From East to West: The Greek Prayer of Cyprian and its Translation into European Vernaculars

Daniel Vaucher

University of Freiburg (CH)
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 2 (2025): 247-273  DOI 10.38145/2025.2.247

The Prayer of Cyprian is an exorcistic and apotropaic prayer that gained popularity in Western Europe, particularly on the Iberian Peninsula and in South America. Since the fifteenth century, it has been transmitted in numerous versions and languages. Notably, the prayer came under the scrutiny of the Inquisition due to its alleged attribution to Saint Cyprian of Antioch and the inclusion of superstitious elements. As a result, it was listed in the Index of Prohibited Books. Until now, the origins of this apotropaion have remained unexplored. This article is the first to illuminate the clear connections between the vernacular recensions and the Greek manuscripts. An examination of the manuscripts, along with their copyists and owners, further reveals that the prayer travelled from East to West during the Renaissance, was translated into Latin, and subsequently rendered into vernacular languages.

Keywords: devotional prayer, exorcism, magic, inquisition, translations

Introduction

Cyprian of Antioch, an alleged magician, bishop, and martyr who supposedly lived in the third and fourth centuries, is a notorious figure and still epitomizes the wise magician in the occult scene today. Over the centuries, numerous spells and prayers have been attributed to this enigmatic figure. This trend began in ancient times in the Greek language but reached its peak in Western and Northern Europe from the sixteenth century onwards in the various vernacular languages. This article focuses on the so-called prayer of Cyprian, originally an apotropaic prayer of protection attributed to the Antiochian saint, which included various adjurations and invocations and thus ended up on the Index of Prohibited Books.

The Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and Latin versions have received some attention in recent years. It is thanks to Itúrbide Díaz, Vicente, Londõno, and Smid that the prayer has become known in the various vernacular languages. However, apart from a brief note by Vicente (an observation that he did not follow up), none of the scholars mentioned recognized identical prayers in Late Byzantine Greek. This article aims to close this gap and demonstrate the undeniable connection between the Greek, Latin, and Western European prayers.

The paper contends that the Latin and vernacular versions originate in Greek models. Even if it remains impossible to trace precisely the development of these anonymous prayers, a look at the manuscripts will highlight possible paths and actors in this process. The various versions of the prayer of Cyprian offer a good example of the complex literary and material contexts of translation processes in Byzantine times and the Renaissance period.1

In the first step, the characteristics of these prayers are briefly described. In a second step, the manuscripts of the Greek prayer of Cyprian will be analyzed. Even if these sources offer only individual insights, the sum of the individual manuscripts provides a picture of a transfer from the Greek-speaking East to the Latin-speaking West. The vernacular adaptations in the West will be presented in a third step. Fourthly, the close relationship between the Greek and Western European prayers will be clearly illustrated by comparing a short passage. Fifthly, we will offer a few examples which clearly reveal that the prayer of Cyprian became one of the obsessions of the Inquisition throughout Europe.

Cyprian of Antioch and Characteristics of the Prayer of Cyprian

According to legend, Cyprian of Antioch was a famous magician who, even with his various arts and the help of the devil himself, was unable to win the love of the Christian virgin Justina.2 Recognizing his powerlessness, he finally converted to Christianity and burned his magical books and idols. He then went through the clerical offices, became a bishop, and, finally, according to legend, died a martyr’s death, together with Justina.3 Although Cyprian renounced magic with his conversion, he remained a ruler over the demons through his art of healing and exorcisms. The so-called conversio reports that “grace was his company against the demons, and he cured all suffering.”4 This understanding of Cyprian as an exorcist was reflected in pseudo-Cyprian literature. The prayer of Cyprian is intended to protect not only the person reciting it but also the bearer or even all the inhabitants of the house in which it is recited from misfortune, illness, and demons. This list already makes it clear that the prayer of Cyprian is “universalistic.” Unlike short protective formulas against specific illnesses or ailments, the prayer of Cyprian is so broadly based that it promises to work against all conceivable forms of evil.

To achieve the protective and healing effect, the reciter uses various rhetorical strategies.5 The long litanies and invocations of patron saints, martyrs, and church fathers are striking. God’s assistance is brought about by enumerating his previous acts of salvation and redemption to make him more disposed to help in the present case as well. Thus, the prayer of Cyprian is ultimately a sequence of long lists and catalogs. What is most remarkable, however, is the conversion story at the beginning of the prayer (see below). This historiola is a clear reference to Cyprian’s vita and therefore links the universalist exorcism with the legend. The mention of a “mythical situation” and its resolution should paradigmatically help the current prayer or spell. By personifying himself in the first-person singular with the figure of the mighty Cyprian, the speaker lends additional impact to his spell.6

Concerning the various contexts in which and purposes for which the manuscripts were used, we can only speculate. The manuscript tradition suggests that some manuscripts were effectively written for use, i.e. for recitation in the case of an exorcism (see below). Some other assumptions can be made. In Byzantine thought, the origin of illnesses was to be sought either in the magical actions of hostile persons (the idea of the evil eye is omnipresent in the prayer of Cyprian) or in the work of demons. Priests and other charismatic personalities could have said such prayers over the sick, in combination with consecrated water, the sign of the cross, and readings from Holy Scriptures. It is important to bear in mind that both the Byzantine and Western churches were always critical of this type of protective prayer and attempted to construct a canonized counterpart to the “private” exorcisms in the officially sanctioned liturgy. The prayer of Cyprian operates in a border area between magic and liturgy.7

Worn on the skin (folded or rolled around the neck), such a prayer can promise an apotropaic effect. For example, an Arabic version of the prayer of Cyprian was most likely worn as a talisman.8 This corresponds with the self-designation of the prayer as phylakterion.9 Moreover, the protection promised in the prayer extends even beyond the bearer. The text vows to protect the entire house and all its inhabitants. In this respect, it is also conceivable that a scroll or a small codex was kept in the house and honored accordingly.

Given the universalistic conception of the prayer, it might seem misleading to speak of an exorcism. The distinction is indeed difficult: the text can serve as a phylactery as well as an exorcism to be recited and performed. Furthermore, the boundaries are blurred when, on the one hand, God is implored for help and, on the other, the demons are addressed and invoked in direct speech.10

Greek Manuscripts

Theodor Schermann, the first editor of the Greek prayer of Cyprian, divided the few manuscripts known to him into two groups: an Antiochian group and a southern Italian group. However, the designation Antiochian is misleading, since it is based on the erroneous assumption that Cyprian of Antioch was the actual author of the prayer and that the two manuscripts of this group (V1 and B1, see below) retained the original liturgical wording. However, his critical apparatus and the more recent edition by Bilabel/Grohmann (based on Ms A1) show that there are significant textual differences between the manuscripts. It is therefore almost impossible to reconstruct an original Greek text. In the case of this type of literature, abridgements, additions, and new passages of text are to be expected.

Several additional manuscripts have come to light since Schermann and Bilabel published their texts. According to the database “Pinakes,” the Greek prayer currently has been identified in ten manuscripts.11

A1: Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Cod. Ambros. A 056 sup.; written 1542, ff. 208r–221v.

A2: Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Cod. Ambros. B 033 sup., fifteenth century., ff. 5r–16r.

B1: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Cod. Bodl. Barroc. 008, sixteenth century, ff. 155r–164r.

B2: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Cod. Bodl. Barroc. 221, fifteenth century, ff. 136r–138v.

M: Palermo, Biblioteca centrale della Regione siciliana “Alberto Bombace”, Cod. Panorm. III B 25; fifteenth century, ff. 41v–64r.

O: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Ott. gr. 290; sixteenth century, ff. 32v–49r.

P: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cod. gr. 426; written 1488, ff. 146r–156v.

V1: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Vatic. gr. 0695, fifteenth century, ff. 262v–264v.

V2: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Vat. gr. 1538; fifteenth-sixteenth centuries, ff. 94v-98v & 116r–142r.

V3: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Vat. gr. 1571; fourteenth-sixteenth centuries, ff. 52v–64r.

None of the manuscripts is older than the fifteenth century. However, the translations into Arabic and Ethiopian, the manuscripts of which date back to the fourteenth century, indicate that a Greek original can be assumed to have existed before that. Of the manuscripts mentioned, A1, A2, B2, M, P, and V1 are composite manuscripts of mixed content. B1, O, V2, and V3 are collections of prayers and exorcisms that correspond to the emerging “rituel d’exorcisme” in the West (from around the fifteenth century).12 While the former group includes manuscripts that were produced probably with a scholarly interest (the aim was to preserve and pass on the text), the latter group had a practical function. They are mostly small-format manuals that were created for use, for example, for recitation during an exorcism.13 With this assumption in mind, I will concentrate on the second group, but without completely ignoring the other manuscripts.

Manuscript O from the sixteenth century is a thin booklet of 79 folios. It contains the martyrdom of Marina of Antioch in Pisidia, followed by a series of exorcisms and prayers of protection common in the Byzantine region.14 Between the martyrdom of Marina and the prayer of Cyprian on ff. 31v and 32r there are two color illustrations, one of the martyrdom of Marina, the other showing a bearded Cyprian with a long robe and halo, holding a red book in his left hand pressed to his chest. A similar miniature of Cyprian can also be found in Cod. P, f. 146v, only here the saint has both hands outstretched towards the edge of the page, as if offering help. On f. 49v, as the signature of Cyprian’s prayer, the copyist presents himself as Ἰωάννης from Patras.15

According to the catalog, V3 is packed with leaves of various origins. Batiffol called the codex “un ramas de feuillets mss. du XVe siècle de style levantin.”16 However, one block can be identified among the various handwritings (ff. 40r–65v) that contains prayers for protection and exorcisms. This begins with a prayer by Basil for the sick, which is known from Byzantine euchologies, followed by an exorcism also attributed to Basil. It is followed by prayers and exorcisms by Saint John Chrysostom and finally the prayer of Cyprian. One scribe is probably responsible for this thematic block. The origin of this block is, as already mentioned, clearly Byzantine. The owner of the codex, Francesco Accida, was originally of Cypriot origin.17 As “Protonotario e protopapa cattolico di Messina,” he donated several manuscripts (mostly of oriental or southern Italian origin) to Pope Gregory XIII in 1583 and some to Pope Sixtus V in 1585, which thus became part of the Biblioteca Vaticana.

V2 is another small-format ritual book from the fifteenth century. It constitutes an impressive collection of magical-exorcistic texts from front to back on 287 folios to which some Latin tables were later added on ff. 1r–6r.18 The codex shows a Calabrian dialect in the headings and marginal notes, for example, when the prayer of Cyprian is said to work “per ligati di qualisiuoglia mali” (f. 117r). Interestingly, the scribe has even copied the Cyprian prayer twice here, namely in two different recensions. The texts collected in it are once again the Byzantine exorcisms mentioned above. The names of the prayers are given by Saint Basil, Saint John Chrysostom, Tryphon, Solomon, Gregory, and others. The martyrdom of Marina is also included, as in Ms O.19 On ff. 217r–229r there is also a prayer for the sick, attributed to Cyprian of Calamizzi, which allows us to assume the origin of the codex in southern Italy.20 The former owner, Cardinal Felice Centino (1562–1641), Bishop of Mileto in Calabria from 1611 to 1613, was also at home in this region. He brought the book to Rome and offered it to the Vatican library.21

Manuscript B1 from Oxford is just 15 cm in size.22 The small codex from the sixteenth century was obviously written for use. It contains mainly prayers, hymns, and exorcisms in neat script and with some decorations. We know the scholar Andreas Donos from Rhetymno in Crete (then under Venetian rule) as the copyist. His pupil was the humanist Francesco Barozzi (1537–1604), also of Cretan origin.23 Barozzi was active as a mathematician, philologist, and astronomer, and he showed an interest in prophecy as well. He published the Pronostico universale di tutto il mondo, a collection of prophecies taken from Nostradamus and other authors, and a bilingual edition of the Oracula Leonis, a prophetic text of Byzantine origin.24 Perhaps this interest in occult literature brought him into contact with the Inquisition, which kept a close eye on him and sentenced him in 1587 (see below).

Manuscript B2 also comes from the same Barozzi collection.25 Irmgard Hutter has traced the history of the codex: Soon after 1381, the manuscript belonged to Markos, the abbot of the Kosmidion monastery in Constantinople, who added scholia and other marginalia to it. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it belonged to Johannes Ratis, and in the second half of the sixteenth century, to Francesco Barozzi or his nephew Jacopo Barozzi on Crete. Together with their collection (and with B1), it was purchased by William Herbert in 1629 and donated to the Bodleian Library.26 This codex also contains the prayer of Cyprian, but here it appears to have been added by another hand at the end of the codex.

The other composite manuscripts found in Western European libraries (and thus not specifically dedicated to exorcisms) fit the pattern outlined so far. Manuscript P, for example, from 1488 and written by a priest named Chorikarios, was purchased in Venice in 1538–1539 by a certain Jérôme Fondule for the French king and brought to Paris.27 Manuscript M from the fifteenth century can be traced to Sicily. It originally belonged to the Abbey of Saint Martino delle Scale.28

To summarize, the division of the Greek manuscripts into an Antiochian and a Southern Italian group needs to be revised on the basis of a precise textual analysis of the newly identified manuscripts. More importantly, the number of manuscripts of the late Byzantine and post-Byzantine period offer other insights. The manuscripts, their copyists, and their owners provide information about the spread of the prayer of Cyprian at the end of the Middle Ages. Greece and Constantinople, as well as Crete and Cyprus, were named as stations of transmission. This would suggest the prayer originally came from the Greek-speaking East.29 The Venetian Empire and its scholars, such as Francesco Barozzi, were prominent in ensuring the transfer of occult knowledge from East to West.30 During the flourishing Renaissance in Italy, coveted manuscripts were brought to Rome, Paris, and Oxford. The Italian south, with Calabria and Sicily, should also be mentioned. Here, we find an exciting mixture of Greek and southern Italian dialects (e.g. manuscript V2).31 In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a transfer of Byzantine exorcisms and prayers to Western Europe took place. We now turn to this transfer.

Vernacular Adaptions

We are probably still a long way from being able to survey all the translation strands of Byzantine exorcism literature. Mention has already been made of the translations of the prayer of Cyprian into Arabic and Ethiopian in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.32 There are references to translations into Syriac and Armenian, but text editions are not yet available.33 A Slavonic recension was published by Almazov.34 The transfer of the prayer of Cyprian into the vernaculars in Western Europe has been better researched. In several publications, Vicente has demonstrated its great popularity in the recent past, both in Spain and Portugal, but also in South America.35

Here, we are more interested in the older Western European versions. These are:

a: Paris, Bibliothèque St-Geneviève (BSG) 1352, fifteenth century, ff. 1–26v.

This book of exorcisms contains Latin prayers attributed to Cyprian, Ambrose, and the Veronese bishop Zenon. Other pieces have been added in the Venetian dialect, such as a pharmaceutical recipe “a far butar fora le fature e altre cose” on f. 63v. Also of a later date is the drawing on f. 36v of a bishop performing an exorcism, probably Saint Ambrose.36 The book opens with a series of psalms, followed by the prayer of Cyprian in Latin. The localization of the manuscript to fifteenth-sixteenth century Venice fits seamlessly into the abovementioned distribution of Greek testimonies. BSG 1352 is, to my knowledge, the only extant Latin example of the prayer of Cyprian to date.37

b: Christophorus Lasterra, Liber exorcismorum adversus tempestates et daemones…, Pamplona 1631 (printed book), ff. 68v–72v.

The prayer of Cyprian begins on f. 68v, which the author claims to have translated from Latin into Spanish, even though most of the pieces in this book were kept in Latin. The bilingualism of this small-format book merits mention. The author evidently considered a “modern” Spanish version to be closer to his audience and therefore presumably of broader appeal than his Latin original. While a Latin version was aimed almost exclusively at clerics in the seventeenth century, a Spanish translation had a completely different target audience.38

c: Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Oración devotíssima de san Cipriano, traducida de latín en castellano, seventeenth century, 3ff., in-folio, Signatura RES FOL-OA-198 (BIS, 25).39

This small leaf from the Paris National Library is closely related to b. It contains the same text as Lasterra’s 1631 version but is undated.

d: Sevilla, Biblioteca de la Institución colombina: La Oratione de santo Cipriano volgare, Signatura 14-01-10 (21)

This Italian manuscript was acquired in Rome in October 1512 and has been part of the collection of Hernando Colón (Ferdinand Columbus), son of the famous navigator Cristobal Colón, ever since. Hernando Colón acquired books of all kinds throughout Europe and compiled one of the largest modern libraries in Seville.40 The ten-page text has a woodcut on the front showing Cyprian driving out demons in an episcopal hat and robe and holding a staff in his hand.

e: Barcelona, Biblioteca de Cataluña, MS. 580. Oració de Sant Cebrià contra els embruixos, Miscellània de textos en llatí i en català, ff. 155v–158r.

This manuscript from Barcelona, dated to the first half of the fifteenth century, is even older. I am not able to judge to what extent this text is related to our prayer of Cyprian.41

f: Barcelona City Archive, AHCB 16/1C. XVIII-9

Smid made known another Catalan version from 1557.42 She found this small “chap book,” which was barely larger than the palm of one’s hand, in the inquisition materials of the Barcelona City Archives. Smid showed how a hermit and healer named Jacintho García came into contact with the Inquisition in Solsona (Catalonia) in 1641. García had carried out exorcisms in his town without the permission of the church and had probably also made use of the Catalan booklet with the prayer of Cyprian (see below).

The list of these six witnesses is not intended to be exhaustive.43 But the few examples already show how the prayer of Cyprian first spread in Latin in Italy, France, and the Iberian Peninsula since the fifteenth century and was then translated into the respective vernacular languages.

The Relationship between the Vernacular Texts and the Greek Prayer

Until now, these vernacular versions have never been associated with the Greek prayer. However, their origin is undoubtedly to be found in the Byzantine East. All traces of the legend lead to the fourth and fifth centuries in the Roman east. Although the prayer of Cyprian is only loosely connected to the legend of the Antiochian bishop through the excerpt presented below, here too, the content and style point to Byzantine demonology and liturgy.44

The only connection to the legend of Cyprian is found in the first part of the prayer, when the speaker refers to his past in the first-person singular and mentions his spells before his conversion to Christianity. I reproduce this passage in several variants in Table 1 to demonstrate the clear connections among the versions.

The structure of this passage is identical in all the recensions. God is invoked with the reference that he knows the evil deeds of his servant Cyprian, with whom the person praying personifies himself. Cyprian cast these binding spells when he did not yet know the name of God, i.e. when he was still a pagan. Cyprian used his magic (or the demons he conjured) to bind the clouds so that it would no longer rain, the trees so they would no longer bear fruit, the animals so that they would no longer give birth, the women so that they would no longer conceive. The Greek version is the most detailed, with references to the vines, gardens, birds, and fish. Here we can already see a shortening in the Spanish and Catalan translations, which still retain the structure but abridge the train of thought.45

The legend of Cyprian tells of the magician’s conversion when he realizes his powerlessness in the face of the Christian faith. The paragraph in the prayer following the passage exposed in Table 1 alludes to this. Now that Cyprian knows the name of this powerful god, he asks him to free the bound forces of nature and the people and to protect them from demonic influences. The elements to be liberated are listed again in Table 2, even if in a slightly different order.

Table 2

Greek edition based on 3 manuscripts		a: Paris, BSG 1352		c: Paris, BNF RES FOL-OA-198 (BIS, 25)		f: Barcelona City Archive, AHCB 16/1C. XVIII-9
Προσπίπτω δὲ γοῦν τῇ σῇ ὀρθοτομώτητι καὶ τῷ ἁγίῳ σου ὀνόματι καὶ ἱκετεύω καὶ παρακαλῶ, ἵνα πᾶς τόπος ἢ οἶκος ἢ ἄνθρωπος ἢ ἔχων μαγίαν ἀνθρώπων ἢ δαίμονος, ὅταν ἐπαναγνωσθῇ ἡ προσευχή μου αὕτη ἐνώπιον αὐτῶν ἢ ἐν τῇ οἰκίᾳ αὐτοῦ, ἵνα λυθῇ ἀπὸ πάσης μαγίας καὶ φθόνου καὶ ἔριδος καὶ ὀφθαλμοῦ κακοῦ, μάλιστα ἀπὸ τὸν δοῦλον τοῦ θεοῦ ΝΝ. (…) νὰ φεύγουν οἱ δαίμονες καὶ δραπετεύσονται οἱ κακοί, τὰ νέφη δὲ πέμψουσι βροχὴν καὶ τὰ δένδρα φέρουσι καρπὸν καὶ αἱ κοιλίαι γεννῶσι καὶ αἱ μητέρες συλλήψονται, καὶ οἱ ἄνθρωποι ἀπὸ παντὸς δεσμοῦ λυθήσονται ἐν ὀνόματι τοῦ πατρὸς καὶ τοῦ υἱοῦ καὶ τοῦ ἁγίου πνεύματος...		Nunc autem domine deus meus Iesu Christe, cognovi nomen sanctum tuum et dilexi illud. (…) Etiam rogo te domine deus meus ut disvinpas (disvincas?) vincula nubium et absolvas ea et descendat pluvia supra fatiem terre: et terra det fructum suum. Et arbores dent fructus suos eorum et pariant mulieres filios suos immaculatos et sugant filii lac matrum suarum: et pisces maris dissolvantur: et animaliaque moventur in aquis: et omnia flumina et volatilia celi: et fontes et omnia que in eis sunt: et omnia vincula dissolvantur ab eis per nomen sanctum tuum et fugiant ab eis omne malum et omne periculum et spiritus invidi non permaneant apud ea nec apud homines portantes hoc scriptum. Amen.		Todas estas cosas hacía yo en el nombre del diablo y ahora, Dios y mi señor Jesucristo, conozco el tu sacratísimo nombre y ámolo, (…) y caiga la lluvia sobre la tierra, y la tierra dé su fruto y los árboles, y las mujeres paran sus hijos sin ninguna lesión, y mamen la leche de los pechos de sus madres, y desátense a su tiempo los peces del mar, y todas las animalias que andan sobre la tierra. Desátense todas las nubes del cielo y todas las otras cosas, y todos los hombres, y todas las mujeres a quienes fueren hechos los hechizos de día y de noche, todos sean desatados por el tu santo nombre. Huya todo enemigo de aquel, o de aquella que sobre sí trajere esta oración, o le fuere leída tres veces.		e per∙so ara Deu meu prech te molt per la tua sancta dilectio que rompes los nuus e tos los ligaments y enuia pluía sobre la terra, e tots los arbres donen lur fruit e los peixos de la mar sien desligats, e totes les coses que son en ella e nengun mal esperit e[n] ells no puga aturar, ni en aquells ho en aquelles que aquest scrita portaran ho legiran, ho legir faran sien desliurats de tot mal, profiten lurs persones e los lurs pensaments e los lurs fets i ferms en tot be, e tu senyor los vulles desliurar del poder del diable, e dels seus agu

Again, the close relationship among the four versions are clear, but so are the deviations and abbreviations that one would expect in translations (especially translations of popular literature).50 These sources offer examples of renderings in various target languages of an original text that has not been translated with strict adherence to syntax and narrow focus on the inclusion of every noun, adjective, or phrase, but the structure and the train of thought have nonetheless been retained. The Latin version (a) from Venice (now Paris) corresponds impressively with the Greek version, not only here but also in the rest of the prayer.

The Prayer as One of the Obsessions of the Inquisition

I have mentioned in passing the critical interest taken in the prayer by leaders of the Inquisition. It may come as a surprise that a Christian prayer dedicated to protection from illness and demons attracted so much attention from the defenders of the faith. But already in late antiquity, the church fathers preached against the use of amulets and the church councils attempted with their legislation to prevent all kinds of ritual practices in the field of magic. In this respect, not much had changed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many scholars of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance showed a keen interest in magic, which led to the publication of numerous grimoires and exorcism books.51 Also, prayers, exorcisms, and magic were converging, resulting in a reciprocal influence.52 As Barberiato has observed, it was often the same individuals who practiced incantations for evil purposes and exorcisms for healing purposes.53 Moreover, the printing of books made it increasingly difficult for the church to control the proliferation of this occult literature.54 The translation of exorcisms previously intended for clerics into the vernaculars further popularized prayers and exorcisms, giving “religious freelancers” an instrument of power.55 One aim of the Inquisition was therefore to keep a tight rein on the laity who had entered into competition with the clergy and to preserve the Church monopoly on the realm of the sacramental.56

This can be seen in the trial in Solsona, Catalonia. Bernadette Smid’s archival work has brought to light the court proceedings against the hermit and healer Jacintho García, who allegedly healed the village population with prayers, holy water, candles, and incense in the first half of the seventeenth century. Together with the court documents, Smid also found the textual witness f (see above) from the year 1557. García had therefore used it for his healings, which is also reflected in the testimonies according to which the healer considered the illnesses the result of maleficium (the prayer of Cyprian being directed against this). Although there were many doctors and hospitals in Solsona, the hermit was apparently very popular: “Jacintho García acted as an intermediary, a specialist coming from outside the local society.”57 But this was also his undoing, as he lacked the Church’s permission to carry out exorcisms.58 Furthermore, the use of superstitious prayers and sacred objects reserved for the Church aroused the suspicion of the Inquisition. It is not known how the trial against García ended.

The action against illicit exorcists coincides with the action taken by the Inquisition against private, devotional prayers, especially those involving specific rituals, objects, or practices mentioned in the rubrics.59 These rubrics, placed at the beginning or the end of the prayers, attributed to the the devotional a merely mechanical and material value, promising effect simply through mechanical compliance with instructions.60 Some devotional prayers were perceived to have superstitious elements or to be associated with magical practices that the Church deemed heretical or dangerous. Thus, a prayer named confessione di Santa Maria Maddalena from the late sixteenth century says, “Whoever recites, or gets others to recite, this confession / for thirty days, for himself or for his family, / will receive contrition for every sin, / Mary Magdalene will be his defender.”61

Such a promise of protection, together with the indication of exact times and repetitions of prayer, can also be found in the prayer of Cyprian. For example, the Oración devotíssima de san Cipriano (c) has a similar rubric before the actual prayer: “This is the most holy prayer of the glorious Saint Cyprian, which was made and ordained to deliver people from evil deeds and spells, and evil eyes, and evil tongues, and for any bindings and enchantments, that all may be unbound and loosed, and for the woman in childbirth and for pestilence and foul air. This prayer is to be read three times on three Sundays, each Sunday once.”62 Here, the boundaries between magic, exorcism, and devotional literature risk being blurred. The Inquisition’s primary goal was to maintain religious orthodoxy, and anything that appeared to deviate from approved Christian doctrine or seemed to involve attempts to manipulate spiritual forces was subject to scrutiny and condemnation.

But even priests such as Cristóbal Lasterra from Navarro (b) attracted the attention of the Iberian Inquisition. Lasterra was himself a commissioner of the Holy Office and thus was entrusted with inquisitorial proceedings against dubious magical literature. In 1624, he became parish priest in San Adrián, where he remained until his death in 1638.63 His office in the Inquisition undoubtedly made him sensitive to this kind of literature, and so it remains a mystery why he himself translated and published such exorcisms together with the prayer of Cyprian in his Liber exorcismorum adversus tempestates et daemones… in 1631. Three years later, his book became the focus of the Inquisition.64

The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition had shown an interest in this type of popular piety, the popular prayers, and the books of Hours as early as the sixteenth century.65 The first Portuguese index of forbidden books had appeared in 1551. The index issued in Spain in 1559 had already included the prayer of Cyprian, as had the Portuguese index in 1561, and finally the Roman index in 1590.66 In his investigation of the trial against Lasterra in 1634, Itúrbide Díaz emphasized why the Inquisition declared war on this type of prayer: Five Jesuits examined the text and, in a report dated December 22, 1634. They unanimously determined that the prayer was unworthy (“indigna”) and could not be attributed to Saint Cyprian under any circumstances, as it contained an anachronistic reference to the Moors, who had not existed during Cyprian’s lifetime. They pointed out that the requirement to say the prayer on three consecutive Sundays and the invocation of Saint Cyprian had a superstitious smell (“huele conocidamente a superstición”).67 Thus, the text was considered historically inaccurate and mistakenly (or deliberately falsely) attributed to Cyprian. And presumably most importantly from the perspective of the Inquisition leaders, it contained references to superstitious practices regarding prayer times and ritual repetition. There is no information in the Inquisition file about the decision that was finally made, but Itúrbide Díaz suspects that the print was probably confiscated.68

Forbidden books also brought the Cretan scholar Francesco Barozzi (the owner of the Greek manuscripts B1 and B2, see above) into the clutches of the Venetian Inquisition.69 A verdict from October 16, 1587 describes the accusations and, after initial resistance, the confessions of Barozzi. He was accused of having adhered to “the vane and pestiferous doctrine” and having taught it to his own son and his disciple.70 When his study was examined, the Inquisitors found two boxes of forbidden books and books of Hours.71 Finally, Barozzi confessed to have collected Greek and Latin magical books and to have experimented even in conjuring demons.72 The other charges and confessions are related to magical and divinatory rituals. Although the prayer of Cyprian is not mentioned anywhere in the entire sentenza, we can draw a link to the banned books. Furthermore, Barozzi was also accused of having abused sacramental items like consecrated water and oil.73 We have already seen the example of Jacintho García, who had used or abused ecclesiastically consecrated objects in his healing rituals, even though our text of the prayer of Cyprian does not prescribe the use of materia magica. Barozzi was ultimately sentenced to a fine of 100 ducats and imprisonment for an indefinite period.74

In sum, the Inquisition fought against the use of certain devotional prayers primarily because they were seen as potential vehicles for superstition, magic, and heterodox beliefs that could threaten Church authority or lead people away from the true faith. Together with the steps taken to prevent the free circulation of prayers and exorcisms, the Catholic Church also worked on standardizing its own rituals during the period of the Counterreformation, ultimately resulting in the Rituale Romanum of 1614, which standardized the practice of exorcism.75

However, the vernacular prayer of Cyprian belonged to a new era. Exorcism had emerged from the domain of the (Greek or Latin-speaking) cleric and had become accessible to everyone, just as Lasterra’s translation of the Latin prayer of Cyprian into Spanish had helped popularize a text banned by the Inquisition.76 In the same period, the famous drama by the Spanish poet Pedro Calderón de la Barca (El Mágico Prodigioso, 1637) shows how popular the legend of Cyprian had become on the Iberian Peninsula. And finally, the numerous vernacular versions from Spain, Portugal, and France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries demonstrate that the Inquisition had only a temporary success.

Conclusions

The prayer of Cyprian in the European vernacular languages has received increased attention in recent decades. These versions originate from a Greek version presented above. It is probably impossible to reconstruct the original text today from the fifteenth-sixteenth century manuscripts. As the translations of the text of the prayer into other languages clearly show, the prayers were part of a living literature that was updated with every copy and every new translation. A comparison of the texts, however, reveals the close connections among the Greek, Latin, and Iberian versions.

The origins of the Greek prayer can no longer be precisely determined today.77 The legend of Cyprian of Antioch began to spread in the Eastern Roman Empire in the fifth century. Long exorcisms and prayers for healing similar to the prayer of Cyprian can be found in Byzantine euchologies, the oldest evidence of which is the magnificent Barberini gr. 336 from the eighth century,78 but it was not until the beginning of the second millennium that collections of exorcisms appeared in the Greek-speaking world, similar to developments a few centuries later in the Latin West.79

Humanism and the Renaissance brought the Greek prayer of Cyprian to the European West. The path that I have traced above, based on the descriptions of the manuscripts, leads from East to West, via southern Italy and Sicily, and via Venice, which at the time had extended its sphere of influence far into the Greek world, including Crete and Cyprus, and which had close contacts to Constantinople. The prayers thus offer a magnificent example of the long-term historical and literary processes of translations from the Greek East via Latin into the Western vernaculars.

In the sixteenth century, a new era began, with the translation of the already Latinized prayer into the vernacular languages. With the change in language, the prayers also underwent a popularization. They became an instrument for healers and exorcists outside the Church and thus also entered into competition with the sanctioned rites of the Church. Here, from the middle of the sixteenth century, devotional prayers as well as exorcisms were closely observed by the Church. Hence, the prayer of Cyprian was also found in the Inquisition trials.

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1. 1 The origins of the Greek prayer can no longer be precisely determined today. The legend of Cyprian of Antioch began to spread in the Eastern Roman Empire in the fifth century. Long exorcisms and prayers for healing similar to the prayer of Cyprian can be found in Byzantine euchologies, the oldest evidence of which is Ms Barberini gr. 336 from the eighth century, but it was not until the first half of the second millennium that collections of exorcisms appeared in the Greek-speaking world. The development of such collections in the Latin West has been studied by Chauve-Mahir, L’exorcisme des possédés, 313–34. The Greek tradition predates the Latin development by several centuries, see Strittmatter, “Ein griechisches Exorzismusbüchlein” and Jacob, “Un exorcisme inédit” for two earlier examples.

2. 2 On the legend, martyrdom, and the spread of the cult, see Krestan and Hermann, “Cyprianus II,” and Vaucher “Orationes Sancti Cypriani,” 25–30.

3. 3 The legend of Cyprian and Justina was mainly recorded in three source writings in Greek: the conversio, a novelistic account in which Cyprian converts to Christianity after his failed attempt to win Justina; the so-called poenitentia or confessio, an account in which Cyprian confesses in the first-person singular all his infamous deeds as a magician and idolater and hopes for forgiveness from the Church; and the martyrium, the account of the martyrdom of Cyprian and Justina. It is generally assumed that these three texts were written in Greek in the fourth and fifth centuries, see the new edition with introduction and commentary in Bailey, “Acts of Saint Cyprian.” Most later revisions are dependent on these three writings: the metaphrasis of the Byzantine empress Eudocia (ed. Bevegni, Eudocia) or the Latin Legenda aurea of Jacob de Voragine (Graesse, Legenda aurea, 632–36) are famous examples.

4. 4 “Xάρις δὲ αὐτῷ ἐπηκολούθησε κατὰ δαιμόνων, καὶ πᾶν πάθος ἰᾶτο,” Bailey, “Acts of Saint Cyprian,” 136–37.

5. 5 More detailed on the rhetorical means in the prayer of Cyprian as well as in related Greek prayers in Vaucher, “The Rhetoric of Healing.”

6. 6 On the use of historiolae in magic, see Frankfurter, “Narrating Power” and “Spell and Speech Act” with more literature. On the personification and role-plays in magic, see Chiarini, “Ἐγώ εἰμι ῾Ερμῆς,” and Vaucher, “The Performance of Healing.”

7. 7 Chauve-Mahir, L’exorcisme des possédés, 329. On the difficult demarcation of magic, ritual, and liturgy, see Sanzo, Ritual Boundaries, and Vaucher, “Gebet, Exorzismus und Magie.”

8. 8 Pap. Heidelberg PSR no. 820, Bilabel and Grohmann, “Studien zu Kyprian dem Magier.”

9. 9 The best discussion of Christian phylacteries is still de Bruyn, Making Amulets Christian.

10. 10 A clear definition and demarcation have not yet been established. It should be noted that Christian exorcisms are closely related to baptism and the confession of sins, but also to the healing of illnesses. Prayers for healing, such as those found in the Greek Euchologies, are therefore also related to the prayer of Cyprian.

11. 11 https://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr/notices/oeuvre/15062/, last accessed February 20, 2025.

12. 12 Chauve-Mahir, L’exorcisme des possédés, 313–34.

13. 13 See Barberiato, “Magical literature,” 164 for other reasons of small-sized books, including, for instance, lower production costs and the simple fact that smaller books could be more easily and more rapidly hidden.

14. 14 Feron and Battaglini, Codices manuscripti, 157: There is a prayer for the sick attributed to Saint John Chrysostom, one attributed to Saint Gregory, a phylactery in the name of Saint Sisinnius and Sinidor, and another prayer by Saint John Chrysostom.

15. 15 Gamillscheg, Repertorium der griechischen Kopisten (= RGK) III 339. According to this, an invocation contains the name of Cyprian of Calamizzi, a Calabrian healer and saint, see Mercati, “Un santo della Calabria.” Healing prayers were also attributed to him in other manuscripts, such as the oratio in infirmos printed in Vassiliev, Anecdota Graeco-Byzantina, 323 from Cod. Vindob. philosoph. 178, f. 31; the same prayer is found in Vat. gr. 1538 (V2) and Marc. gr. App. II.163 (Pradel, Griechische und süditalienische Gebete, 20). In V1 the same prayer is attributed to Saint Chrysostom.

16. 16 Giannelli, Codices Vaticani Graeci, 167–71. Batiffol, “La Vaticane depuis Paul III,” 186, see also Mercati, Per la storia dei manoscritti greci, 96.

17. 17 Batiffol, “La Vaticane depuis Paul III,” 184.

18. 18 Giannelli, Codices Vaticani Graeci, 100–9, see also Almazov, “Chin nad besnovatym,” 4–6.

19. 19 Marina’s description of her life as a demon vanquisher fits into the corpus of exorcisms, see Drewer, “Margaret of Antioch.” We may wonder whether, in the course of a long exorcism, the Vita was also read aloud over the person fallen ill.

20. 20 See above, no. 15.

21. 21 Batiffol, “La Vaticane depuis Paul III,” 190, no. 3, quotes f.1r: Librum hunc è Mileto Romam translatum à fratre Felice Centino Ord: Minor(um) t(i)t(uli) sancti Laurentij in Pane et Perna Cardinali de Asculo nuncupato Ep(iscop)o Maceratensi Bibliothecae Vaticanae dono ipse dedit.

22. 22 Coxe, Bodleian Library, 13–15.

23. 23 Boncompagni, “Intorno alla vita,” 795–848; I was not able to consult Rose, A Venetian Patron.

24. 24 De Maria, “Francesco Barozzi,” 219–29. A wonderful splendor edition can be consulted on https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.14624194, last accessed February 19, 2025. Incidentally, the Oracula are also included in manuscript V1 together with the prayer of Cyprian, see Devreesse, Codices Vaticani, 169–72. This manuscript is notable for its drawings of wondrous animals within the Physiologus and also for its Greek-Latin bilingualism.

25. 25 Coxe, Bodleian Library, 387–89, where the prayer is attributed to Cyprian of Carthage.

26. 26 Hutter, Corpus der Byzantinischen Miniaturenhandschriften, no. 146.

27. 27 Gamillscheg and Harlfinger, Repertorium der griechischen Kopisten (RGK IIa), no. 527. Omont, Inventaire sommaire, vol. I, 46.

28. 28 Martini, Catalogo di manoscritti greci, vol. 1, 82–83.

29. 29 Davies, Grimoires, 28; Rigo, “Hermetic books.”

30. 30 Geanakoplos, Byzantine East and Latin West, 112–64; Barberiato, “Magical literature,” 161.

31. 31 Geanakoplos, Byzantine East and Latin West, 13–15 calls Calabria a “leading outpost of Byzantine influence in the West.” On Sicilian and south Italian spells, see Pradel, Griechische und süditalienische Gebete, and Schneegans, “Sizilianische Gebete.”

32. 32 Basset, Les apocryphes éthiopiens; Grohmann, “Studien zu den Cyprianusgebeten,” Bilabel and Grohmann “Studien zu Kyprian dem Magier.” An Arabic prayer from Lebanon (undated) can also be found in Tallqvist, Zwei christlich-arabische Gebete.

33. 33 Strelcyn, Prières magiques, L–LII; Macler, “Formules magiques,” esp. 28 on the manuscripts, to which should be added Sachau, Handschriften-Verzeichnisse, 589–90. On the Armenian texts s. Wingate, “The scroll of Cyprian.”

34. 34 Almazov, “Vracheval’nye molitvy,” 131–45 from Bibl. Sofia Cod. 869, ff. 187v–194v.

35. 35 Vicente, “El libro de San Cipriano,” and Vicente, “O Máxico San Cipriano.” A French version inserted in the village parish registers of Bosdarros in Southwestern France in 1790 has been reproduced by Desplat, Sorcières et Diables, 64. On the classification and circulation of related orationes, such as that of Saint Marta, see Fantini, “circolazione clandestine,” 62–63.

36. 36 Chauve-Mahir, L’exorcisme des possédés, 330 s.

37. 37 Not to be confused with the prayer of Cyprian are the Latin orationes Cypriani, which are sometimes attributed in the literature to the Antiochian saint, but which have been handed down in the corpus of writings of the Carthaginian bishop of the same name and have nothing to do with the prayer of Cyprian discussed here. See Vaucher, “Orationes Sancti Cypriani.”

38. 38 Smid, “Catalan Saint Cyprian Prayer,” 289.

39. 39 https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k851256q/f1.item.r=oracion%20devotissima%20de%20san%20cipriano

40. 40 Sherman, “Hernando Colón.”

41. 41 It is listed in the Forbidden Prayers Digital Library, https://forpral.uab.cat/prayer/oracion-de-san-cipriano/

    with reference to the catalog entry https://explora.bnc.cat/discovery/fulldisplay?context=L&vid=34CSUC_BC:VU1&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&tab=Everything&docid=alma991002898469706717.

42. 42 Smid, “Catalan Saint Cyprian Prayer.”

43. 43 Fantini, “catalogo bibliographico,” 613 provides evidence of several mentions of the prayer of Cyprian in trial records from the Archivio del Sant’Uffizio in Modena from the years 1571-1608. The inquisitors were instructed to register the existence and titles of the forbidden texts before handing them over to be burned, see Fantini, “catalogo bibliographico,” 599–600 and Fantini, “Censura romana, 240–41.

44. 44 The prayer of Cyprian has not yet been studied in this respect, but there are numerous obvious parallels to the exorcisms of the Byzantine Euchologies; see Vaucher, “The Rhetoric of Healing” with further literature.

45. 45 However, Vicente, “O Máxico San Cipriano” (without page numbering) also knows longer versions of more recent date, which correspond more closely to the Greek original, e.g. Verdadera Oración de los Gloriosos Mártires San Cipriano y Santa Justina, acompañada de la SS. Cruz de Caravvaca. REus, imp. y Librería de Juan Grau. Barcelona, nineteenth century (pp. 10 ss. in the PDF): “Yo no sabía tu santo nombre y terrible, altísimo Dios, más ahora se que tú eres, Dios mío, Dios fuerte, Dios grande, Dios omnipotente, + que habitas en gran luz y eres loable en los siglos de los siglos. En otro tiempo no conocía yo vuestra bondad ni vuestro poder, y Vos veíais los maleficios que yo esclavo del demonio hacia mezclándome con su potestad. Ataba las nubes y no llovía sobre la haz de la tierra, y la yerba de la tierra se secaba y los árboles no daban sus frutos; y me paseaba por medio de los ganados extraviándolos y haciendo que se perdieran. Con mi gran astucia y malicia ligaba las aves del cielo y los peces del mar, y los peces no surcaban las olas del mar, y las aves no volaban por los aires; del mismo modo ligaba las mujeres embarazadas y no podían parir…”

46. 46 Bilabel and Grohmann, “Studien zu Kyprian dem Magier,” 236 ss. offers a text based on manuscript A1 that differs in many respects. For the sake of clarity, I will not reproduce it here. The motifs of the “bindings” before the conversion are at least the same, though the text has been inflated even more by insertions.

47. 47 I provide a transcription (with some assumptions) based on photographs of the manuscript. A Hungarian translation by György Bednárik can be found in Smid 2022.

48. 48 https://forpral.uab.cat/prayer/oracion-de-san-cipriano/. Last accessed February 19, 2025. The text in Lasterra, Liber exorcismorum is closely related, with some linguistic differences but identical formulations and structure.

49. 49 The Greek manuscripts are all issued to a specific name, see Schermann’s apparatus.

50. 50 See Vicente, “El libro de San Cipriano,” 18.

51. 51 Davies, Grimoires, 44–138. See Kieckhefer, Forbidden rites with further literature.

52. 52 Chauve-Mahir, L’exorcisme des possédés, 329.

53. 53 Barberiato, “Magical literature,” 159–60.

54. 54 Smid, “Catalan Saint Cyprian Prayer,” 280; Caravale, “Orazione,” 1141.

55. 55 Davies, Grimoires, 57–67.

56. 56 Martin, Witchcraft, 247; Caravale, Forbidden Prayer, 81–82; Lavenia, “Tenere i malefici.”

57. 57 Smid, “Catalan Saint Cyprian Prayer,” 303.

58. 58 See the note in witness a (BSG 1352), according to which Joachim Gillet, librarian of the abbey, received the book on June 29, 1711: “Mr l’abbé Hoüel, que je n’avois pas l’honneur de connoître, me donna ce livre dans la crainte qu’etant tresdangereux, il ne tombat en mains de personnes qui en abusassent.” https://calames.abes.fr/pub/bsg.aspx#details?id=BSGB10178. The catalog entry also states: “Le catalogue de vente de la bibliothèque de cet abbé en 1735 y atteste la présence de nombreux mss touchant à l’alchimie,” and the collection has a “goût orientalisant,” see http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/cataloguevente/notice141.php

59. 59 Such devotional prayers were addressed to saints asking for help or salvation, for example to Helena, Marta, Magdalena etc., see Caravale, “Orazione,” 1141.

60. 60 Caravale, Forbidden Prayer, 192.

61. 61 “Chi dirà, o farà dir questa confessione / trenta giorni per sé o per sua brigata, / d’ogni peccato haverà contrition, / la Maddalena sarà soa advocata…”; cited in Caravale, Forbidden Prayer, 193. Compare the rubric of the prayer of Cyprian in Modena anno 1600: “Questa devota oration de san Ciprian’ è bona contra maligni spiriti, fatture, incanti; chi la dirà o la farà dir tre volte…” (Fantini, “catalogo bibliographico,” 613).

62. 62 “Esta es la muy santa oración del glorioso san Cipriano, la cual fue hecha y ordenada para librar las personas de malos hechos y hechizos, y ojos malos, y malas lenguas, y para cualesquiera (sic) ligamientos y encantamientos, para que todos sean desatados y desligados, y para la mujer que está de parto y para la pestilencia y aire corrupto. La cual oración ha de ser leída tres veces en tres domingos, cada domingo una vez.” (https://forpral.uab.cat/prayer/oracion-de-san-cipriano/

63. 63 Itúrbide Díaz, “Piedad popular,” 338–39.

64. 64 Ibid., 343–44; Smid, “Catalan Saint Cyprian Prayer,” 289.

65. 65 Londõno, “Oración supersticiosa.”

66. 66 Ibid., 685; Fantini, “Censura romana,” 232. Martínez de Bujanda, Index, 516 lists several versions of Catalan and Italian Oracion de sant Cyprian, por si pequeña as well as Oratione de Santo Cipriano Volgare that circulated in the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries. See Vicente, “El libro de San Cipriano,” 15–25. On the development of the index, see Frajese, Nascita.

67. 67 Itúrbide Díaz, “Piedad popular,” 343. On the superstitious in these prayers, see Caravale, Forbidden Prayer, 191–96.

68. 68 Itúrbide Díaz, “Piedad popular,” 344.

69. 69 On the Venetian Inquisition, see Martin, Witchcraft; Barberiato, “Magical literature,” and Grendler, Roman Inquisition. On the Italian Inquisition see also Lavenia, “Tenere i malefici” and idem, “Possessione.”

70. 70 Boncompagni, Sentenza, c. 36v: “attendeui à queste vane et pestifere dottrine, ma anco ne faceui il Maestro alleuando et nutrendo li proprij figliuoli et genero et anco il suo unico discepolo…”

71. 71 Boncompagni, Sentenza, c. 36v: “libri prohibiti et con parole all’hora, et doppo non conuenienti à Gentilhuomo cristiano”; see Rigo, “Hermetic books,” 79. On the books of Hours, see Londõno, “Oración supersticiosa.”

72. 72 Boncompagni, Sentenza, c. 37r: “hauendo fatto diligente raccolta de libri stampati et manuscritti in Greco et Latino che trattauano de Varij sortilegij Negromantia et Arte Magica essercitandoti in quella facesti diuersi esperimenti scongiurationi de spiriti…”; see Martin, Witchcraft, 157.

73. 73 Boncompagni, Sentenza, c. 40r: “in diuersi esperimenti hauer abusato cose sacramentali come Aqua benedetta, Candelle benedette, stola et Camiso da sacerdote, hauuto consecrato oglio s.to benedetto et consacrati lochi et fatto Altari, genuflesso hai inuocato et riuerito con turificationi et finalmente adorati li spiriti maligni…”

74. 74 On Barozzi, see Boncompagni, “Intorno alla vita,” and Rose, A Venetian Patron.

75. 75 Roy, “The Development of the Roman Ritual,” 20 s. The literature on the history of exorcism is vast, see Young, History of Exorcism; Fontelle, L’exorcisme, or Scala, Exorzismus with further literature.

76. 76 Smid, “Catalan Saint Cyprian Prayer,” 290.

77. 77 See Vaucher, “Orationes Sancti Cypriani.”

78. 78 Parenti / Velkouska, L’Eucologio Barberini offers a full edition of the Euchologion and also the best overview of other Euchologies. On euchologies and methodology, see Rapp, “Byzantine Prayer Books,” and Rapp, “Byzantinische Gebetbücher.” Primary collections are Goar, Euchologion, and Dmitrievskii, Εὐχολόγια.

79. 79 See Strittmatter, “Ein griechisches Exorzismusbüchlein” and Jacob, “Un exorcisme inédit.” Other collections are of a later date, e.g. Vassiliev, Anecdota Graeco-Byzantina, 323–45; Almazov, “Vracheval’nye molitvy [Prayers for healing],” 367–514; Almazov, “Chin nad besnovatym” [Ritual for an Obsessed], 1–96; Pradel, Griechische und süditalienische Gebete; Delatte, Anecdota Atheniensia; Delatte, Un office byzantin d’exorcisme; Micaleff, Exorcistic Prayers. On the Latin exorcism books of the Middle Ages, see Chauve-Mahir, L’exorcisme des possédés, 313–34.

 

Fourteenth-Century Developments in Armenian Grammatical Theory through Borrowing and Translation: Contexts and Models of Yovhannes  K‘ṛnets‘i’s¹
Grammar Book

Gohar Muradyan

Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts, Yerevan

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 2 (2025): 214-246 DOI 10.38145/2025.2.214

The description of Armenian grammar has a long history. Several decades after the  in­vention of the alphabet by Mesrop Mashtots, probably in the second half of the fifth century, Dionysius Thrax’ Ars grammatica was translated from Greek. Until the four­teenth century, eleven commentaries were composed on Thrax’s work. The Ars created the bulk of the Armenian grammatical terminology and artificially ascribed some peculiarities of the Greek language to Armenian. In the 1340s Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i‘i wrote a work entitled On Grammar. He was the head of the Catholic K‘ṛna monastery in Nakhijewan which was founded by Catholic missionaries sent to Eastern Armenia and by their Armenian collaborators, the fratres unitores. K‘ṛnets‘i’s grammar survived in a single manuscript copied in 1350.

In K‘ṛnets‘i’s work, the section on phonetics, the names of the parts of speech and many grammatical categories follow Dionysius’ Ars grammatica. K‘ṛnets‘i also used Latin sources, introducing two sections on syntax, mentioning Priscian, and borrowing definitions from Petrus Helias’ Summa super Priscianum and other commentaries. This resulted in distinguishing substantive and adjective in the section on nouns, in a more realistic characterization of Armenian verbal tenses and voices and the introduction of notions and terms for sentences, their kinds, case government and agreement.

Keywords: Fratres unitores, Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i, Priscianus, Petrus Helias, syntax

What influence did Greek and Latin models exercise on fourteenth-century Armenian grammatical theory? Did Latin models become more authoritative with the arrival of Catholic missionaries in late medieval Armenia? After offering a brief overview of the activities of the fratres unitores, this paper focuses on Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i’s Book on Grammar as a case study which shows how textual imports enriched Armenian grammatical theory and the Armenian language.

Based on the works of Levon Kachikyan and Suren Avagyan, the essay shows that Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i relied on the early Armenian translation of Dionysius Thrax and Dionysius’ commentaries and wrote his section on syntax based on the Latin grammarian Priscianus and also on the works of Priscianus’ commentators. Other scholars, such as Tigran Sirunyan and Peter Cowe, substantialized Avagyan’s and Khachikyan’s speculations on Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i’s Latin sources. Sirunyan in particular showed a series of borrowings from these sources. The paper brings substantial new evidence concerning K‘ṛnets‘i’s reliance on the works of Priscianus and his commentators, namely Petrus Helias. It shows that with the help of Latin grammarians, K‘ṛnets‘i elaborated a more subtle Armenian grammatical theory compared to the Armenian grammatical tradition that had preceded K‘ṛnets‘i, which had been overwhelmingly influenced by Dionysius Thrax’s Greek grammar book.

1 Fratres Unitores: Knowledge Hubs, Cultural Impact, and Translations

In the early fourteenth century, Armenia was under Mongol rule. After proselytis­ing in the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia, Pope John XXII (1316–1334) sent first Franciscan and later Dominican Catholic missionaries to Eastern Armenia. They founded centers for the spread of Catholicism among Armenians in Armenia, such as Artaz and Ernjak (in the Nakhijewan2 province3) and also in neighbouring regions, such as Maragha and the capital of the Mongol Ilkhanate Sult‘aniē in northern Iran and also in Tiflis. The goal of this mission was to convert the Ilkhans of Persia and other khans to Christianity, but these efforts ultimately failed, since the khans embraced Islam and the conditions for Christians deteriorated. The special attitude of Ilkhan Abu Said towards the “Latin friars,” whom he put under his protection in 1320, encouraged local Christians to turn their mind towards the missionaries.4

The Catholic mission was headed by Bartholomew of Podio,5 bishop of Maragha between 1318 and 1330, and his fellow friars, Peter of Aragon and John the Englishman of Swineford.6 Bartholomew was known as an engaging preacher who had gathered around him many young Armenians. Part of the local clergy converted to the new faith. They assisted the missionaries and were called “fratres unitores.”7 They were preceded by the Franciscan Tsortsor monastery founded in the early fourteenth century by Zak‘aria Tsortsorets‘i, aided by Yovhannēs Tsortsorets‘i, vardapet Israyēl, and Fra Pontius.8 The leaders of the Armenian Apostolic Church, in their zeal to preserve its independence, resisted the missionaries and their Armenian adherents and wrote several letters defending the doctrines and rites of the Armenian Apostolic Church.9 Esayi Nch‘ets‘i, the head of the famous Gladzor monastic school, and in particular Nch‘ets‘i’s student Yovhannēs Orotnets‘i and Maghak‘ia Ghrimets‘i in the subsequent generation, as well as Yovhannēs Orotnets‘i’s student, the famous theologian and philosopher Grigor Tat‘ewats‘i (1344–1409), were particularly active in these resistance efforts.10 In the course of this controversy, the pro-Latin faction also produced documents, but few of them have survived.11

The fratres unitores founded several monastic centers. After his arrival to Maragha in 1318, Bartholomew moved to the monastery of K‘ṛna. This monastery was founded by Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i in 1330 in the village of the same name in the historical Armenian province Nakhijewan.12 After Bartholomew died in 1333, the monastery was led by Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i (until his death in 1347).13 K‘ṛnets‘i cooperated extensively with Yakob K‘ṛnets‘i, Peter of Aragon and John of Swineford (Joannes Anglus14), who made good progress in learning Armenian. The K‘ṛna monastery was named “New Athens” (նոր Աթենք), and it remained active until 1766.15 Another center for the fratres unitores was  the St. Nicholas monastery in Kaffa (Crimea).16 As a whole, the congregation consisted of about 14 monasteries at its zenith.17 In 1356, the community of the unitors reached its heyday, running 50 monasteries with about 700 monks. By 1374, the community had declined substantially.18

The fratres unitores translated from Latin Catholic ritual books and Western scholastic authors’ writings, and they also wrote original philosophical, logical, and theological works.19 As a result of their activities, the most important Roman liturgical books became accessible in Armenian.20 Another example, showing the importance of the fratres unitores’ cultural contributions was Bartholomew of Bologna’s On Hexaemeron (Ms M1659, copied in the fourteenth century). It contains considerable information on celestial bodies, plants, and animals based on the writings of several ancient Greek philosophers, medieval theologians, and scholars.21

Most of the translated and original works of the unitor brothers have not yet been published.22 It should be also noted that Marcus van den Oudenrijn’s bibliographic work lists are largely based on the holdings of Western collections.23 At the same time, the largest collection of Armenian manuscripts in Matenadaran (Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts in Yerevan) includes early manuscripts, which contain the bulk of the works listed by Oudenrijn.

The unitors’ intellectual achievements seem to have aroused interest among their adversaries. Although little research has been done on this, it has been stated that the works created in the milieu of the unitors soon reached Armenian intellectual circles, despite the fact that the unitors themselves were trying to ban their spread among their adversaries.24 In a colophon to Bartholomew’s Sermonary, Yakob K‘ṛnets‘i (the most prolific translator of the K‘ṛna school)25 threatens to anathematize and excommunicate anyone who gives it to them.26 In 1363, at the request of Yovhannēs Orotnets‘i, Grigor Tat‘ewats‘i copied Ms M2382 containing Bartholomew’s Dialectics, Gilbertus Porretanus’ Liber sex rerum principiis, and its commentary by Peter of Aragon. In 1389, Yakob Ghrimets‘i, a renowned scholar, copied Ms M3487, a codex encompassing the works of John of Swineford. Yovhannēs Orotnets‘i’s commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation, on Pophyry’s Isagoge to Aristotle’s Categories and on Philo of Alexandria’s De Providentia witness to his awareness of European methodology applied in philosophical and logical writings.27 It was Grigor Tat‘ewats‘i, the most prominent theologian of the Armenian Church, on whose writings Western philosophy and theology had exerted the strongest influence, and he passes this influence on in his work.28

The language of the texts produced by the unitorian brothers bears Latin influence. This influence resembles the use of the artificial grammatical forms and neologisms in the translations of the so-called Hellenizing school, which was a literary trend in old Armenian literature marked by extreme adherence to the literal translation method and by Greek influence on vocabulary, syntax, and even morphology.29 The tendency to copy Latin words and grammatical features gathered further impetus in the so-called Latinizing (լատինաբան) translations and original works produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the Catholic preachers, who were alumni of the Collegium Urbanum.30 This collegium was founded in 1627 in Rome and belonged to the Congregation “De propagande fide” founded in 1622 to promote the Catholic faith in eastern Christian countries. Works of the alumni of the Collegium Urbanum included a series of Armenian grammars. Scholars held different views on whether the fourteenth-century and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts should be viewed as two separate groups31 of Latinizing Armenian literature or it is one and the same trend which regressed for some time and was revived in the seventeenth century.32

After these introductory remarks on the fratres unitores, I now turn my focus to Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i’s grammatical work.

2.1 Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i and His Grammatical Work: The Circumstances
of its Composition and the Influence of Dionysius Thrax

Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i (ca. 1290–1347) was a student of the abovementioned Esayi Nch‘ets‘i, an outstanding scholar himself and one of the most ardent adversaries of the Catholic faith. In 1328, Esayi sent K‘ṛnets‘i to Maragha to explore the curriculum taught there by Bartholomew of Podio. There, K‘ṛnets‘i adopted Catholicism,33 learned Latin, and taught Armenian to Bartholomew (before learning Armenian, the latter communicated with the Armenian brothers in Persian). In 1330, Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i returned to K‘r. na and persuaded the feudal lord of the village (who was his uncle) and his wife to convert to Catholicism. With their financial aid, K‘ṛnets‘i built a new church on the territory of the local Surb Astuatsatsin (Holy Theotokos) monastery and donated it to the Dominican order. Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i was the head of the K‘r. na monastery between 1333 and 1347. Peter Cowe refers to him as the leading figure among the Armenian scholars who joined the Dominican congregation.34 In 1342, K‘ṛnets‘i traveled to the papal see in Avignon to discuss his future efforts towards the union of the Armenian and Roman Churches.35 One of the colophons of Ms M327636 reads:

In the upper monastery of K‘ṛna, under the protection of the Holy Theotokos, headed by doctor Yovhannēs nicknamed K‘ṛnets‘i, in whose name pious lord Gorg (sic!) and his wife lady Ēlt‘ik founded the holy congregation. And those three, doctor Yohan and Lord Gēorg and lady Ēlt‘ik, willingly donated the monastery to the Order of Preachers of Saint Dominic, an eternal gift. This Yovhannēs caused much benefit; he collected here doctors from Latins and Armenians, taking care of all concerning their soul and body, and he translated and is translating many salutary and enlightening writings… and he brought the redeeming tidings to the Armenian people and led those worthy to the obedience to the high throne of Rome…37

Only one of Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i’s translations survives: Bartholomew’s Liber de inferno, probably translated between 1328 and 1330 in Maragha.38 Alberto Casella summarized information concerning three other translations from Yovhannēs’ quill:39 Bartholomew’s Liber de judiciis, translated in 1328–1330 in Maragha;40 the Regula S. Augustini episcopi de vita religiosorum, translated either by Yovhannēs or by Bartholomew,41 and the Constitutiones ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum, probably translated by Yovhannēs, from which two lines are cited by Clemens Galanus.42

Marcus Van Oudenrijn contends that another treatise entitled Disputatio de duabus naturis et de una persona in Christo, composed, according to the colophon “by Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i and bishop Bartholomew” (MS M3640, 14th c., 121r–150v), was written by Bartholomew and translated by Yovhannēs.43 In contrast, Arevshatyan claims that they wrote it together in Armenian before Bartholomew moved from Maragha to K‘ṛna.44

As to original works by Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i, his grammatical work and a letter addressed to the fratres unitores have survived. In the letter, Yovhannēs explains his motifs for conversion to the Catholic faith and ascribes 19 “unforgivable errors” to the adherents of the Armenian Apostolic Church.45

Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i probably wrote his Grammar (Յաղագս քերականին)46 in the 1340s. The text has survived in a single manuscript kept in the Mekhitharist congregation in Vienna (Ms W293, 2r–29r).47 It was copied in 1350, three years after the author’s death in Kaffa (Crimea). Marcus van den Oudenrijn, judging by the short information on this text in the catalogue,48 wrote, “Est commentarius in antiquam versionem Artis Grammaticae Dionysii Thracis.”49

However, the colophon at the end reads:

I, fra Yohan K‘ṛna, called by the nickname K‘ṛnets‘i, has made a short compendium from Armenians and Latins, [small] bits from many authors and grammarians, giving a door and a road for the novices to enter the cities of wisdom, to ascend from practice to knowledge, and with this minor art to the art of arts which is the mother and dwelling and abode for those who are directed towards wit and wisdom (as if aroused by a goad and awakened from the vacillation of drowsiness), so that they arrive at the knowledge of the truth and good, which is the perfection of logic.50

K‘ṛnets‘i did indeed write a “short compendium,” and he combined grammatical knowledge from different sources.51 He used the Armenian version of Ars grammatica by Dionysius Thrax,52 translated from Greek in the second half of the fifth century.53 In addition, K‘ṛnets‘i used some of the several commentaries on Dionysius Thrax’s work, which Armenian authors wrote between the sixth and fourteenth centuries, in particular, the commentary written by his teacher in the Gladzor monastery Esayi Nchets‘i.54 Yovhannēs also included information on syntax that he borrowed from Latin grammatical works. Yovhannēs’ work bears some influence of the sections on the noun and verb in Bartholomew’s Dialectics, as has been noticed.55 The grammar book is written in Grabar (Classical Armenian), but some examples are in Middle Armenian (appearing most apparently in the verbal forms with the prepositive particle կու – ku).

Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i applied most of the terms which Dionysius Thrax’ Armenian translator coined, such as the names of the parts of speech and the main grammatical categories. In this respect, K‘ṛnets‘i followed Dionysius’ abovementioned commentators. At the same time, he also created some new terms, especially those about syntax.

In the introduction to the edition of Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i’s grammatical work, Suren Avagyan has pointed out that some parts had been influenced by (sometimes cited from) the work of Dionysius Thax, whom K‘ṛnets‘i mentioned as “the grammarian” (Քերթող, 220).56 Most affected by the Dionysian Grammar are the phonetic sections of the first and longest part, titled “Part One, on the Simple Knowledge,” which contains the following sections: “[1] On the letter,” “[2] On syllables,” “[3] On long syllables,” “[4] On short syllables,” and “[5] On common syllables” (K‘ṛnets‘i also reflects some real features of Classical Armenian,57 in contrast with the Armenian version of Dionysius58). The last short “philological” chapters also show the influence of Dionysius’ Grammar, which are “Part Four, on Prosody,” “Part Five, on Metric Elements,”59 and “Part Six, on Reading.” In the description of the parts of speech (sections 6–14 of “Part One”), K‘ṛnets‘i combines details found in Dionysius’ Grammar and Dionysius’ Armenian commentaries with Latin sources and his observations.

Like Dionysius Thrax, Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i also discussed some grammatical categories which are not characteristic of the Armenian language.60 One of these features is the gender of nouns. He writes: սերք անուանց... արական է իք – այր, իգական է էք – կին, չեզոք է օք – երկին (168, “the gender of nouns… masculine is ik‘ – man, feminine is ēk‘ – woman, neuter is ok‘ – sky”). The strange ik‘, ēk‘, ok‘ forms are transliterations of the Latin pronoun hic, haec, hoc,61 indicating the gender of the related nouns (cf. Petrus 323–327),62 and are called articula (Petrus 326). The same pronoun with various nouns figures in Priscianus’ section “De generibus” (Pr. 141–144).63 Later, Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i cautions that one should “be aware that there is difference of genders… in the Greek and Latin languages, but not in the Armenian speech [where it occurs] just scattered and at random.”64

Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i applied a considerable number of grammatical terms, drawing their origins from Dionysius Thrax’s Ars grammatica, which became common in Armenian grammatical works. The following are the main terms, followed by the corresponding Latin terms in Priscianus’ work65:

անուն (163–72) = Dion. 12–2266 – ὄνoμα (23.1, 24.3, 6, 29.1, 5, 36.1, 5,67 etc.), “nomen;”

թուական (165–6, 198) = Dion. 18.7, 21.22 – ἀριθμετικόν (33.5, 44.4), “numerale;”

բայ (176–81) = Dion. 12.4, 22.11, 15, 24.10, 25.20, etc. – ῥῆμα (23.1, 29.3, 46.4, 53.5, 54.1, 57.5, etc), “verbum;”

ընդունելութիւն (183–6) = Dion. 12.14, 26.23, 24 – μετοχή (23.1, 60.1), “participium;”

մակբայ (181–3) = Dion. 12.16, 31.1, 2, 5 – ἐπίρρημα (23.2, 72.3, 73.1), “adverbium;”

դերանուն (172–6) = Dion. 12.5, 30.1 – ἀντωνυμία (23.2, 63.1), “pronomen;”

նախդիր (189–90), cf. Dion. 12.15, 30.7 նախադրութիւն68 – πρόθεσις (23.2, 70.2), “praepositio;”

յօդ (190–1) = Dion. 12.15, 27.2 – ἄρθρoν (23.2, 66.1), “articulum;”

շաղկապ (186–9) = Dion. 12.6, 35.7, 11 – σύνδεσμoς (23.2, 86.2, 87.1), “conjunctio.”

Among specific terms designating grammatical categories,69 the following are worth mentioning:

սեր մակաւասար … երկբայական (168) – Dion. 13.10 = ἐπίκοινον (25.1), “genus epichenum70 et dubium” (Petrus 325);

գերադրական (167) = Dion. 13.24, 15.12 – ὑπερθετικὸν (25.7, 28.3), “superlativus” (Pr. III.86);

հրամական (177), cf. Dion. 22.21 հրամայական – προστακτική (47.3), “imperativus” (Pr. VIII.406);

ըղձական (177) = Dion. 22.21– εὐκτική (47.3), “optativus” (Pr. VIII.407);

ստորադասական (178) = Dion. 22.21 – ὑποτακτική (47.3), “subjunctivus” (Pr. VIII.408);

բայածական (197) = Dion. 13.25, 16.3 – ῥηματικόν (25.7, 29.3), “verbalium” (Petrus 1026);

աներևոյթ (178) = Dion. 22.20 – ἀπαρέμφατος (47.4), “infinitivus” (Petrus 202).

2.2 The Influence of Priscianus and His Commentators
on Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i Grammar Book: Findings in the Scholarship

The first and last sections of K‘ṛnets‘i’s grammatical work, therefore, are indebted to Dionysius Thrax and his Armenian commentators. In contrast, the second section, titled “Part Two, on the Knowledge of Combination, that is of the Utterance,” and the third section, titled “Part Three, on Syntactic Links,” deal with syntax. These chapters offered something new, since neither the text of Dionysius nor of his commentators had included sections on syntax. The only name Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i mentioned in these parts on syntax71 was Priscianus (Պրիսիանոս) of Caesarea, the sixth-century author of the Institutiones Grammaticae, a systematic Latin grammar. Priscianus’ grammar book became the most influential work during the Middle Ages (especially books XVII and XVIII, the so-called Priscianus minor).

In a recent article, Tigran Sirunyan has demonstrated a considerable number of textual parallels, literal translations, or paraphrases in Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i’s work from Priscianus’ Institutiones grammaticae.72 Sirunyan has also shown that some passages in K‘ṛnets‘i’s grammar can be traced back to Petrus Helias’ Summa super Priscianum (ca. 1150)73 and to Sponcius Provincialis’ commentary on Priscian’s work (from the thirteenth-century).

Sirunyan is convinced that Yovhannēs drew information heavily from Priscianus’ grammar book when describing morphology, though without referring to Priscianus. Sirunyan also contends that in the sections on syntax Yovhannēs relied to Priscianus’ commentator(s). Such remarks as “Priscianus says”74 are borrowed from Priscianus’ commentators.75 For instance, Petrus Helias often used phrases such as “dicit Priscianus” (246), “tractat” (passim, e.g. 258), and “ponit” (passim, e.g. 244). I provide below the main parallels that Sirunyan offered:

Վանկ է պարառութիւն տառից ի ներքո միո ձայնի և միո շնչո անբաժանելի արտաբերեալ (161), “Syllable is a combination of letters pronounced indivisibly in one sound and in one breath” – “Syllaba est comprehensio literarum consequens sub uno accentu et uno spiritu prolata” (Pr. I.44).

The features գոյացութիւն և որակութիւն (164 = “substantia et qualitas,” Pr. I.55) are added to the Dionysian definition of the noun (Dion. 12.22).

Դերանուն է մասն բանի յոլովական, եդեալ փոխանակ յատուկ անուանն և նշանակէ զյատուկ իմն անձն (172), “Pronoun is a declinable part of speech put in the place of a proper noun and shows a certain person”), cf. “Pronomen est pars orationis, quae pro nomine proprio uniuscuiusque accipitur personasque finitas recipit” (Pr., XII.577).

Բայ է մասն բանի հոլովական76, թարց անգման, հանդերձ ամանակաւ և դիմօք, որ նշանակէ ներգործութիւն և կիր կամ զերկոսեանն (176), “Verb is a declinable part of speech, without case, with tense and person, which shows activity and passivity or both”) – “Proprium est verbi actionem sive passionem sive utrumque cum modis et formis et temporibus sine casu significare” (Pr. I.55); “Verbum est pars orationis cum temporibus et modis, sine casu, agendi vel patiendi significativum” (Pr. VIII.369).

Կերպ բային է ձայն, որ ցուցանէ զախորժակ սրտին (177), “Verbal mood is an expression (lit. voice) showing the inclination of the heart” – “Modi sunt diversae inclinationes animi, varios eius affectus demonstrantes” (Pr. VIII.421).

Մակբայ է մասն բանի անհոլովական, որո նշանակութիւնն յաւելեալ լինի բային, որպէս մակադրական անուանքն գոյականացն, քանզի որպէս ասեմք «խոհեմ մարդ», այսպէս և ասեմք, թէ՝ «խոհեմաբար առնէ» (181), “Adverb is an indeclinable part of speech the meaning of which is added to the verb, as the adjectives to the nouns, for as we say ‘prudent man,’ likewise we say ‘he acts prudently’ ” – “Adverbium est pars orationis indeclinabilis, cuius significatio verbis adicitur… quod adjectiva nomina… nominibus, ut ‘prudens homo prudenter agit’ ” (Pr. XV.61).

The following kinds of adverbs correspond to the Latin ones: երդմնական (182) – “jurativa” (Pr. XV.85), ըղձականք (182) – “optativa” (86), կարծողականք (182) – “dubitativa” (86), որպիսականք (182) – “qualitatis” (86), ժամանակականք (182) – “temporales” (81), տեղականք (182) – “locales” (83), հաստատականք (182) – “confirmativa” (85), յորդորականք (182) – “hortativa” (86), քանակականք (182) – “quantitatis” (86), ժողովականք (182) – “congregativa” (87), որոշականք (182) – “discretiva” (87), նմանականք (182) –“similitudinis” (87):

Շաղկապ է մասն բանի անհոլովական, շաղկապական կամ տարալուծական այլոց մասանց բանին՝ ընդ որս նշանակէ կարգաւորեալ զմիտս բանին, ցուցանելով զօրութիւն կամ զկարգ իրաց (186), “Conjunction is an indeclinable part of speech, connective or disjunctive of other parts of speech, with which it manifests the ordered meaning of the utterance, showing the sense (lit. power) or the order of things” – “Conjunctio est pars orationis indeclinabilis, conjunctiva aliarum partium orationis, quibus consignificat, vim vel ordinationem demonstrans” (Pr. XVI.93).

Զօրութիւն, որպէս թէ ասել. «այս անուն էր գթած և խոհեմ» (186), “Sense (lit. power) – as if [one may] say: ‘so-and-so was merciful and prudent’ ” – “vim, quando simul esse res aliquas significant, ut et ‘pius et fortis fuit Aeneas’ ”77 (Pr. XVI.93); զկարգն, յորժամ ցուցանէ զհետևումն իրաց (186, “order, when he shows the sequence of events”) – “ordinem, quando consequentiam aliquarum demonstrat rerum” (Pr. XVI.93).

The following kinds of conjunctions correspond to the Latin ones: բաղհիւսական – “copulativa,” շարադրական – “continuativa” (Pr. XVI.94), ենթաշարադրական – “subcontinuativa,” շարայարադրական – “adjunctiva” (Pr. XVI.95), փաստաբանական (the same in Dion. 36.14 – αἰτιολογικός, 88.1) – “causalis” (Pr. XVI.96), հաստատական – “approbativa” (Pr. XVI.97), տարալուծական – “disjunctiva, ենթատարալուծական – “subdisjunctiva” (Pr. XVI.98), ընտրողական – “electiva,” դիմադրական – “adversativa” (Pr. XVI.99), բաղբանական (= Dion. 37.1 – συλλογιστικός, 88.2) – “collectiva” (Pr. XVI.100), տարակուսական (= Dion. 36.22 – ἀπορρηματικός, 94.2) – “dubitativa” (Pr. XVI.101), թարմատար (187 = Dion. 37.8 –παραπληρωματικός, 96.3) – “completiva” (Pr. XVI.102).

Նախդիր է մասն բանի ոչ հոլովական, որ նախադասի այլոց մասանց բանին յաւելմամբ կամ բաղբանութեամբ (189, “Preposition is an indeclinable part of speech, which is placed before other parts of speech by addition or connection”) – “Est igitur praepositio pars orationis indeclinabilis, quae praeponitur aliis partibus vel appositione vel compositione” (Pr. XIV.24).

Բանն է պատշաճաւոր շարակարգութիւն ասութեանց (191, “Utterance is a suitable order of phrases”) – “Oratio est ordinatio dictionum congrua” (Pr. II.53).

Փրօլեմսիս, սէլէմսիս, սիմթոսիս, զէօմայ, անտիթոզիս (206, trans­literated terms: “P‘rolemsis, sēlēmsis simt‘osis, zēōmay, antit‘osis”) – prolemsis et silemsis et zeuma (Petrus 1003), antitosis (Petrus 1005).

Արծիւքն թռեան, այս արևելից, և այն արևմտից (207, “The eagles flew, this one form the east, and that one from the west”) – “Aquilae devolaverunt, haec ab oriente, ille ab occidente” (Pr. XVII.125).

Վերբերականութիւն է նախասացեալ իրին վերստին յիշեցումն (209, “Relation is reminding anew of the thing said before”) – “Relatio est, ut ait Priscianus, antelate rei repetitio” (Sponcius Provincialis).78

Իսկ վերբերականացն ոմն է պակասական և ոմն ոչ պակասական։ Պակասական է՝ «այն, որ կու ընթեռնու», ի յո դնի վերբերականն առանց նախադասութեանց, հիբար՝ «այն, որ կու ընթեռնու, կու տրամաբանէ». զի այն և որն է վերբերական և ոչ ունի նախադասեալ։ Ոչ պակասական է այն, ի յոր դնի վերբերականն և նախադասեալն, հիկէն՝ «մարդն, որ կու ընթեռնու, կու տրամաբանէ»։ Եւ գիտելի է, զի վերբերականս այս՝ «որ», կարէ դնիլ ընդ ամենայն անգմունս իւր, առանց նախադասելոյն (209, “Of relatives some are defective and others non-defective. Defective is: ‘the one who reads’ (in which the relative is put without antecedent,79 as ‘the one who reads, reasons’), since ‘the one’ and ‘who’ is relative and has no antecedent. And not defective is that in which the relative and the antecedent are put, as ‘the man who reads, reasons.’ And it should be known that this relative, ‘who’ may be put in all its cases without antecedent”) – “Relationum alia est ecleptica, et alia non ecleptica. Ecleptica est illa quando relativum ponitur per defectum antecedentis, ut ‘qui legit disputat’. Non ecleptica est, quando relativum et antecedens ponuntur in locutione, ut ‘homo, qui legit, disputat’. Et notandum quod hoc relativum ‘qui’ potest poni per omnes suos casus per defectum antecedentis” (ibid.).

Համրն է, յորժամ մի վերբերական վերաբերի առ միւսն, որպակ «այն, որ կու ընթեռնու, կու տրամաբանէ» (209, “[A relation] is mute80 when one relative relates to another, as: ‘he who reads, reasons’ ”) – “Mutua relatio est illa, quando unum relativum tenetur alteri relativo, ut ‘ille qui legit, disputat’ ” (ibid.).

Անձնական է, յորժամ նախադասեալն և վերբերականն ենթադրին վասն նոյնին, որգոն «մարդ, որ կու ընթեռնու, կու գրէ»։ Պարզ է... յորժամ նախադասեալն ենթադրէ վասն միո և վերբերականն վասն այլո, որգունակ «կինն, որ դատապարտեաց, փրկեաց» (210–211, “[A relation] is personal when the antecedent and the relative are supposed for the same, as ‘the man who reads, writes.’ [A relation] is simple… when the antecedent supposes one and the relative another, as ‘the woman who condemned, saved’.”) – “Personalis relatio est, quando antecedens supponit pro uno appellativo et relativum pro eodem, ut ‘P. legit, qui disputat’. Simplex est, quando antecedens supponit pro uno appellativo et relativum pro alio, ut in theologia ‘mulier quae damnavit, salvavit’81 ” (ibid. 358).

Sirunyan concludes that K‘r. nets‘i is an innovator of Armenian grammatical thought who complemented the Hellenizing Armenian tradition with excerpts from Latin sources.

In addition to Sirunyan, Peter Cowe dedicated an article to K‘ṛnets‘i’s grammar book. Cowe called attention to K‘ṛnets‘i’s reference to the seven liberal arts in the introduction82 and noted that K‘ṛnets‘i had modified the order of his grammatical material compared to Dionysius.

Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i discussed the parts of speech so that the pronoun immediately follows the noun, and the participle follows the verb, and he moved Dionysius’ “philological” chapters from the beginning to the end.83 Cowe also analyzed some aspects of his treatment of the verb (the definition of the verb, the imperative mood, the subjunctive mood) and of the pronoun,84 and he made some remarks on the parts of the book devoted to syntax.85 Cowe mainly collated passages from K‘ṛnets‘i’s text with those of Priscianus. He examined the role of Middle Armenian examples in the grammatical book in question and concluded it with the assertion that its author’s “motive was rather one of enlightened pedagogy to facilitate his pupil’s entry through the door of learning rather than embarking on path of obscurum per obscurius.”86 This means that some of K‘ṛnets‘i’s examples were not taken from the “obscure” literary language but from the living language of his time. Cowe also cited K‘ṛnets‘i’s ideas concerning the grammatical gender peculiar to Greek and Latin and the dual number in Greek and Arabic, which are absent from Armenian. Cowe highlighted K‘ṛnets‘i’s combination of two cases of Armenian under one denomination (see the “sending” case below) and K‘ṛnets‘i’s comments concerning the absence of short and long syllables in Armenian.87

2.3 Further Borrowings from Priscianus and his Commentators

A close reading of K‘ṛnets‘i’s grammar reveals further parallels with the works of Priscianus and Petrus Helias that escaped the attention of the scholars mentioned above. These parallels can be grouped into the following categories.

2.3.1 Terms Created by Yovhannēs by Calquing them from Latin

1. մակդրական (165) – “adjectivum” (Pr. II.60, Petrus 219, 220, 833, 1031)88;

2. գոյացական (165) – “substantivum” (Petrus 766);

3. սեր հաւասար (168) – “genus commune” (Petrus 325);

4. ցուցական դերանուն (173) – “pronomen demonstrativum” (Pr. XII.577, Petrus 629);

5. վերաբերական դերանուն (173) – “pronomen relativum” (Pr. XII.577, Petrus 641)89;

6. ազգական դերանուն (173) – “pronomen gentile” (Petrus 641);

7. ստացական դերանուն (173) = cf. Dion. 29.16–17 – κτητική (68.4) – “pronomen possessivum” (Pr. XII.581, Petrus 629);

8. բայածականք (խնդրեն տրական անգումն… «ինձ գովելի» (197), “verbal [noun]s require the dative case… ‘praiseworthy for me’ ” – “verbalia (… construuntur cum dativo casu... ‘laudabilis’)” (Petrus 1026)90;

9. անցեալ անկատար, անցեալ կատարեալ, անցեալ գերակատար (177), “past imperfect, past perfect, past pluperfect” – “praeteritum imperfectum, praeteritum perfectum, praeteritum plusquamperfectum” (Pr. VIII.405, Petrus 488)91;

10. կերպ բային (177) – “modus verbi” (Pr. VIII.406, Petrus 451)92;

11. սեր բային (176) – “genus verbi” (Petrus 455)93;

12. ցուցական (177) – “indicativus” (Pr. VIII.406, Petrus 523)94;

13. բայք առնողականք (179) – “verbum activum” (Petrus 505), cf. Dion. 22.24 ներգործական = ἐνέργητικός (45.1);

14. անձնական բայք (180) – “personale verbum” (Petrus 874);

15. անանձնական բայք (180) – “impersonale verbum” (Petrus 505);

16. գոյացական բայք (200, 206, 208) – “verbum substantivum” (Pr. VIII.414, Petrus, 1017);

17. կոչնական բայք (200, 208) – “verbum vocativum” (Petrus 507);

18. անգումն (passim) – “casus” (Pr. 57, Petrus passim)95;

19. խնդրել զսեռական / զտրական / զհայցական / զառաքական անգումն (179–180, 195, 197), “to require the genitive/dative/accusative/ ‘sending’ case” – “verba… genetiuum exigunt casum” (Pr. 159), “casum exigere” (Petrus passim, e.g. 963, 1055, 1056), the “sending” (առաքական) case was added by the translator of Dionysius after the dative (Dion. 17.18) for the Armenian instrumental case,96 since the Greek dative has such a function. In K‘r. nets‘i’s work, the “sending” case combines the Armenian ablative and instrumental cases, and he offers examples of both (197–198);

20. կառավարել զանգումն (189), “to govern a case,” կառավարութիւն անգմանց (195), “government of cases” – “nomen regit adiectivum… adiectivum regitur a substantivo… substantivum regit adiectivum” (Petrus 1051);

21. կատարեալ շարամանութիւն (198), “perfect construction” – “perfecta constructio” (Pr. XVIII.270, Petrus 648);

22. անկատար բան (198), “imperfect utterance” – “imperfecta oratio” (Pr. XVII.116, Petrus 220);

23. ոչ անցողաբար (199) – “intransitive” (Petrus 874);

24. ձևական շարամանութիւն (206) – “constructio figurativa” (Petrus 902).

2.3.2 Terms Transliterated by Yovhannēs

In addition to փրօլեմսիս, սէլէմսիս, սիմթոսիս, զէօմայ, and անտիթոզիս (examples mentioned above), the following words are also transliterated: “gerundium” (Pr. VIII.410, Petrus 497) – ջերունիդական (178), “supinum” (Pr. VIII.410, Petrus 503) – սուփիննական (178), “dialecticus” (Petrus 859) – դիալեկտիկոս (193).

2.3.3. Passages More or less Accurately Translated from Latin

1. Հետևին անուանն վեց՝ տեսակք, սերք, թիւք, ձևք, հոլովք, անկումն (164, “Six (accidents) accompany (lit. follow) the noun: species, genders, numbers, forms, declensions, and cases”) – “Accidunt igitur nomini quinque: species, genus, numerus, figura, casus” (Pr. II.57).

2. Մակդրական է, որ յաւելեալ լինի ի վերայ իսկականին (165), “Adjective is what is added to the essential” – “Adiectivum est, quod adicitur propriis…” (Pr. II.60).

3. Գերադրական... Աքիլևս է զօրաւորագոյն ևս յունաց, այսինքն վերադրի քան զամենայն յոյնս (167–8), “Superlative… Achilles is the strongest of Greeks, that is he is put higher than all Greeks” – “Fortissimus Graiorum Achilles… sed superlativus multo alios excellere significat” (Pr. III.86).

4. Հետևին բային ութ, այսինքն՝ սերք, ժամանակ, կերպ, տեսակ, ձևք, լծորդութիւն, դէմք, թիւք (176), “Eight (accidents) accompany (lit. follow) the verb,97 that is voices, tense, mood, species, forms, conjugation, person, numbers”) – “Verbo accidunt octo: significatio sive genus, tempus, modus, species, figura, coniugatio et persona cum numero” (Pr. VIII.369).

5. Արդ սերք բային է որակութիւն իմն կազմեալ ի ձայնական աւարտմանէն և ի բնական նշանակութենէն (176), “Now the voices of the verb are a certain quality fashioned by a word (lit. sound) ending and natural meaning” – “Est igitur genus verbi qualitas verborum contracta ex terminatione et significatione (Petrus 455).

6. Են սերք բային հինգ՝ առնողական, կրողական, չեզոքական, հաւասարական, չեզո­քա­կան-կրողական (176), “The voices of the verb are five: active, passive, neutral, common (lit. equal), neutral-passive”) – “Nam cum quinque sint significationes, id est activa, neutra, passiva, communis, deponens” (Pr. XI.564).

7. Չեզոքական է, որոյ գործն նշանակէ առնողական կերպիւ, այլ ոչ անցողական (176), “The neutral [voice] is which signifies action in an active form, but not transitive” – “Neutrum vero genus est qualitas desinendi in o et significandi aliquid quod non sit actio transiens in homines” (Petrus 456).

8. Հաւասարական է, որ միով ձայնիւ նշանակէ զառնելն և զկրելն (176), “The common [voice] is which signifies activity and passivity with the same word” – “Commune vero genus est qualitas desinendi in or et significandi utrumque, scilicet, actionem et passionem” (Petrus 456).

9. Ցուցականք են, որ ցուցանեն զժամանակ, զդէմս և զթիւ (177), “The indicative [verbs] are those which indicate tense, person and number” – “Modi, primus quorum dicitur indicativus, quo, scilicet, indicamus temporum varietatem… vel ab aliis quod fit voces secunde et tercie persone” (Petrus 523–524).

10. Ըղձական կերպ... մակար թէ կու սիրէի (177–8), “Optative mood… would that I loved!” – “Optativus… utinam…” (Pr. VIII.407). The interjection makar in Middle Armenian was borrowed from the late Greek μακάρι.98

11. Տեսակ բայից են երկու՝ նախագաղա­փար և ածանցական99։ Նախագաղափար, հի­զան կարդամ, և ածանցական, որպէս կար­դացնեմ, վազեմ-վազեցնեմ, դատեմ-ենթադատեմ (178), “There are two species of the verb: primitive and derivative; primitive, as ‘I read,’ and derivative, as ‘I cause to read,’ ‘I run – I cause to run, I judge – I express’100” – “Species sunt verborum duae, primitiva et derivativa… est igitur primitiva, quae primam positionem ab ipsa natura accepit, ut lego, ferveo…; derivativa, quae a positivis derivantur, ut lecturio, fervesco…” (Pr. VIII.427).

12. Ձևք բային են երեք՝ պարզ, բարդ, յարաբարդ։ Պարզ՝ որկէն եմ, բարդ հիկէն գրեմ, յարաբարդ որբար սրբագրեմ (178), “There are three forms of the verb: simple, compound and super-compound. Simple, as ‘I am,’ compound, as ‘I write,’ super-compound, as ‘I correct (lit. write clean)’101” – “Figura quoque accidit verbo, quomodo nomini. Alia enim verborum sunt simplicia, ut cupio, taceo, alia composita, ut concupio, conticeo, alia decomposita, id est a compositis derivata, ut concupisco, conticesco” (Pr. VIII.434).

13. Առաջին [դէմք] որ խօսի, երկրորդ է, ընդ որում խօսի, երրորդ է, յորմէ խօսի (179), “The first person is the one who speaks, the second is to whom one speaks, the third is of whom one speaks” – “Prima persona praeponitur aliis, quia ipsa loquitur et per eam ostenditur et secunda, ad quam loquitur, et tertia, de qua loquitur” (Pr. VIII.423).

14. Բայք ոմանք անկանոնք (179), “Some verbs are irregular.” An example of a suppletive verb is offered: կու ուտեմ, “I eat” (Middle Armenian present form), կերա “I ate” – “Irregularium vel inequalium declinatio” (Petrus 514, with the example “fero… tuli”).

15. Ընդունելութիւն է մասն բանի հոլովական, որ լինի առեալ փոխանակ բայի, ուստի և ածանցի իսկ, ունելով սերք և անգումն ըստ օրինակի անուան, զժամանակս և զնշանակութիւնս ի բայէն (183), “Participle is a declinable part of speech, which is taken instead of the verb, from which it derives, having gender and case like the noun, tense and significance102 from the verb” – “Participium est igitur pars orationis, quae pro verbo accipitur, ex quo et derivatur naturaliter, genus et casum habens ad similitudinem nominis et accidentia verbo absque discretione personarum et modorum... accidunt autem participio sex: genus, casus, significatio, tempus, numerus, figura” (Pr. XI.552).

16. Ասէ Պրիսիանոս, թէ ոչինչ բան է կատարեալ թարց բայի (191), “Priscianus says that no utterance is complete without a verb” – “Primo loco nomen, secundo verbum posuerunt, quippe cum nulla oratio sine iis completur” (Pr. XVII.116).

17. Գոյացականքն և մակադրականքն պարտին համաձայնիլ103 ի յերիս պատահմունս, այսինքն ի սերս, ի թիւս և ի յանկմունս (192), “Substantives and adjectives must agree in three accidents, that is in gender, in number and in case” – “Dicuntur accidentia nomini casus et numerus” (Petrus 211).

18. Շարամանութիւն է յարմար շարակարգութիւն ասութեանց (198), “Construction is the fitting arrangement of phrases” – “Constructio itaque est congrua dictionum ordinatio” (Petrus 832).

19. Ի կատարեալ շարամանութեանց ոմն է անցողական և ոմն ոչ անցողական, և ոմն անդրայշրջական (199), “Of complete constructions, one is transitive, one intransitive, and one reciprocal” – “Constructionum autem alia transitiva, alia intransitiva, alia recirpoca” (Petrus 897).

20. Արդ անցողական շարամանութիւն է, ի յոր առնումն և կրումն բանին անցանէ ի մի դիմէն ի միւսն, հիպէս «Պետրոս ընթեռնու զԵսային» (199), “Now transitive construction is [that] in which the activity and passivity of the utterance passes from one person to another, as ‘Peter reads Isaiah’ ” – “Transitiva vero constructio est quando fit transitus de una persona in aliam, ut ‘Socrates legit Vergilium’ ” (Petrus 898).

21. Ոչ անցողական շարամանութիւն է, որ առնումն և կրումն ոչ անցանի ի մի դիմէն ի միւսն, որզան «Սոկրատէս ընթեռնու» (199), “Intransitive construction is [that] in which the activity and passivity does not pass from one person to another, as ‘Socrates reads’ ”) – Intransitiva constructio est in qua non fit transitus de una persona in aliam, ut ‘Priscianus legit’ (Petrus 898).

22. Իսկ անդրանցական շարամանութիւն է այն, ի յոր նոյն անձն ցուցանէ առնել և կրել, հիզան «ես կու սիրեմ զիս, դու կու սիրես զքեզ, նա կու սիրէ զինքն» (199), “While reciprocal construction is in which the same person shows activity and passivity, as ‘I love myself, you love yourself, he loves himself’ ” – “Reciproca vero constructio est in qua ostenditur aliqua res in se ipsam agere, ut ‘Socrates diligit se’ ” (Petrus 899).

23. Բաղադրեալ բանիցն մին մասն կոչի նախընթաց, և միւսն հետևեալ (199, “One part of compound utterances is called antecedent, the other consequent”) – “Relatio quandoque fit ad antecedens, quandoque ad consequens” (Petrus 910).

24. Բայք կոչնականք... ես կու կոչիմ արդար (200), “Vocative verbs… I am called just” – “Vocativa, ut Priscianus: vocor, nominor, nuncupor, appellor” (Pr. VIII.144).

25. Սիլեմսիս է զանազան ասութեանց միով բայիւ համազոյգ յղութիւն (207), “The syllempsis is a collecting of different phrases united with one verb” – “Silemsis vero est diversarum clausularum per unum verbum conglutinata conceptio” (Petrus 1004). Here յղութիւն, “conception, pregnancy,” is used as a semantic calque of “conceptio” in the sense of “grasp, collecting.”

26. Առաջին դէմն յղանա զառաջին և զերկրորդ դէմն, հիպէս «ես և դու և նա ընթեռնումք»… երկրորդ դէմն յղանա զերրորդ դէմն ներքո բայի երկրորդ դիմացն, որ այսպէս. «դու և նա ընթեռնոյք» (207), “The first person collects (lit. conceives) the first and the second and the third person, as ‘I and you and he [we] read’... the second person collects (lit. conceives) the third person under the verb in second person, as ‘you and he [you] read’ ” – “Concipit autem prima persona secundam et terciam... Prima concipit secundam ut ‘Ego et tu legimus’… prima persona concipit terciam ut ‘Ego et ille legimus’… ‘Tu et ille legitis’. Potest enim secunda persona concipere terciam” (Petrus 998).

These passages listed above are the moments in K‘r. nets‘i’s grammatical work that I could trace to Priscianus’ and Petrus Helias’ grammatical works. Based on these passages, I can make the following observations:

a) All the 24 grammatical terms (2.3.1) calqued by Yovhannēs from Priscianus are also found in Petrus Helias’ text. As far as the phrases translated from Latin are concerned, the origins of twelve of them are found in Priscianus and 14 in Petrus Helias. So K‘ṛnets‘i’s dependence on Petrus Helias is stronger than had been previously noticed, but this does not mean that he used Priscianus through the mediation of Petrus, as Levon Khachikyan has argued.104

Taking into consideration the parallels with Sponcius Provincialis (section 2.2), one can assume that Yovhannēs drew information from various sources, as he himself writes in his colophon cited above: “from Armenians and Latins, [small] bits from many authors and grammarians.”105 Bartholomew of Podio could have brought a book from Italy containing excerpts from Priscianus and other grammarians, and Yovhannēs could have used it as a source.

b) K‘ṛnets‘i’s dependence on Latin sources is more extensive than noted by previous scholarship. The influence of Latin grammarians promoted Armenian grammatical theory to a more advanced stage in comparison to the Dionysian tradition. K‘ṛnets‘i covered more aspects of the language and drew a more realistic picture of Classical Armenian, while also reflecting some elements of Middle Armenian. K‘ṛnets‘i singled out substantives and adjectives from the general notion of “noun” (2.3.1.1–2), introduced the categories of transitive and intransitive verbs (2.3.1.12–13), irregular verbs (2.3.3.14), case government (2.3.1.19–20) and agreement (2.3.3.17), of complex sentences (2.3.3.23), the notion that the participle shares features both with the noun and the verb (2.3.3.15), and the explanation of the three persons of the verb (2.3.3.13).

c) Some grammatical terms used by K‘ṛnets‘i are still in use today and are common in the modern Armenian grammatical works.106 To give examples, the terms for “verbal nouns”107 (2.3.1.8), “past imperfect” and “past perfect” (2.3.1.9), verbal “modes” (2.3.11.10) and “voices” (2.3.1.11), the “neutral voice” (2.3.3.6–7), “derivative verbs” (containing prefixes and suffixes – 2.3.3.11), “irregular verbs” (2.3.3.14) go back to K‘r. nets‘i’s grammar book.

3. The Afterlife of Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i’s Grammatical Work

For a long time, Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i’s grammatical work remained inside the milieu of Armenian unitors and was unknown to wider learned circles. This explains why later grammarians, such as Ar. ak‘el Siwnets‘i in the first quarter of the fifteenth century and Dawit‘ Zeyt‘unts‘i in late sixteenth century were not aware of K‘ṛnets‘i’s work and wrote new commentaries on the grammar book of Dionysius Thrax. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many grammatical works appeared that show acquaintance with K‘ṛnets‘i’s work.108 Avagyan contends that Priscianus’ work and its commentaries were K‘ṛnets‘i’s sources, especially regarding questions of syntax. In this respect, K‘r. nets‘i’s grammar is close to several so-called “Grecizing-Latinizing grammars” (հունա-լատինատիպ) written in the eighteenth century.109 Avagyan mentions K‘ṛnets‘i’s influence on the description of nominal and pronominal declensions, the semantic categories of pronouns and the detailed conception of the verbal voices and the Middle Armenian passive suffix ui (ուի/վի). Avagyan has also singled out K‘ṛnets‘i’s influence, to name but a few, on the conjugations of the verb, the more detailed characterization of the participle, the conception of verbs governing certain cases, and other syntactic features.110 The recurrence of K‘ṛnets‘i’s views on grammar in the eighteenth century is a research topic which could be fruitfully studied in the future.

Conclusion

The Armenian Catholic convert Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i, head of the unitorian K‘ṛna monastery in Nakhijewan between 1333 and 1347, became an active agent of the monastery’s cultural activity. He wrote a work On Grammar probably in the 1340s. It partly continues the Armenian grammatical tradition which originated in the late fifth century with the translation of Dionysius Thrax’s Art of Grammar from Greek and also shows the influence of the Latin tradition. As has been illustrated with new evidence, K‘ṛnets‘i’s grammar shows numerous verbal parallels with Priscian’s sixth-century Institutiones grammaticae and Petrus Helias’ twelfth-century commentary Summa super Priscianum on Priscian’s work. The main bulk of new terms and concepts, as well as whole definitions, goes back to these sources. A comparison with other Latin sources might reveal more parallels. Compared to the Armenian version of Dionysius Thrax and its Armenian commentaries, K‘ṛnets‘i’s grammar book shows more “real” features of the Armenian language, i.e. categories that were not artificially borrowed from Greek and were non-existent in Armenian. The most important novelty of K‘ṛnets‘i’s grammar is the sections on syntax. Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i’s grammatical work exerted a considerable influence on several grammars of Latinizing Armenian composed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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Cowe, Peter. “The Role of Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae in Informing Yovhannēs K‘r. nec‘i’s Innovative Account of Armenian Grammar with regard to Terminology, Classification, and Organization with Special Focus on his Investigation of Syntax.” Revue des études arméniennes 39 (2020): 91–121. doi: 10.2143/REA.39.0.3288967

Ghazaryan, Ruben, Avetisyan, Henrik. Միջին հայերենի բառարան [Dictionary of Middle Armenian]. Yerevan, 2009.

Khаch‘ikyan, Levon. “Արտազի հայկական իշխանությունը և Ծործորի դպրոցը” [The Armenian Princedom of Artaz and the School of Tsortsor]. Բանբեր Մատենադարանի [Bulletin of Matenadaran] 11 (1973): 125–210. Reprint in Khаch‘ikyan, Levon, Works, vol. 2, 51–156. Yerevan: Nairi, 2107. References are given to this edition.

Khachikyan, Levon. Քռնայի հոգևոր-մշակութային կենտրոնը և Հովհաննես Քռնեցու գիտական գործունեությունը [The religious and cultural center of K‘ṛna and the scholarly activities of Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i]. Introduction to Yovhannēs K‘r. nets‘i, Յաղագս քերականին [On the grammar]. Yerevan: Armenian Academy of Sciences, 1977 (reprint in Khachikyan, Levon. Works, vol. 2, 449–83.Yerevan: Nairi, 2017).

Khachikyan, Levon, Artashes Matevosyan, Arpenik Ghazarosyan. Հայերեն ձեռագրերի հիշատակարաններ, ԺԴ դար, Մասն Բ, 1326–1350 թթ. [Colophons of Armenian manuscripts, XIV century. Part two, 1326–1350]. Yerevan: Matenadaran, 2020.

Hambardzumyan, Vazgen. Լատինաբան հայերենի պատմություն [History of Latinizing Armenian]. Yerevan: Nairi, 2010.

J̌ ahukyan, Gevorg. Քերականական և ուղղագրական աշխատությունները միջնադարյան Հայաստանում [Grammatical and orthographical works in ancient and medieval Armenia]. Yerevan: Armenian State University, 1954.

J̌ ahukyan, Gevorg. Գրաբարի քերականության պատմություն [History of the grammar of ancient Armenian]. Erevan: Armenian State University Press, 1974.

Kneepkens, Onno C. H. “‘Mulier qui damnavit, salvavit’. A Note on the Early Development of Relatio Simplex.” Vivarium 14, no. 1 (1976): 1–25.

La Porta, Sergio. “Armeno-Latin Intellectual Exchange in the Fourteenth Century: Scholarly Traditions in Conversation and Competition.” Medieval Encounters 21 (2015): 269–94.

Minasyan, “Yovhannēs Orotnets‘i, Life and Works.” Bulletin of Yerevan University. Armenian Studies 17, no. 2 (2015): 3–19.

Muradyan, Arusyak. Հունաբան դպրոցը և նրա դերը հայ քերականական տերմինաբանու­թյան ստեղծման գործում [The Hellenizing school and its role in the creation of the Armenian grammatical terminology). Yerevan: Armenian Academy of Sciences Press, 1971.

Muradyan, Gohar. “The Reflection of Foreign Proper Names, Theonyms and Mythological Creatures in the Ancient Armenian Translations from Greek.” Revue des Études Arméniennes 25 (1994–1995): 63–76.

Muradyan, Gohar. Grecisms in Ancient Armenian, Leuven–Paris–Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2012.

Muradyan, Gohar, Topchyan, Aram. “The Anonymous Armenian Commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories and on Interpretation. Translations or Original Works?” Le Muséon 137, no. 3–4 (2024): 435–47.

Oudenrijn, Marcus Antonius van den. Linguae haicanae scriptores ordinis praedicationis fratrum unitorum et ff. armenorum ord. S. Basilii citra mare consistentium quotquot huc usque innotuerunt. Bern: A. Francke Ag. Verlag, 1960.

Oudenrijn, Marcus Antonius van den. “L’Etude de la philosophie dans le couvent de K‘ṛna.” Bazmavep, Revue d’étude arméniennes 140 (1982): 53–67.

Seidler, Martin. Römische Liturgien in Armenischen Ordensgemeinschaften. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2022.

Seidler, Martin. “Medieval Armenian Congregations in Union with Rome.” In Monastic Life in the Armenian Church: Glorious Past. Ecumenical Reconsideration, edited by Jasmin Dum Tragut, and Dietmar Winkler, 148–57. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2019.

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Sirunyan, Tigran. “Հովհաննես Քռնեցու քերականական երկի սահմանումների լատիներեն նախօրինակները” [The Latin archetypes of the definitions in the grammatical work by Yovhannēs K‘r. nets‘i]. Բանբեր Մատենադարանի [Bulletin of Matenadaran] 24 (2017): 122–40.

Stopka, Krzysztof. Armenia Christiana: Armenian Religious Identity and the Churches of Constantinople and Rome (4th–15th Centuries). Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2017.

Tashean (Dashian), P. Jakobus. Catalog der Armenischen Handschriften in der Mechitharisten-Bibliothek zu Wien. Vienna: Mechitharisten Buch, 1895.

Ter-Vardanyan, Gevorg. “Ունիթորություն” (The Unitorian movement). In Քրիստոնյա Հայաստան հանրագիտարան [Encyclopaedia Christian Armenia], 1038–1039. Yerevan: Editorial board of the Armenian Encyclopaedia, 2002.

Tinti, Irene. “Problematizing the Greek Influence on Armenian Texts.” Rhesis, International Journal of Linguistics, Philology and Literature, 7, no. 1 (2016): 28–43. doi: 10.13125/rhesis/5592

Tsaghikyan, Diana. “From the History of Catholic Preaching in Armenia in the 14th Century with Special Reference to Yovhannēs Krnetsi.” In Etchmiadzin (2022): Appendix, 45–61. doi: 10.56737/2953-7843-2022.13-45

Zarphanalean, Garegin. Պատմութիւն հայերէն դպրութեանց [History of Armenian literature]. Vol. 2, Նոր մատենագրություն [Modern literature]. Venice: Mxit‘arean, 1878.

Weitenberg, Jos. “Hellenophile Syntactic Elements in Armenian Texts.” In Actes du Sixième Colloque international de Linguistique arménienne: INALCO, Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 5–9 juillet 1999 (Slovo 26–27, 2001–2002), edited by Anaid Donabédian, Agnès Ouzounian, 64–72. Paris: INALCO, 2003.

Weitenberg, Jos. “Greek Influence in Early Armenian Linguistics.” In History of the Language Sciences: An International Handbook on the Evolution of the Study of Language from the Beginnings to the Present, edited by Sylvain Auroix et al., vol. 1, 447–50. Berlin–New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000.

APPENDIX

Works and Translations by the fratres unitores: Published Texts

1. Ritual Books

Պրէվիար որ է ժամագիրք սրբազան կարգին Եղբարց Քարոզողաց [Breviarium sacri ordinis ff. praedicatorum]. Venice: Antonio Bortoli, 1714.

Ժամագիրք սրբուհւոյ կուսին Մարիամու Աստուածածնին [Officium sanctae virginis Mariae]. Venice: Antonio Bortoli, 1706.

Van Den Oudenrijn Marcus Antonius, ed. Կանոն սրբոյ Դօմինիկոսի խոսփովանոդին [Das Offizium des heiligen Dominicus des Bekenners im Brevier des “Fratres Unitores” von Ostarmenien. Ein Beitrag zur Missions und Liturgiegeschichte desvierzehnten]. Rome: Institutum Historicum FF. Praedicatorum, 1935.

2. Canon Law

Oudenrijn, Marcus Antonius van den, ed. Les Constitutions des Frères Arméniens de S. Basile en Italie. Rome: Instituto Orientale, 1940.

3. Works by Thomas Aquinas

Oudenrijn, Marcus Antonius van den, ed. Eine alte armenische Übersetzung der Tertia Pars der Theologischen Summa des Hl. Thomas von Aquin: Einleitung nebst Textproben aus den Hss Paris Bibl. Naz. Arm. Bern: A. Francke Ag. Verlag, 1955.

Oudenrijn, Marcus Antonius van den, ed., John of Swineford, compiler. Der Traktat Jalags arakinoutheanc hogiojn. Von den Tugenden der Seele: ein armenisches Exzerpt aus der Prima Secundae der Summa Theologica des Hlg. Thomas von Aquin. Fribourg: Librairie de I’Universite, 1942.

Oudenrijn, Marcus Antonius van den. “La version arménienne du supplementum ad tertiam partem Summae Theologicae.” Angelicum 10, no. 1 (1933): 3–23.

Oudenrijn, Marcus Antonius van den. “Traductions arménienne du la Somme Théologique.” Mekhitar, numéro special de la Revue arménienne Pazmaveb (1949): 313–55.

4. A Work Attributed to Albert the Great

Համառօտութիւն աստուածաբանութեան Մեծին Ալպերտի [Compendium theologiae Alberti Magni]. Venice: Antonio Bortoli, 1715.111

Oudenrijn, Marcus Antonius van den. “Un florilège arménien de sentences attribuées à Albert le Grand.” Orientalia 7 (1938): 118–26.

5. Works by Peter of Aragon

Վասն եւթն մահու չափ մեղացն [De septem peccatibus mortalibus]. In Bartholomew and Peter, Խրատականք և հոգեշահք քարոզք [Instructive and salutary sermons]. Venice: publisher not indicated, 1704, 142–270.

Գիրք առաքինութեանց [Liber de virtutibus]. In Peter of Aragon, Book of Virtues, 1–643. Venice: Demetrios T‘eodoseants‘, 1772.

Յաղագս ութից երանութեանց [De octo beatudinibus]. In Peter of Aragon, Book of Virtues, 644–714. Venice: Demetrios T‘eodoseants‘, 1772.

Գիրք մոլութեանց [De vitiis]. In Peter of Aragon, Book of Vices, 1–456. Venice: Demetrios T‘eodoseants‘, 1773.

Յաղագս պահպանութեան հինգ զգայութեանց [De quinque sensum custodia]. In Peter of Aragon, Book of Vices, 457–66. Venice: Demetrios T‘eodoseants‘, 1773.

Յաղագս պահպանման լեզուի [De custodia linguae]. In Peter of Aragon, Book of Vices, 467–73. Venice: Demetrios T‘eodoseants‘, 1773.

Հաւաքումն յաղագս տասն պատուիրանացն [Compilatio de decem praeceptis]. In Peter of Aragon, Book of Vices, 474–518. Venice: Demeter T‘eodoseants‘, 1773.

6. Works by Bartholomew of Podio

Յաղագս հնգից ընդհանրից [De quinque communibus vocibus]. In Arevshatyan, The Armenian Legacy of Bartholomew of Bologna, 73–110.

Sermons on Confession. In Խրատականք և հոգեշահք քարոզք [Instructive and salutary sermons]. Venice: publisher not indicated, 1704, 9–141.

Bartholomew of Bologna, Dialectica, critical text by Tigran Sirunyan (forthcoming).

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1. 1 The transliteration of Armenian names follows the Library of Congress Armenian Romanization Table (https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/armenian.pdf, last accessed Jan 10, 2025. The Mss I refer to from the collection of Matenadaran (Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts in Yerevan) start with M followed by shelf numbers. The numbers of Armenian manuscripts in the collections of the congregation of Mekhitharists are preceded by the acronyms V (Venice, San Lazzaro) and W (Vienna). The acronym J represents the collection in the Saint James monastery in Jerusalem.

2. 2 In 1921, this Armenian province was annexed to Azerbaijan.

3. 3 The majority of the inhabitants of several villages in this province adopted the Catholic faith, Khachikyan, “The Armenian Princedom of Artaz,” 83, footne 2.

4. 4 Stopka, Armenia Christiana, 205–6.

5. 5 In the fifteenth century, he also began to be referred to as Bartholomew of Bologna or Parvus as a result of a confusion with his namesake, see Casella, Bartolomeo de Podio (da Bologna), 75, n. 3. In Armenian manuscripts he figures as “bishop of Maragha” (Ms M3372, copied in 1761, fol. 356r), “Frank bishop” (M2515, copied in 1323, fol. 82r), “Frank bishop of Maragha” (Ms W312, copied in 1329, fol. 13r), “Latin bishop” (Ms J815, copied in 1325), “saint bishop Lord Bartholomew” (Ms V12, copied in 1332, fol. 188r). Frank/Fr. ank is the denomination of Westerners, especially Catholic French and Italians. In Armenian scholarly literature, he is usually called Bartholomew of Maragha.

6. 6 Joannes Anglus, according to Oudenrijn, Linguae haicanae scriptores, 24, 194, 195.

7. 7 Khachikyan, Introduction to Yovhannēs K‘r. nets‘i On Grammar, 16–51.

8. 8 Khachikyan, “The Armenian Princedom of Artaz,” 204–7.

9. 9 Tsaghikyan, “Catholic Preaching in Armenia,” 51–53.

10. 10 La Porta, “Armeno-Latin Intellectual Exchange in the Fourteenth Century,” 274, 285–93.

11. 11 Chapter 33 of one of such documents, the Գիրք ուղղափառաց (Libro dei Ortodossi) by Mkhit‘ar Aperanec‘i written in 1410, was recently published, with a study and Italian translation, see Alpi, “Il dibattito.”

12. 12 Bartholomew’s activity in Maragha, including the founding of the school of K‘ṛna and the related events, are known from the work of an unitorian author Mkhit‘ar Aperanec‘i, Oudenrijn, Linguae haicanae scriptores, 216–28.

13. 13 On his life, see Tsaghikyan, “Catholic Preaching in Armenia,” 53–57.

14. 14 Oudenrijn, Linguae haicanae scriptores, 195.

15. 15 Zarphanalean, History of Armenian Literature, 194–212: «Միաբանասիրաց դպրոց» (The School of the Union Supporters); Abeghyan, Երկեր (Works), vol. IV, 403–4: «Ունիթոռական գրականություն և լատինաբան աղճատ հայերեն» (The Literature of the Unitors and the Distorted Latinizing Armenian); Ter-Vardanyan, «Ունիթորություն» (The Unitorian Movement); Oudenrijn, Linguae haicanae scriptores. This book contains a brief history of the fratres unitores (19–72) and a comprehensive bibliography (mentioning editions and manuscripts) of their literary production: Armenian-Dominican sacred books (73–122), sermons and sermonaries (123–72), theological writings (173–244), and “De fratribus armenis citra Mare consistentibus” (245–95). A bibliography (manuscripts and editions) of writings by Albert the Great and Bartholomew of Bologna can be found in Anasyan, Armenian Bibliography, 5th-17th cc., vol. 1, 388–402, vol. 2, 1284–1320.

16. 16 Seidler, “Medieval Armenian Congregations in Union with Rome,” 153. A considerable Armenian population lived in Kaffa, which was under Genoese rule at the time. For this reason, the unitores not only built monasteries in Armenia and Georgia but also crossed the Black Sea and founded a public university (“universale studiorum collegium”) in Kaffa, Khachikyan, Introduction to Yovhannēs K‘r. nets‘i, On Grammar, 42. The source for this is Clemens Galanus, Conciliatio, vol. 1, 523. The chapters “De progressibus fratrum praedicatorum in reducendis ad Catholicam fidem Armenis” (508–26) and “De Armeniorum episcopis ex Ordine fratrum praedicatorum assumptis” (527–531) are important sources for the fratres unitores.

17. 17 Seidler, “Medieval Armenian Congregations in Union with Rome,” 152.

18. 18 La Porta, “Armeno-Latin Intellectual Exchange in the Fourteenth Century,” 281.

19. 19 For an overview of the translations in chronological order see Stopka, Armenia Christiana, 215–21.

20. 20 See in detail, Seidler, Römische Liturgien.

21. 21 Khachikyan, Introduction to Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i, On Grammar, 35–38.

22. 22 For the existing editions, see Appendix.

23. 23 Oudenrijn, Linguae haicanae scriptores.

24. 24 Khachikyan, Introduction to Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i, On Grammar, 33.

25. 25 Manuscript colophons mention him as the translator of Bartholomew’s, Peter of Aragon’s and John of Swinford’s works. On the other hand, some translations are attributed to Peter of Aragon and to Bartholomew. Peter and Yakob cooperated in translating other texts.

26. 26 Oudenrijn, Linguae haicanae scriptores, 130 (Armenian text), 133 (Latin translation).

27. 27 Minasyan, “Yovhannēs Orotnets‘i,” 16.

28. 28 His Book of Questions is characterized as a real Summa, see Arevshatyan, “Grigor Tat‘ewats‘i and his Book of Questions,” 1.

29. 29 The Hellenizing school’s translations of mainly scholarly and theological works were made roughly speaking from the late fifth to the early eighth centuries, and they bear considerable Greek influence. Many new words (among them terms) were coined, especially words with newly invented prefixes which corresponded to the Greek ἀντι-, συν-, περι, προσ-, etc. The use of such prefixes is the most striking feature of the Hellenizing translations, see Weitenberg, “Hellenophile Syntactic Elements in Armenian Texts”; Calzolari, “L’école hellenisante. Les circonstances”; Calzolari, “Les traductions Arméniennes de l’École hellénizante”; Tinti, “Problematizing the Greek Influence on Armenian Texts”; Muradyan, Grecisms in Ancient Armenian, 215–24, and Appendix 3: “Latinizing Armenian and its Relation to Hellenizing Armenian.”

30. 30 Many of them were published in Europe, especially in Venice, Rome, Amsterdam, Marseille, Livorno and elsewhere.

31. 31 Achaṛyan, History of Armenian Language, 311; J̌ ahukyan, History of the Grammar of Grabar, 8.

32. 32 Zarphanalean, History of Armenian Literature, 45–55; Hambardzumyan, History of Latinizing Armenian, 27, 85.

33. 33 Many of Esayi Nch‘ets‘i’s students, after attending classes in monasteries in which Latin bishops resided, became Franciscans or Dominicans, Stopka, Armenia Christiana, 212–13.

34. 34 Cowe, “The Role of Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae,” 96.

35. 35 La Porta, “Armeno-Latin Intellectual Exchange in the Fourteenth Century,” 280; Stopka, Armenia Christiana, 214.

36. 36 It reveals that in 1337 fra Juan (John), the Englishman from the village of Swinford and a member of the order of Dominical Preachers, copied a compendium of works on the soul and its virtues and abilities, which was translated by Yakob the Armenian.

37. 37 Khachikyan et al., Colophons of Armenian Manuscripts, 283: ի Վերին վանքս Քռնոյ, ընդ հովանեաւ Սուրբ Աստուածածնին, որոյ առաջնորդ էր՝ հոգաբարձու Յոհան վարդապետն, որ մականուն կոչի Քռնեցի, որոյ անուն շինեցին զսուրբ ուխտս աստուածասէր եւ բարեպաշտ պարոն Գորգն եւ ամուսինն իւր՝ տիկին Էլթիկն: Եւ սոքայ երեքեանն Յոհան վարդապետն եւ պարոն Գէորգն եւ տիկին Էլթիկն ինքնայօժար կամօք նուիրեցին զվանս կարգին քարոզողաց Սրբոյն Դօմինկիոսի՝ տուրք յաւիտենական։ Արդ, վերոյասացեալ վարդապետն Յոհան եղեւ պատճառ բազում օգտութեան եւ ժողովեաց աստ վարդապետք ի լատինացւոց եւ ի հայոց, տածելով զանմենեսեան ըստ հոգւոյ եւ ըստ մարմնոյ եւ թարգմանեաց եւ թարգմանէ գիրս բազումս ոգեշահս եւ լուսաւորիչս... եւ եբեր ազգիս Հայոց զփրկական համբաւն եւ առաջնորդեաց արժանաւորացն մտանել ի հնազանդութիւն գերադրական Աթոռոյն Հռօմա.

38. 38 Oudenrijn, Linguae haicanae scriptores, 186. In addition to the MSs kept in Venice (V244, V681), Vienna (W263, W507) and Bzommar (90, 96) mentioned here, recently Sen Arevshatyan pointed to two MSs of Matenadaran, M5097 (14th c., 196r–213v) and M2183 (copied in 1662, fols. 433v–461r), see Arevshatyan, The Armenian Legacy of Bartholomew of Bologna, 25. The work also exists in MSs M3640 (14th c., 121r–150r), M842 (copied in 1738, 1r–142r) and M5375 (copied in 1841, 143v–164r).

39. 39 Casella, Bartolomeo de Podio (da Bologna), 124–25.

40. 40 Clemens Galanus, Conciliatio, vol. I, 510; Oudenrijn, Linguae haicanae scriptores, 177.

41. 41 Clemens Galanus, Conciliatio, vol. I, 509; Oudenrijn, Linguae haicanae scriptores, 191.

42. 42 Clemens Galanus, Conciliatio, vol. I, 522; Oudenrijn, Linguae haicanae scriptores, 192.

43. 43 Oudenrijn, Linguae haicanae scriptores, 189. He also mentions MSs M842 (1738, the whole MSs), J486 (undated, 320–442), J574 (copied in 1718, 505–78r) and J1357 (copied in 1735, the whole MS). According to catalogues, all these MSs contain the same colophon, as the MS M3640.

44. 44 Arevshatyan, The Armenian Legacy of Bartholomew of Bologna, 25.

45. 45 Cited in Clemens Galanus, Conciliatio, vol. I, 513–22: “Epistola ad fratres unitos Armeniae,” Oudenrijn, Linguae haicanae scriptores, 203. Another letter written by Bartholomew in Armenian and stylistically revised by Yovhannēs is mentioned by Clemens Galanus (ibid., 510), see also Oudenrijn, Linguae haicanae scriptores, 176: “Epistola convocatoria ad synodum in conventu Qr. nayensi habendam (1330)”; Casella, Bartolomeo de Podio (da Bologna), 122.

46. 46 This title is on the title-page of the edition. A longer title preceding the text reads: Համառօտ հաւաքումն յաղագս քերականին (A Short Compendium on Grammar), Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i, On Grammar, 157.

47. 47 This MS contains logical works of other unitores, but also David the Invincible’s Definitions of Philosophy, a Neoplatonic work translated from Greek in the late 6th c.

48. 48 Dashian, Catalog, 719.

49. 49 Oudenrijn, Linguae haicanae scriptores, 205. Oudenrijn’s opinion is repeated by Stopka with the following addition: “using examples from Armenian and Latin authors,” Armenia Christiana, 216–17. Casella too is unaware of the edition and the study of the grammatical work and repeats the same information, Bartolomeo de Podio (da Bologna), 123 (although a reference to the edition is found ibid., 231).

50. 50 Yovhannēs K‘r. nets‘i, On Grammar, 221: Ես Ֆրա Յոհան՝ մականուն կոչեցեալ Քռնեցի, համառօտ հաւաքեցի ի հայոց և լատինացոց զսակաւս ի բազում շարագրաց և ի քերթողաց, տալով դուռն և ճանապարհ նորամարզիցն՝ մտանել և ընթանալ ի քաղաքս իմաստից, զի ի հմտութենէ ելանել ի մակացութիւնս, և փոքրագունակ արուեստիւս՝ առ արհեստից արհեստն, որ է մայր և օթևանք և հանգիստ ընթերցելոցն առ խելս և իմաստութիւնս, իբր խթանաւ ընդոստեալ և ի դանդաչմանէ թմրութեանցն զարդեալ, զի ի ճանաչումն ճշմարտին և բարոյն եկեսցեն, որ է կատարումն բանականին.

51. 51 So Cowe calls it “eclectic hybrid,” Cowe, “The Role of Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae,” 96.

52. 52 Adonts‘, Dionysius the Thrax. This is regarded as the first translation of the so-called Hellenizing School in old Armenian literature (see above and footnote 29). More importantly, the translation of the Dionysian Ars grammatica initiated the Armenian literature on grammar. This translation created the bulk of the grammatical terminology which was used over the course of centuries and remains in use today. This translation also established the principles of how to coin an abstract and scientific lexicon in general. The most important Armenian grammatical terms (like their Latin counterparts) were calqued from Greek. The Armenian version of Dionysius’ grammatical work followed the word-order and syntax of the Greek original, Weitenberg, “Greek Influence in Early Armenian Linguistics.”

53. 53 More precisely, between ca. 450 and the early 480s. There is also a later dating, namely the first half of the sixth century. The controversy concerning the process of dating the earliest translations is summarized in Muradyan, The Creation of the Armenian Grammatical Terminology, 76–111.

54. 54 Avagyan, Introduction to Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i On Grammar, 53, 69, 77, 79.

55. 55 Khachikyan, Introduction to Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i On Grammar, 48; Avagyan, Introduction to Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i On Grammar, 114.

56. 56 The citations from the text in question are followed by the page numbers of Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i, On Grammar, which is the only edition of the work.

57. 57 Avagyan, Introduction to Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i On Grammar, 58. Avagyan argues that K‘ṛnets‘i’s classification of the types of syllables resembles Priscian’s classification into six categories (ibid., 67–68).

58. 58 The anonymous translator of that work also adapted the Greek model to Armenian grammar, e.g. by introducing phonetical features and grammatical categories alien to Armenian (short and long vowels, short and long syllables, grammatical gender, dual number). He created whole paradigms of artificial verbal forms for verbal tenses non-existent in Armenian, etc. He did, however, also manage to reflect some features of Classical Armenian.

59. 59 In Dionysius this title differs: “On Feet,” see Adonc‘, Dionysius the Thrax, 43.

60. 60 See the underlying theory in Alessandro Orengo’s paper in this Special Issue.

61. 61 Avagyan, Introduction to Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i, On Grammar, 69.

62. 62 The citations from Petrus’ commentary on Priscianus are followed by “Petrus” and the page numbers of Petrus Helias, Summa.

63. 63 The citations from Priscianus are followed by “Pr.” and the book and page numbers of Prisciani Institutionum I–XII & XIII–XVIII.

64. 64 Yovhannēs K‘r. nets‘i, On Grammar, 169.

65. 65 Most of them are used throughout the text, so references to pages do not seem reasonable.

66. 66 The references to Armenian Dionysius are “Dion.” followed by page and line numbers of Adonts‘, Dionysius the Thrax.

67. 67 The references to Greek Dionysius are indications of page and line numbers in Dionysius Thrax. Ars grammatica.

68. 68 This term is made of the same components as նախդիր (prefix նախ- and root դիր/դր), with the addition of the suffix -ութիւն.

69. 69 Those meaning “gender” (սեր), “masculine” (արական), “feminine” (իգական), “neuter (gender)” (չեզոք), “number” (թիւ), “nominative” (ուղղական), “genitive” (սեռական), “dative” (տրական), “accusative” (հայցական) “person” (դէմք), “tense” (ամանակ/ժամանակ), “present” (ներկայ), “future” (ապառնի), “past” (անցեալ) are the same.

70. 70 This term is borrowed from the Greek ἐπίκοινον.

71. 71 Yovhannes K‘ṛnets‘i, On Grammar, pp. 191 and 209.

72. 72 Sirunyan, “The Latin Archetypes.”

73. 73 Khachikyan had opined that the Armenian author either made use of both Priscianus and the commentary of Petrus Helias or even that he may have known Priscianus through the mediation Petrus, Khachikyan, Introduction to Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i, On Grammar, 48.

74. 74 Yovhannes K‘r. nets‘i, On Grammar, pp. 191 and 209.

75. 75 Sirunyan, “The Latin Archetypes,” 135.

76. 76 Corrected by the editor to անհոլով (“indeclinable”). Cf. the arguments against this correction, Sirunyan, “The Latin Archetypes,” 125–26.

77. 77 The replacement of “Aeneas” by “so-and-so” and “Virgil” and “Socrates” by biblical names (section 2.3.3, example 22) is consonant with the common practice in earlier Armenian translations from Greek, e.g. Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ καὶ Πάρις (38.1), replaced by “Eleazar, who is also Avaran” (Dion. 19.19–20). For more examples see Muradyan, “The Reflection of Foreign Proper Names.” This wasn’t an absolute rule; in example 3 (2.3.3) Achilles’ name is preserved in the Armenian text. As to “Socrates” in example 21 (instead of “Priscianus”), his name was used by Aristotle in logical examples both in the Categories and in On Interpretation, which were accurately translated into Armenian in the sixth century and incorporated into commentaries on them, see Muradyan, Topchyan, “Commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation.” Such use of Socrates’ name is also found in other Armenian commentaries on Aristotle.

78. 78 Thurot, Extraits des manuscrits Latins, 357.

79. 79 առանց նախադասութեանց; the related նախադասելով (instrumental of the infinitive) was calqued from προτασσόμενα (Dion. 5.14). Above նախադասի was rendered with praeponitur.

80. 80 The translator confused the Latin adjective mutuus (the Latin phrase speaks of a “reciprocal relation”) and mutus (“mute”).

81. 81 Such syntax is explained by the influence of the twelfth-century logical theories; the woman is both Eve and Mary. Кneepkens, “‘Mulier qui damnavit’,” 3.

82. 82 Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i On Grammar, 157–58; Cowe, “The Role of Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae,” 98.

83. 83 Ibid., 99–100.

84. 84 Ibid., 101–8.

85. 85 Ibid., 110–12.

86. 86 Cowe, “The Role of Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae,” 110.

87. 87 Ibid., 114–17.

88. 88 Cf. մակդիր (Dion. 17.25), մակադրական (Dion. 18.15) – ἐπίθετον (33.1, 34.3).

89. 89 Cf. ցուցական (Dion. 18.3, 20.16) – (ὄνομα) δεικτικόν (33.3, 40.1); վերբերական (Dion. 18.2, 20.17) – (ὄνομα) ἀναφορικόν (33.3, 40.1). In Dionysius, these two species are the same species of the noun: “Anaphoric noun (called also… a demonstrative).”

90. 90 Dionysius too speaks about verbal nouns, but there is no indication of any case required by them: բայածական (Dion. 13.25, 16.3) – ῥηματικός (25.7, 29.3).

91. 91 Cf. յարաձգական, յարակայ, գերակատար, անորիշ (Dion. 22–24) – παρατατικόν/παρακείμενον, ὑπερσυντέλικον, ἀόριστον (53.2–3).

92. 92 Cf. խոնարհումն (Dion. 22.19) – ἔγκλισις (47.1).

93. 93 Cf. տրամադրութիւն (Dion. 22.23) = διάθεσις (47.1).

94. 94 Cf. սահմանական (Dion. 22.23) = ὁριστική (43.3).

95. 95 Cf. հոլով (Dion. 13.6) – πτῶσις (12.2). K‘r. nets‘i replaced the old հոլով (literally “circular motion, rolling”) by անգումն (lit. falling) calqued from Latin, and he used the term հոլով (164, 170, 188-190) to indicate various declensions, which was an innovation.

96. 96 Its name is an adjective deriving from the verb առաքել – “to send,” since “the dative” is followed by an explanation related to the verb ἐπιστέλλω – “to send” (ἡ δὲ δοτικὴ ἐπισταλτική, 31.7), see J̌ ahukyan, Grammatical and Orthographical Works, 69; Muradyan, The Creation of the Armenian Grammatical terminology, 247.

97. 97 Cf. a different translation in Cowe, “The Role of Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae,” 101: “Eight [factors] are associated with the verb.”

98. 98 Sophocles, Greek Lexicon, 727, translates “utinam! would that !” whereas Cowe (“The Role of Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae,” 104) follows the different interpretation of this word as a borrowing from Persian, see Ghazaryan, Avetisyan, Dictionary of Middle Armenian, 485.

99. 99 The same terms are in Dion. 23.5–6 = πρωτότυπον… παράγωγον (50.1).

100. 100 The first two verbs are causative (in Middle Armenian form), whereas the verb ենթադատեմ (the prefix ենթ- is added to its “primitive counterpart”) is absent from the dictionaries; it is related to Dion. 2.9–10 ըստ ենթադատութեան = καθ’ ὑπόκρισιν.

101. 101 In fact, in the examples եմ-գրեմ-սրբագրեմ, եմ is the present first-person singular of the verb of being, which coincides with the ending of գրեմ, so this one is labeled “compound,” whereas the “super-compound” սրբագրեմ is a compound proper, the second component of which coincides with գրեմ.

102. 102 This means voice, cf. “significatio sive genus” (Pr. VIII.369).

103. 103 This word (without terminological connotation) and the related abstract noun (համաձայնութիւն), adjective (համաձայն) and adverb (համաձայնապէս) are attested in early texts as calques of the Greek ὁμοφωνέω and the related words. Here, it is an important syntactic term, for which I have not managed to find a Latin equivalent in the available sources.

104. 104 Khachikyan, Introduction to Yovhannēs K‘r. nets‘i, On Grammar, 48.

105. 105 By “Armenians” he means the Armenian version of Dionysius and the Armenian commentaries on that text.

106. 106 In addition to all the terms listed above in section 1 (“Terms Created…”) (except those for “genus epichenum et dubium” and the infinitive) and in footnote 69.

107. 107 With some semantic shift, today it means “verbal adjectives.”

108. 108 They are mentioned above, in section 1. Of special interest among them are three books by the same author, two Armenian grammars published within two years (1674 and 1675), one in Armenian (its title page is in Armenian and Latin: Ioannes Agop sacerdos Armenus. Puritas linguae Armenicae), the other in Latin (Ioannes Agop sacerdos Armenus. Puritas Haigica seu Grammatica Armenica) and a Latin grammar in Armenian (its title page is in Armenian and Latin: Ioannes Agop sacerdos Armenus Constantipolitanus, Grammatica Latina).

109. 109 Avagyan, Introduction to Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i, On Grammar, 140. The characteristic “Grecizing-Latinizing grammars” belongs to J ̌ahukyan, History of the Grammar of Grabar, 120–74 (he examines works by four authors), who also called K‘ṛnets‘i’s work the precursor of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Latinizing (լատինատիպ) grammars of Armenian, ibid., 291 (composed by Franciscus Rivola, Clemens Galanus, Yovhannēs Holov, and Oskan Erevants‘i). See also Hambardzumyan, History of Latinizing Armenian, 135.

110. 110 Avagyan, Introduction to Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i, On Grammar, 146.

111. 111 Fr. Hugo Ripelin Argentoratensis (ca. 1210–ca. 1270) authored this work, but by the fourteenth century, it was already being attributed to others, in particular, to Albert the Great, Oudenrijn, Linguae haicanae scriptores, 199.

Translating Popular Wisdom into Learned Language and Practice:
Egbert of Liège’s Fecunda ratis and the Changing World of the Eleventh Century

Hiram Kümper

Historical Institute, University of Mannheim

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 2 (2025): 186-213 DOI 10.38145/2025.2.186

This paper explores the Fecunda ratis, Egbert of Liège’s early eleventh-century didactic poem in Latin, as an example of the transformation of vernacular, orally transmitted wisdom into structured, literary pedagogy. Drawing on recent theoretical and philological research, it develops a typology of proverbial adaptation in Egbert’s work and analyzes the rhetorical and poetic strategies employed to integrate popular sayings into the moral and educational discourse of the cathedral school. In doing so, the study situates the Fecunda ratis within the broader context of the emerging homiletic and didactic culture of the eleventh century, highlighting its role in shaping the clerical ethos and institutional memory through the literary canonization of the popular voice.

Keywords: classical learning, Latin, vernacular, cathedral schools, Middle Ages

Egbert of Liège’s Fecunda ratis stands as one of the most ambitious and rhetorically refined didactic poems of the eleventh century, remarkable both for its formal complexity and for its systematic integration of proverbial material into a moral-pedagogical framework.1 This study examines the Fecunda ratis as a sophisticated site of cultural translation, in which popular proverbial wisdom, often rooted in vernacular, situational discourse, is rearticulated in the formal register of Latin didactic poetry. Drawing on recent theoretical approaches and the typological and rhetorical frameworks developed by Barry Taylor and Dave Bland, the following analysis seeks to reconstruct the mechanisms by which Egbert transforms orally transmitted sententiae into structured tools of moral instruction within the pedagogical and homiletic milieu of the early eleventh century. Particular attention will be paid to the stylistic, thematic, and performative dimensions of this transformation, as well as to the broader educational and ecclesiastical context in which the Fecunda ratis emerged and possibly circulated.

The Fecunda ratis

Egbert of Liège’s Fecunda ratis (literally, “the fertile ship”) is an extensive collection of sayings in hexameters consisting of two books, which Egbert dedicated to his childhood friend Adalbold.2 It survived in only one eleventh-century manuscript kept in the Cologne Cathedral Library, which contains the poem, a Christmas hymn, and a short prayer.3 The manuscript’s tradition is characterized by eleven different hands following the main scribe with alterations and glosses, which indicates a lively reception and editorial work within the school. The poem was revised, glossed, and provided with alternative readings multiple times, especially by the hands E and L, whose emendations can be traced partly back to their own conjectures.4

The title of the work, Fecunda ratis, refers to the metaphorical idea of a school ship that is full to the point of overflowing, taking on proverbs, fables, parables, sayings, and stories from a wide variety of sources. However, Egbert himself also calls his work liber de aenigmatibus rusticanis,5 which refers to the quality and origin rather than the final purpose of the metaphorical cargo: a collection of popular, often enigmatic proverbs with a didactic purpose that is brought to the new shore of learned education. The poem was thus created from the desire both to add to the traditional educational materials, such as the Disticha Catonis and the fables of Avian, and to provide a new teaching tool for the trivium level that taught skills that could be turned into practice in everyday life.6

The work is divided into two books: the first one has the title prora (bow) and the second one the title puppis (stern). The first book consists of two large parts, the original collection of one-line verses and two-line verses and the extension in longer sections. It thus forms the core of the didactic tradition of sayings. The first part of the book consists of 1,008 verses that can be read as a self-contained collection with a prologue (1.1–4) and an epilogue (1.1005–1008), which suggests that there may well have been an earlier, shorter version that has not survived. The second part consists of longer poems and thematic elaborations, such as fables, allegories, satires, examples, and autobiographical reflections.

The second book, Puppis, contains a dense sequence of Christian ethical reflections, catechism-like pieces, verses about virtues and vices, quotations from Augustine, Gregory the Great, Ambrose, Jerome, and Bede, and Bible versifications and prayers. This book prepares students for the theological specialization, integrating the content of the spiritual curriculum in poetic form.

The stylistic orientation of the work is strongly influenced by the rhetoric of the trivium. There are numerous examples of ordo praeposterus, prolepsis, epistulae, and exempla, but also satirae, allegoriae, and fabulae, with echoes from classical authors such as Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Ovid, and Cicero as well as patristic authors and the Bible.7 Egbert uses ancient and patristic sentences, as well as popular proverbs, local idioms, and stylized scenes from everyday life.

Particularly noteworthy is the juxtaposition and interweaving of erudite high language and simple, popular diction. The style varies between an elegiac tone, mocking satire, pathetic invocation, proverbial brevity, and epic narrative. However, a pedagogical impetus runs through the entire work. It is intended to instruct, entertain, educate morally, and promote intellectually at the same time and thus forms an ideal reading book for adolescent students. Egbert emphasizes several times that his collection should serve to help students recognize and interpret allegorical, moral, and exegetical meanings. Thus, it should be understood as preparation for the study of the Bible.

Egbert of Liège

Not much is known about the author of the Fecunda ratis, Egbert of Liège.8 Sigebert of Gembloux, who lived roughly a generation after Egbert, made the following note: “Egbert, a cleric from Liège, wrote a book in metrical style about rustic riddles, initially brief. However, with an expanded reasoning, he wrote another book on the same subject, which was somewhat larger.”9 This is essentially all we know from contemporary sources. However, Egbert provides some hints himself. His letter of dedication to Adalbold of Utrecht, his childhood friend and the recipient of the Fecunda ratis, reveals relevant biographical information and an approximate dating and localization of the work. Adalbold, born around 975, served as archdeacon at the cathedral of Liège and became Bishop of Utrecht in 1010. He died on November 27, 1026. The time span of his episcopal office then provides the widest possible range for dating the composition or at least for the revision of the collection. Some scholars, including Voigt, have proposed that the Fecunda ratis was presumably commissioned by or at least under the influence of Bishop Durand (ruled 1021–1025), while Provost Johannes and the later Bishop Wazo served as dean of the Liège church.10 This seems well plausible although no exact evidence can be brought up. However, at this time, the cathedral school of Liège emerged as a pioneering center of a new manner of education, setting a precedent for cathedral schools throughout the Latin West.11 Its foundational innovation lay in institutionalizing a curriculum that combined liberal learning with the cultivation of elegant manners (honestas) and moral discipline (mores). This dual focus marked a clear departure from the Carolingian emphasis on doctrinal and scriptural training alone, and it is clearly adopted by Egbert in his Fecunda ratis.

Under Bishop Eraclius (959–971), a student of Brun of Cologne, the school was revitalized with a model that fused moral refinement with classical studies.12 His successor, Notker (972–1008), further established Liège as a leading intel­lectual and ethical center, producing clerics whose virtue and manners were seen as qualifications for high office.13 The pedagogical ethos prioritized visible comportment (how one walked, spoke, and gestured) as outward expressions of internal moral discipline. Wazo of Liège, who was active in 1005–1030, embodied this educational ideal by favoring students who excelled in manners over those merely proficient in letters. Under his leadership, Liège’s reputation flourished as a school of letters, manners, and religion. Later laments by figures like Anselm and Goswin underscore the sad end to this golden age, further attesting to its formative influence. The novelty of schools like Liège lay in integrating ethical and social formation (cultus virtutum) into formal education, shaping clerical elites not just intellectually but as embodiments of courtly, ecclesiastical, and civic ideals. The cathedral school thereby became both a pedagogical and a cultural institution for training future church and court leaders in the virtues of public conduct and personal decorum.

Egbert’s statement of age within the work (if we hold the poem De debilitate ēvī nostrī to give such an autobiographical indication)14 suggests that he was born around 972. He probably received his education together with Adalbold at the famous Liège Cathedral School under Notker, which under his leadership became one of the most important educational centers in the empire. References in the text suggest that Egbert initially enrolled as a student in the lower classes of the cathedral school and then devoted himself to the study of the septem artes liberales, with a clear focus on the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic). Although the work also shows knowledge of the quadrivium (e.g. arithmetic, music), his profile is clearly that of a philologically and pedagogically oriented schoolmaster, not a mathematically and theologically educated cleric.

After having completed his education, Egbert seems to have remained in Liège as a teacher, although he never held the position of head of the cathedral school as magister scholarum. Rather, he apparently worked as a submagister scholae or magister particularis, as was typical for larger schools with a differentiated teaching staff.15 In his dedication, Egbert describes himself as a presbyter and servorum Dei humillimus, that is, as a simple priest in the service of the church.

Egbert’s life is characterized by a continuous commitment to education. Although he was denied the social advancement experienced by other Liège scholars such as Adalbold or Wazo (neither was he appointed bishop nor was he given a position in the court chapel), he left behind a didactic work, Fecunda ratis, which surpasses all known pieces of school poetry of his time in terms of scope, diversity and pedagogical reflection. In his old age (in the Fecunda ratis, he repeatedly refers to himself as an old man, for instance in 1.1497, 1.1508, and 1.1517), he apparently wrote (or rewrote) his work as a summary of a long life in the teaching profession, interspersed with complaints about the decline in willingness to learn (1.508–509, 1.739–740, 1.801–802, 1.979–980, 1.1093–1096, 1.1612–1617), the increasing use of corporal punishment (1.1253–1280), and the growing material insecurity of the teaching profession (1.1075–1078, 1.1170–1173, 1.1497–1506, 1.1675–1683).

Poetics of the Medieval Proverb: from Situational Origins to
Collectional Transformation

In the theoretical discourse of the last few decades, the medieval proverb has increasingly been approached not as a decontextualized maxim but as an inherently situated utterance, one that encodes fragments of lived experience within compact, formulaic linguistic forms. As, for instance, Sebastian Neumeister has argued, proverbial speech resists definitional abstraction precisely because its meaning emerges not from conceptual fixity but from pragmatic pliability.16 Proverbs function less as detachable axioms than as mnemonic and hermeneutic devices: they anchor meaning in narrativized, affectively resonant scenarios, and they acquire significance through their repeated deployment in socially recognizable situations. Within this framework, literary proverb tales are not mere illustrations of gnomic content but acts of retroactive contextualization. They construct plausible experiential settings in which the proverb’s semantic logic can unfold.

A strikingly congruent line of thought undergirds Manfred Eikelmann’s philological study of the German proverb in medieval transmission, particularly as exemplified by the widely attested saying, Wenn man den Hund schlagen will, sagt man, er hat Leder gefressen (“If you want to beat the dog, you say he ate the leather”).17 While departing from different disciplinary platforms (literary theory and historical philology respectively), both Neumeister and Eikelmann converge upon a core insight: the proverb originates as a situational speech act, only subsequently becoming subject to processes of textual abstraction, literary stylization, and collectional systematization. Eikelmann’s contribution lies in his meticulous reconstruction of the stages by which proverbial expressions migrate from primary use in contextualized speech into the secondary realm of textual collections, acquiring new functions and forms in the process. Taking up an idea of the theologian Claus Westermann, Eikelmann draws a fundamental distinction between two modes of transmission: the primary tradition (primäre Überlieferung), where proverbs are embedded in lived communicative situations, and the secondary tradition (sekundäre Überlieferung), where they are extracted from their pragmatic contexts and compiled into collections. Eikelmann uses this theoretical scaffolding to interrogate a range of historical sources, revealing the extent to which medieval proverb collections not only preserved but also transformed the epistemic and performative status of the sayings they contain.

The proverb of the leather-eating dog appears for the first time not in vernacular German but in Latin, notably in the Dialogus Salomonis et Marcolfi, where it figures as part of a gnomic exchange between the idealized wise king Solomon and the grotesquely embodied trickster Marcolf.18 In this dialogic context, the proverb is not merely cited but activated within a stylized confrontation of rhetorical registers. Salomon utters a high-minded sententia on the unreliability of enemy speech, to which Marcolf counters with the proverb: “Qui suum canem vult perdere, per rabiem imponit illi nomen” (He who wants to kill/beat his dog claims it has rabies). Here, the proverb functions subversively, dismantling the moral absolutism of its predecessor and foregrounding the instrumental logic of accusation. While the Dialogus does not simulate spontaneous oral discourse, its dialogical structure reinstates a facsimile of situational logic, within which the proverb’s function is preserved as a performative utterance.

This early Latin transmission is paralleled in the Schäftlarner Sprüche, a twelfth-century florilegium from the Bavarian monastery of Schäftlarn. There, the proverb appears in a compressed, single-line form: “Suspendens catulum, vorat, inquit, opus coriorum” (As he hangs up the puppy, he devours, he says, the work of the tanners).19 While the narrative context is absent, the line’s framing within a monastic miscellany suggests a pedagogical function. It was perhaps to be glossed, recited, or imitated. Such texts underscore the role of ecclesiastical settings in the early formalization of proverbial knowledge, even before the widespread emergence of vernacular collections.

It is only in the thirteenth century that vernacular German attestations become frequent, particularly in didactic and literary contexts. Freidank’s Bescheiden­heit (c. 1230), a sprawling corpus of rhymed aphorisms and moral reflections, includes a stylized version of the proverb: “Der hunt hat leder gezzen, so man dienstes wil vergezzen” ([Claim that] the dog has eaten leather once you want to forget [his] service).20 The formal integration into a metrical couplet, as Eikelmann observes, distances the saying from its situational moorings and transforms it into a Kunstspruch, a self-contained artefact of poetic wisdom.21 The loss of contextual specificity is partially compensated by the stylization and compression of meaning, but it also signals a shift in the proverb’s reception, from a tool of social interaction to a component of authorial didacticism. However, it also presupposes a considerable degree of cultural knowledge on the part of the reader. In fact, this version of the proverb is hardly understandable for anyone not familiar with its proverbial meaning. Literally it translates “The dog has eaten leather once you want to forget service.” Thus, the question of whose service is forgotten is left absolutely open.

A more narrativized reintegration of the proverb’s situational logic is found in Sibote’s Märe von der Frauenzucht (mid-thirteenth century), where a knight plans to kill his horse as a warning to his unruly wife.22 The narrator interjects the proverb, thus casting the knight’s behavior in the moral light of opportunistic cruelty. Here, the proverb serves as a moral frame: it retroactively interprets the action and assigns it to a recognizable behavioral pattern. The tale does not merely illustrate the proverb but actualizes its logic in narrative form, a phenomenon Neumeister identifies as central to the mnemonic power of proverb tales.23

During the late medieval period, there is a proliferation of systematic proverb collections, many of which are tied to pedagogical or homiletic contexts. The Proverbia Fridanci, a set of Latin sermon outlines using vernacular proverbs as thematic prothemata, is particularly illuminating. In these texts, the dog-and-leather proverb is not only cited but subjected to allegorical exegesis: the dog becomes a figure for the preacher and the accusation of eating leather an emblem of unjust persecution. In one version, the commentary reads: “Canis spiritualiter est praedicator […] qui ex odio alterum vult persequi, causam fingit” (The preacher is spiritually a dog… who, out of hatred, wishes to persecute someone and fabricates a reason).24 The allegoresis reconfigures the proverb for moral instruction, but in doing so, it also preserves the narrative and situational logic by re-embedding the saying within a moralized exemplum. The Proverbia Fridanci thus constitute a hybrid form: at once agents of collectional abstraction and mediators of pragmatic intelligibility.

By the fifteenth century, the proverb surfaces in a range of vernacular compilations: the Houghton Codex, Bollstatter’s Spruchsammlung, and the widely diffused Proverbia Communia (in Dutch, Low German, and Latin).25 These collections display varying degrees of formalization. In some, the proverb is presented in bilingual format (for instance, “Coreum comedit canis dum pendere debet / Wenn man den hund hencken will, so hat er leder Gessen”), thereby serving the dual function of linguistic exercise and moral instruction. In others, such as the Tractatulus proverbiorum communium preserved in a Stuttgart manuscript, Latin hexameters are translated into rhymed German distichs, reinforcing the mnemonic architecture of the collection. These collectional forms participate in the broader humanist project of encyclopedic ordering, yet, as Eikelmann warns, they often efface the proverb’s embeddedness in social praxis.26

Taken together, the historical trajectory reconstructed by Eikelmann illustrates how proverbs undergo a double transformation, first, from situational speech to stylized literary form and, second, from literary instantiation to collectional codification. In each phase, the proverb’s semantic value is reshaped. The spontaneous, dialogical, and often performatively charged utterance becomes an object of curation and commentary. Yet as both Eikelmann and Neumeister insist, this shift does not entail semantic closure. On the contrary, the proverb retains a latent openness to context, a polysemous potential that collectional frames must either domesticate or accentuate.

Ultimately, the proverb resists total capture by either literary formalization or classificatory ambition. Its semantic vitality depends not merely on lexical content or syntactic patterning but on its capacity to conjure plausible scenarios of use, scenarios that are culturally coded, narratively inflected, and pragmatically legible. Eikelmann’s historicized philology and Neumeister’s theoretical poetics both converge on this point: the proverb, as a form of “discours répété”, derives its power from being at once open to iteration and singular, recognizable and contingent, collected and lived.27

This being said, we can observe similar phenomena in Egbert’s Fecunda ratis, and we can seek the modes in which he incorporated, transformed, and canonized popular wisdom in his Latin poem.

Proverbs and Popular Wisdom in the Fecunda ratis:
A Typology of Transmission

The search for vernacular origins in the rich proverbial and gnomic material of the Fecunda ratis can draw upon a variety of indications, including (1) explicit signs of being derived from the vernacular, such as the phrases vulgus or vulgo dicitur, (2) proverbs with thematic roots in rustic or popular everyday life, (3) formulaic expressions of demonstrably Germanic or Romance origin, and (4) popular sayings incorporated into scholastic or moralizing allegory.

Occasionally, Egbert prefaces a proverb with an explicit marker of its vernacular status, such as vulgo dicitur or analogous phrases. These cases are relatively rare but striking in their transparency. At least nine instances of such explicit attribution occur in the Fecunda ratis (1.31, 1.103, 1.106, 1.160, 1.179, 1.384, 1.387, 1.1162, and C 25, a variant of 1.385).

In his article Brotlöffel, haariges Herz und wundersame Empfängnis, Wolfgang Maaz offers a convincing demonstration of the second modus of transforming popular wisdom into learned knowledge. He shows how Egbert of Liège strategically integrated quotidian experiences into the fabric of his didactic poetry. The so-called “panificum coclear (edible spoon) – non crescit edentis in ore” (I 1368) offers a particularly vivid instance of Egbert’s use of lived experience. While the Fecunda’s editor Voigt left this verse uncommented, Maaz, drawing on S. Singer’s collection Sprichwörter des Mittelalters, identifies it as a proverbial reflection of a widespread eating practice.28 The bread spoon (coclear ex pane) was a common substitute for wooden or metal utensils, and it was consumed along with the meal itself: “Coclear ex pane utendo consumitur: sic omnis res frequenti usu minuitur.”29 Aristophanic Greek, lexical testimonies from Julius Pollux, Hesychius, and the Suda corroborate the antiquity of this usage, yet no proverbial form predating Egbert has been found.30 The second motif, that of the “pilose heart,” found in a fraudulent man’s corpse, leads Maaz into an intertextual investigation of anatomical lore. Egbert writes: “Verum defuncti rimantur viscera testes / Inventumque nefas mirantur et hispida corda” (But the witnesses probe the entrails of the dead, / and marvel at the discovered crime and the bristly heart).31 Although Voigt considered this a medieval invention, Maaz traces a compelling genealogy to Valerius Maximus, who recounts the vivisection of Aristomenes: “pectus dissecuere viventi, hirsutumque cor repertum est” (they cut open the chest of the living man, and a bristly heart was found). Here too, Egbert adapts a literary topos to a moralized didactic frame. Notably, the parallels in phrasing (callidior/calliditatem, fraudes/astutia, inventumque/invenerunt) suggest direct reception, which Maaz substantiates further through comparison with Rodulfus Tortarius’ De memorabilibus, whose Latin phrasing closely mirrors Egbert’s. Egbert’s realism extends beyond literary sources into empirical knowledge. Maaz draws on pathophysiological explanations of the cor villosum to interpret the “hairy heart” as a case of fibrinous pericarditis, possibly similar to conditions described by Salimbene de Adam, where autopsies revealed lesions and vesicles in the heart area. Through these case studies, Maaz not only dismantles the assumption that medieval school texts lacked engagement with lived experience but also reveals how Egbert’s work interweaves learned citation and empirical reality. More important for our case, the Fecunda ratis, though rooted in classical and patristic tradition, emerges in Maaz’s reading as a uniquely grounded and innovative contribution to medieval pedagogy. Consequently, other such references to rustic and agrarian wisdom (such as 1.73, 1.77, 1.130, 1.253, 1.258, 1.293, 1.617, 1.1162 and 1.1676) deserve similar in-depth investigation in the future.

The third modus of coping with vernacular material is indicated by proverbs found in later Middle High German or Old French collections. These proverbs suggest that Egbert tapped into a transregional corpus of popular sententiae. Examples can be found in 1.69, 1.78, 1.92, 1.96, 1.128, 1.398, 1.579, and 1.1164. Some were identified by Voigt in 1886, but since then, possibilities for wider recognition have increased markedly, most of all after the completion of the thirteen volumes of the Thesaurus proverbiorum medii aevi (1995–2002).32 In the future, digital methods may also add to the analysis of large historical corpora and will help identify related phrases, translations, and varieties of the “discours répété.”33

A fourth and final modus in Egbert’s Fecunda ratis consists of proverbs or proverbial forms that Egbert expands into mini-narratives or allegories. These texts are often longer, and though they preserve a sentential core, they are recontextualized within didactic exegesis or moralizing exempla. Examples include the tales of the fox and the sick lion (1.1174–1189), the sleeping student and the inattentive class (1.739–740), the gluttonous monk who prefers the kitchen to the choir (1.703–705), and the student who mocks his teacher but is later praised (1.1199–1220, 1.1221–1247). This last category attests to Egbert’s didactic craft: proverbial wisdom becomes material for rhetorical elaboration, moral reflection, and institutional critique.

Working with Popular Wisdom: Transforming the Vernacular into Latin

Building on the typology developed above, we now ask about the rhetorical and stylistic details of the transformation from vernacular into Latin. To do this, Barry Taylor’s influential study Medieval Proverb Collections: The West European Tradition (1992) offers one of the most comprehensive frameworks for analyses of medieval proverbial literature, particularly as it oscillates between the oral and the written, the vernacular and the Latinate, the popular and the learned. Rather than defining the proverb narrowly in terms of content or origin, Taylor proposes a functional and rhetorical understanding: a proverb, in the medieval context, is a brief moral statement on conduct, typically paratactically constructed and transmitted either as isolated maxims or within larger compilatory structures. He does not insist on terminological exclusivity (terms such as proverbium, sententia, maxima, and paroemia often overlap in medieval sources) but instead attends to their performative, literary, and didactic roles. The proverb, in Taylor’s reading, is not merely a relic of rustic speech, but a mobile form capable of participating in various textual economies: from schoolroom instruction to theological commentary, from moral florilegia to rhetorical handbooks.

Crucially, Taylor develops a set of criteria for tracing the transformation of proverbs, especially those of vernacular origin, into Latinate literary and didactic formats. These criteria include, first, the degree of semantic literalism or elaboration in the Latin version, with attention to whether the original structure is maintained or expanded for rhetorical effect. Second, the treatment of figurative language, especially the tendency to replace concrete, image-rich vernacular expressions with abstract or allegorical formulations. Third, the presence of pleonastic formulations or explanatory expansions, often indicating a transition from elliptical oral structures to grammatically complete and interpretively secure written ones. Fourth, the degree of formal restructuring, particularly the imposition of meter, rhyme, syntactic symmetry, or antithesis, which elevate the proverb into the realm of ars poetica. And fifth, the level of contextual embedding, or in other words, whether a proverb remains an isolated utterance or is integrated into thematic sequences, moral exempla, or exegetical commentary.

Taylor’s model is not merely descriptive but interpretive. It illuminates the cultural work performed by medieval proverb collections, especially those which seek not to preserve the vernacular for its own sake but to reshape it as an instrument of Latinate ethical instruction. This model proves particularly fruitful when applied to Egbert’s Fecunda ratis, which bears witness to a deliberate and sophisticated process of vernacular proverb adaptation. Egbert’s collection does not include overt markers of source language or explicit claims to translational practice. Yet the idiomatic simplicity, the imagistic familiarity, and the thematic range of many of his couplets suggest that they derive, at least in part, from orally circulated vernacular wisdom. The task, then, is to analyze how Egbert appropriates, transforms, and integrates such material into a highly structured Latin didactic poem, and Taylor’s criteria offer a precise heuristic for doing so.

One of Egbert’s most revealing translations of a likely vernacular source occurs in 1.84: “Neglegentibus pueris uerbera debes intentare, ut corrigantur; senibus et canis, quo digni sunt, honorem impendere” (You must threaten negligent boys with the rod, so that they may be corrected; but to the elderly and grey-haired, you should accord the honor they deserve).34 The moral economy at play is familiar: young people are to be disciplined, elders are to be honored. This combination appears in multiple vernacular traditions, including medieval German and Old French gnomic verse. Yet Egbert’s Latin formulation is not a mere calque. He expands and balances the structure syntactically, pairing two contrasting imperatives in a symmetrical construction. The verb intentare introduces an element of juridical abstraction (“you must threaten” rather than “you must beat”), while ut corrigantur provides a telic clause that rationalizes the punishment in moral terms. Likewise, quo digni sunt implies a measure of ethical discernment in bestowing honor. The line thus avoids both brutality and sentimentality, positioning itself within a moderate, reasoned discourse of pedagogical governance. According to Taylor’s schema, this constitutes a case of semantic and structural elaboration, coupled with didactic contextualization: the vernacular core is preserved but rearticulated in a moral-Latin idiom suited for clerical and scholastic reception.

Egbert frequently employs strategies of condensation and parataxis when adapting proverbs whose force lies in suggestive brevity. The line “Quando domus uicina flagrat, proximat ad te” (1.719: “When the neighboring house is ablaze, the flames draw near to your own) captures a classic motif of neighborly peril: the danger that befalls another may soon be one’s own. This idea, common across European languages, is expressed in Latin without any explicit interpretive frame. Egbert refrains from adding a moral imperative (such as cave or vide), instead relying on juxtaposition and implicature. The result is a maxim that simultaneously asserts and insinuates. Taylor observes that brevity itself can be a source of obscurity, especially when surface syntax remains simple but deeper meaning must be inferred. Egbert exploits this dynamic by maintaining a minimal lexical field: flagrat and proximat are semantically rich but syntactically undemanding verbs. The proverb’s moral significance (solidarity, vigilance, shared vulnerability) is conveyed not through exposition but through structured understatement. Here, the translation strategy involves not expansion but elliptical refinement, preserving the proverb’s gnomic form while transferring its imagery into an elegant Latin construction.

Other examples reveal Egbert’s propensity for allegorical intensification. “Lancibus appositis in villam transilit ignis” (1.384) is a proverb dense with symbolic potential. Literally, “once the platters are set out, fire leaps into the house,” the line evokes the dangers of opulence or complacency, perhaps warning against the vulnerability created by feasting or indulgence. The imagery may derive from a domestic warning in the vernacular, but Egbert’s phrasing is anything but rustic. The alliteration of Lancibus and appositis, the sudden violence of transilit, and the quasi-dramatic culmination in villam combine to produce a line of striking poetic energy. Taylor notes that in many medieval collections, proverbs are made obscure not only by brevity but by figurative saturation. Egbert clearly embraces this tradition, transforming a concrete domestic image into a moralized parable. The proverb, while still recognizable in content, becomes a tableau of moral consequence, in which lexical selection and rhetorical rhythm collaborate to enhance memorability and interpretive density.

This tendency toward poetic stylization is particularly evident in proverbs involving anthropomorphic allegory. “Qui credit vulpi, nudus ad horrea currit” (1.583: He who trusts the fox runs naked to the granary) exemplifies the fusion of vernacular folklore with Latinate moralism. The fox, a longstanding symbol of cunning and deceit, serves here as the focal point of misplaced trust. The image of running naked to the granary is deliberately absurd, designed to provoke not laughter but shame at credulity. Egbert does not tone down the grotesqueness; rather, he deploys it to reinforce the social cost of foolishness. The proverb’s structure (a conditional clause and a paradoxical consequence) is retained from the vernacular, but Egbert sharpens it with an almost Horatian sense of moral ridicule. The vernacular message is neither diluted nor merely repeated, but re-presented with formal concision and moral urgency.

A similar pattern appears in “Verba nocent aliquando magis quam tela cruenta” (1.387: Words sometimes wound more grievously than bloodstained weapons), where the familiar idea that words may wound more than weapons is cast in a strikingly symmetrical structure. The antithesis between verba and tela and the hyperbolic adjective cruenta create a poetic tension that elevates the saying from truism to thesis. He transforms vernacular into classical language which must have been apparent at least to his learned contemporaries.35 Moreover, Egbert’s lexical choices are calculated for rhetorical weight: the abstract noun verba is positioned first, giving it syntactic and semantic primacy; magis quam sets up a scalar evaluation; and aliquando introduces a note of prudent qualification. The line becomes not merely a proverb, but a statement of general moral anthropology, one that recognizes the power of language as a vehicle of harm. The Latin here does not translate a specific vernacular form, but reconstitutes a widely shared sentiment within the conventions of Latin gnomic verse.

In many cases, Egbert seems to reorganize the lexical structure of the proverb to match the syntactic expectations of Latin verse while retaining its ethical charge. The pervasiveness of thematic and lexical parallelism (pueris… senibus, verba… tela, credit vulpi… nudus currit) reflects a commitment to memorability and stylistic harmony. Moreover, Egbert’s preference for non-rhymed but rhythmically measured lines, often constructed in dactylic or elegiac cadence, indicates a desire to stabilize the proverb as a unit of instruction, not merely as a record of speech. Taylor’s observation that the imposition of meter and rhetorical structure serves to “canonize” the proverb within literary culture finds clear confirmation here.

Equally telling is the organization of the Fecunda ratis itself. Proverbs are arranged in thematic constellations: on speech, on punishment, on old age, on friendship, on folly. This allows Egbert to group vernacular wisdom within a moral architecture, reinforcing patterns of association and supporting gradual ethical acculturation. Such sequencing reveals that the translated proverb is not intended to stand alone, but to function within a cumulative pedagogy. Taylor’s distinction between reference collections and didactic anthologies is particularly apt in this regard: Egbert writes for edification, not for citation.

In sum, Egbert’s translation of vernacular proverbs is marked by a com­bination of semantic fidelity and stylistic sophistication. His practice aligns closely with Taylor’s descriptive categories: he elaborates and stylizes, metaphorizes and moralizes, compresses and expands. The result is a corpus in which the oral wisdom of the laity is absorbed into the moral discourse of Latin letters. The vernacular is not preserved in its original idiom, but transformed into a medium fit for moral instruction, poetic admiration, and clerical transmission. Thus, Egbert’s Fecunda ratis exemplifies the cultural work of translation in the high Middle Ages. It is not simply the mechanical reproduction of popular speech, but its disciplined reinvention within a literary and ethical order.

Between Auctoritas and Vox Populi:
The Didactic Potential of the Fecunda ratis

After examining the popular sources that Egbert drew on and the techniques of its translation and remodeling, now the function of the proverbs in his collection should be considered, building upon Dave L. Bland’s seminal study of the rhetorical, poetic, and didactic value of proverbial expressions in the Middle Ages.36 His analysis of the ars poetriae and ars praedicandi sheds light on the functional polyvalence of proverbs in medieval literary culture and provides a critical framework for an understanding of their broader epistemological and sociocultural implications. This framework proves particularly fruitful when applied to the Fecunda ratis.

Bland’s argues that proverbs, far from serving as mere ornamental devices, were deeply embedded in the inventive processes of medieval discourse. Writers such as Matthew of Vendôme and Geoffrey of Vinsauf are shown to integrate sententiae into the very structure of poetic composition, recommending them as legitimate and effective means of beginning a text. Sententiae functioned not only as figures of speech in the classical rhetorical tradition but, rather as sources of invention and amplification. From this point of view, the proverb becomes a dynamic point of departure for the expansion of meaning, adaptable to a variety of contexts and capable of sustaining complex moral and philosophical reflections.

The same holds true for the ars praedicandi, in which proverbs fulfilled a similarly multifaceted role. Preaching manuals by authors such as Robert of Basevorn and Henry of Hesse reveal that proverbial expressions were integral to all structural components of the sermon, from the antetheme and exordium to the subdivisions and conclusio. Proverbs served as mnemonic aids, attention-catching devices, markers of division, and moral signposts. They carried the weight of auctoritas, whether sacred or secular, and often functioned as points of access between learned culture and the lived experience of the laity. Bland’s extensive reference to Alan of Lille’s Ars praedicandi, with its pronounced reliance on scriptural and classical proverbs, further underscores the strategic value of the proverb as a bridge between the rhetorical elite and the oral culture of the common people.

Egbert’s Fecunda ratis can be productively analyzed within this discursive horizon. While Bland does not explicitly mention Egbert, the patterns he describes resonate deeply with Egbert’s method of proverb adaptation and didactic framing. In Fecunda ratis, proverbs function not only as moral axioms but also as generators of narrative exempla and ethical instruction. Egbert often begins or concludes a section with a proverb, which is then paraphrased, elaborated, and contextualized in a manner strikingly similar to the practice outlined in both poetic and preaching manuals. Thus, the proverbs in Fecunda ratis should be understood not as quotations but as rhetorical kernels from which complex interpretative and ethical structures emerge.

One of the most significant parallels lies in the role of proverbs as mediators between written and oral traditions. Bland emphasizes that proverbs are deeply rooted in the vox populi, the wisdom of the people, and that their presence in elevated discourses signals a recognition of this communal epistemology. Egbert’s frequent use of vernacular or vernacularly-inflected sayings, subsequently rendered into Latin, reflects this same dynamic. Proverbs such as “Neglegentibus pueris non discere, senibus autem non posse convenit” (Not to learn befits the careless young; not to be able to learn befits the old) encapsulate commonly held views on education and age, which Egbert then integrates into a broader ethical and theological discourse. These formulations serve to anchor his moral instruction in the everyday experiences of his audience, thus fulfilling the rhetorical ideal of docere, movere et delectare.

Furthermore, Bland’s insight into the casuistic use of proverbs in ethical reasoning finds a clear echo in Egbert’s textual strategies. Many sections of Fecunda ratis can be read as micro-case studies in applied morality, in which proverbs serve as both premises and conclusions. This resonates with Bland’s discussion of the proverb’s role in casuistry, where it provides guidance in exceptional or marginal cases. Egbert’s moral pedagogy is similarly attentive to the complexities of human behavior and frequently uses proverbs to illuminate ethical dilemmas, particularly those involving interpersonal relationships, familial obligations, or the responsibilities of youth.

In addition, the proverbs in Fecunda ratis mirror the formal characteristics identified by Bland as conducive to rhetorical and didactic efficacy. Their brevity, rhythmic balance, and semantic openness make them ideal vehicles for transmission and commentary. Egbert’s treatment of proverbial material often involves layering multiple interpretive voices (scriptural, patristic, classical) around a central gnomic core. This strategy enhances the text’s rhetorical force and underscores its participation in the broader tradition of sapiential literature, a tradition that, as Bland notes, spans both sacred and secular domains.

Finally, Bland’s reflections on the mnemonic and performative dimensions of proverbs in oral-literate cultures offer a compelling lens through which to view Fecunda ratis. Egbert’s text, though written in Latin verse, is suffused with oral resonances, and the proverbial expressions embedded in it would have facilitated both comprehension and memorization. This aligns with the educational and moral objectives of the text, which aimed to instill virtuous conduct in a young clerical readership. By encoding moral lessons in proverbial form, Egbert ensured their retention and internalization, thus fulfilling the pedagogical aims also articulated in the ars dictaminis and ars praedicandi.

The Fecunda ratis and the Educational Renewal of the Eleventh Century

After the first millennium, the Latin literary culture of Western Europe experienced a renewal in both pedagogical methodology and textual production, primarily centered in cathedral and monastic schools. The cathedral schools of Liège, Reims, Chartres, and Bamberg, as well as monastic institutions like Saint Emmeram in Regensburg, emerged as intellectual hubs fostering a learned Latin style that was both anchored in Carolingian precedent and open to rhetorical innovation.37 The educational literature produced in this period reflects a vibrant interplay between didactic intention, rhetorical craft, and spiritual formation. Two figures stand out for their contributions to this evolving landscape: Otloh of St Emmeram (c. 1010–c. 1070) and Arnulf of Saint-Pierre (fl. c. 1050), whose works exemplify the literary ethos of the cathedral school environment and offer valuable parallels for the textual strategies of Egbert’s Fecunda ratis.

Otloh, a monk of the Benedictine abbey of Saint Emmeram in Regensburg, composed a number of texts that straddle the boundaries between autobiography, hagiography, and moral instruction. His Liber de tentationibus suis, written between 1050 and 1060, presents a confessional narrative of his spiritual struggles and also a model of Latinity accessible to educated clerics and advanced pupils. In a closely related genre, his Dialogus de tribus quaestionibus, which is framed as a conversation with the bishop of Regensburg, illustrates the discursive style cultivated in advanced schooling contexts, one which combines dialectical method with stylistic elegance. While Otloh was primarily a monastic writer, his works circulated in cathedral school milieus, a fact that betrays a sensitivity to the pedagogical needs of intermediate and advanced Latin readers. Notably, his Liber visionum compiled edifying exempla in an accessible narrative form, anticipating later developments in school collections of moral tales.

Arnulf of Saint-Pierre, a lesser-known but significant figure active in the ecclesiastical province of Reims, collected a corpus of prose letters and grammatical exercises which survive partially but are suggestive of the type of Latin composition training offered in cathedral schools. His epistolary style, while less ornate than that of contemporaries such as Gerbert of Aurillac (the later Pope Sylvester II), exhibits a clarity and conciseness aimed at instructing pupils in the art of correct and effective Latin expression. Fragments attributed to Arnulf include explications of Priscian and glosses on classical authors, underscoring the continuity of the Carolingian school tradition while adapting it to local didactic needs. His pedagogical output complements the broader effort observable in the early eleventh century to systematize Latin instruction through manageable, thematically coherent units. often using proverbs, fables, and moralizing narratives.

Both Otloh and Arnulf reflect the centrality of Latin prose composition and moral instruction in the curriculum of the early eleventh-century cathedral school. Their works, alongside those of figures such as Gerbert, Fulbert of Chartres, and Notker Labeo, created a literary and didactic environment in which compilatory works like Egbert of Liège’s Fecunda ratis could flourish. Egbert’s text, though unique in its ambitious scope and its explicit program of proverb exegesis, partakes of the same impulse to educate through a mixture of moral authority, stylistic variety, and structural coherence. The intellectual and literary culture of early eleventh-century cathedral schools thus laid the groundwork for a genre of Latin educational writing that was at once creative, mnemonic, and deeply moral in orientation.

From School to Practice: The Fecunda ratis in the Context of
an Early Homiletic Movement

Beyond the notable development of learned education in the cathedral school, Egbert’s times also marked a crucial though still largely preparatory phase in the development of Western European preaching culture.38 This period, long overshadowed by the more prolific twelfth-century explosion of vernacular sermon collections and the rise of scholastic homiletics, deserves new attention as a time of quiet restructuring. From monastic reform centers in Burgundy and Lorraine to cathedral schools in Liège and York, a broad intellectual and pastoral current emerged that redefined the role of preaching in the Christian community. While the period still lacks systematic vernacular homiletic corpora, it offers rich evidence of rhetorical, doctrinal, and moral experimentation that laid the groundwork for such later developments.

In the Latin West, the dominant institutional impulses for reform and pastoral revitalization came from monastic centers such as Cluny, Saint-Vanne at Verdun, and Fleury. These communities, especially under abbots like Odilo of Cluny (d. 1049) and Richard of Saint-Vanne (d. 1046), stressed the internal spiritual discipline of monks and a reinvigoration of liturgical life, but they also supported a more didactically sensitive preaching practice. Although Cluny was primarily liturgical in its orientation, the sheer expansion of its monastic network (the ordo Cluniacensis) created new contexts for spiritual instruction, particularly for lay patrons, dependents, and oblates. Cluniac liturgical commentaries and the exemplary homiletic style found in the Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel or later in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux (whose roots lie partly in this pre-1100 milieu) reflect a homiletic culture that, though still Latin, was increasingly attuned to the moral and spiritual needs of a broader audience.

Parallel developments can be traced in northern France and Flanders. The Benedictine houses of Saint-Bertin (Saint-Omer), Marchiennes, and Elnone began to show signs of liturgical and moral reform, supported by counts like Baldwin IV of Flanders (d. 1035). Although these reforms were primarily disciplinary, the increasing attention to clerical education and the use of simplified Latin texts for the instruction of conversi or lay brothers indicates a growing functional awareness of preaching as pedagogy. Similarly, the region’s close contact with Anglo-Saxon England facilitated the transmission of texts and models of popular preaching, particularly through shared hagiographic traditions and exempla.

Indeed, in Anglo-Saxon England, the eleventh century witnessed a remarkable resurgence of vernacular preaching centered on figures such as Ælfric of Eynsham (d. after 1010). Ælfric’s Homilies, written in Old English and based on patristic sources, were explicitly designed to provide priests with the materials to instruct the laity clearly and doctrinally soundly. His prefaces frequently express concern for the poor Latin competence of local clergy and the pastoral needs of their unlettered congregations. While Ælfric’s work is geographically removed from Egbert’s milieu, it nonetheless exemplifies the same reformist impulse: the desire to make Christian teaching morally effective and theologically correct across different social strata. Furthermore, Egbert’s re-Latinization of popular moral ideas can be seen as a mirror image of Ælfric’s vernacularisation of patristic doctrine.

In Lorraine and the Meuse region, the so-called Saint-Vanne Reform, while less centralized than Cluny, offered an even more directly didactic model. This network, which was associated with monasteries like Saint-Hidulf at Moyenmoutier and Saint-Evre at Toul, combined monastic observance with active pastoral outreach. Under Richard of Saint-Vanne, the region became known for promoting the intellectual and disciplinary renewal of both monks and secular clergy. Here, the integration of cathedral schools into the reform effort was more direct, and it is within this context that Egbert of Liège emerges as a key transitional figure. His alignment of rhetorical formation, moral didacticism, and pastoral purpose places Egbert in close proximity to the emerging preaching culture of the reform era. He reflects a world in which Latin homiletics were increasingly concerned with accessibility and affective impact, even if still formally composed. In this sense, Fecunda ratis may be seen as a pre-homiletic anthology, forming part of a larger pedagogical infrastructure for the training of future preachers in the cathedral and collegiate settings of the Western Empire.

Overall, the eleventh century saw preaching shift from a ritualized and largely elite practice to one increasingly invested in the formation of preachers, the codification of themes, and the pastoral effectiveness of rhetoric. While full-blown sermon cycles or vernacular collections would not appear until later in the twelfth century, the groundwork was already being laid in monastic, canonical, and scholastic environments. Figures like Egbert of Liège, Odilo of Cluny, Richard of Saint-Vanne, and Ælfric of Eynsham embody different strands of this emerging homiletic culture, one that was fundamentally moral, pedagogical, and reform-driven. Their works, though diverse in form and audience, share a common vision: that preaching, whether formal, poetic, liturgical, or proverbial, should serve the deeper transformation of Christian society. It is precisely in this formative ambiguity, between school and pulpit, between proverb and sermon, that the true contours of the early eleventh-century preaching movement in the West come into view.

From Segment to Structure: "Coherence" without "Cohesion" in Egbert of Liège

While Egbert’s Fecunda ratis has long been appreciated as a compendious re­po­sitory of moral instruction, its textual organization merits closer attention, not merely for its didactic architecture, but also for its subtle, rhetorically governed coherence. In contrast to cohesion, which is typically marked by lexical, morphological, or syntactic links between clauses, coherence refers to the underlying conceptual and pragmatic unity that renders a text intelligible and meaningful to its reader. As Helen Chau Hu stresses, coherence is “rhetorical and pragmatic,” while cohesion is “grammatical and semantic.”39 In the case of Egbert, who works with sources ranging from scriptural sententiae to oral vernacular proverbs, the challenge lies in ensuring that the textual units he composes retain thematic unity while exhibiting semantic range and formal independence.

A first observation is that Egbert eschews narrative or syntactic continuity across long stretches of his poem, yet his use of structural parallelism, thematic clustering, and serial progression creates a discursive fabric that can be described, following de Beaugrande and Dressler,40 as globally coherent. The coherence of Egbert’s proverbial corpus is not primarily a matter of grammatical devices but of conceptual chaining: individual couplets or distiches are rarely linked by anaphora or connectives, yet they participate in an implied topical progression, for instance by moving from one age group (children) to another (elders) or from social vices (lying, greed) to their corrective virtues (truth, moderation).

One need merely consider, for example, the aforementioned proverb “Neglegentibus pueris uerbera debes intentare, ut corrigantur; senibus et canis, quo digni sunt, honorem impendere (You must threaten negligent boys with the rod, so that they may be corrected; but to the elderly and grey-haired, you should accord the honor they deserve).41 This couplet functions both as a standalone ethical maxim and as the culmination of a thematic unit on age-appropriate moral treatment. While it lacks syntactic ties to its neighboring lines, it is conceptually coherent with them, continuing a pattern of juxtaposition that Egbert exploits frequently: youth and age, discipline and respect, ignorance and dignity. This rhetorical device corresponds to what van Dijk calls linear or segmental coherence, the relation between successive propositions that develop through difference, refinement, or contrast.42

Another strategy that reinforces coherence in Egbert’s work is the use of repetition and lexical thematization, both of which contribute to what Hadla calls “paragraph unity.”43 Though the Fecunda ratis is not organized in paragraphs, one can detect clusters of lines that cohere through partial repetition of key terms or motifs. A sequence may, for instance, use the verb fallere (to deceive) in several successive lines, either through lexical recurrence or through synonyms (mentiri, circumvenire, dolo uti), generating what Papegaaij and Schubert term “thematic progression by lexical variation.”44 This constitutes a higher-order kind of rhetorical coherence, in which the transmission of moral knowledge is facilitated by the reiteration of core concepts under different verbal guises.

Egbert also makes frequent use of binary structures that resonate with what text linguists identify as one of the primary vehicles of coherence: the organization of textual information into theme and rheme. While Egbert rarely employs grammatical devices such as pronominal anaphora or explicit connectives, he constructs lines in which the theme (the known or morally fixed point) is set against the rheme (the action or consequence to be advised or avoided). For instance, in “Quando domus uicina flagrat, proximat ad te,” the thematic anchor lies in the familiar setting (domus uicina), while the rheme (proximat ad te) introduces an inferred threat. The rhetorical function of the proverb depends upon the reader’s ability to grasp this given–new structure, even without formal markers of such organization. This reflects what Brown and Yule call “top-down coherence,” whereby interpretation arises not from textual cues alone, but from the readers’ background knowledge and expectations of logical or experiential continuity.45

Egbert’s coherence strategy is therefore not discursive in the sense of classical narration, but rather structural-rhetorical. He builds a “text” not out of narrative flow or grammatical cohesion, but out of moral adjacency, logical analogy, and thematic resonance. This aligns with what Hadla describes as a translation-relevant model of coherence, where the task is not to reproduce cohesion across texts but to retain conceptual and rhetorical connectivity, even when formal links are absent or restructured.46

A further dimension of coherence in the Fecunda ratis concerns its didactic sequencing. Egbert frequently arranges proverbs according to conceptual logic: a warning is followed by its remedy, a vice by its punishment, an error by its correction. This results in what Papegaaij and Schubert term “thematic patterns as a summary mechanism,” a cumulative coherence whereby the whole is more than the sum of its parts.47 For example, after the warning cited above about the neighboring house in flames, Egbert proceeds to related metaphors of contagion, including the aforementioned “Lancibus appositis in villam transilit ignis” (1.384: Once the platters are laid out, the fire leaps into the house), an image that maintains thematic proximity to the previous line through the motif of fire, while shifting the scene from neighborhood to domestic festivity. The referential continuity is thus lexically oblique but semantically tight, creating a coherence not by cohesion but by logical and metaphorical adjacency.

Notably, Egbert’s text is not a mere collection of isolated sententiae, nor does it read like a florilegium in which authorities are listed alphabetically or by source. Rather, it is constructed according to moral topology, a textual geography in which clusters of wisdom are arranged in proximity to reinforce one another’s didactic effect. The result is a rhetorical coherence that arises less from textual signals and more from the reader’s recognition of moral progression, structural symmetry, and thematic echo. This coherence, while “covert” in Beaugrande and Dressler’s terms, is nonetheless forceful, precisely because it relies on cognitive continuity rather than on mechanical linking.48

In sum, Egbert’s Fecunda ratis demonstrates textual coherence, despite or rather because of the sparseness of overt cohesive devices. His strategies are aligned with the classical rhetorical principles of dispositio and decorum, and anticipate what modern text linguistics describes as pragmatic, logical, and thematic coherence. Egbert does not require syntactic bonds to hold his text together. He relies instead on the reader’s capacity to perceive moral structure, ethical consequence, and rhetorical patterning. In this sense, the Fecunda ratis’ coherence is not merely a function of textual arrangement, but an artefact of interpretive design.

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1. 1 Manutius, Geschichte, 535–39.

2. 2 All quotes from the Fecunda ratis follow the edition by Voigt, Fecunda ratis, were double checked with the Cologne manuscript, and are referenced by book and verse. All English translations are by the author of this article.

3. 3 Cologne, Erzbischöfliche Diözesan- und Dombibliothek, Cod. 196. On this manuscript, see Plotzek et al., Glaube und Wissen, 321–23, and Senner, Geschichte der Kölner Dombibliothek, 204.

4. 4 See Voigt, Fecunda ratis, v–ix.

5. 5 Ibid., xxi.

6. 6 On this development, see Baldzuhn, Schulbücher, vol. 1, 22–44.

7. 7 For more details, see Weijers, Evolution of the trivium.

8. 8 See Babcock, Egbert of Liège and St Martin.

9. 9 Witte, Catalogus Sigeberti Gemblacensis, 93: Egebertus clericus Leodiensis scripsit metrico stilo de enigmatibus rusticanis librum primo brevem, sed ampliato rationis tenore scripsit de eadem re librum alterum maiusculum.

10. 10 On the development of the Liège cathedral school, see Renardy, Les écoles liégeoises. As a whole, Liège was a boomtown in these decades; see Hirschmann, Konjunkturprogramme.

11. 11 Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 54–56. The Liège cathedral school turned out to be especially influential in the German Empire, see Kupper, Liege et l’église imperial.

12. 12 Lutz, Schoolmasters of the Tenth Century, 21.

13. 13 The two volumes of Kurth provide a rich account: Notger de Liege et la civilisation au Xe siècle. For more on Notker, Liège, and his times, see the essays in Delville et al., Notger et Liège.

14. 14 Voigt, Fecunda ratis, 193 (1.1519): Preteriitque (et eó plus) quinquagesimus annus.

15. 15 Renardy. Les écoles liégeoises, 321–23.

16. 16 Neumeister, Geschichten vor und nach dem Sprichwort.

17. 17 Eikelmann, Sprichwort im Sammlungskontext, 95–107.

18. 18 Benary, Salomon et Marcolfus, 15, v. 87b.

19. 19 Singer, Sprichwörter des Mittelalters, vol. 1, 42. The closest translation to the vernacular is noted from a much younger, fifteenth century manuscript in Morawski, Proverbes français, 78 (no. 2146): “Qui son chien viaut tuer la rage li met sus.”

20. 20 Grimm, Vridankes Bescheidenheit, 183, v. 17–18.

21. 21 Eikelmann, Sprichwort im Sammlungskontext, 111. On the theological term Kunstspruch and its implication, see Preuß, Weisheitsliteratur, 36–37.

22. 22 Niewöhner, Neues Gesamtabenteuer, vol. 1, 17.

23. 23 Neumeister, Geschichten vor und nach dem Sprichwort, 210.

24. 24 Cited from a Berlin manuscript by Eikelmann, Sprichwort im Sammlungskontext, 103. On the Proverbia Fridanci see Klapper, Sprichwörter.

25. 25 Simon, Priamel, Short Verse Poems, and Proverbs, 30–33.

26. 26 Eikelmann, Sprichwort im Sammlungskontext, 105.

27. 27 See Coseriu, Structure lexicale et enseignement du vocabulaire, 194–96.

28. 28 Singer, Sprichwörter des Mittelalters, vol. 1, 94–95.

29. 29 Voigt, Fecunda ratis, 80.

30. 30 Maaz, Brotlöffel, haariges Herz und wundersame Empfängnis, 110.

31. 31 Voigt, Fecunda ratis, 173 (1.1140–1144).

32. 32 See Mieder, Thesaurus proverbiorum medii aevi.

33. 33 For an inspiring though not historical example, see Hamidi et al., Proverbs Translation.

34. 34 Voigt, Fecunda ratis, 20 Fn. 84.

35. 35 I thank Péter Bara for pointing me at this.

36. 36 Bland, Use of Proverbs in Two Medieval Genres of Discourse.

37. 37 See Jaeger, Envy of Angels, 53–75, and Steckel, Kulturen des Lehrens, 689–885.

38. 38 See McLaughlin, The Word Eclipsed?

39. 39 Hu, Cohesion and Coherence, 34.

40. 40 Beaugrande and Dressler, Introduction.

41. 41 Voigt, Fecunda ratis, 20 Fn. 84.

42. 42 Van Dijk, Text and Context, 93–95.

43. 43 Hadla, Coherence in Translation, 178.

44. 44 Papegaaij and Schubert, Text Coherence, 202.

45. 45 Brown and Yule, Discourse Analysis, 66.

46. 46 Hadla, Coherence in Translation, 181.

47. 47 Papegaaij and Schubert, Text Coherence, 127.

48. 48 Beaugrande and Dressler, Introduction, 31.

What Factors Are Conducive to Coherence?
Translation Activity in Late Medieval Western Europe:
A Sketch of a Research Program

Péter Bara

HUN-REN Research Center for the Humanities, Institute of History

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 2 (2025): 158-185  DOI 10.38145/2025.2.158 

Why is the history of intellectual change in the Middle Ages a history of selectively studied influences about which so few historians have dared venture generalizations? Why is it so rich with contradictions? And why do we have so little comprehensive knowledge about the translators behind these intellectual changes? To answer these questions, this article proposes a novel approach to the history of Greek-Latin translations between 1050 and 1350, which substantially reshaped the Medieval Latin intellectual landscape and the cultural history of Europe. After reviewing the conclusions in the most recent secondary literature, the essay offers a sketch of a historical analysis of translation-centered decision-making processes. In doing so, it singles out four hypotheses and describes four research areas corresponding to these assumptions. The proposed research examines the translators’ personalities and activities, their training, mobility, cultural patronage, networks and their audiences (including universities) that influenced their decisions when they chose to translate texts from Greek into Latin. Such an analysis will help us better understand the expanding cultural networks between the medieval Western and Eastern Mediterranean and the development of translations in Latin-using Western Europe.

Keywords: medieval translations, translations from Greek into Latin, medieval knowledge transfer, Byzantine influence on the medieval West 1100–1300

This Special Issue fills a scholarly gap, probably the most significant in historical translation studies. The endeavors and influences of single translators or groups of translators have already been studied for their historical, social, and literary contexts in greater numbers.¹ In contrast, there are relatively few overarching studies that further an understanding of “translation movements” and the coherence and social backdrop behind the works, methods, and results of subsequent generations of translators and epoch-long translation activities.2 The essays in this issue take steps towards establishing an explanatory framework and seek to identify factors conducive to translating texts between a wide range of source and target languages. This paper collects a preliminary set of criteria according to which the coherence behind translations in a specific period can be assessed. My expertise allows me to bring evidence concerning late medieval (eleventh-century to fourteenth-century) translations from Greek into Latin in Western Europe. The features described in the following pages lay the basis for the rest of the issue and offer ideas for future research.

Factors Conducive to Translations from Greek into Latin, 1050–1350:
State-of-the-Art

Translation activity from Greek (and Arabic) into Latin between 1050 and 1350 substantially reshaped the Medieval Latin intellectual landscape and brought about a dramatic shift in the cultural history of Europe. For example, Johannes, a scholar in late eleventh-century Northern Italy, put together a list of the medical books he possessed.3 His books contained 26 newly edited texts composed or translated in the previous century. Johannes witnessed a revolution in medical learning and book culture that had recently taken place. A look at the list of medical bestsellers in the long eleventh century reveals that, of the 18 titles, ten were translations from Arabic and Greek. How could this happen? By the mid-fourteenth century, the entire corpus of Galen’s works and some of Hippocrates’ writings had been translated into Latin. The landscape of medical learning and knowledge was not the only place where these kinds of changes were underway, however. According to my preliminary investigations on translated texts from Greek into Latin, 30 identifiable translators produced 208 texts between ca. 1050 and 1350. The working list of translations includes the Medieval Latin corpus Aristotelicum, a few texts by Plato, mathematical texts (in particular Euclid and Archimedes), Proklos, Dionysian texts, medical texts (especially Galen and Hippocrates), texts on geography, astronomy, miscellanea (horse medicine, falconry), patristic theology and religion, a few lives of philosophers, and astrology and esoteric texts.4

Although the origins of the Greek-Latin translations have long been of interest to historians of the period, an important point of departure is the observation that the last systematic attempt to explore how and why the translations came into being was made just over a century ago. Charles Homer Haskins and other modern scholars have seen the medieval translators’ achievements in a larger European context, which was labelled the “twelfth-century Renaissance.”5 They argued for the existence of a Western European renewal between ca. 1050 and 1200, which also had a lasting impact in the later centuries of the Middle Ages. Researchers noted that a significant body of translations from Arabic and Greek was produced, and these texts were salient features of developments in Western Europe. They referred to this as a “translation movement.” Haskins’ research focused on the long twelfth century, so the timeframe of his ideas concerning this “translation movement” covers this period. The task remains to approach subsequent translations from the perspective of a more analytical term that includes several “movements,” such as the term “translation phenomenon.”6

At present, scholarly explanations of a systematic “translation movement” can still be traced back to Haskins’ ideas. Haskins’ pioneering work laid the foundations of medieval translation studies and provided the first survey of Greek-Latin and Arabic-Latin translators and translations. However, the state-of-the-art of his day (especially the large number of unpublished sources) did not allow him to provide a standard, overarching analytical account of translations. Nonetheless, he developed partial hypotheses which, sometimes implicitly, influenced his views. The first hypothesis is that multicultural environments, such as trilingual (Arabic-Greek-Latin) Southern Italy in the eleventh century, provided the motivations and interactions necessary to produce translations.7 Michael Angold recently pointed out that this assumption needs modification.8 In multicultural environments, written multilingualism ran parallel to and followed the respective (Greek, Latin, Arabic) traditions of law and administration, as Julia Becker has shown.9 Latin translations were needed when information was channeled to Latin-using elites who did not know Greek (or Arabic). The second hypothesis, which is present in Haskins’ oeuvre10 and in many works since then,11 is to link knowledge of Greek in the Middle Ages to the eastward movement of people from Western regions where Latin was used. In other words, Medieval Latin scholars must have travelled “to the East” to learn the language(s) and acquire manuscripts. A third assumption is that school reform and the birth of universities played a role in the production and spread of translations. While these assumptions arguably call attention to certain aspects conducive to the development of a “Greek-Latin translation movement,” they do not offer a coherent explanation of this “movement.”

Since Haskins’ pioneering monographs in 1924 and 1927, the vast field of Greek-Latin translations has been researched in several ways. Scholars have studied the lives of translators and the bodies of translations they produced.12 This secondary literature is often useful as a body of work on specific individuals and texts, especially because it substantially updates Haskins’ oeuvre. Yet it is marked by systematic blind spots. It gives little consideration, for instance, to the broader historical context in which these translations were produced or the audiences for the new texts. More importantly, it does not go beyond Haskins’ abovementioned analytical assumptions, which at present beg reconsideration. This is particularly the case since researchers have in the meantime produced a significant number of critical editions (such as the Aristoteles Latinus13 and the Archimedes collection)14 that add considerably to the body of available sources, not only compared to Haskins’ day but also since d’Alverny and Berschin produced their surveys. The increasing number of critical texts makes it possible to draw a much more detailed picture than either Haskins or Berschin was able to do. The increasing quantity of available data at hand enabled scholars to offer synopses that focused on a region or center where translations were produced.15 Finally, scholars discussed the reception history of a single text16 or a coherent group of texts.17 Despite considerable research in the field, there is still no comprehensive explanatory framework that addresses the historical causes, processes, and effects of translations and translators. This issue sets out to address this challenge.

Daniel G. König offered the first overarching explanatory framework of Arabic-Latin translations.18 His study involved locations in Europe and the broader Mediterranean where translations were produced and read between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries. König singled out the following explanatory building blocks. First, geopolitical shifts, such as the Western encroachment on al-Andalus, Sicily, and the Eastern Mediterranean, influenced the emergence and/or availability of specific forms of bilingualism (König labeled it “intellectualized,” a term which I will discuss below) and the beginnings of translation activity. Second, after the “translation movement” started, its scope and duration were determined by the availability and thematic breadth of appropriate texts, the motivations to translate, and the supporting institutions of patronage. Third, the translated texts became institutionalized as part of the curriculum in monastic and cathedral schools and nascent universities. Fourth, the medieval translation movement reached its end and left its legacy. Haskins’ assumptions and König’s explanatory scheme offer a point of departure for formulating four hypotheses and defining the areas of study that help us ap­proach late medieval Greek-Latin translations.

Factors Conducive to Translations from Greek into Latin, 1050–1350: A Tentative Explanatory Framework

Against the backdrop of previous scholarship, I will present in detail the following four hypotheses:

1. Study of translators’ “intellectual bilingualism” and mobility uncovers how the period’s emerging mobility infrastructure (trade routes, travel opportunities) was connected to the rapidly developing scholarly infrastructure (namely, schools, universities, and different courts).

2. Study of the strategies and means used by translators to characterize their roles (or what I will refer to as self-representation) reveals the ways in which their work overlapped and intersected with contemporary scholarly, political, and economic discourses. It also sheds light on the ways in which the decisions they made helped them establish themselves as cultural mediators and knowledge innovators.

3. Study of translators’ networks and writings demonstrates that a division of labor existed between men of learning and patrons, who were ultimately responsible for masterminding external knowledge import.

4. Dissemination of this imported knowledge took place on different levels and according to a complex set of factors that cannot be reduced to a simpler level of analysis. Analyses of translators’ multi-level knowledge import (including lists, texts, canons, and knowledge organization patterns) uncover mechanisms which remain unknown behind the medieval educational and intellectual shift after ca. 1150–1300 (i.e., the birth of universities and their influence on intellectual history).

Intellectual Bilingualism and Mobility

To understand the motivations of the historical actors who drove the growth of translation activity and the motivations behind the translations themselves, it is necessary to revisit König’s concept of “intellectualized bilingualism.” This means exploring translators’ mobility, through which they acquired their bilingual skills. The roles translators played as cultural mediators can be fruitfully studied by identifying two overlapping infrastructures, without which medieval Greek-Latin translators could not have become cultural agents on the move. These are the A) mobility infrastructure, which provided Greek-Latin translators access to B) scholarly infrastructure. Mobility had a linking function between Western educational centers (schools and libraries) and those of the multicultural zones, such as Southern Italy and Byzantine centers, especially Constantinople. The rediscovery of classical and Byzantine Greek heritage could not have occurred without Westerners exploiting manuscript holdings and Greek education in these zones. The correlation of the two infrastructures can be examined through concrete steps: 1) Collecting available data regarding Greek-Latin translators’ movement based on their biographies and works. 2) Examining the sending contexts of translators: where did the translators come from, what functions did they have in these places, and what was the purpose of travel? 3) Analyzing the receiving contexts: where did the translators go, and what functions did they have in these places? 4) Investigating the infrastructures translators used during their mobility (e.g. diplomats or tradesmen) and its relation to their work as translators. 5) Examining the specific cases of translators in the broader context of Western schools and Byzantine Greek education, with a focus on the possible influence on translations of factors such as different levels of education, curriculum, methods, and necessary time to attain specific skills and expertise. 6) Analyzing how Westerners became insiders in Greek educated society.

My approach, which is based on the notion that one must study translators’ mobility (their travels) and their education side by side, draws on previous scholarship which has called attention to the prerequisites for translating scholarly writings. By establishing the term “intellectualized bilingualism,” König created a novel analytical approach.19 His work provides a key to the study of translations in relation to multiculturality, as Haskins stressed. König emphasized that the translation of specific, in this case scholarly-scientific texts required not only appropriate language skill in oral communication in the source and target languages. In the case of Greek-Latin translations, it also required mastery of the language of Greek source texts, namely a classicizing artificial Greek language20 and patristic Greek, which could be learned from Byzantine masters in schools alongside the concomitant details (termini technici and cultural contexts) of disciplines such as philosophy, theology, or mathematics. In addition, the translator needed Latin schooling in language and the respective disciplines.

Scholars since Haskins rightly point to a breakthrough in the eleventh-century and twelfth-century Western Latin school system and a new, increased interest in manuscript heritage. Schools in their social milieus between 1080 and 1215 are surveyed by Cédric Giraud21 and universities in the volume edited by Hilde De Ridder-Symoens.22 Jacques Verger discussed all stages in the schooling of men of learning between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.23 Examples from regional contexts are given by Cédric Giraud, Constant Mews,24 Robert Witt,25 Stephen Ferruolo,26 Carl Mounteer,27 and Joachim Ehlers.28 With regards to Byzantine education (eleventh–fourteenth centuries), it was assessed in general by Paul Lemerle,29 Sita Steckel,30 and Costas Constantinides.31 Paul Magdalino32 and Niels Gaul33 described eleventh-century and early fourteenth-century Byzantine education as a social phenomenon. So, there are tools at hand to assess which types of schools Greek-Latin translators might have attended and the kinds of knowledge they could have mastered during the period in question, even if there is not much evidence concerning where, when, or if they actually attended schools, apart from the content of their translations and work (method, vocabulary, etc.), which gives an indication of their training.

I also set out from the hypothesis based on Haskins’ work that mobility was indeed a crucial feature of the translation movement. The availability of schools alone would have been insufficient unless translators had acquired language skills and specialized knowledge in both systems (the Latin and Byzantine). As König emphasized in his model, through geopolitical shifts, the period in question witnessed an expanding Western network in the Western and Eastern Mediterranean basin through trade, pilgrimage, territorial gains, and the crusading movement. The question is how Greek-Latin translations used these networks. As part of the expanding Western networks, cultural and linguistic contact zones became triggers behind the translation of texts. Future research must offer a comprehensive analysis of how Greek-Latin translators, (after) being educated in Latin language and scholarly culture, entered these contact zones, learned Greek, and became familiar with elements of classical Greek history and culture that enabled them to undertake the translation of scholarly texts.

Understanding translators’ mobility means examining the mobility of specific groups and general movement patterns. Previous scholarship has established some aspects of this migration and mobility, and it provides a useful methodological tool for further studies. My preliminary investigations proved that Haskins’ abovementioned hypothesis was right: between 1050 and 1350, 28 of the 30 best-documented translators pursued their activities by moving between centers (from England, France, and Italy to Greece, Constantinople, and Antioch).34 As part of Migrationsforschung in a Western-Byzantine relation, Krijnie Ciggaar examined Western travel to Byzantium.35 The presence of Western merchants,36 soldiers,37 and diplomats38 in Byzantium was also the subject of research. Most recently, Leonie Exarchos investigated the services performed by Western intellectuals in the Byzantine court.39 The Viennese project “Mobility, Microstructures, and Personal Agency” presented Byzantine society and culture at the crossroads of Eastern and Western influence.40 In these works, translators are members of specific groups, such as diplomats, intellectuals in Byzantine service, etc.

The approach I propose is to focus explicitly on individual translators and comparisons of their lives and works with the lives and works of their contemporary colleagues in translation. Whereas I accept many of the premises of the abovementioned contributions, I consider it more beneficial to analyze the characteristics and development of each individual topic (education in Latin and Greek and the mobility of translators) rather than moving too rapidly to a higher level of generalization.

Translators’ Self-Representation

To understand how translators carved out agency for themselves, I find it fruitful to assess Greek-Latin translators’ self-representation by discussing 1) the methods with which translators asserted themselves as figures of authority, 2) the reasons they used to justify translating texts, 3), their relation to their subject matter, namely classical Greek and Byzantine material, 4) their uses of ideas from and contributions to the translation theory tradition, and finally, 5) the ways in which they constructed their identities and roles in relation to political, social, and scholarly patterns of the period. In order to offer the necessary backdrop, the social milieus from which translators arrived must be explored. Hitherto, Greek into Latin translators’ roles as mediators have only been subject to case studies.41 Thus, there is no comprehensive picture of the knowledge transfer process. An obvious remedy to this state-of-the-art is to survey all available case studies with the intention of developing a comprehensive interpretative model of the sociocultural processes that framed Greek-Latin translation work.

Previous scholarship has implied that translators are not just implementers, but autonomous decision-makers and drivers of knowledge accumulation, with historical context-dependent roles and motivations. I plan to investigate these implications in a systematic way and consider what it meant for translators to belong to specific social groups and how they represented their complex and situational social identities.

Such research studies the agency of translators in the cultural and knowledge transfer process. Transfer agents have been investigated as “cultural brokers” in and between courts,42 and their roles in crossing spatial, religious, social, and cultural boundaries have been emphasized.43 The Toletan translator Dominicus Gundissalinus, for instance, introduced the Aristotelian classification of knowledge through Arabic intermediaries, such as al-Farabi.44 Translators’ relations to earlier traditions (e. g. in the case of Burgundio of Pisa45 or concerning Amalfitans)46 and to the achievements of other translators have been assessed.47 Dimitri Gutas collected texts on why translators interpreted specific (in that case, scholarly-scientific) texts.48 José Mártinez-Gázquez examined Arabic translators’ relations to Arabic science, which was their subject matter.49 I argued that some translators may have achieved more than others because of their birth/social status by highlighting that Cerbanus Cerbano could defy the doge of Venice because he (Cerbanus Cerbano) was the offspring of an ancient Venetian noble family.50 Peter Classen demonstrated that Burgundio of Pisa was a noble and leading statesman in Pisa.51

Based on the cases of eleventh-century Constantinopolitan imperial employees, Leonie Exarchos established a partial interpretative framework, calling attention to the authority-making process through language and factual skills and also stays and education in Greek-speaking territories.52 Rita Copeland wrote a tour-de-force model book on the influence of translation theory on medieval translations to vernaculars.53

Translators’ prologues and other paratexts are among the most essential sources for the study of their activities. A fruitful approach would be to survey all surviving prologues (both published and unpublished) from the quills of Greek-Latin translators from the period as a whole. Réka Forrai created an analytical framework.54 She looked at prefaces as conceptual narratives and investigated a small portion of recurrent commonplaces/topoi, namely utility, poverty, and bellic/martial topoi. The framework Forrai proposed can be extended by assembling a comprehensive list of clichés (as was also done with other text groups, such as Byzantine saints’ lives)55 alongside the role of other elements in these texts in relation to commonplaces. Consequently, the commonplaces can be analyzed as a means with which the translators constructed their “selves” to provide their credentials, establish their relations to contemporary science, indicate the novelties they brought to it, and show their relations to translation theory. Finally, the statements made by translators could be set against other contemporary narratives, be they private or public (the use of non-Christian knowledge in education and public discourse),56 political57 (e.g., the translatio studii et imperii),58 or social (for instance, utilitas),59 to show how translators construct self-representation in a social or political dimension. The investigation of topoi in the prefaces is closely linked to the systematic study of the social background of Greek-Latin translators on the basis of available sources. Accordingly, textual analysis is combined with historical research to further a nuanced understanding of the social positions of the translators and their networks.

Networks and Patrons

I also seek to understand the social factors that helped or hampered the successful circulation of translations. In order to achieve this goal, one must 1) construct a prosopography-centred dissemination history of translations and 2) analyze the roles of patrons. How can one make sense of the bewildering variety of circumstances under which translations were produced? I will explore what made up for the gaps and inconsistencies that characterized specific translators’ translating activities, bridged subsequent generations of translators, or, alter­natively, fostered systematic results and the coherence of translators’ work in other cases. I seek explanations by exploring the socio-cultural contexts of translators who belonged to a network of scholars and patrons and who, even unconsciously, practiced a division of labor that ultimately was responsible for producing an array of texts that suited their needs. I depart from the assumptions that 1) a scholarly community consisting of translators, scholars, and patrons was responsible for the coherence behind translations and the systematic results and, 2) their activities and efforts to make new texts accessible to a Western audience were influenced by filtering factors of textual transmission.

The first topic to be discussed is the question of the scholarly community, namely of a new social group which, as Jacques Le Goff and Jacques Verger have shown,60 came into being in the eleventh century and continued to place increasingly prominent roles in intellectual exchange: the medieval men of learning. I plan to explore this group as audience and initiators of translations and analyze the specificities of this community to understand better the conditions that shaped the production of translations. A crucial question to answer is how masters in cathedral schools and, after c. 1200, the university elite, including teachers and top-tier students, became the primary audience of translated texts.61 In this knowledge-production procedure, patrons played a crucial role. So far, patrons have been studied only on a case-by-case basis,62 and there is no coherent account of translators’ patrons that includes the impact of the shifting educational paradigm (monastic learning-cathedral school-university) and assesses the roles of different (princely, royal, papal) courts.

One major task is to forge a prosopography-centered dissemination history of published translated texts, studying the process as it unfolded until new materials become available and accessible to the interested public. This involves tracing the translators’ networks, i.e., translators’ personal connections from their perspective, and exploring the knowledge hubs/ learned networks that played crucial roles in the reception of the translated texts. The study of translators’ networks inevitably involves exploring textual dissemination patterns. Concerning textual dissemination, micro and macro levels can be identified. The micro-level refers to the milieu of the translator and first addressee(s) of the translated material involving the actual production circumstances. The macro-level refers to the spread of the translated text to a broader scholarly community and to knowledge hubs such as courts, schools, and universities. This might happen, e.g. through a ruler’s letter,69 monastic networks,70 or university copy houses (the stationarii in the pecia-system).71 From a methodological point of view, micro- and macro-level dissemination can be analysed using different source materials. The actual production circumstances might be found in the prologues to the translations and in documents related to the translators’ biographies. The macro level can be assessed only by studying the history of specific texts in great detail, which involves considerably more data than the study of the micro level.

Table 2. Number of surviving MSS of critically published translations

According to my preliminary overview, 49 percent of the textual corpus is critically edited, which is a prerequisite for a feasible and representative dissemination survey. Editors considered 2372 manuscripts to produce their texts, 66 percent of which had been copied within a century after the translators produced their first versions (Chart 1 above). Chart 2 shows that 87 percent of the texts survived in less than 50 witnesses (33 percent less than 10). The arguably high number of manuscripts significantly drops if one deducts the 6 percent of more than 100 witnesses, constituted by such works as Aristoteles’ Posterior Analytics or Metaphysics. More importantly, by drawing manuscript branches, the editors singled out which manuscripts would constitute the target of my research. I will focus on the “root manuscripts” that served as the basis for later copies. In the case of the Posterior Analytics (James of Venice’s eleventh-century translation), this means 10 out of the 289 witnesses.72 Moerbeke’s thirteenth-century translation of the Metaphysics survived in 202 manuscripts, which can be traced back to two Paris University manuscripts (copied in 23 smaller textual units-peciae) and six Italian witnesses.73 Based on the critical editions, manuscript catalogues, and consulting manuscripts, I will consider which people were connected to specific manuscripts and assess their roles in making texts accessible. My aim is to arrive at an understanding on a quantitative-empirical basis of how translated texts surpassed the threshold of the micro-level and reached the macro-level and became more widely accessible by being read, cited, and commented upon. This limitation is based on the scheme that Michael McVaugh established to study Galen’s university reception (see also the next unit).74 McVaugh distinguished between availability (the existence of a translation), accessibility (the specific translation was within the reach of particular groups), and adaptation (the scholarly community studied and interiorized the new text). By setting the limiting criteria of accessibility, my research focuses on the collective decision-making process of introducing new materials instead of assessing the adaptation process, which has been relatively well-researched by historians of the specific fields.

With regards to agency, the micro-level involves the translators and the patron. The patron existed as a commissioner (for instance, the pope in the case of Burgundio of Pisa)75 a financial sponsor (wealthy Amalfitan merchants in Constantinople),76 or simply the individual who gave the idea of translating specific texts (the Aragonese envoy Ramón de Moncada to Leo Tuscus).77 Sometimes, these roles overlapped. The study of patronage involves assessing its changing motivations and goals in secular, religious (ecclesiastical–monastic), and educational contexts: the importance of Benedictine and mendicant patronage (e.g. Monte Cassino’s essential role in manuscript production and housing Constantine the African’s medical project in the late eleventh century,78 or the role played by the Dominican cultural programme in William of Moerbeke’ translations),79 and the shift towards cathedral schools and universities. The roles played by courts in the selection of new texts from Greek is also to be investigated, such as the Papal Curia and Southern Italy under Norman,80 Hohenstaufen (translations from Greek were made especially during the reign of Manfred [r. 1258–1266]),81 and Angevin rulers.

Reaching the Audience: The Degree of Transmission

One important methodological challenge that I will tackle is the varying level of success that translations reached. In some cases (as e. g., I have argued),82 translators produced systematic results. This is particularly true of such cases as Aristotle83 or Galen,84 which were large corpora that successive generations of translators rendered into Latin step by step. Self-standing texts of great importance, such as John Damascene’s Creed/De fide orthodoxa, were also sought and seem to have entered into academic use relatively quickly. Éloi Buytaert has shown that the Creed was translated on the fringes of Latinate Europe (in the Hungarian Kingdom) ca. 1135, but within fifteen years Peter Lombard was already using it in Paris.85 Shortly afterwards, Burgundio of Pisa retranslated the entire work, which Robert Grosseteste reworked in the thirteenth century according to the new academic tastes.86 In contrast, several case studies show that translations were produced under accidental circumstances.87 Moreover, Greek-Latin translators seem to have worked in isolation: they were aware of previous results, but there is little evidence to suggest that they undertook shared projects with their contemporaries.88

To assess dissemination dynamics, I single out filtering factors that impacted the availability and accessibility of texts. These factors complement personal agency but crucially affected textual histories and the degree of transmission. Some texts did not even reach the macro-level or did not circulate widely for reasons that have only been partly identified. Based on case studies of Aristotelian translations, Pieter de Leemans emphasized the importance of external and internal transmission criteria.89

Leemans’ external criteria highlight the circumstances that helped or hampered the procedure through which a text became accessible to its audience. These included accidental events (e. g. some of the model manuscripts were lost in a shipwreck in the case of Constantine the African),90 competing translations from Arabic (see for instance the few people who read Moerbeke’s translation of Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos from Greek)91 the association of authority with translations (e. g. Thomas Aquinas with Moerbeke’s oeuvre)92 etc. Leemans identifies the correct understanding of the text’s content and message as the internal criterion. I expand this interpretation and seek to understand what roles translators played in successfully transmitting specific contents.

I plan to examine, first, the specific contents transmitted by translators on different levels. This includes studying the lists translators made, which can be considered their first direct contribution to Western scholarship. Henry Aristippus (eleventh century), for instance, translated Aristotle’s life from Greek, which contained a list of the philosopher’s works;93 or Burgundio of Pisa was asked by a Salernitan physician to provide a list of the Galenic works.94 Afterwards, I consider how these lists became new canons in the respective fields. Furthermore, having obtained their intellectualized bilingual skills, translators had access not only to the languages themselves but also to Greek and Arabic systems of thought. Scholars have shown, for instance, that from the eleventh century the late antique Alexandrian medical canon influenced translators’ agendas (in the case of Constantine the African;95 or Burgundio of Pisa).96 Likewise, Alexander Fidora explained97 that the translator and scholar Dominicus Gundissalinus (ca. 1110–1190), in his On the Division of Philosophy, synthesised Latinate tradition (Holy Scripture, Boethius, and Isidore of Seville) with the corpus of Aristotle, which he consulted mainly in Arabic, alongside the explanatory teachings of al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, among others.98 So, first, I will single out a set of transmission criteria considering the multilevel ways in which translators’ knowledge was imported.

Second, I consider how such developments were connected to a changing educational environment in which the primary venue of scholarly study and discussion shifted from monastic to cathedral schools and universities. My primary focus is on how the newly translated texts found a place in or remained outside of this framework and how they transformed it.

Third, I assess the varying pace of the introduction of new knowledge produced by translators. In doing so, I depart from the premises of previous scholarship,99 which claims that the result of external knowledge import was ubiquitous by the thirteenth century in higher education: Aristotle’s oeuvre superseded the previous medieval curriculum in the nascent universities. In contrast, Michael McVaugh argues that in medicine, novel texts entered curricula only decades after their production because the established terminology only gradually gave way to new terminology.100

In addition, I also analyze the mechanisms of translators’ knowledge import by focusing on the field that was a thirteenth-century innovation and was substantially influenced by translators: university education. For reasons of feasibility, I plan to study knowledge import in medical education, which constituted one of the three higher university faculties. I will examine the availability and reception of Galen’s works translated from Greek. The main questions are the following: 1) How can successive stages of the arrival of the “new Galen” be described from the viewpoint of translations from Greek considering multi-level knowledge import (lists of texts, texts, and coherent corpora, such as curricula)? 2) Which Galenic works became more successful and which remained marginal and why? 3) How did medical knowledge hubs/receiving contexts define this procedure ca. 1100–1350? Galen (129–216 AD) was a key medical authority in the Middle Ages.101 The Galeno Latino project provides a comprehensive dataset of Galen’s oeuvre in Latin, inventorying Greek and Arabic translators and translations, alongside their manuscripts.102 The census of manuscripts has proven that a larger corpus (some 25 works) entered Western curricula by the mid-thirteenth century through Arabic and Latin translations.103 The success of translations from Arabic104 and Greek105 has been sketched, and the first synthesis about their reception at universities has been made.106 I will expand McVaugh’s analytical framework to the period as a whole. In order to solve the problem of diachronic relations between successive translators and their translations, my research employs McVaugh’s availability, accessibility, and adaptation scheme.107 Scholars have shown that it took a relatively long time for new Galenic texts to enter circulation after having been produced. It has also been argued that translations from Arabic played the primary role in establishing medical vocabulary, even though medieval physicians and university teachers acknowledged the linguistic superiority of translations from Greek. The fourteenth-century case of Montpellier has proven that more practical masters did not wish to create a new vocabulary based on Greek models, since it had taken some fifty years for a coherent medical language to have been established, at last, from Arabic.108 While this idea has been accepted,109 the details should be subjected to a systematic survey which analyses additional factors, such as the importance of different academic genres.

Conclusions

The model I propose presents prerequisites and working mechanisms of a knowledge transfer process. This process substantially (re)shaped the institutionalization of learning in Latin-using Europe between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries and gave a decisive impetus to intellectual currents of the period. This model considers the knowledge import process as a series of decisions. By using these ideas as a critical framework and point of departure for research, I propose to further a richer understanding of the work and endeavors of the key figures who played major roles, as translators, in the late medieval Western European intellectual shift. In addition, this research also illustrates how the birth and development of ground-breaking notions and systems of thought came into being as the products of interactions among individuals and groups as well as historical, context-dependent influences.

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1. 1 See below p. xx for examples from the field of late medieval Greek-Latin translations.

2. 2 Students of Arabic, to name some important contributors as Dimitri Gutas, Dag Nikolaus Hasse, and Daniel G. König, made substantial advances in their specific research fields (I discuss König’s results below, some works of the other two are included among the references). Earlier researchers, such as Charles Homer Haskins, Marie Thérèse d’ Alverny and Walter Berschin analyzed Greek to Latin and Arabic to Latin translations between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Their results are partly summarized below.

3. 3 Green, “Medical Books,” 277 and 281.

4. 4 For an up-to-date overview of translations from Greek to Latin, consult Bara, “Greek Thought, Latin Culture.”

5. 5 Haskins, Studies in the History of Medieval Science; Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century; Benson and Constable, eds., Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century.

6. 6 Cf. Bara and Toma, Latin Translations of Greek Texts, ix.

7. 7 Haskins, Studies, 142, 156.

8. 8 Angold, “The Norman Sicilian Court,” 147–49.

9. 9 Becker, “Multilingualism.”

10. 10 Haskins, Studies, 147–48.

11. 11 For instance, Exarchos, Lateiner am Kaiserhof in Konstantinopel, 56.

12. 12 d’Alverny, ‘Translations and Translators’; Berschin, Greek Letters and the Latin Middle Ages.

13. 13 https://hiw.kuleuven.be/dwmc/research/al. Last accessed April 4, 2025.

14. 14 Clagett, Archimedes in the Middle Ages.

15. 15 Angold, “The Norman Sicilian Court”; Leemans, ed., Translating at Court.

16. 16 Amerini and Galluzzo, A Companion to The Latin Medieval Commentaries on Aristotle’s Metaphysics.

17. 17 Bydén and Radovic, The Parva Naturalia in Greek, Arabic and Latin Aristotelianism.

18. 18 König, “Sociolinguistic Infrastructures,” 33–55.

19. 19 König, “Sociolinguistic Infrastructures,” 17–20.

20. 20 Gaul, Thomas Magistros und die spätbyzantische Sophistik, 125–31.

21. 21 Giraud, A Companion to Twelfth-Century Schools.

22. 22 De Ridder-Symoens, A History of the University in Europe, vol. 1, Universities in the Middle Ages.

23. 23 Verger, Les gens de savoir, 9–48.

24. 24 Giraud and Mews, “John of Salisbury and the Schools of the 12th Century.” See also Giraud, “La naissance des intellectuels au XIIe siècle.”

25. 25 Witt, L’eccezione italiana.

26. 26 Ferruolo, The Origins of University: The Schools of Paris and Their Critics.

27. 27 Mounteer, “English Learning in the Late Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Century.”

28. 28 Joachim Ehlers, “Die hohen Schulen.”

29. 29 Lemerle, Byzantine Humanism.

30. 30 Steckel and Grünbart, Networks of Learning.

31. 31 Constantinides, Higher Education in Byzantium in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries.

32. 32 Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 316–413.

33. 33 Gaul, Thomas Magistros und die spätbyzantische Sophistik.

34. 34 Bara, “Greek-Latin Translators on the Move, 1050–1200.”

35. 35 Ciggaar, Western Travellers to Constantinople.

36. 36 Discussed for instance in Nicol, Byzantium and Venice; Jacoby, Travellers, Merchants and Settlers in the Eastern Mediterranean; Laiou and Morrisson, Byzantium and the Other.

37. 37 Cigaar, “Réfugiés et employés occidentaux au XIe siècle”; Rodriguez Suarez, “The Western Presence in the Byzantine Empire,” 28–47, 70–102. Military studies are relevant particularly in the case of Hugo Heteriano, about whom Antoine Dondaine suggested that he may had been an imperial bodyguard, see Dondaine, “Hugues Éthérien et Léon Toscan,” 73–74.

38. 38 Shepard, Byzantine Diplomacy; Drocourt, Diplomatie sur le Bosphore.

39. 39 Exarchos, Lateiner am Kaiserhof in Konstantinopel.

40. 40 Rapp and Preiser-Kapeller, Mobility and Migration in Byzantium.

41. 41 Such as Ebessen, “Jacques de Venise;” Nutton, “Niccolò in Context;” Exarchos, Lateiner am Kaiserhof in Konstantinopel, esp. 35–65.

42. 42 Jaspert et al., Cultural Brokers at Mediterranean Courts; Exarchos, Lateiner am Kaiserhof in Konstantinopel. For “go-betweens” in the early modern period, see Höfele and Koppenfels, Renaissance Go-Betweens.

43. 43 Fludernik and Gehrke, eds., Grenzgänger zwischen Kulturen.

44. 44 Fidora, Die Wissenschaftstheorie des Dominicus Gundissalinus.

45. 45 Urso, “In Search of Perfect Equivalence.”

46. 46 Chiesa, “Ambiente e tradizioni.”

47. 47 Berlier, “Niccolò da Reggio traducteur du De usu partium de Galien.”

48. 48 Burnett, Gutas, and Vagelpohl, Why Translate Science?

49. 49 Mártinez-Gázquez, The Attitude of the Medieval Latin Translators.

50. 50 Bara, “Who Was the Author.”

51. 51 Classen, Burgundio von Pisa.

52. 52 Exarchos, Lateiner am Kaiserhof in Konstantinopel, esp. 119–29.

53. 53 Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages.

54. 54 Forrai, “Hostili Praedo Ditetur Lingua Latina.”

55. 55 Pratsch, Der hagiographische Topos.

56. 56 Folliet, “La Spoliatio Aegyptiorum.”

57. 57 Campbell, “The Politics of Medieval European Translation.”

58. 58 Gassman, “Translatio Studii.”

59. 59 Verger, Les gens de savoir, parts ii, iii; Gosman, “Alexander the Great as the Icon of Perfection.”

60. 60 Le Goff, Les intellectuels; Verger, Les gens de savoir.

61. 61 De Ridder-Symoens, A History of the University in Europe, vol. 1, iv.

62. 62 E. g., Oldoni, “La promozione della scienza: L’ Università di Napoli”; Leemans, ed., Translating at the Court. On the notion of translators’ “self-sponsorship,” see Bara, “Greek-Latin Translators on the Move, 1050–1200.”

63. 63 Forrai, “Hostili Praedo Ditetur Lingua Latina,” 128–33.

64. 64 Burnett, Gutas, and Vagelpohl, eds., Why Translate Science?, 445–544.

65. 65 Théry, “Documents concernant Jean Sarrazin.”

66. 66 Federici Vescovini, Pietro d’ Abano tra storia e leggenda, 11–27.

67. 67 Boethius. In Porphyrii Isagogen commentorum editio secunda, Chapter 1.

68. 68 Burnett, “Translation and Transmission,” 354–56.

69. 69 Delle Donne, “Un’ inedita epistola sulla morte di Guglielmo de Luna,” 225–38.

70. 70 Kaska, “Zur hochmittelalterlichen Überlieferung von Maximus Confessor,” 221–39.

71. 71 Beullens and De Leemans, “Aristote à Paris: Le système de la Pecia.”

72. 72 Minio-Paluello and Dod, Analytica posteriora, vol. 1, xxxix. Another twelfth-century example is the Ethica vetus: of the 48 manuscripts, five are considered “root manuscripts” (Gauthier, Ethica Nicomachea, vol. 1, xxi).

73. 73 Vuillemin-Diem, Metaphysica, lib. I-XIV, 55–115. See also Robert Grosseteste’s translation of the Nicomachean Ethics (recensio L): the 36 manuscripts are grouped into seven classes, each containing between three and seven witnesses (Gauthier, Ethica Nicomachea, vol. 1, clxxiv–lxxxvi).

74. 74 McVaugh, “Galen in the Medieval Universities, 1200–1400,” 381–89.

75. 75 Buytaert, De fide orthodoxa, ix–xv.

76. 76 Chiesa, “Ambiente e tradizioni,” 540–42.

77. 77 Jacob, “La traduction de la Liturgie de saint Jean Chrysostome,” 112–20.

78. 78 Green, “Medical Books,” 279–86.

79. 79 Beullens, The Friar and the Philosopher, 69–71.

80. 80 Angold, “The Norman Sicilian Court.”

81. 81 Leemans, Translating at Court, xii–xxviii.

82. 82 Bara, “Greek Thought, Latin Culture,” 62–67.

83. 83 Brams, La riscoperta di Aristotele.

84. 84 Zipser and Bouras-Vallianatos, Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Galen.

85. 85 Buytaert, De fide orthodoxa, xlviii–liii.

86. 86 Burnett, “The Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” 367–68.

87. 87 Bara, “Greek Thought, Latin Culture,” 22–61.

88. 88 Steel, “Guillaume de Moerbeke et Saint Thomas”; Beullens, “A Methodological Approach,” 155–59.

89. 89 Leemans, “Aristotle Transmitted,” 330–38.

90. 90 Veit, “Quellenkundliches zu Leben,” 133.

91. 91 Vuillemin-Diem and Steel, Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, 39–48.

92. 92 Beullens, The Friar and the Philosopher, 77–82.

93. 93 Dorandi, Diogenes Laertius, 9.

94. 94 Durling, “Burgundio of Pisa and Medical Humanists,” 96–99.

95. 95 Green, “Gloriosissimus Galienus,” 324–36.

96. 96 Fortuna and Urso, “Burgundio da Pisa traduttore di Galeno,” 147–49.

97. 97 Fidora, Die Wissenschaftstheorie, 23–97.

98. 98 Fidora and Polloni, “Ordering the Sciences,” 115–30.

99. 99 For instance, De Ridder-Symoens, A History of the University in Europe, vol. 1, iv.

100. 100 McVaugh, “Galen in the Medieval Universities, 1200–1400,” 380–90.

101. 101 Jacquart, “Principales étapes dans la transmission des textes de médecine”; Zipser and Bouras-Vallianatos, Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Galen.

102. 102 https://www.galenolatino.com. Last accessed April 4, 2025.

103. 103 Green, “Gloriosissimus Galienus.”

104. 104 Lond, “Arabic-Latin Translations.”

105. 105 Urso, “Translating Galen in the Medieval West.”

106. 106 McVaugh, “Galen in the Medieval Universities, 1200–1400.”

107. 107 See also above.

108. 108 McVaugh, “Niccolò Da Reggio’s Translations of Galen and Their Reception in France,” 290–300.

109. 109 For instance, Fortuna, “II Corpus delle traduzioni di Niccolò da Reggio,” 288.

Coherence of Translation Programs and the Contexts of Translation
Movements, ca. 1000–1700 AD

Péter Bara

HUN-REN Research Center for the Humanities, Institute of History

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 2 (2025): 155-157 DOI 10.38145/2025.2.155 

Why did pre-modern translators produce their translated texts? What societal, scholarly, and historical factors influenced their activities? How did such factors together create a coherent set of triggers behind translation efforts and the goals translators pursued? This Special Issue aims to explore the complex historical, literary, and material backgrounds that fostered the production of translations between an array of source and target languages, including Greek, Latin, Armenian, and various vernaculars. The essays span a broad timeframe, from the Middle Ages to the end of the Renaissance. The volume investigates the motivations and enabling factors that facilitated the creation of translations and their reception by different audiences. The variety of source and target languages establishes a comparative framework that enriches our understanding of the translation process as a multifaceted historical phenomenon.

Péter Bara explores translations from Greek into Latin between 1050 and 1350. Instead of focusing on a specific translator or group of translators, the essay adopts a programmatic approach to the period in question. Bara seeks to explain how translations were produced against the backdrop of specific historical contexts and the defining characteristics of the epoch. Additionally, Bara emphasizes the societal dimension of translating texts from Greek into Latin. The essay conceptualizes translation as a decision-making process in which translators, scholars, and patrons acted as key agents. The model he proposes takes into account the influence of audiences on the translation process. To this end, the essay identifies four hypotheses, each corresponding to a distinct research area.

Hiram Kümper studies the Fecunda ratis, an eleventh-century Latin didactic poem. The essay highlights several historical and cultural contexts that decisively shaped the poem’s content and generated new knowledge through their interaction. Egbert of Liège, the author, composed the poem for an audience at the cathedral school of Liège. The poem survives in a single manuscript, which shows signs of extensive use. It served to prepare students for proper, exemplary Christian conduct and for later specialization in theology. Accordingly, the second book contains versified passages from the Bible and the Church Fathers. By contrast, the first book is a collection of popular wisdom sayings translated from the vernacular into Latin verse. Kümper closely examines how vernacular sayings entered Latin thought, using contemporary theoretical literature as an analytical framework. He develops a typology of transmission and traces how popular proverbs were transformed into high-register, classicizing Latin. Kümper demonstrates that Egbert used these sayings as case studies for ethical dilemmas–personal relationships, familial obligations, and individual responsibilities–that could be memorized. The essay concludes by situating the Fecunda ratis within the broader context of eleventh-century Western pedagogical culture.

Gohar Muradyan investigates the influence of Greek and Latin models on fourteenth-century Armenian grammatical theory. Her paper demonstrates how the arrival of Catholic missionaries in late medieval Armenia created new conditions for knowledge transfer. The essay centers on the figure of Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i and his grammatical treatise On Grammar. K‘ṛnets‘i belonged to a group of Armenians known as the fratres unitores, who accepted the Catholic faith and maintained close ties with Dominican missionaries. Muradyan underscores the importance of their literary work as translators and original authors and provides a list of published works produced by the unitores. She shows that K‘ṛnets‘i based his grammar on Greek and Latin grammatical theory. After reviewing previous scholarly contributions, Muradyan examines numerous newly identified passages in K‘ṛnets‘i’s grammar, arguing that the influence of the Latin grammarian Priscian and his commentator Petrus Helias is more substantial than earlier scholars had assumed.

Daniel Vaucher investigates the intricate transmission and transformation of the Prayer of Cyprian. This apotropaic prayer was traditionally attributed to Cyprian of Antioch, who was revered both as a magician and as a Christian martyr. Originally composed in Greek, the prayer crossed geographical and linguistic boundaries, appearing in Latin and multiple European vernaculars by the Renaissance. Vaucher argues that despite regional adaptations and ecclesiastical scrutiny, the prayer’s core structure and mythic framework remain rooted in Byzantine spiritual and ritual traditions. The essay proceeds in five stages. First, Vaucher shows that despite its Christian orientation, the prayer functioned both as an exorcism and a talisman, thereby blurring the line between liturgy and magic. The second section examines the Greek manuscript tradition, identifying ten extant copies from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These are divided into two functional categories: scholarly anthologies and practical ritual handbooks. Vaucher highlights manuscripts from southern Italy, Crete, and Cyprus, emphasizing their role in the transmission of Byzantine magical-exorcistic literature to Western Europe. The third section analyzes the Western vernacular translations–Latin, Spanish, Italian, and Catalan versions that began to appear in the fifteenth century. These often took the form of small-format manuals intended for popular or private use. In the fourth section, Vaucher offers a comparative philological analysis of corresponding passages in the Greek, Latin, Spanish, and Catalan versions. These reveal strong textual parallels, especially in key motifs such as demonic control over nature, binding spells, and divine liberation. The final section addresses the growing concern of the Inquisition with the Prayer of Cyprian. Despite efforts to suppress it, the prayer continued to circulate and evolve. Vaucher concludes that the Prayer of Cyprian exemplifies the long-term, translingual, and transcultural transmission of ritual literature.

Alessandro Orengo provides a detailed analysis of Oskan vardapet Erewanc‘i (1614–1674), the influential Armenian printer, scholar, and translator. Erewanc‘i’s biography illustrates how geographical movement shaped translators’ accomplishments. Born in New Julfa, he traveled across Armenia and Poland before eventually settling in Amsterdam. Educated in part by the Dominican missionary Paolo Piromalli, Oskan translated and abridged the first two books of Tommaso Campanella’s Grammaticalia. His Armenian versions–one surviving in manuscript, the other as a printed abridgement–demonstrate both fidelity to Latin grammatical structures and critical adaptation to the Armenian linguistic system. He frequently points out where Latin grammatical categories, such as gender or the superlative, do not apply to Armenian. Oskan also translated an abridged version of Koriwn’s Life of Mesrop into Latin, dictating it to François Pétis de la Croix. While the translation is largely faithful, it contains minor interpretive errors, likely due to oral transmission. Oskan’s work exemplifies the seventeenth-century phenomenon of grammatization, in which Latin served as a universal linguistic model. His translations not only bridged cultural divides but also contributed to the modernization of Armenian grammatical scholarship, balancing inherited traditions with evolving European linguistic frameworks.

The History of the Macsó and Barancs Territories until 1316

Bálint Ternovácz

Budapest City Archives

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 1 (2025): 127-146 DOI 10.38145/2025.1.127

In the early thirteenth century, the Kingdom of Hungary took control of the northern Balkan territories situated between the Drina, Sava, and Danube Rivers. This region was known as Trans-Syrmia or Sirmia Ulterior, though Southern Slavic sources commonly referred to it simply as Syrmia. At the time, this name referred to all the land south of Hungary’s borders and east of the Drina, without clearly defined boundaries. Apart from a brief period in the 1270s when forming banates was attempted, these lands were controlled by the women of the Árpád dynasty and their husbands until 1319. In 1284, the former King of Serbia, Dragutin was granted Macsó, along with Bosnia, Belgrade, and Barancs-Kucsó, and attempted to establish a vassal state of Hungary. After his death in 1316, his son Vladislav lost control, allowing King Milutin of Serbia to seize Macsó. In response, King Charles I of Hungary launched a military campaign, reclaiming the territory by 1319 and reinstating the banate and the title of ban was then given to Hungarian noble families as an honor. This study examines the history and administration of the territories known in secondary literature as the Banate of Macsó and Barancs, covering the period up to 1319 and the military campaigns of King Charles I of Hungary.

Keywords: Syrmia, Macsó, Kingdom of Hungary, Serbia, Angevin dynasty

The interest of the Kingdom of Hungary in the territory of the northern Balkans, bordered by the Drina, Sava, and Danube Rivers, reached the point of military expansion at the end of the twelfth century, as the Hungarian crown was able to take advantage of Byzantine internal struggles following the death of Byzantine Emperor Manuel Komnenos (1143–1180). These territories, known as the Trans-Syrmia or Macsó (Mačva in Serbian) and Barancs (Braničevo in Serbian), began to come into closer contact with the Kingdom of Hungary in the early thirteenth century. With the exception of the 1270s (when an attempt was made to turn the territories south of the Sava-Danube line into a so-called banate, i.e. a frontier province governed by a governor or “ban”), the women of the Árpád dynasty and their husbands held these lands until 1319.

Research into the history of the area is complicated by the fact that there is no known surviving archival source base in the archives in Serbia and Bulgaria. We can reconstruct the events of the more than one hundred years covered in this paper mainly on the basis of Hungarian source material. Narrative sources, such as the Chronicle of Antivari or the work of Serbian Archbishop Danilo II,1 make only passing mention of the areas under study. In the discussion below, I reconstruct the history of the administration of the territories referred to in the secondary literature as the Banate of Macsó and Barancs from the beginning until 1319, until the military campaigns of King Charles I of Hungary (1310–1342).

The Banate of Macsó in Hungarian and South Slavic Historiography

The history and archontology of the banate and bans of Macsó were first dealt with by Frigyes Pesty in his study published in 1875.2 The first monograph that dealt with the subject was an introductory study to the source publication compiled by Lajos Thallóczy and Antal Áldásy on the connections between Hungary and Serbia, published in 1907.3 In this study, however, the Macsó region was mentioned more as a place of diplomacy or warfare between the Hungarian kings and the Serbian rulers, without no discussion whatsoever of the process by which the territories south of the Sava River, surrounded by the Kolubara and the Drina Rivers, were organized into a Hungarian dependent territory in the thirteenth century. Thallóczy attempted to describe the topography of the Macsó province, and regarding this I would like to emphasize two main issues. In his opinion, the Macsó region extended across the Drina River, and he also included parts of Inner Syrmia and Szávaszentdemeter (today Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia). Another noteworthy detail concerning Thallóczy’s map is the location of the castle of Macsó, which he placed on the site of the present-day settlement of Valjevo.4 Alongside the introductory study to this source publication, the work of Lajos Faragó, published in 1911 in the Kaposvár State High School’s newsletter, also merits mention.5 The most recent comprehensive article on the history of Macsó in Hungarian was the encyclopedic glossary of the archaeological background of Macsó, written by Péter Rokay and Miklós Takács,6 which, being a glossary, does not contain the findings of independent research but rather offers a summary of the accepted conclusions of the existing secondary literature, mainly from the South Slavic territories. Other Hungarian researchers have touched on the thirteenth-century history of Macsó, of course, but not a single monograph has been written on the subject in the last hundred years. South Slavic (mainly Serbian) historians have shown much greater interest in the medieval history of the Macsó region. This increased interest is understandable, as the former Macsó region was and still is the province of Mačva, which was liberated from Ottoman occupation and is part of present day Serbia. I would like to highlight the work of two historians from among the writings by many South Slavic researchers. In doing so, I summarize the findings of South Slavic historians on Macsó.

Chronologically, the first work on which I focus was written by Mihajlo Dinić about the areas inhabited by Serbs in the Middle Ages.7 Although he dealt with the history of the name of Trans-Syrmia, which was used as the name of the territories south of the Sava River before the name Macsó appeared and was used from the mid-thirteenth century onwards, Dinić mainly focused on the reign of Dragutin in Syrmia (Srijem in Serbian).8 According to him, the Hungarians named the region Macsó, either because they already had a county called Syrmia (which was organically linked to the kingdom, as the county structure had already been formed) or because they wanted to name the newly acquired territory after its center.9 According to Dinić, Belgrade was part of Banate of Macsó when it was organized in the 1270s.10 He also described how the Serbian king Stephen Dragutin received the territory of Macsó after losing his throne,11 along with Usora, Soli, and Bosnia, from the Hungarian king Ladislas IV after June 11, 1284.12 Along with Macsó, Belgrade also fell into the hands of Dragutin, who then established his residence there.13 The territories ruled by Dragutin were called “the Syrmia territories” by his Serbian contemporaries, and Dragutin himself was called Stephen of Syrmia.14 Before the 1970s, the view that Dragutin had also ruled the inner parts of Syrmia was accepted in the Serbian secondary literature, but this notion was refuted in 1978 by Mihajlo Dinić.

Another noteworthy historical work on thirteenth-century Macsó in the South Slavic historiography is Sima Ćirković’s study published in 2008.15 According to Ćirković, present-day northern Serbia came into Hungarian hands in the late twelfth century.16 The province of Macsó as an institution had no Byzantine antecedents.17 The Byzantine administrative arrangement, with imperial offices and ecclesiastical centers in the larger cities, may have been preserved; the largest settlement may have been Sirmium around 1020. Referring to Byzantine sources, Ćirković claims that in the twelfth century not only Zimony (today Zemun in Serbia, north of the Sava River) but also Bács (today Bač in Serbia) on the left bank of the Danube was included in the territory of Syrmia.18 According to him, the names Inner-Syrmia19 and Trans-Syrmia,20 which referred to the area between the Danube River and the Sava River, and the area between the Drina, Sava, and Kolubara Rivers, may have been created at this time, around the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and clearly represented a Hungarian perspective.21 Among the Serbs, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the name Syrmia was used to refer to the area south of the Sava River, while among Hungarians, the name Syrmia was used only to refer to the Syrmia County between the Danube River and the Sava River. The Byzantine tradition, according to Ćirković, was established in Hungarian circles after the foundation of the bishopric of Syrmia in 1229, according to which the name Syrmia was used to refer to territories on both banks of the Sava River.22 The castle of Macsó could have stood there, hence the name of the area,23 but it is not possible to identify the precise location of the castle on the basis of archaeological or archival sources. Ćirković refutes Thallóczy’s view that the castle of Macsó would have been on the site of the present-day settlement of Valjevo. He does not attempt to pinpoint its exact location, but he explains that the castle could have been closer to Szávaszentdemeter than to Debrc, the center of Dragutin.24

According to him, the name Macsó was only used by the Hungarians. It does not appear in Serbian or Byzantine sources, and neither does Belgrade. The Orthodox Church sources mentioned only Sirmium as the suffragan bishopric of the Archbishop of Ohrid.25 He contends that in the early thirteenth century the region south of the Sava River was granted to Margaret, daughter of King Béla III, who was mentioned as the lady of Macsó. This territory had no defined borders. It extended as far as the Serbian territory of the Nemanjić dynasty.26 After the Mongol invasion, the province was given to Anna, daughter of King Béla IV of Hungary, and her husband Rostislav Mihailovich (who was then Duke of Macsó), and after Rostislav’s death in 1263, their sons Michael and Béla were given the title of Dukes of Macsó. Duke Béla was murdered in 1272, after which the bans of Macsó and Bosnia and the bans of Barancs and Kucsó appeared in the charters, while between 1280 and 1284 Queen Elizabeth was recorded as the duchess of Macsó and Bosnia.27 Ćirković did not analyze the reign of Dragutin in detail.

The most recent study of the medieval territorial extent of Macsó and the collection of medieval settlements in the territory of the banate of Macsó was carried out by Ana Vukadinović Šakanović, who focused her study on the late medieval conditions due to the more favorable availability of sources.28 Attila Pfeiffer wrote a summary study on the location of the Macsó castle.29 Đura Hardi studied the history of the lords of Macsó,30 and Márta Font wrote a thorough study on Rostislav Mihajlovich, who was a prominent lord of the province in the thirteenth century.31

In the Crossfire between Byzantium and the Kingdom of Hungary:
Trans-Syrmia at the End of the Twelfth Century

In the area bordered by the Danube, Drina, and Kolubara Rivers, which was called the Macsó territory from the thirteenth century onwards, Slavs probably settled at the encouragement of the Avars, but their presence is only indicated by place names, and archaeological finds do not support this theory. At the beginning of the ninth century, the area was captured by the Bulgarian Empire, and after this empire fell, from 1018, the area belonged to Byzantium.32

The name Syrmia, which also refers to the area south of the Sava River, first appeared in the twelfth century in the Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja. In the relevant part of the work, also known as the Chronicle of Antivari,33 in the description of the battle between Ban Beloš, who retreated after the death of King Béla II, and the Hungarians who attacked him, the name Syrmia in the chronicle referred to the territory south of the Sava River as well, since the Chronicle mentioned the town of Belyén (Bellina),34 which was south of the Sava River, as part of Syrmia (partes Sremi).35 That the presbyter meant the territory on the right bank of the Sava River as Beloš’ Syrmian parts is clear from the fact that when he wrote about the treaty after the battle lost by the Hungarians, he said that Beloš prohibited his opponents from crossing the Sava River from its beginning to the mouth of the Danube River, i.e. until Belgrade.36 The extent to which the presbyter had precise topographical knowledge of the southern borders of the Kingdom of Hungary is not known, but the southern Slavic literature accepts the description of the extent of Syrmia in the Chronicle.37 In my opinion, Ćirković’s view, according to which the distinction between the inner parts and Trans-Syrmia would have been established as early as the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, is not correct. Even if we accept the presbyter’s account, we can place the origin of the name in the mid-twelfth century at the earliest, but it is more likely that the author was mistaken in his use of the geographical name. In documentary sources, the name Inner and Trans-Syrmia first appears much later, in 1229, in the bull of Pope Gregory IX, dated March 3.38

After the death of Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Komnenos in 1180, Byzantine-­­Hungarian relations were characterized by a particular dichotomy. On the one hand, King Béla III of Hungary acted as a defender of Byzantine interests, while on other occasions, he sought to acquire territories that belonged to Byzantium. Regarding Byzantine-Hungarian relations, Ferenc Makk pointed out that the Kingdom of Hungary was always the active party, taking advantage of Byzantine political infighting, while Byzantium was the passive, defensive partner.39 In 1180–1182, King Béla III first reconquered the Croatian, Dalmatian, and Bosnian territories and also Syrmia, which were annexed by Emperor Manuel in 1167. In the second phase of the Hungarian expansion against Byzantium’s Balkan territories, between 1183 and 1185, as an ally of the Serbian Grand Duke Stephen Nemanja, who was fighting for independence from Constantinople, Béla III conquered the vast territory between Belgrade and Sofia. As a result of the Hungarian conquest in the Balkans, the Bulgarians also launched their own struggle for independence.40 Relations in the territories south of the Danube-Sava line changed completely. In 1185, the Kingdom of Hungary and Byzantium made peace, which King Béla III wanted to confirm with a dynastic marriage. His daughter Margaret was married to Emperor Isaac II (1185–1195), and Margaret received the Balkan territories between Belgrade and Sofia, which had been occupied by the Hungarians, as a dowry.41

Trans-Syrmia or Macsó in the Thirteenth Century

In 1204, during the Fourth Crusade, Byzantium was dissolved, but on its ashes a number of new states were born. The Serbs and Bulgarians, who had long fought for their independence, took advantage of the power vacuum to create their own states, with the territories south of the Danube River falling into Bulgarian hands. King Emeric of Hungary tried to arrange a crown for the Bulgarian Kolojan with the pope, who, recognizing the Hungarian king’s ambitions in the Balkans, bypassed Emeric and sent a crown directly to Kolojan. By accepting the papal crown, the Bulgarian Church was forced to join the Catholic Church. The (now united) Bulgarian Archbishop of Veliko Tarnovo was also given the title of Archbishop of all Bulgarians and Vlachs, bringing the orthodox bishoprics of Belgrade and Barancs under the jurisdiction of Veliko Tarnovo and thus into ecclesiastical union with Rome.42

After 1210 and by 1218 at the latest, King Andrew II of Hungary had recaptured the castles of Belgrade and Barancs, which had fallen into Bulgarian hands.43 After burying her third husband, King Béla III’s daughter Empress Margaret returned to Hungary in 1222,44 accompanied by her two sons, John (Kolojan),45 born to Emperor Isaac, and Gyletus47 (William), born to Margaret’s third husband, Nicholas Sentomna of Salona.46 In a charter issued by Pope Honorius III in 1227, Margaret was listed as a noblewoman and Empress of Constantinople, while John/Kolojan was only listed as a nobleman.47 Péter Gyetvai believes that John was listed as Prince of Syrmia in several charters of King Béla IV between 1240 and 1241,48 but I have found no evidence of this in the charters. The title of Prince of Syrmia did not exist at the time. He was first listed as lord of Syrmia (and count of Bács) in the spring of 1240.49 In his aforementioned bull of March 3, 1229, Pope Gregory IX wrote that the population of Trans-Syrmia ruled by Margaret was Greek-ritual regarding their religion, and they were mostly Greek and Slavic,50 and that the Latin bishopric of Syrmia, established in 1229, was intended to convert them to Rome.51 Although the diocese of Syrmia had its designated center at the time of its foundation, Kő (also known as Bánmonostor, today Banoštor in Serbia) or Kőér, at the northern foot of Fruška Gora, in Inner Syrmia, its jurisdiction extended mainly to the region of Trans-Syrmia.52

In 1232, after the Bulgarians had briefly gotten their hands on it, the territory of Belgrade and Barancs passed permanently into Hungarian hands.53 Pope Gregory IX, in his bull of March 21, 1232, asked the bishop of Csanád to investigate the Bulgarian bishops of Belgrade and Barancs, who had previously united with the Latin Church and who wished to remove themselves from the jurisdiction of Rome, and if they did not return to the allegiance of the Latin Church, to annex the two bishoprics to the Latin bishopric of Syrmia.54 This leads us to the conclusion that the territory of the Trans-Syrmia was not geographically defined. The term simply referred to the areas south of the Sava River and the Danube River that were under Hungarian rule, and in the years after 1220–1232, Belgrade and Barancs may have belonged to this territory. It is not known whether the two dioceses, which had moved away from Rome, were then incorporated into the bishopric of Syrmia. Around 1228, the Bulgarian Tsar John Asen II (1218–1241) broke the ecclesiastical union with Rome and established an autocephalous archbishopric in Veliko Tarnovo.55 In my view, the bishopric of Syrmia, based in Kő, could have exercised conversion and spiritual jurisdiction in the areas surrounded by the Drina, Sava, and Kolubara Rivers, later called the banate of Macsó. The orthodox bishoprics of Barancs and Belgrade (which belonged to the archbishopric of Ohrid before the rise of Veliko Tarnovo) were ecclesiastically attached to the Orthodox archbishop of Veliko Tarnovo and were secularly dependent on Hungary.

After the Mongol invasion, Béla IV gave the territories south of Sava River to his daughter Anna and her husband Rostislav Mihailovich, probably as early as 124756 but no later than 1254.57 The name Macsó first appeared in a charter in 1254. The use of the name Syrmia-Macsó for the territories south of the Sava River was not yet clear at that time. In his charter of December 17, 1256, King Béla IV issued a grant regarding land that was “in the district of Macsó, in the county of Syrmia, beyond the Sava.”58 At that time, it is clear that the name “Macsó” was used to refer to the area surrounded by the Drina, Sava, and Kolubara Rivers,59 as the area east of the Morava River was not yet under Hungarian rule.

The year 1247 was also a milestone in the history of the church in southern Hungary. It was then that the pope moved the seat of the bishopric of Syrmia from Kő, which was in the Inner Syrmia territories (which had been ravaged by the Mongols), to Szenternye (today Mačvanska Mitrovica in Serbia) in Trans-Syrmia.60 By this time, the Latin-rite ecclesiastical presence in the Macsó territories must have strengthened to such an extent that the bishop’s seat and the cathedral chapter could be moved there.

During his reign, Rostislav united the territories on the southern borders of the Kingdom of Hungary, from Bosnia to Barancs. He tried to keep good relations with the Bulgarian Tsar Michael I Asen (1246–1256) who married Rostislav’s daughter. In 1256, Tsar Michael was killed in a boyar revolt led by his cousin, Asen Kaliman.61 He seized power under the name Asen Kaliman II and married the widowed wife of Michael I Asen, but he died a few days later (with the widow’s help). In order to protect his daughter, Rostislav invaded Bulgaria, pushed all the way to Veliko Tarnovo, and laid siege to the city. He did not take Veliko Tarnovo, but retreated to Vidin, where he took the title of Tsar of Bulgaria in 1257.62 He managed to retain Vidin and the title of tsar, despite Bulgarian invasions, as well as Bosnia, Macsó, and the Barancs province until his death.63 The title of Duke of Macsó (like the earlier Trans-Syrmia) included the Barancs lands, in addition to the Macsó district defined above.64

Rostislav is referred to in the sources as the Duke of Macsó.65 Anna was men­tioned as Duchess of Macsó and Bosnia in a document dating from 1254–126466 and as Duchess of Galicia, Bosnia, and Macsó after her husband’s death in 1262.67

In the charter issued on December 17, 1256, King Béla IV defines the region of Trans-Syrmia in the following way when granting land: in county of Szerém, in the Macsó district located beyond the Sava.68

After the death of Rostislav, the title of Duke of Macsó and Bosnia was also held by the king’s youngest son, Béla.69 Duke Béla was surrounded by the power struggle between his uncle, the future King Stephen V, and his grandfather (in which he supported King Béla IV), and he was also attacked from the south by King Uroš I of Serbia.70 In this Serbian attack, Michael, son of Peter, of the Csák clan, later the count of Veszprém, came to the aid of Duke Béla and captured King Uroš’s son-in-law and son of the Serbian king’s master of treasury, for which he received a generous ransom.71 During the war, King Uroš I himself was taken prisoner by the Hungarians.72 Although Duke Béla was last mentioned in a charter in 1271,73 he died almost a year later, when he was murdered by Henrik Kőszegi in November 1272.74

The Banates of Macsó, Barancs and Kucsó

After the assassination of Duke Béla, Macsó was briefly organized as a banate. In 1272, the first documentary evidence of the new banates formed on the territories that were the vassals of the king of Hungary appeared: the bans of Macsó, Usora, Bosnia, Barancs, and Kucsó.75 The first known ban of Macsó was Roland of the Rátót clan (son of Domokos), who also held the office of the palatine of Hungary.76 It is interesting to note that in the year 1273 three persons were mentioned in the documents as bans of Macsó,77 and then between 1272 and 1279 five such officials were mentioned in the documents,78 all of whom held the title of ban of Bosnia apart from John, who seems to have been the exception, and Ákos of the Albert clan, who appeared only in a false document.79 From 1280, Queen Elizabeth’s titles included the title of Duchess of Macsó.80

After the death of Rostislav Mikhailovich in 1262, who had successfully retained and secured the Barancs province from the south with his Bulgarian conquests, his sons, Béla and Michael, shared the Barancs territories, and after Michael’s death in 1266, Béla remained the leader of Barancs, on the right bank of the Pek River, along with Bosnia and Macsó. In my opinion, the Barancs area at that time meant the area to the east of the border river of the banate of Macsó, Kolubara, bordered by the Danube River, including Belgrade. After the aforementioned murder of Béla in 1272, a ban was appointed to the head of the Barancs territories: Gregory the son of Mark of the Péc clan, who is mentioned in the documents as the ban of Kucsó and Barancs between 1272 and 1273.81

Kucsó was also situated on the right bank of the Pek River south of Barancs, and there are no significant sources from its earlier history. It probably shared the fate of Barancs, which was situated less than 40 km to the northwest. It was previously neither a religious nor a major administrative center. Like Barancs, Kucsó was ruled by Rostislav Mihailovich and his sons until the death of Duke Béla. It is possible that in 1272, when the new banates were formed, there were no separate banates of Barancs and Kucsó, but a single one made of the two territories. The case of Barancs-Kucsó was probably different from the case of Macsó and Bosnia,82 when the same person was appointed head of two provinces, which were historically and geographically separate but neighboring, sharing the fate of serving as a “buffer state.” Gregory the son of Mark of the Péc clan may have been ban of Kucsó-Barancs rather than the ban of Kucsó and the ban of Barancs. This question will probably never be answered with sufficient certainty, due to the extremely limited number of surviving sources. The name of Tekes’ son Stephen is mentioned in a source from 1279. Stephen only held the title of the ban of Kucsó.83 After this date, the title of ban of Barancs-Kucsó no longer appears in the sources, and neither Barancs nor Kucsó played a major role in the further history of medieval southern Hungary.

The Kingdom of Stephen Dragutin in Syrmia

As mentioned above, from 1280 to 1284, Queen Elizabeth, widow of King Stephen V of Hungary, held the title of Duchess of Macsó. Dragutin, the former Serbian king who had lost his throne in 1282 and had married Catherine of the Árpád dynasty (the daughter of Stephen V), received the territory of Macsó from his brother-in-law King Ladislas IV after June 11, 1284,84 as well as Usora, Soli, and Bosnia.85 Along with Macsó, Belgrade also passed into the hands of Dragutin, who could then create his residence there.86 The territories ruled by Dragutin were called “the Syrmian territories” by Serbian contemporaries, and Dragutin himself was called Stephen of Syrmia,87 the king of Syrmia. 88

Dragutin’s main ambition was to create a new Serbian state under his rule by unifying the kingdoms he had received from Ladislas IV. Presumably to prevent this, in 1291, Dorman and Kudelin, lords from Barancs, called in the Mongols (according to Ćirković, the Cumans),89 whom Ugrin of the Csák clan defeated at a port on the Sava River.90 By this time, Dragutin’s center had become Debrc, where he set up his court.91 One might ask why he did not make Belgrade his seat. In my view, Belgrade must have been a key fortress for the Hungarian king, and the Hungarian leadership could not have allowed Dragutin to establish the seat of his “Syrmian kingdom” in this strategically important settlement. Whether Belgrade was in the possession of Dragutin or the Hungarian king in the 1290s is not known for certain. According to a charter issued in 1298, the Mongols destroyed Macsó and then prepared to attack Hungary.92 A royal charter from March 20, 1310 states that the Serbian king Milutin, together with John of the Smaragd clan, son of Ajnárd, attacked Hungary and led devastating raids in the counties of Syrmia and Valkó.93 Dragutin died in 1316, and his son Vladislav inherited Macsó, but he was driven out from the territory by his uncle, King Milutin of Serbia in 1316.94

Between 1317 and 1319, there was a war between Hungary and Serbia for the Macsó territories occupied by King Milutin, and two campaigns were led by the Hungarians to retake the region. During the first campaign, in January 1317, the Hungarian army crossed the frozen Sava River to recapture Macsó, which had been occupied by the Serbs.95 In the cold winter weather, the port to cross the river was marked out by the count of Sopron, Nicholas, the son of Amádé from the Gutkeled clan, while on the other bank of the river, the Serbian army was waiting for them.96 Hungarians were also found in the Serbian army who previously had confronted King Charles of Hungary, namely Andrew, Lotár, and Dezső of the Gutkeled clan, the sons of Dénes, who was the son of Lotár.97 King Charles I of Hungary personally took part in the campaign, and he also captured the castle of Macsó that year98 and the castle of Kolobar (Kolubara).99 According to the contemporary documents, Paul Nagymartoni,100 Nicholas, the son of Amadé of the Gutkeled kindred who was the count of Sopron,101 Alexander Köcski,102 sons of Doroszló,103 Mark of Rady,104 the sons of Bereck of Bathur (of the Gutkeled clan) all fought in the war.105 After King Charles I recaptured the rest of the Serbian-occupied parts of the Macsó district, in early 1319,106 during the second campaign in Macsó, he restored the whole banate of Macsó. The office of ban was granted to Hungarian noble families, the Drugets, Ostfis, Garais, Horvatis, etc.107 On September 16, 1319, King Charles issued a charter in Macsó.108

Summary

The northern Balkan territories bordered by the Drina, Sava, and Danube Rivers came under the jurisdiction of the Kingdom of Hungary in the early thirteenth century. This region was called Trans Syrmia(s), Sirmia Ulterior, but Southern Slavic sources often referred to the area simply as Syrmia. At the time, this was understood to mean all the territory lying south of the borders of Hungary, east of the Drina, without any actual designated borders. Between 1230 and 1240, King Béla III’s daughter Margaret and her son John ruled the province of Trans-Syrmia as lady and lord of Syrmia. It was at this time that the Hungarian-ruled district of Macsó began to be permanently separated from the territories of Belgrade and Barancs, which were often harassed by Bulgarian military campaigns.

The territories of Trans-Syrmia (including Bosnia) were given to Rostislav Mihailovich between 1247 and 1254, who held the title of Duke of Bosnia and Macsó (Barancs and Belgrade were not among his titles, nor were they among the titles of his wife Anna). By taking Veliko Tarnovo, Rostislav gained the title of Bulgarian Tsar, securing Barancs and Belgrade from the southeast. After his death in 1262, the title of Lady of Macsó was held by his wife. He was succeeded as Duke of Macsó by his son Béla, who also shared the Barancs territories with his brother Michael. After the murder of Béla in 1272, the territory of Macsó became a banate for seven years (the title of ban of Macsó was mostly held by the same person as the ban of Bosnia). In 1284, the Serbian king Dragutin, who had lost his throne, was given Macsó, together with Bosnia (including Usora and Soli) and the territories of Belgrade and Barancs-Kucsó. According to Serbian sources, Dragutin attempted to establish a new kingdom as a Hungarian vassal state as King of Syrmia, but after his death in 1316, his son Vladislav failed to hold on to power. His uncle, King Milutin, conquered the Macsó territories (Belgrade may have remained in Hungarian hands, but the fate of Barancs is unknown). In the winter of 1317, King Charles I of Hungary personally led a campaign against Milutin, and by 1319, he had recaptured the Macsó territories, where he restored the institution of the banate of Macsó, and the title of ban was then conferred on Hungarian noble families as an honor.

Already in the thirteenth century, the areas between the Drina and Kolubara Rivers were referred to as the banate of Macsó in both historical literature and popular thought. It is clear from the above that this is incorrect: the name Macsó was first used for the region only in 1254, and the title of ban of Macsó appeared in the documents of the period under study between 1272 and 1279. It was only in the Angevin period, after 1319, that the institution of the Macsó banate took root.

Archival Sources

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára [Hungarian State Archives] (MNL OL)

Diplomatikai Fényképgyűjtemény (DF)

Diplomatikai Levéltár (DL)

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1. 1 Danilo II, Životi kraljeve.

2. 2 Pesti, “A macsói bánok.” The thirteenth century archontology of the bans of Macsó was also compiled by Mór Wertner, see Wertner, “Az Árpádkori bánok.”

3. 3 Thallóczy and Áldásy, Oklevéltár, 5–124.

4. 4 Ibid., 482–83.

5. 5 Faragó, “A macsói bánság.”

6. 6 Rokay and Takács, “Macsó,” 421.

7. 7 Dinić, Srpske zemlje, 140.

8. 8 Ibid., 44, 273.

9. 9 Ibid., 285.

10. 10 Ibid., 337.

11. 11 Ibid., 127. In fact, on June 11, 1284, Queen Elizabeth still bore the title of Princess of Macsó. Ibid., 132.

12. 12 After the dethronement of Dragutin, until 1284, when he received the Macsó-Bosnian territories from his brother-in-law, he was able to retain some areas between Raška and Trebinje. (See Dinić, Srpske zemlje, 124–26), and he still held part of Raška after 1284 (see Dinić, Srpske zemlje, 144, 281). The towns of Rudnik and Arilje also remained in Dragutin’s hands. In the latter he built a monastery where he was buried (Dinić, Srpske zemlje, 140–42, 144). Both during Dragutin’s reign in Serbia and after his abdication, Trebinje remained in the hands of the Serbian queen mother Queen Jelena (Dinić, Srpske zemlje, 145).

13. 13 Ibid., 337.

14. 14 Ibid., 281.

15. 15 Ćirković, “Zemlja Mačva.”

16. 16 Ibid., 3.

17. 17 Ibid., 4.

18. 18 Ibid., 7.

19. 19 In Latin Sirmia Citerior, in Serbian Ovostrani Srem.

20. 20 In Latin Sirmia Ulterior, in Serbian Onostrani Srem.

21. 21 For more on the topic see Ćirković, “Zemlja Mačva,” 7; Dinić, Srpske zemlje, 140.

22. 22 Ibid., 7.

23. 23 Ibid., 4.

24. 24 Ibid., 3–4.

25. 25 Ibid., 8.

26. 26 Ibid., 4.

27. 27 Ibid., 6.

28. 28 Vukadinović Šakanović, “Teritorija.”

29. 29 Pfeiffer, “Macsói Bánság.”

30. 30 Hardi, “Gospodari”; Hardi, Itinerarij.

31. 31 Font, “Rosztyiszlav.”

32. 32 Rokay and Takács, “Macsó,” 421.

33. 33 The Chronicle also known as Regnum Sclavorum. See Šišić, Ljetopis; Mošin, Ljetopis; Mužić, Ljetopis, 255–98.

34. 34 “Et non multum longe ab eadem ecclesia in uno monticulo construxit rex castellum, vocavitque illud suo nomine Bello. […] Post haec caepit rex [Beloš] preambulare per terram et per regnum suum. Quodam itaque tempore, dum esset rex in partibus Sremi, Sremani congregantes se cum Ungaris commiserunt praelium cum rege. In quo loco ceciderunt Sremani cum Ungaris, et facta est eis contritio magna. Ab illo ergo die dicta est planities illa, in qua factum (est) praelium, Bellina, nomine regis ob victoriam, quam habuit ibi rex, usque hodie. Post haec Ungari ad regem miserunt quaerendo pacem.” Mužić, Ljetopis, 273.

35. 35 On the location of Belyén (today Beljin, Serbia) see Ternovácz, “A szerémi püspökség,” 463, foot­note no. 49.

36. 36 “Rex praeterea fecit pactum cum eis hoc modo: ut ab illo die in antea non auderent transire flumen Sava, et a loco unde surgit, et sicut currit usque quo intrat in magno flumine Donavi, neque homines regis transirent in illam partem, neque illi in istam.” Mužić, Ljetopis, 273.

37. 37 Dinić, Srpske zemlje, 273, Šišić, Ljetopis, 321.

38. 38 Smičiklas, Codex diplomaticus, vol. 3, 305–6.

39. 39 Makk, Magyar külpolitika, 212.

40. 40 Ibid., 213.

41. 41 Ibid., 213–14. See also Hardi, “Gospodari,” 67–68.

42. 42 Bárány, “II. András balkáni külpolitikája,” 134. In the case of the Orthodox Church of Serbia, the union between the Roman and Greek Church quickly failed, as in 1219–1220 the Autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church was founded, headed by Saint Sava, the first Serbian archbishop. See ibid., 143.

43. 43 Fine, The Late Medieval, 102; see also Gyetvai, Egyházi szervezés, 55; according to Attila Bárány, Barancs and Belgrade were in Hungarian hands probably in 1210, but certainly in 1217: Bárány, “II. András balkáni külpolitikája,” 139.

44. 44 Gyetvai, Egyházi szervezés, 55–56.

45. 45 In a charter of 1233 he is listed as Calo-Iohannes (filius quondam Iursac Imperatoris Constan­ti­napolitani), with a Greek name. Fejér, Codex diplomaticus, vol. 3/2, 351; see also Wertner, “Margit császárné,” 597; he is also mentioned as Colo-Johannes and as a count of “Kewe” in a charter of King Béla IV of 1235. Fejér, Codex diplomaticus, vol. 4/1, 27.

46. 46 On Gyletus, see Rokai, “Gyletus,” 124–27.

47. 47 Smičiklas, Codex Diplomaticus, vol. 3, 264, Theiner, Vetera monumenta, vol. 1, 72.

48. 48 Gyetvai, Egyházi szervezés, 56.

49. 49 “Johannes dominus Syrmie et comite Bachensi.” 21 March 1240 (between the palatine and the judge royal) Fejér, Codex diplomaticus, vol. 4/3, 552; 23 September 1241 (between the Transylvanian voivode and the ban of Slavonia) Smičiklas, Codex Diplomaticus, vol. 4, 135; 14 August 1242 (here already in a more prominent place, between the archbishop of Esztergom and the palatine), Smičiklas, Codex Diplomaticus, vol. 4, 158; 16 November 1242 in the name of Johannes Angelus (again in a more prominent position between the archbishop of Esztergom and the palatine), Smičiklas, Codex Diplomaticus, vol. 4, 175. See also Ćirković, “Zemlja Mačva,” 3, 5.

50. 50 Smičiklas, Codex Diplomaticus, vol. 3, 305–6.

51. 51 For more on the earliest history of the diocese of Syrmia, see Ternovácz, “A szerémi püspökség,” 457–59; according to Mihajlo Dinić, the Catholic Church was not present in any form in the Trans-Syrmian region before 1229. Dinić, Srpske zemlje, 278–79.

52. 52 Ternovácz, “A szerémi püspökség,” 463–66.

53. 53 Fine, The Late Medieval, 129. Between 1235 and 1237, the two castles were briefly occupied by the Bulgarian Tsar John Asen II. See ibid.

54. 54 Theiner, Vetera monumenta, vol. 1, 103–4; See also Gyetvai, Egyházi szervezés, 60.

55. 55 Bárány, “II. András balkáni külpolitikája,” 150, 154–55.

56. 56 Rokay and Takács, “Macsó,” 421; Hardi, “Gospodari,” 71–72, Font, “Rosztyiszlav,” 71. The charter of King Béla IV of June 2, 1247 refers to him only as “Rostislav prince of Galicia and ban of Slavonia,” with no reference to a title of Syrmia or Macsó: Szentpétery and Borsa, Árpád-házi királyok okleveleinek, no. 853.

57. 57 “Rostislav prince of Galicia and lord of Macsó, the son-in-law of the king” (in the list of dignities of the charter, he is listed after ecclesiastical dignitaries, before the palatine): Szentpétery and Borsa, Árpád-házi királyok okleveleinek, no. 1011; see also Zsoldos, Archontológia, 50.

58. 58 “In comitatibus infrascriptis, scilicet […] Syrimiensi in districtu de Mako vltra Zawa.” Wenzel, Árpádkori új okmánytár, vol. 7, 429–31.

59. 59 This is important to point out, because Belgrade was later also included in the Macsó territory.

60. 60 They wanted to replace the ruined Kő with a well-defended seat. The pope suggested Szávaszentdemeter or Szentgergely, north of the Sava River, but the committee of Hungarian ecclesiastical dignitaries chose Szenternye opposite Szávaszentdemeter, which was already in the Trans-Syrmian territory. For more information see Ternovácz, “A szerémi püspökség,” 466–68.

61. 61 Szeberényi, “A Balkán,” 326.

62. 62 Fine, The Late Medieval, 171–72; Szeberényi, “A Balkán,” 326.

63. 63 For more information see Fine, The Late Medieval, 174–75.

64. 64 On relations between the Kingdom of Hungary and neighboring Serbia in the mid-thirteenth century see Gál, “Béla és Uroš.”

65. 65 Dux de Machou. Rokay and Takács, “Macsó,” 421.

66. 66 Szentpétery and Zsoldos, Hercegek, hercegnők és királynék, 61.

67. 67 “Ducissa Galitiae ac de Bosna et de Mazo.” Theiner, Vetera monumenta, vol. 1, 273. This papal bull calls the princess Agnes instead of Anne. Mihajlo Dinić used the term vojvodkinja for Anna, which means “the wife of the voivode” or maybe “princess.” For further literature, see also Ćirković, “Zemlja Mačva,” 5. Ćirković erroneously dated the death of Rostislav to 1263. Ibid., 6.

68. 68 “In comitatibus infrascriptis, scilicet Chanadiensi, Thimisiensi, Syrmiensi, in Districtu de Mako, ultra Zawa.” Wenzel, Árpádkori új okmánytár, vol. 7, 431.

69. 69 “Bela Dux de Machow et de Bozna.” Wenzel, Árpádkori új okmánytár, vol. 8, 255; Fine, The Late Medieval, 175.

70. 70 Ćirković, “Zemlja Mačva,” 6. Duke Béla’s title regarding Macsó and Bosnia was last mentioned in the sources in 1271. See ibid.

71. 71 Fejér, Codex diplomaticus, vol. 4/3, 490.

72. 72 Fejér, Codex diplomaticus, vol. 5/1, 238–40; See also Fejér Codex diplomaticus, vol. 4/3, 490.

73. 73 Theiner, Vetera monumenta, vol. 1, 299; Wenzel, Árpádkori új okmánytár, vol. 3, 247; Ćirković, “Zemlja Mačva,” 6.

74. 74 Petrovics, “Béla herceg,” 93.

75. 75 Ćirković, “Zemlja Mačva,” 6. The banate of Barancs and Kucsó gradually disappeared from the sources during the fourteenth century.

76. 76 Zsoldos, Archontológia, 51.

77. 77 Beside Roland of the Rátót clan (March 30, 1273) Egyed of the Monoszló clan (son of Gregory) Egyed (May 1273), John (May 1273), the abovementioned Egyed again (June 2, 1273) appeared as bans. Zsoldos, Archontológia, 51.

78. 78 Albert “The Great” of the Ákos clan (son of Erdő) appeared only in a forged charter. Zsoldos, Archontológia, 51.

79. 79 Zsoldos, Archontológia, 51.

80. 80 “Ducissa de Machu.” Elizabeth’s title of Princess of Macsó first appears in a charter dated before August 19, 1280. See Szentpétery and Zsoldos, Hercegek, hercegnők és királynék, 127.

81. 81 “Banus de Kucho et Boronch” (MNL OL DL 104891, Szentpétery and Borsa, Árpád-házi oklevelek, no. 2329), “banus de Boronch et de Kuchou” (MNL OL DF 248637, Szentpétery and Borsa, Árpád-házi oklevelek, no. 2363). The sources mention him between November 27, 1272 and May 14, 1273. See. Zsoldos, Archontológia, 51.

82. 82 Zsoldos, Archontológia, 51–52. The person of the ban was also the same in the case of the banates of Usora and Soli (both Henrik of the Héder kindred [son of Henrik], and Ernye of the Ákos clan [son of Erdő] bore the title of ban of both territories, see Zsoldos, Archontológia, 53), but Usora and Soli are mentioned as two separate territories by earlier sources (for example, see Smičiklas, Codex diplomaticus, vol. 4, 237.)

83. 83 Zsoldos, Archontológia, 52; Szentpétery and Borsa, Árpád-házi oklevelek, no. 3019; “Stephanus banus de Kulchou” (MNL OL, DL 85215).

84. 84 Dinić, Srpske zemlje, 127. On June 11, 1284, Queen Elizabeth still bore the title of princess of Macsó. Ibid., 132.

85. 85 For more details, see ibid., footnote 12.

86. 86 Ibid., 337.

87. 87 Ibid., 281.

88. 88 Ćirković, “Zemlja Mačva,” 7.

89. 89 Rokay and Takács, “Macsó,” 421; Cf. Ćirković, “Zemlja Mačva,” 3.

90. 90 Rokay and Takács, “Macsó,” 421.

91. 91 Ćirković, “Zemlja Mačva,” 3.

92. 92 In a charter issued by King Andrew III in 1298, he donated the village of Pabar to Matthew, Paul, Michael of the Csák clan (sons of count Orbán), because they had gained merit against the Mongols, who had destroyed the Macsó region and were about to attack Hungary. Wenzel, Árpádkori új okmánytár, vol. 12, 617.

93. 93 “Cum Iohones filius Erardi concepto spirito malicie, Stephano Regi Seruie nostro emulo dampuabiliter adhesisset, et contra spectabilem virum magistrum Ugrinum […] ac partes regni nostri, de Sirmia, et de Wolko, collectis suis conplicibus, nequiter dimicaret, et seviret.” Anjou-kori okmánytár, vol. 1, 197.

94. 94 Rokay and Takács, “Macsó,” 421.

95. 95 The questions surrounding the dating of the campaign were clarified by Pál Engel, who placed the date of the campaign between January 6 and February 20, 1317. See Engel, “Újraegyesítés,” 115, footnote 123. Cf. Ćirković, “Zemlja Mačva,” 13.

96. 96 “Demum cum ad expugnanda castra de Machou et subiiciendum ipsum regnum nostro regimini ac reprimendam vesanam insolenciam sclavorum scismaticorum ipsius regni, per quos nobis et regno nostro grande scandalum oriri videbatur et fuerat iam exortum, exercitum validum movissemus et difficilis transitus iluvii Zave per algorem hiemalis temporis opposito ac resistente nobis exercitu dictorum sclayorum gentis scilicet regis Urosii adversarii nostri in littore seu portu transitus processum nostrum retardaret, ipse magister Nicolaus tanquam yir strennuus fortune se submittens contra predictos scisrnaticos ante omnes alios cum suis transeuudo exercitui uostro transitum seu vadum securum preparavit.” Smičiklas, Codex diplomaticus, vol. 9, 117–19; Anjou-kori okmánytár, vol. 2, 69–70; for a summary, see Anjou oklt., vol. 7, no. 86.

97. 97 Anjou-okmánytár, vol. 2, 127–30; for a summary, see Anjou oklt., vol. 8, no. 203.

98. 98 Engel, “Újraegyesítés,” 115, footnote 123.

99. 99 Anjou-kori okmánytár, vol. 2, 91–93. For a summary, see Anjou oklt., vol. 7, no. 534; Fejér, Codex diplomaticus, vol. 8/5, 156–64; for a summary, see Anjou oklt., vol. 10, no. 194.

100. 100 Fejér, Codex diplomaticus, vol. 8/2, 200.

101. 101 Anjou oklt., vol. 2, 69–70.

102. 102 During the siege, he was pelted with stones from the castle, for which the king later compensated him. Hazai Okmánytár, vol. 1, 124. Anjou-kori oklevéltár, vol. 7, no. 290.

103. 103 Anjou-kori okmánytár, vol. 2, 91–93, Anjou oklt., vol. 7, no. 534.

104. 104 MNL OL, DL 86970. For a summary, see Anjou oklt., vol. 9, no. 65.

105. 105 Fejér, Codex diplomaticus, vol. 8/5, 161–62. For a summary, see Anjou oklt., vol. 10, no. 142. See also ibid., no. 194.

106. 106 Engel, “Újraegyesítés,” 115, footnote 123.

107. 107 Rokay and Takács, “Macsó,” 421.

108. 108 MNL OL, DL 50671.