The Relics and Cyril and Methodius

In 861, on his way to the Khazars, the Byzantine missionary Constantine — the future St. Cyril, apostle of the Slavs — stopped at Cherson in the Crimea, the city where tradition placed the martyrdom of St. Clement of Rome, and there organized a search for the saint’s lost relics. With the bishop of Cherson and the local clergy, after prayer and a sea-expedition to an island in the bay, he recovered human bones together with an anchor, which he identified as the relics of Clement, drowned with an anchor in the legend. He carried them in solemn procession into the city, and later bore a portion of them westward — through Great Moravia to Rome, where Pope Adrian II received them with honor and they were deposited in the church now the Basilica of San Clemente. There, around 869, Constantine took monastic vows as Cyril and died on 14 February 869, buried in San Clemente beside the relics of the saint whose remains he had recovered. The episode binds the first bishop-martyr of Rome to the evangelization of the Slavs and stands as a vivid image of the undivided, pre-Schism communion of East and West.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

The legend of Clement’s martyrdom — the exile to the Crimean quarries, the anchor about his neck, the drowning, the sea that ebbed each year over an underwater shrine — is treated in the companion file The Anchor and the Sea, where it is pinned to the late Passio / Martyrium Clementis and flagged as hagiography no earlier than the fourth century. The present file does not repeat that legend; it follows the historically firmer thread that runs out of it. For whatever the first-century facts of Clement’s death, by the ninth century there existed at Cherson a living cult of St. Clement, an established belief that his body lay there, and a Byzantine churchman moved enough by devotion to that saint to go looking for him. The search of 861 and the translation of the relics to Rome in 867/868 are events of ninth-century church history, attested in the Old Church Slavonic Life of Constantine and in the Latin Italian Legend, and woven into the well-documented careers of Constantine-Cyril and Methodius and of the Roman popes who received them. What can be told soberly is this later history; what cannot be verified — and is marked as such below — is the identity of the bones themselves.

The Cult at Cherson by the Ninth Century

Cherson — Chersonesus, on the southwestern tip of the Crimean peninsula, near modern Sevastopol — was by the ninth century a Byzantine outpost on the northern shore of the Black Sea, a frontier city of trade, exile, and mission. It was also the home of a firmly rooted cult of St. Clement. The late Passio held that Clement, banished under Trajan to the marble quarries of the region, had converted the prisoners and the surrounding population, been drowned with an anchor tied about his neck, and been laid in a shrine on the sea floor that the receding waters uncovered once a year for the veneration of pilgrims. By the ninth century this cult was old and venerable, but its central wonder had reportedly lapsed: the annual ebbing of the sea was said to have ceased, and with it the means of reaching the underwater tomb. The exact location of the relics had been lost or forgotten. The shrine had become a memory and a hope rather than a place one could visit.

This is the situation the sources describe as Constantine found it: a city that knew it possessed, somewhere off its coast, the bones of an apostolic Father of Rome, but had lost the way to them. The cult supplied the motive; the lost tomb supplied the task. It is worth stressing that the search of 861 presupposes the legend already in place and already believed at Cherson — Constantine did not invent the tradition that Clement lay there but acted upon a tradition he received.

Constantine the Philosopher at Cherson, 860–861

Constantine, called “the Philosopher,” and his elder brother Methodius were Greeks of Thessalonica, schooled at Constantinople, who would become the great missionaries to the Slavs and the framers of a Slavonic liturgy and alphabet. (Their fuller story is told under Saints Cyril and Methodius.) In 860/861 Constantine was sent by the emperor and patriarch on a diplomatic-religious mission to the Khazars, the steppe power northeast of the Black Sea, and his route took him through Cherson. There he wintered, studied — the Life describes him learning Hebrew and Samaritan letters at Cherson — and turned his devotion to the city’s lost saint.

The fullest account is the eighth chapter of the Vita Constantini, the Old Church Slavonic Life of Constantine, composed by his disciples not long after his death and the closest narrative we have to the events (Vita Constantini 8, trans. Kantor 1983). According to it, Constantine, grieved that the relics of so great a saint should lie lost, gathered the bishop of Cherson — named George in the sources — together with the clergy and pious men of the city, and urged a search. After prayer, the company embarked and sailed out into the bay to an island where the relics were believed to lie. There, the Life relates, amid singing and supplication, they dug and recovered human bones, and with them an anchor. The anchor was the decisive sign: it answered the legend, in which Clement had been sunk with an anchor, and the searchers received it as confirmation that these were indeed the saint’s remains. Constantine then carried the recovered relics back to Cherson in procession, with great solemnity, and they were received in the city with rejoicing.

Constantine did not merely find the relics; he wrote about the finding. The sources credit him with three related compositions on the event: a Sermon (or Oration) on the Translation of the Relics of St. Clement; a hymn or liturgical canon in the saint’s honor; and a “brief history” (a short prose narrative) of the discovery. These works are referred to in the tradition and survive in part; they are the literary deposit of his devotion and the immediate source from which later accounts drew. On the Latin side, the discovery is recorded in the Legenda Italica — the Italian Legend, or Vita cum Translatione S. Clementis, associated with Gauderic, bishop of Velletri — which depended on Constantine’s own account of the finding and transmitted it to a Western readership (the Italian Legend is discussed at length in Dvornik 1970). Between the Slavonic Life and the Latin Legend the event is attested from both directions of the one undivided Church.

A Note on the Identification of the Relics

Here the methodology must be applied with care, for two different orders of claim are in play. That a search took place at Cherson in 861, that bones and an anchor were recovered, that Constantine identified them as Clement’s, and that he carried them in procession — these are what the Vita Constantini and the Italian Legend attest, and there is no reason to doubt that such an episode occurred and was understood at the time as the recovery of St. Clement. That the recovered bones were in historical fact the remains of the first-century Roman bishop is a separate claim, and one that cannot be verified.

[Disputed: the identification of the bones-and-anchor recovered at Cherson in 861 as the relics of St. Clement of Rome. The Vita Constantini (ch. 8) and the Legenda Italica attest the discovery and the identification, and Constantine, the bishop George, and the Church received the find as authentic; the anchor matched the detail of the martyrdom legend and was taken as confirmation. But the legend on which the identification rests is itself late (no earlier than the fourth century; see The Anchor and the Sea), the underwater tomb had reportedly been lost for generations, and the relics were located and identified by pious tradition rather than by any chain of evidence reaching back to the first century. Modern historians therefore report that these were venerated and believed to be Clement’s relics, not that the bones can be shown to be his. This file reports the find and its reception as the sources give them, and does not assert the historical identity of the remains.]

This is exactly the distinction the broader silence of the early record imposes: the firmest first- and second-century sources say nothing of how Clement died, still less of where he was buried (see The Historical Clement; Eusebius, HE 3.34, records only that Clement “departed this life” in the third year of Trajan and was succeeded by Evaristus). What the ninth century recovered, it recovered within the world of the developed legend, and the historian honors both the reality of the ninth-century event and the unverifiability of the first-century identification by keeping the two apart. Lightfoot, surveying the relic-history in his great study of Clement, treats the Cherson discovery in just this spirit — as a momentous datum of medieval cult, not as proof of the martyrdom it presupposes (Lightfoot 1890).

The Journey to Rome, 867–868

Constantine kept a portion of the Cherson relics with him. When, after the Khazar mission, the brothers were sent (from 863) to evangelize Great Moravia and to provide the Slavs with Scripture and liturgy in their own tongue, the relics of St. Clement traveled with them. Summoned at length to Rome to answer for the Slavonic liturgy and to have their work and their disciples regularized, Constantine and Methodius arrived in the city in 867/868, bringing the relics of Clement.

The relics decisively shaped their reception. Rome already honored Clement as one of the earliest bishops of the Roman Church and as a martyr, and a church in the city bore his name. For a Byzantine missionary to arrive bearing the recovered relics of that very saint — relics lost on the far Crimean frontier and now restored to the West — was an event of the first significance, and the sources present it as a chief reason for the warmth of the Roman welcome. Pope Adrian II (Hadrian II) received the brothers and the relics with honor. In that favorable atmosphere the Slavonic books were blessed and the Slavonic liturgy approved, and the brothers’ disciples were ordained. The relics of Clement were thus not incidental to the mission’s vindication at Rome; they were, in the narrative of the sources, bound up with it — a gift from the Christian East that opened the doors of the Christian West (Dvornik 1970).

The relics were deposited in the church of San Clemente — the Roman basilica already dedicated to Clement, on the slope between the Colosseum and the Lateran, a site of Christian use reaching back into the early centuries. There the relics venerated as the apostolic Father’s came to rest in the church that bore his name, restored to the city of which tradition made him bishop.

Cyril’s Death and Burial at San Clemente, 869

The story closes with a detail famous for its fitness. At Rome, his health failing, Constantine withdrew into monastic life and took the monastic name by which the Church has ever since known him — Cyril. He died soon after, on 14 February 869. He was buried in the Basilica of San Clemente, near the relics of the very saint whose remains he had recovered at Cherson and carried across half the Christian world to Rome. The man who had found Clement’s relics and brought them home was laid to rest beside them.

The image has held the imagination of East and West alike: the apostle of the Slavs, who had recovered an early bishop of Rome from the lost shrine beneath the Crimean sea, ending his life as a monk in Rome and sleeping by that bishop’s bones. Methodius did not remain; he returned north, was consecrated archbishop, and carried on the work of the Slavonic Scriptures and liturgy until his death in 885 (his story continues under Saints Cyril and Methodius).

Significance

The episode joins two things that might seem far apart: the first-century bishop-martyr of Rome and the ninth-century evangelization of the Slavs. The thread that joins them is St. Clement’s relics, and the figure who carries the thread is Constantine-Cyril. A Byzantine missionary, devoted to a saint of the Roman Church, recovers that saint’s relics on the northern frontier of the empire, bears them westward across his Moravian mission, and delivers them to the bishop of Rome, who honors both the relics and their bearer. It is a story enacted entirely within the one Church before the schism of East and West — a Greek and a Latin Christianity still in communion, still able to receive each other’s saints, books, and liturgies as their own. To tell it as a triumph of one side over the other is to mistake it; its whole force lies in the mutual honor it records.

That communion left its mark on the very building where the relics rest. The lower basilica of San Clemente — the earlier church preserved beneath the present medieval structure — carries frescoes that depict the translation of Clement’s relics and scenes from the life of Cyril, painting the ninth-century story onto the walls of the saint’s own church. The relics remain to this day a focus of devotion at San Clemente, and the basilica itself is treated under Feast and Cult. The Church’s veneration rests, soberly stated, on what the Vita Constantini and the Italian Legend attest: a discovery made and received in faith, in an age that still believed the sea had once drawn back over Clement’s tomb. Whether the bones are the historical Clement’s, the sources cannot tell us; what they tell us is that an early bishop of Rome was honored, by East and West together, as the bond between an apostolic age and the baptism of the Slavs. For the wider setting of that undivided communion, see The Pre-Schism Church.

References

The Life of Constantine (Vita Constantini). In Kantor, Marvin. Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983. (The discovery of the relics at Cherson is recounted in chapter 8.)
Dvornik, Francis. Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970. (On the Cherson discovery, the Legenda Italica, the journey to Rome, and the reception by Adrian II.)
Legenda Italica (the Italian Legend / Vita cum Translatione S. Clementis), associated with Gauderic of Velletri. Discussed in Dvornik, Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs (1970).
Lightfoot, J. B. The Apostolic Fathers, Part I: S. Clement of Rome, Vol. 1. London: Macmillan, 1890. (On the relics and the Cherson tradition.)
Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History, 3.34. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. (Clement “departed this life” in the third year of Trajan, c. 101.)