Wandering Saints and the Distant Empire: The Governance Dilemma of Tenth-Century Byzantine Southern Italy as Seen through St. Neilos the Younger

From the tenth century onward, frequent Arab incursions into Sicily and Calabria triggered a northward movement of Greek communities from southern Italy into central and northern regions. Among them were groups of Italo-Greek saints and laymen who practiced asceticism. While the role of these saints as intermediaries and the Eastern ascetic tradition they embodied have often been interpreted as reinforcing Byzantine imperial authority and extending its influence, this article reassesses that narrative. Through an analysis of tenth-century Italo-Greek saints—exemplified by St. Neilos the Younger—and their interactions with diverse regional powers, it demonstrates that these cross-cultural holy figures and their communities established localized, personal ties that functioned in the absence of effective imperial governance. Simultaneously, they utilized a religious discourse centered on Christian universalist ideals to foster non-imperial, cross-regional identities. These developments reflect, in essence, a form of detachment from the Byzantine Empire and manifest the centrifugal forces operating between the imperial center and southern Italian society. They also imply the erosion of imperial control over key religious resources and local communities. The rise of such localized authority and cross-regional networks conflicted fundamentally with imperial policies aimed at integrating and consolidating control over southern Italy, revealing a dilemma of Byzantine rule in the region during this period. The autonomy and centrifugal tendencies fostered within the multicultural frontier setting led local communities to adopt fluid, ambiguous, and strategic conceptions of identity and authority. This dynamic, practice-based mechanism of identity formation stood in structural tension with the homogenizing model of governance and ideology upheld by the empire, thereby impeding the development of profound affiliation between empire and southern Italian society. Consequently, once the empire's administrative and military efficacy eroded, its domination in the region disintegrated.