The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor (AM 6039) states that Pope Vigilius took refuge in Constantinople from Justinian in a sanctuary of *Sergios (martyr of Rusafa, S00023), and subsequently met Menas, the Patriarch of Constantinople, on the feast of the *Apostles (S02422); all in 547. Chronicle compiled in the Byzantine Empire in the early 9th c., using extracts from earlier Greek texts.
Evidence ID
E08025
Type of Evidence
Literary - Other narrative texts (including Histories)
Major author/Major anonymous work
Theophanes
Chronicle of Theophanes, AM 6039 [AD 546/7]
[...] καὶ ὁ πάπας Βιγίλιος παρεγένετο ἐν Κωνσταντινουπόλει, καὶ δεχθεὶς ὑπὸ τοῦ βασιλέως μετὰ μεγάλης τιμῆς ὑπισχνεῖτο ποιεῖν ἕνωσιν τῆς καθολικῆς ἐκκλησίας καὶ ἀναθεματίζειν τὰ τρία κεφάλαια, τοσοῦτον τιμηθεὶς ὑπὸ τοῦ βασιλέως, ὡς ἐπαρθέντα ἀκοινωνησίαν τεσσάρων μηνῶν δοῦναι Μηνᾷ τῷ Κωνσταντινουπόλεως ἐπισκόπῳ, εἰς ἐπιτίμιον. καὶ Μηνᾶς δὲ αὐτῷ τὸ αὐτὸ ἐπιτίμιον δέδωκεν. ἀγανακτήσας δὲ ὁ βασιλεὺς κατὰ Βιγιλίου διὰ τὸ ἐπιτίμιον καὶ διὰ τὸ ὑπερτίθεσθαι πληρῶσαι τὰ δόξαντα περὶ τῆς ἑνώσεως τῶν ἐκκλησιῶν ἀπέστειλε συλλαβεῖν αὐτόν. ὁ δὲ φοβηθεὶς τὴν ὀργὴν τοῦ βασιλέως τῷ θυσιαστηρίῳ Σεργίου τοῦ μάρτυρος μονῆς τῶν Ὁρμίσδου προσέφυγεν. κἀκεῖθεν ἑλκόμενος κατέσχε τοὺς βαστάζοντας τὸ θυσιαστήριον κίονας καὶ τούτους κατέστρεψεν, βαρὺς ὤν καὶ μέγας τῷ σώματι. ὁ δὲ βασιλεὺς μεταμεληθεὶς ἐδέξατο τὸν πάπαν Βιγίλιον. καὶ παρακληθεὶς Βιγίλιος ὑπὸ Θεοδώρας τῆς αὐγούστης ἐδέξατο Μηνᾶν τὸν πατριάρχην Κωνσταντινουπόλεως, τῇ κθ' τοῦ Ἰουνίου μηνὸς τῶν ἁγίων ἀποστόλων.
'[...] Pope Vigilius arrived in Constantinople and after being received with great honour by the emperor, he promised to unite the catholic Church and anathematize the Three Chapters. He was so greatly honoured by the emperor that he became puffed up and excommunicated Menas, bishop of Constantinople, for four months by way of penance. Menas replied by imposing the same penance on Vigilius. The emperor, annoyed by Vigilius because of the penance and the delay in fulfilling his promises about uniting the Church, dispatched men to arrest him. Vigilius, fearing the emperor's wrath, sought refuge in the sanctuary of Sergius the martyr in the monastery of Hormisdas. As he was being dragged from there, he held on to the columns supporting the altar, and brought them down, for he was a large heavy man. The emperor repented and received Pope Vigilius who, in turn, at the request of the Augusta Theodora, received Menas, patriarch of Constantinople, on 29 June, the day of the Holy Apostles.'
Text: de Boor 1883, 225.
Translation: Mango and Scott 1997, 327-8.
FestivalsCult building - monastic
Non Liturgical Activity
Saint’s feast
Cult PlacesCult building - monastic
Cult building - dependent (chapel, baptistery, etc.)
Non Liturgical ActivitySeeking asylum at church/shrine
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesEcclesiastics - Popes
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
Vigilius, pope from 537 to 555, arrived in Constantinople in 547 after being summoned by Justinian in the hope that he would approve the condemnation of the so-called Three Chapters, and was kept there until shortly before his death in 555 (for a full account of the origins of the Three Chapters controversy and of Vigilius' role, see Price 2009, 1-103; on Vigilius see also Sotinel 1992).Theophanes' passage narrates two of a number of tense incidents which occurred during Vigilius' years in Constantinople as Justinian put pressure on the initially resistant pope to approve the condemnation of the Three Chapters. The passage is garbled in some of its details, however: while the incident of Vigilius' excommunication of Menas and their subsequent reconciliation did take place shortly after Vigilius' arrival in 547, the incident in which Vigilius took refuge at an altar and was dragged from it by Justinian's men actually took place in 551 and in the church of Peter in the Hormisdas district of Constantinople, as we know from Vigilius' own letter, Dum in sanctae Euphemiae (E08275). The error of placing it in an oratory of St Sergius in a monastery of Hormisdas is shared with Malalas (E05742), whose account overlaps with Theophanes but differs in some of its details. The reference to the feast of the Apostles seems to refer to the same incident as another passage in Malalas (E05740).
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:
Price, R., The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553 (Translated Texts for Historians 51; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009).
Sotinel, C., "Autorité pontificale et pouvoir impérial sous le règne de Justinien: le pape Vigile," Mélanges de l'Ecole française de Rome. Antiquité 104:1 (1992), 439-463.
Record Created By
David Lambert
Date of Entry
03/11/2020
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00023 | Sergios, soldier and martyr of Rusafa | Σεργίος | Certain | S02422 | All Apostles | οἱ ἁγίοι ἀποστόλοι | Certain |
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