Christendom's regional systems

MIRI RUBIN

The religion born among the Jews of Palestine under Roman imperial rule some 2,000 years ago is now a global religion characterized by great diversity among its constituent groups.¹ This chapter will study Christianity's regional systems over a thousand years, 500 CE-1500 ce, during which it was the official religion of the Byzantine Empire and spread throughout Europe, much of Asia and parts of Africa.

Amidst great diversity, one major aspect of Christian cultures that may have been familiar and reassuring to those travelling throughout Byzantium, into Europe or the lands of Rus', further east, or south to Ethiopia, was the presence of the figure of the Virgin Mary. Here two main models prevailed, different yet not unrecognizably so. One type, the product of Byzantine imperial Christianity, was Mary as Theotokos, the one who gives birth to God: enthroned, attended by angels, facing the viewer with her solemn son in her lap facing the viewer too.

At the beginning of our period, Byzantine prestige as the foremost Christian polity was displayed in great building projects as well as in the widespread presence of coins, all imprinted with Christian symbols. These defined a visual style. Images of the Virgin Mary disseminated from the imperial capital dominated the style of representation for centuries, in icons, mosaics, and ivories throughout Christian regions, such as the Syriac Bible of the sixth century, the image of Mary in the Irish Book of Kells of c. 800, the Russian icon associated with the protection of Novgorod in 1170, Our Lady of the Sign, or images produced in Italy throughout our period.

This chapter begins with a consideration of some of the characteristics of Christian life and its implications for polities, communities, and individuals. It proceeds to examine life in areas of the world governed by Christian rulers - the borders of which were always shifting - then to the Islamic world, and finally to polities further east. The chapter ends with a consideration of some movements - trade, crusading, mission - which encouraged links between the Christian regions.

The characteristics of Christian institutions

Around 500, Christian life officially dominated the areas that had been part of the Roman Empire. In the provinces of Spain and Gaul, Italy and the Balkans, Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine as well as Egypt and the coast of North Africa, Christian communities were supported and protected by the Byzan­tine Empire around the Mediterranean, and by Christian kingdoms that succeeded the Western Roman Empire (see Map 16.1). Further afield, there was Christian life in Ireland and Scotland to the north and west, as well in the Sasanian Empire to the east, whose state religion was Zoroastrianism.

Map 16.1. Christianity in 406 ce

those in the East were ancient, born from the conversion of members of ancient pagan and Jewish communities, and who used Syriac - eastern and western - for liturgical purposes.

Christianity based its claim to universal truth on the belief that it embodied the fulfilment of biblical prophecies realized in the incarnation, life, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. Its sense of history, defined by the Christian bishop and historian Eusebius (c. 263-339), saw a succession of world powers - from the Chaldeans to the Romans - destined to culminate in a future apocalyptic time. Augustine (354-430), bishop of Hippo in North Africa, established an historical view whereby the new covenant between God and his people was described in the narra­tives of Christ’s life, written down by his disciples the evangelists, and combined with the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible into Christian scripture. A chain of succession was created by Jesus in his lifetime, a bond cemented by the offering of his body at a meal shared by Jesus and his disciples before his death that became known as the Last Supper, and reiterated through the bestowal of authority to the apostles. By the beginning of our period, the bishops of Rome claimed superiority to the other episcopal sees because their see was founded - according to tradition - by St Peter, the leader of the disciples. The authority to interpret, translate and explicate scripture and the authority to determine which enunciations would become part of the grow­ing Christian canon was, and remained, disputed. Control of access to scripture and to the sacraments - rituals understood to convey saving grace - became a prime ecclesiastical preoccupation, periodically and regularly chal­lenged by laypeople and clergy alike. In Europe at the end of our period, this was the issue that brought about the profound critique and rupture with the past associated with the Protestant Reformation.

Christian life was organized in communities, and these were overseen by bishops from great churches situated in cities such as Poitiers, Milan, Lyon, Toledo, Hippo and Antioch. Some bishops were considered more exalted than others because of the apostolic foundation, antiquity, and dignity of their sees, and were designated as patriarchates: Antioch, Alex­andria, Constantinople, Rome, and Jerusalem. By 500 bishops provided the backbone of Christian administration, building where this existed upon the bureaucratic infrastructure of the Roman Empire. They often assumed functions of state when imperial provision failed, supplying cities with grain and water, repairing city walls, and negotiating treaties with Barbar­ian leaders. Bishops also set the standards for religious instruction and true belief: they supervised the training of priests, managed church property, ordered the content and rhythm of liturgy, authorized versions of scripture, maintained church courts, distributed alms, and oversaw the teaching of orthodoxy. Each bishop - or metropolitan in the Church of the East - traced the foundation of his see to an apostle or a martyr, whose cult provided the core of local identity and a uniting theme for regional life alongside the great universal truths of Christianity. By the beginning of our period, such cults celebrated St Martin in Tours, St Peter in Rome, St Vitale in Ravenna, St Thomas on the Malabar Coast. Constantinople adopted the Virgin Mary, Jesus' mother, as its special protector, and there she soon was addressed as Theotokos.

Regional affinities and styles reflected the missionary effort that had led to conversion. Christians in India still claimed their ancestry from St Thomas the Apostle and used Syriac as their liturgical language until this was expunged in the sixteenth century by European Christians. In Syria and Mesopotamia, Christianity had grown among the vast pagan, Zoroastrian and Jewish communities; converts from the latter retained a deep-rooted biblicism and a cautious attitude to the use of images in worship.^[510] When St Augustine (d.

In the analysis of Christian life, whether in Christian polities or under Sasanian, Muslim or Central Asian rule, it may be useful to apply the concepts of charisma and institution as developed by the social theorist Max Weber (1864-1920) in his discussion of the formation of institutions and bureaucracies. The process by which Christian churches emerged may be interpreted as an attempt to routinize the legacy of Jesus' charisma, to make it enduring and repeatable. One example would be the office of bishop, which we have already encountered: heir and successor to the role of apostles as teachers, and guardian of grace to be transmitted to believers through the sacraments. Their eminence was incorporated in certain Euro­pean Christian kingdoms - including England, France, and Poland - into a close relationship with dynasts, the charisma of lineage joining that of episcopal office in interdependence.

Churchmen - educated and competent in Latin, and in central and western Europe after the eleventh century, required to live in celibacy - provided rulers with a wide range of expertise in law, diplomacy, science and communication. They assisted rulers in projecting a credible and legitimate figure of rule, and helped enhance them above other landed magnates. Both in European polities and in the Byzantine Empire, a coexistence of mutual benefit - though not without tension - evolved between dynastic and ecclesi­astical bearers of authority and the bureaucratic structures they endorsed.

Life in Christian polities

The routinization of charisma within the institutions of the church and the beneficial coexistence of church and state bureaucracies in Europe and in the Byzantine Empire invited perennial critique. Those who fashioned lives of ascetic spirituality were believed to possess the authority born of the virtue exhibited in their lives. There were usually holy men, whose lives and influence have been evoked so powerfully by the historian Peter Brown.^[511] They called believers to penance and devoted their lives to the heroics of asceticism. In the deserts of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, in the hills of Armenia and northern Persia, they inspired a powerful genre of hagiography, and drew adherents to shrines. One of these ascetics was St Simeon the Stylite (389-459), who lived for decades upon a stone pillar, encouraging villagers to repent, and drawing pilgrims from as far as North Africa and Europe to QaTat Sim‘an, his shrine some 60 kilometres northeast of Antioch.^[512] Such ‘living saints' could also challenge the power of the state to lay down orthodox belief. When the monk and theologian Maximus the Confessor (580-662), challenged the imperial formulation on the will of Christ he was mutilated - his tongue and right hand cut off - and sent into exile in Thrace in the Caucasus.^[513] Yet soldiers who guarded him were appalled at being forced to incarcerate the holy man.

Christian political hegemony offered many benefits to Christian com­munities, in the legal protection of churches and clergy, in the support of church courts, in munificent benefactions, and the incorporation of Chris­tian content into court rituals. The Byzantine emperors since Constantine presided over the councils that determined matters of faith, and used the power of the state to enforce that orthodoxy by persecuting dissenters. Heresy was tantamount to treason. Yet such support for the church came at a price; in Byzantium and later in European polities, rulers sought to codify belief and define orthodoxy, and also persecuted those who dis­sented from the mainstream. Life outside the protection of Christian rulers could sometimes provide space for more autonomous expression of reli­gious life, and especially of the non-bureaucratic, charismatic type. When the authority of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem declined after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 638 and the separation from the imperial Byzan­tine church that resulted from it, monastic life in the region flourished. The monasteries of the Judean desert became the sole local repositories of Christian scholarship, and produced important scholars, influential for their exemplary - charismatic - teaching, and for their actions outside an enabling official framework.^[514]

Wise rulers attempted to harness the power of charisma. For example, Pope Innocent III was forced to decide what was to be done with Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) and his following. Francis had given up the privileged life of a merchant’s son and sought to live the apostolic life of poverty and preaching.^[515] Pope Innocent did not treat him as just another enthusiast preaching poverty without licence, but rather embraced him. Francis and his followers were turned into a vanguard in the service of the church, with the privilege to preach anywhere in order to turn lukewarm Christians into committed ones. Some Franciscans turned their intellectual and oratorical energies towards polemic against Jews and to missionary efforts far beyond Christian Europe: in Tunis, Egypt and as far as China.

Our emphasis so far has been on the workings of charisma and institutions in Christian regions. These were reflected in the continuous tension between the authority invested in bishops who organized Christian life through the provision of education, ritual and law, on the one hand, and that unmediated authority earned by adored holy people, on the other. The fundamental challenge faced by ecclesiastical institutions, both within and without Chris­tian polities, was in providing believers with a compelling narrative that made sense of their lives, based on authoritative texts and disseminated in the vernacular. Alongside such teaching was the rich ritual world that re-enacted the Christian narrative, and which also marked meaningful points of the life cycle. None of this was easily achieved or uniformly practised, but everywhere Christian rituals incorporated pre-existing - pre-Christian - trad­itions and robust symbols of the Christian faith. Christian rituals, including baptism and the Eucharist, were often enactments of episodes in Jesus' life. No ritual of the life cycle was left untouched, so for example, by the seventh century the Franks possessed a Christian ritual for the marking of an adoles­cent boy's first facial shaving, the barbatoria. More significantly, the religion that announced the coming of an incarnate God, who was enmeshed in exemplary practices of asceticism and physical purity, came to sanction marriage and sexuality.^[516] In Europe, from the twelfth century a rich cultural sphere came to surround marriage as a sacrament of love. The religion which offered eternal life also dealt expertly with the end of life. It solemnized death by claiming it was not the end, and offered ideas and practices - like the concept of purgatory elaborated in Europe - which allowed the living to communicate with the dead and to act in piety on their behalf.^{[517] [518]}

The ritual world marked the human life cycle and celebrated above all the life of Jesus, his mother and apostles, martyrs and saints (see Figure 16.1). By the year 500 a rich world of legend enhanced the life­narratives of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, filling in the gaps in the Christian story and rendering these figures compelling and familiar figures of purity and faith. Peter Brown has described this system as the incorporation of dead humans into the ritual practices of the living.¹¹ Thus were created in a

Figure 16.1 Ivory plaque with the Adoration of the Magi, Early Byzantine, early sixth century (©The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

variety of languages - Greek, Latin, Armenian, Coptic, Syriac - the narratives of Jesus' childhood, the stories which imagined the ends of Mary and Joseph.^[519] In subsequent centuries and in Europe above all, this world of legend - considered by some Christian thinkers to be of doubtful authority, and ever lampooned by Jews - reached heights of elaboration. The prevailing cultural trend in Europe favoured the mediation of religious narratives through eliciting identification: Jesus was portrayed after the year 1200 either as a sweet baby or as a suffering man, and his mother as a doting parent or as a bereaved one, in the European medieval image par excellence, the pieta. These images were available in Christian regions very widely and publicly: a Madonna on every street corner, a cross in every market square (see Figure 16.2).

Christians were organized in communities for collective worship, under the guidance of a priest - sometimes a monk allocated to the task - and these parishes often overlapped with already cohesive groups of neighbour­hood, work and sociability. Parishes often reflected the underlying eco­nomic and social structures: they overlapped with villages and urban neighbourhoods, reinforcing interactions within and between families. This was not only the case in Europe, but in Egypt and Syria under Muslim rule too. From the eve of the Crusades and throughout the Latin presence in West Asia (1099-1291), Melkite Christians - followers of Greek Orthodox Christianity - still lived in large parts of Samaria in villages, each with its small church in Byzantine style, first built probably in the fifth or sixth century.^[520] Where Christians lived in nucleated villages and densely popu­lated cities, provision of pastoral care was probably the most effective, benefitting from the underlying networks of work, security and bureau­cracy. In areas more sparsely populated, or where pastoral or nomadic lifestyles prevailed - as in large parts of Ireland, the Jura Mountains of today's France and Switzerland, or much of Central Asia - provision of pastoral care was less regular and was often disrupted for lack of churches, priests or a sufficiently large congregation. The Franciscan William of Rubruck (c. 1220-c. 1293) was bemused to find (what he considered to be only so-called) Christians among the Naiman people of Central Asia, served

Figure 16.2 The Holy Family, Joos van Cleve, c. 1485-1540/41, Antwerp (Metropolitan Museum of Art / © SCALA)

by ‘a certain Nestorian, a mighty herdsman and the ruler over a people called the Naiman, who were Nestorian Christians’.^[521]

Whatever the terrain and the conditions of subsistence, Christian life always combined elements of the local and predictable with those that were more unusual, even exotic. The local church stood for centuries, maintained and adorned as far as communities could manage and the surroundings allowed. Within it unfolded familiar chants and ritual acts guided by old books, with the participation of the congregation of young and old, male and female, committed and less-committed Christians. Christian life was embed­ded within family and work, but alongside these rhythms there were less predictable, enriching and sometimes baffling, experiences: the visit of a specialist religious, monk or preacher; an encounter with a hermit living in a forest or a cave in the hills south of Siena or those of Tur ‘Abdin in northern Iraq; the arrival of a church tribunal - like that which appeared repeatedly to examine the villagers of Montaillou in the early fourteenth century; pilgrim­age to a shrine nearby or perhaps the return of a pilgrim, merchant or crusader from further afield with tales to tell and souvenirs to show and share.

When and where Christian kingdoms appeared to be in serious threat - confronting conquest, raids, loss of sovereignty, or exaction of tribute - in those zones of war some of the most creative cultural processes took place, often forging unique patterns of identity.^[522] As the Muscovite kingdom of Rus’ (1238-1480) evolved after the Mongol conquests, church writers and secular authorities combined in creating myths of Christian resistance, martyrdom and heroism. In fact, the Grand Duchy of Moscow was established within the sphere of the Khanate of the Golden Horde. The Grand Duchy represented sedentary Christian order, but even after the decline of the Golden Horde it still retained a formative attachment to the dread of the Other - the enemy to the East. It now invested this in the Cossacks - settlers of the steppes who mingled Russian heritage with the life-style and military skills of the nomads - despite the fact that the Cossacks were Christians.^[523]

Christian life was vastly varied even within the lands where it was the majority religion and the rulers were Christian. As we shall see, it developed particular variations where Christians lived as large, tolerated indigenous communities, as was the case under Islam.

Christian life in the Sasanian and Muslim polities

At the beginning of the Middle Millennium, Christianity was already well established within the Mediterranean basin, although it was only beginning to spread northwards in Europe. Under the Emperor Justinian (527-65), Byzantine hegemony was asserted over most of the Mediterranean basin, suppressing the Christian kingdoms of Vandals, Visigoths and Ostrogoths, in which an Arian version of Christianity prevailed. This belief, named for the fourth-century Alexandrian priest Arius, emphasized the separate, created nature of Jesus as Son of God within the Trinity, and it was repeatedly denounced by the Byzantine church councils. To the east of the Empire there was the Christian kingdom of Armenia, with an independent Christian tradition that varied in matters of Christology from the formulations of the Council of Chalcedon of 451. Byzantium and Armenia also bordered the Sasanian Empire, from which Christians often fled to Armenia and Georgia in periods of persecution.

Christianity of the East can be characterized by three main historic groupings, which contained different denominations, some of which have survived until today. There were (1) the Church of the East, the name later applied to those dissident 'Ncstorians' who broke away from imperial Christianity in 431, whose liturgical language was East (classical) Syriac and whose adherents have survived in Iraq and Iran but have also migrated to Europe, Australia and the United States; (2) Syrian followers of imperial Orthodoxy, Melkites and Maronites, whose liturgical language was Greek; and (3) the Syriac Orthodox Church (or the Church of the West, or Jacobite), which separated from Greek Orthodoxy over theological issues in 451, whose liturgical language was Greek and which maintained close ties with other non- Chalcedonian groups such as the Copts, as well as the Nubians and Ethiopians who depended upon the Copts hierarchically. Despite a recognition that there was great variety, certain aspects of Christian practice still amazed travellers: the Coptic priest and traveller Abu al-Makarim (1205-73) described with disapproval the use by Ethiopians of vinegar for communion, just as he marvelled at the sumptuous gilt of a Christian church in San‘a, Yemen.^[524]

Early Christian communities developed within the Byzantine (325-1453) and Sasanian Empires (224-651) and they included - among others - many converts from among the long-established urban Jewish communities. This explains some of the distinctive cultural traits of the region's Christian culture: a liturgy that was highly scriptural, and a theology to which Greek Platonic concepts were all but foreign in these early, formative stages. The cultural centre of Syriac Christianity was Edessa, which was also an import­ant economic centre to which many Persian Christians had escaped during Sasanian persecutions. Edessa's distinctive theology was exegetical in emphasis and it rejected the formulations made in Constantinople about a God in whom divinity and humanity were fully combined. Theodore of Mopsuestia (c. 350-428) taught of Jesus the Man, who offered a ‘habitation' for the Word of God. From this also followed that the Virgin Mary was not the mother of God - Theotokos - bearer of God, the appellation accepted at the Council of Ephesus (431), which became the core of imperial liturgy. Rather, she had given birth to the man Christ, and was thus to be addressed as Anthropotokos or Christotokos. Such understandings are also called Nestorian, after Nestorius, the Syrian Patriarch of Constantinople, who promoted them, until his condemnation at that council. So alien were these beliefs to official imperial Christianity that the school at Edessa was closed by imperial mandate in 489, and a new centre for the Church of the East emerged further east - in Nisibis on the river Tigris - whose school guided Christian thought within the Persian sphere for centuries to come.^[525]

The Church of the East was led by the catholicos, whose province ranged from Lake Van in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south, and whose seat was in the city of Seleucia/Ctesiphon up to 780, when it moved to Baghdad. Besides settled communities, Christians of the East supported in this period some hundred and fifty monasteries, many in the northern borderlands between Byzantine and - up to 651 - Sasanian control. The catholicos supervised Christian worship in all these areas, but in comparison with Europe or Byzantium provisions for believers were sparse. In 820 there were some nineteen metropolitans (equivalent to archbishops), which by the fourteenth century had increased to twenty-five, with some two hundred bishops under them. The growth of Christian communities was followed by institutional provision: the bishop’s see of Kashgar on the Silk Road, for example, was elevated in the late twelfth century to a metropolitan see. Missionaries of the Church of the East reached as far as southern India, Malaya and China, easily travelling with the merchants of the southern Silk Road. As was the case in other Christian regions, the metropolitan - equiva­lent to an archbishop elsewhere - appointed bishops and headed synods. By the early sixth century, metropolitans were appointed for the Christians of India, some sedentary and some itinerant; in the next century one metropol­itan was castigated for the neglect of his duties to the Indian churches ‘which extend from the borders of the Persian Empire to the place they call Qalah'.^[526] Beyond the boundaries of the Sasanian world, then, following the travels of merchants who had traded with the Malabar coast at least since Roman times, Christians settled in the rich spice-trading ports, and drew local people to their religion. For the next millennium or so, Christians of southern India spoke Malayalam in daily life, used Syriac for their liturgy and hagiographical writings, and insisted on the antiquity and apostolic origin of their church.^[527]

The spread of Muslim power affected Christians dramatically in their many and diverse communities. Following the teachings of Muhammad, Jews and Christians were termed People of the Book (ahl al-kitab), and were treated as corporate groups defined by their scripture-based religion. Chris­tians and Jews were deemed to be in error, and thus inferior subjects, but their affinity to the shared history of prophecy and scripture set them apart from other conquered people, whom Muslims regarded as pagans and star­gazers. Jews and Christians lived as protected people (dhimmi) so long as their dependence on the magnanimity of the caliph was recognized through payment of a poll tax and the submission to some civic limitations. One treaty incorporated into a Coptic chronicle shows how this may have worked. It reports that when ‘Amr ibn al-‘As, conqueror of Egypt, entered a treaty of surrender with Cyrus, Melkite patriarch of Alexandria, he promised not to intervene in Christian affairs. During the Umayyad period (661-750), the law of Islam replaced Byzantine and Sasanian law, but it left local administrations intact. The jurisprudence that developed during the ‘ Abbasid period (749/50-1258) aimed to harmonize the teaching of the Quran with local traditions through development of Islamic law.

The prevailing understanding of the link between community (ummah) and religion, which characterized Islam, when applied to Christians and Jews, allowed them to live according to their respective sacred laws, as long as these did not insult Islam.^[528] There were, of course, points of meeting and conflict, for which Muslim law provided guidelines: a Christian could not own a Muslim slave, nor own copies of the Quran or collections of hadith - the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad that were collected and that guided legal deliberations.^[529] There was no universal agreement between Muslim jurists on the extent of legal autonomy for Christians, but in practice they enjoyed it except in cases involving public order and respect for Islam: highway robbery, apostasy and blasphemy. Even given these restrictions, some Christians of the East, whose understanding of Christianity differed from that of their Byzantine rulers, welcomed the advent of the Arab conquerors as liberators.^[530]

Christians of the East were burdened with one anxiety that did not weigh on those in Europe and Byzantium, the fear of apostasy: the conversion of sons and daughters, relatives and neighbours to Islam and away from their shared faith. So they produced tracts aimed at defending their faith and criticizing the tenets of the triumphant one around them. For Christians living in Islamic polities this was a real concern. Conversion to Islam was relatively easy, and it opened opportunities, while conversion from Islam to Christianity was deemed to be apostasy, and was punishable by death. Christians nonetheless lived and prospered alongside Jewish communities that shared many of their living conditions. While the general policy was one of toleration, as the united caliphate turned quickly into a vast array of independent states, Christians lived at greater risk from occasional reversals of policy, and periods of heightened fervour that disturbed the status quo.

This was the case at the northern borders of the caliphate, in the early and mid-eleventh century with the rise to hegemony of the recently converted Seljuks, just as it was in twelfth-century al-Andalus, when it was conquered by the North African Almohad dynasty.

A telling example of a Christian's personal struggle with the attractions of Islam is imagined in the hagiographical account of the life of the Coptic martyr Joannes of Phanijoit. The Life of c. 1211 describes the ways in which a good Christian might be lured by Islam, here appearing in the form of an exoticized Muslim woman, who leads him astray:

Joannes also mixed

with these ones in this way, and he learned their ways, for he was a flax merchant to the women from the avenue of [St Sergius?] in Old Cairo. Satan deceived him with the lust of a Saracen woman.^[531]

Joannes became a Muslim, but when he grew old he returned to his village and was slowly drawn back to Christianity. He sought advice, both spiritual and legal, but there was no way in Ayyubid Egypt for a Muslim to renounce his faith. Joannes thus became a martyr, inspired by the examples of Coptic martyrs during Emperor Diocletian's persecutions in the early fourth century.^[532]

A particularly intense period of violence against Christians and their churches is associated with the arrival of wandering Sufi reformers to Upper Egypt, and their encounter with the ancient Coptic settlements there.^[533] Large Christian communities thrived in Upper Egypt with a network of monasteries endowed and supported by wealthy merchants and by respected and well- connected Christian administrators in service of the Ayubbid sultans.^[534] In the early fourteenth century, anti-dhimmi pamphlets were composed by the Sufis, similar in tone to the invective against the Jews of Europe at the same time. Christians were accused of being rich and haughty, of enjoying privileges from rulers who depended upon their services. Reformers like Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) inveighed against monks in particular, as perverters of religious truth who sought monastic status in order to be free from the poll tax that applied to Christians.

The primacy of Islam was not only embedded in its political rule, but also in the transformation of space. Since Islam was to be recognized as the true religion, the symbols of Christian worship - above all the places of worship - were kept smaller, lower, and less magnificent than mosques. In the decades of conquest and settlement, Muslim governors accommodated the need for new administrative headquarters, combined with the desire to leave local populations undisturbed, by erecting twin cities. This meant that new settlements were built alongside existing ones, like the building of Ramla only four kilometres from Lydda. With the establishment of Umayyad rule in 661 and the associated systems of finance, big building projects were under­taken, such as the construction of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem in 691 / 2, the great Mosque of Damascus in 715, and that of Aleppo a decade later.

Christian communities in Muslim polities retained many of the cultural attributes of their pre-Islamic life. For ritual purposes they continued to use Coptic in Egypt, versions of Syriac in Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia, Greek in Palestine and Asia Minor, and Armenian and Georgian in their respective regions. Yet by the late seventh century, Christian writers were using the Muslim dating system that reckoned time from 622, the year Mohammed migrated from Mecca to Medina, alongside the Byzantine chronology that combined the year from the creation of the world and the imperial tax year. Christians brought to the newly established Muslim polity their traditions of local knowledge and administrative experience, while benefitting from Muslim medical and scientific knowledge. The dependent dhimmi status of Christians - as of Jews - meant that Muslim rulers also expected them to be loyal.

It is striking to note just how deeply Muslim rulers relied on Christians at the highest echelons of prestigious service. Christians were mediators of important and useful knowledge, including astronomy, medicine, science and commerce. Theophilus of Edessa, for example, was astronomer to Caliph al-Mahdi (r. 755-85), and a historian as well. As we have seen, Copts were central to the administration of Egypt. Some Christians were able to offer Muslim courts the practical arts of astronomy, which combined the classical heritage and Persian science.^[535] The earliest mentions of the Arab conquests were made by Syriac Christians who were at work in all areas of learning and administration; they even wrote the histories of Muslim coun­tries in Arabic, a practice that continued into the eleventh century.^[536] Historiographical writings, like the Eusebian scheme of world history, were translated for Caliph al-Mansur (reigned 745-55), and Orosius' Historia of c. 417 was translated in al-Andalus in the tenth century as Kitab Harushiyush, an authoritative history of the Roman Empire, the age that had preceded Islam.^[537]

The Christian contribution to the administration of Islamic rule did not mean that Christians were incapable of developing a critique of that emergent order, although the earliest reactions by East Syrian authors to the advent of Islam display ‘greater awareness that a new empire had arisen, [rather] than that a new religion had been born'.^[538] The religious confrontation with Islam was slow to come, for its most tangible impact on the life of Christians was political. Thus there was a relatively slow emergence of polemical literature, and this was often based on pre­existing texts written against Jews and Judaism.^[539] The rise of Islam would eventually challenge a whole conception of salvation and world history, however. A late seventh-century Armenian historian saw the ‘Ishmaelites' as the fourth beast of Daniel's prophecy; others turned their hopes to a saving Byzantine emperor, while still others blamed that Empire for its failure in the face of Islam.^[540] The emergent Christian historiographical tradition maintained that Muhammad was a trickster, even a lunatic. Why did Islam prosper? Christian authors came to view this as a punishment for the sins of Christians. To those Muslims who saw in Islam's remarkable military successes the sign of divine favour, Christians answered: ‘Do prophets come with a sword?'^[541]

Christian communities assimilated large areas of social practices prevalent within Islam. So, for example, the Coptic Church in Egypt came to legitimize divorce in the thirteenth century, within the environment of Mamluk society in which divorce was very common. In general, patterns of family life of Christians - and Jews - came to resemble very closely those of the Muslim population.^[542]

Just as in Europe and Byzantium, Eastern Christians who lived ordinary lives of work and family admired and supported the unique few who pursued religious perfection through lives of asceticism, mysticism and scholarship. The Church of the East was intellectually lively and active in pastoral provision for its members. Its bishops were not land-holding, political and military figures, as they were in Europe. Some were even known to move between the city and an ascetic life-style. Isaac, bishop of Nineveh (d. c. 700) is a good example. Born in the province of Qatar, he was an ascetic called to the office of bishop who clearly struggled with the responsibilities, and finally abdicated to seek solitude in a monastery in the mountains of Huzistan. The impact of his writings was felt for centuries, with translations into Greek and Georgian, the version that survives. At the centre of Isaac's world was belief in God ‘Creator and Guide of the universe', God as boundless love: ‘How with a love that cannot be measured he arrived at the establishment of the world at the beginning of creation... in love is he going to bring it to that wondrous transformed state, and in love will the whole world be swallowed up in the great mystery of him.'^[543] Another remarkable figure is Joannes of Dalyatha (c. 690-c. 780). Born in a village in the mountains of Kurdistan, Joannes learned the basics of faith there, and then entered a monastery in the mountains of Qardu. After seven years he became a solitary in those mountains. Building on a rich mystical tradition in that region, Joannes wrote letters about the inner life, and prayer: like the fourth-century poet and theologian Ephrem, he contemplated God's glory as light and wonder in a distinctively Syriac fashion.^[544] Syriac intellectual life flourished over centuries not only in civic urban schools, but also in remote places of seclusion. Prayer rather than sacraments animated these men, in Joannes’ words: ‘Continual prayer is wonder before God... Truly, I incline my head in shame, I am silent and I take refuge in mercy. Help me by prayer.’^[545] Such works were disseminated and copied, spreading the fame of even an enclosed monastic. Monks and others translated many works in all religious genres; the seventh-century Life of Mary, for example, written in Greek by Maximus the Confessor, was translated into Georgian in the tenth, and that is the version that has survived to our day.

Just as local political traditions and the circumstances of rule, including such issues as security and fiscal burdens, determined the quality of life for Muslims, so they did for Christians as well. Local arrangements could change dramatically under the influence of large-scale challenges, such as the recur­rent famines of the eleventh century or the advance of Mongol power westwards under the leadership of Chinggis Khan. Yet despite these chal­lenges, Christians developed and maintained networks of trade, pilgrimage, and scholarship, made possible by the placement of crucial facilitators in positions of administrative capacity.^[546] This sphere was served by the Syriac language, even in areas where it was not spoken; it is remarkable just how many Syriac texts were translated into Coptic. One might even say that something like a Syriac cosmopolis developed, to build on a term created by Sheldon Pollock for the Sanskrit sphere.^[547]

A new dynamic affected Christians in the course of the eleventh century with the military initiative led by Seljuk tribes who sacked Baghdad in 1055 and continued to move westward. A new war-zone emerged in Syria and Asia Minor, with the conquest of large parts of Byzantine Anatolia and northern Syria, culminating in the defeat of the Byzantine army at Manzikert in 1071. The region was further destabilized by the advent of European warriors, their conquest of the Holy Land, and their settlement in parts of West Asia for the next two centuries. The Crusades - as they came to be known in various European languages in the course of the thirteenth century - in turn inspired a political and military mobilization in northern Syria and Egypt which saw the ousting of most Christian rule by 1187, and all by 1291. The engagements of this period transformed forever European understandings of Asia and its Christians. The Crusades created new patterns of pilgrimage and mission, led to the creation of military orders inspired by monastic rigour, and also facilitated trade links that were to endure to the end of our period and beyond.

The encounter between Western and Eastern Christians produced some mutual recognition and a great deal of bafflement, even distrust. When the European scholar and bishop of Acre, Jacques of Vitry (c. 1170-1240), encoun­tered the Christians of Palestine, he described their cultural habits as follows: ‘The Syrians use the Saracen language in their common speech, and they use the Saracen script in deeds and business and all other writing, except for the Holy Scriptures... in which they use Greek letters; wherefore in Divine service their laity, who know only the Saracenic language, do not understand them.’^[548] Even in Holy Scripture there was an occasional use of Arabic, as the stunning Coptic manuscript of the Gospels, made in Damietta around 1179/ 80, shows: on the sumptuous full-page image of the Marriage at Cana, titles in Coptic indicate the figures of Mary and Jesus, and an Arabic inscription entitles the whole scene ‘When he changed the water into wine at the Marriage in Cana of the Galilee’. Even more distinctive is the inspiration for the adornment of Gospel books taken from geometrical designs used in the decoration of Qurans. The maker of the carpet-like decoration of a page from a 1205 Coptic manuscript embeds nine crosses into its intricate pattern.^[549] Within the lands of Islam, each with its own distinctive political and economic infrastructure, its own idioms and aesthetics, Christians of the East developed ecclesiastical structures and cultural production that sustained their identity. These qualities often recommended them as useful mediators and administrators, and even inspired them with confidence to spread the word further east, beyond that familiar world.

Christian life outside the Abrahamic sphere

So far we have considered life within Christian polities, in Europe, Byzan­tium and Ethiopia, and Christian life in established communities after the advent of Islam. Christian communities also existed in regions far from the heartlands of the Abrahamic religions. They were usually established as the result of trading contacts that saw the settlement of Christians in trading colonies, followed by missionaries intent on spreading the faith. The Chris­tian communities on the Malabar Coast claimed association with the apostle Thomas, and were most probably created by Christian merchants and priests from Persia in the fifth century.

At the edges of the Muslim political sphere, to its north, the political order was far more volatile than it was in the realm of Islam. The regions from the Black Sea to northern China were inhabited by nomadic tribes that only in the thirteenth century came to be united under Mongol hegemony. Contact with the supernatural for these nomadic people was mediated by spiritually adept individuals later called shamans, who were bound together by strong kinship ties. Not unlike nomadic peoples who encountered Christianity at the beginning of our period, such as the Franks, Goths, and Avars, leaders of steppe nomads often decided on religious conversion for good political reasons and carried their tribe with them. A famous example of this process is the conversion of the upper classes of the Khazars to Judaism in the eighth century, and others are the conversion of the Kerait and Naiman tribes in the Mongolian plateau to Christianity, which happened by about 1000. While most nomads of Central Asia ultimately converted to Islam, there were also communities of Christians, Buddhists, Manicheans and Jews in the cities that they ruled. When nomads conquered sedentary people they usually tolerated local customs and left religious practices intact.^[550]

Missionaries of the Church of the East had left their mark along the Silk Road already before the advent of Islam, as an early iron cross from Jiangxi attests.^[551] Nestorian Christianity also spread north from the edge of the Persian Empire into Central Asia in the sixth century, through the mediation of Sogdian horse merchants, inhabitants of the Ferghana Valley, who tra­versed the steppes. By 650 there was a metropolitan in Samarkand, who oversaw tens of bishops in the region. With the coming of Islam, the nomads of the steppes were attracted to the emergent empire to their south and to the opportunities it offered, especially through military service.

Christianity was introduced along the Silk Road, where communities of merchants developed in Turfan, Dunhuang, Wuwei, Lingwu and in Chang'an (modern Xi-an), the gateway to the Silk Road since the Han dynasty (206 bce- 220 ce) (see Map 17.1, p. 449). These merchants were Persian speaking, and many came from Sogdia, the northwest region of the Persian sphere. Sogdian Nestorians lived in a complex in the capital, in family groups attested by tombstones. In northern China Christian learned men and priests interacted with Tantric Buddhists in the eighth and ninth centuries ce. Both groups were adapting to China, translating their scriptures into Chinese. Christians and Buddhists interacted in the favourable atmosphere of the Tang court, the former borrowing Buddhist terms to assist in the translation of scripture into Chinese. In turn, Nestorians brought sophisticated astronomical knowledge, and the planetary week was adopted as well as Persian systems of divination.^[552]

A Syrian mission, led by the Nestorian priest Alopen, brought Christianity to China during the Tang dynasty (618-907) and was allowed to establish a Christian presence in the capital Chang'an. Soon the Jesus Sutras, writings on Christian history and thought, were produced, beginning in c. 640-60 and into the next century. They tell of the history of the Church of the East with confidence, and see Christian life in China both as part of a wider Christian universe and as one of a variety of local religions, which also included shamanism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.^[553] The oldest of the Jesus Sutras that survives is a tablet of 781 inscribed in Chinese and Syriac, which similarly records Christian history in northern China. Christianity is here portrayed as the Luminous Religion of a triune God who ‘divided his Godhead and the illustrious and adorable Messiah, veiling his true majesty, appeared in the world as a man. Angels proclaimed the glad tidings. A Virgin brought forth the Holy one'.^[554]

Downloaded from https:Zwww.cambridge.org/core. Vanderbilt University Library, on 10 Jan 2017 at 00:04:01, subject to the Cambridge ( of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511667480.017

Map i6.2. Spread of Christianity across Asia

Outside the Muslim sphere Christians vied for a place among a multitude of religions, and their freedom to worship depended greatly on the favour of rulers. From the mid-twelfth century nomadic groups controlled vast terri­tories under a sole ruler, in polities often called empires. One of these was the Qara Khitai Empire founded by the Khitan leader Dashi, which stretched from China to Transoxania and encompassed powerful nomadic people like the Liao. The battle of Qatwan in 1141 sealed Qara Khitai hegemony over the Turkic - now Muslim - Seljuks. It also gave birth to one of the greatest myths about eastern Christianity: the legend of Prester John.^[555] The belief that a Christian kingdom prospered in the east periodically inspired expectations in Christians about Asia, and also about Africa, as the kingdom of Prester John was sometimes thought to be in Ethiopia: he was a hoped-for saviour, an ally in areas dominated by Islam.

The next stage of growth in Christian presence in China was during the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) established by the Mongols. Under Mongol rule China opened its territories to trade and allowed missions to operate. All established priests were understood by the Mongols to possess charisma and magical powers, and so Chinggis Khan (r. 1206-27) and his heir Ogodei were reported to have exempted most clergy - Christian alongside Buddhist, Daoist and Muslim - from payment of some taxes, with the expectation that they use their powers of prayer and blessing to benefit Mongol leaders.^[556] The Mongols retained Muslim and Christian bureaucrats, and this led to continu­ity in local administration and inspired a related continuity in toleration of the religions of the local population. This toleration was particularly evident in the Ilkhanid state in Persia.^[557]

Interesting information about Christian life in Central and East Asia in the Mongol period comes from accounts of travellers, traders and missionaries, who now included many from Europe. The earliest account of the Church of the East was written by the Franciscan friar Giovanni da Pian del Carpine (c. 1182-1252) who travelled through Rus' and Central Asia as papal emissary to the court of the Great Khan. He arrived there in 1246 and witnessed the enthronement of Guyuk, Chinggis Khan's grandson. In 1254 the Franciscan friar William of Rubruck debated Christian faith at the court of the Great Khan Mongke: his interlocutors - whom he sometimes found loquacious and baffling - were Buddhists, Muslims and Nestorians. With Peter Lombard's Sentences and a statuette of the Virgin Mary in his bags he aimed to share the quintessence of Christianity; he consulted Nestorians on strategy and hoped for support from the monotheistic Muslims when debating with the Bud­dhists.^[558] The finest descriptions of all are, of course, those of the Venetian merchant Marco Polo.

The Franciscan friars were particularly committed to the project of conver­sion: Giovanni di Monte Corvino (1246-1328), for example, spent thirty-four years in Beijing, during which he assumed overall ecclesiastical authority. Functioning as an archbishop, he consecrated priests and bishops, and con­verted thousands. Such friars also acted as papal emissaries, and supervised efforts of mission further afield. Three Franciscan missionaries - Gerardo Albuini, Pellegrino da Cita di Castello and Andrea da Perugia - followed one another as bishops of the important river-port-city of Quanzhou (known in Arabic as Zayton). The last of them died in 1332; his tombstone is engraved in Latin, and resembles in its iconography some of the Zayton Christian tomb­stones inscribed in Syro-Turkic.^[559]

Conclusions

With all its diversity of beliefs, rituals, languages and vast geographical reach, in what sense was Christianity indeed a single religion? Did it induce cooper­ation between Christian monarchs? Such affinity was a rhetorical trope that could become beneficial when interests converged, but just as often they did not. Differences in language and culture produced highly unflattering reports from diplomats, like the embittered Lombard Liutprand, bishop of Cremona, who summarized his legation to Constantinople in 968 on behalf of Emperor Otto I: ‘The Greeks cannot be trusted. Don't trust them, Latins; heed not their words. How piously does a Greek perjure himself, providing that he can win by so doing!'^[560] Christian institutions and teaching possessed the potential for inclusion and exclusion, for accommodating diversity as well as encouraging polities to become persecuting societies.^[561] So, for example, in the thirteenth century a coalition of the king of France, the pope and the Dominican order produced an onslaught - a veritable crusade followed by a campaign of inquisition and intensive preaching - against those Christians of southern France who adhered to dualist beliefs, usually called the Cathars or the Albigensians.^[562] In fifteenth-century Ethiopia, political unity was promoted through the dissemination of state-sponsored devotional themes and images for worship. Christian polities saw periods of aggressive expansion in the name of Christianity, such as the Crusades in western Asia or the northern crusades against pagans in the Baltic region.

In order to promote political expansion and state-led conversion, intellec­tuals developed theories of just war, and criteria by which crusades against Christians and non-Christians might be deemed acceptable. Such theories were always a subject for debate and disagreement, and approaches to conversion divided Christian leaders from the very beginning of Christianity. Beyond the realm of theory, however, both the beginning and the end of our period see concerted efforts by Christian dynasts to extend their territories and make them Christian, with the support - moral and sometimes financial too - of church institutions. Yet only Christians living within Christian polities were able to put these theories into practice.

We may end our analysis of Christian regions over one thousand years with a consideration of those activities that brought them into contact with each other and then exemplify their diversity by dwelling on the visual depictions of the Virgin Mary in various regions. A lively tradition of pilgrimage meant that Christians visited Jerusalem throughout our period; some left interesting travelogues, others brought relics back to share with their communities back home.^[563] The Crusades brought many more European Christians into contact with Eastern Christendom and, in the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the other Frankish states of West Asia, generated a modus vivendi with them that has no parallel elsewhere; also, the spread of knowledge about them, and attempts at religious union. The cohabitation of the various Christian groups in the Frankish Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem epitomizes this new reality, as the pilgrim Theoderich noted in his travelogue of c. 1170, and as the Franciscan pilgrim Francesco Suriano appreciated again in the 1460s.^[564] The possibilities of trade made Europeans travel east in search of spices and silk, and south in search of gold and domestic slaves. Trade attracted Christians to travel east along the Silk Roads mediating between China and India, and along the roads and sea lanes that led to West Asia and Egypt. Emissaries were particularly frequent during the heated period of diplomacy and expectations that brought the Mongols and Europeans in touch with one another. Part of the description of Christian life in West Asia and Europe penned by the Beijing-born Nestorian Christian monk, Rabban Sauma (c. 1225-94), has survived. This pious and linguistically adept religious and his companion were sent in 1287 by the Mongol ruler of Iran, the Ilkhan Arghun, to seek contact with the Byzantine emperor and the pope.^[565] Their travelogue sometimes shows just how impressed they were by the rich and varied forms of Christian life they encountered:

Having lost the greater part of what they had on the road, they went on to the monastery of Saint Mar Sehyon, which was in the neighbourhood of the city of Tus [the capital of Khorasan], and they were blessed by the bishop who lived therein and by the monks. And they thought that they had been born into the world anew.^[566]

In the early part of our period, when there were few Europeans in Asia, Jews offered their services of trade between Asia and Europe, often through Sicily and Italy. With the rallying of the European economy after 1100, and the establishment of European states in the eastern Mediterranean, by the twelfth century there were large European merchant colonies in Constantin­ople and the Black Sea; a Venetian presence from the thirteenth century in the Chinese court of the Yuan, which has given us Marco Polo and his testimony. Where there was some regular contact through trade, merchants were accompanied by religious, intent on exploring lands for conversion; above all by friars, unencumbered by parish duties or by the rules of monastic seclusion. Such men were free to join journeys to the East, like the Crusade of King Louis IX to the Holy Land in 1250, which saw the beginning of William of Rubruck’s long trip through the Qipchaq Khanate.

Contact between Christian communities did not eradicate diversity, how­ever. Nowhere is this more evident than in the diverse treatments accorded to the figure of the Virgin Mary. Although the Byzantine visual style was highly influential, it also interacted with local traditions and tastes. Within the Egyptian sphere the Virgin Mary resembled greatly the ancient goddess Isis: centuries before Europeans became enamoured with the scene, Chris­tians in Egypt comfortably observed Mary offering her breast to the Child Christ. Ethiopian images traditionally adhered to the Byzantine style, as can be seen in the wall-painting of the Annunciation of c. 1200 from St Mary’s church in Lalibela. Yet contacts with Europe, as well as with India and China towards the end of our period, are also evident in the art of Ethiopia, as in the icon made for King Lebna-Dengel (1508-40) with Mary as a blond woman, or the panel of a diptych of 1480-1530, in which Mary and her son have distinctly oriental features.^[567]

The further east we travel in the Christian regions, the more constrained is the use of religious imagery. For Christians living under Islam, word and rhyme seem to have filled the affective role played by images in Byzantium and Europe. There Mary is omnipresent too, however, in place-names and church dedications. The Coptic traveller Abu al-Makarim, in his compilation on the churches of Africa and Asia, described the city of Fahsur on the south Indian coast (Travancore): ‘Here there are several churches and all the Christians are Nestorians... It is from this place that camphor comes; and this commodity (is a gum which) oozes from the trees. In this town there is one church named after our Lady, the Pure Virgin Mary.’ The vast majority of churches in Ethiopian Tigray were also dedicated to the Virgin Mary.^[568] When Rabban Sauma reached Constantinople he was surely amazed by the sheer size of Hagia Sophia, and within it of the gleaming majesty of mosaics of the Theotokos. Nothing so monumental and triumphant could be made further east in the Christian regions.

Sometimes vastly differing in core beliefs, other times indistinguishable from the Muslims or Mongols around them, Christian regions had a suffi­cient element of family resemblance, to make them a force - among others - in world history.

FURTHER READING

Angold, Michael. Eastern Christianity. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Baum, Wilhelm and Dietmar W. Winkler. The Church of the East: A Concise History. London: Routledge, 2003.

Brock, Sebastian. Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992.

Brown, Peter. Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity. London: Faber, 1982.

Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition 7th-9th Century. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012.

Beckingham, Charles F. and Bernard Hamilton, eds. Prester John, the Mongols and the Ten Lost Tribes. Aldershot: Variorum, 1996.

Beckwith, Christopher, I. Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World. Princeton University Press, 2012.

Cohen, Mark R., Sidney H. Griffith, Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, and Sasson Somekh. The Majlis: Interreligious Encounters in Medieval Islam. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999.

Ellenblum, Ronnie. Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Griffith, Sidney H. The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam. Princeton University Press, 2008.

Kedar, Benjamin Z. Crusade and Mission: European Approaches toward the Muslims. Prince­ton University Press, 1984.

Lawrence, C. H. Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. Harlow: Longman, 2001.

Le Coz, Raymond. Histoire de l'Eglise de l'Orient. Chretiens d'Iran et de Turquie. Paris: Cerf, 1995.

Limor, Ora and Guy G. Stroumsa, eds. Christians and Christianity in the Holy Land: From the Origins to the Latin Kingdoms. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006.

Logan, F. Donald. A History of the Church in the Middle Ages. London: Routledge, 2002. Moore, R. I. The Formation of a Persecuting Society. Oxford University Press, 1987.

Noble, Thomas F. X. and Julia M. H. Smith. Early Medieval Christianities, c. 600-c. 1100. Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Payer, Peter J. The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages. University of Toronto Press, 1993.

Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The Crusades: A History. London: Continuum, 2005.

Rossabi, Morris. Voyager from Xanadu: Rabban Sauma and the First Journey from China to the West. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1992.

Rubin, Miri. Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary. London: Allen Lane, 2009.

Rubin, Miri and Walter Simons, eds. Christianity in Western Europe c. 1100-c.1500. Cam­bridge History of Christianity vol Iv, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Shinners, John R., ed. Medieval Popular Religion, 1000-1500; A Reader. Toronto University Press, 2006.

Shoemaker, Stephen J. Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary's Dormition and Assumption. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Swanson, Robert N. Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215-c. 1515. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Winkler, Dietmar W. and Tang, Li, eds. Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters; Studies on East Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia. Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2009.

Tanner, Norman P. The Church in the Later Middle Ages. London: I. B. Tauris, 2008.

Wilken, Robert Louis. The Spirit of Early Christian Thought; Seeking the Face of God. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.