II. Ecclesial Jurisdiction in Rome and Thessaloniki

Before discussing the letters themselves and analyzing their claims about Roman and Greek habits of relic veneration, we must first understand how Rome and Thessaloniki fit into late antique geographic, administrative, and ecclesial categorizations. Late antique Roman bishops continually endeavored to expand their jurisdiction beyond their city. While we do not have space here to elaborate on the complex rise of the Roman papacy, a few notable developments illuminate our discussion of boundaries between East and West, as well as the relationship between Rome and Thessaloniki in late antiquity.

Ecclesial jurisdiction traditionally followed civic administrative divisions of the empire. Each city had a bishop, and each province had a metropolitan bishop in the provincial capital with a degree of authority over the other bishops in the province.Footnote ¹⁴ The Council of Nicaea, however, canonized the supra-metropolitan authority of the bishops of Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria, who had extended geographic jurisdictions, with the bishop of Rome having authority over the suburbicarian provinces of Italy.Footnote ¹⁵ The Council of Constantinople granted the bishop of Constantinople honors second only to Rome, and the Council of Chalcedon granted the Constantinopolitan bishop supra-metropolitan jurisdiction over the dioceses of Thrace, Pontica, and Asia (although this was never formally accepted by Rome).Footnote ¹⁶

The Roman episcopacy, beginning in the late 4th century, endeavored to extend its supra-metropolitan authority beyond Italy. One of its most notorious methods was its use of “Petrine discourse,” an appeal to Saint Peter, traditionally considered the first bishop of Rome to whom Jesus gave the “keys of the kingdom” (Matthew 16:19), as a source of enhanced authority, often ecclesial primacy, for Peter’s successors in Rome.Footnote ¹⁷ The Roman bishop’s self-conception of his see’s extended geographical authority, perhaps supremacy, can be seen in Gregory the Great’s vehement rejection of the Patriarch of Constantinople’s use of the title “Ecumenical Patriarch” as a threat to Rome’s ecclesial privilegesFootnote ¹⁸ and his gifting of keys made with filings from St. Peter’s chains and of the pallium, a liturgical vestment placed by the tomb of St. Peter until distributed to metropolitans within and outside of Italy as a sign of their bond with Rome.Footnote ¹⁹ Another major step in the construction of papal supremacy was the Roman bishop’s establishment of the Vicariate of Thessaloniki during the late 4th and early 5th centuries.

This vicariate arose in the wake of complicated changes in imperial administrative boundaries in Illyricum in the 4th century. To summarize briefly:

Macedonia, the diocese in which Thessaloniki was located, switched from the western to eastern civil administration in 395 and had been de facto under Theodosius’s control beginning in 378. Nevertheless, Roman bishops tried to exercise their supra-metropolitan authority over bishops throughout Macedonia and Dacia (eastern Illyricum) by granting certain powers to the metropolitan of Thessaloniki as their vicars, or representatives, following the earlier designation of these provinces as western and, therefore, under Roman ecclesial jurisdiction (see Figure 1).Footnote ²¹

Figure 1.

Provinces, dioceses, and prefectures of the Roman Empire, 400 C.E. 1451×997 mm (28×28 DPI).

A few examples from the Collectio Thessalonicensis – a 6th-century compilation of letters between Roman and Illyrian bishops to demonstrate Rome’s authority over the region – demonstrate Rome’s effort to maintain ecclesial control over eastern Illyricum through the metropolitan of Thessaloniki as its representative.Footnote ²² Pope Siricius (384–399), in a letter to Anysios of Thessaloniki, told the metropolitan to oversee the appointment of bishops throughout Illyricum (that is, beyond the province of Macedonia), thus exercising the supra-metropolitan privilege of approving episcopal elections outside of one’s province, a power belonging only to Rome and other supra-metropolitan bishops.Footnote ²³ Innocent I (401–417) granted to Anysios of Thessaloniki authority over all the Illyrian churches as he says his predecessors Damasus and Siricius had,Footnote ²⁴ and then to Rufus of Thessaloniki the power to act as appellate judge throughout Illyricum on behalf of the pope and to decide which appeals to refer to Rome.Footnote ²⁵ When Pope Leo (440–461) reaffirmed all of these privileges for Anastasios of Thessaloniki, he claimed to be doing so in the manner of his episcopal predecessor Siricius.Footnote ²⁶ The Vicariate of Thessaloniki was thus rather firmly established by the fifth century.

The strength of this vicariate, however, varied over the next several centuries. For example, the patriarch of Constantinople felt it within his purview to depose Stephen, the bishop of Larissa in the province of Thessaly in 529.Footnote ²⁷ The eastern Illyrian churches went temporarily out of communion with Rome during the Acacian Schism (484–519) due to their sympathies with Acacius of Constantinople and Emperor Anastasius’s efforts at unification with opponents of the Council of Chalcedon (451).Footnote ²⁸ And yet Gregory the Great, in the late 6th century, confidently wrote to the Illyrian bishops with orders to carry out his agenda.Footnote ²⁹ The vicariate lasted until the 730s when Emperor Leo III placed eastern Illyricum under the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constantinople.Footnote ³⁰

Thessaloniki thus occupied a liminal position in the late 4th to early 8th centuries. It was politically governed by the eastern Roman emperor since 395, and yet it was ecclesiastically under Roman jurisdiction. Occasionally, such as during the Acacian Schism, it separated from the Roman bishop and sided with Constantinople, the imperial capital much closer to it than Rome, declining to bend to Roman authority. Thessalonians were Greek-speaking, like most inhabitants of eastern Illyricum. Yet the Roman bishop endowed the Thessalonian bishop with special privileges. Thessaloniki was not strictly eastern or western but took parts of its identity from both geographic and ecclesial spheres. We must therefore consider carefully to which areas Hormisdas and Gregory’s letters are referring when they talk about Greek and Roman/western customs of relic veneration. Did they consider Thessaloniki to fall under the category of “Greek” or under that of Rome and the West? If they did consider Thessaloniki “Greek,” do their claims about Greek habits of relic veneration correspond with Eusebios of Thessaloniki’s insider Greek perspective? Furthermore, what can Thessaloniki’s liminality tell us about supposed distinctions between eastern and western customs?

III. Letter of Hormisdas’s Legates to Hormisdas

In June 519, the papal legates in Constantinople sent a letter to Pope Hormisdas in Rome informing him of a request from Justinian – nephew to emperor Justin I – to send from Rome relics of Saint Lawrence so that Justinian could place them in the newly rebuilt church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople.Footnote ³¹ The legates refused Justinian without even consulting Hormisdas first. They wrote Hormisdas to inform him that they denied Justinian’s request because it was “according to the custom of the Greeks” (secundum morem Graecorum) and “against the custom of the apostolic see” (contra consuetudinem sedis apostolicae).Footnote ³² Thus, our first reference to the different habits of relic veneration between Rome and the Greeks. But to which Greeks are the legates referring? To the Constantinopolitans who made the request? To all Greek speakers of the eastern Mediterranean? Or only to those Greeks outside of papal jurisdiction, that is, not within the vicariate in eastern Illyricum? Situating this letter within its broader ecclesio-political context can answer this question.

The papal legates wrote this letter about two months after the termination of the Acacian Schism – a break of communion between Rome and the eastern patriarchs over Constantinople’s efforts to create a compromise between supporters and opponents of the Council of Chalcedon (451). During this schism, the eastern Illyrian provinces that constituted the Vicariate of Thessaloniki were in schism with Rome, siding with Constantinople.Footnote ³³ The schism lasted until Easter of 519, a few years after Hormisdas began corresponding with Emperor Anastasius and later with Justin I and his confidant Justinian to push for reunification.Footnote ³⁴

Several letters from Hormisdas on the negotiation of this reunification are informative when trying to understand the papal legates’ reference to “the Greeks.” In a letter of 512, Hormisdas writes to “all my most beloved brother bishops … and all the ordained and laypersons throughout Illyricum, Dardania, and each of the Dacian provinces,” requesting that they refrain from communion with those anathematized by Rome.Footnote ³⁵ Hormisdas thus strives to sway provinces that once belonged to the Vicariate of Thessaloniki to accept his anathematization, even though they are not currently in communion with Rome due to the schism. In another letter from 515, Hormisdas instructs his legates that, on their way to Constantinople to discuss union, when they stop first in “Greek territories”, they should refuse all but the basic hospitality of the bishops in these regions due to the schism.Footnote ³⁶ These “Greek” territories are clearly parts of the former vicariate, eastern Illyricum lying between Rome and Constantinople, with whom Rome was not in communion at the time. Finally, in a letter of 519 from the deacon Dioscorus to Hormisdas celebrating the reunification of the churches, Dioscorus reports that the papal legates first stopped in Thessaloniki, where the metropolitan agreed to accept Hormisdas’s terms of reunification once they were informed that Constantinople had done so.Footnote ³⁷ These Illyrian provinces that Hormisdas was so eager to woo clearly comprised the former vicariate, and the pope refers to at least some of them plainly as “Greek territories.” Presumably, then, his legates’ reference to “Greek” customs in their letter on Justinian’s request for relics refers to customs of Greek-speaking Christians quite broadly, including those in eastern Illyricum.

Returning to the legates’ letter, when they rejected Justinian’s request because it was not in keeping with the “custom of the Apostolic See,” they instead suggest to Hormisdas that “sanctuaria of the blessed Peter and Paul be granted to him according to custom,” preferably sanctuaria that have been placed “at the second opening (cataracta),” along with pieces of the chains of the two apostles and part of Saint Lawrence’s gridiron. In fact, they tell Hormisdas that Justinian has already sent a man to collect these from Rome. The legates claim that Justinian will be pleased to receive such gifts from the place where “sanctuaria of the Apostles are given all over the earth.”Footnote ³⁸ These sanctuaria are clearly some kind of contact relic placed near the tombs of the saints, a substitute for corporeal relics.Footnote ³⁹

That the distribution of contact relics, as well as the apostolic chains and Lawrence’s gridiron, was indeed customary for Roman bishops is clear from a couple of points. As mentioned, the legates reject the imperial request and suggest alternative contact relics without consulting Hormisdas first, indicating their confidence in Roman custom. Furthermore, the frequency with which Gregory the Great would carry out this practice during his episcopacy suggests that he received this custom from predecessors. Distributing secondary relics in place of bodily relics was doubtlessly a growing tradition in the city of Rome at the time of Hormisdas’s episcopacy. The accuracy of the legates’ broader claim about the “custom of the Greeks” – to divide and/or translate martyrial corpses – is, on the other hand, more difficult to assess given that the only example of the custom given in their letter is Justinian’s request, consistent with efforts by late Roman emperors to obtain relics for Constantinople but perhaps less clearly aligned with customs across the Greek-speaking world as a whole.Footnote ⁴⁰ While the distinction between Roman and Greek customs remains somewhat vague in this letter, the letter of Gregory the Great to the Empress Konstantina in 597 offers more detail about this supposed distinction.

IV. Gregory’s Letter to Konstantina

Before becoming pope, Gregory was the papal apocrisarius (envoy) in Constantinople from 579 to 586. While in the imperial capital, Gregory was especially close with Emperor Maurice and his family, becoming godfather to Maurice’s eldest son, Theodosios, and embarking on long-lasting friendships with several imperial women, including Maurice’s wife, Konstantina.Footnote ⁴¹ It is little wonder, then, that Konstantina made the bold request of Gregory in 594 that he “send … the head of Saint Paul the apostle or something else from the saint’s body (de corpore ipsius),” along with his “shroud” (sudarium) that rests near his body, for a new church in Constantinople dedicated to Paul.Footnote ⁴² Gregory’s response reiterates the distinction between Greek and Roman customs of relic veneration with extended reasoning and anecdotes to back the claim.

Gregory gives two arguments against sending Konstantina parts of the bodies of Roman martyrs: (1) the sacred and dangerous nature of holy bodies and (2) differences in regional customs of relic veneration. To begin with the first argument, the bishop tells the empress that he cannot comply because “the bodies of the apostles, Saints Peter and Paul, gleam with such great miracles and terrors in their own churches that one cannot even enter there without great fear.” The bodies should neither be touched nor viewed. He gives three anecdotes to demonstrate the deadly consequences of coming too close to the martyrs’ bodies. First, when his predecessor Pelagius II refurbished the silver plating over Saint Peter’s tomb, “a really terrifying sign appeared to him” as he stood near the saint’s body. Next, Gregory himself made similar improvements to Paul’s tomb and had workers dig beside the tomb. When a worker “found some bones, not in fact connected with the same sepulcher” and moved them to bury them elsewhere, “some sinister signs appeared to him and he died a sudden death.” Finally, when Pelagius wanted to improve the tomb of Saint Lawrence, he had to dig in order to find it, “as it was not known where the venerable body of the martyr was located.” And “when the martyr’s tomb was suddenly opened, unintentionally, those monks and sacristans who were present and were working, because they saw the body of the same martyr, although they did not presume to touch it at all, were all dead within ten days.”Footnote ⁴³ Gregory conceives of the sanctity of the apostolic relics as potentially dangerous. His stories warn Konstantina that sacred corpses should not be touched, moved, or even viewed. Although some theologies of relics’ power led to ritualized touching and viewing to achieve miraculous effects,Footnote ⁴⁴ in this case, reverence for the sacred necessitates maintaining distance from the relics, like the Ark of the Covenant that must not be viewed or touched in vain.Footnote ⁴⁵

Gregory’s story about Pope Pelagius’s refurbishment of the tomb of Saint Lawrence is notable because Gregory states that the location of the tomb was unknown in Pelagius’s day – a detail strikingly similar to Eusebios of Thessaloniki’s claim that no one knew exactly where the tomb of Saint Demetrios was, as we will see below. The complex history and archaeology of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, the location of Saint Lawrence’s tomb – from catacomb, to a poorly understood Constantinian structure, to a possible construction by Sixtus III, to Pelagius’s 6th-century basilica – lend credence to Gregory’s statement that the tomb’s exact location was unknown to Pelagius due to progressive alterations and perhaps subtle movements of the tomb.Footnote ⁴⁶ This is not the only instance of early Christians losing track of martyrs’ tombs,Footnote ⁴⁷ and we will deal with another example below in Eusebios’s letter concerning Saint Demetrios.

Returning to Gregory’s letter, his second argument against sending corporeal relics to Konstantina is based on his famous distinction between Roman and Greek customs of relic veneration:

Gregory doubtlessly makes an accurate claim that the Roman custom was to create contact relics with small cloths in boxes placed near martyrial tombs that are then taken to churches to place in their altars. The letter from Hormisdas’s legates attests to the practice seventy-five years prior, and Gregory’s description of the custom corresponds with his relic distribution policy as evinced by letters he sent to bishops, kings, and queens alongside sanctuaria, benedictiones, brandea, and non-corporeal reliquiae to be placed in the altars or shrines of churches.Footnote ⁴⁹ To Konstantina, he sent instead “a portion from the chains which the holy apostle himself bore on his neck and hands… For many often come and seek a blessing from the same chains.”Footnote ⁵⁰ While no council made relics a requirement for the dedication of altars until after Gregory’s episcopacy, his letters certainly indicate that it was becoming customary to do so at this time.Footnote ⁵¹ The accuracy of his assertion that this is the case “in all the Western parts” is, however, an unverifiable generalization.

Having explained the Roman custom to avoid touching, moving, and distributing martyrial bodies, Gregory then announces his astonishment at “the custom of the Greeks (Grecorum consuetudine), who say that they dig up the bones of the saints.” Gregory offers three anecdotes to characterize this supposedly Greek custom. First, when explaining the equal power held by corporeal and contact relics, he mentions that Pope Leo, “when some Greeks were in doubt about such relics … brought in scissors and cut into this cloth, and blood flowed out.”Footnote ⁵² He therefore characterizes Greeks as unaccustomed to contact relics and incredulous about their equivalence to corporeal relics. Notably, however, these Greeks may have sought a demonstration of the legitimacy not of contact relics in general, but of the unique Roman brandea – relics of silk cloths in boxes – in particular.

Next, Gregory says that:

We are surely getting only one side of this tantalizing story. While Gregory takes the event as an indication of typical Greek approaches to relics, the monks’ nighttime activity and secretive behavior indicate relic theft or an attempt to pass off regular bones as martyrial relics. Although relic theft and deception were not uncommon,Footnote ⁵⁴ they cannot be used to represent standard patterns of relic veneration. Gregory thus tries to make a rule out of a rather eccentric example.

Finally, Gregory recalls that, at the time of the martyrdom of Peter and Paul,

Gregory retrieved this anecdote from a 5th-century Latin martyrdom account of Peter and Paul that mentions “some Greeks” who wanted to take the apostles’ bodies East but were stopped by an earthquake and left them at the catacombs on the Appian way, where they lay for over a year until they were moved back to the Vatican (Peter) and the Ostian Road (Paul).Footnote ⁵⁶ Nicola Denzey Lewis situates this story among various ancient and medieval theories for the association of Peter’s bones with both the Vatican and the Ad Catacumbas site at the intersection of the Via Appia and Via Ardeatina.Footnote ⁵⁷ Gregory thus takes an etiological narrative focused on the reason for Peter and Paul’s multiple cult sites and shifts the focus to the ethnicity of those moving their bodies. Furthermore, since relic veneration in the form Gregory was familiar with did not exist at the time of this supposed incident in the 60s C.E., we must assume that, if the story is authentic, the people from the East were simply bringing the apostles’ bodies back to their homeland; such movement of corpses was one of the rare exceptions allowed to prohibitions of tomb violation in the Mediterranean.Footnote ⁵⁸

As we asked above about the letter from Hormisdas’s legates, to whom precisely is Gregory referring when he says, “Greeks”? Gregory mentions the “custom of the Greeks” in one other letter, written to bishop John of Syracuse concerning competing Greek and Latin liturgical rites. Some Sicilians were questioning how Gregory could “manage to restrain the church of Constantinople, if he follows its customs in every way,” referring to several minor liturgical formulae in the Roman rite that they claim are also practiced by the “Greeks.” Gregory argues that the Roman church has derived these liturgical customs either from ancient tradition or from Latin Fathers rather than that it has “followed the custom of the Greeks.” While Gregory and his critics are ultimately concerned about the growing authority of the patriarch of Constantinople, the spread of Greek-language liturgy, practiced by all Greek-speaking Christians in the Roman Empire, made manifest this threat in its potential influence on the liturgical rite in Sicily.Footnote ⁵⁹ Greek custom, therefore, applies broadly to all who perform the liturgy in Greek. In this case, Gregory would certainly describe Thessaloniki as Greek. We will determine below whether Gregory’s application of specifically Greek customs of moving and partitioning holy relics applies to this region when we examine Eusebios of Thessaloniki’s letter.

To summarize, while Gregory gives valuable attestation to Roman practices of relic veneration at his time, his anecdotes have nothing to tell about typical Greek customs of relic veneration. Each of them is either too vague, eccentric, or explicable as standard corpse treatment such that it cannot be used to infer a dichotomy between Roman and Greek practices. Gregory has manipulated these rather irrelevant anecdotes simply to make his point. Therefore, since the traditional sources for this scholarly distinction – the letter of Hormisdas’s legates and Gregory’s letter to Konstantina – give no true evidence for the regional differences in practices of relic veneration that they cite, it is appropriate to turn to a native Greek source for comparison. Eusebios of Thessaloniki’s letter provides an instructive parallel for assessing this supposed dichotomy.

V. Eusebios of Thessaloniki’s Letter to Maurice

Eusebios’s letter is embedded within the earliest and most famous text associated with the cult of Saint Demetrios, Ioannes of Thessaloniki’s Miracles of Saint Demetrios, our only textual source on the cult from late antiquity.Footnote ⁶⁰ Although there were several collections of Saint Demetrios’s miracles recorded during the Byzantine period,Footnote ⁶¹ the earliest is comprised of fifteen miracles ascribed in six manuscripts to Ioannes,Footnote ⁶² archbishop of Thessaloniki, sometime between 603 and 649.Footnote ⁶³ Lemerle posits that Ioannes wrote the miracles during the first years of Emperor Heraklios’s reign, possibly drawing on his own and earlier sermons on Saint Demetrios.Footnote ⁶⁴ Most of the miracles occurred during the episcopacy of Ioannes’s predecessor Eusebios or of Ioannes himself. Skedros suggests that, due to the Miracles’s references to speaking, listening, and a church assembly as the audience, they may have been delivered orally as a series of sermons, although this could be merely a literary guise.Footnote ⁶⁵ Whatever the case, the Miracles offer a window into the late antique cult of Saint Demetrios in Thessaloniki from a native, contemporary informant.

According to his martyrologies, Demetrios was killed by Galerius ca. 304 C.E. and buried beneath the Roman bathhouse where he was imprisoned and executed.Footnote ⁶⁶ The early phases of the tomb’s monumentalization are disputed. Due to a reference to a small shrine (μικρὸς οἰκίσκος) over his tomb in Symeon Metaphrastes’s 10th-century version of Demetrios’s passion, some believe there must have been a small monument over the tomb in the 4th century before a church was built there.Footnote ⁶⁷ At some point in the 5th century, a certain Leontios, prefect of Illyricum, cleared the area around the tomb and constructed a shrine (οἶκος) over it.Footnote ⁶⁸ Leontios’s project was possibly the famed five-aisled basilica that still stands on the site – albeit reconstructed after fires ca. 620 and in 1917 – though some scholars think it more likely that it was a three-aisled predecessor to the current church.Footnote ⁶⁹ This is because excavations and analysis of the five-aisled basilica show an earlier apsidal structure beneath the current oneFootnote ⁷⁰ and because the architecture and art of the five-aisled basilica indicate a mid- to late 5th-century foundation,Footnote ⁷¹ while the Leontios in question is thought to be a prefect from 410s or 440s.Footnote ⁷²

One of the most notable features of the late antique cult of Saint Demetrios is its lack of access to or concern about the location of Demetrios’s physical remains.Footnote ⁷³ Possibly, there were no corporeal relics associated with the cult; certainly, there was no access to these relics or knowledge of their precise location, such that they were unimportant in the veneration of the saint in the 5th to 7th centuries. In their efforts to locate what they feel was an essential part of all late antique saints’ cults, some scholars have identified certain locations in the basilica where they suspect Demetrios’s relics must have rested. Charalambos Bakirtzis argues that late antique Thessalonians thought the tomb of Saint Demetrios rested under or near two small chambers located in the northwest corner of the basilica, since the Miracles record people lying in northern chambers of the basilica for healing, and since these were the only parts of the previous Roman bath incorporated into the basilica.Footnote ⁷⁴ Georgios and Maria Sotiriou, who excavated the basilica after a fire in 1917, argued otherwise based on their findings. They discovered beneath the bema a cruciform trench surrounding a conical stone mound, inside of which was a marble-plated stone cavity holding a glass vial filled with blood. The Sotirious argued that this was the dedication reliquary of an earlier basilica, supported by the presence of an apse surrounding the cruciform structure.Footnote ⁷⁵ Lemerle, however, has convincingly argued that the reliquary belonged to the five-aisled basilica built in the late 5th century, as it is found directly beneath the latter church’s altar and did not fit squarely within the earlier apse. The vial, he argued, did not contain a corporeal relic but a blood-soaked cloth, corresponding with the account in Demetrios’s martyrdom that his servant took his blood-soaked orarion after his death.Footnote ⁷⁶ The problem with these two arguments, as Skedros and others point out, is that they ignore the late antique evidence in the Miracles of Saint Demetrios that says little about the northwestern rooms and nothing about a reliquary beneath the altar; instead, the Miracles focus on the ciborium as the most important cultic monument in the church, although the presence of actual physical remains beneath it is questionable.Footnote ⁷⁷

The ciborium was located slightly west of center on the north side of the central nave, its location marked today by an outline on the floor of the reconstructed basilica. It was a silver-plated hexagonal structure with an icon or an effigy of Demetrios on a couch inside.Footnote ⁷⁸ Before the 11th century, we see no indication that the official cult promoted interaction with corporeal relics under the ciborium, although popular opinion seems to have held that they rested there.Footnote ⁷⁹ Several times in the Miracles, Ioannes explains that worshipers thought the relics were located beneath the structure, though he never confirms or denies this suspicion. In Miracle 1, he notes that “some say that [Demetrios’s] all-holy relics lie under the earth” (φασί τινες κεῖσθαι ὑπὸ γῆν τὸ πανάγιον αὐτοῦ λείψανον) at the ciborium.Footnote ⁸⁰ In Miracle 6, he says that the ciborium “is said to hold the sacred tomb of the martyr.”Footnote ⁸¹ In Miracle 10, worshipers explain, “We have heard from our ancestors that here [at the ciborium] lies in a godly manner the very glorious prize-bearer Demetrios.”Footnote ⁸² And yet, in none of Ioannes’s miracle accounts does a supplicant touch or see physical remains of the martyr at the ciborium or anywhere else in the church. Rather, people receive visions, dreams, and healings, often at the ciborium, in which Demetrios was thought to reside spiritually, if he was not physically present. Only beginning in the 11th century did the cult become more tactile as Demetrios became an oil-exuding saint and pilgrims collected myron from a fountain in what is now misleadingly called the “crypt,” which was thought to flow from the saint’s tomb somewhere in the basilica.Footnote ⁸³ Demetrios’s corporeal relics, therefore, were never directly accessible. While pilgrims could indirectly come into contact with them through myron in later Byzantium, in late antiquity, direct access to these relics was inconsequential; no one knew where exactly they were, if they existed at all.

Miracle 5, in particular, offers essential insight into the role of relics – or lack thereof – in the veneration of Demetrios at Thessaloniki. John begins this miracle story with an apology for the lack of access to Demetrios’s corporeal relics:

Aware that relics are not accessible to Saint Demetrios’s supplicants, Ioannes claims that their location has been lost due to the Thessalonians’ overwhelming piety in keeping the martyrs’ bodies hidden from their persecutors.

Ioannes then explains that Emperor Maurice, the husband of Empress Konstantina, who made a similar inquiry of Gregory the Great, wrote to the metropolitan Eusebios of Thessaloniki asking “that a relic (λείψανον), something of the Christ-bearing martyr Demetrios, be sent to him.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Eusebios was a contemporary of Gregory the Great and bishop of Thessaloniki from at least 597–602, for Gregory wrote several letters to Eusebios dated to this period.Footnote ⁸⁶ Ioannes then quotes Eusebios’s letter (“The blessed high priest Eusebios … furnished [Maurice] with a letter such as follows” [Εὐσέβιος … τοιοῖσδέ τισιν ἐχρήσατο γράμμασιν]). Scholars agree that this is a quotation from the Eusebios’s actual letter and that we have little reason to doubt its authenticity, for the rest of the Miracles demonstrates Ioannes’s access to a Thessalonian episcopal archive.Footnote ⁸⁷ We thus have a letter contemporary to Gregory the Great in response to a relic request from the same imperial regime (Maurice and Konstantina), written from a native Greek perspective.Footnote ⁸⁸ It is worthwhile to quote the letter in full in order to tease out the similarities with the two papal letters discussed above:

Eusebios leads his letter with the same argument that Hormisdas’s legates and Gregory used: that his see is not accustomed (οὐχ … εἰώθασι) to treating relics in the way Maurice is proposing.Footnote ⁹⁰ The bishop juxtaposes this with other places (“as is doubtless the case in the other villages”), just as the popes contrast the Roman custom with the custom of the Greeks. Yet, also like the papal letters, Eusebios offers no definitive description of these customs of other regions. He knows the customs of his own city best. He boasts that faith is enough for the Thessalonians; because they do not need to perceive things externally,Footnote ⁹¹ Eusebios, making the same claim as Ioannes, says that the Thessalonians have hidden away all the bodies of their martyrs such that no one knows where they are. Some have doubted the historical reality of Ioannes and Eusebios’s claim, but it is ultimately impossible to prove. While there is some evidence for other martyrial tombs and reliquaries in and around Thessaloniki, it is difficult to know how many Thessalonians were aware of the location of these tombs.Footnote ⁹²

Also like his contemporary Gregory, Eusebios offers an anecdote to make his point. Justinian, he claims, made a similar request for relics of Demetrios from Thessaloniki. In response, the Thessalonians dug in an unspecified place in the basilica where they thought Demetrios’s relics lay. Their readiness to dig for the body indicates that the Thessalonians were initially willing to divide and translate relics according to “Greek” custom. Yet my argument centers on the exception to this dichotomy beginning in late 6th-/early 7th-century Thessaloniki. We would do well to recognize that the habits even of individual cities transformed over time. As the Thessalonians dug, a fire eventually appeared, and a voice told them to stop. Afraid to go any further, the excavators collected dust – now fragrant – from the spot before which the fire appeared to send to Justinian.Footnote ⁹³ There are several parallels here with the papal letters. Hormisdas’s legates were responding to a relic request from Justinian, who requests Demetrios’s relics in Eusebios’s story. Thus, out of all the letters discussed here, the relic requests come from only two imperial regimes: those of Justinian and Maurice. An anecdote of a previous attempt to find or move relics bolsters Eusebios’s rejection of Maurice’s request just as it did for Gregory, who offered Konstantina three stories about his predecessors’ ominous interactions with relics.

One may object that while Gregory refused to distribute relics of Peter and Lawrence, whose location he knew, Eusebios could not distribute Demetrios’s relics because he did not know where they were. Perhaps Eusebios would have happily followed Greek custom and sent Demetrios’s relics to Maurice, if he had been able to locate them. Or, as some have suggested, perhaps he refused to send relics in order to maintain the local nature and prestige of the cult, not because he was fundamentally opposed to relic distribution.Footnote ⁹⁴ While it is ultimately impossible to answer such historical counter-factuals with so little evidence, I agree with other commentators that Eusebios, Ioannes, and the Thessalonians did think that the relics were in the basilica and that they had gotten close to locating them when the miraculous fire appeared. We saw with the case of Saint Lawrence’s tomb that it was possible for Christians to lose track of the precise location of martyrial tombs after centuries of successive monumentalization and rebuilding of shrines.Footnote ⁹⁵ The Miracles and later texts make it reasonable to assume that late antique Thessalonians thought the relics were in some unspecified location under the basilica. Additionally, the supernatural fire and voice that appear to the diggers parallel the visions and deadly repercussions that Gregory describes happening to those who dared to touch or look at Peter and Lawrence’s bones.Footnote ⁹⁶ If Gregory’s predecessors experienced these effects when they dared to approach holy relics, the implication of the vision Eusebios describes is that the diggers were getting close to the relics. The sweet smell that the excavators experience also aligns with other accounts of relic discoveries.Footnote ⁹⁷ We cannot know whether Eusebios would have divided and sent Demetrios’s relics to Maurice if he had found them definitively; our evidence simply shows the Thessalonians, like the Romans, refusing to come too close to them out of reverence.

Finally, in lieu of corporeal relics, both Eusebios and Gregory sent contact relics to the emperors. Here, however, we see local customs shape the production of these secondary relics. The two papal letters describe a custom of producing sanctified cloths by placing them in boxes near the martyrs’ tombs, or of giving pieces and shavings of Peter’s chains and Laurence’s gridiron. The cloths, at least, have the same efficacy as bodies, as proven by Pope Leo’s cutting of a cloth that then spewed blood. Eusebios, on the other hand, offers sanctified dirt that has been collected from the area where the fire appeared to the diggers, presumably near where Demetrios’s body lay. Justinian, he says, “received it with every joy, receiving it as if it were itself the body of the martyr.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Secondary relics, in both cases, become equivalent substitutes for martyrial bodies. To send corporeal relics would be “ill-advised” and “dangerous,” says Eusebios.Footnote ⁹⁹

With Eusebios’s letter, we therefore have testimony from a native Greek author – according to Hormisdas and Gregory’s categorization of eastern Illyrians as “Greek,” and according to what modern scholars think of as “Greek” – contemporary to Gregory on customs of relic veneration. When posed with the same imperial request to divide and send corporeal relics of the local martyr Demetrios, Eusebios gives a response remarkably similar to that of the Roman popes: he sends contact relics instead of corporeal ones because it is dangerous to come into direct contact with holy corpses. It is possible that Eusebios, as the papal vicar of Thessaloniki and correspondent of Pope Gregory, was influenced by Roman approaches to venerating martyrial relics – an ultimately unprovable claim. Yet the language of the oft-cited papal letters – and of Delehaye and later scholars who cite them – indicates that Greek Christians in general, including those in Illyricum, were accustomed to divide and translate martyrial relics. Eusebios’s description of the treatment of Demetrios’s relics in Thessaloniki, strikingly similar to those of Hormisdas’s legates and Gregory, challenges this strict dichotomy. Even if Thessalonian relic veneration was partially influenced by Rome, then this interaction in and of itself challenges any strict boundary between East and West; eastern and western Christians communicated with and mutually influenced each other rather than operating in two distinct cultural spheres.