and

158 Chronicle, 123.1 159 Chronicle 123.1 73 pre-Christian historiography, and the reliance on appeal to the divine or supernatural to explain these disasters is far from unique even to Western historiography.160

What follows is an analysis of John’s theory of history in sections of the text in which the narrative skeleton can readily be attributed to the work of other historians, such as John Malalas and the ecclesiastical historians Sozomen, Socrates Scholasticus, and

Theodoret of Cyrrhus. This reading will not, indeed cannot, be exhaustive, but through a series of representative case studies it will allow us to generalize on John’s mechanism of historical causation. John rarely editorializes or addresses the reader directly, so rather than exploring his explicit statements, I will compare him to his sources, showing how he, like many other ‘pious’ men turned historian, put God and the Devil into otherwise secular history.

John’s vision of history is replete with a variety of themes, and a significant recurring aim is to demonstrate to readers how particular behaviors and decisions might, on the one hand, invite the wrath or support of God, or court the dangerous influence of demonic forces on the other. In this sense, the text seems to offer something akin to a monastic view of “world history” and of Roman history, in which the discipline of the individual corresponds directly to the stability of the Christian Roman world. I do not mean to suggest that this work is monastic in the same sense that Karl Krumbacher used the term, with a focus on the perceived quality of the author’s writing, an approach that is

160 On natural disasters in Hellenstic and Roman historiography, see Jerry Toner, Roman Disasters (Cambridge: Polity, 2013); Holger Sonnabend, Naturkatastrophen in der Antike: Wahrnehmung, Deutung, Management (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1999); In early Christian historiography, G.W. Trompf, Early Christian Historiography: Narratives of Retributive Justice (New York: Continuum, 2000) 112-115, 122- 124, 294-296. 74 rooted in misguided attacks on the quality of the author’s writing ability and the education of his audience.161 Rather, I wish to argue that the Chronicle stands in part as a work whose narrative is instructive to the individual, illuminating for John’s “lovers of virtue” the wide-reaching ramifications of moral and immoral individual and collective behavior on humanity.

It is worth highlighting two observations when discussing Christian historiography’s response to natural disaster in general and the Chronicle specifically.

First, the Christian historian, be he a church historian, chronicler or a writer of “world history,” did not simply understand divine intervention as a possible cause of natural disaster, but the only possible cause of natural disaster.162 His duty then, as a historian, is not to simply to describe the earthquakes which rocked Antioch, or the bolt of lightning that killed Rua, but to explain what had provoked divine wrath in the first place.163 Here divine intervention inevitably appears as a response to human behavior. For the premodern mind before and after monotheism, “It was impossible to divide disasters into those which had occurred as a result of human agency and those which had been brought about by the divine,” as Jerry Toner writes. “Natural and supernatural explanations of

161 Sergei Mariev, “Byzantine World Chronicles: Identities of Genre” in Shifting Genres in Late Antiquity, 305-308. On Karl Krumbacher’s Monchsgeschichte genre and its transformation into Trivialliteratur by Herbert Hunger, see Herbert Hunger, Die Hochsprachliche Profane Literatur Der Byzantiner, vol. I (Munich: Beck, 1978), 257-278 162 On “world history” or chronicle as genre see Brian Croke “Origins of the Christian World Chronicle,” in Histories and Historians in Late Antiquity, eds. Brian Croke and Alanna Emmett (Sydney: Pergamon Press, 1983), 116-131 163 As Sonnabend has written, “Für Erdbeben kann es keine natürlichen Ursachen geben, sie sind wie andere Naturereignisse göttliche Zeichenentweder eine Strafe oder aber auch eine Hilfe.” Sonnabend, Naturkatastrophen, 125. For more on this trend in late antique Christian historians with various theological stances, see Edward Watts, “Interpreting Catastrophe: Disasters in the Works of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite, Socrates Scholasticus, Philostorgius, and Timothy Aelurus,” Journal of Late Antiquity 2 no. 1 (2009): 79- 98. 75 disaster therefore reinforced one another in a manner which had an understandable appeal.”164

Second, following Sonnabend, we must understand that the historian’s decision as to whether a natural disaster must be understood as punitive or helpful is informed entirely by the author’s perceptions of the policies and characters of either individual secular or religious leaders or entire populations.165 John holds the same view as his some of his predecessors in his willingness to attribute some natural disasters to collective failures of entire cities or empires.166 As in the Old Testament narratives of cities such as

Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18-19:1-29), the Roman empire witnessed natural catastrophe not because of the moral failures of one emperor or patriarch, but because of the collective failures of entire cities or the empire.167 Conversely, some disasters may not be disasters at all, but as with the drowning of pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea, the act of a vengeful God on behalf of his people against the wicked pharaoh.

Divine Wrath in the Chronographia and Chronicle

Before beginning an analysis of John of Nikiu, it would be helpful to examine the views of the source of his narrative skeleton, the Chronographia. John Malalas’s history frequently discussed natural disasters, paying close attention to the disasters that plagued

Antioch, particularly its earthquakes. Mischa Meier has analyzed the way in which

164 Toner, Roman Disasters, 73 165 Sonnabend, Naturkatastrophen, 148-9 166 David Olster, Roman Defeat, Christian Response, and the Literary Construction of the Jew (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1994), 39 167 We might hold against this argument the equally forceful argument of Agathias, of whom John of Nikiou was aware (Chronicle 92.19), that such disasters are part of a normal historical appearance of luck and unlucky eras, and to attribute whole earthquakes to divine wrath at sin would be nonsensical. Agathias, Histories, 5.22.8. Olster, Roman Defeat, Christian Response, 40. 76

Malalas used natural phenomena in his chronicle, pointing out that, while ultimately his work is a salvation history, “Malalas…avoids any linking of the disaster described with eschatology.”168 This may have had much to do with what Meier sees as Malalas’s attempt to turn his audience away from a hypothesized prevailing attitude that the end of the world and the return of Christ was imminent. Focusing on Malalas’s depiction of

Justinian’s reign, Meier instead argues that the emergence of several natural disasters was instead meant to characterize the age of Justinian as an age of fear. Meier’s interpretation of the text takes an interesting turn in looking at fear as positive, following the work of

Roger Scott on the role of fear in texts from the sixth century: “just as God spreads fear through sending natural disasters which have a pedagogical function, so his earthly representative, committed to the imitation of God (mímesis theoú/imitatio Christi), acts similarly within the context of his own capacities.”169

If one were to accept John of Nikiu as a careless plagiarist, primarily of Malalas, one might suspect that his treatment of natural disasters would reflect this view, and indeed, common features in their understanding of the role of the divine in such disasters are clear. First, John of Nikiu and John Malalas shared an understanding of natural phenomena as stemming from the supernatural, a common feature of historiographical works that preceded and followed both texts. John of Nikiu’s explanation of this connection is infrequently made explicit, but he saw earthquakes, lightning storms, and other portents such as comets and eclipses, as the result of divine action.

168 Mischa Meier, “Natural Disasters in the Chronographia of John Malalas: Reflections on Their Function—An Initial Sketch,” The Medieval History Journal 10, no.1-2 (2006): 250 169 Meier, “Natural Disasters in the Chronographia of John Malalas,” 259; Roger Scott “Malalas, the Secret History, and Justinian’s Propaganda” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 39 (1985): 99-109 77

Second, both authors frequently represent the imperial response to the disaster as an important part of telling the complete story of the disaster.170 For Malalas, imperial responses to disaster, be it Claudius’s dispensation of tax relief for the guilds of the city of Antioch following an earthquake or Theodosius II’s barefoot procession following an earthquake in Constantinople, were key to understanding God’s relationship with mankind, with God dispensing cruel lessons and the emperor providing mercy or relief from these punishments, as God’s representative on earth and leader of his earthly kingdom.171

John of Nikiu in turn also registers imperial response, although the responses are rarely as predictable as they might be in Malalas. John of Nikiu’s emperors might follow the narrative of Malalas, as in the case of Theodosius, but at times do not respond at all.

But it is in these similarities that we find the central difference between the two authors’ theory of history, and the role of God in each narrative. Malalas’ God is destructive and retributive but only pedagogically so: For example, when ash began to fall from the sky upon Constantinople in the reign of Leo II, the citizens immediately concluded that this was originally meant to be fire, and they had only been preserved by the mercy of God. As a result, they concluded “now let us turn from our wrong-doings, lest we perish utterly in our sins.”172 He punishes and admonishes, but it is only ever the disembodied narrator who tells us that God was present at all.

170 Meier, “Natural Disasters in the Chronographia of John Malalas,” 256 171 Claudius: Chronographia 10.23; Theodosius: Chronographia 14.22 172 Chronographia 14.42 78

The God of John of Nikiu as Protector

John of Nikiu’s God is persistently engaged in active and immediate combat with satanic forces and those who seek to steer Christians away from correct theology or hurt them.

As the following cases will show, John used natural disasters as a means of offering a divine historical causation that did not see God’s destructive capacity as pedagogical, but as direct assistance in the on-going struggle between Christians and those who would seek to undermine their collective faith and strength, especially heretics, who were particularly well poised to do so. His reading of history is distinctly sectarian in nature, interested in God’s relationship with his chosen people.

Of the disasters depicted in the Chronicle, only two predate the Christianization of the empire. Save a great flood on the Orontes which occurred before the Hellenistic period, and two floods in Attica, John of Nikiu was primarily interested in those phenomena that could be explained as an act of God in relation to the behavior of individuals who are Christians or those individuals who were hostile to a particular version of Christianity. These disasters almost never favor the emperor, with the notable exception of the death of Rua, king of the Huns, who is struck by lightning and has his army destroyed by fire from heaven, a feat accomplished, so we are told, after

Theodosius tells Proclus and all the clergy “to pray to God on his behalf that victory should be given to him over his adversaries…”173 Instead, the ways in which God creates these natural disasters can be placed into two broad categories by the nature of divine interaction. The first of these are natural catastrophes that reflect a retributive theology in

173 Chronicle 84.83 79 which the acts of God are used to protect Christians from the works of heretics and heathens, or else to punish these villains for their works and undermine them. 174 While this may mean that the disasters are positive events for the empire, especially post-

Constantine and pre-Chalcedon, this is not always necessarily the case. This is a fundamentally different act from the warnings God might provide in the text of Malalas.

These acts seem to play out as strategic or tactical maneuvers in God’s larger conflict against his enemies both human and diabolic. The second category reflects an indiscriminately punitive conception of God’s wrath. This category of natural disasters is generally not only destructive to the enemies of Christians, but to whole cities and the entire empire, regardless of who inhabits them. Very rarely is any lesson conveyed in these natural phenomena, nor is a change of behavior provoked or expected. Rather, this second category covers those acts which are strictly destructive, even Noachine in the totality of their destruction.175

174 Other examples of this category include: An earthquake that is in Antioch that is brought on by a visit from Trajan, who persecuted Christians. This earthquake also extends to the island of Rhodes. Chronicle 72.12-13; A universal famine during the persecutions of Christians by Galerius; An earthquake in Nicaea meant to stop the Arians from assembling in the city. Chronicle 78.8; An earthquake in Constantinople brought on, presumably, by the banishment of John Chrysostom from Constantinople Chronicle 84.39; an eclipse on the day of Marcian’s ascension to the throne, presaging his decision to convene the Council of Chalcedon Chronicle 84.38 an earthquake in Constantinople during the reign of Leo. Dust falls from heaven instead of rain, prompting the new emperor to flee the palace. This was presumably in response to the recent death of Marcian, who assembled the Council of Chalcedon Chronicle 88.1-4. 175 Other examples of this category include: A universal famine during the persecutions of Christians by Galerius; An earthquake and tsunami during the reign of Valens, an Arian persecutor of Nicene Christians Chronicle 82.19; a plague throughout the empire and an earthquake in Syria during the reign of Basiliscus, brought on by his failure to convene a Council in Jerusalem that would undo the decisions made at Chalcedon Chronicle 88.35; An earthquake in Antioch during the reign of Justin (more on this below) Chronicle 90.24; An earthquake in the land of Egypt brought about by Justinian’s treatment of anti- Chalcedonians Chronicle 90.81-83; An earthquake and eclipse in Antioch during the reign of Maurice, which destroyed the city, owing to the heresy of Maurice Chronicle 101.1-5 80

An exemplary case of the first category is the case of an earthquake during the reign of Constantius II. John derived his account of the reign of Constantius II primarily from Malalas, who was typically disinterested in Christian sectarian disputes. Malalas mentions only that Constantius was an Arian and what survives of his work does not describe any earthquakes during his reign. The nearest earthquake Malalas describes in

Nicaea occurred during the reign of Valens.176 But where Malalas presents Constantius with muted praise for his building projects, Constantius’ Arian leanings are the central focus for John of Nikiu, who gives him no such praise and strikes all of his building projects from the Chronicle, except the construction bridge in Cilicia, and suggesting that the Persian invasion of Shapur I was the direct result of the emperor’s Arianism.177

John then mentions that Constantius II attempted to hold two synods to resolve the Arian controversy in 358, one for the Western churches in Remini, and another in the east that was eventually held in Seleucia, although Nicomedia and Nicaea were both considered as prime options before a violent earthquake destroyed Nicomedia in that year.178 John claims that an earthquake destroyed Nicaea, which he calls “the chief of cities of our three hundred and eighteen fathers,” and fails to mention the earthquake that rocked Nicomedia in the same year. 179 John goes on to state that this happened “by the will of God” because the Arians wished to assemble there to “corrupt the holy orthodox

176 Reign of Constantius: Chronographia 13; Earthquake in Nicaea during the reign of Valens: Chronographia 13.35 177 Chronicle 78.5 178 On the dual councils of Seleucia and Ariminum in 358, see Richard Flower, Imperial Invectives against Constantius II (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 15; and nn69; Pierre Maraval Les Fils de Constantin: Constantin II (337-340), Constance II (337-361) Constant (337-350) (Paris: CNRS, 2013), 272-276. 179 Chronicle 78.8 81 faith established by our holy Fathers…and it was for this reason that the wrath of God prevented them.”180

John even seems to have made use of some of the terminology that appeared in

Malalas. This is the case for John’s term, “wrath of god,” (mäʿate ’əgzi’abəḥēr መዓተ

፡እግዚአብሔር) which he uses to describe a variety of incidents from disease to floods and earthquakes and which corresponds neatly with Malalas’ own use of the term theomenia

(θεομηνία) to describe earthquakes.181 But John’s theomenia was not meant to inspire fear but instead described God’s destruction of his enemies, and the aftermath of the event cannot be described as instructive or cautionary. Constantius does not respond to the earthquake, nor do his bishops. Where Meier had argued that the response of the emperor was a key part of Malalas’s interpretation of natural disasters, John of Nikiu does not preserve Constantius’ response, but he soon went on to assemble a council of bishops in Milan which excommunicated Athanasius of Alexandria, although the emperor’s attempt to murder the bishop is ultimately foiled.182 This arrangement is not reflected by Malalas at all, suggesting that John supplemented Malalas’ sparse account with a version of the story preserved in a source used by John and common to the

Ecclesiastical History of Sozomen, as well as those of Socrates Scholasticus and

Theodoret. Socrates does not mention a Nicaean earthquake and the synod was ultimately

180 Ibid. 181 According to Brian Croke, this term was quite common among late antique church histories, specifically in reference to earthquakes as manifestations of “divine ire.” Among historians the term first appeared in the work of Sozomen Soz. Eccl. Hist. ii.4.4. Brian Croke, "Two Early Byzantine Earthquakes and Their Liturgical Commemoration," Byzantion 51 (1981): 123. 182 Chronicle.78.20-21 82 not held in Nicaea because it was deemed less convenient than more easterly cities such as Tarsus in Cilicia and Seleucia, where the synod was ultimately held.183

In Sozomen’s account, Constantius attempted to convene a synod in 358 in

Nicomedia. As bishops from the empire made the long journey to the city, an earthquake, followed by a fire destroyed the city and killed many, including the bishop of

Nicomedia.184 Basil, the bishop of Ancyra sought to encourage the emperor to convene the synod once more, this time suggesting that the bishops convene in Nicaea instead.

Ultimately the council was not held in Nicaea “on account of the earthquake which had recently occurred in the province.”185 But this would be a puzzling use of the source because Sozomen stated that, as news of the disaster at Nicomedia spread, “far more was rumored to those at a distance, than had actually occurred. It was reported that Nicaea,

Perinthus, and the neighboring cities, even Constantinople, had been involved in the same catastrophe.”186

The most likely source for the account which supplements John of Nikiu’s rendition of Malalas is Theodoret’s, in which Eudoxius of Antioch, the influential Arian bishop of Constantinople, is credited with suggesting that the synod be moved to Nicaea.

Theodoret writes that Eudoxius used his political influence to make this suggestion to members of the imperial court, but his plan was ultimately foiled by an earthquake, the earliest account of an earthquake explicitly set at Nicaea and tied to Constantius’s

183 Soc. Eccl. Hist. ii.39 184 Soz. Eccl. Hist. iv.16 185 Ibid. 186 Ibid. 83

Seleucian synod. Theodoret believed the earthquake occurred because the Arian bishops had selected the city for its significance in the articulation of Nicene doctrine:

In the same city the bishops who were assembling on this later occasion were intending to lay down the contrary [position to the Nicene creed]. The sameness of the name would have been sure to furnish a means of deception to the Arian crew, and trick unsophisticated souls. They meant to call the council ‘the Nicene,’ and identify it with the famous council of old. But He who has care for the churches disbanded the synod.187 Theodoret’s history is on its face an odd choice for John. Theodoret was heavily sympathetic to prominent members of the Nestorian party, hated by contemporary diaphysites and miaphysites alike, and was most famously hostile to of one of Egypt’s universally famous theologians, Cyril of Alexandria whose polemical theological writings against Theodoret, ultimately led to the latter’s excommunication.188 But alternative explanations attributing the story to Sozomen or Socrates are simply too convoluted to be more plausible than John’s use of Theodoret, save an appeal to an as-yet non-existent complete version of the Chronographia.

There is one reason why John might have turned to Theodoret’s depiction of this story. Theodoret had long had difficult relations with imperial government, and his lack of firm Constantinopolitan social connections made for a history filled with emperors and notable peoples led astray by heretical theology.189 While Theodoret’s theological and

187 Theod. Ecc. Hist. ii.21 188 John himself praises Theodosius II for calling the second council of Ephesus, in which Theodoret was excommunicated, and later refers to him as “Theodoret the Nestorian” (ትአድርጥስ ንስጡራዊ), Chronicle 92.12 189 Harmut Leppin, “The Church Historians (I): Socrates, Sozomenus, and Theodoretus” in Greek and Roman Historiography in Late Antiquity: Fourth to Sixth Century, ed. Gabriele Marasco (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 221. See Hartmut Leppin, "Zum Kirchenpolitischen Kontext Von Theodorets Mönchsgeschichte," Klio 78, no. 1 (1996): 212-230; For the life of Theodoret see Theresa Urbainczyk, Theodoret of Cyrrhus: The Bishop and the Holy Man (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 10-32; Pierre Canivet, Le Monachisme Syrien selon Theodoret de Cyr (Paris: Editions Beauchesne, 1977), 36-63 . 84 exegetical writings would have been unapproachable for John, his historical writing provided a source that allowed him to add more palatable explanatory flesh to the skeleton of Malalas. Where Malalas seems less interested in dwelling on the particulars of ecclesiastical history and theological disputes in general, these disputes drove much

John’s perception of why and how God acted on the world. John’s modification to the story describes what measures the God of the orthodox Christians took to mitigate the spread of heretical belief. The action taken by God directly countered the influence of a heretical sect that had seized control of an imperial government which had been corrupted by their influence.

In another example of God’s actions on behalf of the orthodox against heretics,

John of Nikiu seeks to tie yet another earthquake in the city to Arian activity, this time in the reign of Valens. While it is likely that this earthquake aligns with the earthquake and tsunami of 365 CE with its epicenter near Crete, famously recorded by Ammianus

Marcellinus, scholars have pointed to several bouts of seismic activity during the 350s and 360s, constituting what Gavin Kelly described as “a period of ‘seismic crisis’ in the

Eastern Mediterranean.”190As such, John could be referring to any number of earthquakes during the reign of Valens. The account comes straight from Malalas, with very little modification to the actual story.191 It is far from an exact copy of the sentence, however:

John added some minor but significant embellishments, such as dating the disaster to the days “of this abominable prince” and including the fact that the sea rose against the city

190 Gavin Kelly, "Ammianus and the Great Tsunami," The Journal of Roman Studies 94 (2004): 143; Guidoboni, op.cit. (n. 4, 1994) 257-77; Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae, 26.10.15-19 191 Chronographia, 13.35 85 of Nicaea where Malalas does not mention the subsequent tsunami.192 The causal chain of events is not established explicitly by John in this instance, as with other disasters. With that said, the accounts that precede and follow it suggest that this act of God was also retributive. Immediately preceding this, the reader is introduced to Valens, the emperor who, according to John, “had formerly been a Christian but afterwards walked in the way of the Arians and had attached himself strongly to their abominable faith.”193 The account that follows it describes a persecution of Nicene churches and the confiscation of property in cities of the empire, including Constantinople.194

After this passage and a notice about the earthquake in Nicaea, John writes of a flood in Alexandria that is driven back by the Alexandrian patriarch Athanasius before it could wreak havoc on the orthodox city. The patriarch dispelled it by speaking directly to god, saying “O Lord, You, God who does not lie, it is you who made this promise to

Noah after the flood, saying, ‘I will never again bring a flood of waters upon the earth.’”195 Such a story never appears in any of the known sources of John of Nikiu, nor does it appear in the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria. We must presume some

Egyptian source for this tale, a kind of heroic marvel, but its origins are less important than the relationship it establishes between God and those Christians John deems orthodox and defenders of orthodoxy. As opposed to being forced to divine the thoughts of God, there are opportunities for dialogue, discussion and negotiation, undoubtedly calling to mind images of figures of the Old Testament, who bargained with a vengeful

192 Chronicle 82.19 193 Chronicle 82.17 194 Chronicle 82.17-18 195 Chronicle 82.22 86

God on behalf of themselves, their cities and their people. One is immediately struck by the similarity of Athanasius’ role in the narrative to that Old Testament figures such as

Abraham, who pleaded on behalf of Sodom with God (Genesis 18:22-33), or that of

Moses, who turned away God’s wrath at the idolatry of the Israelites during Moses’ brief absence after leaving Egypt (Exodus 32:11-14). By reminding God of the promise made to Noah after the Great Deluge, thereby turning away a disaster of the sort that had devastating several other Roman cities, particularly Nicaea, Athanasius successfully defends his flock, and his success reflects the ability of holy figures to intercede with the divine on behalf of collective people and turn away theomenia, further suggesting that the wrath of God was distinct from total unchecked destruction.196

John of Nikiu’s God as Destroyer

This relationship with a vengeful God who nevertheless defends his chosen people is presented by John in stark contrast to the second category of divine action through natural disaster. Of the numerous examples of this type the clearest is the great earthquake of

Antioch during the seventh year of the reign of Justin I in 526. John took the story from a report preserved by Malalas. Malalas’s report describes a tremendous earthquake that led to fires which completely leveled the city of Antioch. Malalas presents the event with graphic descriptions of the earthquake and fire and the deaths of 250,000 people; he notes that many of the victims were not natives but tourists who had come for the festival of the

Ascension of Christ.197 Those who survived fled with their belongings and were attacked

196 God also checks his wrath during a particularly difficult storm in the pass of Chalcedon, which Constantine I calmed by throwing one of the holy nails into the sea. Chronicle 42.2 197 Chronographia 17.15 87 as they left the gates of the city. But this account of the earthquake also preserved many instances in which the wrath of God was tempered by benevolent miracles. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, as peasants and brigands attacked citizens of

Antioch fleeing the disaster, Malalas tells us that eventually the philanthropia of God punished looters and brigands, many of whom died from putrefaction and blindness.198

The reader is treated to further seemingly chance occurrences, which Malalas interpreted as arising from God’s philanthropia. Pregnant women who had been buried under the rubble were saved a month later, their newborn children in their arms, and on the third day after the disaster a cross of light appeared in the sky over Antioch, which prompted the citizens to remain “weeping and praying for an hour.”199

Puzzlingly, Jeffreys et. al. chose to translate philanthropia tou theou as “God’s benevolent chastisement of man,” when describing the fates of looters and brigands. The same term is used when the emperor reacts to the disaster, but his actions are more readily identifiable as benevolent acts of a merciful God, as in the case of the newborns and their mothers drawn from the rubble alive: the editorial choice to translate philanthropia as “God’s love of man,” obscures the plasticity of this term’s application.200 Meier mentions Malalas’ use of the term, but does not dwell too long on the idea of divine philanthropy and the incongruity of describing the deaths of robbers

198 Chronographia 17.16. 199 Ibid. 200 John Malalas, The Chronicle of John Malalas trans. Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael Jeffreys, and Roger Scott (Melbourne: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1986), 240 88 and citizens alike as philanthropia, even choosing to translate it, perhaps with some irony, as “God’s benign nature”.201

Philanthropia is a concept with deep roots in the pre-Christian Mediterranean world, and was nearly supplanted by the Christian term agape, but traditionally educated early Christian writers soon found that the term had a great deal of utility, both in describing God’s love of humanity and human love of other human beings.202 By the time of Constantine, this term had taken on the idea of temperance, truth, gentleness, and justice in relation to the state, and was considered “the supreme attribute of the Deity,” even by a non-Christian author like Themistius.203 The attribute of philanthropia also emerged as an important characteristic of God among Christian authors writing about

God in the fourth century, and it developed into a lasting attribute of God, so much so that by the eighth century CE the use of this attribute in relation to God served as a formulaic feature of Byzantine-Arabic papyri204 When applied to God in theological or liturgical writing, the term essentially stood as a special characteristic of the divine nature, an expression used of God’s love for humanity that most frequently appeared in relation to God’s incarnation of Christ on earth.205 But this is not a undefined love of

201 Meier, “Natural Disasters,” 256. 202 Glanville Downey, “Philanthropia in Religion and Statecraft in the Fourth Century after Christ,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 4, no. 2/3 (1955), 200. Hubert Martin argued convincingly that Plutarch’s use of the term seemed inseparable from ideas of civilization and Hellenism, but from these ideas could spawn translations as disparate as pleasantness, affability, graciousness, all related to suitability to civilization, “not only in Plutarch’s time but at other periods as well.” Hubert Martin, “The Concept of Philanthropia in Plutarch’s Lives,” The American Journal of Philology 82, no. 2 (1961), 174-75. 203 Downey, “Philanthropia in Religion and Statecraft,” 202 204 Herbert Hunger, “Philanthropia: Eine grieschische Wortprägung auf ihrem Wege von Aischylos bis Theodoros Metochites,” Anzeiger der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenshaft. Philosophisch-Klasse 100 (1963), 8-9. 205 Downey, “Philanthropia in Religion and Statecraft,” 204-206. 89 human beings, but a notion bound up with God’s dikaiosyne, his sense of justice, which prevents it from deteriorating into what Constantelos described as “harmful sentimentality.”206

Meier’s interpretation of Malalas’ use of the term clearly reflects the view of philanthropia as an attribute tempered by grim dikaiosyne, portraying kindness and disaster alike as the judgement and mercy of a just God, whose retributive disasters also allow him to present the Antiochenes with his divine philanthropia. The combination of terrible disaster and miraculous intervention ultimately prompts the Antiochenes to abandon the greed and arrogance that the wealth of the city had stirred in them, and to instead turn their thoughts towards the divine.207 For Malalas, a better world required fear of God’s punishment (and that of his earthly representative), and Malalas’ view of the divine served to produce what Roger Scott called a reflection of “Old Testament values,” within the narrative, the idea that prevalence of fear in society was a positive attribute that insured a better Christian world, an argument very much at home in a work published during the reign of Justinian.208 This serves as a lynchpin of Malalas’ cyclical view of human history and was likely part of an effort both to highlight Justinian’s mercy and to counter the eschatological claims of his contemporaries, whose chronographic calculations had led them to conclude that the reign of Justinian surely heralded the end of days.209

206 Demetrios Constantelos, Byzantine Philanthropy and Social Welfare (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1968), 34 207 Meier, “Natural Disasters,” 256. 208 Scott “Malalas, the Secret History, and Justinian’s Propaganda,” 104. 209 On some of Malalas’ contemporaries’ chiliastic approaches to historiography and his response to them, see Elizabeth Jeffreys, “Malalas’ Use of the Past” in Reading the Past in Late Antiquity ed. Graeme Clarke 90

John of Nikiu’s account, indeed most of his narrative altogether, is entirely divorced from this vision of historical mechanism. Where Malalas saw the earthquake as the result of a general lapse in piety, and more specifically, widespread greed and arrogance, a predictable recurrence on the long road to the salvation of the entire empire,

John of Nikiu’s understanding of what caused the earthquake was more complex and rooted in his theological and ethical views. John begins with an unrelated story from the

Chronographia, during the reign of Justin, in which the Blue faction rioted and attacked the factions, presumably in Constantinople.210 Many accused Justinian, Justin’s nephew, of helping the Blues, and Theodotus, the prefect and ex-comes Orientis sent to deal with the issue, was prepared to kill Justinian, who only escaped this fate because he had fallen ill and was subsequently released by the prefect. The emperor blamed Theodotus for this and sent him into exile.211 This narrative is a condensed form of an account found also in the Secret History of Prokopios, although as Jeffreys et. al. noted, it seems to lack much of the detail found in Prokopios, or perhaps mangled it.212 Prokopios instead stated that the Blues were acting while Justinian was sick, and that it was Justinian who attempted to

(Rushcutters Bay: Australian National University Press, 1990), 129ff; Brian Croke, “The Development of Byzantine Chronicles” in Studies in John Malalas ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys (Leiden: Brill, 1990) 34-38. 210 Chronographia 17.12. Chronicle 90.16. This translation comes from Phil Booth, who argues that “factions” is a more likely translation of the Ethiopic ’ahəzab አሕዛብ. Phil Booth, “Shades of Blues and Greens in the Chronicle of John of Nikiou,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 104, no 2 (2012): 565. 211 Chronicle 90.16-19 212 John Malalas, The Chronicle of John Malalas trans. Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael Jeffreys, and Roger Scott (Melbourne: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1986), 235, nn416.8. I reproduce this particular note here: “The..readings of John of Nikiou are interesting in that a) they provide a narrative which could have been abbreviated into Ba, since there are several points of correspondence; b) they seem to show some knowledge of the situation described in Prokopios, Anecdota IX 35-42, especially Justinian's personal involvement and his illness at a crucial moment. On the other hand, a) John of Nikiou does not correspond to Prokopios in detail; b) the monophysite John was anxious to find material derogatory to the orthodox Justin and Justinian.” 91 expel Theodotus, but on a charge of witchcraft and poisoning.213 John, uniquely, adds that Theodotus was told to mete out justice showing total impartiality, implying that

Justin had wished to see the arrest and possibly the execution of his nephew, but this is likely a mis-transcription by John, as Malalas states that Theodotos had killed an illustris named Theodosios.214

According to John, this incident, Severus’ flight into Egypt earlier in the narrative, and the schism that arose in Antioch when the population refused to take communion from Severus’s Chalcedonian replacement in Antioch culminated in a dramatic show of popular displeasure. The soldiers and people gathered in

Constantinople and called for a new emperor.215 Then a man named Qamos stood among the assembled and delivered a prophecy, in which God said that, while he loves the people of Constantinople, he would give them a ruler appropriate to a city and empire of sinners, one who is a “hater of the virtuous.”216 Justin attempted to stem the panic by appointing two new prefects, Theodore and Ephraim of Amida, who quickly restored order. We are then told that “these means were not yet sufficient to turn away the wrath of God from the earth owing to the declension of the emperor,” and what follows is an account of the earthquake, and while reproducing the casualty list in Malalas, he appends the patriarch Euphrasius, Severus’ hapless Chalcedonian replacement, following the

213 Procopius Anecdota 9.35-42 214 Chronicle 90.16. Chronographia 17.12 215 Chronicle 90.20. There is some difficulty translating the term ትዓይን tə‘ayən. Charles renders it as “the people,” without comment, Charles, Chronicle, 135, but Zotenberg, while also settling on “le peuple” notes that it could also be “‘les factions,’ ho stratos kai oi demoi.” Zotenberg, Chronique, 383 n. 8 216 Chronicle 90.21. A more detailed discussion of this passage can be found below, n.73. 92 account of John of Ephesus.217 While there is an element of divine combat here in the death of Euphrasius, Severus’s Chalcedonian replacement is replaced once more by

Ephraim of Amida, who also persecuted the orthodox.218

After this account, once again breaking from the narrative laid out in Malalas, the

Chronicle adds that the Antiochenes celebrated Ascension after the earthquake and sought intercession, and that upon seeing the devastation not just of Antioch but of

Seleucia and Daphne as well, the people blamed these calamities on the expulsion of

Severus and on Justin’s “abandonment of the faith of the God-loving emperors that preceded him.”219 In an act paralleling that of Justinian in Malalas, Justin takes off his crown and imperial garments and mourns along with the senate, making a barefoot procession “on the fifth day of the Easter festival” and giving out an unprecedented amount of money for reconstruction in the region.220 It is important to note that, according to John, Justin only undertook these acts because he had heard what the people said about the earthquake. In other words, John did not see Justin’s public piety and imperial philanthropia as the acts of an emperor interceding on behalf of his citizens because of an earthquake, but those of an emperor who was concerned about his ability to maintain his divinely sanctioned authority. This was an unfavorable depiction of the emperor, designed to show him as desperately clinging to power in the face of a tumult of

217 Chronicle 90.24; John of Ephesus I.41 218 Chronicle 90.32. It is unclear if this is the same Ephraim of Amida who was appointed as an official in Constantinople after an uprising in the city, Chronicle 90.23. 219 Chronicle 90.33 220 Chronicle 90.34 93 unrestrained divine wrath that seeks neither to correct the errant emperor nor chastise wayward citizens.

John’s understanding of why this happened does not require much careful parsing, in large part because John uses the voice of those present to tell the reader what caused this disaster. Speaking through the population of Antioch, John tells the reader that this disaster had occurred because of (1) the abandonment of the orthodox faith, presumably by the general public, (2) the unjust expulsion of the miaphysite patriarch of Antioch,

Severus, and (3) the evil deeds of Justin and his court, most importantly his official abandonment of the “orthodox faith of the God-loving emperors before him.”221 Though at first glance this may appear to be instructive, with God bringing punishment on a disobedient people with the hope that they change, John’s revision of Malalas’ account suggests that the disaster was not meant to teach the Christians a lesson, but to undermine

Justin’s government, and cause widespread suffering which would break both the enemies of God and the righteous alike. In fact, before the earthquake, John depicts most of the population of Constantinople as fully aware of how morally and theologically bankrupt Justin was, and yet even this was not sufficient for God, who rejects the requests of the people for aid.222 Given the circumstances of the narrative, it is difficult to see this as anything other than the act of a retributive, rather than a philanthropic, God.

221 Chronicle 90.33 222 Chronicle 90.21. God tells the citizens, through Qamos, “Look, I love you; for what reason do you beseech me? (Note here that Charles translated the interrogative “በአይ ምክንያት,” “for what reason?” as the adverb, “wherefore,” distorting the sense of the passage). Behold, I gave to you that one, and I will not permit another except for him. Because if he acted according to what was written, you would ask this [same thing] of the enemies of the king. (This is my own translation of a passage in which Charles translates ኅበ as “from,” whereas the preposition is typically translated as “to, towards.” While plausible, it produces the unlikely and puzzling assertion that God did not grant the prayers of the city because if he had, he would 94

In an account of an earthquake in Egypt during the reign of Justinian, drawn from unidentified local sources, about which we have no data, except that John identified the authors of this account as, “our fathers, the divinely-influenced Egyptian monks.”223

Whole villages were swallowed into the earth over the course of an entire year, and the quake’s end was heralded by a memorial celebrated up to the author’s own time. John blamed this disaster on the several decisions that he subsequently described, including forcing the eastern churches to inscribe the names of Chalcedonian bishops on the diptychs, an act that he viewed not only as a strong imperial rebuke of the anti-

Chalcedonian position, but also an unwelcome innovation. John explains that previously church councils had never been mentioned during divine services.224

All of this is to highlight that this second category of divine intervention bears many features that could be understood as a kind of divine violence that is strictly destructive and retributive, with no redemptive or protective features. To convey this vision of natural catastrophes, John must work uphill against Malalas’ notion of

then have to answer to the supplications of the emperor’s enemies! Charles writes, “for if he did according to that which is written, supplications would arise amongst the adversaries of the emperor.” Rather, it seems more likely that the Ge’ez translator was attempting to convey something in the protasis that I might translate literally as “then supplications towards the enemies of the emperor would arise,” i.e. if the king had been pious, your supplications would be directed at the emperor’s enemies, not Me.) God goes on to confirm that there is no redemption or salvation in the offing: “It is because of the sins of the city that I appointed this emperor, enemy of the good. So says the Lord: I will give rulers to you according to your own hearts.” This last line is a poetic inversion of Jeremiah 3:15, in which God states that he will provide his people with, “shepherds after my own heart, who will feed you with knowledge and understanding.” This inversion serves to emphasize not only God’s role as an indiscriminate destroyer rather than a protector or benevolent chastiser of his people, but also to highlight the gradual decline of God’s relationship with humanity in his role as divine kingmaker, an important recurring theme of the Chronicle. While Justin’s new officers, Theodore and Emphraim of Amida, manage to quell the unrest for a time, John reminds the reader, before his account of the earthquake at Antioch, that their efforts were for not. Chronicle 90.24 223 Chronicle 90.83. 224 Ibid. 95 philanthropia. In service of this, John also put a great deal of effort into conveying the idea that some catastrophic natural phenomena, far from being “normal”, i.e. inevitable chastisement of lapses of piety, are instead indications of severe moral and theological lapses both in the high places of government and among the populace, which ultimately lead to a kind of separation from and antagonism towards God.225 At times the Chronicle even strives to respond directly to any chronographic arguments that might suggest that such disasters ought to be considered normal. For example, another earthquake in the city of Antioch (the seventh according to John’s count) occurred during the reign of Maurice and was accompanied by an eclipse. After the panic had subsided and the sun had returned, John suggests, independent of any verifiable sources, that many believed “this event is one that has taken place at the end of the cycle of 532 years,” perhaps referring to paschal cycles or astronomical charts marking the appearance of solar eclipses.226 Further calculations confirmed their suspicion that they had indeed witnessed these events at the end of the twelfth paschal cycle. John did not trouble himself with the particular shortcomings of such an argument in chronological and historical terms, instead simply informing the reader that holy and righteous persons rejected this argument, saying “this chastisement has befallen the earth owing to the heresy of the emperor Maurice.”227 “The heresy” could refer to the forced conversions of heretics, Samaritans, and Jews, which

225 This is a fundamentally different argument from that offered by David Olster, who suggests, in reference to many sixth-century Christian authors, that “Punishment of individual sin was assumed; it was collective punishment that was rejected.” Olster, Roman Defeat, Christian Response, 40-41. John, some one hundred years later, is entirely willing to understand these disasters as collective punishment of a Christian empire, so horrifically retributive that the good might very well be swept away with the bad. 226Chronicle 101. 227Chronicle 101.5. 96

John certainly viewed negatively, but it more likely means both Maurice’s tepid handling and punishment of a magician named Paulinus who invoked demons in his name and, more importantly, his reversal of the emperor Tiberius II’s gentle treatment of anti-

Chalcedonian figures, likely tied to the forced conversions mentioned above.228

These implicit and explicit challenges to the chronographic, cyclical view of historical causation reflect John of Nikiu’s view of the relationship between the divine and humanity. Whereas the skeleton of his work, derived from John Malalas¸ developed a cyclical view of history as an argument against his own sixth-century contemporaries who may have seen the end of days as imminent, John of Nikiu’s interpretation turned

Malalas’ argument on its head. For John, while the end of days may not have been at hand, there was nothing cyclical about the natural disasters which plagued the empire.

Rather, these disasters were direct, divine retributive acts calculated either to destroy

God’s earthly enemies; or signal a separation of God’s Christian Roman empire from himself, or both. John precedes most accounts of natural disasters with explanations of the ways in which human behavior had provoked God’s wrath, which causes floods, earthquakes, eclipses, and other. As the Christian government built on piety and correct theology declined, taken over by heretical or crypto-pagan emperors, the frequency of

228 Paulinus: Chronicle 98. Forced conversions of Jews, Samaritans, and heretics: Chronicle 99. John describes these as happening “at the beginning of his reign,” undoubtedly to demonstrate to the reader a causal relationship between the implementation of his forced conversion policy and the disasters which followed. It is also important to note that John claims Maurice was accused and censured for engaging in “heathen practices” and was deeply grieved for the censure. Chronicle 98.13 On Tiberius II’s treatment of miaphysites see John Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450-680 A.D. (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989) 275, 227; W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement: Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972) 322-23, 328-29. For John’s own discussion of Tiberius II’s reign and his treatment of miaphysites, see Chronicle 94.18-25. 97 natural disasters increased in kind. But the physical destruction of important cities such as

Antioch, Alexandria, and Nicaea do not mirror the spiritual destruction of the Christian empire per se, but instead the moral decay of its leaders and its people. In much the same way that a lazy or incompetent mason might cause the collapse of a bridge, so John saw the collapse of cities to the wrath of god as an unavoidable result of the persistent and recurring failure of individual moral rectitude on the part of those in power, but that this did not in itself signal the end of the empire.

Conclusion

These two categories of divine response through natural disaster, one acting as a bulwark for the Christians and the other as a punitive and destructive force reflecting the moral and theological degradation of the empire, reveal a religio-historical worldview entirely different from that of John’s source material and thus reflect his own authorial voice.

John often saw these natural disasters as God’s response to human behavior that displeased him, and, as such, entirely within the power of human beings to turn away or prevent, even mid-disaster, as in the case of Athanasius. As such, John’s model of historical causation leans heavily on recounting and assessing the quality of individual human agents, particularly emperors, bishops and those in their government, because ultimately it is their obedience to the rule of God and correct theology, their willingness to “do that which is written,” that determined the success not only of battles and individual careers, but of the Christian emperor and his empire.

This is certainly not to suggest that all of the Chronicle can be reduced to this relationship between the divine and his people, and later chapters of this study will reveal

98 the degree of complexity in John of Nikiu’s historical thought. But one cannot disregard the ethical dimension of the text, especially considering John’s interest in profiting the souls of the “lovers of virtue.” Given the interest show in various religious and secular moral exemplars, one can easily imagine the extent to which John must have written to the religious and moral concerns of his audience, both monastic and secular. John’s preoccupation with ethical concerns in the text has the effect of expanding all individual moral concerns to a world-historical scale. The bishop understood the sins and virtues of individuals and collectives not simply as destructive or beneficial to the individual, but as actions with a wide-ranging impact on the survival of the anti-Chalcedonian Christian community in Egypt. In this sense, the history can be read as a kind of supplementary monastic history: Where the lives of saints, monastic rules, and theological treatises could tell the monk (or the secular audience interested in living piously) how to live an ethical life and worship God correctly, John’s history tells the reader, in emphatic terms, why one ought to live this way at all. In doing so, the Chronicle also has the effect of casting the anti-Chalcedonian church as a chosen people of God, not immune from his anger, but if pious and faithful, certain to receive protection on earth and substantial rewards in the world to come.

Chapter 4. Emperors, Demons, and the Moral Argument of the Chronicle

Introduction Satan and his demons frequently engage with human beings in John’s Chronicle, generally appearing either passively as objects of worship (a common way of deriding pagan practices) or actively as participants in the historical narrative. In his modification of the narrative skeleton of Malalas, John of Nikiu’s emperors often face the challenges of demonic forces who seek to corrupt the pious and impious alike, invariably with the aim of undermining the explicitly Christian and implicitly Roman oikoumene. In order to properly understand John’s theory of history, and the theological and historical argument that underlies it, it is not enough to consider human relations with the divine in terms of interactions with God. One must consider how interactions with demonic forces and the devil himself came to affect human history.

John deploys satanic and demonic interactions in a two-fold strategy: First, John uses Satan in his narrative as a sower of discord who seeks to dismantle Christian unity at its various peaks. Second, John deploys demons as a narrative strategy to explain, externalize and exculpate the theological and moral deficiencies of important individuals, usually emperors and those in positions of government. John uses these two strategies to create a Christian history of humanity in which the efforts of God’s people to draw themselves closer to an ideal society in which good citizens are led by pious rulers have

100 been ultimately frustrated by diabolical and demonic machinations that prey on failures of moral or religious discipline.

John mentions demons as objects of worship frequently before Christianity enters his narrative, but rarely as agents and always with vague descriptions. The brief notice of the reign of King Solomon comes close to describing demons as agents. In this account,

John claims that Solomon commanded an army of demons, and in some instances credits demons with granting prophecies to those who worshiped them, i.e. idolators.229 Demons first interact with the Romans during the reign of Domitian, when they convince the emperor to exile John the Theologian, and from then on demonic interaction serves no purpose other than to frustrate the growth and unity of the church.230 Satan looms large throughout the narrative, and his presence in Egypt roughly signposts the beginning and end of the Chronicle: Towards the beginning of the narrative, he is positioned as the primary influence behind the legendary Egyptian pharaoh Rhampsinit’s decision to prostitute his own daughter to fund the construction of a temple, and at the end of the

Chronicle he returns to enslave Egypt during the Arab Conquest.231

In contrast, while John Malalas’s Chronographia serves as the narrative skeleton for much of the work, it does not afford much of a place for the devil or demons, and when they do appear, it is through secondhand report: King Herod only hears that Jesus has the ability to drive demons out of patients, but Malalas never describes this healing,

229 Solomon: Chronicle 38; Demonic prophecy: Chronicle 51.59; Chronicle 59.5-9. 230Chronicle, 71. 231Chronicle, 19. John does not blame Satan for inspiring the pharaoh’s plan, but rather for stirring up lust in his daughter. 101 despite describing other instances of healing that do not involve demons at all.232 He mentions both the devil and his demons explicitly only once, as an excuse for the Nika

Riots during the reign of Justinian, an account that John of Nikiu elected not to preserve in his own work. John, however, introduced demons and the devil from a wide variety of historical and non-historical texts into his narrative, and he magnified their role.233

Understanding the role of demons in the Chronicle not only provides a more complete vision of the supernatural forces that John believed acted on human beings, but allows us to examine fully the extent to which John saw human action as a meaningful part of historical causation, and to what degree human agency could be undermined. This demonology is central to a complete vision of John’s theory of history because it is

John’s ethical and theological concerns that inform this vision of history and drive the larger narrative onward. This preoccupation, I will argue, is distinctly monastic, and it creates a historical vision in which humanity’s collective and individual internal struggles drive the destiny of the Christian oikoumene. In doing so, this historical vision also has the added benefit of indirectly absolving John’s church qua institution for the catastrophic collapse of Roman and Christian hegemony in Egypt.

Demons in Late Antique Historiography

John’s use of demons was no innovation in Christian historiography. Demons were a frequent feature of historical writing throughout Late Antiquity. Even Prokopios, the recherche-classicizing historian par excellence, can hardly resist relating several demonic

232 John Malalas, Chronographia, 10.12 233 By non-historical I mean texts which do not fall under the any modern or ancient definition of the genre, such as classicizing histories, chronicles, annals, etc. 102 encounters involving Theodora and Justinian I in his Anecdota.234 While demons are often treated as exclusively literary or allegorical devices, such readings of these creatures must not discount their appearance as more than mere rhetorical cudgels.235 In much the same way that the whims of the gods or the interpretation of omens and oracles had real consequences for ancient peoples, so too demonic activity provided a real explanation for a variety of phenomena related to human behavior and decision- making.236 Demons served a variety of functions as the genre of historical writing rapidly

Christianized in the wake of Eusebius’ Chronicle and Ecclesiastical History as well as of the development of new genres of historical writing such as hagiography.237

The devil and demons more generally performed a variety of narrative functions in late antique historical works. The majority of these can essentially be reduced to two broad categories. The first is the ability to prompt irrational or discordant human behavior such as public outbursts and the disruption of church services. The second is the ability to

234 Prokopios, Anectdota 12.4, 35.1, 45.2, 54.1, passim; Averil Cameron, Procopius and the Sixth Century, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 54-57. 235 Gregory Smith, “How Thin is a Demon?” Journal of Early Christian Studies 16, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 479-483. 236 It is notable that John never credits any natural disasters to demonic or diabolic intervention, leaving that solely in the realm of divine activity. 237 For the role of demons as objects of worship, particularly in the early work of Eusebius: Garry Trompf, Early Christian Historiography: Narratives of Retributive Justice (London: Continuum, 2000), 263. Dale Martin Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 211. Hazel Johannessen, The Demonic in the Political Thought of Eusebius of Caesarea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 43-53. For the role of the demons in hagiography: David Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity.” Journal of Roman Studies, 61(1971): 88-89. It is worthy of note that where Brown points to the holy man as able to break the hold of the possessed through performative shows of exorcism, the Chronicle never once depicts an exorcism. Once a demon takes hold of a victim in the Chronicle, their fate is sealed. If Brown describes these exorcisms in earlier Late Antique texts as “the sort of operetta which Late Roman men felt that they needed to play out to a happy ending,” John can only have these instances of possession play out as tragedies in order to convey his desired message. 103 effectively force or convince their victims to take particular actions, thereby undermining their ability to make good decisions and leading them to harm themselves and others.

This generally takes the form of inspiring heresy, pagan worship, ecclesiastical infighting and other such “divisive” behavior. In the political realm, they can even change their victims’ political or theological beliefs.

Demons never appear apropos of nothing. Within such narratives, the appearance of demonic forces in the human world must then be understood in the context of the broader narrative that suffuses all Christian historical writing, namely the on-going struggle of God and his angelic forces against the devil and his demons. Where God provides messages and guidance, as well as other forms of direct and indirect assistance to individuals under his protection, Satan and his demons seek to undermine this assistance to individuals and in doing so to steer humanity away from salvation.

John was certainly not the first to integrate demons in his theory of history. In her study of the historical and political works of Eusebius of Caesarea, Hazel Johannessen argues persuasively that for Eusebius, “the struggle of pious humans to escape from demonic influence was an ongoing feature of all historical time, including his own time.”238 This demonic activity could affect human chances of salvation but most importantly could foster internecine disputes that would undermine the ability of

Christian leaders to “present a strong front in the fight against the demons.239 For

Eusebius, according to Johannessen, demons were an ever-present feature in human

238 Johannessen, The Demonic in the Political Thought of Eusebius, 144 239 Ibid, 168-169. 104 history, and as such played a significant supernatural role in his historical accounts of human affairs. John of Nikiu can be understood as a continuator of the Eusebian tradition in the role that he assigns demonic and satanic intervention in his own historical work.

John’s use of Satan and his army of demons in the narrative is significant, but not frequent. Demons explicitly appear in fourteen chapters of the narrative, five of which antedate the birth of Christ. While they sometimes appear as objects of worship as a polemical way of referring to paganism, they are more often active participants in important historical moments and seem frequently to generate conflict, thereby initiating the plot of a given episode of the Chronicle. As such, demons seem to interact primarily with monarchs and rulers, either directly or through intermediaries such as magicians and astrologers. They initially appear as the object of worship by Egyptians, and soon after the exodus of Hebrews led by Moses, the Egyptians continue this practice, which is described as forsaking God.240 Their interaction with monarchs not only effects themselves and their families, but the fate of entire empires and peoples.

John of Nikiu’s brief notice on the reign of Nectanebo II offers an interesting example of the nature and results of such interactions in a pre-Christian context.

Nectanebo II, whom John describes as the last pharaoh, consults with his diviners as well as with “impure” demons regarding whether he will continue to rule over Egypt after

Artaxerxes’s recent capture of Egypt.241 Upon hearing that he will not, he immediately

240 Chronicle, 19.2. 241 Chronicle, 51.61. The Ethiopic gives his name as ስክጣናፉስ [səcTanafus], which Zotenberg identified as a ,nakTaanaafus]. Hermann Zotenberg, Chronique de Jean] نكطانافوس faulty transcription of the Arabic Évêque de Nikiou. Texte Éthiopien (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1883), 275 n1 105 flees to Macedonia.242 John calls the demons impure, but otherwise they are not directly responsible for his failures, and the text does not say more. The lack of detail likely stems from John’s source material: this story is a modified form of that found in the various

Alexander Romance traditions, wherein Alexander’s suspected father, Nectanebo II, finds out that not only will the Gods of Egypt no longer converse with him as they had in the past, but were in fact marching at the head of the various armies arrayed before him, prompting his flight to the gates of the capital of Macedonia.243

The betrayal of Nectanebo II by the gods of Egypt, while not Christianized in surviving accounts of the Alexander Romance in Arabic, Syriac, or Ethiopic, was amenable to John’s editorial work; he had only to change the gods of Egypt to demons, and could leave his audience to infer that the famed purported father of Alexander suffered betrayal from the demonic magic in which he had placed his hopes. Nectanebo

II’s depiction in the text is particularly noteworthy for his prominent position as the last pharaoh of Egypt and his ability to practice magic, both also emphasized in John’s source material. The last pharaoh was not simply a victim of his court diviners, but was himself a magician, according to John.

Demons appear also in John’s brief notices on the reign of Solomon, assisting him with the construction of the very first (so John tells us) baths, libraries, and schools.244

This brief mention is a very late iteration of the ongoing and modular circulation of the

242 Chronicle, 30.11, “And after the people of Egypt were destroyed, those who were left worshipped demons and abandoned God.” This is puzzling passage seems to tacitly suggest that the Egyptians had previously worshiped God, and what follows seems to suggest that Egyptian polytheism really began after the Hebrew exodus. See Chronicle 30.11-13. 243 Pseudo-Callisthenes, Historia Alexandri Magni, 1.1-3 244 Chronicle, TOC, XXXVIII. 106

Testament of Solomon, a pseudepigraphic text which described the construction of

Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem written some time after the first century CE.245 John’s use of demons includes two strategies in particular that are revealing in terms of the narrative utility of these creatures: First, he does not attribute the construction of the

Temple to demons. David, we are told, prepared the building materials, and Solomon built it in Jerusalem, but this notice on the construction of the Temple and the first mention of Solomon’s demons are separated by six brief chapters on the state of affairs in

Greece during the era of the Judges.246 This is likely because Chapter 32 was meant to be understood as a highly condensed history of the city of Jerusalem, beginning with its construction by Melchizedek and ending with the death of Christ. But organizing the narrative of Solomon’s reign in such a way also conveniently separates the construction the biblical holy site par excellence from the activity of Solomon’s demonic helpers, a move further reinforced by the bare description of this chapter in the Chronicle’s table of contents, “Concerning him who first built a bath (beytä baläne ቤተ፡ባለኔ) in the world.”247

245 As Boustan and Beshay note, “The activities of the writers and copyists who composed, transmitted, and, at times, quite aggressively recycled the Testament tradition should be treated not as noise obscuring a lost original, but as an opportunity to study the ongoing production and deployment of its constituent units of literary tradition.” Ra’anan Boustan and Michael Beshay, “Sealing Demons, Once and for All: The Ring of Solomon, the Cross of Christ, and the Power of Biblical Kingship,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 16 (2015): 104. 246 These are, to wit: A brief account of a Greek named Panoptis (Zotenberg, Chronique de Jean, 259, identifies the Ge’ez Banudis, as Panoptis, based on a faulty transcription of the Arabic) who was the first to create handicrafts in “the West” (Chronicle, 33); an account of the discovery of an inscription on a stone tablet by Prometheus and Epithemeus and its translation by Elijah, followed by his ascent to heaven (Chronicle, 34); The rise of Athens after a flood and the marriage laws of Kekrops (Chronicle, 35); Orpheus of Thrace writes the Theogony, which John believed to be the first account among the heathens (ሐንፋዊያን,hänifawiyan, translated by Charles as “Greeks”) of a trinitarian anti-Chalcedonianism (Chronicle, 36); a brief account stating that Athenian philosophers were the first to practice medicine and that Athens is still the home of this practice (Chronicle, 37). 247 Significantly, Solomon is never explicitly mentioned by name in the table of contents, although the reason for this is unclear, perhaps pointing to John’s interest in discovery and invention as opposed to discoverers and inventors per se. 107

Baths, libraries, and schools—some of the vital amenities of upper-class urban life— could safely have their construction attributed to Solomon’s demonic helpers.248

Second, John only offers a vague account of why Solomon fell out of favor with

God. The Testament of Solomon has Solomon lose the very spirit of God as a result of actions he takes in order to wed a Shunammite woman. The demon Eros persuades him to crush five grasshoppers in his hand in the name of Moloch, in order that the woman might sleep with him. Upon doing so and suffering his separation from God, Solomon tells the reader that he was then obliged to build a temple to Baal, Moloch, and Rapha.249

John, however, simply tells us that the strange women with whom Solomon lived

“polluted Jerusalem with their gods,” turning the warning about Solomon’s temptation and the trickery of the demon Eros into a more explicit warning about the deleterious effects of lust.250 He does not accuse Solomon himself of idolatry, only of taking idolatrous women as his wives. We find then, a key correlation between demonic forces, lust, the dangers of demonic proximity to power, and potential wider consequences of this proximity in the pre-Christian portion of the narrative, which lays out the historical relation between the demonic and mankind.

But demons not only act destructively: they also connect the narrative’s Christian future with its pagan past through prophetic revelation. In an episode pulled from

Malalas’ Chronographia, it is a prophet of Apollo who informs the Argonauts that the

248 This might suggest John’s use of Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities 8.5, but this would require John to have understood his composition of books as tantamount to establishing schools and libraries, and would still not explain his construction of baths. 249 Testament of Solomon, 26.1-8. 250 Chronicle, 38.1-2. 108 temple they are constructing would be a house of Jesus Christ. Specifically, he tells the argonauts that “There are three but only one God. And behold, a virgin will conceive his word, and this house will be his and his name shall belong to thousands.”251 John ends the narrative by saying that it was a “prophecy of the demons” (ትንቢቶሙ፡ለአጋንንት tənbitomu lä’aganənt) that came to the argonauts, whom John further rebrands as “heathens” (lit. men of the gods, polytheists säb’a ’ämaləkt ሰብአ : አማልክት). The argonauts later inscribe the message on a slab of marble and place it in a temple (presumably the aforementioned newly constructed temple of Rhea), which the emperor Zeno later converted into a

Church dedicated to the Virgin Mary.252

We might conclude from these stories that John’s interest in the demonic relations with pre-Christian humanity is limited; when they do not appear as formulaic short-hand for efficacious polytheism, they primarily appear when John draws on non-historical sources, such as the Testament of Solomon and the Alexander Romance.253 In short, John did not insert demons into the text through reinterpretation but made use of Christian texts which foregrounded the demonic, and his treatment of the reign of Nectanebo II seems to

251 Chronicle, 40.6. This is a stripped-down and slightly modified version of the prophecy offered by Apollo himself in the account preserved by Malalas: “Do all that leads to virtue and honor. I proclaim only a triune, high-ruling God, whose imperishable word will be conceived in an innocent girl. He, like a fiery arrow coursing through the midst of the whole world, will make it captive and bring it as a gift to his father. This will be her house and her name will be Mary.” John of Nikiou’s omission of this part of the story may be the result of editorial decisions on the part of the Arabic translator, or else might reflect John’s own effort to identify the temple as a future church with as little implication as possible of a continuity of pagan religious practice. Malalas’ description of the house as that of Mary might have suggested something akin to a continuation of pagan belief, with Mary replacing Rhea. 252 Chronicle 40.8-9. On this particular account, see Anthony Kaldellis, The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 47-53 253 By non-historical I mean texts which could not be understood to fall under the genre of historiography (including hagiographies, martyr acts, and religious texts). Whether or not his contemporaries understood these texts as “fictional” accounts, John clearly understood them as some sort of report of past events. 109 exemplify this practice. But this maneuver should not be disregarded as the side-effect of

John’s method of compilation. John found the appearance of these creatures relevant for his historical project, and his use of such texts constitutes an element of John’s voice as an author and historian, who composed an interpretation of events in the distant past drawn from a range of sources that were foundational to his explanation of why the

Roman empire had lost control of so much of his empire and why the Christian population of Egypt had become subject to Islam.

Demonic Mediums in the Chronicle

Once the events of the reign of Constantine foreground Christians in John’s narrative,

Satan and his army of demons appear more frequently and almost exclusively in imperial contexts. These are not always generic statements of the Eusebian type which attribute periods of social or religious turbulence vaguely to demonic activity, but specific instances in which Roman emperors succumb to demonic influence.254 It is rare to see emperors depicted as true victims in any meaningful sense, and instead they either consciously accept or reject the assistance or influence of Satan and his demons, as monks might in early Christian literature. But how do different emperors come to encounter demonic forces before they themselves make these fateful decisions? God grants Solomon the ability to control demons, but this divine empowerment is clearly an exception that John had little interest in exploring in detail. Nectanebo II’s encounter with the demonic is far more representative of imperial interaction with demonic forces: of the

254 For a clear example of Eusebius’ historical use of such statements as causative explanations for heresy, persecution, or internal discord, see his account of Eunomius of Cyzicus, Ecclesiastical History, 4.7. 110 eleven instances in which an emperor—including one instance in which the son of

Sasanian shahanshah Hormizd IV, Khusrow II, is described as a demon-worshipper255— interacts with demons, most of the time this interaction is mediated by philosophers, augurs, and magicians, and other specialists whose practices do not fall within the realm of acceptable Christian practice. In every other instance, the emperor is exposed to these practices either as a regular part of his education, through direct participation in gruesome human sacrifice, as in the case of the Tetrarchs, or through courtiers and pagan members of the court.

It seems that, according to John, demons could not simply attack human beings, but in some way had to be invited into the court via individuals close to the emperor, or else the emperor in question must have already been particularly predisposed to such practices. This is much in line with the appearance of demons in Egyptian monastic literature more broadly.256 As David Brakke suggested of earlier texts, “succumbing to demonic suggestion, then, emerges as a process of negative externalization,” and demons took over the bodies of the possessed by provoking “embodiment or exteriorization of a false identity, one foreign to the monk’s actual identity as spiritual essence, thus stealing the body and making it ‘their home.’”257 As in the case of the monks, the demons who tempt the emperors can represent an inclination to evil already present within the emperor.

255 Chronicle, 95.26. 256 Here, I do not wish to identify Egyptian monastic literature as a distinct genre. I can only point to tendencies in the hagiographic writing produced by Egyptian monastic circles from roughly the 5th centuries CE to John of Nikiou’s own historical work. 257 David Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk, 20 111

Philosophers are a favored target for John. In the earlier parts of the Chronicle, philosophers appear as one of the many religious specialists in the pre-Christian landscape; benign figures, they are credited with creating medicines for stomach ailments in Athens, and a Phrygian philosopher is credited as the first to play musical instruments.

But once Christianity enters the scene, they become almost exclusively antagonistic. John tells the reader, following Malalas, that Domitian, who was also persuaded by pagan priests, (kähänatä ta‘ot ከሀናተ ታዖት; lit. priests of the idols, pagan priests258) was himself a

“great philosopher among the pagans” (wä-kone filsuf ‘äbiy la‘əl hänäfawəyan ወኮን

ፊልሱፍ ዐቢይ ላዕል ሐነፋውያን).259 Julian is deceived in part by the philosopher Libanios, who encourages him to give up Christianity and sacrifice to demons.260 When philosophers are redeemed, it is through public conversion: Kyros, during the reign of Theodosius II, and

Isokasios, during the reign of Leo I, were both public philosophers in the imperial government’s employ who converted to Christianity after circumstances brought them into conflict with their respective emperors.261

Augurs, diviners, and astrologers also act as key intermediaries for demonic forces in their role as competitive religious professionals with mantic abilities. As potential sources of strategic advantage for monarchs, and certainly fixtures of the Greco-

258 Chronicle, 71.5. Charles confusingly translates this as “ministers of the demons,” a very imprecise translation since the word for demons, አጋንንት (äganənt) does not appear in that sentence. (Charles, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, 53) 259 Chronicle, 71.1. 260 Chronicle, 78.36. John is mistaken in this instance, as Libanios was not one of the philosophers who exercised influence in the court of Julian, although the two did maintain a correspondence before the former’s exile. 261 Note here discrepancy in story between Malalas and Chronicle regarding Isocasius’ case. It is not clear that Chronicle understood Isocasius to be a pagan philosopher, just a philosopher who later became a priest. Or that a translator simply misunderstood the story. Cite Malalas trnsl notes 112

Roman historiographic tradition, these figures frequently appear in a position to offer advice to kings, presumably regarding favorable or unfavorable portents. As an example of their role in the pre-Christian era, a notable example is Faunus Hermes (simply

Fawnos) who appears in a فونوس referred to as Funus, ፉኑስ, a misrendering of the Arabic story that John pulls from Malalas’ Chronographia.262 Faunus-Hermes’ is able to supply the Egyptians with gold, and when he is asked to “supply them with the answer from God about the future,” he leads the Egyptians to understand him as a god, a clear, if implicit, connection between a pagan, and thus, demonic power and the worship of created things.263

Like the demonic prophecies offered to the Argonauts in Chapter 40, diviners in

Memphis tell the pharoah Petissonius that God is the first among all the gods.264 But once we enter the Christian era in John’s work the oracles and auguries generated by these experts are often incorrect and can lead to disastrous consequences for the emperor, his empire, and the people of God. Maxentius (306-312) is accompanied to the battle of the

Milvian Bridge by augurs who “read the oracles of Satan,” in a failed effort to attain some sort of advantage over his enemy Constantine I at the Battle of the Milvian

Bridge.265 Maximinus’ augurs also fail him in his efforts against Licinius, leading him to

262Chronicle, 9 263John Malalas, The Chronicle of John Malalas trans. Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael Jeffreys, and Roger Scott (Melbourne: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1986), 9. For more on Faunus-Hermes, Benjamin. "Joseph as a Model for Faunus-Hermes: Myth, History, and Fiction in the Fourth Century." Vigiliae Christianae 63, no. 5 (2009): 493-521. It is important to note here that while John does not explicitly use the word demon, or call this practice demonic, king-worship combined with mantic ability ought to suggest as much tacitly. 264 Chronicle, 30.3. 265 Chronicle, 72.49. John never describes the performance of an actual augury, but this seems irrelevant. The reader can safely presume that they had used their abilities to call the battle in favor of their patron. 113 purge most of them from his court, along with his court magicians.266 Zeno’s faith in the abilities of the astrologer Maurianus led him to have the beloved patrician Pelagius murdered and thrown into the sea, causing an uproar in the city, and a near rebellion by an officer named Arcadius who was nearly assassinated himself. Though the uprising was suppressed, John reports that Zeno, who is otherwise well-liked by the chronicler, soon died of dysentery.267 The emperor Maurice was also convinced by a “prefect who knew astrology” and a logothete named Leon to exile the Egyptian Aristomachus, who had made a name for himself in Constantinople building aqueducts on behalf of the emperor, to Gaul.268 They based this assessment on the observation of a star that they had seen in the skies.269

Though she was a philosopher, and not someone explicitly identified as an augur or diviner of any kind, Hypatia also falls into the category of those non-Christians with mantic abilities, although these abilities are not mentioned explicitly. John claims that

Hypatia, a pagan philosopher, was responsible for “causing men to err by means of

Satanic deceptions.” (ወአስሐተት ብዙኃን ሰብአ በስሕታተ ሰይጣን) wä äshähatet bəzuchanä säbə’ä be səhətatä säyTan 270 This is immediately preceded by a brief mention of her interest in performing magic, use of astronomy, likely understood as something more akin to astrology, and her interest in music, with the tacit assumption that these were a

266 Chronicle, 72.89. 267 Chronicle, 88.97. 268 Chronicle, 95.18 269 Chronicle, 95.18-20. Theophylact of Simocatta, Historiae, 7.10 also describes a comet appearing in the reign of Maurice, though he ascribes no significance to this event. 270 Chronicle, 85.87. 114 key part of the arsenal by which she caused men to stray.271 There is an abundance of evidence that the historical Hypatia actually built astrolabes, or at least participated in the development of one, as corroborated by a letter of Synesius of Cyrene, in which he credits his female teacher (never explicitly named as Hypatia) with some help in his own construction of this device.272

But John’s own understanding of Hypatia’s abilities and her role in the events that led to her death were more complex than this historical reality. Charles, ever seeking to

“correct” the Chronicle to the best of his ability in his positivist reading of the text, decided to translate the word ästurlabat (አስጡርላባት) as astrolabes in the text.273

Zotenberg observed, however, that in chapter 4, the only other instance in which the word appears in the body of the text, “astronomy” is a more plausible translation of the word, following his interpretation of John of Antioch and the Chronicon Paschale.274 In this context, an internal analysis of the Chronicle would imply that John was not describing her scientific achievement as such, but implicitly accusing her of divining the future through astronomy, and by doing so making herself useful to the local notables of the city. John ultimately presents her ability to sway the governor Orestes as a cause of consternation for the Christians, who found him unjustly hostile to Hierax, an

271 John’s report of Hypatia’s musical ability is a reference to a popular story also preserved in Damaskios’ sixth-century Philosphical History, in which Hypatia rebuffed her student’s romantic advances by playing music. Damaskios dismissed this story, suggesting instead that Hypatia had instead showed him a rag stained with menstrual blood,. Damaskios, The Philosophical History, translated by Polymnia Athanassiadi. (Athens: Apamea Cultural Association, 1999), 129 272 Synesius on astrolabes N. Terzaghi, Synesii Cyrenensis opuscula, Rome: Polygraphica, 1944: 132-142. On Synesius’ correspondence with Hypatia, see Edward Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 66-78 273 Charles, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, 16; Zotenberg, Chronique de Jean, Évêque de Nikiou, 240 n 4. 274 Zotenberg, Chronique de Jean, Évêque de Nikiou, 240 n 4. 115

Alexandrian Christian who was publicly punished by Orestes after being accused by

Alexandria’s Jews of being a rabble-rouser.275 In her dual role as astronomer and persuasive philosopher, Hypatia acts as a diabolical conduit who caused political disturbances and undermined the religious devotion of Orestes, ultimately allowing John to indirectly pin Orestes’ hostility to the Alexandria’s Christians to his lapsed church attendance, which was caused, we may assume, by the influence of Hypatia and other pagans who came to his home.276

While John does not explicitly mention demons, the gesture towards her “satanic deceptions” are enough to suggest that John himself might not have understood what an astrolabe was, or else that he perceived this device as part of her diabolically inspired tricks. Regardless, the connection between John’s implicit description of Hypatia as someone engaged in some work of astrology/astronomy and the possibility that this may have been a part of her persuasive arsenal are enough to point to the role of the demonic and diabolical in the sowing of discord in Alexandria. The philoponoi, even the Jews to some extent, are all spared chastisement, and Satan emerges as the primary troublemaker through his ability to use pagans to influence the leaders of the Roman government.

Regardless of the efficaciousness of these figures in their ability to help their patrons, negative consequences inevitably follow. This becomes particularly clear when read against the prophetic powers of various holy men scattered throughout the Chronicle at key points. For example, the patriarch Athanasius identifies and adopts the orphaned

275 Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, 7.13. 276 Chronicle, 85.87. 116 future patriarch Theophilos and his sister as “children of the church”; after their

Ethiopian slave takes them to a temple of Apollo and Artemis to pray, the idols in this temple fall as soon as they enter the temple.277 The Egyptian patriarch Timothy tells the emperor Basiliscus that the empire will begin to collapse if he does not undo the

Chalcedonian articulation of Christology. When the emperor fails to keep his promise, a plague hits Constantinople, and the Syrian city of Gabala is destroyed by an earthquake.278 Abba Jeremiah, a holy man from Alexandria, tells the emperor Anastasios, then not yet an emperor and banished into exile, that if he did not transgress against the

Christian faith, and if he rejected Chalcedonianism, God would save him from his enemies. Soon afterward Anastasius is recalled from exile and made emperor.279 The

Patriarch Severus of Antioch prophesies that Vitalian, a former commander of troops in

Thrace who rebelled against Anastasius and was later recalled to service by Justin as strategos, would soon die a violent death. John describes Vitalian as a political enemy of

Severus who wished to cut out his tongue. Soon after Severus flees Antioch for Egypt,

Vitalian is found to be plotting against Justin and is swiftly executed.280 Severus is also credited with prophesying in a letter to the emperor Anastasius that no son would sit on his father’s throne as long as the decision of the Council of Chalcedon remained in effect, a prophecy that finds its fulfillment in the exceedingly short reign of Constantine III (641

CE).281 Finally, Theophilos the Confessor, an Egyptian pillar saint, explicitly tells the

277 Chronicle, 79.1-9. 278 Chronicle, 88.30-35. 279 Chronicle, 89.1-13. 280 Vitalian’s feelings towards Severus: Chronicle, 89.71, Chronicle, 90.8; Retroactive mention of Severus’ prophecy: Chronicle, 90.12. 281 Chronicle, 90.6. 117

Roman general Niketas that he would prevail against Bonosus and that Heraclius would become emperor within the year. Niketas opens the gates of Alexandria and scores a final climactic victory after Bonosus’ captain is struck by a stone from the walls of the city and

Niketas’ auxiliaries sally forth and drive Bonosus and his troops to the city of Kariun.282

There are notable patterns in this collection of prophetic holy men: They are all anti-Chalcedonian apart from Athanasius (whose teachings were embraced by anti-

Chalcedonians), and all Egyptian apart from Severus of Antioch (who spent years in exile in Egypt). They are all closely associated with monks, who, since at least the fifth century

CE, were understood in the late antique Egyptian literary milieu as possessing mantic powers.283 Whether one considers Apa Moses’ ability to predict the attacks of Blemmyes, or Shenoute’s ability to predict (or rather, control) the flooding of the Nile, these holy men, according to David Frankfurter, “entered the oracular role almost as a consequence of their pedagogical charisma, as if all public expressions of religious expertise somehow had to be translated or extended into divination.”284 The insertion of these figures and their prophecies had the same effect in John’s history that these figures had on the

Egyptian landscape, replacing the mantic services provided by “popular” and institutional

282 Chronicle, 108.1-12 283 David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 87-89. Valerie Fox notes that in Late Antiquity, “‘magic’ was an extremely vague term, capable of embracing a great number of distinct activities. From Ammianus and the Code together we may distil divination and astrology (when practiced outside imperial control) the presentation of petitions at pagan shrines, the owning of ‘secret’ books, the wearing of amulets, necromancy, incantations, the use of ‘occult’ (perhaps foreign) words and characters, and the making of love-potions.” As such, I can only deal with those magicians who are explicitly described as such by John with the term ሠርይ (särrəy). Valerie Fox, “The Demonisation of Magic and Sorcery in Late Antiquity: Christian Redefinitions of Pagan Religions,” in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvanian Press,1999), 322.

284 David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt, 89 118 pagan religious professionals with those of Christian holy men. The clash between these two mantic professionals, Christian and demonic, divinely inspired and diabolically so, represented a clash between God and the devil, played out in a religious and political landscape in which the very existence of the Christian oikoumene was at stake. In such instances, it was not enough for John to demonstrate that the Christian God was the only efficacious source of such predictive abilities, but that behind the abilities of the antagonists lie the destructive demonic and satanic forces.

Finally, magicians, specialists capable of making use of demonic in order to produce supernatural effects resembling the miracles produced by agents of God, also play a significant role in the narrative as demonic and diabolic conduits. We have already discussed one notable example in Nectanabo II, but magic and magicians frequently appear at the side of kings, in the case of Julian, the tetrarchs, and even the Pharaoh

Petissonius, who used a book of magic written by two magicians which helped him rule.

Magicians in general appear as more seductive figures, relying on social connection and charm to secure access to power in the world of Christian government, and by doing so to sow discord.

The Chronicle’s magicians frequently attempt to cause disorder by enchanting members of government, and are often explicitly described as housing or making use of demons.285 Peter Brown noted of earlier Christian texts, that the demons compelled to service by the magicians are the true enemies, and it is not the magicians themselves who

285 While I did not include Hypatia among magicians in order to emphasize her mantic abilities, she also fits quite comfortably in the category of magicians who make use of demons. 119 are traditionally perceived as the enemy.286 But the magician is, nevertheless, extremely dangerous because, as Brown notes,

Above all, the sorcerer is a man who enjoys power over the demons, even over the gods…In Christian sources, the demons act as the servants of the sorcerer: he is the servant of the Devil only in a very generalized sense, for he is free to abandon him by destroying the books of his trade and by accepting Christian baptism.287 But for John it is not so clear that magicians ever have stable control over the demons who claim to serve them. For example, Pamprepius is a practitioner of magic who acted as a key participant in the 481-82 revolt of the magister militum Illus against the emperor

Zeno, which saw Leontius crowned emperor and Zeno’s mother-in-law and former

Empress consort of Leo I Verina denounce the emperor in a widely disseminated letter.288

John describes Pamprepius as having fallen under the influence of demons, essentially their victim, despite the mastery attributed to him in works such as the Suda and the

Chronographia of Theophanes, which described him as an active deceiver of Leontius and Illus.289 He creates chaos through influential and opportunistic infection, helping Illus convince officers in the army to rebel. Ultimately, he is killed by the rebel troops, who learn while they are besieged in the fortress of Papyrios that Pamprepius planned to abandon the rebels and join Zeno’s troops, led by the Scythian officer John.290 His body was unceremoniously tossed from the walls. Here we find a clear contradiction of

286 Peter Brown, “Sorcery, Demons and the Rise of Christianity from Late Antiquity into the Middle Ages” in Witchcraft, Confessions, and Accusations ed. Mary Douglas, (New York: Routledge, 2004), 33 287 Ibid, 34 288 Chronicle, 88.69-89 289 Suda, Π, 137. Theophanes, Chronographia, AM 5976, 130. On the life of Pamprepius and his time in the imperial court, see Alan Cameron, “Wandering Poets: A Literary Movement in Byzantine Egypt.” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 14, no. 4 (1965):470-509, especially 473, 475, 486, passim. 290 Chronicle, 88.89 120

Brown’s assessment of the sorcerer: Pamprepius is far from the self-possessed master of demons, but ultimately deceived by them. His mastery was unable to save his rebel allies but more importantly left him vulnerable to this same group. His desire to abandon the rebellion at the last moment paints him as naïve at best, and at worst an unwitting pawn of demons who aimed to sow dissent.

The account of the emperor Maurice’s interaction with the magician Paulinus is another clear indication of John’s mix of pity and contempt for practitioners of magic and their sympathizers. In this account, Maurice’s failure to swiftly punish the magician

Paulinus, responsible for invoking demons through a silver bowl, almost causes a riot in

Constantinople, after the patriarch John Nesteutes threatened to resign his position and close all the churches in the city.291 Maurice’s encounter with Paulinus stands out as notable because technically John does not explicitly present Maurice as flawed. John instead blames “those who followed him (Paulinus) in his evil acts” for delaying the execution of the magician, and while Maurice doesn’t seem to be in a hurry, his hand is ultimately forced by the patriarch, who insists on an immediate execution of the sorcerer.292

The earliest account of this tale survives in the Historiae of Theophylact of

Simocatta, which Theophylact wrote during the reign of Heraclius (between 610 and 630

CE) and which John likely used as a source.293 Theophylact’s account is understandably

291 Chronicle, 98.11-12 292 Ibid. 293 Historiae 1.11.3. A similar story appears in the Life of Theodore of Sykeon, although the details there are substantially different. For the dating of the Historiae, see Michael Whitby, The Emperor Maurice and His Historian:Theophylact Simocatta on Persian and Balkan Warfare (Oxford,Claredon Press, 1988),39-49. John Frendo, “History and Panegyric in the Age of Heraclius: The Literary Background to the Composition 121 far more generous, insisting that Maurice was reluctant to kill the magician “since he preferred to heal those who had gone astray with repentance rather than punishment” and instead suggesting that it was John Nesteustes who wished to see Paulinus “consigned to fire.”294 John significantly downplays Maurice’s reasoning and instead places the blame on Paulinus’ followers, who tried to save the wizard. Maurice’s behavior is secondary to the danger posed by the followers of this wizard. Strikingly, in John’s report, the magician acts as a “patient zero,” who quickly infects groups of influential people, such that even the imperial court is stalled. It is only because of the potential for a revolt by the broad mass of pious citizens that the magician meets his fate.

John’s perception of the magician is novel here. He depicts the magician as a powerless host, only one step removed from those who believed that it is he, and not the demons, who are in control. Only the patriarch’s desperate action can overturn this virulent strain of demonic action, and the potential uprising caused by his decision to close the churches. It is telling that Maurice is only able to counteract Paulinus’ influential followers when all the people cry aloud “May the orthodox faith spread and

of the Histories of Theophylact of Simocatta,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 42 (1988): 155-6 also points out that the composition appears in the Chronicle, but is entirely un interested in the tale, suggesting that the two shared a common source, a life of John Nesteustes written by a certain Photinus. Michael Whitby, “Greek Historical Writing after Procopius: Variety and Vitality” in The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East I: Problems in the Literary Source Material eds. Averil Cameron and Lawrence Conrad (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1992), 51 n. 111 rejects this on the grounds of lack of evidence, simply suggesting that John drew from Theophylact. This seems most plausible, although one must also consider the possibility that both historians drew from a common source on the reign of Maurice which is yet unknown to us. 294 Stephanos Efthymiadis, “A Historian and his Tragic Hero: A Literary Reading of Theophylact Simokatta’s Ecumenical History” in History as Literature in Byzantium ed. Ruth Macrides (New York: Routledge, 2010), 176 hints that while this account was sympathetic, Theophylact may have included a veiled criticism of Maurice, for submitting to the will of the patriarch. While John agrees with the account that the patriarch wished to see him consigned to fire, Theophylact notes that he was impaled and strangled, not burned. John of Nikiou simply states that “he” (it is unclear whether Maurice or John is meant here) had burnt Paulinus alive. Chronicle 98.11. 122 prosper!”295 The magician is always to John at once a perpetrator and a victim, guilty for seeking power through nefarious means, but inevitably destroyed by that very power they sought to harness.

Though demons do not explicitly appear in all of the examples above, one should not ignore the methods by which John believed that demonic forces influence historical events: While God seeks to help Christians, and later on Romans, as a community, his ability to do so is hindered by the very actors who are meant enact his will, i.e. influential agents of local and imperial government. As such, it stands to reason that John understood demons as attacking their victims through trusted figures, whose abilities are derived from demonic assistance. When Satan and his army find success it is often attributed to the moral failures of their victims: for instance, the prevalence of demonic activity in the reign of Maurice can be chalked up to his greed and his habit of following heathen practices.296 Julian’s ambition opens the way to the seduction of augurs and demons who promise him the position of emperor. Demons are treated as the mere symptom of pre-existing ethical and moral degeneracy on the part of individuals. From a historiographical perspective, John’s method is to “diabolize” these individual faults, to borrow a phrase from Dayna Kelleres, in order to present these very shortcomings as openings through which Satan and his demons act on the arc of history by undermining church and state through powerful individuals.297

295 Chronicle, 98.11 296 John seems very inconsistent about Maurice’s pagan predilections, but it seems as though the fact that Maurice was not above reproach was bad enough for John. 297 Dayna Kalleres, City of Demons (Oakland: University of California Press 2016), 4ff 123

But the appearance of a magician afforded to pious or righteous kings an opportunity to reject such influence in explicit terms. When Justinian is introduced to the magician Masides and his band of demons, from which Masidis drew his ability to inflict his victims with terrible illnesses, the emperor had the magician burnt alive, but not before rebuking Addaeus and Aetherius, the two patricians who brought the magician into his presence, stating, “I do not desire the magic and sorcery which you practice, thinking that you can benefit the government. Am I, Justinian, a Christian emperor, to conquer by the help of demons? No, my help is from God and my Lord Jesus Christ, the creator of the heavens and the earth.”298 All of this is to say that people afflicted by the demons that populate the narrative are not helpless victims; the presence of diabolical influence does not render them impotent. Rather, Satan and the demons present opportunities for individuals to test their discipline and conviction, in much the same way that monks in isolation might have had their discipline tested when approached by demons.

One more important appearance of demons is not quite acknowledged as such, but nevertheless serves to further nuance John’s demonology. Chapter 97 preserves an account of two creatures (ፍጥረት, fəTrät, lit. “created things”), resembling a man and a

298 Chronicle, 90.58-9. Aetherius’ long career would terminate in the reign of Justin II. He is first mentioned as a leading member of the senate in the reign of Justinian by Evagrius, Ecclesiastical History, 5.3 and later became the head of an imperial domus under the same emperor. Theophanes Chronographia, AM 6053 claims that he was involved in a plot to replace Justinian, and Evagrius Ecclesiastical History, 5.3 claims that he was executred in the reign of Justin II for conspiring to poison the emperor, alongside Addaeus. John of Nikiou is unique in mentioning the introducing this story of Masides, and while this might be reason to suspect that Justin was mistaken for Justinian here (as we find in other instances), in this particular instance that would make no sense, as this is followed by an account of Justinian’s interactions with the Huns, and the Aksumite war in Himyar. As such, we may add this unique account to the laundry list of questionable behavior from Aetherius, and disregard Addaeus as a hapless accomplice. For Aetherius’s rap sheet, see “Aetherius 2”, PLRE III, 21-22. 124 woman, which were discovered in a river (presumably the Nile) during the reign of the emperor Maurice. 299 The creatures quickly create a spectacle among those travelling by the sea, and many stop on the shore to view the spectacle. Menas, the governor of Egypt, sees them as well and, in the company of the spectators as well as of notable citizens of

Alexandria who accompanied the governor, and they compel the river creatures to show themselves once more “in the name of god, who created you.”300 The creatures obliged their audience, revealing their face, hands, and chests. The spectators quickly began to speculate as to what these demons were, suggesting that this apparition was the work of demons, a good or bad omen, or even that the river had two sexes, and could thus produce novel creatures. John quickly dismisses this speculation with little discussion, suggesting that all those who suggested the latter options were “liars, and there was no evidence (ጥያቄ, Təyaqey) in their accounts.”301

In Theophylact’s version of the report, Menas himself is the one who stumbles upon these creatures, while visiting the Delta.302 The male creature came out first, revealing his body only from the waist up, “like a man ashamed to display his genital

299 Chronicle, 97.34-35. The word used here, ባሕር, bahər is an uncommon translation of the word for a large river. 300 We know little of this Menas, as he is not mentioned elsewhere in the Chronicle. He is the son of a certain Main, who is unknown to us, and the father of a certain Theodore, who conspired with the party of Herakleios during his uprising against Phokas. Chronicle, 107.5. 301 Chronicle, 97.37. This reading is based on an admittedly difficult interpretation of እሉ ኵሎሙ (all of these people) which reads እሉ as referring to those who suggested every theory beside that of demonic apparition. This theory finds some support in the fact that the theory of demonic apparition ends the relevant sentence and that the sentence begins by stating that everyone who saw the apparition reported that it was the work of demons in the water. Further, the new sentence, which begins with “ወካልኣን,” “and others,” does not explicitly describe this second group as having been present, establishing an apposition between eyewitnesses and speculators after the fact. With that said, we are still left with the puzzling problem that among the “others” are those who suggest that this might be a bad omen, which does not necessarily clash with the idea of demonic apparitions. 302 Historiae, VII.16. 125 organs to the spectators.”303 Menas tells the apparition that if this was a demonic visitation of some sort, that it should disappear, but if not it should continue to reveal itself until people were tired of it. Shortly thereafter the female creature appears and everyone in attendance looked at the creatures until sunset. Theophylact decided that, according to reports “that very being was the Nile, whom poets’ utterances are accustomed to represent.” What follows is a very long but learned digression on the origin of the Nile river, in which Theophylact concludes that the Nile flood is the product of rains in Ethiopia. Theophylact then abruptly returns to the narrative at hand, reporting that Menas told the emperor Maurice about this event. Upon hearing it, the emperor becomes “exceedingly downcast in spirit,” but no explanation is given for the emperor’s reaction.304

George Hamartolos, the ninth-century Byzantine chronicler also gives an account of this event. While largely apparently following Theophylact, his account differs significantly in the details. First, George confidently declares that these creatures were in fact Sirens, with altogether pleasing and dangerous voices.305 However, for George the creatures were not passive spectacles, but just as dangerous as his classification of them would suggest. After the sirens vanish into the river, those who had come to the shore to stare at them and hear their voices were quickly snatched up by crocodiles lurking in the water.306 This offers George the chance to engage in a paragraph-long digression on the anatomy of crocodiles, derived largely from Herodotus (2.68).

303 Ibid. 304 Historiae VII.17 305 George Hamartolos, Chronicon Breve, 4.225 306 Ibid. 126

It is possible that John had access to Theophylact’s own work, as John explicitly mentions his access to other such historical authorities as Procopius and Agathias. In their description of Menas’ conversation with the creatures, both Theophylact and George make use of the rare phrase ὅρκοις ἔβαλλε (roughly, “to assail with oaths”), although in different forms.307 We find a near parallel to this construction in John’s assertion that

Menas, notables of the city, and a crowd of people also adjured or compelled the creatures (አምሐልናክሙ “we adjure you, compel you to swear”) to reveal themselves.308

But more telling is John’s curt and dismissive enumeration of the theories surrounding the appearance of these creatures. Theophylact’s mention of the emperor’s downcast spirit could very well be the “bad omen” to which John refers. His critique may further bear the mark of contemporary popular traditions unknown to us moderns, in which the

Nile is understood as being Osiris, and together with the Isis, (who is understood as the landing of the river) having generative powers.309 It is not a far reach to suggest, from this, that it is the very river which itself is “of two sexes” and is capable of generating new creatures.

But what should the reader make of this account, with all but demonic explanations quickly dismissed by the bishop of Nikiu with little explanation? His

307 Theophylact suggests that it was Menas alone who compelled (ὅρκοις ἔβαλλε) the male creature while the female had yet to emerge, Historiae, 7.16 whereas George Hamartolos insists the people joined in: ὁ δὲ λαὸς ὅρκοις ἔβαλλον. Theophanes’ sparse account seems to be derived from that of Theophylact. 308 Chronicle, 97.36. 309 Eusebius’ Life of Constantine iv.25, contains an account in which the priests of the Nile are described as androgynous men, who were outlawed by Constantine. Frankfurter Religion in Roman Egypt 42-46 notes that popular local traditions surrounding offerings to creatures in the Nile are a feature of the Vita of Pachomius, and that these ought to be understood less as established, institutionalized religions and more as traditions “too intertwined with popular economic mentality, and yet sufficiently independent of official religion, to be effectively eliminated as ‘pagan’” (45). 127 dismissal of all these stories may serve two strategies. First, in line with the other appearances of demons in the reign of Maurice, the appearance of demons and their negative (or in this case, merely distracting) presence may simply have been used to highlight the beginning of decline in this period, coming as it does off of the heels of a description of a chaotic Egyptian uprising and being further followed by the story of

Paulinus and his demonic silverware. But second, and perhaps most importantly, it may have served to illustrate that by the reign of Maurice the empire had fallen so far into moral degradation that most citizens were simply incapable of seeing the demons who were obviously all around them, and even resorting to old folk-traditions about the auto- generative capacity of the Nile.310 As such, this seemingly innocuous story may have served to highlight the spiritual and intellectual disorder that accompanied the political disorder of Maurice’s reign.

Ethics and Demonic Intervention

What is left, then, is to explain what John believed constitutes the kind of unethical or immoral behavior that would invite demonic or satanic influence and ultimately compromise the stability of the empire. Religious or spiritual practice outside the realm of normative Christian practice is undoubtedly the easiest target to identify. John generally understands demons to be the sole source of efficacious pagan sacrifice,

310 It is worth mentioning this passage from Eusebius’ Life of Constantine iv.25, in which the priests of the Nile are described as androgynous men, whose practice was outlawed by Constantine. Frankfurter “Religion in Roman Egypt” 42-46 notes that popular local traditions surrounding offerings to creatures in the Nile are a feature of the Vita of Pachomius, and that these ought to be understood less as established, institutionalized religions and more as traditions “too intertwined with popular economic mentality, and yet sufficiently independent of official religion, to be effectively eliminated as ‘pagan’” (45) 128 divination, and magic, an argument that was by no means novel by the seventh century.

The practitioners of these pagan rituals are usually understood as enslaved in some way to demons, whose close interaction with and proximity to their victims usually leaves them physically or psychologically damaged. One need look no further than the parade of maladies that afflict the enemies of the Christians, from psychological instability to a variety of physical maladies ranging from blindness to infestations of worms, none of which are attributed to divine wrath, but rather to the corrupting effect of demonic influence. Moreover, this was no distant threat to the bishop of Nikou: His account of the

Arab conquest betrays a host of anxieties about Christian conversion to Islam. Though these may have proved to be unfounded for the most part, the role that such anxieties play in the text magnifies the role of the demonic forces which drove paganism.

Heresy is treated as a more destructive force, more closely associated with the active role of an envious devil himself, rather than the persistent harassment of his demonic subordinates. John appears to have understood the pull of a state-sponsored paganism as constituting an ongoing threat to himself and his contemporaries, if Islam could be understood by them as a kind of paganism.311 But it paled in comparison to the more immediate and destructive threat of dissension and apostacy within the church and empire, and in such instances John often directly invokes Satan. After Licinius is given possession of the east and peace is restored, it is Satan whom John accuses of seducing

311 Chronicle 120.29 is the only point at which the author explicitly refers to the Arabas (whom he calls Ishmaelites and Muslims) as heathens (ሐነፋውያን, hanefawiyan); Regarding Ps. Methodius’ view of Islam as a “doctrine of demons,” for its rejection of Christian sacraments and of Christ, see Gerrit Reinink, “Following the Doctrine of the Demons: Early Christian Fear of Conversion to Islam” in Cultures of Conversion, eds. Jan N. Bremmer, Wout J. van Bekkum and Arie L. Molendijk (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 127-138 129

Licinius and of steering him towards the advice of those “whose eyes were made blind,” leading him to make an attempt at Constantine’s life, which was ultimately foiled by the intersession of God.312 Julian is referred to as the son of Satan.313

But these examples of apostasy are not as striking as the role of Satan in chapter

83 of the Chronicle. The chapter begins by offering praise of Gratian and Theodosius, crediting them with ending the excesses of Valens and destroying idolatry, but most importantly with banning “the teaching of the wicked Arians” and establishing “the pure and spotless faith,” with the assistance of Gregory the Theologian, Basil of Caesarea,

Gregory of Nyssa and Amphilochius of Iconium, who each helped to do this by disputing with the Arians.314 The combined military and ecclesiastical efforts of the emperors and bishops culminate in the second ecumenical council, held in Constantinople in 381 CE, where the emperor and a collection of bishops “drove out infidelity and heresy from all the provinces of his empire and introduced the worship of the one God in three Persons, and strengthened the orthodox faith.”315

As a result of this action, peace prevails, but only until Satan emerges, jealous at the perceived prosperity of the church. Here John diverges from the perceptions of his earlier sources: Where Socrates might see dissension among bishops as the cause of further problems for both Church and state, according to John it is Satan who causes dissension to arise in the first place.316 John graphically describes these inspirations to

312 Chronicle, 77.94. 313 Chronicle, 78.40. 314 Chronicle, 83.1-5. 315 Chronicle, 83.21-22. 316 Theresa Urbainczyk, Socrates of Constantinople: Historian of Church and State, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 75-77. 130 dissent as “dividing and sundering the limbs of the one complete body, which is the Holy

Church.”317 What follows is an account of Timothy of Alexandria’s admonishment of

Gregory of Nazianzum for abandoning his see, which sparks dissent among bishops from the east.318 Church and state are not passive in this conflict, and they both select a man named Nectarius as patriarch, who proves just as unwilling as Gregory to take up the role. But ultimately Nectarius falls victim as well: Arians spread a rumor that Theodosius

I had died on campaign against Maximus in Milan, and they burn Nectarius’ patriarchal palace. From then on, even as Theodosius defeats Maximus and returns to

Constantinople, the Arians wreak havoc in Thessalonica and threaten the life of John

Chrysostom; the emperor’s response to these outbursts showed such violence in suppressing the rioting in Thessalonica, and in his threat to destroy the city of Antioch for destroying a statue of his wife Flacilla, that he had to be reprimanded by Miletus of

Antioch and a “monk of the wilderness” in these respective cases.319 Ultimately both the institutional and “popular” arms of the church are forced to reign in the state, forcing common allies to manage one another.

Satan’s role in this bout of unrestrained chaos may contain the germ of a source devoted to a rebuttal of potential Arian or pagan claims that the implementation of the decisions of the Council of Constantinople had caused chaos throughout the realm, leading to the deaths of untold thousands and nearly ending in the destruction of Antioch, the crown empire’s jewel in Syria. But more importantly, John attributes internal

317 Chronicle, 83.23. 318 Chronicle, 83.24-30. 319 Chronicle, 83.32-36 131 dissension to the direct influence of Satan, who in turn acts through the violent actions of heretics. Where orthodoxy and stability invite the envy of Satan, he is only able to undermine the stability of the state through the violent actions of heretics. Unlike demons, who must directly possess or seduce their victims, Satan needs only encourage heresy in order to undermine the foundation of the stability of the church.320

Alongside these theological failures are moral failures that are more centered on individual behavior rather than theological thought. Excessive ambition and pride are the key failures of religious and secular leaders. But perhaps most notable is the outsized role that sexual licentiousness plays; it is a significant preoccupation of the Chronicle’s author, one that he took from his source material with a great deal of enthusiasm and inventiveness.321 For example, in a telling mis-transcription of Malalas’ account of archaic Attica, in the aftermath of a flood in Attica during the reign of Ogyges a contemporary of Joshua, leader of the Israelites,322 Kekrops (incorrectly transcribed as

Elwates) promulgated laws ending promiscuous intercourse and homosexuality, including a prescript implying that if this behavior were to continue, “his country of

Attica will be destroyed by a deluge from God.”323 This would seem like perfectly

320 This is not a novel discovery. As Carile noted of John’s depiction of the pervasive political and social unrest during the reign of the Emperor Anastasius, “Per Giovani di Nikius le ricorrenti ribellioni constantinopolitane connesse con la politica filo-monofisita di Anastasio, sono opera di Satan: egli è una fonte inequivocabile dello stretto nesso fra politica, ideologia, religione e ribellioni urbane nel cui contesto giocano un ruolo le fazioni del circo, il cui riesame dovrà partire proprio da una più generalecorretta diutilizzazione di Giovanni di Nikius.” Antonio Carile, "Giovanni Di Nikius, Cronista Bizantino-Copto Del VII Secolo," in Byzance: Hommage À André N. Stratos (Athens, 1986), 3. 321 For Malalas’ views on chastity as an element of civilized behavior in relation to Justinianic law and propaganda, see Roger Scott, “Malalas’ View of the Classical Past” in Reading the Past in Late Antiquity, ed. Graeme Clarke, Brian Croke, Alanna Emmett Nobbs, and Raoul Mortley (Canberra: Australian National University Press 1990), 153-156. 322Chronicle, 29.1. 323 Chronicle, 35.1. 132 standard “cutting-and-pasting” from the Chronographia, except that Malalas did not make any mention of homosexuality at all, and did not mention the threat of a flood.

Instead Malalas’ Kekrops only mentions that the sexual licentiousness of the women of

Attica had made it impossible for the men to determine who their children were, and that

“the land of Attica was being destroyed because of this practice.”324

Much is distorted in this text, in large part due to the Arabic or Ethiopian translator’s unfamiliarity with the concept of “nymphs,” the appellation given by Kekrops to women who were required by his new law to enter into monogamous marriages as virgins.325 But the Ethiopic is clear enough to reveal that John inserted accusations of homosexuality, which distorts the problem presented by Attic promiscuity as presented by Malalas: that men were unable to determine who their children were.326 John’s decision to reinterpret the problem as one of same-sex relations among men introduces a moral dimension that Malalas seemed disinterested in, because it added nothing to the strictly practical problem of parentage. John took female promiscuity as part and parcel of a wider problem of sexual licentiousness and Christianized the punishment.

The problems that emerge as a result of sexual debauchery, predictably understood as any sexual behavior that is not heteronormative and within the bounds of marriage, are a recurring theme played out through various stories in the Chronicle, and invariably bring harsh and fatal divine consequences. Solomon’s loss of control over demons and the pollution of Jerusalem resulted from the women who lived with him.

324John Malalas, Chronographia 4.6 325 Chronicle, 35.6-8. 326 Chronicle, 35.1. 133

John also modified the story of Nero and his consort-turned-husband Pythagoras, noting that, because of his choice not only to engage in same-sex relations with Pythagoras, but also to do so “as a woman” (ከመ፡አንስት, kämä anist), Nero is punished by God with a pseudo-pregnancy. His belly becomes distended, as though pregnant, and in the course of opening his belly to deliver the “child,” the wise men performing the surgery kill him.327

In an example more closely tied to ecclesiastical affairs, John goes further than any of his predecessors in his description of the unpopularity of Paul Tabenniosota, claiming that in addition to being a widely hated Nestorian, he was deposed by the emperor Justinian himself for having sex with a deacon in a bath at Alexandria.328

The consequences are not directed exclusively at the individual but could nevertheless have cascading negative effects on the entire society. John describes

Maximian’s son Maxentius as taking not only married female partners, but married men, a claim that he did not derive from Socrates Scholasticus, Lactantius, or any other prominent authors he might have had access to or stories that he had heard. While

327 Chronicle, 70.1-6. John does not seem familiar with the details of the story (such as the name of Pythagoras/Doryphorus) and it is unclear where the story of Nero’s pseudo-pregnancy might have come from. Sporus is also notably absent from the story. For a modern scholarly account of Nero’s sexual relationships with Sporus and Pythagoras/Doryphorus as depicted by his contemporaries, see Edward Champlin, Nero (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003), 160-171. 328 Chronicle, 92.7-8. No other author who wrote about the patriarchate of Paul Tabbeniosota mentions this accusation. Prokopios, Anecdota 27.14-15 accuses Paul of having a deacon named Psoes executed on a charge that he had, in some way, obstructed his ability to carry out imperial orders. Ps.-Zachariah 10.1 is more specific, noting that Paul was removed from his position for his involvement in a murder that occurred in the baths of the city. This is particularly puzzling as there is no possible route of translations via Coptic, Syriac, Greek, or Arabic (or some combination of the four) through which the murder of this man, who is not identified, could be misunderstood by an Ethiopic or Arabic translator as an instance of same- sex relations, at least not in the way he chose to describe the event (ግበረ፡ዘኢይደሉ፡ከመ፡ስዶማውያን, literally, “an act as unseemly as [that of] the Sodomites). Furthermore, while both John and Prokopios attribute Paul’s punishment to Justinian, Pseudo-Zachariah instead notes that the victim’s son flees to Theodora, who sends Ephraim of Antioch and Abraham Bar Khalil to replace Paul with Zoilus. This seems to suggest that John wished to point out the righteousness of Justinian, an idea that may not have sat well with earlier anti-Chalcedonians. 134 normally this might be cause for chastising the population of the city as a whole for their participation, John is careful to absolve citizens of any wrong-doing, noting “the people

[or men] of the city of Rome were helpless in what they did; for he treated them contrary to the customs of their city.”329 Of course, this was not Maxentius’ only sin; his ill- treatment of Christians and arbitrary wealth confiscations also play a prominent role in

John’s brief account of his reign. But his sexual abuse of married citizens carried equal weight, and he is ultimately killed by Constantine, acting as God’s intercession on behalf of the city. John clearly took liberties in compiling the text by taking accusations of sexual licentiousness and extending or escalating these to accusations of homosexuality, and where his sources gave him that very accusation, as in the case of Nero, he escalated the consequences further still. This allowed the author to deploy a narrative strategy that made Constantine a savior of the entire city, and not just of the Christians and property owners within it.

Preoccupation with same-sex relations is certainly not out of the ordinary, particularly in John’s own socio-political milieu, for among monks and the laity it was a long-standing concern to Christian leaders and writers of Egypt.330 According to Ewa

Wipszycka, a bishop in Byzantine Egypt, “exercised minute control over the moral behavior of his flock, particularly in the sexual domain,” often by reading reports from local clergy about the “failings” of individual members.331 Terry Wilfong confirms this

329 Chronicle, 77.40. The word säb’ä, ሰብአ could refer specifically to the men; also note that complications involving the translation of the word ኅተተ (chättätä) may not absolve the city at all. 330 Heike Behmler, “Koptische Quellen zu (männlicher) ‘Homosexualiät,’” Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur 28 (2000), 27-53. 331 Ewa Wipszycka, “The Institutional Church” in Egypt in the Byzantine World, ed. Roger S. Bagnall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 335 135 preoccupation in the same set texts under examination by Wipszycka, namely the sermons of Pisentius, bishop of Coptos (599-632 CE) and the archive of his contemporary, Abraham, bishop of Amant. Both bishops express an explicit interest not only in maintaining marriage, but in regulating women’s sexual activity in private.332

Wipszycka and Wilfgong derive this assertion from the archives of Abraham and

Pisentius, writing primarily in the seventh century, and it is not unreasonable to expect that this same degree of concern might have been shared by John two generations or so later, even if his (or any authority figure’s) ability to actually police sexual practices is simply impossible even in a monastic setting, let alone among the lay public. But this certainly wouldn’t stop the effort: In fact, we are told that John lost his position as an administrator precisely because of his excessive zeal in enforcing the punishment of a monk accused of sexually assaulting a young woman.333 As such, it is not unreasonable to assume John’s preoccupation with homosexuality was more than a mere extension of a long-standing rhetorical strategy by historians to heap such accusations onto already villainous historical figures. Rather, it reflected an attempt at a rhetorical strategy by which he could carry out his administrative duty, to explicitly warn his wards away from sexual behavior that would endanger themselves, their monastic communities, and the wider Christian community by exposing them to demonic influence.

It is important to note that John does not tie all the actions described above to demonic or Satanic influence. The narrative strategy of highlighting the sexual deviancy

332 Terry Wilfong, The Women of Jeme (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2002), 30-31; 80-83 333 Basil Evetts, History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria (Paris: Patrologia Orientalis vol 3, 1910), 32. 136 of his subjects, and at times demonizing them, even if only implicitly, likely reflected an active pedagogical interest in the sexual behavior of the monks ostensibly under his administrative control. It would have been impossible or at least difficult for John to trawl through every single correspondence from every monastery in upper Egypt relating accusations of same-sex relations between monks, and it would have been similarly difficult to admonish each monastery by name to insure that no monks engage in sexual activity with each other, along with the other administrative duties that might fall onto an individual tasked with supervising so many monasteries. John’s intellectual project may have simply been preemptively didactic in this instance: accusations of homosexuality, attached to figures already understood as wicked for a host of other reasons that would have been readily understood by his audience of monks, afforded John an opportunity to remind his wards of the real spiritual and ultimately physical dangers associated with sexual licentiousness and same-sex relations, allowing him to preemptively deal with such occurrences. When these preventative measures failed, and an offense was committed that could not be ignored, John could always turn to flogging.

Conclusion

All of this is not to say that John envisions a consistent and steady decline of institutions, and in fact, as Carile noted, there are moments of unabashed optimism scattered throughout the work.334 But such moments of optimism, rooted as they are in what Carile described as a confluence of the intentions of good men and institutions, are

334 “Si tratta delle tonalita di una storiografia che tende all'opera di pieta ed esprime una ottimistica visione del mondo in cui bene ed istituzioni finiscono per coincidere;” Carile, “Giovanni di Nikius,” 374. 137 frequently tempered by moral failure. The narrative enumeration of sins and sinners—and the demonic and diabolic intervention this invited—may have served for John as instructive for the monks whom he oversaw in his position as madabbar. But the emphasis on sin also gave him an opportunity to illustrate to his readers the ways in which individual moral failures could have catastrophic consequences extending far beyond those for the individual and his soul.

Beyond practical pedagogical concerns, this view of history may have ultimately served to absolve John’s own institution from blame. In a work filled with the negative consequences of heresy and division, one sees a possible response to the accusation that it was the faction of Benjamin (or more broadly, those who did not fall in line with the prescriptions of other Melkites) who were to blame for the success of the Arab invasion in Egypt. John was instead able to build a case that it was in fact the collective moral failure of Christians, in addition to the failures of heretical churchmen and the willingness of the government in Constantinople at best to tolerate them and at worst to facilitate and aid them, which caused disaster after disaster, culminating at last in the Arab conquest.

This in turns dovetails neatly with the absence of apocalyptic tone in the text. These are not the prophesied end times or evidence for a pious core of orthodox Christians inching closer to the return of God. Nor can these actions be understood as the punitive actions of a wrathful God seeking to straighten out his flock. Instead, we find, by the end of the text, a people alienated entirely from God, and the province of Egypt politically sundered from the body of the empire just as the heretical Chalcedonians had separated the province’s

138 orthodox churchmen from the body of the church. Egypt was thoroughly “enslaved to

Satan.”335

While the subject matter in which the narrative of individual and collective decay is set may vacillate between the political and the theological, it is important to remember, as Olster noted, that “for these Christians, the empire was indistinguishable from its religion.”336 It is only the “orthodox”—the churchmen, ascetics, pious laymen, and whoever John might have understood them to be—who are left without blemish. We might, then, imagine John admonishing his readers to look to their own behaviors and to that of their neighbors for answers about their current condition—to Chalcedonians, anti-

Chalcedonian schismatics, the Roman government, to those individuals both in high places and among the citizenry who had failed in their personal discipline and theological training; in short, anyone but him and his superiors and colleagues. If indeed this was addressed to his charges, the monks of Egypt, or to the educated populations around

Alexandria and the Delta, we might imagine him admonishing them to act as bulwarks of a Christian way of life to come, a life to be lived not under Christian government, but in persecution like the martyrs before them.

335 Chronicle, 119.1. 336 David Olster, Roman Defeat, Christian Response, 21 139

Chapter 5. Compassionate Villains and Heretical Martyrs: John’s Approach to Ecclesiastical History and Theology

Introduction John of Nikiu’s position as a member of the Coptic clergy in seventh- and early eighth-century Egypt frequently plays a central role in scholarly analyses of his

Chronicle, invariably coloring how scholars interpret his historiographic approach. On some level, to read his Chronicle as an anti-Chalcedonian approach to Christian world history makes some sense. Because John was a member of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the most numerous and politically influential of the several anti-Chalcedonian factions in

Egypt at his time, the scholar seeking any context through which to interpret his account of the Arab invasion and treatment of the Heraclean civil war must take into account our sparse biographical accounts of the author in the History of the Patriarchs, in addition to

John’s stark condemnation of the Council of Chalcedon and the Egyptian Chalcedonian church. But to understand John as writing solely from this position fails to consider not only the complexity of Egypt’s ecclesiastical landscape in the seventh century, but the complexity of the author’s own position in the anti-Chalcedonian hierarchy. It reduces him to a mouthpiece of the See of St. Mark in the wake of the Arab conquest, an essentialized voice which speaks only as an avatar of the concerns of a proto-nationalist

Coptic population founded upon a firm anti-Chalcedonian Christian identity.

140

This chapter investigates John of Nikiu’s theological and political views by reading the text as an ecclesiastical history, focusing particularly on his treatment of church and imperial politics from Markianos’s convention of the Council of Chalcedon in

451 CE. It asks whether John’s approach to ecclesiastical history can be so easily narrowed down to that of a monophysite Egyptian bishop in the church that Abba

Benjamin, patriarch of the anti-Chalcedonian church of Egypt from 623-662, had secured in the wake of the Arab conquest of Egypt. I argue that John’s theological views frequently do not align with the official stance of his superiors, particularly the issue of aphthartodocetism, which was still heavily disputed in his own time, and that he did not view divisions along theological lines as institutional divisions, but rather as the result of heretical individuals corrupting and dividing a church that was, in theory, still united.

John’s own world, and as such his vision of the history of Christianity, was not always so neatly bifurcated as modern authors would have us believe. His Chalcedonian counterparts were capable of compassion and mercy, and he even viewed some heretical aphthartodocetists as martyrs whose deaths could just as easily incite God’s fury.

This analysis of John’s view of religious and ecclesiastical history will also include his treatment of some Roman emperors, particularly Justinian and others whose reigns had demonstrably adverse effects on the Church with which John was affiliated. In general, John did not view his Church qua institution as a new hierarchy, or even an institution apart, but as the orthodox church in exile. John used his history to propose individual moral excellence as the only route to the reunification of the church and the salvation of Christians worldwide.

141

Modern Scholarship on John of Nikiu’s Doctrinal Stance

Modern historians frequently insist that John of Nikiu be understood as a “monophysite” historian and that this is the only aspect of his historiographic approach that is useful to know. Among the many examples that could be adduced, Robert Hoyland asserts that

John simply “reverses the Chalcedonian judgements on the merits of the successive emperors, denouncing the likes of Markianos, Justinian and above all Heraclius the arch- persecutor, but praising Anastasius and even the only grudgingly tolerant Tiberius.”337

James Howard-Johnston’s reading of the Chronicle tacitly suggests the same thing, even using this presumption as an argument against the possibility of a Greco-Coptic hybrid original of the text. Of course, there are several good philological reasons to suggest that

John did not compose the text in Greek at all. But these are not the arguments advanced by Howard-Johnston, who instead felt that this notion was hard to swallow primarily because “it would have been odd for John to use the language of the Coptic

Monophysites’ Chalcedonian opponents.” 338 Jean-Michel Carrié, while less reductive,

337 Robert Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw it: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2019), 153; John Moorhead, writing about the Monophysite historiographic treatment of Roman emperors broadly, and John of Nikiou in particular, similarly suggested, “Emperors subsequent to Chalcedon are judged with reference to their doctrine, and so Monophysite authors tend to reverse the judgements of Chalcedonian writers” ("The Monophysite Response to the Arab Invasions," Byzantion 51 [1981]: 584). 338 James Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 185. On the extensive use of Greek by anti-Chalcedonian Egyptians in both secular and liturgical settings until the end of the eighth century, see Arietta Papaconstantinou, “What Remains Behind: Hellenism and Romanitas in Christian Egypt after the Arab Conquest,” in From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East, eds. Hannah Cotton, Robert Hoyland, Jonathan Price, and David Wasserstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 451, and passim. 142 also claimed that John’s text invited his contemporary readers to take up a new identity based on a mass commitment to monophysitism.339

We can briefly illustrate how insufficient these analyses are by briefly focusing on

John’s treatment of one emperor in particular: Justinian I. It is here that the first signs of the startling complexities of John’s historical vision are played out. While John roundly criticizes Justinian’s uncle and predecessor Justin I for his theological error and the cruel actions that stemmed from it, his portrayal of Justinian is far from similarly even. When the reader is first introduced to Justinian, it is as a facilitator of the violence of the Blue faction in Constantinople. John tells us that Justinian helped the Blues “to commit murder and pillage among the people.”340 He then narrowly escapes punishment at the hands of

Theodotus after falling ill.341 We hear no more of Justinian until he comes to power, but his reign is treated as a breath of fresh air after the brutality, irreligion, and outbursts of divine wrath that accompanied the reign of his uncle. Contrary to his purported methodological approach, as described by Hoyland and others, the bishop of Nikiu, at least initially, appears entirely sympathetic to the new emperor. He notes that Justinian

ወገበረ፡ኵሎ፡ትሩፋተ፡ወተኀብኡ፡አምኔሁ፡ኵሎሙ፡አሕዛብ፡ዘአንበለ፡ኅፍረጥ። ወሐነፀ፡አብያተ፡ክርስቲያናት፡ውስተ፡ኵሉ፡ምካን፡ወመካናተ፡ለተወክፎ፡ነግድ፡ወማኀደረ፡ለመፍቅ ደ፡አእሩግ፡ወመካነ፡ለሕሙማን፡ወአብያተ፡ለእጓለ፡ማውታ፡ወብዙኃን፡ካልኣን፡ዘይመስልዎሙ፡ለ ዝንቱ፤ወሐደሶን፡ለብዙኃት፡አፀጉራት፡እለ፡ተጀስታ፡ወወሀበ፡ብዙኃተ፡ንዋያተ፡ለሰብእ፡ወኢገብረ፡ መኑሂ፡ከማሁ፡እምነጀሥት፡እለ፡ቀደምዎ። … practiced every virtue, and all shameless people concealed themselves from his notice. And he built churches in every place, and hospices for strangers, and asylums for old men, and hospitals for the sick, and

339 Jean-Michael Carrié, “Jean de Nikiou et sa Chronique: Une Écriture Égyptienne de l'Histoire?,” in Événement, Récit, Histoire Officielle: L'Écriture de l'Histoire dans les Monarchies Antiques, eds. Nicolas Grimal and Michele Baud (Paris: Collège de France, 2004),166 340 Chronicle, 90.16. 341 On Theodotus, see “Theodotus qui et Colocynthius 11”, PLRE II, 1104-1105; On his relationship with Justininan in 523-24 CE, see Brian Croke, “Justinian under Justin: Reconfiguring a Reign,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 100, no.1 (2007): 39-40. 143

orphanages, and many other like establishments. And he restored many cities which had been destroyed and gave large sums of money to the people. None of the emperors that preceded him had done as he did.342

The Chronicle goes on to praise his military defeat of the Persians in defense of the

Lazaeans; the rejection of the magician Masides (in which he not only rejects the use of magic, but goes on to explicitly state his trust in the divine power); his management of the Huns under Queen Boa and the conversion of the Hunnish king Grod; and his support for the conversion of the Aksumites, allegedly for the first time.343

It is only later in this account that the portrayal of Justinian transforms into something recognizably hostile. After successes in Arabia and Ethiopia, we are told of an earthquake which caused many cities and villages to fall into sinkholes in Egypt; John describes as his source for this event “our fathers, the divinely-influenced Egyptian monks.”344 The explanation given for this is that the emperor had changed the orthodox faith, by calling for the inscription of the names of those who had participated in the

Council of Chalcedon on the church diptychs across the empire for the first time.345

The high crime of combining heresy with novelty begins a downward spiral in

John’s depiction of Justinian. John claims, erroneously, that the Henotikon of Zeno was abolished. The name of the Antiochene Patriarch Severos was proscribed, and the

Alexandrian patriarch Timothy and his entire city was spared much bloodshed only after

342 Chronicle, 90.49-51 343 Chronicle, 90.52-80. On Grod and his conversion to Christianity, see A.D. Lee, From Rome to Byzantium AD 363-565: The Transformation of Ancient Rome (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 279. 344 Chronicle 90.81-83. No other account of this earthquake exists, even within Egyptian texts, and the date of commemoration, the seventeenth of Ṭəqəmt is the celebration of the Patriarch Dioskoros II (561-517) 345 Chronicle 84-85 144 a personal intercession by Theodora and a host of ascetics Timothy had sent to

Constantinople to plead on the city’s behalf. But once Timothy passed away, Justinian placed three Chalcedonians on the patriarchal throne of Alexandria: Paul the

Tabenniosite who was caught in a compromising position with a deacon in a bath; Zoilus, who resigned his position upon recognizing his unpopularity in the city; and finally

Apollinarios, whom John incorrectly identified as a member of the Severan-Theodosian faction of the anti-Chalcedonian church.346

The Chronicle describes Justinian as “a new Markianos,” a supporter of

Chalcedon, but also as the savior of Rome, a peacemaker who pacified Persia and the arranger and editor of Roman law. Finally, the emperor died of old age having driven out

Eutychius, the Patriarch of Constantinople and his successor John, both of whom John describes as sympathetic to anti-Chalcedonian theology.347 We are left with a surprisingly complex picture. On the one hand, Justinian was a good Christian emperor who was rewarded for resisting the temptation of magicians with victory on the battlefield; on the other, he was a heretical persecutor, one step removed theologically from Nestorius, who

346 John makes several notable mistakes or omissions in describing this rapid succession of patriarchs. First, he accuses Paul of sodomy, which no other author in the Byzantine or Copto-Arabic tradition mentions (see Chapter 4); He then seems to suggest that Zoilus resigned his position, and while Ps.-Zachariah of Mitylene does confirm the presence of an armed guard around, it appears as though he did not resign his position for fear of the Alexandrian crowds, Zoilous Pseudo-Zachariah Rhetor, Chronicle, trans. Geoffrey Greatrex, Cornelia Horn, and Robert Phenix, (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2011), 401; and finally, Apollinarios is identified as a Theodosian when in fact the History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria famously remarks that upon Theodosius’ death, Apollinaris held a banquet in celebration of the Chalcedonian victory. “History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria,” trans. B. Evetts, Patrologia Orientalis 5 (Brepols: Turnhout, 1910), 451, Alberto Elli, Storia della Chiesa Copta (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 2003), 325n1. 347 Chronicle 94.11-15. 145 used imperial authority to impose heresy and novelty on the people of Alexandria and

Constantinople, and, as a result, compromised their salvation and the safety of the state.

The modern scholarly assessment of John of Nikiu’s historical approach to the author and his world as narrowly “monophysite” cannot account for the complexity of this account. But what produced such a complex view of this historical figure, especially one with such an outsized negative impact on the Egyptian anti-Chalcedonian movement? Furthermore, what does this depiction of Justinian tell us about the seventh- century bishop of Nikiu’s perception of his own institution’s ecclesiastical history and the degree to which his theological views aligned with those expressed by his colleagues in the anti-Chalcedonian Church of Early Islamic Egypt?

Christian Doctrinal Clashes in pre-Islamic Egypt

In order to answer these questions, we must survey the ecclesiastical history of Egypt for the period about which John of Nikiu wrote, especially given the outsized influence that theological conflict seems to play in his depiction of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. Various theological and ecclesiastical disputes defined the religious scene in

Egypt between 518 CE, when Severos of Antioch arrived in Egypt, to the state of the church under the rival patriarchs Benjamin and Kyros, his Chalcedonian counterpart. The anti-Chalcedonian Church in which John was a bishop did not in fact represent all

Egyptian Christians. Not only was it not the sole church in Egypt, but it was not even the only rival to the Chalcedonian church of Alexandria, which represented the body of

146 clerics supported by the Roman government before the collapse of Roman authority in the province in 642 CE.348

After the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE, and more importantly the expulsion of the Patriarch Severos from his seat in Antioch in 518 CE, Egypt had become a hotbed of anti-Chalcedonian activity. This expulsion was carried out by the emperor Justin I upon his accession that same year, and the lenient, even friendly policies vis-à-vis anti-

Chalcedonians that had defined the reign of his predecessors Zeno I, Basiliskos, and

Anastasios I were immediately undone. In addition to the exile of prominent anti-

Chalcedonian ecclesiastical leaders, a feast of the Council of Chalcedon was first celebrated that summer, as well as a feast of the Four Synods (Nicaea, Constantinople,

Ephesos I, and Chalcedon).349 This was followed by an initial bout of purges spanning nearly all of the Near East.350 Egypt, however, to the chagrin of those who thought to enshrine the Council of Chalcedon as official religious policy, was entirely left alone.351

348 Maged Mikhail suggested that “on the eve of the Arab conquest, no less than nine factions claimed to be the true Church." With that said, he does concede that some groups, such as Manichaeans and Arians, likely existed in Egypt in name only by the time the Arabs had arrived. He further misses groups who did seem to be active, such as the “tritheist” adherents to the doctrine of John Philoponos. See From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt: Religion, Identity, and Politics after the Arab Conquest (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 54. 349 Note that while John believes that Justinian was the one responsible for introducing the synods in the diptychs, that Justin seems to have been the one responsible for this. Pauline Allen, Sophronius of Jerusalem and Seventh-Century Heresy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 7. 350 Frend notes that “as with other religious repressions in the fifth and sixth centuries the results of Justin’s measures are not easy to determine’; while some monks were killed outside of Antioch, many bishops conformed to the new pro-Chalcedonian norm, and many bishops fled into exile. On the whole, lay people seem to have been spared persecution (The Rise of the Monophysite Movement:Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972], 247–249). 351 Pierre Maraval, Le Christianisme de Constantin à la Conquête Arabe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), 404. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 247. On the Chalcedonian response to Justin’s Egyptian strategy (or lack thereof), particularly that of Pope Hormisdas I, see Jean Maspero, Histoire des Patriarches d’Alexandrie: Depuis la Mort de L’Empereur Anastase jusqu’a la Réconciliation des Églises Jacobites (518-616) (Paris: Bibliothèque de L’École des Hautes Études, 1923), 74. 147

Then, in 521, Justin’s policy seemed to shift: he simply waited for the death of anti-Chalcedonian clergy before replacing them, a policy seen as preferable to active forced replacement.352 This policy, in combination with Justin I’s inexplicable lenience towards Egypt, had the effect of turning Egypt in general, and Alexandria in particular, into a hub from which the exiled bishop of Antioch, Severos, and his peers, who still had a great degree of influence, were able to maintain an anti-Chalcedonian movement in

Syria and beyond through correspondence and the use of local agents. This allowed them to guide and support what William Frend referred to as the “grass-roots” of the anti-

Chalcedonian movement in Syria, the lay population, and the scattered anti-Chalcedonian monastic settlements.353 It is important to emphasize that the intent was not to create a parallel church to challenge Rome and Constantinople. To Severos and his peers, there was only one church, and those who defended the “correct” theology had simply fallen out of favor with a government headed by an impious emperor.354 While far from ideal, this state of affairs created an ideological bloc that, though presently illegal, hoped to exert influence on imperial policy well after its supposed defeat.

But this retreat and consolidation of the movement in Egypt would also prove to be fertile ground for a host of internal fractures for the anti-Chalcedonian Severan party.

Severos was, after all, “foremost a monk-theologian,” and while administrative concerns would continue to occupy much of his time in exile, as they had in Antioch, he found

352 Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 253. 353 Ibid. 354 Nestor Kavvadas, “Severus of Antioch and Changing Miaphysite Attitudes toward Byzantium” in Severus of Antioch: His Life and Times eds. John D’Alton and Youhanna Youssef (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 124 148 himself continually enmeshed in debates surrounding the precise articulation of the anti-

Chalcedonian faction’s Christology.355 The greatest and perhaps earliest root of internal dissent would spring from debates with his own close anti-Chalcedonian comrade, Julian, the bishop of Halikarnassos. While they were formerly close allies and victims of the persecutions of Justin I, their alliance ultimately fractured under the weight of a theological question that would have profound theological and ecclesiastical effects in

Egypt well after both men had died: Was Christ’s body incorruptible, and if so, was it always?

The two had apparently already disagreed on this question, according to Yonatan

Moss, as early as their first meetings in Constantinople in 511 CE.356 Julian’s position was clearly stated and derived from Severos’ own stated positions on the subject.357 To the bishop of Halikarnassos, there was no question but that Christ’s body was incorruptible (aphthartos) and as such was incapable of truly suffering. Furthermore, in order to avoid a charge of Eutychianism, he was forced to take up what Aryeh Kofsky correctly identifies as a paradoxical position: While on the one hand he claimed that

Christ’s body could not in reality suffer, “Julian admitted the reality of the passion of

Christ, anathematizing whoever claimed that it occurred only in appearance [and] that the

355 On Severos’ episcopal career pre-exile, see Pauline Allen and C.T.R. Hayward, Severus of Antioch (New York: Routledge, 2004), 11-24. 356 Yonatan Moss, Incorruptible Bodies: Christology, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 22. 357 Allen and Hayward, Severus of Antioch, 46. This in turn forced Severus to produce a work defending his earlier Philalethes, which had emphasized the divinity of Christ in an effort to highlight the unity of Christ’s two natures. 149 passion and death did not affect the humanity of Christ.”358 As soon as the debate had reached Egypt in the 520s and 530s, it was no longer a private disagreement between two allies, but a large-scale ideological conflict between two factions, with the two theologians directing attacks not just at each other but at their followers.359 The role of their host, the as yet un-persecuted and apparently unperturbed Timothy III is unclear, but extant sources appear to suggest that he was unable, assuming he attempted, to quell the growing unrest, and whatever his objections to the Julianist party were have survived only in a fragmentary form, condemning the movement in the vaguest terms.360

Given the apparent patriarchal and Severan objections to Julianist theology, its popularity in the city of Alexandria is remarkable. In part, this must be attributed to

Julian’s residence in the big city, allowing him to proselytize more effectively and efficiently than the opponent of his party, who was forced to drift from city to city and monastery to monastery throughout the province.361 Some may have found Julianist

358 Aryeh Kofsky, “The Miaphysite Monasticism of Gaza and Julian of Halicarnassus,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 78, no. 1 (2012): 86 359 Yonatan Moss notes that Julian spoke in the third person when addressing Severos’ arguments, and Severos for his part spoke of Julian and “members of his entourage.” Moss, Incorruptible Bodies, 27. 360 The History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria insists that Timothy was staunchly anti-Julianist and devoted a great deal of energy to refuting Julian’s party. Further, passages from sermons delivered by the patriarch and preserved by Cosmas Indicopleustes seems to depict the patriarch as defending Christ’s suffering and humanity. In an exposition delivered on 22 Pashons (May 17) of an uncertain year, commenting on John 4:6 (Ὁ οὖν Ἰησοῦς κεκοπιακὼς ἐκ τῆς ὁδοιπορίας ἐκαθέζετο οὕτως ἐπὶ τῇ πηγῇ) Cosmas records Timothy as saying, “thus, in anticipation refuting those who erroneously think He assumed a body in appearance only, for He showed clearly that He submitted to sufferings…By these sufferings then which were not incurred by sin the Lord declared that His flesh obeyed, showing clearly that He had become man in nature and in truth, and not in seeming.” Cosmas Indicopleustes, The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk, trans. J.W. McCrindle (London: Hakluyt Society, 1897), 355. With that said, even the History relegates the patriarch to a marginal character in his own biography, devoting most of the discussion to Severos’ exile and Justin/Justinian’s persecution. History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, 451-455. 361 Kofsky speculates that this may have been a result of the popularity of Julian’s theology in Alexandria and the countryside. It strikes me as more likely that Julian’s popularity was a result of initial proximity rather than his theology, especially considering the patriarch’s apparent hostility to his views. Furthermore, 150 theology appealing because it tacitly supported the view that monastic asceticism could return the body to a pre-fall state of sinlessness, just as Christ’s body was at once human and incorruptible.362 This base of popularity was no mere splinter among a united faction, but by this point arguably a separate movement with a significant impact on the populace of Egypt, and while the surviving Syriac sources, all Severan, paint the movement as marginal, Egyptian sources and even Liberatus viewed it as a significant threat to the unity of the church, and not without good reason.363

Upon Timothy IV’s death in 535, this theological debate would have profound and lasting effects on the unity of the Alexandrian church. Theodosius, a Severan deacon under Timothy was enthroned, but shortly thereafter, a popular Julianist, Gaianas, was seated on the imperially supported throne.364 John of Nikiu himself suggests that it was

Severos was forced to remain on the move given his seniority and prominence as a former Patriarch of Antioch, which undoubtedly had the effect of slowing communication with his contacts in Alexandria and ensuring that Julian and his followers would always have a communication advantage. Aryeh Kofsky, “Julianism after Julian of Halicarnassus” in Between Personal and Institutional Religion: Self, Doctrine, and Practice in Late Antique Eastern Christianity, eds. Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony and Lorenzo Perrone (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 252. 362 Or that one could, through ascetic practice, even render the body Christlike. Aryeh Kofsky, “The Miaphystie Monasticism of Gaza and Julian of Halicarnassus,” 90; 95-96. With that said, it should be noted that in at least one instance, an informant told Severos that all the monasteries but one in the Ennaton had subscribed to the letter of Julian in the 520s. In general, the informant seems to suggest that the overwhelming majority of those who disagreed with Severos were ill-educated, but even this contemporary assessment can only be accepted with caution: Academics and citizens of modern democracies are familiar with the use of this kind of invective when discussing the popularity of competing theories or ideologies in informal settings. Sebastian Brock, “A Report from a Supporter of Severos on Trouble in Alexandria,” in Synaxis Katholike: Beiträge zu Gottesdienst und Geschichte der fünf altkirchlichen Patriarchate für Heinzgerd Brakmann zum 70. Geburtstag eds. Diliana Atanassova and Tinatin Chronz (Vienna and Munich: Lit Verlag, 2014), 52, 56. 363 According to Sebastian Brock, in a letter from one Severan supporter to another that “the archbishop of Alexandria is mentioned several times, but without name: it is implied that he is careful to avoid taking sides by not mentioning some controversial term or phrase, though the writer claims that his actions show that he favours the party of Severos.” One might easily imagine letters from supporters of Julian conveying a similarly positive message about the Patriarch’s stance. Brock, “A Report from a Supporter of Severos on Trouble in Alexandria,” 47. 364 Maspero, Histoire des Patriarches d’Alexandrie, 143 151

“the foolish populace” who made Julian’s successor Gaianas the patriarch, and Liberatus of Carthage, writing sometime between 555 and 567 CE, claimed that the people of

Alexandria, with the support of local monks, had expelled Theodosius after he was enthroned.365 For a time, at least, the Julianists had full authority to consecrate bishops and consolidate power in the region, calcifying divisions which would last for centuries afterwards. While Theodosius and the Severan party were after some time able to regain power with the aid of Theodora and the imperial court in Constantinople, the damage had been done.366 The impact of the brief period of Julianist control under Gaianas proved so great that John himself referred to Julian as a Gaianite.367 Theodosius’s reign found imperial support not only from the Augusta Theodora, but from the good fortune

(however brief) of the ascendancy of Anthimus as Patriarch of Constantinople in 536

CE.368 Whatever the feelings of the emperor, it would appear that the Severan anti-

365 Chronicle 92.2; Liberatus, Breviarum Causae Nestorianorum et Eutychianorum, 20. Jacques Jarry, operating under the incorrect supposition that circus factions overlapped with religious affiliation, suggested that Gaianas had secured the support of the Green faction. Jacques Jarry, “Hérésies et Factions en Égypte Byzantin,” Bulletin de l’Institut Francais d’archéologie orientale 63 (1968):” Kofsky, “Julianism after Julian of Halicarnassus,” 253, following Anna Maria Dimicheli, “La politica religiosa di Giustiniano in Egitto: Riflessi sulla chiesa egiziana della legislazione ecclesiastica giustinianea,” Aegyuptus 63 (1983): 229-233, argued that “Gaianus’s supporters…may have been regarded as something like representatives of the Coptic ethnic spirit, at least in the heyday of the movement.” Both statements are unsubstantiated and rooted more in speculation than hard evidence, the former relying on a dated and incorrect correlation of religious and social affiliation with circus faction support, and the latter on a problematic and outdated assertion of the existence of a proto-Coptic (i.e. non-Roman Egyptian Christian) identity where it is clear that none existed. Both ultimately fail to recognize the remarkable complexity of the religious scene in sixth-century Egypt. While either is possible, if not plausible, one can only reasonably argue that the Severan party seemed to be in control of a greater part of the established physical institutions of the Alexandrian church, and even this statement must be made with the caveat that the disparity in political power and influence between the two parties is unknown and perhaps unknowable given the state of extant evidence. 366 Pseudo-Zacharia Rhetor, Chronicle, 9.16.b claims Gaianas held power for three months. The biography of Theodosius in the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, 459, claims that Theodosius was removed from his see for two years. Liberatus, Brevarium, 20 gives us 103 days. 367 Chronicle 94.6 368 Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 270-272 152

Chalcedonian movement had not only weathered the storm of the turbulent post-

Athanasius years, but had even triumphed, the survival of Gaianas’ party in Egypt and beyond notwithstanding.

But this state of affairs could not last for very long. While at first Justinian made concerted efforts to reconcile the two factions, by 536 CE, “‘No nonsense at Alexandria’ was now the imperial policy.”369 After meetings the emperor arranged with Pope

Agapetus in 536 CE in which the Pope managed not only to consecrate a new Patriarch of

Constantinople, but to procure a written confession of faith from the Emperor, Justinian appeared to have ended most attempts at reconciliation with anti-Chalcedonian churchmen. In 538 CE, his newfound hardline stance against the recalcitrant Alexandrian see had culminated in the emperor’s unilateral decision to install Paul Tabennesiota as the sole Chalcedonian Patriarch of Alexandria.

To some degree, this was understandable. In addition to the emperor’s convictions about the necessity for unity in the church and an increasing conflation of the state and religious apparatus, Alexandria was vital as a primary source of grain for Constantinople, and more so in light of the expanding needs of army and administration created by

Justinian’s military activities. The church of Alexandria had tremendous influence on the production and movement of grain out of Egypt, from patriarchal control of vast tracts of land and villages to control of shipping from the hinterland up to Egypt via the Nile. 370

As John Meyendorff notes, this would be the situation for years to come, and under the

369 Edward Hardy, “The Egyptian Policy of Justinian,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 22 (1968): 34. On Justinian’s efforts at reconciling reuniting the church, see Fergus Millar, 370 Michael Hollerich, “The Alexandrian Bishops and the Grain Trade: Ecclesiastical Commerce in Late Roman Egypt,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 25, no. 2 (1982):203-206. 153 reign of Maurice, the Chalcedonian patriarch Eulogius “acted as the de facto highest authority in Egypt, successfully opposing, where necessary, local imperial officials and even assuming leadership of civil government.”371 Those responsible for delivering the annona to Constantinople could look to the church for short-term liquidity, a necessity in a business with such high risks and narrow profit margins.372 As such it was imperative for Justinian to control the theological squabbles in the city as quickly as possible.373

Theodosius’ church was now in exile, and yet another faction had risen to prominence in the interim, that of the Agnoetai.374 An anti-Chalcedonian Theodosian deacon named Themistius, in the process of constructing an argument which emphasized

Christ’s humanity, eventually argued that Christ’s humanity necessarily made his human soul ignorant.375 All churches, save the state-sanctioned church in Alexandria, had effectively become churches in exile, consecrating clerics independently. These four groups—the Chalcedonians, anti-Chalcedonian Severans (Theodosians) and Julianists

(Gaianites), and the Agnoetai—would be joined later by the Tritheists under John

371 Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions, 276. See also Maspero, Histoire des Patriarches d’Alexandrie 267-68 372 Ibid., 202-203. Hollerich notes that by the time of the patriarchate of John the Almsgiver, (c. 606-616 CE), the patriarch seems to have even been given control of a sea-going fleet as part of a larger program of ceding more control to the patriarch, apparently in a bid by the emperor to cement control of Alexandria. Whether this was the sole distribution mechanism of the annona is unclear. 373 On the broader policies and impacts of Justinian’s management of social disturbances, see Peter Bell, Social Conflict in the Age of Justinian: Its Nature, Management, and Mediation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 267-317 374 It is possible that this schism occurred in the reign of Timothy III. For the chronology of the debate, see Albert van Roey and Pauline Allen Monophysite Texts of the Sixth Century, (Leuven: Peeters Press, 1994), 3-9 375 Few primary texts discuss the beliefs of the Agnoetai in any detail. See Liberatus Beviarium, 19, Pseudo-Leontius, De Sectis, 5.6. 154

Philoponos, who argued that the trinity consisted of three substances, which amounted to a type of polytheism, at least according to Theodosius himself.376

The situation in Egypt would remain conflicted well into the seventh century, and even as Roman dominion collapsed and gave way to Arab rule, many of the factions involved would maintain their presence. Most notably, the Gaianites maintained a presence in Egypt well into the ninth century, and their leader Theodoros even managed to send clergymen to India during the reign of the Severan Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria

Simon I (689-701 CE).377 Imperial policy briefly softened in the years following the death of Justinian in 565, and the imperial court even hosted councils between the tritheist and Severan-Theodosian factions of the anti-Chalcedonians, overseen by John

Philoponos, a theologian, philosopher, and intellectual father of the tritheist movement.378

Yet, despite this apparent shift in imperial policy, Constantinople maintained its grip on ecclesiastical politics in Alexandria. Following the deposition of Theodosius, the imperial court maintained the practice of ordaining new patriarchs in Constantinople before sending them off to Alexandria, and while the Theodosian-Severan faction in

376 Stephen Davis, The Early Coptic Papacy: The Egyptian Church and Its Leadership in Late Antiquity, (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2004), 109; On the history of this movement prior to John Philoponos, see Albert van Roey and Pauline Allen, Monophysite Texts of the Sixth Century, 122-129. On Philoponos’s earlier philosophical writings, which undoubtedly served as a vital component of his theological thought and contribution to anti-Chalcedonian theological discourse, see Leslie Maccoull, “A New Look at the Career of John Philoponus,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 3, no. 1 (1995). Furthermore, though I have not included them here, some mention should be made of the Barsanuphians, or akephaloi, those anti-Chalcedonians who had refused the conciliatory gesture offered by the Emperor Zeno through his Henotikon in 482 CE. This is undoubtedly the oldest group of anti-Chalcedonian splinter groups, and evidence of their existence stretches into the ninth century CE. See Maspero, Histoire des Patriarches d’Alexandrie, 291; Randall Stewart, “Barsanuphians,” The Coptic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. New York, N.Y.: MacMillan, 1991. 377 History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, 295 378 William Frend, Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 317-319 155

Constantinople went ten years without a leader after the death of Theodosius in 567, the see of Alexandria remained firmly in Chalcedonian hands. Save for a brief period between 619 CE and 629 CE, in which the Sasanian Persian state allowed the Severan-

Theodosian patriarchs Andronikos and Benjamin unfettered control of the Alexandrian see and its attendant ecclesiastical authority, the anti-Chalcedonian movement remained institutionally defeated.379

With the marginalization of the Egyptian anti-Chalcedonian movement came a disproportionate increase in the influence of the Chalcedonian patriarch in the secular and religious life of the province. The new Chalcedonian Patriarch Kyros was brought in to his position around 630 CE by the emperor Herakleios, and with his see came the ability to requisition supplies from rural pagarchs, collect taxes, mobilize military forces to force doctrinal compliance (at least according to surviving anti-Chalcedonian texts), and even negotiate on behalf of the state with the Arab invaders.380 This does not mean that Kyros’ solution to dissension was uniformly violent, and in one case he was even able to form the Pact of Union in 633, reconciling, at least temporarily, the Severan-Theodosian and

Chalcedonian parties on the basis of a monoenergist doctrine that Christ had one energeia.381

379 Stephen Davis, The Early Coptic Papacy, 114-115; Ruth Altheim-Stiehl, “The Sasanians in Egypt: Some Evidence of Historical Interest,” Bulletin de la Société d’Archéologie Copte 31 (1992): 95. 380 Phillip Booth, “The Last Years of Cyrus, Patriarch of Alexandria,” in Mélanges Jean Gascou: Textes et Études Papyrologiques, eds. Jean-Luc Fournet and Arietta Papaconstantinou (Paris: Association des Ami du Centre d’Histoire det Civilisation de Byzance, 2016), 511-514. John Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450-680 A.D., (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989), 345-46 381 John Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions, 347-348; Jack Tannous, “In Search of Monotheletism,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 68 (2014): 42-44. On the spectacular failure of this policy in Egypt and throughout the empire, see Jack Tannous, “In Search of Monotheletism,” 44ff. 156

Although the various factions often participated in heated polemic which created lasting and destructive divisions between them, it is important to note that this is in many ways a reflection of the historical, theological, and hagiographic literature that preserved this history. Because of the nature of these sources, conflict is often foregrounded in such a way as to contaminate our ability to assess properly the practical effects of theological disagreements. As Ewa Wipszycka argued, “the situation concerning the relationships between the representatives of the two Churches in Egypt during the 6th-7th cent. was indeed very fluid and depended on the line-up of the social forces (not just the ecclesiastical ones) in a certain place, at a certain historical time.”382 In line with this insight, I suggest that even to John of Nikiu, a historian for whom many of these events continued to permeate the society in which he lived, the border between religious friends and enemies could be, and indeed were, quite blurry.

If we attempt to read the Chronicle as a strictly “monophysite” history, or more specifically as a Severan-Theodosian history, we miss clues which reveal a host of complexities about both the author’s world and the author himself, and this can lead to the unnecessary assumption that whatever seems out of place must be a result of an error in transmission.383 While it seems possible that in some instances this complexity results from John’s uncritical use of contradictory sources, a study of those sources can yield a

382 Ewa Wipszycka, “How Insurmountable was the Chasm between Monophysites and the Chalcedonians,” in Beyond Conflicts: Cultural and Religious Cohabitations in Alexandria and Eypt between the 1st and 6th Century CE, ed. Luca Arcari (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 223-224.

383 A notable example is the confusion caused by Zotenberg’s belief on two occasions that the Ethiopic rendering of the name of Kyros of Alexandria (kirs) was a misreading of the name for Pyrrhus of Constantinople (birs). Phillip Booth, “The Last Years of Cyrus,” 522 157 great deal of information about the intellectual world in which he lived. After all, a historian’s use of contradictory sources, produced by members of factions that were ideologically opposed to the historian, might reveal a great deal about the historian and his world. John’s use of pro-Gaianite and Chalcedonian sources imply that his own theological views may have been more complicated than we have previously thought, and that in this particular instance, his uncritical use of sources seems all but improbable.

Doctrinal Unity and Conflict in the Chronicle John did not simply view every Chalcedonian partisan within church and state institutions as wicked. We have already seen his generous treatment of Justinian, but a brief consideration of some of his more sympathetic and complex treatments of Chalcedonian and heretical figures will suffice to demonstrate that John’s view of good and evil moral actors cannot be so easily divided along partisan lines.

For example, John is sympathetic to Tiberius II, identifying him as someone who stopped the persecutions that had come to characterize the reigns of Justin I and

Justinian.384 John ends his account of the emperor by explaining why his reign was so brief: “Because of the sins of men his days were beset, and they were not worthy of a

God-loving emperor such as him...”385 We are told that Maurice performed at least one good deed during his reign, writing a decree that losses of cargo from Alexandria would be covered by the imperial treasury, and governors of Egypt would no longer be allowed to punish the captains of lost ships.386 As for religious leaders, John IV, the Chalcedonian

384 John describes him as a young man who was very beautiful, a lover of goodness, generous, and strong of heart. Chronicle, 94.19-20. 385 Chronicle, 94.26. 386 Chronicle, 103.1-3. John’s treatment of Maurice is predominantly negative, as most anti-Chalcedonian treatments of him were. Philip Wood, “We have no King but Christ”: Christian Political Thought in 158 patriarch of Alexandria, is depicted as tolerant to all, and praised for it. 387

Constantinopolitan patriarch John IV Nesteutes is also presented as a particularly pious ascetic and champion of orthodoxy.388 Though John of Nikiu clearly did not agree with his Christology, he calls him orthodox in the context of the discovery and execution of the magician Paulinus, and so in this instance it seems clear that orthodoxy here is

Christianity as contrasted with paganism.

But of these sympathetic or mixed portrayals, John of Nikiu’s two brief but puzzling accounts of the reign of Apollinarios, the Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria appointed by Justinian, are perhaps the most surprising. There is only one other detailed report on the career of the Patriarch Apollinarios, preserved by the tenth-century

Chalcedonian patriarch Sa’id ibn Batriq (933-944) in his chronicle, the Nazm al-Jawhar.

It provides what can only be described as fodder for anti-Chalcedonian polemic.

Apollinarios is introduced as a friend of Justinian who arrived both as a military man, sent to put down a restive anti-Chalcedonian uprising in Alexandria, and as a church leader, sent to take up the patriarchate. Ibn Batriq writes that when the populace responded to Apollinarios’s presence by throwing stones at him, he quelled the uprising by summoning those who would listen to the reading of an imperial letter in a church on

Greater Syria on the Eve of the Arab Conquest (c. 400-585) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 172. But the emperor was also the subject of an anti-Chalcedonian hagiography, François-Nicolas Nau, “Les Légendes Syriaques d’Aaron de Saroug, de Maxime et Domèce, d’Abraham, maître de Barsôma, et de l’Empereur Maurice” Patrologia Orientalis 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1910), 773-778. This might suggest that the mixed position John held on Maurice was reflective of the broader anti-Chalcedonian view on that emperor. 387 Chronicle, 94.24. The tenth-century Chacledonian patriarch of Alexandria, Sa’id ibn Batriq, dismissively refers to him as a Manichaean with no explanation. Eutichyios, Annales, Patrologia Graeca 111, 1076D 388 John IV’s asceticism: Chronicle, 96.10; his defense of orthodoxy: Chronicle, 98.11-12 159

Sunday. When the population gathered together, he informed them that it would be best to revert to Chalcedonianism, and when they refused, he had a great number of them slaughtered by his troops, with the survivors fleeing to the monastery of Makarios in

Wadi Habib.389 Even the Chalcedonian Ibn Batriq seems to have seen this as an inappropriate response to the rampant violence of the Alexandrian anti-Chalcedonians, and the scale of the violence is notable. The History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria does not mention this story, instead claiming that Apollinarios had simply forbidden anti-

Chalcedonian bishops from entering the city and had seized the churches, forcing the

Severan Patriarch of Alexandria, Peter IV and his successors into hiding.390

John of Nikiu, conversely, makes no mention of this event, and has little to say about Apollinarios. But what he does say reveals a great deal about the history of his text.

There are two separate and brief accounts of the life of Apollinarios, both seemingly unrelated to each other and separated by two chapters. In the first account, John claims that Apollinarios (ዮሊናርዮስ), was an anagnostis (አናጕንስጢስ) from the Salama monastery of Alexandria, who was compassionate (መሐሬ) and sympathetic to the Theodosian

Party.391 John claims that they promised him gifts in exchange for establishing the faith of the church.392 In the second account, we find that Apollinarios was the hegumenos

389 Eutichyios, Annales, Patrologia Graeca 111, 1069B-D 390 History of the Patriarchs, 469-471. The History was the product of successive writers. The biography of Peter IV was produced by the archdeacon George, himself a Severan, and scribe to the patriarch of Alexandria Simon I (d. 701), in the early seventh century and written in Coptic. Maged Mikhail, From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt: Religion, Identity and Politics after the Arab Conquest (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 5 has noted that scholars have often prized Eutychios’s accounts over the History whenever these accounts contradict Arab Muslims sources. For a detailed study of the entire History see Maged Mikhail, From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt, 5-8. 391 Chronicle, 92.9. 392 Chronicle, 92.10. It is impossible to tell what exactly John meant by “establishing the faith,” without presuming beforehand that this means either the anti-Chalcedonian position, which John supported, or the 160

(ቆሞስ) of the monastery of Banton, that is, the Ennaton monastic complex, who was rejected by the city’s populace because of their devotion to Julio-Gaianite theology.393Regardless of which of these two accounts reflects John of Nikiu’s original composition, it is likely that this narrative was produced in such as a way as to portray

Apollonarios in a sympathetic light, or at least without the same open hostility that John reserved for other Chalcedonian patriarchs.394

Most striking however is a depiction of Julio-Gaianite sympathy in the Chronicle.

John notes that several Gaianites tried to kill Kyros, but were stopped by Eudokianos, the brother of a local prefect. He had several of these Gaianites killed by his archers and two apparently had their hands cut off without trial. John follows this account by suggesting that those who were wronged, presumably the Gaianites, were avenged by God, who sent the Muslims out to conquer all the land of Egypt.395 This interesting insertion colors

John’s later comments about the causes of the Arab conquest. John never attributes the

Arab invasion of Egypt to Kyros’s state-backed persecution of the Severan hierarchy, but rather to God’s anger at the theological deviance of the imperial government and church, an accusation that a Gaianite could level at the Chalcedonian Egyptians just as effectively

Chalcedonian position, which the historical Apollinarios supported. Who “they” might be is also unclear, but it is reasonable to assume that this might be a reference to the Severan notables in the city, who believed they could get their man to reject Chalcedon once he was appointed patriarch of Alexandria. ,from the Coptic ⲡⲉⲛⲛⲁⲧⲟⲛ. Regarding ቆሞስ: Both Zotenberg, Chronique بنطون Likely via the Arabic 393 399 and Charles, The Chronicle of John, 148 translated the word ቆሞስ as comes. This is a puzzling choice as no such title exists for any religious figure in antiquity, whereas to this day Egyptian Copts refer to the See Ewa Wipszycka, “Hegumenos,” The Coptic Encyclopedia, 2nd .) قمص( head of a monastery as qummuṣ ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1991) 394 For a detailed explanation of this argument, see p 172 ff.below. 395 Chronicle 116.10-14 161 as a Severan bishop.396 He in effect enshrines these heretics into the hall of Egyptian martyrs, not at the expense of all Chalcedonians, but the wicked Kyros, in some sense universalizing the suffering experienced by Egyptian Christians at the hand of the patriarch.

Of course, this point must not be overstated. As we shall see below, support of

Chalcedon frequently does serve as a signal to the reader that even those who appear to be good statesmen or clergy are in fact wicked. But it would be a mistake to think that support for Chalcedon in and of itself is what makes these individuals bad actors.

Chalcedonian ideology survives only insofar as it facilitates this presumably Satanic project. To put it another way, although everyone who is wicked is a supporter of

Chalcedon (or Arius before this council, and paganism before that), not everyone who supported Chalcedon could, de facto, be understood as wicked. Chalcedonians may then be understood as noble and God-loving insofar as they allow correct theology to thrive, or failing that, to at least allow it to survive unencumbered by persecution.

The Christian Universalism of the Chronicle of John of Nikiu

If Chalcedonianism alone is not enough to condemn historical figures, we are left with a more difficult question which is vital to understanding his sectarian affiliation: What was

John’s perception of the defining ecclesiastical events of post-Chalcedonian ecclesiastical history? I have attempted to speak about the splintering of the anti-Chalcedonian movements in Egypt as a splintering into factions within one institution, but there are

396 Eudokianos appears once more in Chronicle 119.8. as an enemy of a military officer named Menas. He was the brother of the prefect Domentianos, who abandoned the city of Nikiou when the Arabs arrived in 641 CE. “Domentianus”, PLRE IIIA, 408. 162 particular instances where one could argue that particular groups had formed distinct para-institutional structures, particularly the Julio-Gaianite aphthartodocetists and the

Severan-Theodosians during the reign of the anti-Chalcedonian Alexandrian patriarch,

Damian (576-605 CE), through the consecration of bishops, sometimes to quite distant locations.397 With that said it is important to emphasize that John of Nikiu, and indeed many of the historical figures about whom he wrote, did not see their particular factions and sub-factions as distinct churches. Rather, for John, the history of the church is that of a universal history dealing with precisely two institutions, the state and the church, their fall from whatever John perceives as orthodoxy, and the causes and outcomes of that fall.

John understood all theological positions as existing within the institution of the church, supported by the state.

Therefore, John understood every event in ecclesiastical history as either fostering the unity of the church in correct theology or attempting to destroy it through disunity and incorrect theology. Of all the historical events which John viewed as vital to the creation of unity, the Henotikon of the emperor Zenon and the Constantinopolitan archbishop Akakios stands out as the first attempt at fostering unity in the oikoumene.

John’s depiction of Zenon is positive but starts out decisively less so.398 He appears initially almost as a function of divine chastisement. John ignores the hostile relations

397 See Aryeh Kofsky, “Julianism after Julian of Halicarnassus”; Phillip Booth, “Towards the Coptic Church: The Making of the Severan Episcopate,” Millennium 14, no 1 (2017): 151-189. For Julianist expansion into Syria, South Arabia, and Armenia, see Dawid Wierzejski, “Anfänge der Julianistichen Hierarchien.” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 20, no. 2 (2016): 276-305. 398 This does not include the prolepsis of Chronicle, 40.8-9, in which Zeno is called a Godloving emperor having converted a temple of Rhea built by Jason and the Argonauts in Cyzicum into a church of the Virgin Mary. 163 between Basiliskos and Zenon, instead asserting that Basiliskos had risen to the throne after Leo I and “the other emperors who succeeded him.”399 Basiliskos failed to uphold his promise to Timothy II Ailouros that he would undo the decisions made at Chalcedon with a formal council in Jerusalem, instead opting for a lenient position of mutual tolerance.400 His punishment for this is the loss of power at the hands of Zenon and a period of instability which followed thereafter.

Under Zenon, Akakios, Patriarch of Constantinople, presents the Henotikon to the emperor and suggests that he ought to subscribe to it.401 This marks a significant shift in the text towards a positive treatment of the emperor. Once John explicitly establishes that

“the letter of Zenon says that there is one nature in the Word of God which was incarnated, and that the bishops who had been removed (presumably from the diptychs) should be remembered,”402 he describes Zenon in the brief note on his death as God- loving, despite his association with an astrologer.403

399 Chronicle, 88.26 400 Chronicle 88.30. Ironically, John later praises Anastasios for a similar show of tolerance and lenience towards the Chalcedonian party. Chronicle 88.92. 401 Two exceptions are that of Flavianos II of Antioch (498-512 CE) who is described as a Nestorian who accepted the document formally, but later joined the Chalcedonians once more, and that of Makedonios of Constantinople, who accepts the Henotikon but is later revealed to be a Nestorian. Makedonios had few friends in either faction, and despite his Chalcedonian leanings, lost the support of hardline Chalcedonians for supporting the Henotikon. Iain Torrance, Christology after Chalcedon: Severus of Antioch and Sergius the Monophysite (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1988), 4. 402 Chronicle, 88.64. Though the bishops are not explicitly named we can simply presume that John meant to refer to bishops who had been punished for failing to adhere to the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon. In point of fact the Henotikon mentions nothing of the sort, at best reducing Chalcedon to a punitive assembly which anathematized Eutyches and Nestorios. William Frend, The Rise of the Monophsyite Movement, 178. 403 Chronicle, 88.92 164

John gives a large role to the Henotikon, which he comes to understand as one of the key tests of orthodoxy among bishops.404 Those who adhere to the document are invariably described as orthodox, and when John describes shifts in ecclesiastical policy under Justin and Justinian, he explicitly chastises both emperors for rejecting the

Henotikon, as well as for making other changes to the norms of church life and generally undoing what John considers orthodoxy. In short, for John, the Henotikon becomes a kind of shorthand for orthodoxy itself, a text John treated as holding the symbolic weight of the entire anti-Chalcedonian movement, surpassing even the second Council of Ephesos in symbolic and practical importance.405 John likely read the Henotikon, as many anti-

Chalcedonians later would, as an implicit rejection of the Council of Chalcedon, even if no explicit mention of the council was made in its actual text.406

As to the actual content of the imperial declaration of faith, John believed that the crux of the text was its subscription to Nikaea, Constantinople, and Ephesos, rejecting the other councils; and indeed an explicit declaration that “The nature of the Word of God which was incarnated is one.”407 One could see how John might have come to this

404 Chronicle, 89.69. One should note that he is not out of the ordinary here, as the Henotikon was with few exceptions treated as a “touchstone” of anti-Chalcedonian orthodoxy. William Frend, The Rise of the Monophsyite Movement, 168. 405 The council at Ephesos is hardly mentioned at all. For references to 2nd Ephesos, see Chronicle 87.34. 406 Sebastian Brock and Brian Fitzgerald, Two Early Lives of Severos, Patriarch of Antioch, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 10. For the text of the Henotikion, see Evagrius Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, 3.14. 407 Chronicle 88.62-63. The actual text of 88.63 translates more precisely as “…the Henotikon, which means, ‘the writing of the faith of the three councils, which are Nikaea, Constantinople, and Ephesos, and which rejects the other councils.’” I understand ይመንንዎን, from መነነ, “to reject,” as the durative use of the imperfect, and this in turn as meaning that the whole clause as the translation of the word “Henotikon,” rather than as an explanation of the text. Of course, one must question whether this gloss is the product of the Ethiopian or Arabic translator of the text, but given that the text is further described as an explicit declaration of the imperial Christological position rather than a declaration about the council, this could be an indication that the gloss is Ethiopian or Arabic, rather than a product of John himself. 165 conclusion, but let us leave aside the issue of his particular reading of the edict’s strong rejection of Chalcedon. John does engage in an intentional misreading: The text of the

Henotikon, as it has come down to us, “studiously avoided the use of the controversial terms ‘nature,’ hypostasis and prosopon.”408 The term which the bishop of Nikiu used, translated into Ethiopic as ጠባይዒ, a borrowing from Arabic, precisely corresponds to

φύσις, and it is this term that the Henotikon specifically avoids. John of Nikiu seems to have gone beyond reading the edict as implicitly anti-dyophysite, claiming that the document explicitly stated just that.409

When the emperor Zenon dies, John refers to him as God-loving, and his successor Anastasios comes to power. Anastasios is unambiguously understood as orthodox, and predictably so, for the prophecy of an Egyptian abbot, Abba Jeremiah, suggested that he would become emperor only if he rejected Chalcedon.410 When dissension and unrest became the order of the day, because of the enmity of Satan,

Anastasios was able to restore order, and when that task was accomplished, he turned his attention to religious matters, establishing the same peace in the ecclesiastical sphere by agreeing with the Henotikon.411 In John’s view, peace was dependent on adherence to the

Henotikon of Zeno: When Flavianos of Antioch betrays his initial acceptance of the

Henotikon by joining the Chalcedonians in accepting the Tome of Leo, thereby betraying

408 Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions, 198. 409 This may have reflected John’s anticipation of Anastasios I’s explicit support of this position in 510 CE. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 217-218. 410 Chronicle 89.11 411 Chronicle, 89.18. John is vague, simply suggesting that people demanded that some individuals not be sent to prison. Following Charles, The Chronicle of John, 123n195, this is likely a mangling of an incident involving the Green faction in the Hippodrome. See, Chronographia, 16.4, Chronicon Paschale, trans. Michael Whitby and Mary Whitby (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989), 99. 166 the faith of the state, he is banished to Petra; Makedonios, the patriarch of

Constantinople, is also expelled from Constantinople.412 It is likely that the unrest that had previously broken out in Antioch was simply understood as a symptom of his betrayal by John.413 When Makedonios lost an argument with Severos concerning the

Trisagion, he stirred up “heretics” (presumably Chalcedonians) against the emperor, claiming that he had introduced novelties and so corrupted the faith.414 This eventually sparks a riot in which a crowd of citizens attack a monk in the house of Marinos, a Syrian official, and proclaim Areobindos, a son-in-law of the Western Roman emperor.415 It is revealed beforehand that he too had ostensibly accepted the Henotikon.

These narratives illustrate the stabilizing effect that John believed the Henotikon had. It acted as not only a proclamation of correct doctrine, but an imperial document by which the emperor would unite the church. As such, when Satan acts against the emperor, we find him acting through those who pretend to accept it, hiding their scheming behind formal declarations of adherence. Therefore, the instability that plagued Anastasios’ reign was not a function of his incompetence or of his having lost the favor of God; in fact, on

412 Makedonios: Chronicle, 89.68. Flavianos: Chronicle, 89.69. Of course, the actual events surrounding the expulsions of Flavioanos and Makedonios are more complex than John portrays them. For example, John fails to note, for example, that Makedonios was at one point Anastasios I’s spiritual advisor, and both figures were forced at various points to publicly establish themselves as sympathetic and hostile to Chalcedon. Furthermore, On the religious policies of Anastasios I, see Fiona Haarer, Anastasius I: Politics and Empire in the Late Roman World (Cambridge: Francis Cairns, 2006), 115-183; John Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Chiristian Divisions, 202-203 notes that Makedonios’s exile did not mark an official turn to monophysitism as John of Nikiou suggests, merely a more lenient position. 413 Antioch and all the cities broke out into civil war, and Anastasios insisted that they cease fighting and submit to his authority as was appropriate for Christians. Chronicle 89.17. Later, a group of Antiochene Christians burn a synagogue in Daphne and change it into a church of St. Leontios, prompting Anastasios to send officers on two separate occasions to quell the uprising and punish the ne’er-do-wells. Chronicle 88.23-29 414 Chronicle, 88.59 415 Chronicle, 88.62-65. On the Trisagion riots, see Kazimierz Ginter, “The Trisagion Riots (512) as an Example of Interaction between Politics and Liturgy,” Studia Ceranea 7 (2017): 41-57. 167 one notable occasion, it is God’s protection that saves Anastasios from an attempted assassination during a riot.416 Rather, instability resulted from the disobedience of antagonistic figures, usually heretics, aided and abetted by Satanic interference.417 The reader is invited to view the Henotikon not as a partisan manifesto, but as the product of the kind of leadership that John believed an emperor should exercise over both church and state as a necessary prerequisite for the safety of the global community of Christians.

But what of orthodox writings that were not generated by the state or by figures who were not emperors? John of Nikiu does mention the Philalethes of Severos of

Antioch and the Mystagogia of the Constantinopolitan Patriarch John III Scholastikos as key texts, but he assigns to them no particular importance in the intellectual dueling that determined the fate of ecclesiastical politics. More important is the work of Cyril of

Alexandria, around which many actual theological debates of the sixth century turned.

John’s treatment of the works that assess Cyril is important in revealing the means by which he justified his theological position and those of the figures whom he praises. For example, in the case of the Philalethes, John’s main criterion of validity appears to be the degree to which any particular idea adhered to the teachings of previous teachers of the church, particularly Cyril of Alexandria. Severos’ Philalethes was in fact produced in part as a response to the production of a Chalcedonian florilegium of Cyril’s work, which

416 Chronicle, 89.18-21. 417 Satan is explicitly blamed for one riot in Constantinople (Chronicle, 89.18). Another in Antioch is also implicitly blamed on Satanic enmity, (Chronicle, 89.23). Other disturbances are blamed on cannibalistic barbarians (Chronicle, 89.33, Nephalios and his persecution of the orthodox monks of Palestine (Chronicle, 89.48) ), the Chalcedonian patriarch of Constantinople Makedonios (Chronicle, 89.59), and Vitalianos, a disloyal commander of the Thracian troops who also happened to be an enemy of Severos and so we can presume, by the transitive logic at work in the text, an opponent of anti-Chalcedonian orthodoxy (Chronicle, 89.79). 168 had, in Severos’ view, selectively made use of citations of Cyril’s work in order to support a dyophysite position.418

For John of Nikiu, theological debate turned around the careful interpretation of historical texts which had already been defined as authoritative by both parties, much as it did for the theologians engaged in the debates that he described. For example, John demonstrates Severos’ brilliance by demonstrating his deep understanding of Cyril’s work: when an Alexandrian named Dorotheos, who had with him the “writings of the faith of St. Cyril,” spoke with Severos in Constantinople, Dorotheos “found in him the gift of the doctrine of holy Cyril.”419 While John seems to stress that it was both

Dorotheos and Cyril who argued against Makedonios and the Chalcedonians, and that they both composed the Philalethes together, the contrast between the sources of their knowledge highlights the brilliance of Severos as a leader of the anti-Chalcedonian movement.420 Dorotheos carries the treatise of Cyril from which he derives his

418 “He has made a compilation out of some treatises of the holy Cyril, entirely changing them in the process to fit his own doctrine, imagining that they will support his iniquitous teaching; while others of them he has willfully mutilated- all those which perfectly demonstrate the meaning of what has been said, and which were able to reprove his cunning.” Severos of Antioch, Philalethes, ed. Robert Hespel, Corpus Christianorum Orientalium 133 (Louvain: Imprimerie Orientaliste L. Durbecq, 1952), 159. English translation of this passage: Allen and Hayward, Severus of Antioch, 66. 419 Chronicle 89.52. 420 Zotenberg noted that there is a significant problem with John’s account of this meeting: We are only aware of one Alexandrian Dorotheos who lived at the same time as Severos. He was a Chalcedonian, who was sent into exile for a lengthy work in defense of the council which he sent to Anastasios’ sister-in-law, Magna. (Theophanes, Chronographia, AM 6002). Though the two did communicate, it seems highly unlikely that they would have agreed to attack Chalcedonians together. What is more, we know for certain that the sole author of the Philalethes was Severos, and that he had composed it while he was still a monk of Palestine. Hermann Zotenberg, “Mémoire sur la Chronique Byzantine de Jean, Évêque de Nikiou,” Journal Asiatique 7, no. 12 (1878): 313. The most intuitive explanation for this is that John had reworked the history of his ecclesiastical hierarchy in such a way as to suggest that it was not imported from Syria, but at least in part the product of Egyptian intellectuals as well. While there are many opportunities and figures with which to do this, the placement of an Egyptian as an author of one of the key anti- Chalcedonian texts of the sixth century positions the Egyptian church as active participants in the intellectual world of Severos. 169 knowledge and ability to argue against the Chalcedonians; Severos was, to borrow the translation used by Charles and Zotenberg, imbued with it.421 To expand this point beyond the individual under discussion in this passage, John did not understand the monophysite position as a particularly clever or novel interpretation of Christology, but as the Cyrillian position, and the only form of orthodoxy that the church could accept.

This was not a battle between warring dogmas, but an attempt by Chalcedonian usurpers to undermine the church’s theological foundation and its relationship with God.

John assigns importance, then, not to the miaphysite position in and of itself, but to the proper functions of church and state. He understands the state as operating well precisely when it intervenes in church affairs, using the force of imperial decrees to promote ecclesiastical unity and to squash heresy and dissent; the emperor should serve as the ultimate guarantor of unity and orthodoxy. The church and its thinkers, conversely, are depicted as intellectuals who provide the framework in which this exercise of state power over the church finds its theological foundations and justifications. When the state took up an anti-Chalcedonian reading of the Henotikon as its official policy, it reflected the healthy function of the institutions of church and state, but only because the individuals who led the church-state apparatus, the patriarchs and the emperor, were in and of themselves righteous and orthodox people. Satan’s attempts to undermine the health of the institution are depicted as attacks on the individuals who promote anti-

Chalcedonian orthodoxy, understood broadly as adherence to the norms established by early church fathers such as St. Cyril of Alexandria, but also figures not mentioned

421 Charles, The Chronicle of John, 127; Zotenberg, Chronique, 374. 170 above, such as Gregory of Nazianzus, or the decisions of councils such as First Ephesos and the Council of Nikaea.

On the other hand, even when the institution seems to be in a state of disrepair, particularly after the death of Anastasios, there are still righteous individuals to be found throughout state institutions, and their righteousness is determined by their adherence to correct theology. Failing that, meritorious figures could still spare the righteous from persecution, and demonstrate merciful or deferent behavior to their opponents.

John’s Theological Positions

Considering these factors and the actual events of the periods John covers, we may now venture into an examination of John’s theological position. If we do not begin from the supposition that John was a perfect avatar of the normative anti-Chalcedonian theology of his day (if such a thing even existed), we are left with a figure whose theological stance is mysterious at best, and at worst we risk attributing key bits of historical evidence to error.

In other words, we cannot simply write off the bishop of Nikiu as a “monophysite” historian because this tells us almost nothing about his theology, on the one hand, and completely erases his nuanced and ecumenical historical judgements on the other.

Of course, John certainly had a broadly anti-Chalcedonian view of Christology.

This much is apparent from his treatment of the imperial figures who called the council,

Markianos and Pulcheria, with the latter depicted as the prime instigator, challenging her brother Theodosios and ultimately violating her vow of chastity in order to seize

171 power.422 But as we have seen, this is not the beginning and end of the history of anti-

Chalcedonian theological positions, both in terms of ecclesiastical history and

Christology by the end of the seventh century when the Chronicle was produced. There are several instances in which John of Nikiu offers his commentary on moments of ecclesiastical history and these offer the clearest window into the author’s own beliefs, and perhaps what he viewed as key theological conflicts in his own time.

Instead of exhaustively listing every instance in which John offers his commentary on theological controversies, it will suffice here to mention some accounts that no one doubts are representative of his views, and some that have prompted expressions of confusion in scholars. For example, there can be no doubt that John is hostile to any indication of duophysite Christology, but his reasoning is not always clear.

He objects that Proclus had “sided with the Nestorians” by suggesting that “if Christ was in every respect incapable of suffering after his incarnation, he could no more suffer in body than could the divine nature of the Son.”423 John immediately chastises him by suggesting that this was a position held by those who believe in four persons of the trinity, but it is not readily apparent how John reaches that conclusion.424

He blames the separation of Egypt from the Roman Empire after the Arab conquest and the deposition of the emperor Herakleonas in 641 C.E. on the Chalcedonian hegemony over in the Christian population of Egypt, and he claims that just as Severos

422 Chronicle, 85.36. On Pulcheria’s role (or lack thereof) in the coronation of Markianos, see Richard Burgess, “The Accession of Marcian in the Light of Chalcedonian Apologetic and Monophysite Polemic,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 86/87 (1993/1994): 64-68 423 Chronicle, 89.43-44 424 Chronicle 89.44. 172 had prophesied concerning the reign of Anastasios, the Romans had undermined their ability to control the state as shown by the inability to establish father-son succession .425

He goes on to state that the position of the Chalcedonians was that there are two distinct natures in Christ after they became one.426 John claims to cite Gregory the Theologian:

We recognize God the Word to be one from two; For the Lord was united to the flesh and was one substance (አካለ. Alternatively, hypostasis). The divinity is not transformed into manhood, nor the manhood [into] the other nature, but the Word which was incarnated was never altered, and the Word cannot change. Indeed, the Word which was incarnated is one Substance of the Lord.427

This is uncontroversial in its anti-Chalcedonianism and pairs well with John’s other expressions of anti-Chalcedonianism, such as when he describes the flight of the

Chalcedonian Patriarch Kalendion and the return of Peter the Fuller.428 In that instance

John explicitly states that “we anathematize the council of Chalcedon and their impure faith.”429

The passage appears more enigmatic, however, when read against other instances of theological exposition in the text. For example, in his description of the theological wrangling of the last days of the emperor Justinian, John tells the reader that it was in fact

Justinian who had taken up the position that Christ’s body was corruptible, and that he punished the Constantinopolitan Patriarch Eutychios when the latter told the emperor,

425 Chronicle, 120.56. John makes a final reference to a letter of Severos which states “No son will sit on his father’s throne as long as the faith of the Chalcedonians exists…” This prophecy is also used to similar ends in after the death of Herakleios (Chronicle, 116.6). On John’s depiction of the succession crises that followed the death of Herakleios, see Phillip Booth, “The Last Years of Cyrus, Patriarch of Alexandria.” I should also note that while John claims to cite Gregory the Theologian, we find no text that reflects this supposed citation. 426 Chronicle, 120.56 427 Chronicle, 120.57 428 Chronicle, 88.64 429 Ibid. 173

“The body of our Lord which suffered for us is living, imperishable, incorruptible, and unchanged. We believe that he gladly accepted sufferings by his own will and after the resurrection he was uncorrupted and unchanged.”430 This report, which precedes the account of the arrival of Apollinarios, mentioned above, might easily be written off as a misunderstanding introduced after several transmissions, but John seems to emphasize the point, concluding the account by stating, “Therefore, it is incumbent upon us, concerning discussion about whether he was corruptible or not, to put aside (i.e. to ignore) the life-giving suffering which he accepted in the flesh by his will and by his power, and which he did for our salvation.”431 If John had simply stated that the Romans were attached to this dogma, the argument that this was an error of successive translations might be plausible. But his insistence on emphasizing this theological argument is puzzling, and by making use of the writings of Cyril and an author he believed to be Gregory of Nazianzus, and referencing those of Severos, we are left with the conclusion that our author intended to defend this position.432 While it is necessary to consider the possibility that John was, as a historian, mistaken about who defended which position, this would be a remarkable error on his part. This was very much a live issue for the bishop of Nikiu, as Gaianites were still influential when John composed his history. We can presume then that if Gaianite theology had not changed significantly in

430 Chronicle, 94.4 431 Chronicle, 94.10 432 Yonatan Moss, Incorruptible Bodies, 151n27, suggests that it is not clear which letter of Succensus John of Nikiou might have been referring to, but it is undoubtedly the first, as the second letter makes no reference to the corruptibility of Christ’s body. He correctly suggests that the reference to a Gregory the Theologian was more reminiscent of the Kata Meros Pistis of Ps.-Gregory Thaumaturgos, and not any known work by Gregory of Nazianzus. Yonatan Moss, Incorruptible Bodies, 151n31 174 the century between the events in the Chronicle, and John’s composition, he had not only made an error about the ideological positions of two different factions, but had inadvertently painted Severos as a heretic. This simply seems implausible to me, for if

John had indeed made this error, it would be akin to an American historian of the Civil

War insisting that it was in fact the Confederates who fought to end the practice of chattel slavery in the North.

Hyperbole aside, John would not be entirely incorrect in drawing a link between aphthartodocetism and Severos’ theological writings. As mentioned above, Julian of

Halikarnassos indeed believed that he had simply taken Severos’ position, as given in the

Philalethes, to its logical conclusion, and presented his aphthartodocetist writings to

Severos, prompting the Antiochene patriarch to produce an apologia for the work.

Yonatan Moss believed that John of Nikiu was a Severan only in name and that his

Christology was Julianist, and that this was “consistent with this ecclesiological posture.”433 In other words, John had not stumbled into an antiquated heresy in the course of writing a neutral historical account but insisted on identifying Severos as an aphthartodocetist (itself an early Julianist position) and claimed that this was orthodoxy.

While it might be an overstatement to suggest that John was an aphthartodocetist or Julio-Gaianite, it is certainly plausible that John was far more ecumenical in his sympathies than modern scholarship is willing to concede. The passages I presented at the beginning of this section as representing a mainline Severan-Theodosian view suddenly appear vaguer in their Christological details; they are certainly broadly anti-

433 Ibid. 175

Chalcedonian, but the emphasis on the incorruptibility of Christ’s body is in line with the

Julianist position.434 In some sense, Yonatan Moss is right to identify him as a Julianist, but misses the significance of this position. What we have is a bishop of no small rank who seems to have held beliefs that were heretical by the standards of his own church and put him in the same theological camp as his living, breathing ecclesiastical opponents.

We must return to the problem of the two accounts of the Alexandrian patriarch

Apollinarios mentioned above. Both are brief: the first account simply notes that after the end of the patriarchate of Zoilos, “the emperor [Justinian] appointed an anagnostis from the monastery of Salama in the city of Alexandria, who was named Apollinarios

[ዩሊናርዮስ]; and he was compassionate and aligned with the party of the Theodosians. And they [i.e., “the inhabitants of the city,” mentioned in the previous sentence] prevailed on him that he might become patriarch instead of Zoilos, and they promised him many gifts that the faith of the church might persevere.”435The second account reads as follows” And

[the emperor Justinian] sent a letter to Agathon, the prefect [ሥዩም] of the city of

Alexandria that he might establish Apollinarios [ዩሊናርዮስ], who was the qomos

[hegoumen] of the monastery of Banton (i.e. the Ennaton), as the patriarch of the

Chalcedonians in the city of Alexandria and the other cities of Egypt.436

Modern scholarship has treated these two passages as contradictory and concluded that the presence of both creates incoherence in the work. Jean Maspero was largely hostile to the idea that John had produced an accurate or coherent account of the

434 Chronicle 120.57. 435 Chronicle 92.9-10 436 Chronicle 94.8 176 career of Apollinarios and gave up on attempting to study the accounts in any detail. He found the first account of Apollinarios in John of Nikiu so confusing, he could only comment, “…je renonce à découvrir par quelle suite de confusions et de quiproquos le text actuel de la chronique en est arrive là.”437 Philip Booth on the other hand was content to accept both accounts as an uncritical assimilation of two different sources, and inferred that Apollinarios had formerly been a Severan-Theodosian and was convinced to align himself with the Chalcedonian faction of Alexandria.438 But he does not investigate this further, satisfied with the notion that some within the Ennaton had found their own ways to make their peace with the Chalcedonian church. These accounts merit closer study, however, for two reasons: first, given the paucity of evidence of Apollinarios’s career prior to taking the patriarchate, any such evidence deserves attention; second, the ambiguities of these accounts may give us a sense of John’s ecumenical view of church history.

Let us first dispel the notion that the two accounts are totally contradictory.

Despite the apparent differences on Apollinarios’s location, both place him in a monastery near Alexandria. There is no evidence of a monastery named Salama in

Alexandria, but there was such a monastery in the Ennaton, suggesting that in both instances the Chronicle seems to drawing from a tradition which understood Apollinarios to be a member of one of the various monastic communities of the Ennaton.439 The first

437 Maspero, Histoire des Patriarches d’Alexandrie, 158. The most detailed modern account of Apollonarios’s career remains Maspero, Histoire des Patriarches d’Alexandrie, 156-165. 438 Booth, “Towards the Coptic Church,” 158-159. 439 Mary Ghattas, “Toward the Localization of th Hennaton Monastic Complex,” in Christianity and Monasticism in Northern Egypt: Beni Suef, Giza, Cairo, and the Nile Delta, eds Gawdat Gabra and Hany Takla (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2017), 42. 177 account claims that he was a “reader” (anagnostes) and “compassionate”, or “merciful”

(መሓሬ, mähare), while the second terms him a “leader” (hegoumenos) of the monastery.

Possibly the latter term is used generically, and “reader” describes Apollinarios’s precise role; in any case, they agree that Apollinarios was a prominent monk. The accounts agree that “the inhabitants of the city” played some role in Apollinarios’s appointment and reception as patriarch

We must also consider the contexts in which the two accounts appear. The first account appears at the start of a chapter that begins with the death of the Egyptian anti-

Chalcedonian patriarch Timothy III, and it describes the tumult surrounding the accessions of Gaianas and Theodosios. Apollinarios appears as the last of a string of three

Justinianic appointments to the Alexandrian see after Paul Tabennesiota and Zoilos.440

This list is then followed by a mangled account of the Second Council of Constantinople, which seems at times supportive of the council (“And after much strife and toil, many men accepted the righteous faith…”441) but at others seems to take a more mainline anti-

Chalcedonian view, for example, in Asturalyos’ letter to the emperor Justinian establishing the true faith as that which recognizes one nature in God, Mary as theotokos, and the reality of Christ’s suffering in the crucifixion.442 Therefore Apollinarios appears in the first account as yet another imperial appointee, and this time a turncoat, who was apparently persuaded to leave the church in its Chalcedonian state. But of the three

440 Chronicle, 92.1-10 441 Chronicle, 92.11 442 Chronicle, 92.15-17. It is unclear who this figure as, as he is only mentioned in this passage of the Chronicle. It is possible that the Ethiopian translators were unable to read the unmarked Arabic and misread this figure’s actual name, but it is impossible to know who this figure was. “Asturaljos,” PLRE II, 174. 178

Justinianic appointments in Alexandria, the first a Nestorian, the second accused of sexually assaulting a deacon, he is far and away the least objectionable, a Severan whose only fault was making no effort to bring the church back in line with an anti-

Chalcedonian theology.

The second account is preceded by yet another narrative of the disagreements between the Theodosians and Gaianites, this time focusing primarily on their theological differences across the empire, rather than what had occurred with the death of Timothy

III in 535. Here we find Eutychios of Constantinople (patriarch of Constantinople 552-

565, 577-582) presenting the aphthartodocetist position to Justinian as orthodox, and

Justinian in turn rejecting this proposition and ostensibly supporting Julian in suggesting

“He was a man like us, and the holy writings say, ‘Christ suffered for us in the body.’”443

While the theological position described is incorrect, this is clearly an account of the last year of Justinian’s life, in which he began adhering to a kind of Chalcedonian aphthartodocetism, with the only problem being that the positions have been reversed:

Justinian, and by extension Apollinarios, is instead depicted as supporting the Severan-

Thedoosian and Chalcedonian view of Christ’s body, and Eutychios becomes an aphthartodocetist. What is more, apharthartodocetism is presented as the Severan-

Theodosian theology, and explicitly supported by further citation by the author with references to Cyril’s letter to Succensus and an uncertain Gregory the Theologian.444

While this might easily be written off as a mistake on the translator’s part (or John’s for

443 Chronicle, 94.1-10 444 Ibid. 179 that matter), the surviving Cyrillian letter could very well be interpreted as supporting either theological stance.445 Here Apollinarios is presented as a figure who was rejected by the city of Alexandria precisely because of his hostility to the incorruptibility doctrine.

Finally, we must consider the distinct possibility that the term “Theodosian” in the first account may be intended to distinguish those who supported the imperial-backed return of Theodosios to his episcopal see from those who supported the brief rule of

Gaianas. It may refer to those who rejected the Julio-Gaianite pre-resurrection incorruptibility/impassibility doctrine, Chalcedonians and anti-Chalcedonians alike, as opposed to the Severan and Chalcedonian position which held that the body of Christ became incorruptible and impassible only after the resurrection. According to Evagrios and Michael the Syrian, Apollinarios was a strong anti-aphthartodocetist, siding with

Eutychios of Constantinople, Anastasios of Antioch, and others in rejecting Justinian’s aphthartodocetic turn towards the end of his life.446 That is when he describes

Apollinarios as “Theodosian,” John is saying that the patriarch was hostile to the

Gaianites and their theological position, and nothing more.

445 The following passage seems to support a stance of incorruptibility: “Since he is life and life-giver, he would destroy the corruption in the flesh and rebuke its inborn motions, plainly those which tend toward love of pleasure.” Cyril of Alexandria, Letter of Succensus, Bishop of Diocaesarea,in St. Cyril of Alexandria: Letters 1-150 transl. John McEnerney, (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987), p 195-196, and again “Wherefore since human flesh became the Word's own, the subjection to corruption has come to an end, and since as God, he who made it his own and proclaimed it as his own "did not know sin," as I said, he also put an end to the sickness of loving pleasure. And the only begotten Word of God has not corrected this for himself, for he is what he always is, but obviously for us.” Ibid. For more on this expression of aphthartodocetism, see below. 446 Evagrius Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, 4.39; Michael the Syrian, Chronicle, 9.34; On Justinian’s aphthartodocetist turn, see Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions, 244; On the distinction between Justinian’s aphthartodocetism and mainline Julio-Gaianism: Michael Van Esbroeck, “The Aphthartodocetic Edict of Justinian and its Armenian Background,” in Studia Patristica 30, ed. Elizabeth Livingstone (Leuven: Peeters, 1997), 584-585; Kate Adshead, “Justinian and Apthartodocetism,” in Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity, eds. Stephen Mitchell and Geoffrey Greatrex (London: Duckworth and the Classical Press of Wales, 2000), 331-336. 180

In sum, both accounts depict Apollonarios as anti-aphthartodocetic, without addressing his stance vis-à-vis Chalcedon and Severan theology. The first describes

Apollinarios as a sympathetic character, a useful ally in the fight against the Gaianites, who were popular in Alexandria, and a tremendous improvement over Paul, whom John described as an apostate Nestorian and persecutor, and over Zoilos, who caved in the face of Alexandria’s hostility to his rule.447 The second account reflects a tradition, perhaps made by a Gaianite (or at least a sympathetic) redactor, who viewed Apollinarios as fundamentally hostile to the aphthartodocetists in Alexandria and Egypt more broadly.

What is clear is that both stem from a tradition, perhaps indigenous, which highlights

Apollinarios’ hostility to the theological position of aphthartodocetism, on the one hand, and those who supported Gaianas’s ascension, on the other. Counter-intuitively, this might have rendered the controversial patriarch as a palatable figure to both

Chalcedonians (who would approve of a Chalcedonian choice regardless) and anti-

Chalcedonians Severan-Theodosians (who were hostile to the Gaianite party).

Though John appears to use two separate accounts, and the factual details seem to be incorrect at points, the two accounts nevertheless point to an attempt to paint

Apollinarios in a sympathetic light. There is certainly evidence that there has been some editorial work on the first account of Apollinarios. The Table of Contents heading for the chapter in which the first account of Apollonarios appears reads, “The reason for us

Christians being named after the name of Theodosios, and the appearance of the

447 On the popularity of the Gaianite doctrine in Alexandria, see Liberatus, Breviarium, 20 and Kofsky, “Julianism after Julian of Halicarnassus,” 253-54 181

Gaianites and their faith. And the reason the officials posted notices in the forum (ምሥያጥ) so that there would be a record of them (i.e. the notices) so that all who might want them would take them.”448 It is not clear what exactly this means, and Zotenberg gave up attempting to translate the second sentence, while that offered by Charles is incoherent and incorrectly translated.449 But the second sentence of the entry does not correspond to any events in the surviving Ethiopic chapter, suggesting that something had indeed been removed from the chapter, either by John himself or someone else for reasons that are simply lost to successive translation. Nonetheless, the point remains that, if one abandons a polarized dualistic model of Egyptian Christianity, the two accounts of Apollinarios are not fundamentally contradictory, but emblematic of both the complex factionalism of the period and John’s ecumenical perspective.

To John, the particulars of ecclesiastical allegiance mattered very little, and it was upright theology that was important to him. John’s position may be incoherent to modern historians who hold to a dualistic model of late ancient Egyptian Christianity: he simultaneously stood firmly on the side of the Severan-Theodosian ecclesiastical institutional apparatus, held aphthartodocetist beliefs, and supported the Chalcedonian institutional apparatus and its state backers where it tangibly supported his interests and beliefs. To this end, we might understand the aphthartodocetist account of Apollinarios’s entry into Alexandria as supportive of this project. Aryeh Kofsky argued that the

448 Chronicle,TOC 91 449 Zotenberg, Chronique, 235n2. Charles’ translation of the second sentence reads, “And concerning that which the chief officials published in the market-places, that there should be a memorial with them till all who wished might take it.” Charles, The Chronicle of John, 11. 182 incorruptibility position of Julian of Halikarnassos stemmed in part from the Asketikon of

Abba Isaiah, and that viewing Christ as incorruptible meant that his voluntary suffering offered humans the possibility of a return to their original state, tacitly encouraging asceticism as a means to that end.450 To put this another way, there was a great deal of synergy between the ascetic practices vaunted by monastic communities of Egypt and the theology offered by Julian and his followers. If John did indeed compose the Julianist sections of the text, we ought to understand this as supportive of a view that individual righteousness could restore not only the body of the Christian oikumene but also the bodies of individual Christians to a natural state of sinlessness.

Conclusion

To conclude, I return to the issue of the sympathetic treatment of Justinian, by all accounts the archnemesis of John of Nikiu’s own Egyptian Severan-Theodosian party.

John’s view of Justinian was complicated by his project of focusing on the behavior of individuals. John was in a position wherein it was important to him to describe all institutional failures or successes as the product of individual behavior. Justinian’s career must have been particularly complicated for John, as this period of tremendous success was also a traumatic, if formative period for the anti-Chalcedonian movement. He could not simply ascribe all these successes to Justinian’s correct religion, and instead opted to paint a picture of a man who begins as just and pious, but once falling prey to heretical individuals becomes a persecutor of the righteous and a heretic. He is then able to ascribe

Justinian’s initial victories to his piety, and his later failures to the wrath of God, as

450 Kofsky, “The Miaphysite Monasticism of Gaza” 183 expressed by natural disaster. John did not present a polarized memory of Justinian because this simply did not reflect his own reality.

In his brilliant analysis of miaphysite political thought in the sixth century, and the Ecclesiastical History of John of Ephesos in particular, Philip Wood suggests that

John of Ephesos was aware that because imperial support, while expected, would often not come, he could turn to non-Roman Christian powers which “challenged the monopoly of the Roman emperors on a pious mandate for rule.”451 In sum, John of

Ephesos conceived of the monophysite church in Syria as a distinct institution belonging to an imagined community that was separate from the Roman Empire, and, we may presume, the Chalcedonian church it supported.452

I mention this analysis to contrast it with John of Nikiu. John of Nikiu did not live in the sixth century, nor did he live under a Roman state. While he saw the Roman government as historically important for the formation of the church, it was not the government under which he lived. Regardless, his treatment of ecclesiastical and theological issues seems to demonstrate that he imagined a community of Christians that still included the Roman state and the Christians who lived within it, Chalcedonians included. His pessimistic view, I argue, was informed by this very fact: where John of

Ephesos could look to other kings to fill the role that Roman emperors were once expected to, John saw no alternative in an Arab Muslim state.

451 Wood, We Have no King but Christ, 215 452 Ibid. 184

Neither John’s world, nor his Chronicle, can be so neatly bifurcated along ecclesiastical or Christological lines. To John’s mind, there was only one Christian church in Egypt, to which all Egyptians who had not completely apostatized belonged.

Because his view of church disputes was not institutional, the explanation for division and schism rests at the level of individuals in positions of power. Furthermore, we may conclude that for John, while moral uprightness was vital to survival of state and ecclesiastical institutions, and by extension the Christian oikumene, that a good institution did not always produce good individuals, and more importantly, that individual rectitude was malleable. This might have encouraged John’s readers to be always on guard, to carefully consider their moral positions, and to constantly engage in the toil of resisting and rejecting diabolic temptation where it could do a great deal of damage, that is, in the realm of theology and Christology.

185

Chapter 6. Conclusion

This study has made several important challenges to modern scholarship on the Chronicle of John of Nikiu. Scholars have treated the Chronicle as hopelessly corrupted through successive translation. The task of the historian of early Byzantium and the Arab conquest of Egypt has been to dig past the simple speech, horrendous errors, and difficult preservation history, in order to find gems of historical truth from sources that predate the

Chronicle’s inept author. The positivist approach treats John as a compiler, and a poor one at that,—at worst, a derivative, monophysite partisan writer, or at best, a one- dimensional mouthpiece of burgeoning Coptic identity who was largely alienated from the Byzantine sources from which he drew. In these ways scholars have transformed John into an avatar of Coptic monophysite sentiment, a copyist whose sentiments were no more complicated than a hostility towards Constantinople and its Chalcedonian church, and whose historical outlook was provincial, and focused particularly on Egypt

By abandoning this utilitarian approach, we find an author who was deeply pessimistic about the state of his world and his home, even though the end of governance in Egypt by the Byzantine state that had persecuted his church offered a host of new opportunities and had largely left the wealth of his socio-economic class intact. But we do not find someone whose view of the world had shrunk to Egypt alone. Instead, John is

186 at once hostile toward heresy and yet found many heretics worthy of praise. The

Chronicle stands as a complex snapshot of a moment of attempted identity formation, not of Coptic identity, but of a Christian identity that integrated Egypt into the wider community of Christian believers beyond its borders. John leveraged his epistemological and moral authority to recast Roman history and the history of Christianity in such a way as to explain why one ought to live as a good Christian, rather than simply explaining how one ought to do so.

John’s theory of history and prescriptive guidelines reveal an author who, far from parochial, was very interested in the broader world—“world” here meaning the

Eastern Mediterranean and, later, the Roman empire—and was not narrowly focused on the Christians of Egypt, understood as distinct and separate from the Roman empire of which it had been a part for over half a millennium. Because his task was to provide moral exemplars and show the effects of their actions on the broader Christian oikoumene’s well-being, the Chronicle was largely concerned with individual actors, and if any “people” were understood to be the subject of this text, it was the Christian people.

John undergirded this theory of history with a coherent understanding of divine and demonic interaction with humanity. Instances of supernatural interaction with humanity had the function of revealing the broader consequences of success and failure for John’s “lover of toil,” who sought moral excellence, and also revealed his monastic outlook, which externalized and exculpated human behavior and its consequences.

Lapses in discipline could invite demons who could indirectly cause the deaths of many, or worse still upend a state. Conversely, the morally upright could always rely on the

187 support of God and a close relationship with the divine that would ensure the well-being of the individual, and more importantly, garner divine support against the demonic forces which John depicted as perpetually lying in wait.

Yet John did not create a narrative that exclusively pointed to his own church and its predecessors as the only individuals capable of moral excellence and religious discipline. John’s Egyptian context was a complicated one in which doctrinal boundaries were often unclear and shifting, and where one could reasonably expect moments of collaboration and cross-pollination between Chalcedonians and anti-Chalcedonians.453 As such, the moral universe depicted in the Chronicle is equally complex, creating a vision of the past in which doctrinal opponents could be appreciated for their compassion and piety, while criticized for their theology.

Although modern scholars have long recognized that the material conditions and socio-cultural mentalities which prevailed in Roman Egypt were important features of the

Islamic period, no study of John has to date attempted to address his interest in Rome despite living long after Rome’s presence in Egypt had dissipated. While there is some evidence that the Arabs had begun a process of integrating themselves into Egypt, a series of gaping social, cultural, and religious chasms had been left by the hasty final exit of the Roman government from Egyptian life, particularly in the realm of religion. John’s work reflects an attempt to fill these vacuums and to depict and thus to form the church as a community of moral exemplars and pedagogues.

453 On the complex and often cordial relationship between the Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian churches in Egypt, see Ewa Wipszycka, “How Insurmountable was the Chasm between Monophysites and Chalcedonians?” in Beyond Conflicts: Cultural and Religious Cohabitations in Alexandria and Egypt between the 1st and the 6th Century CE ed. Luca Arcari (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 207-226. 188

John’s prescriptive narrative schema relied on both his historical learning and his moral authority as a bishop to attempt to draw his audience to his party of Severan

Christians, and John saw this party as the universal Christian identity, of which his church was a representative. We must concede that he was not popular: ultimately, the works of his contemporary George the Archdeacon would better stand the test of time in his native Egypt, as the Severan Coptic church flourished. But it is still surprising to note that, even as the bonds of international Christian solidarity looked as though they might whither in the face of political circumstance and doctrinal conflict, here one bishop still understood his church to be universal, and its foundations still distinctly Roman.

With this in mind, the Chronicle must be foregrounded in discussions of the position of Coptic in late-Roman and early Islamic Egypt, and this conversation must extend beyond the realm of language. Recently Jean-Luc Fournet addressed Greek’s persistent prestige over Coptic as the language of law and political and ecclesiastical governance well after the withdrawal of the Roman state from Egypt. Greek was the language of choice for everything from liturgical language, to official documents and funeral inscriptions. In his own words, “it occupied an overarching position in all senses of the term.”454 He also notes its dominance as the language of the Church of Egypt.455 In a particularly striking passage, Fournet attempts to address the question of whether the growth of Coptic-language legal documentation coincided with a decline of Hellenism.456

454 Jean-Luc Fournet, The Rise of Coptic: Egyptian versus Greek in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 57. 455 Ibid., 58 notes that the last extant festal letter announcing the date of Easter, from 713 or 719, was produced in Greek and subsequently translated. 456 Ibid., 96 defines “Hellenism” as “Greek language culture in all its forms.” 189

Based on the available papyrological evidence, both documentary and literary, he argued that Greek “was very much alive, but its sphere of influence shrank as it came to be used for gradually more practical and utilitarian purposes.” 457 If we consider this development alongside the decline of Egyptian cities, beginning in the sixth century, whose lifestyles

Fournet sees as fundamental to literary production, we might conclude that the civic life that had defined Roman Egypt receded into the villages, which, while not totally disavowing Hellenism, eventually let it fade into irrelevance as it no longer became necessary for those with prominence in society to have access to the Greek language and its texts.458

How remarkable, then, is it to find an author who so comfortably straddled the line between a Hellenism in decline, if we are to believe Fournet, and an ascendant

Coptic language. John found it necessary to translate a host of Greek historical documents into Coptic for the purposes of composing a text which was at once distinctly

Hellenistic (or at least reflected a kind of Hellenism which had been passed through a

Roman sieve) in its historical outlook, and yet rooted both in the Coptic language and the traditions of the Egyptian church, inserting as it does Egyptian holy men into the early life of Anastasios I and transforming Diocletian into an Egyptian. While I do not disagree with Fournet in the broad outlines of his argument, which admittedly focuses on legal and administrative texts, I think it would be a mistake not to register Coptic literature and the

Chronicle as an heir of Roman culture and intellectual history. In the end what is most

457 Ibid., 99 458 Ibid., 99. 190 striking about the Chronicle is how unremarkable it truly is. The Coptic language is, after all, a product of Roman Egypt; the first literary texts appeared in the third century CE, and even its initial appearance as Old Coptic occurred in Roman Egypt.459 It would not be unreasonable to call it a Roman language. The Chronicle represents not a Hellenism in decline conveyed in the ascendant language, but a slight variation of the status quo:

Roman history delivered in a Roman language. The field’s dimensions had shifted, strategy had changed somewhat, and perhaps there were even new spectators in the stands, but the game of historical literary production had not fundamentally changed, at least in this brief moment in the cultural history of Egypt and the Coptic language.

Finally, this study could not delve into a full history of the text in its Ethiopian context, which is undoubtedly a significant part of the life of the text. A cultural biography of this text would ask what this text meant to its Ethiopian readers, treating the

Chronicle’s survival not as mere historical accident, but a conscious act of collaborative selection by Egyptian and Ethiopian scholars and patrons. Such a study could indeed extend to a range of Egyptian texts translated in Ethiopia in the late medieval and early modern period. This would undoubtedly go some ways towards explaining why this text found a far more productive life in the Ethiopian highlands than it did in the Coptic

459 Ibid., 6. Arietta Papaconstantinou, “‘What Remains Behind’: Hellenism and Romanitas in Christian Egypt after the Arab Conquest,” in From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East eds. Hannah Cotton, Robert Hoyland, Johnathan Price, and David Wasserstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 462 notes that “Greco-Roman culture, and the Byzantine Empire that now carried it still enjoyed a certain level of prestige, sufficiently recognized by those who were excluded for it to function as a status symbol.” On the development of Coptic in Roman Egypt, see Malcolm Choat, “Coptic” in The Oxford Handbook of Roman Egypt ed. Christina Riggs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 581-593, esp. 582-586; Helmut Satzinger, “Old Coptic,” The Coptic Encyclopedia, vol. 8 ed. A.S. Atiya (New York: Macmillan, 1991) 169-175. 191 intellectual circles of Egypt, and thereby how this fascinating text came to survive as one of Egypt’s most important surviving late antique texts.

192

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Agathias, Histories: Keydell, Rudolf. Agathiae Myrinaei Historiarum Libri Quinque. Recensuit Rudolfus Keydell. Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967; Frendo, Joseph D. The Histories. 2nd ed. Berlin: Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae, 1975.

Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae: Rolfe, John Carew. Ammianus Marcellinus. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940.

Aurelius Victor, De Caeseribus and Epitome de Caeseribus: Pichlmayer, F. Liber de Caesaribus, Origo gentis Romanae, Liber de viris illustribus urbis Romae, Epitome de Caesaribus, Leipzig: Teubner, 1911. Bird, H. W. Liber De Caesaribus of Sextus Aurelius Victor. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994.

Chronicle of Susenyos: Beyene, Solomon Gebreyes. Chronicle of King Gälawdewos. Louvain: Peeters, 2019.

Chronicon Paschale: Chronicon Paschale. Translated by Michael Whitby and Mary Whitby. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989

Cosmas Indicopleustes, The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk, translated by J.W. McCrindle. London: Hakluyt Society, 1897

Cyril of Alexandria, Letter of Succensus, Bishop of Diocaesarea: St. Cyril of Alexandria: Letters 1-150 translated by John McEnerney. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987.

Damaskios, The Philosophical History: Athanassiadi, Polymnia. The Philosophical History : Text with Translation and Notes. Athens: Apamea Cultural Association, 1999.

193

Eusebius via Jerome, Chronicle: Donalson, Malcolm Drew. A Translation of Jerome's Chronicon with Historical Commentary. Lewiston: Mellen University Press, 1996.

Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History: Oulton, J. E. L., and Kirsopp Lake. Ecclesiastical History. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926.

Eusebius, Life of Constantine: Life of Constantine; translated by Averil Cameron and Stuart Hall, Eusebius: Life of Constantine. Oxford: Claerendon, 1999.

Eutichyios, Annales: Patrologia cursus completes: Series Graeca, 111. Edited by Jean- Paul Migne. Paris, 1863

Evagrius Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History: Whitby, Michael. The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.

George Hamartolos, Chronicon Breve: Patrologia cursus completes: Series Graeca, 110. Edited by Jean-Paul Migne. Paris, 1863

John Malalas, Chronographia: Johannes Thurn. 2000, Ioannis Malalae Chronographia, Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae 35 (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter); Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael Jeffreys, and Roger Scott. The Chronicle of John Malalas. Melbourne: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1986

John of Antioch: Mariev, Sergei. Ioannis Antiocheni Fragmenta quae Supersunt Omnia. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2009.

John of Nikiu, Chronicle: Hermann Zotenberg. Chronique de Jean, Évêque de Nikou: Texte Éthiopien. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1883.

John Zonaras, Epitome Historion: Banchich, Thomas and Eugene Lane. The History of Zonaras: From Alexander Severus to the Death of Theodosius the Great. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Jordanes, Getica: Grillone, Jordanes, and Grillone, Antonino. Getica. Auteurs Latins Du Moyen Âge 30. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2017.

Josephus, Jewish Antiquities: Josephus, Flavius, Louis H. Feldman, Ralph Marcus, H. St. J. Thackeray, and Allen Paul Wikgren. Jewish Antiquities. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930.

194

Liberatus, Breviarum Causae Nestorianorum et Eutychianorum: Liberatus, Breviarium causæ Nestorianorum et Eutychianorum. Patrologia cursus completes: Series Latina 68. Edited by Jean-Paul Migne. Paris, 1866.

Life of Theodore of Sykeon: Dawes, Elizabeth A. S., and Norman Hepburn Baynes. Three Byzantine Saints: Contemporary Biographies. Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1996.

Mena of Nikiou, The Life of Isaac of Alexandria and the Martyrdom of Saint Macrobius, trans. David Bell. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1988

Michael the Syrian, Chronicle: Chabot, Jean Baptiste. Chronique De Michel Le Syrien, Patriarche Jacobite D'Antioche (1166-1199). Bruxelles: Culture Et Civilisation, 1963.

Panegyrici Latini: Nixon, C. E. V., Barbara Saylor. Rodgers, C. E. V. Mynors, and Mynors, R. A. B. In Praise of Later Roman Emperors : The Panegyrici Latini : Introduction, Translation, and Historical Commentary, with the Latin Text of R.A.B. Mynors. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Prokopios, Anectdota: Kaldellis, Anthony. The Secret History: With Related Texts. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010.

Pseudo-Callisthenes, Historia Alexandri Magni: Kroll, Wilhelm. Historia Alexandri Magni. Berlin: Weidmann, 1926.

Pseudo-Leontius, De Sectis: Patrologia cursus completes: Series Graeca, 86. Edited by Jean-Paul Migne. Paris, 1865.

Pseudo-Zachariah Rhetor, Chronicle translated by Geoffrey Greatrex, Cornelia Horn, and Robert Phenix, (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2011)

Severos of Antioch. Philalethes. edited by Robert Hespel, Corpus Christianorum Orientalium 133. Louvain: Imprimerie Orientaliste L. Durbecq, 1952

Severus ibn al-Muqaffa, History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria: Evetts, Basil. History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria. Patrologia Orientalis T. 1, Fasc. 2, 4; T. 5, Fasc. 1; T. 10, Fasc. 5. Paris: Firmin- Didot, 1904.

195

Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History: Zenos, A. C. "Socrates Scholasticus: Ecclesiastical History." Select Library of the Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church 2/2 Bufallo1890).

Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History: Walford, Edward, and Anthony P. Schiavo. The Ecclesiastical History of Sozomen: A History of the Church from AD 324 to AD 440. Merchantville: Evolution Publishing, 2018.

The Testament of Solomon: Conybeare, F. C. The Testament of Solomon. Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2007.

Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History: Walford, Edward, and Evagrius. A History of the Church : From A.D. 322 to the Death of Theodore of Mopsuestia, A.D. 427. Bohn's Ecclesiastical Library. London: H.G. Bohn, 1854.

Theophanes, Chronographia: Mango, Cyril A., Roger Scott, and Geoffrey. Greatrex. The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor : Byzantine and Near Eastern History, AD 284-813. Oxford : New York: Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, 1997.

Theophylact of Simocatta, Historiae: Whitby, Mary and Michael Whitby. The History of Theophylact Simocatta. Oxford: University Press, 1986.

Secondary Sources

Adams, Colin. “Transition and Change in Diocletian’s Egypt: Province and Empire in the Late Third Century.” In Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early to Late Empire, edited by Simon Swain and Mark Edwards, 82-108. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Adshead, Kate. “Justinian and Apthartodocetism.” In Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity, edited by Stephen Mitchell and Geoffrey Greatrex, 331-336. London: Duckworth and the Classical Press of Wales, 2000.

Allen, Pauline and C.T.R. Hayward. Severus of Antioch. New York: Routledge, 2004.

––––––. Sophronius of Jerusalem and Seventh-Century Heresy Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Altheim, Franz and Ruth Stiehl. Christentum am Roten Meer. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971.

Altheim-Stiehl, Ruth. “The Sasanians in Egypt: Some Evidence of Historical Interest,” Bulletin de la Société d’Archéologie Copte, 31 (1992): 87-96.

196

Amélineau, Emile. Histoire du Patriarche Copte Isaac: Étude Critique, Texte et Traduction. Paris: Ernest Leroux,1890.

––––––. “La conquête de l’Égypte par les Arabes,’ Revue Historique 119 (1915): 273- 310.

Baumeister, Theofried. Martyr Invictus: Der Martyrer Als Sinnbild Der Erlosung in Der Legende Und Im Kult Der Fruhen Koptischen Kirche ; Zur Kontinuitat Des Agyptischen Denkens. Munster: Verlag Regensberg, 1972.

Behmler, Heike. “Koptische Quellen zu (männlicher) ‘Homosexualiät,’” Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur 28 (2000): 27-53.

Bell, Peter. Social Conflict in the Age of Justinian: Its Nature, Management, and Mediation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Beyene, Solomon Gebreyes. “The Tradition and Development of Ethiopic Chronicle Writing.” In Time and History in Africa edited by Alessandro Bausi, Alberto Camplani, Stephen Emmel, 145-157. Milan: Biblioteca Ambrosiana, 2019.

––––––. Chronicle of King Gälawdewos. Louvain: Peeters, 2019.

Booth, Phil. “Shades of Blues and Greens in the Chronicle of John of Nikiou,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 104, no. 2 (2011): 555-601

––––––. “The Muslim Conquest of Egypt Reconsidered,” in Constructing the Seventh Century edited by Constantin Zuckerman, 639-670. Paris: Association des Amis du Centre d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, 2013.

––––––. “The Last Years of Cyrus, Patriarch of Alexandria.” In Mélanges Jean Gascou: Textes et Études Papyrologiques edited by Jean-Luc Fournet and Arietta Papaconstantinou, 509-558. Paris: Association des Amis du Centre d’Histoire et Civilization de Byzance, 2016.

––––––. “Towards the Coptic Church: The Making of the Severan Episcopate,” Millennium 14, no 1 (2017): 151-189.

––––––. “A Circle of Egyptian Bishops at the End of Roman Rule (c. 600): Texts and Contexts.” Le Muséon 131 (2018): 21-72.

Boustan, Ra’anan and Michael Beshay. “Sealing Demons, Once and for All: The Ring of Solomon, the Cross of Christ, and the Power of Biblical Kingship,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 16 (2015): 99-130.

197

Brakke, David. Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Brock, Sebastian and Brian Fitzgerald. Two Early Lives of Severos, Patriarch of Antioch. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013.

Brock, Sebastian. “A Report from a Supporter of Severos on Trouble in Alexandria.” In Synaxis Katholike: Beiträge zu Gottesdienst und Geschichte der fünf altkirchlichen Patriarchate für Heinzgerd Brakmann zum 70. Geburtstag edited by Diliana Atanassova and Tinatin Chronz, 47-64. Vienna and Munich: Lit Verlag, 2014.

Brown, Jeremy and Daria Elagina. “A New Witness to the Chronicle of John of Nikiu: EMML 7919,” Aethiopica 21 (2018): 120-136

Brown, Peter. “Sorcery, Demons and the Rise of Christianity from Late Antiquity into the Middle Ages.” In Witchcraft, Confessions, and Accusations edited by Mary Douglas, 17-45. New York: Routledge, 2004.

––––––. “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity.” Journal of Roman Studies, 61 (1971): 80-101.

Budge, E.A.W. Miscellaneous Coptic Texts in the Dialect of Upper Egypt. Edited, with English Translations. London, 1915.

––––––. A History of Ethiopia: Nubia and Abyssinia. London: Methuen and Co., 1928.

Burgess, Richard. “The Accession of Marcian in the Light of Chalcedonian Apologetic and Monophysite Polemic,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 86/87 (1993/1994): 47-68.

Butler, Alfred. The Ancient Coptic Churches of Egypt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884

––––––. The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902

Cameron, Alan. “Wandering Poets: A Literary Movement in Byzantine Egypt.” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 14, no. 4 (1965):470-509

Cameron, Averil. Procopius and the Sixth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985

Canivet, Pierre. Le Monachisme Syrien selon Theodoret de Cyr. Paris: Editions Beauchesne, 1977.

198

Carile, Antonio. “Giovanni di Nikius, Cronista Bizantino-Copto del VII Secolo.” Felix Ravenna 121-122 (1981): 36-88

Carrié, Jean-Michel. “Jean de Nikiou et sa Chronique: Une Écriture ‘Égyptienne’ de l’Histoire?” In Evénement, Récit, Histoire Officielle: L’Écriture de l’Histoire dans les Monarchies Antiques. Colloque du Collège de France, Amphitéâtre Margu, edited by Nicolas Grimal and Michel Baud, 155-172. Paris: Cybèle, 2003.

Charles, R.H. The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu: Translated from Zotenerg’s Ethiopic Text. London: William and Norgate, 1916.

Choat, Malcolm. “Coptic.” In The Oxford Handbook of Roman Egypt edited by Christina Riggs, 581-593. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Constantelos, Demetrios. Byzantine Philanthropy and Social Welfare. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1968

Croke, Brian. "Two Early Byzantine Earthquakes and Their Liturgical Commemoration," Byzantion 51 (1981): 123.

––––––. “Origins of the Christian World Chronicle,” In Histories and Historians in Late Antiquity, edited by Brian Croke and Alanna Emmett, 116-131. Sydney: Pergamon Press, 1983.

––––––. “The Early Development of Byzantine Chronicles.” In Studies in John Malalas edited by Elizabeth Jeffreys, 27-37. Leiden: Brill, 1990

––––––. “Justinian under Justin: Reconfiguring a Reign,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 100, no.1 (2007): 39-40.

Crum, Walter. “Review of The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, Translated from Zotenberg’s Ethiopic Text,” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 4, no.1 (1917): 207-209

Davis, Stephen. The Early Coptic Papacy: The Egyptian Church and Its Leadership in Late Antiquity. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2004.

Delahaye, Hippolyte. “Les Martyrs d’ Égypte” Annalecta Bollandiana 40 (1922): 149- 154.

Den Heijer, Johannes. “History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria” In The Coptic Encyclopedia. Vol. 8 edited by Aziz Atiya, 1239b-1242b. New York: Macmillan, 1991.

199

Dillmann, August and Werner Munzinger. Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae Cum Indice Latino: Adjectum Est Vocabularium Tigre Dialecti Septentrionalis Compilatum a Werner Munzinger. New York: F. Ungar, 1955.

Dimicheli, Anna Maria. “La politica religiosa di Giustiniano in Egitto: Riflessi sulla chiesa egiziana della legislazione ecclesiastica giustinianea.” Aegyuptus 63 (1983): 217-257.

Downey, Glanville. “Philanthropia in Religion and Statecraft in the Fourth Century after Christ,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 4, no. 2/3 (1955): 199-208.

Efthymiadis, Stephanos. “A Historian and his Tragic Hero: A Literary Reading of Theophylact Simokatta’s Ecumenical History.” In History as Literature in Byzantium edited by Ruth Macrides, 169-186. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Elagina, Daria. “The Textual Tradition of the Chronicle of John of Nikiu: Towards the Critical Edition of the Ethiopic Version.” PhD diss, University of Hamburg, 2019).

Elli, Alberto. Storia della Chiesa Copta. Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 2003

Evetts, Basil. The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt and Some Neighboring Countries, attributed to Abu Salih, al-Armani. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895

Fiaccadori, Gianfranco. “John of Nikiou.” In Christian Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, vol. 1, (600-900) edited by David Thomas and Barbara Roggema, 211-218. Leiden: Brill, 2009

Flower, Richard. Imperial Invectives against Constantius II. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016

Fournet, Jean-Luc. The Rise of Coptic: Egyptian versus Greek in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020)

Fox, Valerie. “The Demonisation of Magic and Sorcery in Late Antiquity: Christian Redefinitions of Pagan Religions.” In Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome, edited by Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark, 277-348. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvanian Press,1999

Frankfurter, David. Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001

200

Frantsouzoff, Sergei. “The Chronicle of John of Nikiu: Some Peculiarities of its Languages and Contents,” Newsletter of St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University of the Humanities Series 3, Philology 4 (2010): 77-86.

Frend, William. The Rise of the Monophysite Movement: Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.

Frendo, John. “History and Panegyric in the Age of Heraclius: The Literary Background to the Composition of the Histories of Theophylact of Simocatta,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 42 (1988): 143-156.

Garstad, Benjamin. "Joseph as a Model for Faunus-Hermes: Myth, History, and Fiction in the Fourth Century," Vigiliae Christianae 63, no. 5 (2009): 493-521.

Geissen, A. “Numismatische Bemerkung zu dem Aufstand des L. Domitius Domitianus,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 22 (1976): 280-286

Ghattas, Mary. “Toward the Localization of the Hennaton Monastic Complex.” In Christianity and Monasticism in Northern Egypt: Beni Suef, Giza, Cairo, and the Nile Delta, edited by Gawdat Gabra and Hany Takla, 37-48. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2017.

Ginter, Kazimierz. “The Trisagion Riots (512) as an Example of Interaction between Politics and Liturgy,” Studia Ceranea 7 (2017): 41-57.

Haarer, Fiona. Anastasius I: Politics and Empire in the Late Roman World. Cambridge: Francis Cairns, 2006

Hardy, Edward. “The Egyptian Policy of Justinian,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 22 (1968): 21-41.

Hollerich, Michael. “The Alexandrian Bishops and the Grain Trade: Ecclesiastical Commerce in Late Roman Egypt,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 25, no. 2 (1982):187-207.

Howard-Johnston, James. Witnesses to a World Crisis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010

Hoyland, Robert. Seeing Islam as Others Saw it: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam. Princeton: Darwin Press, 1997.

201

Hunger, Herbert. “Philanthropia: Eine grieschische Wortprägung auf ihrem Wege von Aischylos bis Theodoros Metochites,” Anzeiger der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenshaft. Philosophisch-Klasse 100 (1963): 1-20.

––––––. Die Hochsprachliche Profane Literatur der Byzantiner. Munich: Beck, 1978.

Huntingford, George. The Historia Geography of Ethiopia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Jarry, Jacques. “Hérésies et Factions en Égypte Byzantin,” Bulletin de l’Institut Francais d’archéologie orientale 63 (1968): 173-186.

Jeffreys, Elizabeth. “Malalas’ Sources.” In Studies in John Malalas, edited by Elizabeth Jeffreys, Brian Croke, and Roger Scott, 167-216. Leiden: Brill, 1990.

––––––. “Malalas’ Use of the Past” in Reading the Past in Late Antiquity edited by Graeme Clarke, 121-146. Rushcutters Bay: Australian National University Press, 1990.

Johannessen, Hazel. The Demonic in the Political Thought of Eusebius of Caesarea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016

Jones, A. H. M., J. R. Martindale, J. Morris, and Morris, John. The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (Abbreviated as PLRE). 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971-1992.

Kaldellis, Anthony. The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009

––––––. The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2015), 68

Kalleres, Dayna. City of Demons. Oakland: University of California Press 2016

Kavvadas, Nestor. “Severus of Antioch and Changing Miaphysite Attitudes toward Byzantium.” In Severus of Antioch: His Life and Times edited by John D’Alton and Youhanna Youssef , 124-137. Leiden: Brill, 2016.

Kelly, Gavin. "Ammianus and the Great Tsunami," The Journal of Roman Studies 94 (2004): 141-167.

Kofsky, Aryeh. “The Miaphysite Monasticism of Gaza and Julian of Halicarnassus,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 78, no. 1 (2012): 81-96.

202

––––––. “Julianism after Julian of Halicarnassus.” In Between Personal and Institutional Religion: Self, Doctrine, and Practice in Late Antique Eastern Christianity, edited by. Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony and Lorenzo Perrone, 251-294. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013.

Kolb, Frank. “Chronologie und Ideologie der Tetrarchie,” Antiquité Tardive, 3 (1995): 21-31.

Krueger, Derek. “Early Byzantine Historiography and Hagiography as Different Modes of Christian Practice.” In History and Historians in Late Antiquity, edited by Brian Croke and Alanna M. Emmett, 13-20. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1983.

Krumbacher, Karl. Geschichte der Byzantinischen Literatur: von Justinian bis zum Ende des Oströmischen Riches, 527-1453. Munich: Beck, 1897.

Lee, A.D. From Rome to Byzantium AD 363-565: The Transformation of Ancient Rome. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013

Leppin, Hartmut. "Zum Kirchenpolitischen Kontext Von Theodorets Mönchsgeschichte," Klio 78, no. 1 (1996): 212-230.

––––––. “The Church Historians (I): Socrates, Sozomenus, and Theodoretus.” In Greek and Roman Historiography in Late Antiquity: Fourth to Sixth Century, edited by Gabriele Marasco, 219-256. Leiden: Brill, 2003.

Little, Donald. “Coptic Conversion to Islam under the Bahri Mamluks,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 39 no. 3 (1976): 552-569.

Maccoull, Leslie. “A New Look at the Career of John Philoponus,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 3, no. 1 (1995):47-60.

Maraval, Pierre. Le Christianisme de Constantin à la Conquête Arabe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006.

––––––. Les Fils de Constantin: Constantin II (337-340), Constance II (337-361) Constant (337-350). Paris: CNRS, 2013.

Mariev, Sergei. “Byzantine World Chronicles: Identities of Genre.” In Shifting Genres in Late Antiquity, edited by Geoffrey Greatex and Hugh Elton, 305-318. Surrey: Ashgate, 2015.

203

Martin, Dale Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004)

Martin, Hubert. “The Concept of Philanthropia in Plutarch’s Lives,” The American Journal of Philology 82, no. 2 (1961): 164-175.

Maspero, Jean. Histoire des Patriarches d’Alexandrie: Depuis la Mort de L’Empereur Anastase jusqu’a la Réconciliation des Églises Jacobites (518-616). Paris: Bibliothèque de L’École des Hautes Études, 1923.

McCann, James. “Ethiopian Chronicles: An African Documentary Tradition,” Northeast African Studies 1, no.2 (1979): 47-62.

Mcintosh-Varjabédian, Fiona. Écriture de l’Histoire et Regard Rétrospectif: Clio et Épiméthée. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010.

Meier, Mischa. “Natural Disasters in the Chronographia of John Malalas: Reflections on Their Function—An Initial Sketch,” The Medieval History Journal 10, no.1-2 (2006): 237-266

Meyendorff, John. Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450-680 A.D. Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989.

Mikhail, Maged. From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt: Religion, Identity and Politics after the Arab Conquest. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015.

Millar, Fergus. “Rome, Constantinople, and the near Eastern Church under Justinian: Two Synods of C.E. 536,” The Journal of Roman Studies 90 (2008): 62-82.

Moawad, Samuel. “John of Shmoun and Coptic Identity.” In Christianity and Monasticism in Middle Egypt edited by Gawdat Gabra and Hany Takla, 89-98. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2017.

Moorhead, John. “The Monophysite Response to the Arab Invasions," Byzantion 51 (1981): 579-591.

Moss, Yonatan. Incorruptible Bodies: Christology, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016.

Nau, François-Nicolas. “Les Légendes Syriaques d’Aaron de Saroug, de Maxime et Domèce, d’Abraham, maître de Barsôma, et de l’Empereur Maurice” Patrologia Orientalis 5 Turnhout: Brepols, 1910

204

Nöldeke, Theodor. “Review of Chronique de Jean, Évêque de Nikiou: Texte Éthiopien, Extrait de Notices des Manuscrits, 24/1 (Paris: Imprimerie National, 1883),” Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen 2 (1883): 1364-1374

Olster, David. Roman Defeat, Christian Response, and the Literary Construction of the Jew. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1994.

Orlandi, Tito. Elementi di Lingua e Letteratura Copta: Corso di Lezinoi Universitarie. Milan: La Goliardica, 1970.

––––––. “Cycle.” In The Coptic Encyclopedia. Vol. 5 edited by Aziz Atiya, 666a-668b. New York: Macmillan, 1991.

––––––. “Hagiography, Coptic.” In The Coptic Encyclopedia. Vol. 5 edited by Aziz Atiya, 1191a-1197b. New York: Macmillan, 1991

Panayotakis, Costas. “Baptism and Crucifixion on the Mimic Stage,” Mnemosyne 50, no. 3 (1997): 302-319.

Papaconstantinou, Arietta. “Hagiography, Historiography, and the Making of the Coptic ‘Church of the Martyrs’ in Early Islamic Egypt.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 60 (2006): 65-86.

––––––. “‘They Shall Speak the Arabic Language and Take Pride in it’: Reconsidering the Fate of Coptic after the Arab Conquest.” Le Muséon 120 (2007): 273-299.

––––––. “What Remains Behind: Hellenism and Romanitas in Christian Egypt after the Arab Conquest.” In From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East, edited by Hannah Cotton, Robert Hoyland, Jonathan Price, and David Wasserstein, 447-466. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009

––––––. “Hagiography in Coptic.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography edited by Stephanos Efthymiadis, 323-344. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.

Reinink, Gerrit. “Following the Doctrine of the Demons: Early Christian Fear of Conversion to Islam.” In Cultures of Conversion, edited by Jan N. Bremmer, Wout J. van Bekkum and Arie L. Molendijk, 127-138. Leuven: Peeters, 2006.

Rodinson, Maxime.“Notes sur Le Texte de Jean de Nikiou.” In IV Congresso Internazionale di Studi Etiopici: (Roma, 10-15 Aprile 1972) edited by Enrico Cerulli, 127-137. Rome: Accademia Naazionale dei Lincei, 1974.

205

Rogozhina, Anna. "Antioch as 'The Holy City' in Coptic Hagiography," Journal of Ancient History 77, no. 2 (2017): 356-376.

Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Satzinger, Helmut. “Old Coptic.” In The Coptic Encyclopedia. Vol. 8 edited by Aziz Atiya, 169b-175b. New York: Macmillan, 1991.

Schwartz, Jean. L. Domitius Domitianus: Étude Numismatique et Payrologique (Brussels: Fondation Égyptologique Reine Elisabeth, 1976).

––––––. “L. Domitius Domitianus,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 25 (1977): 217-220.

Scott, Roger. “Malalas, the Secret History, and Justinian’s Propaganda,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 39 (1985): 99-109.

––––––. “Malalas’ View of the Classical Past.” In Reading the Past in Late Antiquity, edited by Graeme Clarke, Brian Croke, Alanna Emmett Nobbs, and Raoul Mortley, 147-164. Canberra: Australian National University Press 1990.

Smith, Gregory. “How Thin is a Demon?” Journal of Early Christian Studies 16, no. 4 (2018): 479-483.

Somers, Margaret. “Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation,” Social Science History 16, no. 4 (1992): 591- 630.

––––––. “The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach,” Theory and Society 23, no. 5 (1994): 605-649.

Sonnabend, Holger. Naturkatastrophen in der Antike: Wahrnehmung, Deutung, Management. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1999.

Stewart, Randall. “Barsanuphians.” In In The Coptic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2 edited by Aziz Atiya, 347b-348a. New York: Macmillan, 1991.

Tannous, Jack. “In Search of Monotheletism,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 68 (2014): 29- 67.

Terzaghi, N. Synesii Cyrenensis Opuscula. Rome: Polygraphica, 1944.

206

Thomas, J. David. “The Date of the Revolt of L. Domitius Domitianus,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 22 (1976): 253-279.

––––––. “A Family Dispute from Karanis and the Revolt of Domitius Domitianus,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 24 (1977): 233-240.

Toner, Jerry. Roman Disasters. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.

Torrance, Iain. Christology after Chalcedon: Severus of Antioch and Sergius the Monophysite. Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1988.

Treadgold, Warren T. The Early Byzantine Historians. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Trompf, G.W.F. Early Christian Historiography: Narratives of Retributive Justice. New York: Continuum, 2000.

Urbainczyk, Theresa. Socrates of Constantinople: Historian of Church and State. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

––––––. Theodoret of Cyrrhus: The Bishop and the Holy Man. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.

Van Den Berg-Onstwedder, Gonnie. "Diocletian in the Coptic Tradition," Bulletin De La Société D'Archéologie Copte XXIX (1990): 87-122.

Van Esbroeck, Michael. “The Aphthartodocetic Edict of Justinian and its Armenian Background.” In Studia Patristica 30, edited by Elizabeth Livingstone, 578-586. Leuven: Peeters, 1997.

Van Roey, Albert and Pauline Allen. Monophysite Texts of the Sixth Century, Leuven: Peeters Press, 1994

Walraff, Martin. “The Beginnings of Christian Universal History from Tatian to Julius Africanus,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 14 (2010): 540-555.

Watts, Edward. “Interpreting Catastrophe: Disasters in the Works of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite, Socrates Scholasticus, Philostorgius, and Timothy Aelurus,” Journal of Late Antiquity 2 no. 1 (2009): 79-98.

––––––. Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

207

Webb, Ruth. Demons and Dancers: Performance in Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Weismann, Werner. “Gelasinos von Heliopolis: Ein Schauspieler-Märtyrer,” Analecta Bollandiana 93, 1-2 (1975): 39-66

Werthmuller, Kurt. Coptic Identity and Ayyubid Politics in Egypt: 1218-1250. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2010.

Whitby, Michael. The Emperor Maurice and His Historian:Theophylact Simocatta on Persian and Balkan Warfare. Oxford: Claredon Press, 1988.

––––––. “Greek Historical Writing after Procopius: Variety and Vitality.” In The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East I: Problems in the Literary Source Material edited by Averil Cameron and Lawrence Conrad, 25-80. Princeton: Darwin Press, 1992

Wierzejski, Dawid. “Anfänge der Julianistichen Hierarchien,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 20, no. 2 (2016): 276-305.

Wilfong, Terry. The Women of Jeme. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2002.

Wipszycka, Ewa. “Le Nationalisme a-t-il Existé en Egypte Byzantine,” The Journal of Juristic Papyrology 22 (1992): 83-128.

––––––. “The Institutional Church.” In Egypt in the Byzantine World, edited by Roger S. Bagnall, 331-349. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

––––––. The Alexandrian Church: People and Institutions, (Warsaw: The University of Warsaw Foundation, 2015)

––––––. “How Insurmountable was the Chasm between Monophysites and Chalcedonians?” In Beyond Conflicts: Cultural and Religious Cohabitations in Alexandria and Egypt between the 1st and the 6th Century CE edited by Luca Arcari, 207-226. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017.

Witakowski, Witold. “The Ethiopic Life of John Chrysostom.” In Chrysostomosbilder in 1600 Jahren: Facetten der Wirkungsgeschichte eines Kirchenvaters edited by Martin Wallraff and Rudolf Brändle, 223-231. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008.

Wood, Philip. “We Have no King but Christ”: Christian Political Thought in Greater Syria on the Eve of the Arab Conquest (c. 400-585). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

208

Woods, David. “Late Antique Historiography: A Brief History of Time.” In A Companion to Late Antiquity, edited by Philip Rousseau, 357-372. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Zotenberg, Hermann. “Mémoire sur la Chronique Byzantine de Jean, Évêque de Nikiou,” Journal Asiatique 7, no. 10 (1877): 451-517.

––––––. “Mémoire sur la Chronique Byzantine de Jean, Évêque de Nikiou,” Journal Asiatique 7, no. 12 (1878): 245-347.

––––––. “Mémoire sur la Chronique Byzantine de Jean, Évêque de Nikiou,” Journal Asiatique 7, no. 13 (1879): 291-386.

Zuckerman, Constantin. “Les Campagnes des Tétrarques, 296-298: Notes de Chronologie,” Antiquité Tardive, 2 (1994): 65-70

209