Michael the Syrian
Encyclopedia
Michael the Syrian also known as Michael the Great or Michael Syrus or Michael the Elder, to distinguish him from his nephew, was a patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church
Syriac Orthodox Church
The Syriac Orthodox Church; is an autocephalous Oriental Orthodox church based in the Eastern Mediterranean, with members spread throughout the world. The Syriac Orthodox Church claims to derive its origin from one of the first Christian communities, established in Antioch by the Apostle St....

 from 1166 to 1199. He is best known today as the author of the largest medieval Chronicle, which he composed in Syriac
Syriac language
Syriac is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. Having first appeared as a script in the 1st century AD after being spoken as an unwritten language for five centuries, Classical Syriac became a major literary language throughout the Middle East from...

. Various other materials written in his own hand have survived.

Life

The life of Michael is recorded by Bar Hebraeus. He was born ca. 1126 in Melitene (today Malatya), the son of the Priest Eliya (Elias), of the Qindasi family. His uncle, the monk Athanasius, became bishop of Anazarbus
Anazarbus
Anazarbus in Ancient Cilicia was an ancient Cilician city, situated in Anatolia in modern Turkey, in the present Çukurova about 15 km west of the main stream of the present Ceyhan River and near its tributary the Sempas Su.A lofty isolated ridge formed its acropolis...

 in Cilicia
Cilicia
In antiquity, Cilicia was the south coastal region of Asia Minor, south of the central Anatolian plateau. It existed as a political entity from Hittite times into the Byzantine empire...

 in 1136.

At that period Melitene was part of the kingdom of the Turcoman Danishmend dynasty
Danishmends
The Danishmend dynasty was a Turcoman dynasty that ruled in north-central and eastern Anatolia in the 11th and 12th centuries. The centered originally around Sivas, Tokat, and Niksar in central-northeastern Anatolia, they extended as far west as Ankara and Kastamonu for a time, and as far south as...

, and, when that realm was divided in two in 1142, it became the capital of one principality. In 1178 it became part of the Sultanate of Rûm
Sultanate of Rûm
The Sultanate of Rum , also known as the Anatolian Seljuk State , was a Turkic state centered in in Anatolia, with capitals first at İznik and then at Konya. Since the court of the sultanate was highly mobile, cities like Kayseri and Sivas also functioned at times as capitals...

. The Jacobite monastery of Mar Bar Sauma was close to the town, and had been the patriarchal seat since the 11th century.

As a child, Michael entered the service of the monastery, and became archimandrite before the age of thirty. He made various improvements to the abbey fabric, including improving the water supply and the defences against raiders. On the 18th October 1166 he was elected Patriarch of the Jacobite church, and consecrated in the presence of twenty-eight bishops.

In 1168 he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and then stayed for a year at Antioch. Both towns were at the time part of the Latin crusader states, and Michael established excellent relations with the crusader lords, especially with Amaury de Nesle, Latin patriarch of Jerusalem
Patriarch Amalric of Jerusalem
Amalric of Nesle was a French prelate from Nesle in Picardy. He was Prior of the Holy Sepulcher by 1151. He was Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem by 1158 to 1180. He died October 6, 1180 in Palestine.-References:...

. Returning to the monastery of Mar Bar Sauma in the summer of 1169, he held a synod and attempted to reform the church, then tainted with simony
Simony
Simony is the act of paying for sacraments and consequently for holy offices or for positions in the hierarchy of a church, named after Simon Magus , who appears in the Acts of the Apostles 8:9-24...

.

The Byzantine emperor Manual I Comnenos
Manuel I Komnenos
Manuel I Komnenos was a Byzantine Emperor of the 12th century who reigned over a crucial turning point in the history of Byzantium and the Mediterranean....

 made approaches to him to negotiate a reunion of the churches. But Michael did not trust the Greeks. He refused to go to Constantinople when invited by the emperor, and even refused twice, in 1170 and 1172, to meet his envoy Theorianus, instead sending as his own representative bishop John of Kaishoum and then his disciple Theodore bar Wahbon. In three successive letters to the emperor, he replied with a simple statement of the monophysite creed of the Jacobites.

Around 1174 Michael had to contend with a revolt by a party of bishops. He himself was twice arrested at the instigation of the dissident bishops, so he says; once by the servants of the prefect of Mardin and the second time by those of the emir of Mosul. Also the monks of Bar Sauma rebelled against him in 1171 and 1176.

Between 1178 and 1180 he resided again in the crusader states, at Antioch and Jerusalem. He was invited by Pope Alexander III to attend the Third Council of the Lateran
Third Council of the Lateran
The Third Council of the Lateran met in March 1179 as the eleventh ecumenical council. Pope Alexander III presided and 302 bishops attended.By agreement reached at the Peace of Venice in 1177 the bitter conflict between Alexander III and Emperor Frederick I was brought to an end...

, but declined. However he did participate by letter, writing a long treatise on the Albigensians, based on the information he had been given.

In 1180 his former pupil Theodore Bar Wahbon had himself elected patriarch at Amida under the name of John by certain malcontent bishops, beginning a schism which lasted for thirteen years. Michael took energetic action, got hold of the anti-patriarch and locked him up at Bar Sauma and formally deposed him. Some of monks allowed Ibn Wahbon to escape, who fled to Damascus and tried in vain to appeal to Saladin
Saladin
Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb , better known in the Western world as Saladin, was an Arabized Kurdish Muslim, who became the first Sultan of Egypt and Syria, and founded the Ayyubid dynasty. He led Muslim and Arab opposition to the Franks and other European Crusaders in the Levant...

. He then went to Jerusalem, and, after the fall of the city in 1187, went to Rumkale with the Armenian catholicos Gregory IV, who allowed him to obtain official recognition from Prince Leo II of Armenian Minor
Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia
The Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia , also known as the Cilician Armenia, Kingdom of Cilician Armenia or New Armenia, was an independent principality formed during the High Middle Ages by Armenian refugees fleeing the Seljuk invasion of Armenia...

. Theodore had many supporters, and the schism did not end until the death of Theodore in the summer of 1193. According to Bar Hebraeus Theodore could write and speak in Syriac, Greek, Armenian and Arabic, and composed a statement of his case against Michael in Arabic.

In 1182, Michael received the sultan Kilij Arslan II
Kilij Arslan II
Kilij Arslan II was a Seljuk Sultan of Rûm from 1156 until his death in 1192.As Arnold of Lübeck reports in his Chronica Slavorum, he was present at the meeting of Henry the Lion with Kilij-Arslan during the former's pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1172...

 at Melitene, and held cordial talks with him.

He died at the monastery of Bar Sauma on 7th Nov. 1199 at the age of sixty-three, having been patriarch for thirty-three years. His nephew, Michael the Younger, known as "Yeshu Sephethana" or "big lips", became anti-patriarch at Melitene from 1199-1215, in opposition to Athanasius IX and then John XIV.

Works

Michael was a profuse author. He wrote works on the liturgy, on the doctrine of the Jacobite church, and on canon law. Numerous sermons have also survived, mostly unpublished. But he is best known for the World Chronicle that he composed, the longest and richest surviving chronicle in the Syriac language.

The Chronicle

This work ran from Creation up to his own times. It is also a source of many documents not otherwise preserved. He made use of earlier Ecclesiastical Histories now lost. It includes a version of the so-called Testimonium Flavianum
Josephus on Jesus
This article is part of the Jesus and history series of articles.Josephus was a renowned 1st-century Jewish historian...

.

The work is extant in a single manuscript written in 1598 in Syriac in a Serto hand. This was copied from an earlier manuscript, itself copied from Michael's autograph. The manuscript is today held in a locked box in a church in Aleppo
Aleppo
Aleppo is the largest city in Syria and the capital of Aleppo Governorate, the most populous Syrian governorate. With an official population of 2,301,570 , expanding to over 2.5 million in the metropolitan area, it is also one of the largest cities in the Levant...

 and not accessible to scholarship. However the French scholar J.B. Chabot arranged for a copy to be made by hand in 1888 and published a photographic reproduction in four volumes (1899–1910), with a French translation. In 2009, the facsimile of Edessan-Aleppo codex was published by Gorgias Press
Gorgias Press
Gorgias Press is an academic publisher of books and journals covering a range of religious and language studies that include Syriac language, Eastern Christianity, Ancient Near East, Arabic and Islam, Early Christianity, Judaism, and more. Gorgias Press was founded in 2001 by George Kiraz, and is...

 in the first volume (edited by Mor Gregorios Yuhanna Ibrahim) of a series on the Chronicle of Michael the Great.

An abbreviated Armenian translation also exists, from which Victor Langlois published a French translation in 1868. This alone preserves the preface of the work. A shorter Armenian version also exists which has not been published.

A Garshuni version is also extant in British Library ms. Orient. 4402, and an Arabic version beginning with book 5 exists in a Vatican manuscript.

Points of interest

His work has been used by NASA scientists because of his record of climatic changes, now known to be linked to volcano eruptions. He records that in 536 AD:
And in 626 AD:
He is a contemporary source for the Latin crusader states
Crusader states
The Crusader states were a number of mostly 12th- and 13th-century feudal states created by Western European crusaders in Asia Minor, Greece and the Holy Land , and during the Northern Crusades in the eastern Baltic area...

, and records the tolerance and liberalism of the Catholic Franks towards the monophysites:
He also praises the Templars
Knights Templar
The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon , commonly known as the Knights Templar, the Order of the Temple or simply as Templars, were among the most famous of the Western Christian military orders...

 and Hospitallers to his own people:
He identifies the Syriac-speakers of his time with the ancient Arameans:
He also mentions an earlier, 9th century dispute between Jacobite Syrians with Greek scholars, in which the Jacobites endorsed an Assyrian continuity
Assyrian continuity
The Assyrian continuity claim deals with the claims made by modern Assyrians that they are the direct descendants of the Akkadian and later Aramaean inhabitants of ancient Assyria....

:

External links

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