One of the long-standing narratives of ecclesiastical history remains the resolute and ultimately successful claim to autocephaly made by the archbishops of Cyprus, despite centuries of periodic challenges, including the very extinction of the Orthodox archiepiscopacy itself under Latin rule. The claim to Cypriot autocephaly has always been rooted in the late fifth-century discovery of St Barnabas's relics, which came to serve as an unambiguous declaration of the apostolic founding of the Cypriot Church. The tradition of the apostolicity of the Cypriot Church, and thus its right to autocephaly, has long been a settled fact in modern scholarship and continues to be asserted by the Cypriot Church.Footnote 1 Yet equally unambiguous has been the additional claim that, in honour of St Barnabas's relics, the Emperor Zeno (c. 425–91) also granted to the archbishops of Cyprus certain imperial regalia privileges which remain to this day as a joint bulwark of autocephaly alongside the apostolicity of the Church. The modern Cypriot Church thus celebrates both autocephaly and the imperial regalia privileges in tandem as rights ab antiquo, and modern western scholarship has also embraced the late antique origin of the regalia privileges.Footnote 2 This article investigates the historical origins of these privileges and their relationship to the established late antique tradition of the Cypriot Church's apostolic autocephaly.
The search for evidence of a late antique conjunction between Zeno's clear and certain recognition of Cypriot autocephaly and a separate grant of imperial regalia privileges to its archbishops has produced a curious discovery: St Barnabas himself is hard to find in late antique and medieval Cyprus. In fact autocephaly had already been secured in the fourth century by the island's other great episcopal hero, St Epiphanius.Footnote 3 Furthermore, the imperial privileges said to have been granted in St Barnabas's honour are in fact nowhere to be found. These privileges are odd in two ways. Firstly, although they are said to have been issued as a means of securing the autocephaly of the Cypriot Church from patriarchal control, they themselves have nothing to do with ecclesiastical jurisdiction and authority. Rather, they are regalia rights symbolic of temporal power freighted with imperial sovereignty: carrying a gold-orbed sceptre in lieu of a pastoral crosier, wearing a robe in the imperial purple rather than the monastic black, and signing official documents with imperial red (cinnabar) ink have nothing to do with ecclesiastical administration but everything to do with temporal governance. Secondly, these three privileges are oddly placed in a late fifth-century context, since such imperial administrative grants to Orthodox prelates were unheard of in the polity of Byzantium. Byzantine emperors regularly maintained an imperial governor and military commander on the island and thus did not rely on the archbishops for either civil or military administration there.Footnote 4 Hence the purported imperial privileges of the Cypriot archbishops are analogous to the Donation of Constantine in the Latin tradition, that is, they are set in an historical context devoid of any actual archiepiscopal secular governance. Such a double anachronism explains the complete absence of any surviving historical evidence for these privileges throughout both the late antique and medieval eras of Cyprus' history.
Such powerful apostolic and imperial auctoritas would not have been neglected by medieval archbishops if they had been available. Yet the medieval Greek archbishops and bishops of Cyprus did not in fact turn St Barnabas's relics and imperial regalia to their advantage. The thousands of episcopal lead seals that survive from their administrative documents from the sixth through the twelfth centuries virtually never employed the hallowed Apostle of the isle in their iconography. Archbishop John of Cyprus (late seventh century) may have included the bust of St Barnabas on his seals though this remains uncertain;Footnote 5 it is more certain that Archbishop Theodore did so in the late seventh or early eighth century.Footnote 6 Yet all subsequent archbishops preferred other emblems of their ecclesiastical authority: most employed the more popular Cypriot episcopal saint, Epiphanius of Salamis (c. 310–403), with a few looking off-island to the model bishop St Nicholas or the proto-martyr St Stephen for their seals. Among the island's several bishops one finds lead seals depicting the Hospitality of Abraham, the Hodegetria, or even Daniel in the Lion's Den and the Madonna with Child.Footnote 7 The apostolic benediction of the blessed Barnabas was therefore very rarely attached to the daily ecclesiastical business of the Byzantine Church on Cyprus.
St Barnabas and the legend of his miraculous fifth-century patronage of the Cypriot Church's autocephaly was never forgotten.Footnote 8 Indeed, evidence survives of a continuous literary tradition that maintained the memory of Alexander the Monk's mid sixth-century Laudatio account of the autocephaly story.Footnote 9 A contemporary of Alexander and Hagia Sophia's own reader, Theodorus Anagnostes, had quickly learned of it and proceeded to insert the autocephaly tradition tied to St Barnabas into his own mid sixth-century Historia ecclesiastica.Footnote 10 The Cypriot bishop Leontius of Neapolis (Limassol), in his seventh-century hagiography of St John the Almoner, tells of the latter's pilgrimage to the relics of St Barnabas and St Epiphanius (though here Epiphanius has become the miracle worker).Footnote 11 The geographer George of Cyprus, though confusing the Gospel author Matthew with Barnabas's reputed cousin John Mark, commented in his early seventh-century Descriptio orbis Romani that ‘The eparchy of Cyprus has continued, having sovereignty for itself, because here the holy apostle Barnabas was found, having the Gospel of Mark [sic] on his chest.’Footnote 12 The early ninth-century monastic chronicler from Constantinople, George Hamartolos, maintained the tradition,Footnote 13 which was then taken up by George Kedrenos in his eleventh-century compendium of world history.Footnote 14 This literary tradition no doubt accounts for the story's inclusion in the eleventh-century imperial Menologion (a hagiographical collection) of Michael iv the Paphlagonian (1034–41).Footnote 15
Even after the end of imperial rule on Cyprus, Byzantine writers like Nilus DoxapatrisFootnote 16 and Joel the ChronographerFootnote 17 sustained the autocephaly tradition in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries respectively. And the last significant ecclesiastical historian of Constantinople, Nikephorus Kallistos Xanthopoulos, carried the Barnabas-based autocephaly claim into the early fourteenth century in his own Historia ecclesiastica.Footnote 18 This tradition is remarkably consistent in its details over almost eight centuries, with the only variant being some isolated confusion about whether the tree under which St Barnabas's remains were found was a carob or a cherry. Every instance contains the clear assertion that St Barnabas's miraculous appearance resulted in the autocephaly of Cyprus from the claims of the metropolitan of Antioch, based on Barnabas's apostolic foundation of the Cypriot Church. But not a single one of these accounts makes mention of the imperial privileges; indeed, the literary evidence is as silent about these as the sigillographic evidence.
The centre of St Barnabas's cult on Cyprus was a pilgrimage church named after him in Salamis (later renamed Constantia after the emperor who rebuilt it after fourth-century earthquakes had devastated the settlement) near Famagusta. And even when the capital city of Salamis-Constantia was abandoned in the seventh century in favour of Famagusta, the monastic church of St Barnabas continued to function as an active pilgrimage shrine from late antiquity down to the present day.Footnote 19 The thirteenth-century pilgrim Wilbrand of Oldenburg serves as an eye-witness of this: on his visit to the church, he describes its environs as a ‘civitas destructa’.Footnote 20 Yet amid all the centuries of a sustained local cult of St Barnabas on the island of Cyprus, often under great duress, there is not one late antique or medieval source anywhere attaching to this cult a tradition of imperial regalia privileges granted by Emperor Zeno to the archbishops of Cyprus.
It is important at the outset to make clear then, that no account of the three imperial regalia privileges (orbed sceptre, purple robe, cinnabar ink) appears in medieval Greek texts – either in tandem with or apart from the St Barnabas autocephaly tradition.Footnote 21 And indeed there is none in medieval Latin texts either. The fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Cypriot bureaucrat and historian Leontios Machairas (c. 1369–1458), respectful as he was of the Catholic Church and the Lusignan ruling elite for whom he worked,Footnote 22 says nothing of the matter in his Recital concerning the sweet land of Cyprus, entitled ‘Chronicle’, written in the Greek Cypriot dialect. He does, however, give us insight into how the linguistic and cultural climate of the island had changed by the early fifteenth century:
§158. And because there are two natural rulers of the world, the one lay and the other spiritual, so there were in this little island: the emperor of Constantinople and the patriarch of Antioch the Great, until the Latins took the land. For this reason we were obliged to know good Greek, for sending letters to the emperor, and to be perfect in the Syrian language (for the patriarch): and thus men used to teach their sons, and thus the chancery was carried on in the Syrian language and in Greek, until the Lusignans took the land. (And the royal court was the foundation of the Greek emperor, and there the dukes lived, who used to come here.) And (when the Latin period began) men began to learn French, and their Greek became barbarous, just as it is today, when we write both French and Greek, in such a way that no one in the world can say what our language is.Footnote 23
The Lusignan crusader kingdom not only produced linguistic, cultural and religious diversity on Cyprus but also an evolving Cypriot memory of the island's own history. For Machairas records a traditional need to learn Syriac before the Frankish era because of the archbishop of Antioch's ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the island. Now we can have no doubt that Machairas was very well educated and socially connected, and so would never have knowingly made such a public gaffe about the island's ecclesiastical history.Footnote 24 Yet his institutional memory is a far cry from late antiquity's confident assertions of autocephaly. This suggests that after almost three hundred years of Latin rule the Cypriot Orthodox population had no living memory of an active, autonomous Greek archbishop (indeed, such had long since been replaced by a Roman Catholic metropolitan).Footnote 25 Though the Greek clergy were strenuous in their assertions of independence from the Latin Church until the mid-thirteenth century, by the fifteenth century a modus vivendi had been functioning for some time, built as it was on years of living side-by-side, and on the successful implementation of the papal Bulla Cypria of 1260 (which assured the Greek clergy semi-autonomy under Latin clerical oversight).Footnote 26
The result was that no schism or heresy conflict came to dominate Cypriot religious history during the Lusignan years, whose French monarchs were in fact often patrons of the Greek Church.Footnote 27 And in this historical context of a wider definition of the Cypriot community (i.e. inclusive of Latins, Greeks and other immigrant Christian communities like the Syrian Maronites and Armenians), St Barnabas as patron of Greek Cypriot autocephaly faded into near oblivion while St Epiphanius advanced as the miracle-working patron saint-bishop of the island, as pilgrims like the early fourteenth-century Westphalian priest Ludolf discovered.Footnote 28 This multilingual and multi-religious world, formed over some three centuries,Footnote 29 was acknowledged in an off-hand way by the Cypriot Athanasius Lepentrenus in his letter to the Byzantine scholar Nikephorus Gregorias around 1350:
Neither will most of the barbarians, at least those who have had some schooling, be without a part in this beautiful feast [i.e. of Gregorias' exquisite prose writing]; for there are Cypriots who are competent in three languages and can translate Greek into the languages of the Syrians and of the Italians. So be it.Footnote 30
If we look past Lepentrenus' blinkered private aside about barbarian Syrians and Italians who need beautiful Greek translated for them, it is clear that at least for the Cypriot Greek elite an education meant access to the French, Latin and Italian languages, which in turn opened doors to high preferment as cultural and political mediators in the Lusignan and Venetian governments.Footnote 31 As a result of such a role, a certain ‘westernisation’ in administrative practices and intellectual categories became part of their subsequent education,Footnote 32 and it was from this growing knowledge of western European political and ecclesiastical ideas that the notion of the imperial regalia privileges of St Barnabas would finally emerge.
For its origins, we turn to the troubles and texts of sixteenth-century Cyprus. The end of the Lusignan dynasty in 1489 and the era of Venetian rule (1489–1571) saw the production of Italian-language histories of Cyprus written by the Latinised Greek Cypriot bureaucratic community. The changed audience for their histories is telling, given the turn to Italian as the language of communication. For the Venetians needed to know the history of their newly annexed island, and learned Greek Cypriots took charge of their historical education. The first glimpse into this process of cultural transmission is provided in a manuscript compilation containing the thirteenth-century medieval French Gestes de Chiprois Footnote 33 in Italian translation, which is named after its owner, the Venetian nobleman and legal scholar Francesco Amadi (†1566). A private collection for his own extensive library, this compilation also contained something else: an anonymous short Italian chronicle of Lusignan-era Cyprus also apparently translated from an original medieval French source or sources.Footnote 34 Whence Amadi obtained this remains unknown, but it is essentially a translation of the record covered in Machairas's history, and then extended down to 1441.Footnote 35
This historiography was further enriched in the later sixteenth century by additional efforts at extending Machairas's history. Though still in the Greek Cypriot dialect, a recapitulation of Machairas's Lusignan-era narrative was integrated into additional material chronicling the transition to Venetian rule by George Bustron, a scion of one of Cyprus' elite Greek families known for their careers in the Lusignan civil service, with some even achieving nobility by the later fifteenth century.Footnote 36 And a fuller translation of Machairas's history into Italian was produced by Diomède Strambaldi, another Greek Cypriot whose family had risen to prominence among the French elite in the later years of the Lusignan era.Footnote 37 Amadi, Bustron, Strambaldi – their histories were specifically designed to summarise and transmit the record of Cyprus' venerable past to the Venetians and thereby represented a collective effort to educate the island's new masters about the essentials of the land that they now governed. Yet not a single one of these three sources mentions the St Barnabas autocephaly story, let alone any claimed imperial regalia privileges. Autocephaly, when considered in the larger context of Machairas's fifteenth-century history, appears to have been completely forgotten and the regalia privileges were hitherto completely unknown.
When then did the St Barnabas autocephaly story return? It would only prove to be useful in the context of a Venetian empire collapsing at the hands of the expanding Ottoman empire, with Cyprus already a tributary of the Porte after the Ottoman-Venetian peace treaty of 1540. Florio Bustron (†1570), kinsman of George Bustron and a notary in the Venetian Secrète, fluent in French, Italian and Latin as well as his native Cypriot Greek, was the right man at the right time for rediscovering St Barnabas.Footnote 38 He had been specifically entrusted with translating the Lusignan Assizes of Cyprus from their medieval French into the Venetian dialect in 1531,Footnote 39 and even when no longer serving as a notary the Venetian government still secured his services to make a copy and translate a 1455 Lusignan diploma of the Haute Cour. He was also a committed Cypriot patriot whose life may have ended during the Turkish siege of Nicosia (22 July–9 September 1570).Footnote 40 This Bustron, therefore, had the capacity, the commitment and the occasion to translate into an Italian-language chronicle the meaning of his island's history, and he did so by returning to its original patron saint.
Florio Bustron enjoyed many years of access to the Secrète archives, from which he wrote his history during the urgent final decade or so of Venetian rule.Footnote 41 For the early centuries, though, he relied heavily on Amadi, with supplements at least from the Lignages d'Outre-Mer (pedigrees of the most important Lusignan-era crusader families), the Remembrances de la secrète and the Assizes. Yet in addition to reprising these sources, he chose to insert two additional narratives about St Barnabas into the historiographical storyline already so thoroughly established by Machairas, Amadi, Strambaldi and his own ancestor George Bustron. As a Renaissance scholar he was well versed in the historical sources for late antique Cyprus, and thus he marshalled a collection of illustrious Cypriot heroes and saints for a patriotic history celebrating the noble and ancient culture of Cyprus.Footnote 42 And this would of course include St Barnabas.
The first story is taken from the apocryphal Acts of Barnabas, where St Barnabas and St Mark bring down divine destruction on a theatre filled with naked revellers in Kourion because of their immorality.Footnote 43 Would it be too credulous to suspect that Florio Bustron chose to include the partnership of these two biblical saints on Cyprus as a precedent for his Italian readers from the Republic of St Mark to ponder? Secondly, after describing the martyrdom of St Barnabas and then listing his early successors as archbishops of Cyprus, Bustron reintroduces the autocephaly miracle story of Alexander the Monk's Laudatio:
In tempo del quale Antimio, un' Pietro Enapheo, arcivescovo d'Antiochia, li mosse differentia, et voleva obbligarlo per suo suddito, dicendo lui essere apostolico, havendo l'apostolo Paulo nella sua città; Anthimio andò avanti all' imperatore e si diffese respondendo: Cipro esser libera, et non suggetta, et esser anco lui apostolico, havendo l'apostolo Barnaba nella sua città, el quale ha nel suo senso l'Evangelio de San Matheo, et questo seppe per rivelation divina. L'imperatore, volendosi guistificar de questo, mandò con esse Anthimio prelati; li quali, andata fuora di Salamina poco distante verso occidente, in una grotta, hanno trovata la persona di quest' apostolo Barnaba, et l'Evangelio, lo qual tolseno, et in quel locho hanno edificata una bellissima chiesa a spese dell' imperatore; e d' alhora liberato Anthimio et concesso che si possi intitolare arcivescovo de Cipro.Footnote 44
Bustron, therefore, perhaps recovering the Laudatio from an archive to which he had access, repeats here the essence of the late antique autocephaly claim for the Cypriot Church. But then he goes a remarkable step further and adds something completely new to the story: the regalia privileges finally make their first public appearance: ‘Et li concesse il baston imperiale, con il pomo in cima, et il capello con la croce rossa di supra, et molte altre immunità a honor perpetuo di questa isola benedetta et santa.'Footnote 45 An imperial sceptre with an orb on top (i.e. an aureum pomum), a cape with a red cross and many other immunities for the perpetual honour of this blessed and holy island: these thirty-three Italian words would have more of a future than a past. Inserting regalia rights into the St Barnabas autocephaly story is consistent with the administrative milieu of Florio Bustron's career, but why was the regalia symbolism added to the St Barnabas autocephaly story, and why at this juncture in Cyprus' history? What would lead Florio Bustron directly to contradict Machairas's account of Cyprus' dependence on the patriarchate of Antioch, which had recently become available to Venetian readers in the form of Strambaldi's Italian translation?
Several points of note appear immediately. The first is that we do not yet have the complete set of three privileges here: the red (cinnabar) ink is missing and will only appear in the early modern period; the imperial purple on the robe is not specified either since only a red cross is granted (more reminiscent of St George's Cross as a crusading symbol, though perhaps also of its ancient use by the Byzantine cavalry);Footnote 46 and finally the imperial sceptre – evocative enough of delegated sovereign power – has an ‘apple’ attached to its top. This is of course not merely an ornamental fruit, but rather a well-known insignia, the aureum pomum, a profoundly obvious claim to imperial temporal sovereignty on the island of Cyprus.
Indeed the aureum pomum, in combination with an imperial sceptre, is the most striking aspect of Florio Bustron's ‘first draft’ of these imperial privileges. This symbol (also known as the Christianised globus cruciger when orb and cross were combined, as they remain to this day on the Cypriot archiepiscopal sceptre) had an ancient Roman origin and was well known in Byzantium through unbroken tradition.Footnote 47 It was also documented in western European circles since at least the imperial coronation of Henry ii by Pope Benedict viii in 1014.Footnote 48 Moreover his successor Henry iii appears in an eleventh-century Echternach miniature of his royal coronation (5 June 1040) holding the Reichsapfel (aureum pomum with cross as globus cruciger) in his left hand while grasping the eagle sceptre in his right (each arm being supported by a leading abbot).Footnote 49 This symbol of sovereign rule appears again at the imperial coronations of Henry v by Paschal ii (under duress) in 1111 and of Henry vi by Celestine iii in 1191.Footnote 50 And, quite striking for present purposes, in the early sixteenth century the papacy began to locate its own globus cruciger on the very apex of the papal triregnum tiara.Footnote 51 In each and every instance the ‘golden apple’ as globus cruciger has been a Christian emblem of terrestrial sovereignty. Furthermore, it was an object that rulers held in their left hand (the sceptre being in the right hand) during coronations and this remained so even after it was miniaturised and added to the crowns of early modern and modern European monarchs (the orb here is referred to as the ‘monde’).Footnote 52
So Florio Bustron asserts that the archbishop of Cyprus was privileged not only to make ritual use of the imperial sceptre and the aureum pomum (two of the three standard imperial regalia objects), but also to combine them in an unprecedented manner to fashion a wholly new and unique insignia – one more akin to the globus cruciger finial on early modern papal tiaras and European crowns than to any Byzantine regalia. The globus cruciger was never placed in miniature on Byzantine imperial crowns, nor was it even considered a regalia object for ritual purposes as in the West.Footnote 53 Furthermore, the ‘baston imperiale, con il pomo in cima’ combines them in a manner unheard of anywhere else in Christendom: sceptres in both the Byzantine and Latin Middle Ages were very often tipped with a cross (known as a scepter cruciger), but not with a complete though miniaturised globus cruciger.Footnote 54 Again, it was customary for the orb to be held in one hand and the sceptre in the other; these two objects were never combined to create a new insignia.
There is therefore a striking anachronism in this stylised sceptre, which draws its finial design from Renaissance papal tiaras and European crowns rather than fifth-century Byzantine regalia, and even then it exhibits a scepter-globus cruciger ornamentation unknown elsewhere in Christendom. Either a wholly new invention of Emperor Zeno, or of Florio Bustron, this insignia clearly bears the elements of Bustron's age and cultural orientation rather than of Zeno's.Footnote 55 Further confirmation of Florio Bustron's invention of the imperial privileges appears in a Cypriot icon of St Barnabas from the church of Agios Loukas in Nicosia, dated exactly to the time of Florio Bustron's Historia overo commentarii de Cipro in the mid-sixteenth century. The icon includes a donor portrait of a Greek bishop kneeling before him, and Barnabas is depicted in his traditional Greek iconography with ecclesiastical vestments – yet without any imperial regalia.Footnote 56 In recent years this icon has been repaired and displayed in the archiepiscopal synodikon or great Synod Hall in Nicosia, and it was also reproduced in 1966 (six years after independence from British rule) in a Cypriot government stamp set commemorating the 1,900th anniversary of St Barnabas's martyrdom. The set also included a stamp depicting Emperor Zeno granting the imperial privileges to Archbishop Anthemius. In sum, St Barnabas was an apostolic founder-saint to the Greek Cypriots until the end of the sixteenth century; but to Florio Bustron's intended Italian-speaking, Catholic Venetian audience he now took on the trappings of temporal regalian authority like western European bishops, archbishops and popes.
In addition to elements in their design, the ideological significance of the regalia privileges must also be considered as further evidence of origin. Neither in the Orthodox nor Latin Churches is a pre-modern episcopal claim to such symbols of imperial terrestrial sovereignty to be found, let alone a claim to the exercise of such sovereignty, except for the Roman pontiffs in the Papal States. In a well-known effort to shore up its fragile status in those territories granted to the papacy by Charlemagne's father King Pepin after vanquishing the Lombard threat, some enterprising cleric famously forged a charter by Emperor Constantine at some point around the mid-eighth or early ninth century. Supposedly in thanks for Pope Sylvester's healing his leprosy and converting him to Christianity, the emperor therein granted terrestrial privileges to the papacy which retroactively redefined Pepin's grant as a restoration rather than an original benefaction. For the specific purposes of this article one particular portion of the Donation of Constantine is relevant:
We concede and, by this present, do confer, our imperial Lateran palace … then a diadem, that is, the crown of our head, and at the same time the tiara; and, also, the shoulder band, that is, the collar that usually surrounds our imperial neck; and also the purple mantle, and crimson tunic, and all the imperial raiment; and the same rank as those presiding over the imperial cavalry; conferring also the imperial sceptres, and, at the same time, the spears and standards; also the banners and different imperial ornaments, and all the advantage of our high imperial position, and the glory of our power … we placed upon his most holy head, with our own hands, a tiara of gleaming splendour representing the glorious resurrection of our Lord. And, holding the bridle of his horse, out of reverence for St Peter we performed for him the duty of groom; decreeing that all the pontiffs his successors, and they alone, may use that tiara in processions. In imitation of our power, in order that for that cause the supreme pontificate may not deteriorate, but may rather be adorned with power and glory even more than is the dignity of an earthly rule: behold we – giving over to the oft-mentioned most blessed pontiff, our father Sylvester and the universal pope, as well our palace, as has been said, as also the city of Rome and all the provinces, districts and cities of Italy or of the western regions; and relinquishing them, by our inviolable gift, to the power and sway of himself or the pontiffs his successors – do decree, by this our godlike charter and imperial constitution, that it shall be (so) arranged; and do concede that they (the palaces, provinces, etc.) shall lawfully remain with the holy Roman church.Footnote 57
Papal assertion of this charter's validity subsequently led not only to the Great Schism between the Latin and Greek Churches in 1054, but also (in the heat of the Investiture Contest in the next generation) to Pope Gregory vii's insertion of the so-called Dictatus Papae into the papal register in 1075, which was a summa of twenty-seven assertions of papal power embodying Gregory's reform principles.Footnote 58 And among those powers claimed by the papacy – based clearly on the Donation of Constantine – was privilege number eight: ‘That he alone may use the imperial insignia.’Footnote 59 Now the claims to terrestrial imperial privileges for the popes of Rome make those of Florio Bustron's imperial privileges for the archbishop of Cyprus seem quite modest in comparison. Yet the difference of scale should not obscure the similarities between the two: (1) both secured unique privileges regarding use of imperial regalia (i.e. imperial dress and sceptre); (2) both also secured at least the ideological groundwork for imperially licensed territorial independence as a physical manifestation of these insignia rights; (3) both rediscovered pasts were appropriated (not unlike at St Barnabas's miraculous appearance in the fifth century) at a time of great anxiety about the Church's future autocephaly both temporal and spiritual; (4) both relied on ancient claims belied by anachronisms in the details of the imperial donations.
The homeland of Florio Bustron was obviously threatened by the instability of a rapidly eroding Venetian empire,Footnote 60 and given the centuries of Latin control of the island and his own family's professional relationship to the French and Venetian ruling elite, he had to have known in detail about papal claims to terrestrial sovereignty and to sustaining Romanitas in the West.Footnote 61 Indeed, he also knew very well the papacy's authority to move Latin Christians into crusading ventures to recover lost Christian lands in the eastern Mediterranean. Given that the primary audience for his Italian-language history of Cyprus was Catholic Venetian nobles and their associated Italian colonists, not the island's majority population of Greek-speaking Orthodox Cypriots,Footnote 62 it does not require excessive exertion to suspect that Florio Bustron's recovery and embellishment of the St Barnabas autocephaly tradition had intentional and immediate purpose.
Florio Bustron chose to dedicate the history to ‘Alli Illustri Signori, Conti, Cavaglieri, et Nobili Ciprii’, of which the last class, the Latinised Greek Cypriot nobility, comprised a very small community whose illustrious social status, like that of Bustron himself, depended on their service to the Venetian government. Yet since his loyalty to the Serenessima did not eclipse his own patriotic desire to see a renaissance of Cyprus' noble and ancient culture, Bustron wrote an Italian-language history primarily in order to educate the Catholic Venetian and other Italian colonists about the antiquity and cultural greatness of Cyprus.Footnote 63 Of course he no doubt also hoped to stir the patriotism of his small circle of fellow Greek Cypriot intellectual and political elites to strive for a renewed and vital Cyprus, but this ideal was clearly set within a larger, colonised Renaissance Italian context as his neologism Ciprio (an Italian equivalent for the Greek Kypraios) symbolises.Footnote 64
One cannot postulate from silence, and so we shall never know for sure. But it is quite plausible that Bustron turned to Cyprus' apostolic founding saint just as the papacy had turned to the power of St Peter. Both apostolic founding saints had drawn temporal privileges for their Churches (in collaboration with their earthly heirs, Archbishop Anthemius and Pope Sylvester respectively) from emperors in their Church's time of need. And the time of need was once again upon his island as the window of Venetian rule was closing, so Florio Bustron wrote primarily to an Italian-speaking, Latin church audience of nobles and clergy with urgency and in ecclesiastical terms that they could understand. Byzantine authority had not been exercised on the island for centuries, not unlike on the Italian peninsula in the eighth century, and the only source of support (albeit at the risk of continued subjugation) was Latin Christendom – it should not be forgotten that by this time a century had passed since the collapse of the Byzantine Empire. And so it is not too much to conclude that the regalia privileges of the archbishops of Cyprus have their historical origins in Florio Bustron's ‘Donation of Zeno’. Like his precedecessor Alexander the Monk, this Cypriot civil servant in the Venetian government whose world was becoming increasingly unstable called upon an ancient Cypriot hero in a new way – this time, however, in an Italian Catholic liturgical idiom – to secure continued Latin defence of the island. But the value added by the claims to imperial rights to temporal authority, although completely anachronistic for the mid-sixteenth century, laid an additional claim of sovereignty independent of Venetian power. Bustron would not be the only Cypriot writer to attempt to persuade a Catholic audience of Cyprus' significance and sanctity, based on its historical antiquity and apostolic ancestry.
Étienne de Lusignan continued to work on his Chorography as the month of November 1570 drew to a close. Although it appears that his early drafts of the history had been produced in Cyprus, by the time of the bloody Ottoman conquest of that year he had already been travelling abroad for several months. And so he tried urgently to polish an admittedly incomplete editing job in Naples, writing in an Italian tongue of which he was admittedly no master, while the siege of Famagusta was in its third month (one of his brothers would die in that siege).Footnote 65 Born into the ruling Lusignan family of old,Footnote 66 he had entered the Dominican Order in his youth (he was now in his late forties) and had served as the vicar of the Latin bishop of Limassol (1562–8) while a brother became a Basilian monk and a sister a Basilian nun, and two of his cousins were Latin canons of Paphos and archdeacons of Limassol.Footnote 67 With a family thoroughly shaped by a complex Cypriot identity, Étienne was a Roman Catholic cleric deeply distressed by the end of Latin rule on the island and so wrote his history for Italian and French Catholics as an impassioned call to arms on behalf of his suffering homeland.Footnote 68 To aid this purpose, he dedicated the Chorography, ‘To the most Christian and Glorious Charles ix, King of France, and to the Most Happy and Victorious Henry, Recent King of Poland’,Footnote 69 as he hoped to capitalise on the Valois dynasty's historical ties to the Lusignan house and to French crusading. He hastened to remind the royal brothers that the French crusading Lusignans had once come to Cyprus
to light that extinguished schismatic lamp with the true, catholic and very holy Latin rite and kept its flame for about three hundred years, until it was taken and ruled by the Venetian Republic. Later, alas, it fell and was extinguished, having sunk like a pearl into the wickedness of the enemy of Christianity, so we can rightly say along with the Prophet, ‘The crown of our leaders has fallen, woe to us who have sinned!’Footnote 70
It soon becomes clear that Lusignan was recommending a crown ripe for the taking by the French monarchy through a latter-day crusade to recover a holy land – and he impresses in making his case with a strong rhetorical strategy that involves St Barnabas. Lusignan inserts a different miracle of power story from the Acts of Barnabas which parallels Florio Bustron's account of the destruction of the theatre at Kourion. Angry at pagan nakedness at the temple of Venus in Old Paphos, ‘he said a prayer and immediately the temple fell to the ground’. This legend was a common story told to pilgrims visiting the island and builds on the biblical account of the preaching visit by St Paul and St Barnabas to Paphos where they encountered Barjesus (Acts xiii. 6–12).Footnote 71 But as if to provide a contemporary lie of the land for any French monarch contemplating an invasion of the island, Lusignan hastens to point out as well that
In past years this city had two strong castles on the coast, which were more strongly fortified than any others at the time of the Lusignan kings. When the Venetian noblemen got the island, they destroyed them, because they were afraid of potential treason. They could be fortified again, but it would be quite expensive.
A few pages further on he considers the city of Salamis as the city of St Barnabas, wherein it becomes clear that he is familiar with Alexander the Monk's Laudatio story, yet he employs the island legend of the apostolic saint as a healer of head ailments (as his own experience testifies)Footnote 72 rather than as the founder and patron saint of Cyprus' autocephaly:
There was also the church of Saint Barnabas the Apostle, which is large and beautiful, and near where he was martyred. There is also a cave or well in which he was placed by his cousin Mark (also called John), and with him the book of Saint Matthew the Evangelist, written in Saint Matthew's own hand. Around the years [sic] of our Lord 473 the body and book were found and recovered. They put them in a nobler place. Then, they built a little chapel in the cave where there is a well of water, which heals any sort of illness in the head. I have tried many remedies but none worked, except the above mentioned water. ‘Quia gloriosus Deus in sanctis suis’.Footnote 73
Lusignan is intent on emphasising what a holy island Cyprus was, given all the sacred history that it had experienced, rather than on making an appeal for the integral independence of the island itself. He obscures Emperor Zeno's role and suggests that the martyr's body and gospel book were merely put ‘in a nobler place’, and erroneously ascribes the inscription of the gospel to St Matthew rather than to St Barnabas. But, above all else, the subject here is the island of Cyprus and its holy history, not St Barnabas:
As he [God] said to His dearest children: ‘Ego dixi Dii estis’, and ‘filii excelsi omnes, vos estis’. The [vessel] of election [i.e. St Paul] says to his companions, ‘Vos estis templum Dei, et spiritus Dei habitat.’ And the friend of Christ, which is the island of Cyprus, as the bishop Leontide says, has produced a great number of these [illustrious] men, of all kinds, and it has put them in the heavenly and eternal palace to contemplate their author and contemplator. He [God] always protected his friend from greedy hands, although he has given it tribulations and sufferings. We do not have to be astonished about that, because, God being in love with the island, his lover, says: ‘Quos amo, corrigo et castigo.’ Therefore, you, sacred island with a double holiness, do not have to suffer and to be desperate in the present time. Take as example our holy mother Jerusalem in every respect, and you can hope in the fact that you will be soon consoled. And you, divine religious Mendicants, who have carried the fruits of Jerusalem to Cyprus and called it a province of the Holy Land. It is indeed connected with the Holy Land, sanctified and producing fruits, in general as well as those mentioned above.Footnote 74
This is powerful rhetoric in which Cyprus is given personhood: it is a child of God, a friend of Christ, even God's own lover who has borne much holy fruit to the enrichment of the Holy Land. Indeed, Cyprus is ‘a province of the Holy Land’, a spiritual and material extension of Jerusalem, which was always considered the heart and soul of the crusading movement by Latin Christians. Lusignan takes on the role of the prophet Isaiah consoling Jerusalem in a time of suffering: ‘you can hope in the fact that you will be soon consoled’. What the holy island lacked was a Christian monarch worthy and ready enough to rescue God's beloved land.
In his patriotic narrative Lusignan is quick to give credit to St Barnabas and thereby the Cypriots for the conversion of Antioch,Footnote 75 and after briefly recounting St Barnabas's ministry with St Paul in Antioch, he quickly moves to the two apocryphal legends about Barnabas from third-century Syria: Pseudo-Clementine's Recognitiones, in which the Cypriot apostle was said to preach in Rome leading to the conversion of St Clement, whom Lusignan says St Barnabas then sent to Antioch to be baptised by St Peter; and Pseudo-Epiphanius' Index apostolorum, which records Barnabas as the first bishop of Milan subsequent to his preaching in Rome (which would seem to belie his martyrdom in Salamis).Footnote 76 These were carefully chosen inclusions in his narrative, given Lusignan's intended reading audience and avowed reason for writing. He makes their import clear in a rather blunt fashion:
So you can imagine how much the city of Antioch has to be grateful to the Cypriots, and how much Christianity owes to Cyprus. But what will we say about you, Holy Rome, which have received the first principle of your holiness mainly from Barnabas? And you, Milan, which received such grace from him, as well as you, Bergamo and Brescia [where Barnabas also preached while in Italy]? Here you see, therefore, how Cyprus is Christ's friend and a true province of the Holy Land, because it was the main reason that Rome was sanctified as head of the world.
What a tour-de-force. In one master stroke St Barnabas is refashioned not as the patron saint of Cypriot independence, but rather as the patron saint who founded Christianity in Antioch, Rome, Bergamo, Brescia and Milan. The preeminent pioneer of Christianity who apparently outdid both St Paul and St Peter in apostolic preaching and ministry to the Church, to whom all Christians owe so much, was now the apostle whose homeland was in need of the aid of all Christendom. One can easily say that Étienne de Lusignan joined Alexander the Monk and Florio Bustron as a troika of visionaries who reinterpreted the apostolic power and meaning of St Barnabas in the context of urgent moments of conflict on the island of Cyprus. Yet even though Lusignan had Florio Bustron's claimed imperial privileges available for inclusion in this grandiose characterisation of St Barnabas, he never employed them to bolster his argument for the surpassing apostolicity of his hero saint. It is hard to imagine that he would have chosen to forego them if they were widely known and recognised in 1572.Footnote 77
Unfortunately for Lusignan, the apostolic authority of St Barnabas did not prove sufficient to overcome growing internal religious conflicts in Europe and to sustain the already long-diminished crusading movement. Alas, this descendant of crusaders turned in vain to his fellow Latin Christians with a plea for one more crusade as a blessing for all Christendom. Six years later he tried once again, this time in the French language: he corrected the several errors in his Italian edition and then translated the history while residing in the Dominican house of Saint-Jacques in Paris from May to November of 1578. He had the French edition published in Paris in 1580 under the title Description de toute l'ile de Cypre.Footnote 78 Yet no crusaders went forth, and just as in Jerusalem, so in Cyprus, the Turks ruled.Footnote 79 It seemed that the saints grew silent well before Étienne de Lusignan did at his death in 1590. At this anxious, urgent moment when Lusignan employed every spiritual, historical and rhetorical leverage that he could muster on behalf of his beloved Cyprus, not once did he ever refer either to the Cypriot Church's heritage of autocephaly or to any archiepiscopal privileges of imperial regalia. These were not useful arguments at the time.Footnote 80
The imperial regalia privileges were therefore not possessed by the archbishops of Cyprus ab antiquo, but rather only make their first appearance in Florio Bustron's mid sixteenth-century claim to these ‘immunities’ for the blessed and holy island of Cyprus. This is also the first point at which the autocephaly tradition is bundled with the imperial regalia privileges. It is instructive to note that this first claim to imperial privileges combined with apostolicity was directed to Italian readers during the violent transition from western European rule to that of the Ottoman Empire. Bustron's account therefore was directed to an Italian-speaking audience fully familiar with the Donation of Constantine and with a history of Catholic crusading against Muslims in the eastern Mediterranean. In those turbulent times, so grandiose a claim to immunities and to status as a holy land did not carry the day either in Renaissance Italy or on Cyprus. As the medieval popes had already discovered, high claims to imperial terrestrial sovereignty without the protection of a cooperative earthly power often proved difficult to sustain. Yet, like the rediscovery of St Barnabas's relics at a more opportune time of need, Bustron's claim to imperial privileges would be recovered in later modern historical contexts where it would bear much more fruit. Ironically, this would all take place under the auspices of two new imperial authorities: the Ottoman and British governments.
