medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Theophylact of Nicomedia (d. ca. 840). We know about this victim of Byzantine second iconoclasm chiefly from a fairly full Bios written in about 870 (BHG 2451) and from a shorter Bios with somewhat different content written by a cleric of his church in the late ninth or early tenth century (BHG 2452). A native of Asia Minor, he studied in Constantinople under the future patriarch St. Tarasius, who then sent him along with St. Michael of Synnada to a monastery that he had founded on the Thracian shore of the Bosporus. There the ascetic Theophylact proved to be an exemplary monk and, we are told, was rewarded with the gift of thaumaturgy. In about 800, Tarasius having become patriarch, Theophylact was appointed bishop of Nicomedia (today's İznik in Turkey's Bursa province).
As bishop, Theophylact is reported to have been a paragon of pastoral care, preaching against iconoclastic views, succoring the poor and the lame, and establishing from his funds a hospital with a staff of doctors and attendants in which he himself worked as an attendant one day a week and where visitation of the sick formed part of his daily round. On Good Friday he would bathe them himself -- lepers included -- in warm water. After the iconoclast emperor Leo V had come to power in 813 Theophylact became a leading spokesman of the iconophile resistance. For this he was banished late in 814 or very early in 815 to a fortress in Caria, where he spent the remainder of his life in an exile of varying severity. His body, returned to Nicomedia in about 846, was interred in the church of Sts. Cosmas and Damian that he had built as part of his hospital.
Some medieval images of Theophylact of Nicomedia:
Theophylact (at right; at left, St. Paul of Prusias) as depicted in a pair of March calendar portraits in a smaller dome in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321/1322) in the monastery church of the Theotokos at Gračanica in, depending on one's view of the matter, either Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo:
http://tinyurl.com/7tqtl6s
Theophylact as depicted, at the east end of the nave with other hierarchs, in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321/1322) of the monastery church of the Theotokos at Gračanica in, depending on one's view of the matter, either Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo:
http://tinyurl.com/omelrzo
Higher resolution:
http://tinyurl.com/yjvom4u
Theophylact as depicted (lower register at right, panel at lower right) in an earlier fourteenth-century set of miniatures from Thessaloniki for the Great Feasts (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 30v):
http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/bodleian/msgrthf1/30v.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
(matter from an older post revised)
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