Byzantine Thessaloniki and the Two Brothers

Constantine (later Cyril, c. 826–869) and Methodius (c. 815–885) were born into a senior military family of Thessaloniki, the Byzantine Empire’s second city and a Greek metropolis ringed by Slavic settlement. Methodius rose in the imperial administration, governing a Slav-populated province before withdrawing to monastic life on Mount Olympus in Bithynia; his younger brother Constantine was educated at the Magnaura school in Constantinople under Leo the Mathematician and the future patriarch Photius, won the title “the Philosopher,” and entered the service of the Church. This file establishes the city, the family, and the formation of the two men who would create Slavic literary Christianity.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Equals-to-the-Apostles)

Thessaloniki, the Empire’s Second City

Thessaloniki in the ninth century was, after Constantinople, the greatest city of the Byzantine Empire: a fortified port and metropolis on the Via Egnatia, the seat of a strategic command, a center of trade, learning, and the cult of its patron the Great-Martyr Demetrius (Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 1971, ch. 2; Tachiaos, Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica, 2001, ch. 1). Its population was Greek-speaking and its culture thoroughly Byzantine, but the city did not stand in a Greek world. Since the great Slavic migrations of the sixth and seventh centuries the hinterland of Macedonia had been settled by Slavic tribes — the Sklaviniai — whose speech could be heard in the markets and whose presence pressed upon the city walls; Thessaloniki had more than once been besieged by Slavic forces, and the Miracles of St. Demetrius preserves the memory of those assaults (Vlasto, The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom, 1970, ch. 1; Obolensky 1971, ch. 1).

This proximity is the first fact of the brothers’ story. A boy growing up in ninth-century Thessaloniki would have heard Slavic spoken from childhood, and a much later tradition reported by the emperor — when he sent the brothers to Moravia — has him say, “you are both Thessalonians, and all Thessalonians speak pure Slav” (Vita Methodii 5; trans. Kantor 1983). The remark, whatever its precise historicity, captures a real condition: the apostles of the Slavs came from one of the few places in the Greek world where a cultivated Byzantine could also command a Slavic vernacular. How fluent the brothers were, and whether their Slavic was a native command or a learned competence later perfected, is debated; but that they had genuine access to the spoken language from their Thessalonian background is the consistent testimony of the sources and the consensus of scholarship (Tachiaos 2001, ch. 1; Dvornik, Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs, 1970, ch. 1).

The Family of the Drungarios Leo

The brothers were the sons of a man named Leo, who held the rank of drungarios — a senior officer subordinate to the stratēgos (military governor) of the Thessalonian command — and of his wife Maria; they were, the Vita Constantini says, the youngest and eldest of seven children (Vita Constantini 2; trans. Kantor 1983). The family was therefore of the provincial aristocracy of the imperial service, well-connected and comfortable, with access to the patronage networks that ran between Thessaloniki and the capital. Methodius was the eldest of the seven and Constantine the youngest; their exact birth years are not recorded and are reconstructed from later data, conventionally given as c. 815 for Methodius and c. 826/827 for Constantine, with Methodius perhaps a dozen years the senior (Tachiaos 2001, ch. 1; Dvornik 1970, ch. 1). The names by which they are best known are not their baptismal names symmetrically: “Methodius” is the monastic name the elder brother took on entering religious life (his secular name is not securely preserved, though later tradition supplies “Michael”), while “Constantine” was the younger’s baptismal name, and “Cyril” the monastic name he assumed only at the very end of his life in Rome (Tachiaos 2001, ch. 1; Dvornik 1970, ch. 1). For clarity this guide follows the sources in calling the younger brother Constantine until his Roman profession and Cyril thereafter.

Methodius the Administrator

The elder brother’s early career lay in government, not the schools. According to the Vita Methodii, Methodius’s abilities and family standing brought him an appointment as archōn — governor — of a Slav-populated principality or province (a Sklavinia), where for some years he administered a region of Slavic subjects of the empire (Vita Methodii 2; trans. Kantor 1983). The location is not named in the Life and is debated; it is often placed in the Slavic districts of Macedonia or along the Strymon (Dvornik 1970, ch. 1; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 1). The detail matters because it gave Methodius direct, governing experience of a Slavic population — a practical apprenticeship in Slavic affairs that complemented his brother’s scholarly gifts.

After this period of service Methodius abandoned his administrative career and withdrew to the monastic life. The Vita Methodii presents the change as a deliberate renunciation of worldly honor: he “exchanged the darkness of office for the light” and entered a monastery on Mount Olympus in Bithynia (in Asia Minor), the great monastic center of the age, where he gave himself to ascetic discipline and study (Vita Methodii 3; trans. Kantor 1983; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 1). Mount Olympus would become the place where the two brothers were reunited and where, between missions, they pursued the life of prayer and learning together.

Constantine “the Philosopher” at the Magnaura

The younger brother’s path ran through the schools. The Vita Constantini tells of a precocious, almost prodigious child: a boy who dreamed of choosing Wisdom (Sophia) as his bride, who outstripped his teachers in Thessaloniki, and whose reputation reached the capital, where he was summoned to be educated alongside the young emperor Michael III (Vita Constantini 3–4; trans. Kantor 1983). The hagiographic gilding here is plain — the precocity topos and the Solomonic dream of Wisdom belong to the conventions of the genre (Tachiaos 2001, ch. 2) — but the substance, that Constantine received the highest education the empire could give, is firm. At Constantinople he studied at the Magnaura, the imperial higher school then being renewed, under two of the most learned men of the age: Leo the Mathematician (Leo the Philosopher), the polymath who revived Greek mathematics and science, and Photius, the future patriarch and the foremost scholar of his generation (Vita Constantini 4; Dvornik 1970, ch. 1; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 2). Constantine’s curriculum, as the Life describes it, embraced grammar, dialectic and the whole of philosophy, rhetoric, arithmetic, astronomy, music, and the other Hellenic arts (Vita Constantini 4; Kantor 1983).

His attainments earned him the epithet by which he is known in the sources, ho Philosophos, “the Philosopher” — a title of real intellectual weight in ninth-century Byzantium, not a courtesy (Dvornik 1970, ch. 1; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 2). After completing his studies Constantine declined an advantageous marriage and an administrative post, was ordained (the sources present him in the diaconate and as a man of the clergy), and took up duties in Constantinople. He served for a time as chartophylax — librarian and chancellor — of the patriarchal church of Hagia Sophia, and held a teaching chair in philosophy at the Magnaura, where he had himself been formed (Vita Constantini 4; Dvornik 1970, ch. 1; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 2). [Disputed: the Vita Constantini also assigns the young Constantine a leading role in a public disputation with the deposed iconoclast patriarch John the Grammarian (Annes) (Vita Constantini 5; Kantor 1983); Dvornik (1970) treats the episode as substantially historical given Constantine’s standing, while other scholars judge it in part a hagiographic set-piece dramatizing his dialectical brilliance against heresy.]

The Brothers Reunited

The two strands of the family’s gifts — Methodius’s governing experience and monastic discipline, Constantine’s learning and dialectical power — converged when the younger brother, after his years in the capital, withdrew from public life and joined his elder brother in the monastic communities of Mount Olympus in Bithynia (Vita Constantini 7; Vita Methodii 4; Kantor 1983; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 2). There they lived together in study and prayer, and there they were when the imperial summons came that would set them on the road to the Slavs. The Vita Constantini presents the Khazar embassy as the first of those summonses; in fact the brothers’ joint missionary career, the creation of the alphabet, and the whole work for which the Church venerates them all grew from this monastic partnership, the meeting of two complementary men of one Thessalonian family (see The Khazar Mission; on the wider missionary age, The Photian Age).

References

Vita Constantini (Life of Constantine), chapters 2–7. Trans. in Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1983.
Vita Methodii (Life of Methodius), chapters 2–5. Trans. in Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives, 1983.
Dvornik, Francis. Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970, ch. 1.
Tachiaos, Anthony-Emil N. Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica: The Acculturation of the Slavs. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001, chs. 1–2.
Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, chs. 1–2.
Vlasto, A. P. The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, ch. 1.