6 January 1088 A.D. Theophylact Exiled to Ohrid, Bulgaria
No author.
“Theophylact’s Flattery `Exiled’ Him to Ohrid.” Christianity.com. May 2007.
http://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/901-1200/theophylacts-flattery-exiled-him-to-ohrid-11629791.html. Accessed 7 Jul 2014.
Can
you make too good an impression on someone important? Theophylact may have
thought so.On this day, January 6, 1088, he gave an
enthusiastic speech before Alexius, Emperor of Byzantium, warmly praising the
emperor and his mother Anna Dalassena. He crowed over the emperor's conquest of
parts of the Balkans. The emperor was a diplomat and servant of the church,
said Theophylact. His speech had unintended consequences.
Evidently the emperor was
pleased. In Byzantium (the eastern half of the old Roman Empire), church posts
were under government control. They were often given as rewards. The emperor
promoted Theophylact to be archbishop of Ohrid in Bulgaria (now Macedonia).
For Theophylact, who was a
cultured man, the promotion was like a sentence of exile. In Constantinople, he
had libraries, palaces, and shimmering architecture. He taught the sons of
important men. Theophylact even taught prince Constantine Doukas, who was
expected to become emperor; and he was a friend to the boy’s beautiful mother,
Maria of Alania. By transferring to Bulgaria, he would have to leave all that
behind and many friends, too. Like other snobby Byzantines, he considered Ohrid
a barbarian backwater. But churchmen were civil servants, who had to go
wherever the emperor ordered, so he went.
As Theophylact soon found out,
he was leaving behind even more than he had thought. When he drew near to
Ohrid, a horrid stench stunned his nose. Evidently sanitation standards were
not as high as in Constantinople.
Byzantium's conquest of Bulgaria
still rankled Ohrid. Theophylact's coming rubbed salt in the wounds of its
defeat. Formerly, the Bulgarians had had their own patriarch. Resentful of
their loss of independence, they greeted Theophylact with jeers and insults. To
spite him, they sang a victory song, extolling their nation's past triumphs.
They were not consoled by the fact that the emperor had given local bishops the
privilege of consecrating Theophylact or that the emperor had confirmed that Bulgaria's
church would be independent of the Patriarch of Constantinople. Theophylact was
an outsider, and they knew he was expected do his part to keep Bulgaria glued
to the empire.
For his part, Theophylact did
not like Bulgaria, which he called "of all provinces of the empire, the
most pitiable." He was homesick and begged friends to help get him
released from the place. After a visit home, he wrote, "So I return to the
Bulgarians, I who am a true Constantinopolitan and, strange though it is, a Bulgarian."
Yet he had compassion on
Bulgaria's poor. In several letters he pleaded for tax relief and pointed out
that one child in five was seized to be sold into slavery as payment for taxes.
He urged a show of mercy "lest the patience of the poor be finally exhausted."
One way that Theophylact tried
to forget his homesickness was to write. 130 of his letters were published.
These are hard to understand today because he wrote in a "puzzle"
style used by educated men of that era. Even so, they are full of useful bits
of Byzantine and Bulgarian history and satirical comments. He came to love
Slavic literature and Slavic church heroes and wrote a life of St. Clement of
Ohrid and retold the story of the fifteen martyrs buried at Strumitsa, not far
from Ohrid. In "exile," he also wrote commentaries on the gospels and
on Paul's epistles.
Amazingly, four hundred years
later, Theophylact's January 6th speech was still generating fallout. A German
scholar named Erasmus discovered the archbishop's writings. He borrowed some of
Theophylact's ideas for a satire called In Praise of Folly. That book, by
poking fun at wrongs in the church and society, helped bring about the
Protestant reformation in Europe.
Bibliography
New Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Thomson, Gale, 2002.
Obolensky, Dimitri. Six Byzantine Portraits.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
"Theophylact." New
Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge. Grand Rapids:
Baker Book House, 1954.
Last updated May,
2007.
No comments:
Post a Comment