Department of Civilizations and Forms of Knowledge

Il presente articolo si propone di inquadrare la raccolta di poemi di Barhebraeus e Bar Ma'dani del ms. Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Orientale 298 nell'ambito della sua tradizione manoscritta, illustrandone alcune specificità.
Ad un approfondimento su temi e aspetti formali della raccolta seguiranno trascrizione, traduzione e commento di alcuni poemi, inediti ed editi.

Bar ‘Ebroyo’s Chronicle is preserved in a remarkably high number of manuscripts in comparison to the other historiographical works in Syriac, which all survive in just one copy. The textual tradition of the Chronicle therefore allows a unique insight into its reception and its study contributes fundamentally to the philological and literary evaluation of the work. This article addresses the textual tradition of the Chronicle by focusing on three aspects: the identification of the manuscripts eligible for a critical edition of the text, the separated transmission of the two parts of the Chronicle (Chronography and Ecclesiastical History) and the continuations of the Chronicle. This preliminary study aims at providing a sounder philological base for a future critical edition (which is among the desiderata). In fact, there are fewer manuscripts eligible for a critical edition than the catalogue lists suggest. In addition, the independent transmission of the Chronography and the Ecclesiastical History is limited to very few cases and it is explained by a later development of the tradition. Finally, the study of the continuations will be integrated into the data emerging from the collatio of the manuscripts to show that the textual tradition can be divided in two branches (Redaction I and Redaction II).

Syrian Orthodox historians adopted a compilatory method in the composition of their chronicles. The practice of selecting, excerpting and structuring previous material in a new work is thus a cue of the way the authors intended to provide historical knowledge to the readers. This article focuses on the compilation method of the Syriac Renaissance chronicles of Michael the Great and Anonymous (1234). Through a compared text analysis, common redactional techniques and attitudes will be detected, which partly results from the participation of the authors to a common compilation culture, and partly from the new historical and cultural context they were working in. It will be argued that both Michael the Great and the Anonymous employ novel redactional devices to emphasize the authoritative value of the quotations and harmonize the combination of the sources with the aim of providing a reasoned systematization of earlier historical knowledge. The new historical circumstances which determined the 10th century centralization of the Syrian Orthodox community in the Melitene region and the consequent economic and intellectual flourishing created the conditions for the development of these intellectual projects and the new literary techniques associated therewith. Moreover, whereas parallel projects of systematization in other traditions (like e.g. Byzantium) produced excerpts collections, Syriac Renaissance historians adopted exclusively the chronicle format. This choice ties in the earlier historiographical tradition since no historical collection exists independently in Syriac, which betrays the relevance of the chronological arrangement for the Syrian Orthodox historical discourse.

The establishment of the metropolis of Tagrit as the Syrian Orthodox seat of Persia (early 7th c.) did not come without raising conflicts of jurisdiction between the local Miaphysite hierarchy, based in the monastery Mor Matay, and the patriarchate which hoped to extend its outreach in the eastern region. The foundation of the metropolis of Tagrit is related in two key sources: the Letter of the patriarch Athanasius Gamolo to the Matthaeans (624-629) and the Canons of Mor Matay. Scholars has so far read the Canons of Mor Matay as a later fabrication aimed at compensating for the growing influence of Tagrit seat and, accordingly, have questioned the official recognition of Mor Matay as metropolis before the early 9th cent. This paper argues that such an interpretation ultimately derives from the biased representation of Mor Matay rights given by the patriarchs Dionysius of Tell Maḥre and Michael the Great in their chronicles. Starting out from a reappraisal of the sources, this paper suggests an officially recognized metropolis of Mor Matay, administering six dioceses of Assyria, already existed when Tagrit seat was established. The recognition of both Tagrit and Mor Matay as metropolis, and the canonical rights thereby associated, indeed brought about a jurisdictional anomaly that Matthaeans, maphrians and patriarchs exploited to defend their sphere of influence.

The Ecclesiastical History of Bar 'Ebroyo has long been recognized as a crucial source for the history of the Eastern churches in the Mongol period but it has hardly been appreciated as a literary work on its own. Over the past decades, further study on Bar 'Ebroyo has permitted to dismiss his undeserved label of unoriginal epistomist and to reassess the value of his work. This book seeks to inject that perspective into the study of Bar 'Ebroyo as an ecclesiastical historian and it argues that his Ecclesiastical History offers an original historical narration that encompasses geo-ecclesiology, theology and political theory. Often read as a mere abridgment of Michael the Great's Chronicle, the Ecclesiastical History incorporates a number of additional sources and deploys specific narratological tools to convey a unique vision of history that results from the cultural, political and personal circumstances in which Bar 'Ebroyo wrote his work. In short, the Ecclesiastical History shows how the long-lived tradition of the Church history writing was adjusted to respond to the specific challenges that the political and religious landscape of 13th century Middle East posed to the Syrian Orthodox community.

Her fields of expertise include the history and historiography of the Christian Near East in the tenth to twelfth centuries, the application of computational and statistical methods for manuscript stemmatology, and reflections on the implications of employing digital media and computational methods in humanities contexts. She is currently working on a digital critical edition of the Chronicle of Mattʿēos Uṙhayecʿi (Matthew of Edessa).

The Syriac Julian Romance, a tripartite fictional account of the reign of the Emperor Julian, was hitherto only partially known from two manuscripts. This article publishes the missing first section from Vat. Sir. 37, a section that narrates the death of Constantius II. The complete text allows us to demonstrate that the narrative was composed by a single author and that the tripartite structure does not reflect three older, separate texts. Further, we identify the Miscellaneous Chronicle of 640 as the source for most of the historical information in the Romance. This implies a new date in the first half of the seventh century, which is supported by other chronological indications in the Romance.

Combining evidence from Muslim and Christian sources, this paper attempts to offer some plausible readings as to the identity of the mediators who negotiated the submission of the main Byzantine cities in the context of the Arab conquest (mid. 7th. c.). It also explores how later Christian attitudes towards Islamic lordship and the definition of sectarian confessional groups were retrojected into the portrayal of the actors involved in the negotiations. It argues that ecclesiastical hierarchs, supported by local Arab–Christian elites, had to get involved in the negotiations to fill the void left by Constantinopolitan officials as result of Heraclius’ foreign policy. It also contends that the involvement of Roman Arab leaders conjured up images of treachery and betrayal in later normative narratives which remodelled them as apostates and collaborators.

This article publishes and discusses the fragments of the lost Ecclesiastical History of Daniel of Ṭur ʿAbdin. Daniel was a West-Syrian historian who lived in the first half of the 8th century; he was the maternal grandfather of the chronicler and patriarch of Antioch Dionysius of Tell Maḥre (†845), and one his main sources for the history of the Umayyad period. The article offers a reassessment of Daniel’s person and work, followed by the edition, English translation and historical commentary of fragments and testimonia.