The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor (AM 6149) contains multiple entries describing Pope *Martin I (bishop of Rome and confessor, ob. 655/6, S00859) and *Maximos the Confessor (monk, theologian, and confessor, ob. 662, S01455) as confessors and/or martyrs because of their persecution by the emperor Constans II. Chronicle compiled in the Byzantine Empire in the early 9th c., using extracts from earlier Greek texts
Evidence ID
E08046
Type of Evidence
Literary - Other narrative texts (including Histories)
Major author/Major anonymous work
Theophanes
Chronicle of Theophanes, AM 6149 [AD 656/7]
τῷ δ᾿ αὐτῷ ἔτει καὶ τὰ κατὰ τὸν ἅγιον Μάξιμον καὶ τοὺς μαθητὰς αὐτοῦ ἐπράχθη ὑπὲρ τῆς ὀρθῆς πίστεως ἀγωνισαμένων κατὰ τῶν Μονοθελητῶν. οὕς Κώνστας εἰς τὴν ἑαυτοῦ κακοδοξίαν μὴ ἰσχύσας μετενέγκαι, τὴν θεόσοφον καὶ πολυμαθεστάτην γλῶσσαν τοῦ ἁγίου ἀπέτεμε μετὰ τῆς δεξιᾶς χειρὸς αὐτοῦ, ὡς πλεῖστα κατὰ τὴς αὐτοῦ δυσσεβείας σὺν τοῖς μαθηταῖς αὑτοῦ Ἀναστασίοις συγγραψαμένου, ἅ καὶ κατ᾿ ἔπος οὗτοι γεγράφασιν, ὡς οἱ φιλομαθεῖς γινώσκουσιν.
'In the same year took place the affair of St Maximus and his disciples, who had struggled on behalf of the true faith against the Monotheletes. Being powerless to convert them to his heresy, Constans cut off the tongue of this divinely wise and most learned man as well as his right hand on account of his having written, together with his disciples the Anastasii, many works against his impiety, [some of] which they composed in dialogue, as is known to lovers of learning.'
AM 6150 [AD 657/8]
τῷ δ᾿ αὐτῷ ἔτει ἐξωρίσθη Μαρτῖνος, ὁ ἁγιώτατος πάπας Ῥώμης, ὑπὲρ τῆς ἀληθείας γενναίως ἀγωνισάμενος καὶ ὁμολογητὴς γενόμενος, ἐν τοῖς κλίμασι τῆς ἀνατολῆς τελευτήσας.
'In the same year Martin, the most holy Pope of Rome, was exiled. He had struggled bravely for the truth and became a confessor. He died in the Klimata of the East.'
AM 6160 [AD 667/8]
μετὰ τὴν ἀναίρεσιν Θεοδοσίου, τοὺ ἀδελφοῦ αὐτοῦ, ἐμισήθη ὑπὸ τῶν Βυζαντίων, καὶ μάλιστα ὅτι καὶ Μαρτῖνον, τὸν ἁγιώτατον πάπαν Ῥώμης, ἀτίμως ἤγαγεν ἐν Κωνσταντινουπόλει καὶ ἐξώρισεν εἰς τὰ τῆς Χερσῶνος κλίματα, καὶ Μάξιμον τὸν σοφώτατον καὶ ὁμολογητὴν ἐγλωσσοτόμησεν καὶ ἐχειροκόπησε καὶ πολλοῦς τῶν ὀρθοδόξων αἰκίαις καὶ ἐξορίαις καὶ δημεύσεσι κατεδίκασε διὰ τὸ μὴ πείθεσθαι τῇ αἱρέσει αὐτοῦ, καὶ τοὺς δύο Ἀναστασίους μαθητὰς ὑπάρχοντας τοῦ ὁμολογητοῦ καὶ μάρτυρος Μαξίμου ἐξορίαις καὶ βασάνοις ἐπέδωκεν.
'After the murder of his brother Theodosios he [Constans II] was hated by the people of Byzantium, particularly because he had also brought ignominiously to Constantinople Martin, the most holy Pope of Rome, and exiled him to the Klimata of Cherson; because he had cut off the tongue and hand of the most learned confessor Maximus, and had condemned many of the orthodox to torture, banishment, and confiscation of property for not accepting his heresy; because he had subjected to exile and torture the two Anastasii, who were disciples of Maximus, the confessor and martyr.'
Text: de Boor 1883, 347, 351.
Translation: Mango and Scott 1997, 484, 485, 490-91.
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesEcclesiastics - Popes
Ecclesiastics - Popes
Ecclesiastics - lesser clergy
Monarchs and their family
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
In the early 650s, Pope Martin I and Maximus the Confessor were the leading opponents of the religious policies of the emperor Constans II. Constans continued to favour the Christological doctrine known as Monotheletism, originally adopted by his grandfather Heraclius in the 630s. Opponents of the doctrine regarded it as heretical and incompatible with the doctrines of the Council of Chalcedon. Martin, who had been pope since 649, maintained the active opposition to Monotheletism initiated by his immediate predecessors, holding a synod at Rome in 649 to condemn it and co-operating with Maximus, the most significant theological critic of the doctrine. Though a Greek-speaking easterner by origin, Maximus had been resident in Rome since the mid 640s.In June 653, Martin was arrested in Rome by the Exarch (governor of the Byzantine territories in Italy) and taken to Constantinople. He was put on trial before the senate in December 653, and subsequently sent into exile at Kherson in the Crimea, where he died in 655/656 (for the dates and further details, see Booth 2014, 300-305; Howard-Johnston 2010, 157-62; Neil 2010). Maximus was also brought to Constantinople, and was put on trial in 655. In the trials of both Martin and Maximus the formal charges were primarily for secular offences such as supporting rebellions. Maximus was first exiled to a town in Thrace, but a few years later, in 662, he was subjected to new charges and this time was mutilated and exiled to Lazica in the Caucasus, where he died shortly after his arrival (13 August 662). The 'two Anastasii' mentioned by Theophanes were condemned alongside Maximus in 662. One Anastasius was a lifelong disciple and associate of Maximus who had accompanied him for decades by the time of his condemnation; the other, Anastasius the Apocrisiarius, was an opponent of Monotheletism in his own right: a former papal apocrisiarius (ambassador) in Constantinople whose resistance to imperial policy caused him to be exiled to various remote parts of the empire through the 650s. He was recalled to Constantinople to be tried with Maximus in 662, and like him was mutilated and exiled to Lazica, where he died in 666. For fuller details on Maximus' life and trials, see Allen 2015; Booth 2014, 305-26.
Of the three extracts given here, the first two appear under the supposed years of the events in question, while the third comes from Theophanes' general summing-up of the character of Constans II in his entry for the year of Constans' death (668). Theophanes has somewhat garbled the chronology, putting the trials of Martin and Maximus under the wrong years (Martin's was in 653, Maximus' in 655 and 662) and also in the wrong order. There is a substantial corpus of contemporary or near contemporary texts about the persecution of Martin and Maximus (collected and translated in Allen and Neil 2002, Neil 2006) but according to Mango and Scott, Theophanes' references are based not on these, but on the same anti-Monothelete historical tract that he used to give a general history of the controversy in one of his entries for the 620s (Mango and Scott 1997, lxxxvii; see E08045).
The phrase 'in the Klimata of the East' (ἐν τοῖς κλίμασι τῆς ἀνατολῆς), which literally translated simply means something like 'in the eastern regions', here apparently refers to a specific region in Crimea: see Mango and Scott 1997, 463, n. 16.
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:
Allen, P., "Life and Times of Maximus the Confessor," in: P. Allen and B. Neil (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: OUP, 2015), 3-18.
Allen, P., and Neil, B., Maximus the Confessor and his Companions: Documents from Exile (Oxford: OUP, 2002).
Booth, P., Crisis of Empire: Doctrine and Dissent at the End of Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
Neil, B., Seventh-century Popes and Martyrs: The Political Hagiography of Anastasius Bibliothecarius (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006).
Neil, B., "From Tristia to Gaudia: The Exile and Martyrdom of Pope Martin I," in: J. Leemans (ed.), Martyrdom and Persecution in Late Antique Christianity: Festschrift Boudewijn Dehandschutter (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 179–94.
Record Created By
David Lambert
Date of Entry
27/11/2020
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00859 | Martin, bishop and confessor of Rome, ob. 655/656 | Μαρτῖνος | Certain | S01455 | Maximos the Confessor, monk, theologian and confessor, ob. 662 | Μάξιμος | Certain |
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