Charters, Empires, and Ottoman Centuries

After the founding of the Great Lavra, Athos was governed by a succession of imperial charters (typika), flourished under the patronage of the Byzantine and then the Serbian, Bulgarian, and Georgian rulers, reached a cultural and spiritual golden age in the Palaiologan fourteenth century, and then passed under Ottoman rule around 1423–1424, which it survived through submission, heavy taxation, and endurance for four centuries. This file traces the imperial typika, the Byzantine golden age, the Ottoman period, and the fortunes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries down to the liberation of 1912 and the modern settlement.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Athonite)

The Imperial Typika

The Tragos of 972 (see The Early Hermits and Saint Athanasius) was the first of a series of imperial charters that shaped the constitution of the Mountain across the Byzantine centuries. A second Typikon was issued in 1045 under the Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos, revising the regulation of the Mountain’s common life — restraining certain commercial activities, adjusting the relations of the great houses and the hermits, and reaffirming the presiding role of the protos and the Synaxis at Karyes (the Typikon of Constantine IX Monomachos, 1045, ed. in Papachryssanthou, Actes du Prôtaton, Paris, 1975; Morris, Monks and Laymen in Byzantium, 843–1118, Cambridge, 1995, on the eleventh-century regulation). A third great Typikon followed in 1394 under the Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos, adapting the governance of the Mountain to the changed conditions of the late-Byzantine period (Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, ch. 3, on the succession of typika; Papachryssanthou, Actes du Prôtaton, 1975). These charters, together with the great series of monastic acts preserved in the Athonite archives — the imperial chrysobulls, the deeds and property records edited in the Archives de l’Athos — make Athos one of the best-documented institutions of the Byzantine world, and the study of its archives (the Actes of Lavra, Iviron, Vatopedi, and the rest) is a major field of Byzantine scholarship in its own right (Bryer and Cunningham, eds., Mount Athos and Byzantine Monasticism, Ashgate, 1996, on the archives).

The Byzantine Golden Age

From the tenth to the fourteenth centuries Athos grew into the pre-eminent monastic centre of the Orthodox world. The founding of the Lavra was followed by a wave of great foundations: Vatopedi and Iviron in the later tenth century, and in the following centuries the other houses that make up the twenty (see The Ruling Monasteries). From the beginning the Mountain drew monks from across the Orthodox world — Iviron was a Georgian foundation, and Slavic and other houses followed — so that Athos became, already in the middle Byzantine period, a pan-Orthodox and international monastic republic (Speake, A History of the Athonite Commonwealth, Cambridge, 2018; see The Pan-Orthodox Mountain). The monasteries accumulated lands, dependencies (metochia) on the mainland and the islands, treasures, relics, and manuscript libraries, and they were sustained by the patronage of emperors and of Serbian, Bulgarian, Georgian, and Romanian rulers (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, chs. 2–3; A History of the Athonite Commonwealth, 2018).

The spiritual summit of this golden age was the fourteenth century, when Athos became the heartland of the hesychast movement — the tradition of inner prayer and the vision of the Uncreated Light defended by St. Gregory Palamas, and vindicated by the Constantinopolitan councils of 1341, 1347, and 1351 (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 3; Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, London: Faith Press, 1964; see The Home of Hesychasm, and, for the saint himself, St. Gregory Palamas). The same period produced the Mountain’s greatest surviving frescoes — the work associated with Manuel Panselinos and the “Macedonian School” at the Protaton (see The Libraries and the Art). This double flowering, spiritual and cultural, is the reason the fourteenth century is remembered as the Athonite golden age, even as the empire that had chartered the Mountain was entering its final decline.

The Ottoman Centuries

The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 was preceded, for Athos, by its own submission: the Mountain came under Ottoman control in the early fifteenth century, generally placed around 1423–1424, when the monks — anticipating the conquest and seeking to preserve their communities and properties — submitted to the Ottoman sultan and secured a measure of protection for their lands and self-government (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 4, on the Ottoman submission and the terms; Fennell and others on the Ottoman-period Mountain). The strategy was one of accommodation: by submitting early and paying tribute, the Athonite monasteries retained their internal autonomy, their monastic life, and much of their property through the centuries of Ottoman rule, when the Mountain became one of the great preserves of Orthodox monasticism and learning under Islam (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 4).

The Ottoman centuries were nonetheless hard. The monasteries bore heavy and rising taxation, which repeatedly drove them into debt and forced the sale of treasures and lands; their numbers and prosperity fluctuated with the fortunes of the empire and the burden of the tax-farmers (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 4). It was under these pressures that many houses adopted the idiorrhythmic form of life — a relaxation of the strict coenobitic common life, in which monks kept their own property and arrangements — as a response to economic and demographic strain (see Coenobitic and Idiorrhythmic). The period also produced martyrs: Athonite monks who went out to confess Christ before the Ottoman authorities and were put to death, the “neomartyrs” whose Lives were gathered by St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and St. Makarios of Corinth in the New Martyrologion (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 4; on the neomartyr tradition see The Athonite Synaxis). This neomartyric witness is reported here soberly, as the record of Christians who chose death rather than apostasy under a non-Christian power — a phenomenon of its historical situation, not an occasion for polemic against Islam or Muslims.

The eighteenth century saw, amid the hardship, a remarkable intellectual and spiritual revival on the Mountain. The Athonite Academy (the Athonias) was founded near Vatopedi in the 1740s as a centre of Greek learning; and the Kollyvades movement — a group of traditionalist monks including St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and St. Makarios of Corinth, who insisted on frequent communion and the strict observance of tradition — produced, among other works, the Philokalia, the great anthology of hesychast spiritual texts published at Venice in 1782 (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 4, on the Athonias and the Kollyvades; see The Philokalia and The Home of Hesychasm).

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The nineteenth century brought a great influx of Slavic and especially Russian monks, funded by the resources of imperial Russia. The Russian house of St. Panteleimon (the Rossikon) grew enormously, and by the early twentieth century the Russian monastic population on Athos rivalled or exceeded the Greek, provoking anxieties about a “Slavic” or specifically Russian domination of the Mountain — the so-called panslavism question (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 5, on the Russian expansion; Fennell, The Russians on Athos, on the nineteenth-century growth; see The Pan-Orthodox Mountain). This Russian presence collapsed after 1917: the Bolshevik Revolution cut off the funding and the flow of novices, and the Russian and other Slavic houses entered a long decline that lasted most of the twentieth century.

Athos was liberated from Ottoman rule in 1912, during the First Balkan War, when the Greek navy took the peninsula. Its international status was then disputed — Russia and others favoured an internationalised, pan-Orthodox regime — but the outcome, confirmed by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) and the Greek Constitution of 1926, was Greek sovereignty combined with a guaranteed internal autonomy under the spiritual jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 5, on the liberation and the settlement; on the constitutional result see Sovereignty and the Modern State). The Charter of the Holy Mountain was drawn up in 1924 and ratified by Greek legislative decree in 1926, giving the Mountain the constitutional and administrative framework it still has (the Charter of the Holy Mountain, 1924; Constitution of Greece, Article 105).

The mid-twentieth century was the low point. War, the loss of the Slavic influx, the ageing of the communities, and the general secularising pressures of the age brought the monastic population to its nadir — around a thousand monks by the early 1970s, many of them old, in houses that seemed to be dying (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 6, on the mid-century decline and the figures). It was from this apparent terminus that the remarkable renewal of the last decades of the century began — the subject of Sections 06 and 09 (see The Twentieth-Century Revival and Pilgrimage Numbers and Challenges).

References

Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. (Chs. 3–6 on the imperial typika, the Byzantine golden age, the Ottoman submission and centuries, the neomartyrs, the Athonias and the Kollyvades, the Russian expansion, the 1912 liberation, and the mid-century decline.)
Papachryssanthou, Dionysia. Actes du Prôtaton. Archives de l’Athos 7. Paris: Lethielleux, 1975. (The typika of 1045 and 1394 and the central archive of the Mountain.)
Morris, Rosemary. Monks and Laymen in Byzantium, 843–1118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. (The middle-Byzantine regulation of the Mountain.)
Speake, Graham. A History of the Athonite Commonwealth: The Spiritual and Cultural Diaspora of Mount Athos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. (The pan-Orthodox patronage and reach of the Mountain.)
Bryer, Anthony, and Mary Cunningham, eds. Mount Athos and Byzantine Monasticism. Aldershot: Variorum/Ashgate, 1996. (The Athonite archives and Byzantine context.)
Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. Trans. George Lawrence. London: Faith Press, 1964. (The fourteenth-century hesychast controversy and its councils.)
Constitution of Greece, Article 105; Charter of the Holy Mountain, 1924 (ratified 1926). (The modern constitutional settlement.)