The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor (AM 5870) describes how *Isaakios (late 4th/early 5th c. abbot in Constantinople, S02118) miraculously perceived the death of the emperor Valens in the Battle of Adrianople in 378 by smelling the emperor's burning body from his prison cell in Constantinople. Chronicle compiled in the Byzantine Empire in the early 9th c., using extracts from earlier Greek texts.
Evidence ID
E08005
Type of Evidence
Literary - Other narrative texts (including Histories)
Major author/Major anonymous work
Theophanes
Chronicle of Theophanes, AM 5870 [AD 377/8]
This passage follows Theophanes' account of the Battle of Adrianople in 378, in which the emperor Valens was defeated and killed by the Goths.
Φασὶ δὲ ὅτι ὁ θεῖος Ἰσαάκιος ἐν τῇ φρουρᾷ τῆς δυσωδίας Οὐάλεντος ἐμπριζομένου ἀντελάβετο θείῳ χαρίσματι καὶ ψυχῆς καθαρότητι προεῖπέ τε τὴν ἀναίρεσιν αὐτοῦ τοῖς συνοῦσιν, πρὶν ἢ παραγενέσθαι τοὺς ἀπαγγέλλοντας ἐκ τοῦ πολέμου τὰ πεπραγμένα.
'They say that the holy Isaakios, while in prison, became aware of the foul smell of Valens' being burned, and, by the grace of God and the pureness of his soul, foretold his death to those who were with him before the messengers from the war arrived to announce what had happened.'
Text: de Boor 1883, 65.
Translation: Mango and Scott 1997, 100.
MiraclesMiraculous sound, smell, light
Protagonists in Cult and Narratives
Miraculous sound, smell, light
Revelation of hidden knowledge (past, present and future)
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesEcclesiastics - monks/nuns/hermits
Source
Theophanes (759/60-818) came from a wealthy and politically prominent family from Constantinople. After marriage and a brief career as a secular official, he became a monk, living in the monastic communities centred around Mount Sigriane in Bithynia, and eventually abbot of the community known as Megas Agros. He acquired the epithet 'Confessor' (Homologetes) through his resistance to the renewal of Iconoclasm by the emperor Leo V (813-820), which led to Theophanes' imprisonment and then exile to the island of Samothrace, where he died. For full discussion of the evidence for Theophanes' life, see Mango and Scott 1997, xliv-lii, and, for a briefer summary, his entry ('Theophanes 18') in the Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire (http://www.pbe.kcl.ac.uk).The Chronicle of Theophanes covers the period from 284/5 to 812/813. It was a continuation of the Chronicle of George Synkellos (ob. c. 810) which ran from the creation of the world to 284. George had apparently intended to continue his chronicle down to his own time but died before he could do so; the extent to which Theophanes, in producing his chronicle, was simply editing and polishing material already collected by George remains uncertain (see Mango and Scott 1997, liv-lv). The Chronicle of George Synkellos contains some material relevant to the cult of saints, up to its stopping point in 284; however, this is not included in the CSLA database because the sources for all George's information (chiefly Eusebius) survive and have database entries in their own right.
Theophanes and his sources
The key characteristic of Theophanes’ Chronicle is that it is not a composition of Theophanes’ own, but a patchwork of extracts from earlier sources, collected and arranged in chronicle form, in other words under an entry for each year. Theophanes’ role was confined to piecing the patchwork together (i.e. removing pieces from their original context and placing them under individual years), and to some extent condensing and abbreviating material. As he put it in his preface: 'I did not set down anything of my own composition, but have made a selection from the ancient historians and prose-writers and have consigned to their proper places the events of every year, assigned without confusion' (trans. Mango and Scott 1997, 2). Since many of Theophanes’ sources are still extant, the extracts in his chronicle can often be compared with the original, which shows that that this was indeed his method of compilation, though he makes occasional editorial interventions, and sometimes misunderstands source material (Mango and Scott 1997, lxxii, xci-xcv; Howard-Johnston 2010, 272-3, 276-84).
It is because Theophanes' Chronicle is essentially a compilation of earlier sources that a number of extracts from the Chronicle are included in the CSLA database, even though the work itself dates from more than a century after AD 700, our usual cut-off point for evidence. We have not included material which reproduces sources that have their own entries in our database (such as Eusebius, John Malalas, Theodore Lector, Procopius, and Theophylact Simocatta), but have included entries (for the period up to 700) for items in Theophanes whose original source is lost.
For discussion of Theophanes' work as a whole, see the introduction to Mango and Scott's translation (Mango and Scott 1997, xliii-c); Howard-Johnston 2010, 268-312; and the essays in Jankowiak and Montinaro 2015.
Chronology
Theophanes' chronology is based primarily on the annus mundi (year since Creation). There was more than one system of calculating AM dates: the one used by Theophanes, following George Synkellos, was the Alexandrian era, which started from the equivalent of 5492 BC, thus making the first year of the chronicle, AD 284/5, the AM year 5777. The first day of the year under the Alexandrian system was 25 March, and this was used by George Synkellos; however, it is evident that Theophanes (without ever stating his practice explicitly) used 1 September as the first day of his chronicle years, thus matching the standard secular dating system in the Byzantine empire (indictions): see Mango and Scott 1997, lxvi. While the year-by-year chronology is based on the annus mundi, Theophanes includes considerable other information in the heading for each entry (not given here): the year from the Incarnation (the same principle as AD dating, but the system used by Theophanes dated the Incarnation to AD 8/9), and the regnal years of the Roman emperor (Theophanes only ever lists one emperor here, normally the one ruling in Constantinople), the king of Persia (the Caliph in later entries), and the bishops of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. The accuracy and mutual consistency of these different forms of dating varies considerably across different entries. In the body of each entry, Theophanes often preserves the form of dating used by his source, such as consular years or indictions. For a full overview, see Mango and Scott 1997, lxiii-lxxiv.
Discussion
Isaakios was a pioneering monastic leader in 4th century Constantinople (for details see Hatlie 2007, 66-7). The sources about him, both his Life (E06980) and the references to him in historical sources, emphasise his conflict with the emperor Valens, ruler of the East from 364 to 378, over the emperor's Homoian beliefs. On 9 August 378, Valens was defeated and killed by the Goths at the battle of Adrianople. Various versions of his death circulated: Theophanes, using Theodore Lector (217) as his direct source, but following a tradition also represented by Sozomen (6.40) and Theodoret (4.32), has Valens taking refuge in a cottage which the Goths then set on fire, burning him to death.The incident here is preceded in Theophanes' narrative by a confrontation between Isaakios and Valens when the emperor was marching out of Constantinople, in which Isaakios warned Valens that he was fighting against God (hence Isaakios' imprisonment). Theophanes takes this from Theodore Lector (216), though it appears widely in the sources, with some differences of detail (Sozomen 6.40; Theodoret 4.31; Life of Isaakios 7-8). However, the claim that Isaakios learned of Valens' death by miraculously smelling his burning body appears only in Theophanes (possibly it appeared in Theodore Lector's full text, but has been lost in its current fragmentary state).
Bibliography
Edition:de Boor, C., Theophanis Chronographia (Leipzig: Teubner, 1883).
English translation and commentary:
Mango, C., and Scott, R., The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History AD 284-813 (Oxford: OUP, 1997).
On Theophanes:
Howard-Johnston, J., Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (Oxford: OUP, 2010).
Jankowiak, M., and Montinaro, P. (eds.), Studies in Theophanes (Travaux et mémoires 19; Paris: Centre d'Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, 2015).
Further reading:
Hatlie, P., The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, ca. 350-850 (Cambridge, 2007).
Record Created By
David Lambert
Date of Entry
13/10/2020
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S02118 | Isaakios/Isaac, late 4th/early 5th c. abbot in Constantinople | Ἰσαάκιος | Certain |
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