The Monasteries of Byzantium

For a thousand years monasticism was woven into the fabric of the Christian Roman empire. This file treats the wider Byzantine institutional world beyond any single reformer: the great urban monasteries of Constantinople, the imperial and aristocratic foundations, the typika by which founders governed and endowed their houses, and the deep entanglement of monasticism with Byzantine society, economy, and politics — including the tension between the ideal of withdrawal and the reality of monastic wealth and influence.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine)

Monasticism at the Heart of the Empire

In Byzantium the monastery was not on the margins of society but near its center. Constantinople itself contained scores of monasteries — one older estimate counts well over a hundred within and around the city across its history — and monasteries filled the countryside and the provincial towns as well (Alice-Mary Talbot, “Monasticism,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander Kazhdan, Oxford, 1991; Talbot, Varieties of Monastic Experience in Byzantium, Notre Dame, 2019). Monasteries were centers of prayer and asceticism, but also of learning, manuscript copying, hymnography, iconography, charity, and medicine; they held relics that drew pilgrims, ran hospitals and hostels and old-age homes, and served as places of retirement, refuge, and burial for the powerful. The monastic estate was one of the great institutions of Byzantine civilization, and the holy monk — the ascetic whose evident sanctity gave him authority independent of office — was one of its characteristic figures of power, as Peter Brown’s studies of the “holy man” in late antiquity have shown (Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 61, 1971; Rosemary Morris, Monks and Laymen in Byzantium, 843–1118, Cambridge, 1995).

Urban and Imperial Foundations

Byzantine monasticism embraced a wide range of settings. Alongside the remote ascetic mountains — Olympus in Bithynia, Latros, Galesios, and eventually Athos — there flourished a dense urban monasticism in the capital and other cities, of which Theodore’s Stoudios is the great example (see Theodore the Studite and the Stoudion). Urban monasteries were embedded in city life: they served the liturgical needs of neighborhoods, received the offerings and the tonsures of city-dwellers, and were often small houses attached to a family or a founder rather than vast communities.

Above all, monasteries were founded by the great. Emperors and empresses, aristocrats, patriarchs, and wealthy officials established or “restored” monasteries as acts of piety, as guarantees of prayer for their souls, and as family institutions. Among the most famous imperial foundations was the monastery of Christ Pantokrator, established by the emperor John II Komnenos and the empress Eirene in Constantinople in 1136, a great complex that included a celebrated hospital (xenon) with a detailed medical staff and provisions set out in its founding document — a vivid witness to the charitable and social role of the imperial monastery (the Typikon of the Pantokrator, 1136, trans. in Thomas and Hero, eds., Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents, Dumbarton Oaks, 2000). Founders frequently retained rights over “their” monasteries — appointing superiors, drawing revenues, securing burial and commemoration — through the institution of the charistike (the granting of a monastery’s management to a lay patron) and through founders’ clauses in the typika, an entanglement of piety and property that reformers repeatedly criticized (Morris, Monks and Laymen in Byzantium, 1995, on the charistike and lay patronage).

The Typika

The characteristic Byzantine instrument of monastic order was the typikon — the foundation-and-rule document a founder drew up for his or her monastery. Unlike the West, which came to be governed by a few great rules (above all Benedict’s), the East never adopted a single universal legislative rule; instead each major monastery had its own typikon, setting out its constitution, its liturgical usages, its disciplinary regime, its property and administration, and the founder’s wishes for commemoration (Thomas and Hero, eds., Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents, 5 vols., Dumbarton Oaks, 2000 — the great edition and translation of these documents; and see East and West). The typika are our richest source for the actual life of Byzantine monasteries, and they show enormous variety: coenobitic and less-than-coenobitic houses; large communities and tiny ones; men’s and women’s monasteries; houses that insisted on strict enclosure and common life and houses that permitted individual monks their own resources.

Two features of the typika deserve note. First, they reveal the recurrent struggle between the coenobitic ideal and its erosion. Many typika legislate strict common life precisely because it was under pressure; the drift toward idiorrhythmic arrangements — monks keeping their own money, cells, and table within a nominally common house — was a chronic tendency that reformers from Theodore the Studite onward fought, and that would recur on late Byzantine Athos (Thomas and Hero, 2000; Talbot, Varieties, 2019; and see The Vows and the Monastic Day). Second, the typika show the founders’ anxiety to secure their houses’ independence — many seek to protect the monastery from lay interference and from the charistike by declaring it self-governing (autodespoton) or by placing it under the protection of the patriarch as “stavropegial,” a legal category that survives in Orthodoxy to this day (Thomas and Hero, 2000, on independence clauses; Morris, Monks and Laymen, 1995).

Wealth, Withdrawal, and Their Tension

The place of monasticism in Byzantine society generated a permanent tension that this file must name honestly. On the one hand stood the ascetic ideal of withdrawal, poverty, and prayer; on the other, the reality that successful monasteries accumulated lands, dependent peasants, tax privileges, and political weight. The very charity and prayer for which monasteries were endowed made them attractive recipients of donation, and the accumulation of monastic property became a matter of imperial concern. Several emperors — most notably Nikephoros II Phokas, himself a friend of monks, in a novel (law) of 964 — sought to curb the further growth of monastic landholding and the founding of new monasteries, arguing that the multiplication of endowed houses served vanity and avarice more than the ascetic ideal and drained land from the taxpaying population (the novel of Nikephoros II Phokas, 964; discussed in Morris, Monks and Laymen in Byzantium, 1995, and in the standard legal histories). Later emperors reversed such measures, and the pattern of restriction and renewed endowment recurred.

This tension — between the monastery as a place of ascetic poverty and the monastery as a great proprietor — is not a Byzantine peculiarity but a structural feature of institutional monasticism wherever it succeeds, and it sets the stage directly for the sharpest Orthodox debate on the subject, the Russian controversy of the Possessors and the Non-Possessors, which restated in Slavic terms the very question the Byzantine reformers and emperors had faced (see Possessors and Non-Possessors). The Byzantine monasteries thus bequeathed to later Orthodoxy not only their liturgy, their typika, and their spiritual masters, but also this unresolved question about the compatibility of the ascetic ideal with institutional wealth — a question the tradition has never settled by a single answer, and to which it has returned in every age (Morris, Monks and Laymen, 1995; Talbot, Varieties, 2019).

References

Thomas, John P., and Angela Constantinides Hero, eds. Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents. 5 vols. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000. (The great edition of the typika; the Pantokrator typikon of 1136; independence and stavropegial clauses.)
Morris, Rosemary. Monks and Laymen in Byzantium, 843–1118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. (Lay patronage, the charistike, monastic landholding, the novel of Nikephoros Phokas.)
Talbot, Alice-Mary. Varieties of Monastic Experience in Byzantium, 800–1453. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. (Urban and rural monasticism; idiorrhythmic drift; the range of Byzantine monastic life.)
Talbot, Alice-Mary. “Monasticism.” In The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander Kazhdan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Brown, Peter. “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity.” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 80–101. (The holy man as a figure of authority.)