medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
In addition to celebrating St. Eustathius / Eustachius and his wife and sons Sts. Theopista, Theopistus, and Agapius, some Orthodox churches (esp. Greek ones) celebrate today another St. Eustathius, he of Thessalonica / Thessaloniki. As this E. (d. ca. 1195) was both a prominent churchman and a truly major scholar, it is at least mildly embarrassing that this list, devoted as it is to scholarly discussions of medieval religious culture, should seemingly have neglected until now to provide him a notice, however brief, in its longstanding "saints of
the day" postings.
We know about E. chiefly from his surviving letters and sermons, from remarks and observations in his numerous other writings, and from closely posthumous memorial speeches by his fellow bishops Euthymius Malakes (a friend from E.'s student days in Constantinople), the metropolitan of Neai Patrai, and Michael Choniates (the historian and a former student of E.'s), the metropolitan of Athens. A member of the Constantinopolitan intellectual elite, he had been a private teacher of grammar before becoming one of the deacons of Hagia Sophia and, in the later 1160s or early 1170s, Master of Rhetors in the patriarchal school. During his time in the capital he wrote the very learned commentaries on Homer's _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ for which he is famous (two of our manuscripts of the commentary on the _Iliad_ are at least largely in E.'s own hand, making this perhaps the earliest long work for which which an autograph witness survives) as well as commentaries on other ancient authors, speeches for the imperial court, and a variety of lesser works.
Senior clerics of Hagia Sophia often capped their careers with a bishopric. In 1174 E. was named metropolitan of Myra, a once great see in Lycia that by this time had fallen on hard times. There is no evidence that E. ever traveled to this see and in the late 1170s he exchanged it for that of Thessalonica, the second city of the empire. As metropolitan there he delivered sermons castigating the socially prominent for lax morals and urging greater charity -- which he wished to have funneled through the metropolitan church -- for the city's poor. He introduced from Constantinople the feasts of the Elevation of the Holy Cross and Holy Monday and made monetary distributions during the attendant festivities. At the same time, E. had to fight off attempts by civic authorities to tax church income and to deal with monastic institutions that resisted his efforts to bring them under the bishop's control. His treatise _On the Improvement of Monastic Life_ has a lot to say to the discredit of the monks of Thessalonica.
In 1185 military forces of the kingdom of Sicily briefly invaded the empire in the hope of putting a puppet on the throne after the assassination of Andronicus I. One of their successes in this campaign was the seizing of Thessalonica, which they then held for several months to the great disruption of the city's economy. E.'s engaging account of this civic disaster, _On the Capture of Thessalonica_, presents him in a largely positive light as the spokesperson for the citizenry (the imperial governor having fled) during this foreign occupation and may, along with the concern for the people's well-being expressed in his sermons, have fostered post-mortem impressions of his saintliness. During his last years (which included a period of exile in 1191 and 1192) E. wrote another major work, his commentary on the iambic Canon on the Pentecost traditionally attributed to St. John of Damascus.
E.'s popular cult was immediate: Euthymius Malakes speaks of the collection of healing drops of moisture from his tomb. It is unknown when he was formally glorified but by the early fourteenth century he had definitely achieved the status of official sainthood. E. is one of Thessaloniki's four sainted bishops whose portraits appear in the prothesis of the katholikon at Vatopedi, painted in 1312, and he is portrayed in no fewer than four of the churches endowed by Serbia's king Milutin (d. 1321). Views of those latter portraits follow:
a) E. as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321/1322) in the parecclesion of St. Nicholas in the monastery church of the Theotokos at Gračanica in, depending on one's view of the matter, Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo:
http://tinyurl.com/3j4v22ub) E. (second from left) as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1313 and ca. 1320) in the altar area of the King's Church (dedicated to Sts. Joachim and Anne) in the Studenica monastery near Kraljevo (Raška dist.) in Serbia:
http://tinyurl.com/2a7ksquc) E. (at left; at right, probably St. Niphon of Cyprus) as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1313 and 1318; conservation work in 1968) by the court painters Michael Astrapas and Eutychius in the church of St. George in Staro Nagoričane in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia:
http://tinyurl.com/3bc3wuxDetail view:
http://tinyurl.com/3bkevue d) E. as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1314 and ca. 1320) by the court painters Michael Astrapas and Eutychius in the church of St. Nikita near Čučer in today's Čučer-Sandevo in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia:
http://tinyurl.com/65yjmh5Two complementary, English-language assessments of E., both published in 1995, are Michael Angold, _Church and Society in Byzantium under the Comneni, 1081-1261_ (Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1995), ch. 8 ("Eustathius of Thessalonica"; pp. 179-196), and Robert Browning, "Eustathios of Thessalonike Revisited", _Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies_ 40 [= n.s., vol. 2] (1995), 83-90.
Best,
John Dillon
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