Readers Beyond Byzantium: The Image of Edessa (BHG 794–796)

Revered as acheiropoietos (i.e., not made by human hands), the image of Christ from Edessa was a sacred cloth with Jesus’ face. When the city of Edessa was conquered by the Byzantine army, the emperor Romanos I Lekapenos had that precious object brought to Constantinople on 16th of August 944. The relic, later called Mandylion (tissue or towel), was credited with the power to place on the throne the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (945–959). This paper aims to shed light on the readership of the literary sources from the 10th century, especially the Narratio de imagine Edessena [i.e., the Story about the image of Edessa] (BHG 794–796). The hagiography explicitly states that it draws on a collection compiled at the behest of Constantine VII, to whom the writing of the text is solemnly attributed. Therefore, the emperor is both the reader of the diverse sources, ultimately coming from Edessa and here translated from Syriac into Greek, and the writer of the Narratio – or perhaps neither. However, the collapsing of ‘reader’ and ‘author’ functions into one another has significant consequences which, in turn, elucidate some of the socio-cultural patterns in the 10th century.