Chapter 10

‘Anointed with your Blood and Holy Oil’: Byzantines, Crusaders and Warrior Saints in the Eastern Mediterranean (324–1099)

Lynda Garland

From the conversion of Constantine the Great in AD 312 and the consequent endorsement of Christianity as an officially acceptable religion in the Roman Empire, sainthood became an immediate and noteworthy phenomenon across the Mediterranean. One group of saints quickly became particularly prominent, the important cadre of ‘military’ or ‘warrior’ saints (the ‘stratelatai’), whose popularity was a reaction to the persecutions of Christians in the previous two decades. The terms ‘military’ or ‘warrior’ are in fact misleading, as these saints were not necessarily soldiers (though some had had a career in the army), but were so termed as they were martyrs for the faith who had fought for the cause of Christianity by willingly suffering persecution under the pagan emperors of Rome, especially Diocletian (ad 284–305) and his colleagues Galerius (ad 293–311), Maximinus Daia (ad 305–313) and Maximian (ad 286–305): there had also been regional third-century persecutions in AD 249 under Decius (ad 249–251) and in AD 257–258 under Valerian (ad 253–260).¹ The veneration of these ‘warrior’ saints was widespread across the Empire, and the long-standing popularity of their cults is shown by the existence of texts of their martyrdom narratives and miracle collections in a multiplicity of languages, including Greek, Syriac, Latin, Armenian, Ethiopian and Coptic.²

These warrior saints, with regional variations, attained phenomenal popularity among worshippers and were reverenced by all Christians in the East. The most notable of them, who were known as the ‘Great Martyrs’ (Delehaye’s ‘etat-major’ or officer corps), were St Theodore Teron (‘the Recruit’),³ St Theodore Stratelates (‘the General’),⁴ St George of Lydda,⁵ St Merkourios of Caesarea,⁶ St Prokopios (the earliest Palestinian martyr)⁷ and St Demetrios of Thessaloniki.⁸ There were others whose veneration was more localized, of whom the most important were Sts Sergios and Bacchos of Syria,⁹ St Menas of Egypt,¹⁰ St Eustratios and the Holy Martyrs of Sebaste in Armenia,¹¹ St Artemios of Egypt¹² and St Eugenios of Trebizond.¹³

Persecutions and the Martyrs

During the persecutions under Diocletian and his colleagues between AD 303 and 313, Christians who were put to death were generally not proactively targeted because of their faith, but suffered execution because they refused to engage in emperor-worship. These martyrs who died during the persecutions were later seen as attaining the ultimate crown as champions of the faith; with the official acceptance of Christianity, those saints who were prepared to die to proclaim their faith came to be seen as warriors against the pagan forces of evil, with the emperors engaged in the persecutions depicted as malevolent fiends inspired by demons and diabolic priests. The martyrs’ dogged resistance to pagan duress, including tortures of every description as described and illustrated with relish in the sources (see Figure 10.1), meant that they could be portrayed in militaristic terms, with their deaths seen as victories against paganism and won under the standard of the Cross (the vexillum regis, ‘standard of the King’): St George, for example, the ‘great martyr’ (‘ megalomartyras’), was said to have been miraculously revived after various attempts to execute him, and to have been finally beheaded after surviving being chopped into pieces, buried alive and burnt.¹⁴ The ‘warrior saint’ was, therefore, so described because he was a miles Christi or miles Dei (soldier of Christ or soldier of God) and a member of the militia Christi (the army of Christ).

As early as AD 323 or 324, in his Martyrs of Palestine, Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, recorded the names of 135 Palestinian martyrs: 120 men and fifteen women.¹⁵ The term martyr (‘ martys’), originally meaning ‘witness’, was used for these men and women because they gave witness to their faith through their sufferings and death, but by the fourth century it had come to refer to those who were willing to die for their Christian beliefs;¹⁶ the first unambiguous use of the term refers to St Polycarp of Smyrna c.AD 160.¹⁷ At a very early date, their shrines – such as that of Thekla, the ever-popular if fictitious follower of St Paul¹⁸ – became important centres of worship and attracted immense numbers of pilgrims,¹⁹ and their relics were seen as having a particular potency in attaining favours and miracles for their venerators.²⁰ The supposed tomb of Thekla at Meriamlik near Seleucia was visited, for example, by both St Gregory, Bishop of Nazianzus (and later Patriarch of Constantinople), in AD 374 and the western pilgrim Egeria in AD 384.²¹

Figure 10.1: The martyrdom of St Blaise of Sebaste (Armenia), a healer, from the Menologion of Basil II (MS Vat. Gr. 1613). Blaise was supposedly beheaded under Licinius in AD 316, after being flogged and torn with iron combs. (© ART Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

Warrior Saints and the Army

The persecution of Christians at the end of the third century and beginning of the fourth was the historical context for the narratives of most of these martyrs: this is even the case for Theodore Stratelates (‘the General’), the account of whose martyrdom can be dated no earlier than the ninth century. The early lives and passions of the military saints focus on their steadfastness in the face of torture and death, and they are not distinguished from other martyrs: their miracles seldom had any link with defence of the Empire and are most frequently connected with healing. By the sixth and seventh centuries, however, perceptions of these saints had begun to shift and they are seen more frequently as members of the army of God and called on for aid in battle, although depictions of them still tend to portray them in court dress rather than as soldiers. In a late sixth-century icon in the monastery of St Catherine on Mt Sinai, for example, Saints Theodore Teron and George are portrayed flanking the Mother of God (the Theotokos) and Child (see Figure 10.2) dressed in ceremonial court costume and carrying the crosses of martyrs.

Figure 10.2: A sixth-century icon from the Monastery of St Catherine, Mount Sinai, depicting Saints Theodore (left) and George in court dress flanking the enthroned Virgin and Child with archangels behind. (Photo © Evgeny Ardaev via Wikimedia Commons)

The Diocletianic persecution of AD 303 had specifically targeted professional soldiers in the Roman Army who were Christians, while Licinius, as emperor of the East (ad 313–324), had forced Christians to resign from his forces as part of his anti-Christian measures: his edict was reversed by Constantine, who allowed Christian soldiers, if they chose, to resume their former military rank.²² Realistically, there must have been tensions for Christians in the pre-Constantinian Roman Army, for example when taking the oath of allegiance to the emperor, and hence membership of the armed forces was a useful plot device leading to a saint’s persecution and martyrdom. But, despite the fact that warrior saints came increasingly to be seen as having been soldiers prior to their martyrdom, this had not been the case for a number of them in the earliest sources, and, prior to the tenth century, warrior saints were not seen as a homogenous ‘type’, except for the fact that they had all suffered martyrdom for their faith.

The backgrounds and careers described in their passion narratives varied greatly: while some, like Menas and Theodore Teron, were said to have been soldiers and George, Merkourios and Theodore Stratelates army officers, Demetrios and Nestor were civilians, Artemios was governor of Egypt and Prokopios a member of the clergy. It was, however, later thought appropriate that the ‘histories’ of those saints, who had not seen armed service or been associated with the armed forces, be revisited. St Demetrios (a proconsul) and St Prokopios (a bishop), for example, were reimagined as soldiers. Another development in the hagiography was the belief that a major role of these ‘warrior’ saints was to use their military skills in interventions to protect Christians on the field of battle, assassinate leaders of the enemy and defend cities against barbarians and pagan marauders. This perception of their duties and responsibilities as saints exponentially expanded until, by the tenth and eleventh centuries, they are seen riding alongside Byzantine and crusader armies in defence of the forces of good against rebels, invaders and infidels.

The Warrior Saint Cult

When, in the tenth-century, the warrior saints came to be seen as a homogenous group – a spiritual military elite – a new iconography emerged, in which they were often depicted on horseback rescuing captives from pagan enemies and combating mythical beasts such as dragons (see below). Furthermore, these saints became a clearly defined corps under the Macedonian emperors, with the first extant reference to the ‘martyroi hoi stratelatoi (‘warrior martyrs’) apparently by Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (ad 913–959) in his De ceremoniis, where they are named alongside Christ, the Theotokos (Mother of God) and the ‘arch-general’ Michael as the protectors of Constantinople.²³ Constantine’s son Leo VI (ad 886–912) was personally responsible for the increased popularity of these saints: both he and his wife (St) Theophano experienced a vision of St Demetrios, as a young man in military dress, after Leo had been imprisoned by his father Basil I, and the emperor himself wrote three homilies on the subject of this saint (BHG 536–38), as well as a hymn, and dedicated a church to him in the Great Palace.²⁴

From the reign of Leo, Byzantium saw the production of new lives of these saints, with hymns written and churches built in their honour; in addition, art began to depict them together as a group, although the saints chosen for illustration were not always consistent. An ivory triptych of Constantine Porphyrogennetos, now at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, depicts Theodore Teron, Eustathios, Prokopios and Arethas, and George, Theodore Stratelates, Demetrios and Eustratios in two divisions of four, on either side of a central panel with a ‘Deesis’ scene (Christ, flanked by the Virgin and John the Baptist) and five apostles. This is apparently the earliest depiction of a group of more than two military saints. An inscription on each side reads: ‘An emperor had the four martyrs sculpted, with them he puts to flight the enemies by authority’ and ‘here is the foursome of the martyrs, who decorate the crown with the four virtues’.²⁵ Despite the army background of several of these saints, they are all depicted on this triptych in formal court regalia, although one of each group – Eustathios and Theodore Stratelates – carry swords. Elsewhere, at this period, they are depicted in military garb: the ivory triptych in the Hermitage depicts in the central panel the death of the forty martyrs of Sebaste (who died in a frozen lake), while fully armed warrior saints, again four on each side, occupy the two wings (see also Figure 10.7 for St Demetrios).²⁶ The mosaic cycle of the Boeotian monastery of Hosios Leukas, completed in the 1020s, also depicts Merkourios, Prokopios, Teron, Stratelates, Demetrios and George as soldiers, while the medallion portraits of six of these saints (Stratelates, Demetrios, George, Prokopios, Merkourios and perhaps Teron) in the Psalter of Basil II (976–1025), which flank Basil in parade armour on the frontispiece, show them equipped with shields and lances above cowering figures, identified as Bulgarian prisoners or Basil’s reverential subjects, with the legend ‘The martyrs are his allies, for he is their friend. They smite those who are lying at his feet’ (see Figure 10.3).²⁷

Figure 10.3: A replica of a miniature of Basil II in triumphal garb as a Roman general, from his early eleventh-century Psalter (BNM, MS. Gr. 17, fol. 3r). The archangels Michael and Gabriel are handing Basil his lance and crown, and he is flanked by medallions of the warrior saints, also armed with lances: Theodore Stratelates and Demetrios (left), George, Prokopios and Merkourios (right) and perhaps Theodore Teron (bottom left). (© The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

The popular epic-romance Digenis Akritas, compiled in the eleventh and twelfth centuries based on earlier oral tales from the Eastern frontier, describes its hero (Basil the ‘two-blood border lord’) as assisted against the Arabs and other enemies by St George, the Theodores and St Demetrios, as well as by Christ, the Virgin and archangels:

‘Having as his help the grace of God, the unconquerable Mother of God, the angels and archangels too, and the victorious great martyrs, both the all-glorious Theodores, the General and the Recruit, and much-labouring noble George, the miracle-worker and martyr of martyrs, and glorious Demetrios, the patron of Basil [Digenis] and the boast and pride of the one who vanquished all his foes, the Hagarenes and Ishmaelites and barbarous Scyths who rage like dogs.’²⁸

Precedents for Divine and Angelic Epiphanies

The Classical World

The topos of the gods or heroes intervening in battle and assisting one or other of the opposing sides is a frequent plot device in the Iliad. Generally in these cases the gods are invisible to the mortal combatants. Only on one occasion are the heroes able to see deities on the battlefield, when Athena gives Diomedes the power to discern the gods in combat, removing the mist which veils men’s sight (at which he spears Aphrodite, wounding her in the arm, and attacks Apollo three times before being warned not to match himself against immortals).²⁹ Pritchett lists forty-nine instances of battlefield apparitions in ancient Greek history,³⁰ with a variety of epiphanies occurring during the Persian Wars, including, at Marathon, Theseus, Echetlos, Pan and a giant hoplite, and, at Salamis, the phasma of a woman and the Aeacidae.³¹ In 279 BC, according to an inscription from Kos,³² Apollo appeared to help drive off the Celtic attack on Delphi; a thanks-offerings was made to the god ‘for manifesting himself during the perils which confronted the sanctuary’. The Greek gods’ concern for their cities lasted into Christian times. Zosimos’ New History, written perhaps c.AD 500, covers Roman history down to AD 410. He is one of the last pagan historians, fiercely opposed to Christianity. He records that, when Alaric attacked Athens in AD 395, he saw Athena walking along the city walls, dressed just like her statue: this was presumably the Athena Promachos, which stood on the acropolis between the Erechtheion and the Propylaia, rather than the Athena Parthenos, the cult statue from the Parthenon. The 7-metre high Athena Promachos was garbed in an aegis decorated with the Gorgon’s head and a helmet with a horsehair crest, while the Athena Parthenos stood 12.7 metres tall and was armed with an aegis, shield, spear and helmet.³³ Not only was Athena in full armour ready to defend her city, but Alaric also had a further vision of Achilles ‘raging’ in front of the walls, as described by Homer when he was engaging the Trojans in revenge for the death of Patroklos. He was so struck with these epiphanies that he sent heralds with proposals for peace, and Athens and Attica were left unharmed, preserved by their presiding deity and a great hero of legend.³⁴

The Romans also believed that the gods manifested themselves to mortals and protected them in battle, as well as actually participating in action on the battlefield alongside human combatants. In early Roman history, it was believed that the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, in the guise of two young horsemen, assisted the Romans against the Latins at the Battle of Lake Regillus c. 496 BC,³⁵ and a temple was built in the Roman forum in their honour, in the place where they were said to have watered their horses. Two hundred years later, it was rumoured that the god Mars had come to the help of the consul Luscinus (cos. 282, 278 BC): when the Romans attacked the Lucanians’ camp near Thurii, an armed warrior of formidable size was seen carrying scaling-ladders, who could not be found the next day. Valerius Maximus reports that the finding of a helmet with two feathers was seen as evidence of divine intervention having taken place, and that a thanksgiving was consequently held in honour of Mars.³⁶ It was usually, however, the Dioscuri who were thought to intervene in battle, and Cicero’s de natura deorum also records an incident in which Castor and Pollux were thought to have delivered the news of the defeat of Perseus at Pydna in 168 BC. When P. Vatinius was returning to Rome from Reate, two young warriors on white horses told him that on that very day, Perseus had been taken prisoner. He reported the news to the Senate, who threw him into prison for spreading an unfounded report, but was released when a dispatch arrived from the general L. Aemilius Paullus which confirmed the account, and was recompensed with a grant of land and exemption from military service. Castor and Pollux also purportedly announced the victory at Pharsalus in 48 BC, while the noise of clanging armour and a sounding trumpet in the sky during the wars with the Cimbri suggested their involvement.³⁷

The Biblical Tradition

Numerous works in the Bible also provided evidence of divine intervention in warfare by angels and saints. In the Old Testament, Yahweh himself was frequently portrayed as smiting the Israelites’ enemies, such as the Egyptians’ first-born children and the Egyptian army at the Red Sea, as well as the Philistines and Moabites.³⁸ Divine assistance was actually provided for Judas Maccabaeus on the battlefield, when angels intervened in two engagements against the Seleucid ruler Antiochos IV Epiphanes (175–164 BC): in one, five resplendent men on horses with golden bridles protected Judas, showering arrows and thunderbolts on the enemy, while in the other a celestial horseman, clad in white and equipped with weapons of gold, instilled courage in the Jewish troops.³⁹ The Maccabees, who died at the hands of Seleucid oppressors because they refused to abandon the Torah, were seen by fourth-century bishops as proto-martyrs, and venerated alongside Christian martyrs and saints (see below). Judas was also handed a golden sword by the prophet Jeremiah in a dream prior to the Battle of Adasa in 161 BC, and told to use ‘this holy sword, the gift of God’ to crush his enemies, which he successfully accomplished.⁴⁰

A similar epiphany had occurred earlier, when Seleukos IV (187–175 BC), Antiochos’ brother, instructed his minister Heliodoros to appropriate the riches of the temple in Jerusalem: the spectators saw ‘a horse, splendidly caparisoned, with a rider of fearsome aspect, which rushed fiercely at Heliodoros, and reared up, attacking him with its hooves’. The rider was wearing golden armour, while ‘there also appeared to Heliodoros two young men of exceptional strength and outstanding beauty, splendidly dressed, who stood on either side of him and scourged him, ceaselessly raining blows upon him.’ The apparition quite naturally terrified all those who accompanied Heliodoros and impressed the bystanders.⁴¹

There are also references in books of the Bible to a heavenly army, and it was actually the ‘multitude of the army of heaven’ (πλῆθος στρατιᾶς οὐρανίου: generally, but somewhat misleadingly, translated as the ‘heavenly host’) which celebrated the birth of Christ and the angel’s announcement to the shepherds.⁴² This army appears to have had an archistrategos (commander), an unnamed warrior who appeared to Joshua outside of Jericho, standing in front of him with a drawn sword to encourage him to claim the Promised Land, while in the Book of Daniel the archangel, Michael the ‘Prince’, features as Israel’s guardian angel or commander, who opposed the guardian angel of the Persians.⁴³ The conflict between the forces of heaven and those of darkness are portrayed in the Book of Revelation as a war between two heavenly armies, in which Michael leads his angels against the dragon and the dragon and his angels are hurled to the earth, losing their place in heaven. Elsewhere in the same book, the ‘armies in heaven’ (τὰ στρατεῦματα τὰ ἐν τ ῳ οὐρανῳ), riding on white horses and wearing clean, white linen, follow the ‘rider on the white horse, whose name is Faithful and True’, who judges with justice and wages holy war. These capture the beast and the false prophet and cast them into the fiery lake of burning sulphur.⁴⁴

As a result, the dragon, or flying serpent, became the embodiment of evil in early Christian iconography, and Constantine the Great had a picture set up in the portico of his Constantinopolitan palace of a dragon, ‘that hateful and savage adversary of mankind’, depicted under his feet and that of his children, stricken through with a dart and cast headlong into the depths of the sea. According to Eusebius, the dragon represented ‘the secret adversary of the human race’, illustrating the prophecy that ‘God would bring his great, strong and terrible sword against the dragon, the flying serpent, and destroy the dragon that was in the sea.’⁴⁵ The serpent also appeared on Constantine’s coinage representing his defeat of Licinius and paganism in general: coins minted at Constantinople from AD 327 depict on the reverse a labarum, crowned by the chi-rho symbol, spearing a serpent-dragon, symbolizing Constantine’s victory over his pagan rivals (see Figure 9.2). The legend reads SPES PUBLICA: ‘Public Hope’, or ‘Hope of the State’.⁴⁶ The iconographic type is linked to the amulets depicting Solomon, or a Holy Rider (St Sisinnios of Antioch, for example), spearing a prostrate demon, such as the female demon Obyzouth or Gillo, who strangled newborn babies: amulets of this type date from the fourth century or earlier.⁴⁷ The idea of a ‘divine army’ supporting Constantine was articulated by the pagan Nazarius in an oration in AD 321, who claimed that at the battle against Maxentius in AD 312 his soldiers had seen a host in the sky marching in battle array to his assistance, with flashing shields and armour. According to Nazarius, Constantine’s father, the deified Constantius Chlorus, led this army of heaven (the force appears to have been pagan rather than Christian), and he compares the apparition of the Castor and Pollux duo who intervened at Lake Regillus with the celestial army that supported Constantine.⁴⁸

St Merkourios and the Death of Julian the Apostate

It is with Julian ‘the Apostate’ that warrior saints were believed to have seriously taken up arms against enemies of the faith. From as early as the fourth century, the saints were believed to have been involved in the assassination of pagan or heretic emperors, and this intervention later expands into action on the battlefield against enemies of the Empire. Initially, these episodes are reported at second hand, and the dramatic action takes place in visions or dreams, which are then confirmed by accounts of the emperor’s death. The fourth-century emperors Julian (ad 361–363) and the Arian Valens (ad 364–378), both of whom were antagonistic to Orthodoxy, died in battle in unknown circumstances. In each case there were competing explanations for their deaths, which gradually evolved into the belief that their deaths had been caused by the intervention of a warrior saint. In both cases the involvement of the saint was revealed in a dream.

The death of the pagan emperor Julian in June AD 363 was ascribed to St Merkourios, and the legend predates the first attestation of Merkourios’ cult in Cappadocia in the early sixth century. While a popular saint, Merkourios possessed no church in the capital. According to the tenth-century martyrdom narratives, he was a young and handsome valiant warrior, appointed stratopedarches (a senior military commander) by the emperor Decius. When the emperor asked him to sacrifice to Artemis, he refused, and so was tortured and put in prison, despite his previous victories over the barbarians, and was executed by beheading at Caesarea.⁴⁹

Julian, nephew of Constantine the Great, had left Antioch in March AD 363, intending to attack the Persian capital Ctesiphon. He was persuaded by his generals not to attempt a siege of the city, and during a withdrawal on 26 June was wounded by a spear to the abdomen in a raid on his troops by the Sassanid army.⁵⁰ In the accounts of his death outside Ctesiphon, the responsibility for the killing evolves exponentially from the action of a Persian or Saracen or Christian soldier until it comes to be attributed directly to the hand of God. Libanios (c. AD 314–392), in his funeral oration, was the first to suggest that the person responsible for his death might have been a Christian in Julian’s own army, while Philostorgios (c.ad 368–439) stated that the spear had been hurled by one of the Arab horsemen in service with the Persians, though he admitted that some thought the blow had been struck by Julian’s own friends.⁵¹ Similarly, Socrates Scholastikos (c. AD 380-after 439) listed several current theories for the death of Julian: a Persian who hurled his javelin and fled; one of his own men (the preferred explanation); and – an account recorded by one of Julian’s bodyguards, Kallistos – a demon, though Socrates adds that ‘this is possibly a mere poetical fiction, or perhaps it really was true, for vengeful furies have undoubtedly destroyed many people’.⁵²

By the mid-fifth century, the vengeance of God through the agency of an angel or warrior saint was being openly scouted as a possibility: Theodoret (c. AD 393–466) comments that ‘whether it were a man or angel who plied the steel, without doubt the doer of the deed was the minister of the will of God’. His citation of Julian’s exclamation, ‘Thou hast won, O Galilaean’, as he flung a handful of his blood into the air in his last moments, is the first evidence for these famous last words.⁵³ Sozomen (c.ad 400–450) suggested three possibilities: that Julian’s death was the work of a Persian or Arab (‘Saracen’); or a soldier, possibly a Christian, angry that Julian had imperilled the army; or that supernatural agency had been responsible -but heavenly, not demonic as suggested by Socrates. In this proposed scenario, two saints had been dispatched to slay the emperor as agents of divine wrath. Like the gods of the Iliad, they were invisible to the combatants on the battlefield, but were seen by two people in dreams – one a friend of Julian and the other a philosopher from Alexandria. In this account, Julian’s friend had fallen asleep in a church where he had taken shelter while on a journey to join Julian in Persia, and saw ‘either in a dream or a vision’ all the apostles and prophets assembled, deliberating on how to take vengeance on Julian for his persecution of Christians. Two of the assembly stood up and volunteered to take action, leaving in haste ‘as if to deprive Julian of the imperial power’. In suspense, the dreamer did not continue his journey, but awaited a further revelation, and the next night saw the sequel to his original dream, when the two saints returned to the same assembly and announced that Julian’s death had been accomplished.⁵⁴

The second vision was sent to Didymos at Alexandria (c. AD 313–398), who had continually fasted and prayed for the cessation of Julian’s persecution of the Church. From worry and hunger on this occasion he had fallen asleep in his chair, and dreamt that he saw white horses riding through the air and heard a voice saying to them, ‘Go and tell Didymos that Julian has been killed exactly at this time; let him communicate this news to Athanasius, the bishop, and let him get up and eat.’ Athanasius was intermittently the Orthodox Bishop of Alexandria (he was exiled five times) between AD 328 and 373. Sozomen, the author, states that he had been ‘credibly informed’ that Didymos and Julian’s friend had actually seen these visions, and that these were not far from the truth.⁵⁵

Sozomen does not identity these bellicose saints by name, but Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos in his Church History states that they were Merkourios and Artemios:⁵⁶ Artemios, governor of Egypt, was an Arian, who had suffered martyrdom at Antioch under Julian in AD 362, and hence an appropriate choice for the role. While a warrior saint, Artemios’ main claim to fame was his specialization in cures for men suffering from hernias and diseases of the genitalia: the petitioners incubated overnight in his church in Constantinople in hope of a cure.⁵⁷ It is probable that Sozomen, as an Orthodox Church historian, did not name the two saints because Artemios was an Arian, and hence it was inappropriate that he be given the credit for successfully eliminating the pagan emperor.

Figure 10.4: An icon from the Church of St Merkourios, Old Cairo, depicting St Merkourios killing Julian the Apostate, with St Basil (who saw the assassination in a dream) watching from the right. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

By the sixth century, it was taken as a matter of faith that a warrior saint had been the agent of divine vengeance against Julian, and the deed was ascribed to Merkourios. In an anonymous Syriac source, Jovian (Julian’s Orthodox successor, AD 363364) is said to have experienced a dream in which Merkourios appeared to him, armed with a bow and three arrows, and informed him that he was going to kill Julian in three weeks’ time, warning Jovian in effect of his future imperial status.⁵⁸ Byzantine chroniclers in the sixth century also recorded that St Merkourios had been the agent (see Figure 10.4), and validate their accounts by having the revelatory dream experienced by no less a churchman than St Basil ‘the Great’ of Cappadocia (ad 330–379).

The first source to incorporate St Basil in the storyline is Malalas’ Chronicle, written under Justinian in the mid-sixth century (it ends at AD 563), the first universal Byzantine chronicle written for a popular audience. In this account, Christ instructs Merkourios to kill Julian, and the Chronicle records a series of dreams sent to Julian and others to further the plot.⁵⁹ While still at Antioch before setting out on his Persian expedition, Julian had a dream of a blond youth – presumably St Merkourios himself – who told him he would die in Asia, and then outside Ctesiphon had a further dream of a man in a light cloak who entered his tent and stabbed him with a spear; when his attendants, eunuchs and guards rushed in and saw his spear-wound, Julian asked them the name of the village where they had set up camp, and when they replied ‘Asia’, he cried out ‘Sun, slay Julian’, and immediately passed away. In a dream that same night, Basil, later the Bishop of Cappadocia, saw the heavens open and Christ sitting on his throne. Christ summoned Merkourios, telling him to go and kill the Emperor Julian, who had risen up against the Christians. Merkourios, wearing a shining iron breastplate, disappeared, and later appeared and reported: ‘Emperor Julian has been stabbed and died, as the Lord had ordered.’ Basil, who was a student friend and frequent correspondent of Julian, woke in shock and reported this dream the next day to his clergy, but they all implored him to be silent on the issue until it was confirmed by outside reports – as, of course, it soon was. The Chronikon Paschale closely follows this account, as does John of Nikiu.⁶⁰ Unfortunately, Basil only became bishop in AD 370, seven years after Julian’s death, but the story is delightfully anecdotal.

In the History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, the date of which is uncertain, the dying Julian himself realized that his death had been accomplished by a saint, and Basil’s dream of the assassination is corroborated by two others, who experienced the dream while in prison with him:

‘He [Julian] saw in the night an army which came upon him from the air, and one of the soldiers struck him with a lance on the head so that it pierced him through the body. Then, realising it was one of the martyrs, he filled his hand with his blood and threw it upwards saying, “Take that Jesus, for you have conquered the whole world.” And Basil, the holy man, three days before the death of Julian, who was in prison, woke from his sleep and said to the two who were with him, “I have seen tonight the martyr St Merkourios entering into his church and taking his lance saying, ‘In truth, I will not allow this unbeliever to blaspheme against my God.’ When he had said this he disappeared and I did not see him again.” Then both his companions said to him, “I also saw the same thing.” So they said to one another, “We believe without doubt that this has taken place.” And they sent to the church of the martyr St Merkourios to look for his lance, which was kept there, to see whether it was still there or not. And as they could not find the lance they were convinced of the truth of the dream. And three days later the letters with the news of Julian’s death arrived at Antioch.’⁶¹

According to tradition, Julian had had Basil incarcerated prior to his departure to the Persian front. It is not made clear where the church and lance of St Merkourios were located, but the disappearance of the saint’s weapon from the church is seen as evidence for the belief that a spiritual being could make use of a physical weapon.⁶²

Sergios, Theodore and the Emperor Valens

Warrior saints also – allegedly – encompassed the death of the Arian emperor Valens (ad 364–378), who died at Adrianople fighting against the Visigoths in August AD 378. This was the worst defeat suffered by the Empire since the Battle of Cannae: Valens’ body was never found and his fate not known. Ammianus gives two different accounts of his death: that he was mortally wounded by an arrow, and that he was wounded and carried to a wooden hut, which was torched by the Goths.⁶³ Socrates Scholastikos likewise gives alternative versions: that he was burnt to death, or that he removed his imperial garb and ran into the ranks of the infantry, where he was cut down.⁶⁴ However, the account of Faustus of Byzantium, an Armenian historian whose work covers the period from c.ad 330–387, but which was probably written in the 470s, records that St Theodore Teron (‘the Recruit’) and St Sergios were the agents responsible for Valens’ death. Sergios, an army officer, had supposedly been executed by Maximian, together with his companion Bacchos (Justinian and Theodora built a church to the saints in Constantinople, often called the ‘little Hagia Sophia’).

Sergios was martyred at Resafa, and his cult acquired more prominence than that of his comrade Bacchos.⁶⁵ In this narrative, which closely resembles that of Merkourios and Julian, a sophist (perhaps Libanios of Antioch), travelling to Byzantium at Valens’ request to write a refutation of Christianity (Valens was actually an Arian, not a pagan), spent the night in the martyr-chapel (martyrium) of Thekla outside Antioch. There, while still awake, he saw a gathering of many martyrs, including Thekla, all adorned with great brilliance. When they were seated, the martyrs bemoaned the fact that ‘the saints of the Lord who have not yet departed from the earth’ were suffering persecution, imprisonment and exile, and that they had therefore assembled to avenge the faithful of the Lord by removing Valens, who was hindering Christ’s labourers, including the diligent labourer Barsilios (St Basil). ‘Come then’, they said to each other, ‘let us send two of our number to go and remove the evil-doer Valens from life’. One of these saints was called Sargis (Sergios), the other Theodoros (Theodore).

The sophist who had experienced the dream refused to continue his journey the next day with his escort, and on the following night he again had a vision of the assembly of the martyrs, to which Sargis and Theodoros returned, reporting that they had killed Valens, enemy of the truth. The whole assembly arose, praised Christ and departed. Upon revealing what he had seen, the sophist risked execution for treason, but was given three days’ grace, during which Valens’ death was confirmed.⁶⁶

While there has been some debate about whether this story is simply an imitation of the better-known Merkourios and Julian anecdote, in this case there was no reason for the identity of the saints to have been changed, and it is now generally agreed to be a ‘stand-alone’ episode, which deliberately promoted the cults of two Eastern warrior saints.⁶⁷ St Sergios, together with his companion and fellow-martyr Bacchos, was particularly popular in Syria and Christian Arabia, with his major shrine at Resafa (Rusafa) in Syria, at the extreme eastern end of the Empire.⁶⁸ The city was an important pilgrimage site from the fourth century and was renamed Sergiopolis after its major saint from c.AD 425, the date of the earliest known shrine to Sergios. He was a logical choice for an Armenian source, as he was venerated in the Armenian Church as a military saint, as was his namesake Sarkis the General, who was martyred under Shapur II with his son Martyros.⁶⁹ Euchaita (modern Avkat) in Pontos in northern Asia Minor was the main cult centre of Theodore, who was already by AD 380 venerated as a military saint for intervention in battles (see below) and famous in Syria, Palestine and Asia Minor.⁷⁰

The Appearance of Saints on the Battlefield

The first Christian saints actually believed to have engaged the enemy on the battlefield were not warrior saints but the apostles John and Philip, and they were again seen not by the actual participants in the conflict, but in a dream. The occasion was the battle between Theodosius I and the usurper Eugenios in AD 394. Even though Eugenios was a practising Christian, his defeat by the orthodox Theodosius led to his being depicted by Christian historians as a champion of paganism.⁷¹ The incident is recorded by Bishop Theodoret of Cyrrhus, writing between AD 444 and 450, who is therefore hardly a contemporary source.

The opposing sides met at the River Frigidus (to the east of Aquileia in Italy), and while asleep, Theodosius was said to have had a vision of ‘two men clothed in white on white horses’, who urged him to be of good cheer, and arm and marshal his men for battle at dawn, ‘for we are sent to fight for you. I am John the evangelist and I am Philip the apostle.’ A soldier in the ranks who also saw the vision reported it to his centurion, and the story thus reached the emperor, confirming his own dream.⁷² Other ‘miracles’ are recorded for the battle: Theodosius prayed for a storm, and a fierce tempest blew in the faces of the Western troops, even sweeping their own arrows back into their faces, while a great dust storm blinded them. Theodoret may have been drawing on narratives of Castor and Pollux, with perhaps hints of the Book of Revelation where the army of heaven battled the forces of darkness and the dragon. The authenticity of the dream, as with the Coptic account of Merkourios’ slaying of Julian, is confirmed by its also being experienced by a third party.

There was also a legend that St Peter (and perhaps St Paul too) had intervened to prevent Attila marching on Rome. In AD 452, at a meeting between Attila and Pope Leo, two huge men appeared (or in the version of the eighth-century source Paul the Deacon, only one), dressed in priestly robes with swords, and threatened Attila and his army with death if they attacked Rome: these saints, whose apparition helped convince Attila of the inadvisability of proceeding on to Rome, were said to have been Saints Peter and Paul.⁷³

Patron Saints of Cities

One of the main duties of a warrior saint was the protection of their city against invaders, of which St Demetrios’ concern for Thessaloniki is the prime example (see below). Where the capital itself was concerned, the Theotokos was always its main defender, and from the late sixth century the city had been seen as under her direct protection. She personally intervened to defend it when under siege, and, when the Avars besieged Constantinople in AD 626, their khagan saw ‘a woman in stately dress rushing about on the walls all alone’. According to Theodore Synkellos, ‘she was present everywhere, winning uncontested victory and inflicting fear and horror on her enemies. She gave strength to her servants, protected her subjects from harm, and destroyed the enemy hordes.’⁷⁴ However, from the sixth century on, warrior saints also began to take a prominent part in the defence of their cities or the Empire as a whole, either of their own volition or sometimes as generals under her command and carrying out her instructions. The Theotokos, however, remained a preeminent defender of her city and Byzantine troops in the field, and was credited with military successes: after his victory in Bulgaria in AD 971, John I Tzimiskes (ad 969–976) had an icon of the Theotokos carried in his triumphal chariot while he processed into the capital on foot; and in his civil wars in AD 989, Basil II (ad 976–1025) was said to have personally carried an icon of the Theotokos into battle.⁷⁵ It was also customary for icons of saints to be taken into battle, with John I Tzimiskes considering the icons of the Saints Theodore as his ‘allies and protectors against the foe’ (see below).

Demetrios was not the only saint recorded as intervening successfully when his city was under attack. St Sergios was renowned for having prevented Khusrau (Chosroes) I in AD 543 from successfully storming Resafa (now renamed Sergiopolis).⁷⁶ The Persian ruler sent 6,000 men to besiege the city to loot its treasures, but an Arab Christian in his army warned the town in time. Only 200 Roman soldiers were there to defend the city, but the spy informed them that the besiegers would only have water for two days. According to the historian Procopius in the sixth century, it was faith in Sergios and the citizens’ prayers that saved the city. In Evagrius’ account, written at the end of the century, the saint took a more direct role. The Persians had been informed that the city was only manned by women, children and invalids, but as they approached they perceived an immense army on the battlements and as a result Khusrau’s army retreated the next day:

‘Khusrau advanced his whole army against the city. Suddenly along the circuit of the walls, in defence of the place, innumerable shields appeared, and when they saw these the people sent by Khusrau returned, describing, with wonder, the number and type of the weapons. And when, on further enquiry, he learned that very few persons remained in the city, and that these consisted of the elderly and children due to the absence of the men of fighting age, he realised that the miracle was the work of the martyr [Sergios], and, influenced by fear and wonder at the faith of the Christians, he withdrew back to his own country.’⁷⁷

In this case, while the inhabitants realized that their survival was due to the intervention of St Sergios, the vision was actually vouchsafed to the enemy army, and Khusrau retreated because he understood that the city was under the protection of its warrior saint and was therefore impregnable.

Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos himself, in the de administrando imperio, recorded that Patras in the northern Peloponnese was saved in AD 805 by St Andrew (the apostle), its patron saint, when the town was attacked by the Slavs. Andrew was not a warrior saint, but he took on the mantle of one in defence of his city.⁷⁸ A scout had been instructed to give a signal (the lowering of his standard) to announce the arrival of the military governor to the city’s aid. When, however, he found that the governor was not coming, he began to return to the city, holding his standard erect. Owing to the intercession of the apostle Andrew, his horse slipped and he dipped the standard. The inhabitants of the city, seeing the signal and believing that the military governor was on his way, opened the gates of the city and sallied out. There they saw Andrew on horseback charging upon the barbarians, who were totally routed. He was also seen by the Slavs, who in their terror fled to his church for refuge:

‘And the barbarians saw him, and were amazed and confounded at the violent assault upon them of the invincible and unconquerable warrior and captain and marshal, the triumphant and victorious first-summoned apostle Andrew. They were thrown into disarray and disconcerted, fear possessed them, and they fled for refuge into his most sacred church.’⁷⁹

In both these cases, the enemy had received visual proof that the saint was protecting his city, one by conjuring up a miraculous army of defenders and the other by participating personally in the engagement and terrifying the attackers. Interestingly, on this occasion, the saint was seen not just by the enemy, but by both sides in the conflict.

St George and his Dragon

The archetypal and still today the most popular military saint in Greece and Europe generally, the ‘Great Martyr’ (megalomartyras), was St George of Lydda (known in Greek as Diospolis, the ‘city of Zeus’), a town in Palestine, south-east of Jaffa. This was an early centre of Christianity and supposedly the site of his burial, even though his martyrdom narratives describe him as a young aristocratic military officer from Cappadocia, who was allegedly executed by Diocletian at Nikomedeia in Bithynia in AD 303. There is no actual evidence that George was an historical figure (unlike many of the other military saints), and he is not mentioned by the fourth-century sources Eusebius or Jerome.⁸⁰ Church authorities themselves in the early sixth century considered his Life to be fictitious, and it was listed in the Decretum Gelasianum, a work supposedly composed by Pope Gelasius (ad 492–496) but probably dating to the early sixth century, which listed apocryphal writings such as accounts of saints and martyrs compiled or recognized by heretics and schismatics and which were not accepted by the Church.⁸¹ At this point, therefore, George’s acta were seen as apocryphal, or at least ahistorical. His burial place at Lydda was, however, a pilgrimage site from the early sixth century; while the sanctuary there may have been built at the end of the fourth century, the earliest pilgrimage account is the sixth-century pilgrimage travel guide, the de situ terrae sanctae, of the archdeacon Theodosius (written between AD 518 and 530).⁸² The earliest church of George in Constantinople was mentioned in AD 518; there were nine churches in total dedicated to him in the capital.⁸³

While St George was one of the warrior saints who was actually said to have been a soldier, none of the miracles in his miracle collections involve combat or army service, and his martial ethos is relatively late in developing: he is often shown as healing children or saving them from captivity among his other feats, as in the mosaic from the Church of St Demetrios in Thessaloniki (see Figure 10.5).⁸⁴ He generally appears, however, as a soldier on horseback (he was depicted as a warrior in a sixth-century wall-painting from Bawit in Egypt),⁸⁵ and some of his miracles portray a pugnacious quality, particularly towards non-Byzantines, such as Arabs. His portrait in military garb was sufficient to repel a band of ‘Saracens’, who intended to destroy the mosaic decorating the façade of his church where he was depicted dressed in armour and carrying a lance, while on another occasion some Saracens camping in Lydda went to sleep and gamble in George’s church. Though they were warned that St George would punish them, one of the Saracens threw his spear at the saint’s icon, which returned upon him straight through the heart. His companions were killed as they ran away. A miracle collection of Adamnan of Iona, On the Holy Places, recording the Frankish pilgrim Arculf’s account of his travels in the late seventh century, also shows the icon punishing disrespect towards the saint: an unbeliever threw his lance at a column on which the image of St George was depicted, but the lance passed through the column, his horse died, and when he tried to retrieve his lance his hand got stuck inside the column until he repented.

Figure 10.5: A seventh-century mosaic from the Church of St Demetrios in Thessaloniki, depicting St George in court dress as the patron of two young children: his hand is on the shoulder of one child, and he is blessing the other. (© Art Collection 2/Alamy Stock Photo)

In another anecdote that St Arculf claimed to have heard in Constantinople, a large force was assembling for an expedition. One of the cavalry entered the city and addressed the depiction of George, commending himself and his horse to George’s protection, and asking that by virtue of his prayers they would both return safe and well. Many thousands perished in the campaign, but this man returned to Diospolis on the same beloved horse because he had requested George’s protection for them both. When the cavalryman attempted to give George increasing amounts of gold in exchange for the horse, the animal remained rooted to the spot and refused to move. Finally, the soldier realized that he had consecrated his horse to the saint and ‘assigned him as a gift to the holy confessor’, together with the sixty gold coins with which he had tried to ransom him.⁸⁶ Accounts portray George as an expert at protecting his shrine: according to the Khuzistan Chronicle, written in the midseventh century, following the Persian conquest of Jerusalem in AD 614 a Persian commander attempted to despoil George’s church. His soldiers were unable to enter the building, and when he himself attempted ingress, the hooves of his horse stuck to the ground and he was immobilized. To release himself, he had to vow a silver dedication in the shape of the church, an object which from that day was pointed out to pilgrims as proof of the saint’s powers.⁸⁷

Arkadios, Archbishop of Cyprus in the seventh century, praised George’s role in earthly and heavenly armies, describing him as ‘the unconquerable shield of the soldiers of Christ, ally of the emperor, fortification of fighting men’.⁸⁸ However, in early accounts where George’s intervention made a difference to history, his involvement tended to be ‘hands-off’ rather than as a participant in violent conflict. In one miracle in an Ethiopian account, George, together with the archangel Michael, was responsible for violently deposing Diocletian himself from the throne (the reader will no doubt remember that George was said to have been martyred under Diocletian). One of Diocletian’s generals, Euchios, who had been sent to destroy George’s shrine at Lydda, broke the lamp of the shrine. The flying glass from the lamp impaled itself in his head and he developed leprosy where the oil had splashed on him, dying horribly on the third day. Diocletian prepared to take revenge for this by destroying the shrine, but before his fleet could embark at Constantinople, George descended from heaven along with St Michael and overturned Diocletian’s throne, the golden pomegranates of which crushed his eyeballs. Diocletian was not killed, but Constantine assumed the throne in his place.⁸⁹

Another occasion on which George ensured victory for the right side is mentioned in the Life of Theodore of Sykeon in Galatia (c.ad 540–613), written by a contemporary author, one of Theodore’s disciples.⁹⁰ The popularity of George’s cult is apparent in this Life, in which George plays a prominent role protecting Theodore from demons and temptations. However, for all George’s martial qualities, when Domnitziolos, nephew of the emperor Phokas (ad 602–610), was sent as general against the Persians and requested divine assistance, it was his prayers to George that ensured his success, rather than actual intervention from the saint: Domnitziolos asked Theodore’s advice prior to the campaign, and Theodore commended him to God and St George. When the general fell into an ambush, he prayed to George and thus escaped from danger.⁹¹

The heroic deeds for which George was primarily celebrated from the eleventh or twelfth century onwards related to the killing of dragons, a legend which may date to as early as the seventh century. In a seventh-century painting in Cappadocia, he is shown with St Theodore Teron attacking two serpents around a tree, but George is mostly shown in combat with a man prior to the eleventh century, and Theodore Teron’s association with dragons goes back much earlier than that of George (see below). George and Theodore are frequently represented together on horseback killing a dragon, which is either serpent-like or lizard-like, and sometimes with two heads.⁹² George’s rescue of a princess was first attested in an eleventh-century Georgian manuscript, and the legend was made famous by Caxton’s Golden Legend, a fifteenth-century English translation of Jacobus da Voragine’s thirteenth-century work Legenda Sanctorum, which records how a fierce dragon which was ravaging the city of Silene in Libya was placated daily by two sheep. When these ran out, they had to resort to humans, but George saved the king’s daughter when she was about to be sacrificed, refused the offered treasure and converted the entire city to Christianity.⁹³

His cult, like that of the other warrior saints, grew exponentially in the second half of the tenth and first quarter of the eleventh centuries, under the military emperors Nikephoros II Phokas (ad 963–969), John I Tzimiskes (ad 969–976) and Basil II (ad 976–1025), when emperors were celebrated for their courage and victories on the battlefield against Bulgar, Rus and Arab foes. George, like other warrior saints, was frequently invoked on campaign. In AD 971, after a defeat of the Kievan Rus in Bulgaria, John I Tzimiskes made offerings for victory to George, ‘the gloriously triumphant martyr’, as the Byzantines had charged the enemy on George’s feast day, 23 April. In the final encounter, however, at Dorostolon (Drista), it was St Theodore Stratelates that intervened to assist the Byzantines to victory (see below). As the warrior saint best known in the West, the Crusaders in the Holy Land were particularly attracted to George’s cult, and he was seen to intervene in their interests during the Crusades in battle against the Moslems on several occasions (see below). As a result of the crusades, Edward III (1312–1377) made George patron saint of England instead of Saints Peter and Paul, and he was invoked at Agincourt in 1415 against the French. More than any other warrior saint, George’s career went from strength to strength across Europe: in Russia, he intervened on behalf of Alexander Nevsky against the Swedes in 1240 and the Teutonic Knights in 1242, and fought alongside other saints against the Mongols at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1440.⁹⁴ Even in the First World War, the British Parliamentary Recruiting Committee in its posters presented St George as symbolizing the uprightness and morality of Britain’s challenge to the Germanic dragon (see Figure 10.9). Unfortunately, the value of St George as a symbol of righteous victory was appreciated by others than the English, and in the same war Germany put illustrations of St George on its war-loan posters, on one of which George’s banner bears the German double-headed eagle, while George is shown as triumphing over the wicked dragon – the Allies – with the legend ‘Thanks be to God / Givest thou a mite / Be it never so small / Thou shalt be blessed by God’.⁹⁵

Theodore ‘the Recruit’ and Theodore ‘the General’

Theodore ‘the Recruit’

Theodore Teron (Latin, tiro; Greek, teron), an ordinary soldier from Euchaita (Avhat) in Pontos, was one of the earliest and most venerated of the warrior saints.⁹⁶ He is mentioned c. AD 380 in a late fourth-century encomium by Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, as a recruit in the infantry, who refused to sacrifice to the pagan gods and who set light to the temple of ‘the Mother of the gods’ in Amaseia. He was therefore condemned to be burnt in a fiery oven. In his miracles as described by Gregory, Theodore is shown as warding off demons, curing illnesses, providing protection on journeys and assisting the poor. Gregory also mentions his recent defence of Euchaita against Scythians (‘for in the past year, as we believe, he calmed the barbarian storm and stopped the horrible war of the wild Scythians’), and Gregory begs Theodore as saint to ‘fight for us as a soldier’:⁹⁷ an early example of the way in which the role of the warrior saints was overwhelmingly to develop into that of protection against external enemies. As Euchaita was on the eastern frontiers, it was a pivotal location in Arab-Byzantine conflict, which doubtless encouraged accounts of Theodore’s intervention on the battlefield.⁹⁸ In the late tenth or early eleventh century, during the reign of Basil II, the general Nikephoros Ouranos reworked Theodore’s life and miracles.⁹⁹ In this account, Theodore’s role as protector of his city, Euchaita, against external enemies – even in the face of divine plans for its destruction – had come to full fruition: the saint warded off a barbarian attack after initially being instructed by angels to stand aside to allow the barbarian invaders to succeed. Unwilling to let his city suffer, he prayed for the divine order to be rescinded and with his help Euchaita was saved.

Figure 10.6: An engraved agate seal ring (intaglio) depicting St Theodore Teron slaying a manyheaded dragon, dating to c. 1300. An inscription on the reverse reads: ‘Jesus Christ, Lord, help your servant, whom you, Holy One, know.’ (Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum ofArt, New York, Accession number 1999.325.227: Gift of Nanette B. Kelekian, in memory of Charles Dikran and Beatrice Kelekian, 1999)

In other miracles, a woman had a vision of Theodore, armed and on horseback, warding off a barbarian attack, while the Arabs were unable to destroy his sanctuary, with their leader being made to roll around on the ground, biting his tongue.¹⁰⁰ Already by the seventh century, a legend had arisen in which Theodore killed a dragon near Euchaita – it was Theodore, not George, who was the original dragon-slayer.¹⁰¹ In a version of his life dating to AD 890, he dealt with a dragon who was blocking a road by making the sign of the Cross and cutting off its head, assisted by a princess named Eudokia, while in Ouranos’ later account, he rescued his mother from a dragon when she was drawing water from a spring. Iconographically, he was associated with a dragon from the sixth century (see, for example, Figure 10.6), and three seals dated from the mid-sixth to the early eighth centuries (one belonging to a Bishop Peter of Euchaita) feature a bearded figure, who is probably Theodore, spearing a snake-like dragon.¹⁰²

Theodore ‘the General’

While there is evidence from at least the fifth or sixth centuries for the cults of the other members of the elite corps of warrior saints, Theodore Stratelates (the ‘General’) is an exception: the term ‘stratelates’ can signify a high army rank or be a more generic term for a high-ranking officer.¹⁰³ This Theodore first appears in the literary record in the ninth century in the laudatio written for him by Niketas of Paphlagonia, and Niketas is the first writer to explicitly refer to two saints, not one, named Theodore.¹⁰⁴ Stratelates’ execution was placed in the reign of Licinius (martyrdom by flagellation), and his biography appears to closely parallel that of Teron. He was associated with Euchaneia (not far from Euchaita) as the site of his cult, and does not appear to have had any churches in Constantinople. A contemporary, his servant Augaros or Abgar, was said to have written his earliest vita (preserved in an eleventh-century manuscript). There appear to have been specific class-based reasons behind the spread of his cult, so that with the increased militarization of Byzantine society and the rise to power of aristocratic generals the veneration of the more lowly Theodore Teron (‘the Recruit’), a soldier of no rank, was balanced by that of a high-ranking officer. This Theodore was often paired iconographically with Theodore Teron, and from the eleventh century, Stratelates is shown with a forked beard to distinguish him from Teron, whose beard is shown as pointed.¹⁰⁵ His first extant portrayal appears to have been that in the Menologion of Basil II (a compilation of saints’ lives: see below), in which he alone of the warrior saints is depicted as an army officer, with a lance, sword and shield: the others are depicted in the act of being martyred.

The cult of this saintly ‘officer and gentleman’ became particularly prominent during the reigns of the more militaristic emperors of the later tenth and early eleventh centuries: Nikephoros II Phokas, John I Tzimiskes and Basil II. Both Theodores are prominent in the epic-romance Digenis Akritas, which glorifies aristocratic independence and warfare as a fine art, and Digenis built a church in honour of one of them on his estate (presumably Stratelates); he swears on their names, and received two gilded icons of them as wedding presents, as well as – taking Theodore Teron as a model – fighting off a dragon who attempted to seduce his wife.¹⁰⁶

Stratelates’ cult quickly became popular with the military, particularly the Eastern armies,¹⁰⁷ and certainly by the third quarter of the tenth century, emperors were invoking him in battle. His pre-eminence as an imperial warrior saint was assured after he assisted John I Tzimiskes against the Rus in 971 on his feast-day. Even earlier, St Basil the Younger (died AD 944), in his Life written by a contemporary,¹⁰⁸ had predicted that the Rus would attack the capital in AD 941 and that Theodore ‘the most holy general who has the surname Spongarios [perhaps Sphorakios, the designation of a church dedicated to Theodore in Constantinople] will lead the defence, with the Mother of God and all the saints’.¹⁰⁹ It is not impossible that John I deliberately chose to attack the Rus on Theodore’s feast-day as a result of this prophecy.

Theodore Stratelates and the Battle of Dorostolon

In AD 971, John I Tzimiskes faced a problem resulting from the presence of Sviatoslav and the Kievan Rus in eastern Bulgaria.¹¹⁰ Tzimiskes’ predecessor, Nikephoros II Phokas, had employed the Rus against the rebellious Bulgarians, and Sviatoslav invaded the region, probably in the summer of AD 968. He had to return home to deal with a Pecheneg attack, but was in Bulgaria again the following year, when he deposed Boris II and captured the major city of Preslav. Unfortunately for the Byzantines, however, he was so impressed by the region that he planned to stay permanently: Bulgaria compared so favourably to the Ukraine that he decided to transfer his capital from Kiev to Little Preslav (Preslavets or Presthlavitza), near the mouth of the Danube. According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, he explained to his court that it was a far better site for a capital than Kiev, and that ‘all the riches would flow there: gold, silks, wine, and various fruits from Greece, silver and horses from Hungary and Bohemia, and from Ruthenia furs, wax, honey, and ancient laws’.¹¹¹ Finally, in AD 971, Tzimiskes captured Preslav and restored Boris to his throne, and Sviatoslav was besieged in Dorostolon (Dristra), near the mouth of the Danube, where he surrendered in July. The Byzantine victory was attributed in no little measure to the intervention of Theodore Stratelates, and the Rus were soundly defeated, with most of them killed (15,500) or wounded, as opposed to only 350 Byzantine casualties.

There are two accounts of Theodore’s role in events. Both agree that when the encounter took place at Dorostolon, on the feast day of Theodore Stratelates (8 June), a storm arose and blew strongly into the Rus faces, impeding their advance. Leo the Deacon, in an account written not long after the battle, described as pivotal the appearance of an unknown figure on the battlefield:

‘It is said that a man on a white horse appeared who went ahead of the Romans [Byzantines] and encouraged them to advance against the Scythians [Rus]; he broke through the enemy regiments in a miraculous fashion and threw them into disarray.’

No one in the camp had previously seen this warrior, and even though the emperor had him looked for afterwards so that he could present him with suitable rewards, he could not be found. ‘Therefore a definite suspicion came about that it was the great martyr Theodore, whom the emperor used to pray to in battle to protect and preserve him together with all the army.’ This suspicion was corroborated by the fact that, on the evening before the battle, a nun had dreamt that she saw the Mother of God, escorted by men ‘in the form of flames’ (i.e., angels), and that she instructed them to summon the martyr Theodore. When the saint, a brave young man in armour, appeared, the Theotokos said to him, ‘Lord Theodore, your John, who is fighting the Scythians at Dorystolon, is now in great difficulty. Make haste to help him. For if you are too late, he will be in danger.’ The saint replied that he would obey her commands, and departed to assist the emperor: the nun then woke up.¹¹²

This slightly hesitant account (Leo is reporting a third-hand account, and only after the battle was it realized that the warrior was St Theodore) was updated by Skylitzes in the second half of the eleventh century, with a more elaborate narrative, in which he records that Theodore had been seen by the entire army:¹¹³

‘A man appeared to the entire Roman army, riding on a white horse, pressing forward, routing the ranks of the enemy and throwing them into disarray, a man previously and subsequently unknown to anyone. They say he was one of the gloriously victorious martyrs named Theodore, for the emperor always used [the icons of] these martyrs as allies and protectors against the enemy.’

Again, a dream by a third person is used to confirm the authenticity of the account. At Byzantium, a woman confirmed that the apparition was true:

‘for she had a dream before the engagement in which she seemed to be in the presence of the Theotokos and heard her saying to a soldier, “Lord Theodore, John my friend and yours is in trouble. Go swiftly to help him.” She reported this to her neighbours at sunrise.’

To honour the martyr and repay him for his timely aid, Skylitzes states that John Tzimiskes built Stratelates a splendid and well-endowed shrine for his relics and renamed Euchaneia as Theodoroupolis (‘city of Theodore’); this city, the main centre of the cult of Theodore Stratelates, was situated not far from Euchaita, the cult centre of Theodore Teron. Leo the Deacon, however, reports more probably that it was the city of Dorostolon itself, the site of the encounter, that was renamed Theodoropolis, and a seal belonging to a ‘katepan [commander] of Theodoroupolis’ has been found nearby at Preslav.¹¹⁴

This episode is remarkable as the only occasion in Skylitzes’ history in which a saint makes a personal appearance, and the first time in which a military saint is shown as a comrade-in-arms of the emperor, coming to assist him personally on the battlefield and being rewarded for his intervention by a new shrine and the renaming of a city. While the plot device of a dream is used as corroboration of the narrative, the Byzantine troops as a whole are said to have experienced the apparition of the saint, thus transforming a vision of an unknown combatant into a divine intervention witnessed by all participants – at least those on the winning side. Both the Saint Theodores also worked together in the thirteenth century to help Theodore II Laskaris (1254–1258) retake the fortress of Melnik in Bulgaria in 1256. According to Theodore Pediasimos, the emperor invoked their help while in Serres, and he later saw two handsome young men who routed the enemy.¹¹⁵

Basil II ‘the Bulgarslayer’ and the Warrior Saints

John’s successor, Basil II (John was in effect regent for the young emperor, having married his aunt), who spent nearly forty-nine years on campaign against Bulgars and Arabs, was particularly devoted to the warrior saints. On one occasion, when en route to Bulgaria in AD 991 after the end of lengthy civil wars against pretenders and rebels, he made a particular point of stopping at Thessaloniki to make a thanks-offering to St Demetrios for his assistance.¹¹⁶ His Psalter and Menologion (a compilation of 430 brief saints’ lives, each with an illustration) both show his devotion to military saints and the degree to which he relied on them, particularly for their patronage and protection during his campaigns. The Menologion (Vat. gr. 1613), now in the Vatican library, was commissioned by or made for him sometime after AD 979. This volume actually comprises a synaxarion, a list of saints and their feast days, with a short life for every saint, each a summary of exactly sixteen lines, taking half a page, with the other half for the illustration. This is the most lavishly illustrated of all Byzantine liturgical manuscripts. The volume only covers the feast days between September and February, so there may have been a second volume which is now lost.

The illustrations are given particular prominence, and it would have been a suitable volume for a hard-working but pious emperor to take on campaign. While a number of different types of saints are featured, three-quarters of the subjects are martyrs, and the warrior saints are almost invariably shown in the act of engaging with their martyrdom, with their sufferings and torture portrayed in some graphic detail (see Figure 10.1 for Blaise of Sebaste). The only one depicted in full armour is Theodore Stratelates, now one of the most pre-eminent of the warrior saints after his victory at Dorostolon, who is shown with lance, sword and shield.¹¹⁷ The emphasis on the warrior saints and their martyrdoms no doubt reflected Basil’s choice of heavenly protectors.

The dedicatory poem addresses Basil as ‘sun of the purple, reared in the purple robes, excelling both in victories and in learning’, and describes how the work will assist and support him in his role as emperor:

‘This book contains beautiful images like stars, wise prophets, martyrs and apostles, of all the righteous, of angels and archangels ... may he [Basil] find as his active helpers during his reign all [saints] whom he has had portrayed with colours, to be allies in his battles, deliverers from hardships, curers of illnesses, and in the Last Judgement fervent intercessors with the Lord.’¹¹⁸

Basil’s dedication begs the saints and angels portrayed in this volume to assist him in his campaigns and intercede for him on Judgement Day. The illustrations appear to have been intended to function as icons, with the emperor being able to call upon the help and divine protection of as many holy persons as possible, whatever the crisis, and to provide a brief biography of the saint appropriate for each day throughout the year. The format suggests that Basil was not a reading man, and that his spiritual exercise would focus primarily on the icon itself, which was briefly elucidated by the text.

We are also fortunate enough to have Basil’s Psalter (a book of devotional material, such as the Book of Psalms), which shows his devotion to the warrior saints. In the frontispiece, a miniature of Basil himself, portrayed as a triumphant Roman general (see Figure 10.3), he is flanked by roundels of six of the most prominent warrior saints, all armed with lances. The accompanying poem describes the scene, highlighting the award of the crown and lance to Basil by the archangels, and describes the warrior saints as his fellow-soldiers, fighting by his side in battle and casting down his enemies.¹¹⁹

St Demetrios of Thessaloniki

Thessaloniki, from at least the middle of the fifth century, was devoted to its patron saint Demetrios, who had supposedly been martyred under Maximian,¹²⁰ and his primary role from the earliest period had been to defend Thessaloniki from the threats of attacks and sieges by the Avars and Slavs from the north. Demetrios, at least in this early period, was not thought to have had a military background, but is described as of senatorial family and proconsul of Greece, rather than a career soldier.¹²¹ He was also known as ‘myroblytos’, the myrrh-giver, as a sweet-smelling oil (myron) flowed from his relics in the church at Thessaloniki. This was believed to have therapeutic qualities and was taken away in special flasks (enkolpia) by pilgrims from at least the eleventh century.¹²² It was also believed to give protection in battle, and amulets with the oil were carried into combat (see Figure 10.8). Despite a Latin version of Demetrios’ passion being written by Anastasius Bibliothecarius in the ninth century, he did not enjoy the same popularity in the West as in the East until the time of the Crusades (see below).

There are two seventh-century collections of his miracles, the earliest of which was composed by ‘John the archbishop’ in the first decade of the century, and which comprises fifteen stories dating to c.ad 582–615. Many of these are concerned with healing miracles at the ciborium (the structure thought to mark the site of the saint’s tomb and the focus of the cult which contained a silver image of the saint) and relate to his miraculous myron: according to John (Miracle 10), the ciborium stood on the left-hand side of the church, had a hexagonal base, eight columns and carved silver partitions with a cross on a silver globe on the top. The saint cured Marianos, the governor of Thessaloniki, of paralysis, as well as a prefect who suffered from a discharge of blood: he appeared to both in dreams and they were cured after being taken to his shrine. Miracles 13–15, however, present Demetrios conclusively as saviour of his city, warding off the sixth- and seventh-century attacks by Avars and Slavs.¹²³ In Miracle 13 in John’s collection, he is portrayed, probably in reference to the siege of the city in AD 586, as involved in the actual fighting at the walls, ‘not just in our imagination, but before our very eyes, on the wall dressed as a hoplite, and the first to ascend the ladder’. After attacking the convent of St Matrona, the Slavs tried to scale the walls, but Demetrios appeared in military dress and struck the first of the enemy with his lance, making him fall backward onto those behind him on the ladder and killing him.¹²⁴ In Miracle 14, he brought about the apparition of a large army which scared off the city’s besiegers. One of the barbarians saw him in person as ‘a ruddy and radiant man, seated on a white horse and wearing a white cape’. In Miracle 15, a man who took refuge to pray in the cathedral during a siege had a vision in which Demetrios was summoned to heaven by two angels as the city was going to be surrendered to its enemies. In the vision, Demetrios refused to abandon his people, and the man left the cathedral and ran along the walls shouting, ‘Take courage brothers, the victorious one is with us.’ The city was saved.¹²⁵

Figure 10.7: An ivory icon of St Demetrios with spear and shield, dating to 950–1000. The cleft in the frame’s base may have supported a standard for carrying the icon in processions or into battle. (Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Accession number 1970.324.3: The Cloisters Collection, 1970)

The second collection was written seventy years later, and includes six further miracles which happened in the time of the anonymous author. The writer summarizes them as ‘release of prisoners, healing of the sick, help in wars, guiding sailors’, while Demetrios’ involvement in healing illness and demoniac possession was so well known that it was not worth writing about. In Miracle 2, he causes a projectile inscribed ‘in the name of God and Saint Demetrios’ to collide with one launched by the enemy, both missiles landing in the enemy camp; in another, he comes to the relief of the city on foot, his chlamys (cloak) thrown up and carrying a rod in his hand. In Miracle 1, he is seen in his chlamys marching along the walls of the city and on the sea.¹²⁶

In the miracles described in the Latin version of Demetrios’ Life by Anastasius the Librarian (Bibliothecarius), the saint also helped to provision the city when a famine accompanied the siege. When the city sent ambassadors to the emperor for help, Demetrios, ‘just as he is depicted in paintings’ (his icons were obviously well known), appeared on the island of Chios to a shipmaster named Stephen who was taking 200 bushels of corn to Constantinople, and instructed him to sail instead to Thessaloniki. The man, terrified at the apparition, replied that he had heard it was on the point of falling to the barbarians. The saint, however, told him to proceed there and tell any ships he might meet that Thessaloniki had been saved by the mercy of God. The saint began to walk in the direction of Thessaloniki on the sea; Stephen sailed there and found that the enemy had recently abandoned their siege due to divinely inspired fear. Similarly, in Miracle 6, Demetrios provisioned the city by sending grain-carrying ships at Chios to Thessaloniki. But Demetrios was still renowned generally for his healing skills: when Cyprian, an African bishop, was enslaved by Slavs while en route to Constantinople, Demetrios (‘a soldier of the great emperor’) liberated him and led him to the gates of Thessaloniki. Realizing that his rescuer was the saint, Cyprian returned home to Africa and built there a church and ciborium like that at Thessaloniki, using porphyry which miraculously arrived by sea. This shrine too was a healing one: ‘if any sick person goes to this temple in prayer, and if he is anointed with oil from his [Demetrios’] lamp, he will be cured.’¹²⁷

Demetrios, like other warrior saints, was initially depicted as a youthful martyr in tunic and chlamys as in the early seventh-century mosaic on the façade of his church. But by the tenth century, his portrayals were becoming more militarized, and in the Middle Byzantine period, like other warrior saints, it was quite normal for him to be portrayed in military dress (see Figure 10.7). When Demetrios appeared to Leo VI and his wife Theophano in prison, according to her Life (composed c.ad 895), it was as a young man in military dress with a spear and shield.¹²⁸ From this point he was often paired with St George as a warrior, both iconographically and in literary accounts.¹²⁹ The gold and enamel pendant St Demetrios reliquary in the British Museum dating to the eleventh century depicts both George and Demetrios and was intended to hold holy oil (myron) from Demetrios’ shrine and blood-soaked earth from the site of his martyrdom, both of which had healing and apotropaic powers, as well as other relics: this reliquary was clearly intended to be taken on campaign (see Figure 10.8). Encircling the picture of St George, the inscription in Greek reads, ‘[The wearer] prays to have you as his fervent protector in battle.’ Around the side, there is another inscription in Greek, ‘Anointed with your blood and holy oil’. Inside the amulet, an eighteenth-century inscription in Georgian states that it is the ‘Queen’s relic’ and contains a fragment of the True Cross.¹³⁰ Demetrios’ myron was valued at all levels of society: an octagonal silver-gilt reliquary in Moscow (in the State Historical and Cultural Museum), with portraits of Constantine X (1059–1067) and Eudokia Makrembolitissa, was commissioned by the mystographos (notary) John Autoreianos. The dedication reads:

‘I am a true image of the ciborium of the lance-pierced martyr Demetrios. On the outside I have Christ inscribed, who with his hands crowns the fair [imperial] couple. He who made me anew is John of the family of the Autoreianoi, by profession mystographos.’¹³¹

The saints Nestor and Loupos, two companions of Demetrios associated with his martyrdom, are also depicted.

In any crisis faced by the inhabitants of Thessaloniki, their immediate response was to turn to Demetrios. Of course, there had to be some explanation for those occasions when he failed to save the city from attackers. After Thessaloniki was sacked by the Arabs in AD 904, the patriarch Nicholas Mystikos preached a sermon in Constantinople explaining that the saint had been so distracted by Christ’s anguish at mortals’ sins that he was too preoccupied to become involved. Alternatively, according to John Kaminiates – who describes himself as a contemporary eyewitness of events in the city – Demetrios did try to intercede but was refused divine permission to become involved.¹³²

The belief in the protection of Demetrios and the apotropaic and salvific nature of his miraculous myron was displayed in 1041 during a Bulgarian siege of the city by the general Alousianos with 40,000 troops. After six days, the citizens kept an all-night vigil at Demetrios’ tomb, and then smeared themselves with the myron which flowed from his tomb before marching into battle on the following morning, throwing the Bulgars into disorder by their unexpected sortie. Skylitzes commented that ‘the Bulgarians were not in the least willing to offer a sustained or courageous resistance, for the martyr was leading the Roman army and smoothing a path for it’, while Bulgarians captured in the battle reported on oath that they saw a youth on horseback leading the army and exuding a fire which burnt up their troops. Fifteen thousand Bulgarians were killed and a similar number taken prisoner. It is only fair, however, to state that the account of the battle by the Byzantine moralist Kekaumenos was critical of Alousianos for not establishing a camp or resting his men.¹³³

Emperors campaigning in Thessaly requested Demetrios’ aid as a matter of course. Just as Basil II, when en route to Bulgaria in AD 991 after the end of the lengthy civil wars, had made a particular point of stopping at Thessaloniki to make a thanks-offering to St Demetrios for his assistance,¹³⁴ Alexios I Komnenos nearly 100 years later relied on the saint for help against the encroachments of the Normans in northern Greece, according at least to his daughter Anna Komnene, who presents a picture of her father as the epitome of imperial piety. When Bohemond and the Normans were besieging Larisa, south of Thessaloniki, in 1082–1083, Alexios had a dream the night before he met them in battle. He dreamt he was in the sanctuary of Demetrios and heard a voice say, ‘Cease tormenting yourself and do not worry: tomorrow you will win.’ The voice seemed to come from an icon of the saint, and Alexios prayed to the martyr and promised that if he won he would travel to Thessaloniki and formally process through the town on foot in his honour. On the next day he was victorious.¹³⁵ Alexios was the first emperor to put Demetrios on coins, during his Norman campaign against Guiscard (the issue was struck at Thessaloniki). The saint was portrayed as a soldier, in short tunic, breastplate, sagion (a military cloak) and sword, handing a labarum to the emperor.¹³⁶

In the thirteenth century, Demetrios was said to have assassinated Kalojan (Johanitsa), the Bulgarian voivode (military leader), when he was besieging Thessaloniki in 1207 episode. In this, Demetrios was being ascribed the tyrant-killer role played by earlier saints such as Merkourios. In fact, Kalojan was known to have been assassinated by another voivode, Manastras. Nevertheless, the chance to ascribe a further miracle to Demetrios was too good to pass by, especially as the city was currently under Latin control following the ill-fated Fourth Crusade which captured Constantinople. Robert of Clari, who served with the crusade, recorded:

‘John “the Vlach” and the Cumans [allies of the Bulgarians] went and besieged Thessaloniki and set their engines up to attack the city . Now in this city there was the body of my lord St Demetrios, who would never permit his city to be taken by force. And there flowed from his holy body such great quantities of oil that it was a great wonder. And it happened, as John the Vlach was lying one morning in his tent, that my lord St Demetrios came and struck him with a lance through the body and killed him. When his own people and the Cumans knew that he was dead, they broke camp and went away to their land.’¹³⁷

The ‘Latins’ were only too anxious to appropriate Demetrios as their own saviour and protector, and hoped that he would desert the Byzantines and transfer to them his services towards the city of Thessaloniki and its inhabitants – a sanguine state of mind which they had demonstrated throughout the Crusades in the Eastern Mediterranean from even before their capture of Antioch, not un-akin to the ‘godnapping’ of the ancients, who appropriated the local gods whenever they took possession of enemy cities or territories.¹³⁸

Warrior Saints and the First Crusade

Following the military engagements of the First Crusade in Asia Minor and the Crusaders’ experiences during the long trek south, the cult of the warrior saints became especially popular in the West, and their veneration an integral element of knightly piety. A particular catalyst for the popularity of these saints was the Crusaders’ victory at Antioch over the besieging army of Kerbogha in 1098.¹³⁹ Warrior saints had not been unknown, however, in the West prior to this period: Orderic Vitalis, writing c. 1130, stated that Gerold d’Avranches at the court of Hugh of Chester in the 1070s had exhorted knights by tales of the saints Demetrios, George, Theodore, Sebastian, Maurice and the Theban Legion, and Eustace. All of these were martyred saints, some of whom were particular to the West, though Eastern saints like Demetrios were also included.¹⁴⁰ Orderic may, however, have included the Eastern saints Demetrios and Theodore because of their prominence in Outremer (the Frankish conquests in the Holy Land) after the First Crusade. Sebastian, Maurice and Eustace were military officers who had suffered martyrdom in the western empire, where their major cult sites were located. In England, the Anglo-Norman Laudes regiae, of which the earliest example was composed between 1084 and 1095, also invoke the intercession of Saints Maurice, George and Sebastian (all of whom were popular in the West) on behalf of English princes and warriors.¹⁴¹

Figure 10.8: A gold and enamel pendant reliquary, 37mm in diameter, with the enamelled half-figure of St George carrying a sword, and (inside) a hinged enamel panel featuring St Demetrios in the tomb and four compartments for relics. Dating to the eleventh century, the amulet originated at Thessaloniki and contained Demetrios’ holy oil and blood-soaked earth from the site of his martyrdom. (Courtesy of the British Museum, accession number 1926.0409.1)

It was, however, during the First Crusade that warrior saints came to be seen both as intercessors for the crusading forces and as their supporters on the actual battlefield. On their way to Constantinople, Crusade contingents had passed through Thessaloniki, where Adhémar of Le Puy, the papal legate, spent time recovering from a Pecheneg attack. While there, Crusaders would have visited the church of St Demetrios and witnessed the miraculous myron produced by Demetrios’ relics. They would also have heard how Demetrios had spectacularly saved the city from the Bulgarian siege in 1041. Likewise, during their sightseeing in Constantinople, they would have become acquainted with the major churches of Eastern warrior saints in the capital, such as the magnificent construction of St George of Mangana by Constantine IX Monomachos (1042–1055) and the churches of St Theodore Teron, of which there were fifteen in the capital, with one particularly singled out for mention by Anna Komnene.¹⁴² The leaders would also have been given the chance to venerate the holy relics of the crucifixion housed in the Great Palace, in the Church of the Theotokos of the Pharos, which would have whetted their appetite for the acquisition of Eastern relics. This palace chapel held many of the items from the life and crucifixion of Christ, including fragments of the True Cross, the Crown of Thorns, Sponge and Sacred Lance, the Holy Nails and the Virgin’s girdle.¹⁴³

At their departure from Constantinople for the long journey south through the mountains and passes of Asia Minor, the Crusaders were accompanied by Greek bishops who would have helped them to engage with the centres of worship through which they passed. They thus became acquainted on their journey with some of the local cult centres of Eastern saints, such as that of St George at Lydda near Jerusalem, whom they believed would help them in battle.¹⁴⁴ As their trek towards Jerusalem took them ever further from home, with the soldiers often suffering unbelievable hardships in alien conditions and beset by dangers and enemy forces almost beyond their comprehension, it was only to be expected that they called on the help not only of those saints they venerated at home, but also of those whose cults they encountered in these terrifying and unfamiliar conditions, to aid them in their penitential journey of faith.

It was logical that the Crusaders should invoke the warrior saints for assistance, as they related their own personal sufferings to those of the saints themselves, and saw their own trials and the deaths of their comrades on God’s service as an act of martyrdom which they had willingly embraced, as the saints had done. Since they also believed that during their lifetime the saints had been soldiers, this gave them an even closer emotional and pietistic bond with them. In his account of the successful siege of Nicaea in 1097, the author of the Gesta commented: ‘Many of our men suffered martyrdom there, and gave up their blessed souls with joy and gladness ... All of them entered heaven in triumph, wearing the robe of martyrdom they had won.’¹⁴⁵ As well as seeing themselves as successors and imitators of the warrior saints, the Crusaders also viewed the Maccabees as exemplars for their struggles: they were well aware of the angelic help given to Judas Maccabeus, and saw him as a forerunner of the Christian tradition and a proto-martyr.¹⁴⁶ The Crusaders actually considered that their own struggles and commitment both surpassed the military exploits of the Maccabees and equalled their spiritual victories.¹⁴⁷ Consequently, they too expected to be granted angelic help in their engagements with the enemies of Christ.

That the clerics on crusade knew of a number of Eastern warrior saints, and hoped for their assistance, is clear from a letter written in January 1098 during the siege of Antioch by the Latin and Greek bishops with the crusade. In this communication, they called on Western leaders to supply them with additional troops and specifically ascribed the victories to date that they had gained against the Muslims (five battles won, and forty cities and 200 castles captured) to the protection of saints George, Theodore, Demetrios and Blaise, their ‘fellow-travellers’ on crusade. In the missive, the bishops asserted that ‘we do not trust in any multitude, nor in power nor in presumption, but in the shield of Christ and justice, under the protection of George and Theodore and Demetrios and Blaise, soldiers of Christ truly accompanying us’.¹⁴⁸ The choice of saints is an interesting one. George, Theodore and Demetrios were, of course, traditional warrior saints, not unknown in the West (Demetrios less so than the other two, although many of the Crusaders would have been made aware of his feats on behalf of his city as they passed through Thessaloniki).¹⁴⁹ Blaise (Blasios), however, is an intriguing addition here, since the saint was an Armenian healer, martyred under Licinius (see Figure 10.1), and well-known for his healing miracles, particularly his aid in treating objects such as fish-bones stuck in the throat. The sixth-century doctor Aetios of Amida in northern Mesopotamia recommended the following exhortation in such cases:

‘If a patient has a bone stuck in the throat, the doctor should sit opposite him and say the following: “Come up bone, whether bone or stalk or whatever else, as Jesus Christ drew Lazarus from his tomb, and Jonah out of the whale, thus Blasios, the martyr and servant of God, commands ‘Bone come up or go down’”.’¹⁵⁰

Blasios’ main shrine was at Sebaste (modern Sivas) in far eastern Asia Minor, and it seems unlikely that the Crusaders would have had any contact with his cult. The Blaise referred to in the letter may in fact not be St Blaise of Sebaste, but the lesser Blaise, a martyred shepherd whose cult was based at Caesarea in Cappadocia, an area through which the Crusaders passed after the Battle of Heraclea in September 1097, and to whom they may have prayed for assistance after coming across a church dedicated to him during their journeying.¹⁵¹ This St Blaise is not known for any particular deeds of military intervention, but this reference to him by the bishops suggests that the Crusaders were in the habit of calling on the aid of local saints as they encountered their churches on their journey and of ascribing their victories to their intervention. As they drew ever further from home in Turkish-occupied territory, it must have seemed increasingly natural to attribute their survival to date to supernatural assistance and the fact that the saints of the region were on their side.

That warrior saints had actually intervened in a specific engagement in favour of the Crusaders was first mentioned by Raymond d’Aguilers, a chaplain serving with Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse. Raymond’s history was written soon after the event and completed before 1105, and of all the chroniclers of the First Crusade, he is perhaps the most open to suggestions of miraculous apparitions and supernatural assistance. This episode took place during the engagement against the Seljuq leader Kilij Arslan on 1 July 1097, while the Crusaders were proceeding south through Asia Minor after the siege of Nicaea. They had split up to make provisioning of the large army less challenging, and the force in advance of the others – that under the leadership of Bohemond – encountered Kilij Arslan’s army at Dorylaion and was surrounded by the Seljuqs. Upon the arrival of the Provençal troops under Saint-Gilles, Kilij decided to retreat. Raymond, however, records that, according to some witnesses, two handsome knights in flashing armour – unnamed, but presumably to be identified as George and Demetrios – came to the Crusaders’ assistance, causing the Turks to flee in panic. Raymond admits that these reports only came from Turkish deserters and that he was not an eyewitness himself:

‘Although we did not see it, some related a remarkable miracle in which two handsome knights in flashing armour, riding before our soldiers and apparently invulnerable to the thrusts of Turkish lances, terrified the enemy so that they could not fight. Although we learnt this from apostate Turks who have now joined us, we can cite as evidence that for two days on the march we saw dead riders and dead horses.’¹⁵²

The only evidence given for this miracle, therefore, were the corpses of riders and horses met with on the following two days of their march, and the Crusaders themselves, according to his account, did not experience the vision. If Raymond is correct that some of the renegade Turks reported that they had seen this supernatural intervention, these may have been influenced by episodes in the Quran where it is foretold that angels would assist Muhammed’s army at the Battle of Bedr if the Muslims kept faith: ‘if you are patient and godfearing, and the foe presses upon you, your Lord will reinforce you with 5,000 swooping angels.’ The eighth-century Life of Muhammed by Muhammed ibn Ishaq also mentions that in this battle, Gabriel was heard spurring on his horse (‘Forward, Hayzum!’) and that some Meccans reported that they saw horsemen clad in white between heaven and earth, whom no one could withstand.¹⁵³ It would be intriguing, to say the least, if Turkish deserters played a part in encouraging the Crusaders’ expectation of supernatural assistance as they fought to gain control of the Holy Land.

From this point, warrior saints make a number of appearances in Raymond’s chronicle, as aids in battle and signs of divine favour, as well as guides and guardians of the army, and he clearly believed in their efficacy, as he did in that of the Holy Lance miraculously discovered at Antioch on 15 June under the church of St Peter, which the Crusaders took as a sign of their divinely foretold success and which encouraged them to attempt to break Kerbogha’s siege of the city.¹⁵⁴

The Battle for Antioch, June 1098

The apparition of warrior saints who rode alongside the Crusaders when they marched out of Antioch to face Kerbogha’s besieging army in 1098 is one of the best-known episodes of the First Crusade. The city had finally been taken by the Crusaders on 3 June that year after a prolonged siege lasting from 21 October 1097 (although the citadel still remained under Moslem control). It was then besieged on 7 June by Kerbogha of Mosul, with a large force. The Turkish army was numerically superior to that of the Crusaders, but as these were facing starvation they decided to make a sortie and meet their besiegers in battle. Guibert of Nogent, in the Dei gesta per francos (Deeds of God Done by the Franks), describes the famine in Antioch (he was not an eyewitness): the suffering of the men was so great that they were compelled to eat the foulest food, the flesh of horses and donkeys, while they were weakened by long hunger, suffering from steady, destructive starvation.¹⁵⁵

The sortie was attempted on 28 June, the troops hoping for divine assistance from the Holy Lance, which was carried in the line of battle by the Pope’s legate, Adhémar, Bishop of Le Puy. As they engaged with the Turks and were on the point of being surrounded, according to the Gesta Francorum, the earliest eyewitness account of events written c. 1100–1101, there was a miraculous intervention when Saints George, Merkourios and Demetrios rode to the Crusaders’ assistance at the head of a divine host of cavalry, routing the Turks:

‘There appeared from the mountains an innumerable host of men on white horses, whose standards were all white. When our leaders saw this army, they were completely ignorant as to what it was, and who they might be, until they realised that this was the help sent by Christ, and that the leaders were Saint George, Merkourios, and Demetrios. This is quite true, for many of our men saw it.’¹⁵⁶

The chronicler, probably a cleric from southern Italy serving with the Norman Bohemond, and who would therefore have been acquainted with Greek saints,¹⁵⁷ obviously felt that he had to defend the truth of his account. He understood that it might be viewed with scepticism: he does not explicitly say that he saw the apparition himself, only that ‘many of our men’ did so. Furthermore, the Crusaders as a whole did not immediately make sense of the apparition, and only later realized it was divine help sent from heaven. Presumably, the identity of the riders and spiritual army was confirmed after the battle by the army leaders and bishops, who had already asserted that they were receiving valuable assistance from warrior saints. The Crusaders were in a mind-set to expect supernatural aid against the Turks, and only too willing to be convinced of the authenticity of the experience, while it was in their leaders’ interests to encourage the rank-and-file to believe that they could hope for assistance from warrior saints and the ‘heavenly host’ on the battlefield.

The heavenly host was not the only example of celestial phenomena seen at Antioch prior to the engagement: the Crusaders were obviously not only prepared for, but actually expecting omens and portents from above foretelling their victory whatever the odds. The fact that many of them were half-dead with hunger and exhaustion would also have played a part in encouraging them to believe that they experienced supernatural phenomena. Before they marched out of the city, the Gesta describes that they saw a fire in the western sky, which ‘approached and fell upon the Turkish army, to the great astonishment of our men and of the Turks also’.¹⁵⁸ Robert the Monk (Robert of Rheims), who was writing c. 1107, concurs, saying that

‘a flame appeared in the sky coming from the West and fell onto the Turkish army. This sign deeply impressed everyone, particularly the Turks amongst whose tents it fell. They began to see glimmerings of what would come to pass, that the fire descending from heaven represented the anger of God; because it had come from the West it symbolised the armies of the Franks through whom he would make his anger manifest.’¹⁵⁹

Earlier, while the Franks were besieging Antioch in December 1097, they had seen ‘a remarkable reddish glow in the sky and besides felt a great quake in the earth, which rendered us all fearful. In addition many saw a certain sign in the shape of a cross, whitish in colour, moving in a straight path toward the East.’ In this case, the apparition fuelled their guilty belief that they were being warned that they were wasting time at Antioch and had deviated from their primary mission to reach Jerusalem.¹⁶⁰

Robert the Monk also recorded a comet on the night of 2/3 June 1098, as the Crusaders were about to take Antioch: ‘On that night a comet blazed amongst the other stars in the heavens, giving off rays of light and foretelling a change in the kingdom. The sky glowed fiery red from North to East. It was with these portents shining prominently in the heavens and as dawn began to bring light to the earth that the army of God entered Antioch.’¹⁶¹ At critical points in the campaign, participants thought it quite natural that supernatural phenomena would foretell their path to victory, or some aspect of divine assistance manifest itself. The finding of the Holy Lance is just one case in point, despite certain misgivings about the circumstances of the discovery (not everyone believed Peter Bartholomew’s account of events and the details of his vision of St Andrew). Moreover, the leaders at least would certainly have seen the ‘genuine’ Lance in the palace at Constantinople, one of the relics – like the fragments of the True Cross and the Crown of Thorns – on which they swore the oath that they would hand over any ex-Byzantine possessions (like Antioch) that they conquered.¹⁶² The Lance found at Antioch was, however, genuinely accepted at this point by many of the soldiers as the relic from the Crucifixion. They believed that it had been sent to them as a divinely inspired aid in battle, while it was not in the interests of the leaders to diminish their enthusiasm too openly.

Where the vision of the warrior saints riding alongside the army outside Antioch is concerned, it is interesting that the saints that helped the Crusaders to victory were not exactly the same as those mentioned in the letter of the bishops earlier in the year: Theodore is replaced by Merkourios,¹⁶³ another, if less well-known, Eastern warrior saint, while Blaise is omitted. Perhaps the Crusaders’ views of the most appropriate saints to assist them in battle had evolved during their travels in the Near East. In addition, the letter was written by a council of bishops, whereas, after the heat of battle, it is likely that one of the ‘leaders of the army’ (who, according to the Gesta, interpreted the miracle to their troops) would have identified the saints as those most recognizable by his men. Since the Gesta is a Norman source, and the Norman leader Bohemond had been recognized by the other leaders as the incoming Prince of Antioch, it is likely that what we may have here is an identification of this miraculous triad with saints acceptable to the Norman contingent.

Nearly all subsequent accounts of the First Crusade, many of which are based on the Gesta, record the appearance of the saints at the battle outside Antioch, or some equivalent form of divine intervention, though frequently the saints are not mentioned by name.¹⁶⁴ Not everyone can have believed in this vision of George, Demetrios and Merkourios, or there were at least a number of different versions as to what had occurred. Fulcher of Chartres (a participant), Albert of Aachen and William of Tyre omit any mention of the intervention, which suggests that there were genuine doubts about what had taken place. Furthermore, a letter asking for support for the Crusade, written in October 1098 by the clergy and people of Lucca, narrates the experience of Bruno, a layman from that town, who had been present at the victory at Antioch. Bruno had reported that the Crusaders were assisted by the miraculous appearance of a large, resplendent host (‘vexillum admirabile excelsum valde et candidum, et cum eo multitude militum innumera’), but had not mentioned the presence of any warrior saints at the head of this heavenly army – this suggests that Bruno did not believe that he had personally seen them, and perhaps the individual saints were not so well known to the ordinary soldiers as to their leaders, and thus their involvement impressed the rank and file less than the heavenly host in its spectacular entirety.¹⁶⁵

Similarly, Raymond d’Aguilers, who was also present, does not refer to specific warrior saints participating in this battle, riding forth from the mountains to the Crusaders’ assistance, but to a miraculous host that silently joined the army outside the city. He presumably considered that this body of men, which he believed had assisted the Crusaders, consisted of those of their comrades who had died en route: these had been miraculously sent to aid them on this occasion, in continuation of their vow. Raymond may perhaps have been concerned to play down the role of specific saints in the victory, as he attributed it to the miraculous powers of the Holy Lance. Not only was the Lance present on the battlefield, carried by Adhémar of le Puy, the papal legate, but Raymond – who was in the same division – states he had the honour of carrying it at some point. His account of the supernatural intervention records that:

‘When all our fighting men had exited the city, five other lines appeared among us. Our princes had drawn up only eight, but there were thirteen of our lines outside the city. ... God multiplied our army in such a way that we, who before appeared to be fewer than the enemy, were more numerous than they were in the battle . The lines of the enemy fell upon those of us in the squadron of the Bishop, and even though their forces were greater than ours, because of the protection of the Holy Lance which was there, they there wounded no one and failed to hit any of us with arrows. I saw these things of which I speak and I carried the Lance of the Lord there.’¹⁶⁶

Even when the chroniclers follow the account of the Gesta and describe the intervention of the saints, they do not always consistently agree on the saints’ identity: the Poitevin priest Peter Tudebode – whose account of the First Crusade, written before 1111, is based closely on that of the Gesta – considered that the divine riders were George, Demetrios and Theodore, not Merkourios. He describes a vast army riding white horses and flying white banners, which appeared from the mountains:

‘Our forces were very bewildered by the sight of this army until they realised that it was Christ’s assistance, just as the priest Stephen had predicted. The leaders of this heavenly host were Saint George, the Blessed Demetrios and the Blessed Theodore. Now this report can be believed because many Christians saw it.’¹⁶⁷

He expands on the episode, stating that the saints’ intervention had been promised beforehand by Christ, as long as the Crusaders proved their piety and commitment to the faith. In this elaboration of the backstory, prior to the battle, a priest called Stephen had experienced a vision in which Christ promised the Crusaders aid if they repented, gave alms and celebrated masses – ‘then they shall begin the battle and I shall give them the help of St George, St Theodore, St Demetrios and all the pilgrims who have died on the way to Jerusalem’.¹⁶⁸ Like the Crusaders in the Gesta’s account, Tudebode states that the soldiers, as they marched out to meet Kerbogha’s troops, were uncertain of the identity of the army that came to their assistance, only realizing after the event that this had been the fulfilment of Stephen the priest’s vision.

Clearly, the appearance of Merkourios, who was not so well known in the West as some of the other warrior saints, was considered something of a difficulty. Like Tudebode, the account of William of Malmesbury in the 1120s omits him, mentioning only George and Demetrios. In William’s account, the Crusaders ‘were convinced they saw those ancient martyrs who had been knights in their own day, and who by their deaths had purchased the crown of life, St George and St Demetrios, with flying banners come charging from the hill-country, showering missiles on the enemy and aid upon themselves’.¹⁶⁹ Saints could also be selected for nationalist purposes. According to Robert the Monk, a fourth saint, Maurice, accompanied George, Merkourios and Demetrios at Antioch.¹⁷⁰ St Maurice was a patron saint of the Holy Roman emperors, whose relics had been translated to Magdeburg by Otto I in AD 961. As he was alleged to have been a soldier in the Roman Army, and commander of the Theban Legion – all of whom were martyred by Maximian – he was in the Westerners’ view appropriately qualified as a warrior saint, and had been identified as such even before the First Crusade.¹⁷¹ It may have been felt appropriate to include him in the divine support crew to encourage all the Germans on crusade and to put in a claim for further support from the Holy Roman emperor.

Robert’s account engaged with the metaphysical question of how saints and other spiritual beings were able to intervene physically on the battlefield. His narrative includes a (suppositious) conversation between Bohemond and a Turk, Pirrus, who betrayed Antioch to the Crusaders, in which Pirrus asked for an explanation as to how natural laws allowed for the saints’ appearance and physical intervention. According to Robert, it was only in Bohemond’s conversation with Pirrus that he was alerted to the saints’ presence in the battle. Pirrus had asked Bohemond about the identity of ‘the white force’ whom he had seen come to the Crusaders’ assistance, and where they were encamped. Realizing that this must have been a heavenly host, Bohemond explained that they comprised a divine army from the sky that appeared at the command of Christ, and which was led by Saints George, Demetrios, Merkourios and Maurice, who had ‘suffered martyrdom for the faith of Christ and fought against unbelievers across the earth’. When Pirrus enquired as to how the saints were equipped with physical horses, armour and banners, and how they were able to take part in a terrestrial battlefield engagement, Bohemond was forced to reply that this was ‘beyond his understanding’. He referred the query to his chaplain, who explained that, when God sends spiritual beings into the world, they take on physical forms so that mortals can see them:

‘When the all-powerful Creator decides to send his angels or the spirits of the righteous to earth, they assume bodies of air so that they can appear to us, because they cannot be seen in their essential spiritual form.’¹⁷²

Some Crusaders must have had concerns about the reality of the apparitions and how the saints were able to manifest themselves corporeally. Most, however, expected supernatural assistance in their quest and would have resisted any attempt to question their memory or perception of saintly interventions, considering the practical help given them more important than the underlying theology.

With regard to the perception that warrior saints assisted Christian armies, there is a clear line of transmission from Byzantine to Crusader sources, with the degree of divine assistance exponentially increasing with time. At Antioch, for example, saints are recorded as actually appearing on the battlefield and intervening in conflicts, as they had been doing in Byzantine sources in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Rather than individual saints, however, like St Demetrios or St Theodore, the Crusaders have them appear en masse, supported by an entire heavenly army. Alternatively, they believed that thousands of dead comrades had been miraculously resurrected to fight alongside them. This willingness to accept the presence of the supernatural presumably reflected the dangers and crises faced by the Crusaders in hostile territory far from home, as well as their belief that they were themselves contemporary martyrs courting suffering and death for their faith.

Warrior Saints in Western Europe

In Byzantine sources, Saints Demetrios, Andrew, Theodore and Merkourios are recorded as having protected their worshippers or fought alongside Byzantine emperors and armies against human but demonically inspired enemies. While many of those from Northern Europe would have known little of Eastern saints, the Normans on the First Crusade were well acquainted with Greeks and Greek culture in Sicily and southern Italy, and many of them had served as mercenaries in the Byzantine army. They were therefore far more au fait than other contingents with regard to the identity of Eastern warrior saints and details of their cults. The Normans already viewed George in particular as a potent help in battle, and Geoffrey Malaterra records an apparition of the saint as early as 1063, when the Muslims were defeated near Cerami in Sicily by the future Roger I. It should be noted, however, that Geoffrey was writing long after the event, and that his narrative ceases abruptly with the events of July 1098, contemporaneous with the battle for Antioch, although his account does not seem to have been influenced by events in the East. He records that a certain knight, magnificently armed, was seen by the Normans, mounted on a white horse and carrying a white standard with a splendid cross on it tied to the tip of his lance: ‘It were as if this knight were advancing with our battle line and rushing at the enemy where they were the thickest . our men were elated and called out again and again “God and St George”.’ Struck with the joy of such a vision to the point where they were shedding tears, the troops eagerly followed the horseman into battle. Many also saw a banner containing a cross hanging from the top of the count’s lance, a banner ‘only God could have placed there’.¹⁷³

In addition, the Normans had not been above an attempt to suborn a Byzantine warrior saint’s loyalties – Theodore, in this case. Anna Komnene records an incident when the Norman leader, Robert Guiscard, specifically attempted to gain the favour of this Byzantine military saint and use his assistance against the emperor, her father Alexios, and his army. Prior to the Battle of Dyrrachion in 1081, Robert arrived at the shrine of the martyr Theodore (presumably, but not definitely Theodore Teron), which was located outside its walls. There, according to Anna, the Normans ‘throughout the night sought to propitiate the Deity, and also partook of the Immaculate Sacred Mysteries’ – in other words, they entreated a Byzantine saint to desert his own side and assist them in their attack on the Byzantine Empire.¹⁷⁴ With much the same mindset, Roger II and his Normans acquired the icon of Theodore Stratelates when they raided Corinth in 1147. As well as prisoners (‘the most comely and deep-bosomed women’), they also appropriated the icon of Theodore, ‘the greatest among martyrs, renowned for his miracles’. As justification for the theft, it was argued that Theodore had made the deliberate choice not to protect Corinth, because he wanted his city and icon to be captured: he had abandoned the Byzantines and gone over to the side of the Normans.¹⁷⁵

Where the capture of Antioch was concerned, it was in the interests of Bohemond, the first prince of Antioch, and his Normans to validate as far as possible his claim to the city and his refusal to return it to the Byzantines. Antioch had only fallen to the Turks in 1084, and, in the agreement made at Constantinople between Alexios I and the First Crusade leaders as they passed through early in 1097, the latter had sworn that, in return for Byzantine assistance and supplies en route, ‘whatever towns, countries, or forts that had formerly belonged to the Roman Empire – which of course included Antioch – would be handed over’. Despite this, according to Raymond, all the princes (except for Raymond of St-Gilles) agreed that if Antioch was captured it was to be offered to Bohemond,¹⁷⁶ and he remained there while the other Crusaders continued to Jerusalem. This may give an insight into the context of the warrior saint apparition in the battle against Kerbogha outside Antioch. The Gesta, which first reported the saints’ battlefield intervention, was a Norman source, and the episode may have been inspired by the Normans’ wish to justify their claim to Antioch and refusal to return it to Alexios by proclaiming that Byzantine saints had themselves assisted in the city’s defence against the Turks, legitimizing the Crusaders’ claim to Antioch and vindicating their decision to renege on their oath to the emperor.

The Crusaders and St George

En route to Jerusalem, the Crusaders stopped at Ramla, which lay near to the famous cult centre of St George at Lydda (Lod). Considering that there was a general belief among the soldiery that St George had aided them in person at Dorylaion and then at Antioch, it was natural that the Crusaders would want to pay him homage at his centre of worship, seeing him as a potent intercessor and fellow-combatant against the Turks. On their travels, they had even acquired, rather underhandedly, the relic of one of his arms, which then accompanied them on the Crusade. It had been found in an unspecified monastery in Asia Minor or Syria by a priest named Gerbod (Gerbault) of Lille, who was in the service of Robert of Flanders. As the relic had been purloined, and worse, because it was not venerated in the proper manner, the priest who acquired it died, as did everyone else who was successively responsible for the care of the arm until Robert intervened, punishing those who neglected it and installing it with reverence in his tent.¹⁷⁷ The sickness and deaths then ceased and the relic began to work miracles.

Raymond d’Aguilers also records a rather implausible anecdote about relics of St George (in addition to the discovery of the Holy Lance) being found at Antioch while the Crusaders were besieged there. This miraculous find followed a dream experienced by a cleric, Peter Desiderius, which led to George’s bones being found in the church of St Leontios, along with those of Saints Cyprian, Omechios, Leontios and John Chrysostom. In the dream, St George (without identifying himself) instructed Peter to collect the relics of the four saints and take them with them to Jerusalem. When Peter and his companions, including Raymond himself, found the bones of a fifth saint whom they tenuously identified as Merkourios, they left the relics in the church because they were unsure of the saint’s identity. In a second vision, George appeared to Peter and claimed the bones to be his own, describing himself as the standard bearer of the army (and hence of the greatest assistance to the Crusaders), and instructing him to ensure that they took his relics to Jerusalem together with those of the other four saints.¹⁷⁸ Raymond also documents other miracles on the Crusaders’ journey: their forces were miraculously increased in the battle against Ridwan of Aleppo on 9 February 1098, and a miraculous rain filled the moat of the fort of La Mahomerie in March, while a shooting star fell near Kerbogha’s encampment on 13/14 June.¹⁷⁹

As the army was so enthusiastic in its veneration of St George, when they reached Ramla in June 1099 on their approach to Jerusalem, the leaders decided to create an episcopal see in George’s honour. George was the best known of the saints who had personally aided them, and his cult centre was to date the only one of a major warrior saint they had encountered in Asia Minor. The Gesta describes the decision as follows:

‘Near Ramla is a church worthy of great reverence, for there lies the most precious body of St George, who there suffered blessed martyrdom at the hands of the treacherous pagans for the name of Christ. While we were there, our leaders chose a bishop to protect and build up this church, and they paid him tithes and endowed him with gold and silver, horses and other animals, so that he and his household could live in an appropriate and pious manner.’¹⁸⁰

The Crusaders must have felt that they were finally approaching their stated objective in the Holy Land. Robert of Rouen was installed as the first bishop in 1099, and virtually every subsequent chronicle of the First Crusade mentions this episode. While it was the leaders who decided on this foundation, George was regarded as a powerful intercessor by both clerics and laymen in the army, and this bishopric acknowledged the help given by the saint to the Crusaders over the last three years. From 1115, Roger of Antioch (regent for Bohemond II) minted coins featuring St George on horseback killing a dragon.¹⁸¹

In his account of events at Ramla, Raymond refers to St George as ‘our avowed leader’, and states that the Crusaders founded the episcopate, so that ‘St George would be our intercessor with God and our faithful leader through his dwelling place’.¹⁸² The fact that the Crusaders successfully took Jerusalem a month later, in July 1099, even though George’s assistance or intercession there is not made much of in the chronicles, would have strengthened the army’s belief in his protection, which only increased with time. The twelfth-century epic poem, the Chanson de Jerusalem, actually records that the Crusaders met the Moslems outside Ramla before proceeding to Jerusalem, and that this was the site of a major conflict. During this engagement, Bohemond called on the Holy Sepulchre and St George, at which a heavenly force appeared consisting of Saints George, Barbaros, Demetrios, Denys and Maurice, plus a legion of angels. St George was the leader of the host, killing the emir of Ascalon and unhorsing many others: with his assistance, Ramla was secured.¹⁸³ The fictional nature of the episode is shown by the fact that Bohemond had actually remained behind at Antioch and that no battle took place at Ramla, but it reveals how intrinsically the warrior saints had come to be associated with the Crusade’s success. St Denys was obviously included because of his connections with the kingdom of France: the chanson was, after all, composed in French for French speakers. St Barbaros was venerated in the East as a (very) minor warrior saint, with whose cult some of the Crusaders must have become acquainted, for him to be included here. Bohemond was said to have publicly offered thanks to George after the battle, and promised to install a bishop at Ramla along with twenty clerics.¹⁸⁴

While it was at Antioch that supernatural assistance by warrior saints was generally accepted and from this point taken as an almost expected occurrence in the heat of battle, there was also a suggestion that one particular saint – George -aided the Crusaders in their capture of Jerusalem: Raymond d’Aguilers is once again the source. At one point, when the leaders were on the point of withdrawing their siege engines, which had been badly damaged, from the city walls, a knight whose name Raymond did not know ‘signalled with his shield from the Mount of Olives to the Count of Toulouse and others to move forward’. This account is repeated in the history of William of Tyre.¹⁸⁵ Neither historian names the knight, but he was later believed to have been George. In the Golden Legend, c.1275, the Crusaders are described as not daring to mount the scaling ladders in view of the defenders’ resistance, until encouraged by the saint:

‘and when it was so that they had assieged Jerusalem and durst not mount ne go up on the walls for the quarrels and defence of the Saracens, they saw appertly S. George which had white arms with a red cross, that went up tofore them on the walls and they followed him, and so was Jerusalem taken by his help.’¹⁸⁶

In addition, according to a number of witnesses, the papal legate Adhémar of Le Puy, who had died at Antioch on 1 August 1098, was seen by many leading the final assault on Jerusalem. He had appeared beforehand in a vision to Peter Desiderius, giving instructions for the Crusaders to fast and process around Jerusalem as a penance for their past offences to ensure victory. William of Tyre adds that, when Jerusalem had been captured, many of the Crusaders saw their dead companions, who had ‘risen again in spirit’, visiting the holy places in Jerusalem – evidence that ‘those who had been called from this temporal life to the enjoyment of eternal blessedness were not deprived of their heart’s desire, but accomplished to the full that which they had sought with such fervent devotion’.¹⁸⁷ Even those Crusaders who had died en route were restored to life and permitted to reach Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre, and so fulfil their vow.

The Afterlife of the Warrior Saints

In the twelfth century, belief in the invincibility of the warrior saints had in no way waned, and the Byzantines certainly believed that Sts George and Theodore were able to give them aid against the encroaching waves of Turks occupying Asia Minor. The catalyst for the permanent loss of Anatolia to the Seljuks was in 1176, when Manuel I Komnenos was seriously defeated at Myriokephalon after the Byzantine army was ambushed by the Turks in south-western Asia Minor – a disastrous end to the final attempt to recover the interior of Anatolia from Turkish control.

As with earlier defeats, the faithful demanded an explanation as to why the warrior saints had failed to come to the emperor’s aid, while everyone – up to and including the emperor – had been anxious for advance knowledge of whether the warrior saints would come to their assistance on this occasion. One version explaining why the saints were absent in this battle was given by the historian Niketas Choniates. He recorded that a citizen named Mavropoulos, an interpreter, had approached the emperor to tell him that he had had a dream about the warrior saints. Manuel was clearly anxious to learn of any possible prophecy relating to the campaign. Mavropoulos had dreamt that he had entered a church of St Cyrus, and there he heard a voice proceed from an icon of the Theotokos stating that the emperor was in the greatest danger. ‘Who will go out in my name to help him?’ the icon asked. Someone unseen said, ‘Send George.’ ‘He is lethargic’, came the response, and the other voice then suggested, ‘Let Theodore go forth.’ He was also rejected, and finally the icon sorrowfully proclaimed that no one could avert the forthcoming evil.¹⁸⁸ The episode suggests that the intervention of one of the saints in battle was eagerly hoped for, but that under these dire circumstances even George’s or Theodore’s assistance was judged inadequate by the Mother of God. The battle was consequently lost.

While the warrior saints continued to intervene in battle on behalf of the Byzantines after the First Crusade, in the West the idea of saints assisting ‘Crusaders’ – anyone who was fighting for the Christian faith in battles against pagans and Muslims (as in the account of the Battle of Cerami) – swept across Europe, taking particular root in Spain because of the frontier shared between Muslims and Christians. A great many victories in the past were now attributed to saintly intervention. According to sources that postdate the First Crusade, St James the Greater (the apostle), who became known as St James ‘Matamoros’ (‘the Muslim-killer’), had reputedly aided a Christian army at the Battle of Clavijo against the Moors in Spain in AD 844, when he appeared in full armour at the head of a legion of angels. Later, he was also said to have intervened at Simancas in AD 939 and to have helped Ferdinand I capture Coimbra in 1064. However, all the sources which mention Saint James postdate the First Crusade and his interventions are retrojected into accounts of earlier conflicts. But his legend continued: the saint was later translated to the New World, and in Latin America he became Santiago Mataindios (‘Indian-slayer’), and in the nineteenth century, by a further translation by anti-colonialist Indian-Americans, Santiago Mataespañois (‘slayer of Spaniards’).¹⁸⁹ When fighting the infidel, there was a confident expectation of divine help, and it was a matter of pride for all sides to receive saintly assistance, which legitimized both the cause and the conflict.

The belief in support from warrior saints for the nationalist cause was continued into the twentieth century in Greece itself. When the Greeks recaptured Thessaloniki from the Ottomans on Demetrios’ feast day, 26 October 1912, it was taken as a divine sign that the town was intended to be permanently Greek,¹⁹⁰ while during the First World War in 1917 the church on Tinos (the most important pilgrimage site in Greece) took charge of making the ‘sacred banner’ of the National Army, which jointly featured St George (the patron saint of Greece) and the icon of the Panayia (Theotokos) of Tinos, the island where a miraculous icon of the Virgin was found in 1823. The local newspaper reported that this banner would render the soldiers as invincible as Achilles.¹⁹¹ Warrior saints even intervened in the Second World War: it was reported that in December 1940, in the Greek-Italian war, forty unknown soldiers suddenly appeared and started fighting alongside the Greeks. After the victory, they disappeared into the ruins of an old Byzantine church (presumably that near Onchesmos, where a monastery dedicated to the forty Martyrs of Sebaste was founded by Justinian, AD 527–565). It was then believed that this had been an apparition of the Forty Saints (Agioi Saranta), the forty martyrs who were the elite of a Roman legion, who were originally venerated in that foundation and had emerged to help their compatriots. The town, now in southern Albania, is now known as Saranta in honour of the forty saints.¹⁹²

Battlefield ‘Miracles’

Since ancient times, there have been theories of social manipulation to account for epiphanies and ‘miracles’ (for example, the deliberate manipulation of ancient omens, both on and off the battlefield), as well as theories that experiences of supernatural phenomena had been triggered by superstitious fancies or overactive imagination, which resulted in the blurring of boundaries between fancy and reality.¹⁹³ But this is not to deny that throughout history, ‘miracles’ have been not only accepted but experienced simultaneously by large bodies of combatants and widely celebrated as proof of divine favour. In antiquity, reports of epiphanies were (generally) met with credulity and taken seriously: the Athenians, for example, do not seem to have doubted Philippides’ encounter with Pan after Marathon, and honoured the god with a shrine and festival.¹⁹⁴ Such encounters, and the belief in them, are not confined to pre-modern times. A study by the Israel Defense Forces regarding epiphanies of Rachel the Matriarch in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead (2008–2009) concluded that, even in the twenty-first century, soldiers genuinely believe in miracles on the battlefield, and are neither lying nor hallucinating in their reports of such incidents. Rachel the Matriarch was seen by a number of soldiers, deterring them from entering houses that were later found to have been laid with explosives.¹⁹⁵ Such miracles take place within a specific social and cultural context, and soldiers naturally experience visions which align with their religious beliefs (for example, a Christian is more likely than a Jew to experience an intervention by St George), while miracles are more likely to present themselves to soldiers who are already influenced by a religious mindset.

Battlefield miracle stories can range from unexpected (or even expected) weather conditions (like driving rain or wind) to the halting of bullets by some solid object (like a religious text in a pocket) or natural phenomena such as eclipses, comets or fog. They can also simply involve timing, such as a weather event which favours one of the two sides, rather than, for example, a supernatural apparition or epiphany. The appearance of a venerated figure in battle is at the extreme end of a typology of miracles, being a violation of natural laws and involving the intentional intervention of a supernatural force in the natural course of things (for example, walking on water). The divine epiphanies which were a feature of the ancient and medieval world generally comprised miracles of the extreme type; in Rösman’s investigation, which proposed a range of categories for military miracles, these are defined as having violated nature, involved the divine, been benevolent in intent and possessing a clear purpose.¹⁹⁶

The usual scenario in such interventions involved a supernatural entity lending assistance to one side of the combatants at a crucial stage of a battle.¹⁹⁷ There is a degree of consistency in the descriptions of such interventions in the Byzantine and medieval world, with an underlying pattern determined by the preconceptions and expectations of the participants: the warrior saints here are a case in point. Their normal modus operandi is to appear unexpectedly on the battlefield, whether recognized or not by the troops, and drive off the opposing side. Sometimes their involvement is only acknowledged after the event, while their actions may simply be perceived in a vision or dream by a single protagonist, although a ‘confirmatory’ dream might also be received by another party to provide corroboration of the original dream.

The apparitions of warrior saints on the battlefield are akin to experiences which have been termed the ‘Third Man Factor’ and the ‘Sensed Presence’ (SP), where more than one person – and sometimes a group – share the same experience of a sense of having been guided by an unseen or otherworldly presence: the terms ‘Illusory Shadow Presence’ and ‘Felt Presence’ are also employed.¹⁹⁸ The term ‘Third Man Factor’ was inspired by the scene in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land (‘Who is the third who walks always beside you....?’).¹⁹⁹ Eliot was himself inspired by Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition of 1914–1915, where three members of the expedition all experienced the sensation of an unseen presence as they trekked across the ice to the whaling station on South Georgia. Numerous examples of such episodes, which occur in a conscious or waking state, suggest a genuine psychological experience, which happens in situations of extreme stress (as experienced by our medieval protagonists in battle),²⁰⁰ and can consist of a vision of the beneficent intervention of a supernatural entity at an opportune moment, and which appears to its visionaries as a real-life experience.

Visions of this type frequently take place in unusual, high-risk situations, and are often met with on battlefields, in cases where the visionaries have been suffering deprivation, stress and fatigue, with the future outcomes of the conflict unpredictable and uncertain. The hallucinations experienced in SP epiphanies are transient and of non-psychiatric etiology, and occur in the course of the traumatic episode (not after the event); typically, they are experienced in an extreme life-threatening situation by mentally healthy people in a waking state.²⁰¹ There is little resemblance to epiphanies during sleep, which result from a different mental condition.²⁰² On occasions, sometimes dozens or hundreds of combatants experience the SP episode, and the images related to their vision are culture-specific and drawn from the repertoire of images of the visionaries’ cultural heritage. When the impressions of the episode are later shared, the stories are adjusted for consistency, and others can convincethemselves by auto-suggestion that they shared the experience. Visions can also be contagious, and transmitted at the time of the episode through body language or verbal communications.²⁰³

Figure 10.9: Parliamentary Recruiting Committee Poster No. 108, Spottiswoode and Co Ltd, 1915. St George is shown in full plate armour on horseback, driving his lance into the body of a winged dragon, symbolizing Germany. (Imperial War Museums PST 0408. © IWM Art)

It is only to be expected that surviving descriptions of such events show signs of embellishment and literary embroidery, but few of the battlefield interventions discussed above appear to be entirely fictitious: ‘Soldiers, being in intense, life-threatening situations, in need of making order out of the chaos of battle, are good candidates for reporting miraculous stories.’²⁰⁴ Furthermore, if a war is framed in religious terms, combatants will be more open to observing miracles during the course of the action. The participants in the First Crusade, who saw themselves as voluntarily involved in a penitential, divinely commanded activity, expected such interventions and, being empowered by their religious beliefs, were able to rise above their exhaustion, deprivation and alien environment and use such visions as a coping mechanism. The telling of such miracle stories was also a bonding device between comrades and different contingents. Similarly, soldiers in the Byzantine army, fighting for their emperor or their city, were able to interpret such epiphanies as signs of divine favour. Some interventions were considered so normal that they were confidently expected: it was when St Demetrios failed to avert an attack on Thessaloniki that an explanation had to be found for his actions, or lack of them.

Reports of supernatural intervention have been staunchly defended in modern times, and positively encouraged by army leaders, politicians and the media -and even accepted by historians. For example, there is the account of the angelic horsemen riding white horses and clad as medieval knights allegedly sighted by some of the soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force as they retreated from Mons in Belgium between 23 and 26 August 1914. The vision was proclaimed a miracle by patriotic newspapers at home in the UK, and, as late as the 1960s, noted historian A.J.P. Taylor accepted the reality of the Mons apparition.²⁰⁵ The only problem is that the episode was totally fictional – there is no evidence that soldiers at the time believed that they had witnessed a supernatural intervention – and grew out of a short story ‘The Bowmen’, inspired by the retreat from Mons, written in 1915 by the journalist Arthur Machen. In this piece, one of the soldiers in the force calls on St George with an invocation that he remembered seeing in a London vegetarian restaurant (‘adsit Anglis, Sanctus Georgius’. ‘St George help the English!’); St George then (in the story) appears leading the bowmen of Agincourt to destroy the Germans with invisible arrows.²⁰⁶

St George was already a powerful symbol of recruiting propaganda (see Figure 10.9), and the legend satisfied patriotic needs and became a powerful and enduring part of the mythology of the First World War, while the rumours even expanded to include the details that French soldiers had seen a vision of Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc), and Russian soldiers one of General Skobelev.²⁰⁷ Machen himself over the next thirty years (he died in 1947) was unable to persuade anyone that his story was completely fictional, even though not a single Mons veteran came forward with an unambiguous account of a vision he had personally witnessed. With the bowmen transformed into angels – as more appropriate for a Church of England audience – the episode was showcased as a centrepiece of patriotic sermons, poured over by spiritualists, printed and reprinted in national newspapers, and reproduced in pamphlets sent to the front.²⁰⁸ The legend became self-perpetuating and an integral part of popular belief and national identity, with its accuracy passionately defended at all levels. In a time of national crisis, rumour and superstition thus created an enduring and powerful legend in which St George in 1914 led an angelic host to protect ordinary English soldiers against their dastardly enemies. This train of narrative causality, in which a story takes shape of its own accord in defiance of any ‘facts’, leads directly back to the battle for Antioch in 1098 and the earlier interventions of warrior saints to protect Byzantine cities and armies.

Conclusion

For troops in the field – both Byzantines and Westerners – episodes of divine intervention in battle proved that their army was divinely favoured: they were certain that they were fighting on the right side. Since they were fighting on the right side, they expected, therefore, to receive supernatural assistance. Robert the Monk asked what of comparable importance to the First Crusade had taken place in more than a millennium, since the mystery of the crucifixion itself, ‘than our journey as pilgrims to Jerusalem – a task that itself was not human, but divine?’²⁰⁹ In such circumstances, the Crusaders were convinced that supernatural assistance would support them in times of crisis – nothing else could be more important than the fulfilment of their quest. Even when warrior saints were not visible on the battlefield itself (as they were at Antioch and, supposedly, Jerusalem), they were thought to be fellow-travellers on crusade, providers of support and assistance to the troops, and exemplars of the willing martyrdom endured by the Crusaders, who were ‘under the protection of George and Theodore and Demetrios and Blaise, soldiers of Christ truly accompanying us’.²¹⁰

Similarly, since the fourth century, the Byzantines had believed that, along with the Theotokos, protectress of Constantinople, warrior saints were the defenders of their cities and empire. As a result, it was natural that they must have been involved in the assassination of pagan and heretic emperors, and Merkourios, Sergios and Theodore were therefore portrayed as responsible for the removal of Julian and Valens. When emperors on campaign invoked the saints, had their icons carried into battle and engaged the enemy on a particular feast day, the saints were bound to respond and assist the army: with every victory to which they contributed, their interventions, as reported, become more overt, more decisive, more highly anticipated by the combatants and more publicized by grateful generals.

It would, however, be judgemental to assume that the accounts of these medieval interventions were the result of either cynical manipulation, ignorant superstition or neurological or pathological states: armies in the field throughout history, up to and including the twenty-first century, have believed that they had experienced supernatural interventions in battle, and in a significant number of these cases, however apocryphal, these epiphanies spurred them on to further victories by giving them hope and encouragement amidst the horrors of war.

Notes

1. See Frend (1965), esp. pp.477–535; Delehaye (1933); Walter (2003), pp.19–22.

2. On the cult of the warrior saints, see especially Delehaye (1909); Walter (2003), esp. pp.22–28.

3. Delehaye (1909), pp.11–25; Walter (1999); Walter (2003), pp.44–58; Haldon (2016).

4. Delehaye (1909), pp.26–43; Halkin (1981); Oikonomides (1986); Walter (2003), pp.59–66; Haldon (2016).

5. Budge (1888), (1930); Howell (1969); Riches (2000); Walter (1993); Walter (2003), pp.109–44.

6. Delehaye (1909), pp.234–48; Binon (1937); Binon (1937a); Walter (2003), pp.101–08.

7. The first Palestinian martyr, beheaded in Caesarea during Diocletian’s persecution, according to Euseb. On the Martyrs of Palestine 1.1–2; Delehaye (1909), pp.228–33; Walter (2003), pp.94–100.

8. Delehaye (1909), pp.103–09; Lemerle (1979); Lemerle (1981); Cormack (1989); Walter (2003), pp.67–94.

9. Peeters (1921); Fowden (1999); Walter (2003), pp.146–62.

10. Delehaye (1910a); Devos (1959); Devos (1960); Grossman (1998); Duffy & Bourbouhakis (2003), pp.65–81; Walter (2003), pp.181–90.

11. Halkin (1970); Weitzmann (1979); Walter (2003), pp.219–22.

12. Crisafulli, Nesbitt & Haldon (1996); Walter (2003), pp.191–94.

13. Rosenqvist (1996).

14. Budge (1888); Brooks (1925); see also Malone, in this volume.

15. Euseb. On the Martyrs of Palestine 1–13.

16. Revelation 2:13, cf. 6:9; Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.2 (ad 177); Amm. Marc. 22.17.

17. Martyrdom of Polycarp 9.3.

18. Dagron (1978); Johnson (2012); Festugiére (1971), pp.33–82.

19. Euseb. Vit. Const. 3.28: μαρτύρια (martyrs’ shrines).

20. See Grabar (1946); Walter (1982), esp. pp.144–58.

21. Maraval (1982), pp.226–331; Davis (1998); Walter (2003), p.28.

22. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 8.4, Vit. Const. 2.33; see also Malone, in this volume.

23. Const. Porph. Cer.1.481.

24. Kurtz (1989), p.10; Janin (1934); Magdalino (1990), pp.198–201; for the hymn, Const. Porph. Cer. 2.89.

25. Pentcheva (2006), pp.82–83; Nelson (2011–12), pp.186–87, with fig. 15.

26. Nelson (2011–12), p.188, with fig. 16; Walter (2003), fig. 46.

27. Sevcenko (1962), p.272.

28. Digenis Akritas 1.19–25.

29. Hom. Il. 5.121–444.

30. Pritchett (1979), p.39; see also Wheeler (2004); Graf (2004).

31. Hdt. 6.105, 117, 8.84; Plut. Thes. 35.5, Them. 15.1; cf. O’Sullivan (2020).

32. SIG³ 398.

33. Lundgreen (1997), pp.190–97; Dinsmoor (1934), pp.93–106. Both statues were taken to Constantinople, the Promachos in AD 465, while the Parthenos (or a copy: the original was badly damaged by fire in 165 BC) was recorded as being there in the tenth century.

34. Zos. 5.6.

35. Livy 2.20; Dion. Hal. Rom. Ant. 6.13; Cic. Nat. Deor. 2.6; Delehaye (1904), pp.427–32.

36. Val. Max. 1.8.6; Amm. Marc. 24.4.24.

37. Cic. Nat. Deor. 2.6; Dio 41.61: Pharsalus; Plin. Nat. Hist. 2.148, cf. 7.86: the Cimbri. See Roussel (1931) for Q. Labienus’ failure to take Panamara in 40 BC, when he was repelled by Zeus Panamaros.

38. For example, Exodus 12:29, 15:1–21; 1 Samuel 5:6–12; 2 Samuel 8:1–18.

39. 2 Maccabees 10:29–30, 11:8–9.

40. 2 Maccabees 15:11–16.

41. 2 Maccabees 3:24–26.

42. Luke 2:13–14.

43. Joshua 5:15; Daniel 10:13–21.

44. Revelation 12:7–8, 19:14, 20.

45. Euseb. Vit. Const. 3.3; cf. Isaiah 27:1.

46. For an example, see a nummus minted in AD 327 at Constantinople: RIC, vol. 7, 572.19, cf. 64: at https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/C_1890–0804-11.

47. Bonner (1950), p.221; Walter (2003), pp.33–38, 241–42.

48. Pan. Lat. 4.14.1–4, 4.15.4–7, 4.29.1.

49. Delehaye (1909), pp.234–48; Walter (2003), pp.101–08; Binon (1937); Binon (1937a).

50. Amm. Marc. 25.3.3.

51. Liban. Or. 18.274; Philostorgios Hist. Eccl. 7.15.

52. Socrates Hist. Eccl. 3.21.

53. Theodoret Hist. Eccl. 3.20, cf. 3.18.

54. Sozom. 6.1.

55. Sozom. 6.2; for Didymos, see Theodoret Hist. Eccl. 4.26.

56. Xanth. Hist. Eccl. 10.35.

57. Miracles of Artemios: Papadopoulos-Kerameus (1909), pp.1–79; Crisafulli & Nesbitt (1997); Mango (1979); Walter (2003), pp.191–94.

58. Delehaye (1909), pp.92–101.

59. Malalas 13.25. In the account of John Damascene, it is the Theotokos who dispatches Merkourios: Walter (2003), p.105.

60. Chron. Pasch. 550–51 (s.a.363); John of Nikiu Chronicle 80.19–26.

61. Evetts (1907), pp.419–20 (History of the Patriarchs 2.420); Baynes (1937), pp.22–29. For the ninth-century miniature in Paris (gr.510, fol. 409v), which shows Merkourios spearing Julian, who has fallen from his horse, see Brubaker (1999), pp.232–35.

62. Cf. Xen. Hell. 6.4.7; Diod. 15.51.2–4; Cic. Div. 1.74 for Herakles’ weapons disappearing from his shrine in Thebes prior to the Battle of Leuktra in 371 BC, ‘evidence’ that he had gone to do battle against the Spartans.

63. Amm. Marc. 31.12–13.

64. Socrates Hist. Eccl. 6.38.

65. On Sergios, see Peeters (1921); Fowden (1999); Walter (2003), pp.146–62.

66. Baynes (1937).

67. Baynes (1937), who argued that Valens is here a title and refers to Julian; Garsoian (1989), esp. pp.130–32; Peeters (1921), pp.70–73.

68. Walter (2003), pp.146–62; Fowden (1999). For Sergiopolis: Procop. Buildings 2.9.3–9.

69. Woods (1997), pp.335–67; Efthymiadis (2011), pp.310–16.

70. Delehaye (1909), pp.127–35, 183–201; Walter (1999), pp.163–210.

71. Sozom. 7.22; Rufinus Hist. Eccl. 11.31–3; Theodoret Hist. Eccl. 5.24; see also Malone, in this volume.

72. Theodoret Hist. Eccl. 5.24.

73. Paul the Deacon Historia Romana 14.12; cf. Prosper of Aquitaine Epitome chronikon 1367; cf. Robinson (1905), p.51, for the miraculous tale built on Prosper’s contemporary account. Raphael’s painting of the encounter between Leo and Attila can be accessed at: http://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/stanze-di-raffaello/stanza-di-eliodoro/incontro-di-leone-magno-con-attila.html.

74. Chron. Pasch. 180; Theodore Synkellos, Homily on the Siege of Constantinople in 626, 19; cf. Av. Cameron (1978), pp.96–102; Pentcheva (2006), pp.37–59. For accounts of the Avar siege, including that of Theodore Synkellos, see Barisic (1954), pp.371–95.

75. Leo Deac. 9.12; Psellos Chron. 1.16.

76. See Fowden (1999), p.134.

77. Procop. Pers. 20.1–16, Buildings 2.9.9; Evagrius Hist. Eccl. 4.28.

78. A different St Andrew – Stratelates (‘the General’) – was one of the corps of warrior saints: Walter (2003), pp.245–46.

79. Const. Porph. DAI 1.229–31.

80. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 8.5 mentions a man of distinction martyred at Nikomedeia, but there is no reason to take this to refer to George; see Walter (1993), pp.295–326. For George’s passion and miracles: Brooks (1925); Budge (1888); Cumont (1936); Noret (1974). On his cult, see Didi-Huberman, Gabretta & Morgaine (1994); Howell (1969); Riches (2000); Walter (1995).

81. Leclerq (1924).

82. Geyer (1898); Wilkinson (1977), p.65.

83. Janin (1969), pp.69–78.

84. James (2017), figs 104, 105; see Aufhauser (1913); for healing children suffering from leprosy and demonic possession, see Budge (1888); for captivity, see Grotowski (2003), with figs 1–9.

85. Walter (1995), pp.317–18.

86. See Festugiére (1971), esp. pp.268, 308–10; Budge (1931); Sahas (1986); Meehan (1983), pp.113–17 (Adamnan 3.4.1–13).

87. Greatrex & Lieu (2002), pp.235–36.

88. Krumbacher (1911), pp.78–81; cf. Noret (1974).

89. Budge (1888), pp.270–74; in another version, Diocletian did reach Lydda, but the archangel Michael struck him blind: Walter (2003), p.120.

90. Festugiére (1970); trans. Dawes & Baynes (1948).

91. Festugiére (1970), p.97.

92. Walter (2003), figs 27, 28.

93. de Voragine (2012), pp.238–39, trans. Caxton (1483) at: https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/basis/goldenlegend/GL-vol3-george.asp. See also Walter (2003), pp.125, 321; Hengstenberg (1912); Howell (1969); Kuehn (2011), pp.108–09.

94. Walter (2003), pp.132–34.

95. A poster by Fritz Boehle (1873–1916) at: http://www.english.emory.edu/LostPoets/GermanPosters.html; see Darracott & Loftus (1981). In 1999, a candidate for a Greek ecological political party (concerned over NATO’s bombing of Serbia) had himself portrayed on posters as St George fighting against a dragon with the head of Bill Clinton: Seraidari (2009), p.144.

96. For Theodore Teron, see Halkin (1962); Halkin (1981); Delehaye (1966); Walter (1999), pp.163–210; Leemans (2003); Haldon (2016).

97. Cavarnos (1990), pp.61–71; Leemans (2003); Zuckerman (1991), pp.479–86.

98. Cavarnos (1990), pp.61–71; cf. Walter (2003), pp.45, 49. For an inscription from Euchaita describing Theodore as ‘Christ’s athlete who is a citizen of heaven, Theodore the guardian of this city’, see Mango & Sevcenko (1972), pp.378–84.

99. Miracles: Delehaye (1909), pp.194–201; Sigalas (1921), pp.50–79; Halkin (1962), pp.308–24; Delehaye (1909), pp.183–201; Haldon (2016), pp.92–111.

100. Delehaye (1909), pp.196–98.

101. Hengstenberg (1912), pp.78–106, 241–80; Walter (2003), p.309.

102. Zacos & Verglery (1972), pp.792–93; Walter (2003), pp.51–56, with figs 23a, 23b, 25; see Kuehn (2011), pp.108–09.

103. For Theodore Stratelates, see Haldon (2016); Oikonomides (1986), pp.327–35; Woodfin (2006), pp.111–143.

104. Walter (2003), pp.59–64.

105. Maguire (1996), pp.20–23, figs 11–15.

106. Digenis Akritas 1428, 1861, 2406–10, 3031–34, 3242–43. Trapp (1976) compares episodes in the Digenis epic to the lives of the Saints Theodore.

107. Oikonomides (1986), pp.327–35; Walter (2003), pp.44–66.

108. Sullivan, Talbot & McGrath (2014).

109. BHG 263–64f; Grégoire (1938), pp.291–300.

110. For warrior saints and the Rus, see esp. White (2004); White (2013).

111. The Russian Primary Chronicle 6477.

112. Leo Deac. 9.9.

113. Skylitzes 308–09.

114. Skylitzes 309; Leo Deac. 158; Jordanov (1995), nos 228–31.

115. Walter (2003), p.64; Treu (1899), p.21.

116. Skylitzes 339. For Basil’s visit to the tombs of St George and the two Theodores to ask for protection in battle, see Crostini (1996), p.78.

117. Nelson (2011–12), pp.190–91, with fig. 18.

118. Sevcenko (1962), dedicatory poem at p.273.

119. See Cutler (1976–77); Stephenson (2003), pp.54–55. For the lance as the primary weapon of warrior saints, see Grotowski (2010), pp.313–33.

120. For the relative importance of Thessaloniki and Sirmium in the beginnings of the Demetrios cult, see Vickery (1974); Lemerle (1981), p.202.

121. Delehaye (1909), pp.103–09, 259–63; Frendo (1997); Obolensky (1974); Skedros (1999). For the church at Thessaloniki: Cormack (1969); Cormack (1985); Walter (1973); Bakirtzis (2003).

122. See Grabar (1954).

123. Miracles: Lemerle (1979), pp.50–165 John of Thessaloniki: BHG 499–523), 168–241 (anonymous: BHG 516z–522).

124. Lemerle (1979), p.135.

125. Lemerle (1979), pp.157, 164; cf. Woods (1999).

126. Lemerle (1979), pp.168–241, esp. 190–94.

127. Woods (1999).

128. Kurtz (1898), p.10; Magdalino (1990), pp.198–99.

129. For depictions of him, see Walter (2003), pp.83–87; Cormack (1989).

130. Further views of the reliquary, including photographs of the hinged St Demetrios panel and the compartments for relics, can be found at: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1926–0409-1.

131. Moscow, State Historical Museum and Cultural Museum (Moscow Kremlin), Inv. no: Mz 1148; see Grabar (1950), pp.3–28.

132. Westerink (1981), pp.8–17; Bohlig (1973), p.22.

133. Skylitzes 413–14; Walter (2003), p.82; Kekaumenos 160–62.

134. Skylitzes 339; Crostini (1996), p.78.

135. Anna Komnene 5.5.

136. Morrisson (2003), pp.174–76.

137. Robert of Clari 116; cf. Akropolites History 26, where Kalojan himself saw an armed man who appeared before him in his sleep and struck his side with his spear. See Walter (2003), pp.87–88; Grotowski (2010), pp.103–04; Lapina (2009); Obolensky (1974), pp.19–20.

138. See Dillon (2020).

139. MacGregor (2004), p.319.

140. Chibnall (1972), 3.214–16; MacGregor (2003), pp.220–22. See also Roach (2016), pp.177–201; for Maurice: O’Reilly (1978); Girgis (1993); Woods (1994).

141. MacGregor (2003), pp..224–25. For a late eleventh-century prayer in which God was asked to protect a knight who defended a church or other ecclesiastical institution from his enemies though the help of Maurice, Sebastian and George, see Flori (1978), pp.274–78, 436–38.

142. Walter (2003), p.50; Janin (1969), pp.148, 152–53; Anna Komnene 8.3.

143. Klein (2006).

144. Riley-Smith (1982), p.57.

145. Hill (1962), pp.16–17.

146. For Gregory Nazianzen’s homily ‘On the Maccabees’, see Vinson (1994), pp.166–92; for John Chrysostom’s three homilies on the Maccabees: Mayer (2006); cf. Joslyn-Siemiatkoski (2009).

147. For example, Hill & Hill (1969), p.53 (Raymond d’Aguilers on the battle against Ridwan of Aleppo, 9 February 1098); Fulcher Hist. 117; cf. Lapina (2012), pp.1–6.

148. Hagenmayer (1901), pp.69, 147, 271–72; Lapina (2009), p.93.

149. Demetrios became popular in the West after the crusade: see Lapina (2009), pp.93–112; MacGregor (2003), p.233.

150. Garrison (1929), p.123; Hirshberg (2000), pp.131–32; Faraone (2018), p.213 and n.105.

151. MacGregor (2004), pp.322–23 with n.13.

152. Hill & Hill (1969), pp.45–46; see Lapina (2007), pp.117–39.

153. Quran 3:125, 8:9; Guillaume (1967), pp.303, 310.

154. See Ashbridge (2007), pp.3–36.

155. Huygens (1996), pp.218, 299, 308.

156. Hill (1962), p.69.

157. Morris (1993), pp.55–71; MacGregor (2004), pp.325–26.

158. Hill (1962), p.62.

159. Bull & Kempf (2013), p.69; see also Bull (2014).

160. Fulcher Hist. 224.

161. Bull & Kempf (2013), p.54.

162. Ashbridge (2007); Anna Komnene 10.9–11; Hill & Hill (1969), p.55. The Holy Lance had probably been in Constantinople since AD 629; in the tenth century, it was kept in the palace chapel of the Theotokos of the Pharos and was venerated by the Byzantine court on Good Friday. Robert of Clari was certainly shown it (in the palace of Boukoleon) in 1204: Const. Porph. Cer. 1.34; Robert of Clari 68–69; Klein (2006), pp.79, 87 with n.66, 91.

163. Delehaye (1909), pp.91–101; Walter (2003), pp.101–08.

164. Riley-Smith (1982), pp.55–56.

165. MacGregor (2004), p.326 n.19; Hagenmayer (1901), p.167.

166. Hill & Hill (1969), pp.81–83.

167. Hill & Hill (1977), pp.111–12.

168. Hill & Hill (1977), pp.98–100.

169. Mynors, Thomson & Winterbottom (1998), 1.638–39.

170. Bull & Kempf (2013), p.76: Robert also states that Bishop Adhémar himself was the first to see the heavenly army and cried out to the troops that God was fulfilling his promise of assistance.

171. Girgis (1993); O’Reilly (1978); Woods (1994).

172. Bull & Kempf (2013), pp.51–55.

173. Pontieri (1928), p.44.

174. Anna Komnene 4.6.

175. Choniates Hist. 76; Lapina (2015), p.71.

176. Anna Komnene 10.9–11; Hill & Hill (1969), p.55.

177. MacGregor (2004), p.336.

178. Hill & Hill (1969), pp.131–34.

179. Hill & Hill (1969), pp.45, 56–57, 62, 74; cf. Ashbridge (2007). For the shooting star, cf. Hill (1962), p.62; Fulcher Hist. 243–44.

180. Hill (1962), p.87; for Ramla and other cult sites of St George, see Delehaye (1909), pp.45–50.

181. Kuehn (2011), p.99.

182. Hill & Hill (1969), p.136.

183. Thorp (1992), pp.50–53, lines 690–854.

184. Delehaye (1910), pp.276–301; MacGregor (2004), p.340 and n.55.

185. Hill & Hill (1969), pp.149–50; William of Tyre 8.16.

186. de Voragine (2012), p.242; trans. Caxton (1483) at https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/basis/goldenlegend/GL-vol3-george.asp.

187. William of Tyre 8.22; Brundage (1959).

188. Choniates Hist. 190–91.

189. Lapina (2015), p.148; Garcia (2006); Farina (2018), pp.64, 103–12; Erdman (1977), pp.274–75.

190. Mackridge & Yannakakis (1997), p.21 with n.20.

191. Florakis (1990), pp.25–26; Seraidari (2009), p.142.

192. Florakis (1990) p.103; Seraidari (2009), p.154 with n.12.

193. Herman (2011).

194. Hdt. 6.105.

195. Rosman (2018).

196. Rosman (2018).

197. Herman (2011), p.130.

198. See Suedfeld & Geiger (2008); Geiger (2009); Shermer (2010); Herman (2011).

199. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 5: ‘What the Thunder Said’.

200. Geiger (2009).

201. Herman (2011), pp.147–50.

202. Herman (2011); for dreams in Classical Antiquity, see Harris (2009).

203. Geiger (2009), pp.241–42.

204. Rosman (2018).

205. Taylor (1966), p.29.

206. Machen (1915).

207. Clarke (2002), pp.152–53; Mikhail Dmitriyevich Skobelev (1843–1882) was famous for his heroism and conquests in Central Asia during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–1878. Dressed in white, and mounted on a white horse, he was known by his soldiers as the ‘White General’.

208. Clarke (2002), pp.156–67; Clarke (2004), p.236, calls it ‘a classic example of a contemporary “urban” legend’. Cf. the widely promulgated angelic visitation and clairvoyant vision that George Washington was said, during the American Revolution, to have experienced at the Valley Forge encampment in the winter of 1778, the first account of which appeared in the National Tribune 4.12, in December 1880.

209. Bull & Kempf (2013), p.4: ‘sed post creationem mundi quid mirabilius factum est preter salutifere cruces misterium, quam quod modernis temporibus actum est in hoc itinere nostrorum Iherosolimitarum?’’; Lapina (2015), p.144.

210. Hagenmayer (1901), pp.69, 147, 271–72.