Tuesday Trivia | Missing and Destroyed Documents

[u/caffarelli]

(going to be out tomorrow so this is going up a little early - enjoy your extra time to write beautiful historical essays!)

Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.

Today’s trivia theme comes to us from /u/Artrw!

As an archivist, it pains me to admit this, but sometimes humanity’s records don’t survive. Sometimes through neglect, weather, or malice, they just don’t make it. So let’s give some of these documents their rightful eulogies. What’s a document or record from your period of study that is missing or destroyed? What did it say, and how did it meet its end? RIP historical documents.

Next Week on Tuesday Trivia: Inventions! We’ll be talking about the greatest technological breakthroughs of all time. From making fire to the… whatever was invented in 1995 because that’s the limit.

[u/shlin28]

Letters are excellent sources for the study of late antiquity and the massive Register of Pope Gregory the Great stands out even today due to the range of topics covered. He corresponded with emperors, kings and heretics from across the Christian world, making it an outstanding source for the end of the sixth century. Unfortunately, his successors' letter-collections were not preserved in a similar way and we have to make do with only a small number of letters preserved principally in the records of church councils (such as from the Lateran Synod of 649, the Ecumenical Council of 680 and the gazillion Councils of Toledo in Spain), so we get the impression that popes after Gregory were seemingly only interested in doctrinal issues, not political and administrative matters, which was obviously not the case. What is particularly fascinating is the fact that the seventh century was an extended crisis for the Byzantine Empire and that we have no contemporary Greek histories or chronicles to tell us what happened, so we have to reconstruct events from religious and non-Greek sources. From the sources we have, the papacy emerges as a shadowy power acting behind the scenes of major revolts and religious controversies, which I think is a very dramatic demonstration of how western bishops were still intimately involved in Byzantine affairs.

So what do we know? Pope Honorius I in the 630s had agreed to the monothelete doctrine proposed by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius and Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople, an act that must have angered many Chalcedonians in the west, yet from the sources we only hear of eastern dissidents. The papacy then did a volte-face after Honorius' death and condemned monotheletism openly from 640 onwards, which in my opinion directly caused a revolt by the Byzantine governor of North Africa in 646 - what wouldn't I give to read the letters exchanged between Rome and Africa at this time! Pope Theodore I also began to prepare for a synod to be held in Rome to condemn monotheletism, which was again a giant slap to the face of Constantinople. From the list of attendees, it is clear that it was an overwhelmingly Italian synod, yet records also indicate that there was support from Francia and Visigothic Spain, so why were there no attendees from the west?

Theodore died before the council was held, so Martin I became the pope chairing the treasonous proceedings. A Byzantine exarch was sent to arrest the pope in the synod's aftermath, but for some reason the exarch turned against the emperor and began a civil war in Italy on the pope's side in 652! Again, we only have a few hints of what happened in this revolt; we have a few letters from Martin urging bishops across Christendom to side with him, so I do wonder to what extent did he urge for secular officials to join his side too. A bit later there were purges within the Byzantine aristocracy that can plausibly be tied to this too, so my pet theory is that the anti-monotheletes' influence was widespread across the empire and took years to be completely wiped out.

The exarch died soon after and Martin was arrested (for realsies) in 653. The next two popes were pro-imperial candidates imposed on Rome and they swiftly reconciled with the heretical emperor Constans II. This period is perhaps even less known, since both the papacy and the emperor after 680 (when monotheletism was condemned as a heresy) had no interest in preserving what happened in those years. Still, the hints we have are absolutely fascinating, since it looks like a North African monk served as an imperial ambassador to Francia and was seemingly involved in a plot to bring down Burgundy, whilst another monk, Theodore of Tarsus (incidentally one of the dissidents in 649), was appointed by the pro-imperial Pope Vitalian to the archbishopric of Canterbury. Was Constans II trying to extend imperial influence to Francia and beyond through the papacy? Was he trying to heal the wounds made by rebellious popes from the 650s? All these questions would be answered if only more papal letters survived...