The Miracula

The Miracula Sancti Demetrii — the Miracles of Saint Demetrios — are two collections of miracle-narratives gathered at Thessaloniki across the seventh century: Book I, some fifteen homiletic miracles compiled in the 610s–620s by John, archbishop of Thessaloniki, a named author who writes for several episodes as an eyewitness or near-contemporary; and Book II, an anonymous and looser collection from later in the same century, dominated by the great Avar-Slav sieges. This file describes the Miracula as documents — their authorship, date, structure, contents, and manuscript transmission — and the foundational critical edition of Paul Lemerle, whose very title announces their double character: devotional miracle-collections that are, incidentally, the single richest narrative witness to the Slavic penetration of the Balkans. The miracles are reported here as the collections’ own testimony (METHODOLOGY §3.5); their source-critical use as history belongs to a companion study.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; the Myrrh-Streamer)

What the Miracula Are

The Miracula Sancti Demetrii are not a single book but a dossier — two distinct collections, of different authorship and date, transmitted together in the Greek manuscript tradition and bound by their common subject: the wonders worked by the great martyr Demetrios in and for his city of Thessaloniki (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 2). They belong to the world of the early Byzantine cult of the saints, where a martyr’s tomb became the center of a civic devotion and the documentary record of his cures, apparitions, and rescues accumulated into collections read out, copied, and venerated (Skedros 1999, 31–60; on the period, Byzantine Church). Unlike the Passio traditions, which narrate the saint’s death (see The Passio Traditions), the Miracula narrate his ongoing presence: they are the literary deposit of a living cult at the basilica of Saint Demetrios, attesting both the myron flowing from the tomb (see The Myrrh-Streamer) and, above all, the saint’s repeated defense of the city against besieging armies.

What gives the Miracula their unusual standing is precisely that they are testimony from within. The compiler of Book I is a named ecclesiastic of Thessaloniki writing about events in living memory, several of which he claims to have witnessed or to report from those who did; the compiler of Book II, though anonymous, writes within a generation or two of the sieges he records and preserves circumstantial detail unavailable elsewhere (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 2, 32–46; Curta 2001, 50–51). The result is a body of devotional literature that doubles, against the intentions of its authors, as the most concrete contemporary narrative of the Avar and Slavic assaults on the second city of the empire.

Book I: Archbishop John of Thessaloniki

The first collection is the work of John, archbishop of Thessaloniki, who held the see in the early decades of the seventh century and compiled his miracles in the 610s or 620s (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 2, 32–40; Skedros 1999, 138–141). John is no anonymous hagiographer: he names himself, addresses his congregation in the second person, and casts his miracles as homilies — discourses delivered, or framed as delivered, in the basilica before the people of the city, in the form and tone of liturgical preaching (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 1, text of Book I; vol. 2, 32–40). This homiletic character governs the whole of Book I: each chapter is an encomiastic narrative, exhorting the faithful to gratitude and trust in their patron even as it recounts a particular wonder.

The collection comprises roughly fifteen miracle-narratives (the manuscript count varies slightly with how the editor divides the material), arranged not by strict chronology but by edifying theme (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 1; vol. 2, 32–46). The early chapters concern cures and apparitions at the shrine: the saint healing a paralytic, appearing to the sick, manifesting himself within his ciborium or to the eparch of the city. The middle and later chapters turn to communal deliverances — Demetrios protecting Thessaloniki from plague, from famine, and from the gravest of all its trials, the great barbarian siege.

John writes for several of these episodes as an eyewitness or near-contemporary, and he is at pains to distinguish what he himself saw or learned from reliable witnesses from what he reports at second hand (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 2, 33–40; Skedros 1999, 138–141). This self-conscious source-marking is part of what makes Book I valuable to historians: its author is aware of the difference between testimony and tradition, and he signals it.

The Plague and the Apparitions (Miracula I)

Among the cures and shrine-wonders of Book I, the collection reports an outbreak of plague from which the saint delivered or shielded the city, set within the same early-seventh-century horizon as the sieges (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 1, Miracula I.3; vol. 2, 47–52). The opening miracles establish the pattern of the saint’s manifestations — Demetrios seen at his tomb, appearing in the likeness given him by his icons, interceding for individual petitioners and for the city at large (e.g. Miracula I.1; Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 1). These narratives are presented by John as the testimony of his church: reported as what the witnesses say they saw, not asserted here as independent fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Great Siege of c. 586 (Miracula I.13–15)

The dramatic center of Book I is the great siege of Thessaloniki by a vast Avar-led, predominantly Slavic host — the most extended single narrative in the collection (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 1, Miracula I.13–15; vol. 2, 69–93). John recounts the sudden appearance of the barbarian army before the walls, the terror of the citizens, the assaults with siege engines and ladders, and the city’s deliverance, which the narrative attributes throughout to the personal intervention of Demetrios — seen upon the walls, repelling the attackers, and inspiring the defense (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 1, Miracula I.13). It is from this account that much of what is known of early Avar-Slav siege warfare derives, including the description of the great wheeled siege-towers and stone-throwing engines deployed against the walls (Curta 2001, 50–55, 100–105; Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 2, 69–93).

The dating of this siege is one of the few genuinely contested points in the chronology of Book I. [Disputed: Lemerle (1979–1981, vol. 2, 69–93) places the great siege of Book I in 586, the date now generally followed; but the *Miracula*'s internal chronology is imprecise, and earlier scholarship and some subsequent discussion have proposed 597 or other dates in the 580s–590s, since the text fixes the event by the episcopate and by relative time rather than by an absolute year (cf. Curta 2001, 50, who follows the c. 586 dating while noting the underlying uncertainty).] What is not in dispute is that the siege belongs to John’s near-memory: he writes of it as an event his elders lived through, and the homiletic frame presents it as a deliverance the city still recalls with gratitude.

Book II: The Anonymous Continuation

The second collection is anonymous and later — composed in the later seventh century, after the events of Book I and by a different hand (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 2, 94–103; Skedros 1999, 141–144). Book II abandons the tight homiletic form of John’s collection for a looser, more straightforwardly narrative manner; it is shorter in its number of discrete miracles but longer and more circumstantial in its siege-accounts, which dominate it almost entirely (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 1, text of Book II; vol. 2, 94–103). Where Book I gathers cures, apparitions, plague, and one great siege, Book II is essentially a chronicle of the combined Avar-Slav sieges of the 610s–620s and their aftermath, narrated as successive deliverances of the city by its martyr-protector.

The dating and even the unity of Book II are less secure than those of Book I. [Disputed: Lemerle (1979–1981, vol. 2, 94–103) dates the compilation of Book II to the later seventh century, after c. 680, on the evidence of the latest events it records and its relationship to Book I; the precise terminus and whether the collection grew by accretion remain debated, and some of its chapters may preserve earlier material redacted later (cf. Curta 2001, 51, 111–119).] The text itself does not name its author, and the homiletic “I” of John is absent; the compiler stands further back from his material than John did, even where his information is detailed and apparently good.

The Sieges of the 610s–620s (Miracula II.1–2)

The opening chapters of Book II narrate a sequence of assaults on Thessaloniki by coalitions of Slavic tribes, sometimes under Avar leadership, in the second and third decades of the seventh century (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 1, Miracula II.1–2; vol. 2, 94–135). These include a great combined land-and-sea attack — the Slavic tribes assaulting the harbor with hollowed-log boats (monoxyla) while a land force pressed the walls — and a prolonged blockade accompanied by famine within the city (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 1, Miracula II.1, II.2; Curta 2001, 106–119). The named Slavic groupings of the Thessalonian hinterland appear here, and it is from Book II that historians draw much of their knowledge of the Sklaviniai, the Slavic settlements that by now ringed the city (Curta 2001, 106–119; Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 2, 94–135). Throughout, the deliverances are credited to Demetrios — appearing on the walls, scattering the enemy, sustaining the besieged (see The Defender Against the Sieges).

Kuver and Mauros (Miracula II.5)

The most remarkable single narrative of Book II is the episode of Kuver (Kouber) and his lieutenant Mauros (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 1, Miracula II.5; vol. 2, 137–162). Kuver is presented as the leader of a population of descendants of Roman captives deported by the Avars to Pannonia and now returned, who breaks from the Avar khagan, crosses into the Balkans, and settles near Thessaloniki; his agent Mauros, the narrative relates, attempts by stratagem to seize the city from within before the plot is exposed and the city again preserved (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 1, Miracula II.5; vol. 2, 137–162; Curta 2001, 111–119). The Kuver episode is unique among early Byzantine sources for its picture of population movement, deportation, and ethnic mixture in the post-Avar Balkans, and it is one of the chapters on which the modern reconstruction of the period most heavily depends (Curta 2001, 111–119; Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 2, 137–162).

A Possible Book III and Later Additions

Some manuscripts and the later tradition carry, beyond the two collections proper, further miracle-material — a so-called Book III or a body of later additions, of distinctly later date and of a more conventional hagiographical character (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 2, briefly; Skedros 1999, 144–145). These later accretions, including miracles set in the centuries after the seventh, do not share the contemporary authority of Books I and II and are generally treated separately from the two ancient recueils; Lemerle’s edition concentrates on Books I and II as the plus anciens recueils, the most ancient collections, and the later material is of value chiefly for the continuing history of the cult rather than for the seventh century (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 1–2; Skedros 1999, 144–145). The boundary between the ancient core and the later supplements is itself part of the transmission history the critical edition had to disentangle.

Transmission and the Lemerle Edition

The Miracula survive in a Greek manuscript tradition of varying fullness, with the two collections transmitted together and the later additions attached in some witnesses; there are also early translations and adaptations, including Latin and Slavonic versions that testify to the diffusion of the cult (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 2, on the manuscript tradition; Skedros 1999, 137–145). Disentangling the original shape of John’s homiletic Book I from the anonymous Book II, and both from the later accretions, was the central editorial labor of the modern critical edition.

That edition is the foundational modern work on the Miracula: Paul Lemerle, Les plus anciens recueils des miracles de saint Démétrius et la pénétration des Slaves dans les Balkans, two volumes (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1979–1981). The first volume contains the critical Greek text of Books I and II; the second is a full historical and source-critical commentary (Lemerle 1979–1981, vols. 1–2). Lemerle’s edition superseded all earlier printings and remains the standard text by which the Miracula are cited, by book and chapter (Skedros 1999, 137; Curta 2001, 50–51). The very title of the work announces the document’s double nature: it is at once an edition of recueils de miracles — collections of miracles, devotional literature of the cult — and a study of la pénétration des Slaves dans les Balkans, the Slavic penetration of the Balkans. Lemerle saw, and his title declares, that one cannot edit these miracle-collections without writing the early history of the Slavs, because they are the same text.

The Double Character

This double character is the defining fact about the Miracula. In intention they are works of devotion: Book I a series of homilies of thanksgiving to the city’s protector, Book II a chronicle of deliverances credited to him, both composed to nourish the cult at the basilica and to bind the citizens to their saint in gratitude and confidence (Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 2; Skedros 1999, 31–60). Read as the cult’s own testimony — which is how this file presents them (METHODOLOGY §3.5) — they record what the church of Thessaloniki believed Demetrios had done for it: healed its sick, stayed its plague, and again and again turned back the armies at its walls.

Incidentally, and without intending it, the same texts became the single richest narrative source for the Avar-Slav sieges of Thessaloniki and for the Slavic settlement of the Balkans in the late sixth and seventh centuries (Curta 2001, 50–55, 106–119; Lemerle 1979–1981, vol. 2). For long stretches of this period the Miracula are very nearly the only contemporary witness, and the whole modern reconstruction of the Slavic Sklaviniai, the siege techniques of the Avars and Slavs, and episodes such as Kuver’s migration rests substantially upon them (Curta 2001, 50–55, 111–119). To use a devotional miracle-collection as a historical source is, however, a delicate operation: its purposes, its rhetorical conventions, and its theology must be reckoned with before its data can be trusted. That source-critical operation — how the historian extracts history from hagiography, and where the Miracula may and may not be relied upon — is the subject of its own study (see The Miracula as History). What concerns the present file is the document itself: two seventh-century collections, one by a named archbishop and one anonymous, edited by Lemerle, in which a city’s gratitude to its martyr was written down and, with it, the earliest history of a people.

References

Lemerle, Paul. Les plus anciens recueils des miracles de saint Démétrius et la pénétration des Slaves dans les Balkans. 2 vols. Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), 1979–1981. (Vol. 1: critical Greek text of Miracula Books I and II. Vol. 2: historical and source-critical commentary — the authorship and date of Book I [John of Thessaloniki, c. 610s–620s, pp. 32–40]; the great siege at Miracula I.13–15 and its dating to c. 586 [pp. 69–93]; the plague [pp. 47–52]; the anonymity and later-seventh-century date of Book II [pp. 94–103]; the sieges of the 610s–620s at Miracula II.1–2 [pp. 94–135]; the Kuver and Mauros episode at Miracula II.5 [pp. 137–162]; the manuscript transmission and later additions. The foundational modern edition.)
Skedros, James C. Saint Demetrios of Thessaloniki: Civic Patron and Divine Protector, 4th–7th Centuries CE. Harvard Theological Studies. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999. (The cult at the basilica; the Miracula as the cult’s literature; John of Thessaloniki and Book I, pp. 137–141; Book II and the later additions, pp. 141–145; the place of the miracle-collections in the civic devotion.)
Curta, Florin. The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, c. 500–700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. (The Miracula as historical source for the Avar-Slav sieges and Slavic settlement; the great siege of c. 586, pp. 50–55; the sieges and Sklaviniai of the seventh century, pp. 106–119; the Kuver episode, pp. 111–119.)