medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
In the Roman Martyrology today is the day of commemoration of the Martyrs of Rhaithou. An undated and otherwise problematic account (BHG 1300; related texts at BHG 1300b and 1300h; there is also a version in Syriac), whose narrator is called Ammonius and is said to be a monk of Canopus who was staying at Mt. Sinai, informs us of the slaying of a substantial number of monks at Rhaithou (also Raithou and Raithu), the port on the Gulf of Suez that served as a gateway for the Christian communities at the holy mountain or close to it (Rhaithou's modern successor is at-Tûr or El Tor, the capital of Egypt's South Sinai governorate). The perpetrators are said to have been Blemmyes (a Greek name for one or more Nubian tribal groups), the number of those killed is given variously as forty or as forty-three, and the slaughter is said to have occurred on 28. December in the time of a bishop Peter of Alexandria.
If the account is accepted as historically accurate, this Peter will have been the later fourth-century patriarch of that name, pope St. Peter II (373-380 or 381). But there is a widely accepted view that the account is instead highly fictionalized and that the underlying event, if it occurred at all, may have taken place rather later (conjectures include the mid-fifth century and ca. 510). Additionally, the entire narration may be a doublet of the event described in the narrations of the martyrs of Mt. Sinai commemorated in the Roman Martyrology on 14. January (prior to its revision of 2001 the RM also commemorated the martyrs of Rhaithou on that date). Byzantine synaxaries and their successors in modern Orthodox churches use 14. January for a joint commemoration of the two groups (this is now sometimes transferred to 13. January, as 14. January is the Leavetaking of the Theophany).
Two period-pertinent images of the martyrdom of those at Rhaithou, both illustrating the joint feast of the Martyrs of Sinai and Raithou but differing in their iconography from images of the suffering of those at Sinai in ways permitting the inference that here it is the suffering of those at Rhaithou that is depicted:
a) as depicted in the earlier eleventh-century Imperial Menologion for January in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore (ms. W. 521, fol. 92v):
http://thedigitalwalters.org/Data/WaltersManuscripts/W521/data/W.521/sap/W521_000188_sap.jpg
b) as depicted in a badly degraded January calendar scene in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1335 and 1350) in the narthex of the church of the Holy Ascension at the Visoki Dečani monastery near Peć in, depending on one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/yznqvkj
Best,
John Dillon
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