This session explores an important, yet still under-studied, aspect of Byzantine survival beyond Byzantium: the presence there of Christians still in communion with Constantinople, and the broader gravitational pull of Constantinople and the Christian Roman Empire on the imaginations of Christians at large within the Islamicate sphere. Focusing particularly on the period between Justinian and the first Abbasid caliphs, it examines several inter-connected phenomena: the ideology and reality of the Chalcedonian pentarchy either side of the Arab-Muslim conquests; the fate of the Chalcedonian churches in the face of Miaphysite rivals and the rising Islamic power; Miaphysite views of the Chalcedonian emperor, church, and past; and the construction of Chalcedonian/Melkite identities in dialogue with, and distinction from, Constantinople. These and related questions will be discussed by a panel of scholars specialising in early Byzantine and Islamicate church history, thus contributing to a richer understanding of the development of the complex religious landscape in this transformative period.
Iconoclasm has been recently considered an imperial phenomenon unrelated to the rejection of icon worship by Muslim authorities in the caliphate. Whereas the second treatise of John the Damascene on images apparently supports this view as it has emperor Leo III as the target of his criticism, the treatise of Abu Qurrah seems rather to…
The Arab conquests of the mid-seventh century brought about significant changes for the imperial church. Within a few decades, three of the four eastern patriarchates had been lost by the empire, leaving most of the remaining territory under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the patriarchate of Constantinople. Well into the eighth century, the Chalcedonian patriarchs of…
This paper presents a hitherto unrecognised miaphysite history embedded in the Chronicle of the Egyptian bishop John of Nikiu (d. 700). The identification of other sources within the Chronicle, as well as the recognition of thematic coherence across different sections, has allowed for the delineation of this source across sections ranging from the late fourth…
A central problem facing the imperial Byzantine church in the sixth and seventh centuries was the emergence, in Egypt and Syria, of dissident anti-Chalcedonian groups that threatened its unity. In the early Islamic period, these same groups would come to reverse the confessional domination over the institutional church that Chalcedonians had enjoyed since the age…