Rufinus and the Captive Woman: The Earliest Account

The earliest written account of the conversion of Iberia, told by Rufinus of Aquileia in his Ecclesiastical History (10.11, c. 402/403) and reported, he says, on the authority of the Iberian prince Bacurius. A Christian woman taken captive lives an austere life of prayer among the Iberians; her prayer heals a sick child carried door to door, and then the gravely ill queen; the king is converted when a sudden midday darkness traps him in the hunt and lifts only when he calls on “the God of the captive”; the people build a church, and a column that no machine can raise is set upright by the captive’s night of prayer; the king sends to the Emperor Constantine for clergy. In all of this the woman is unnamed.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox / Pan-Orthodox

The Source and Its Authority

The conversion of the Iberians enters written history in the Latin Ecclesiastical History of Rufinus of Aquileia (c. 345–411), who translated Eusebius into Latin and continued the work with two books of his own, composed about 402/403 (Books 10–11). The episode stands at Rufinus, Historia Ecclesiastica 10.11 (trans. P. R. Amidon, The Church History of Rufinus of Aquileia, Books 10 and 11, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). This is the earliest account of the event by roughly four centuries, and everything later — Greek, Georgian, devotional — stands downstream of it or beside it.

Rufinus is careful to give his source. He attributes the story to Bacurius, an Iberian of royal descent who had risen in Roman service — dux Palaestinae and later comes domesticorum — a man, Rufinus says, of deep concern for religion and truth, whom he had come to know personally and from whom he heard the account (Rufinus, HE 10.11). Bacurius is no literary fiction: he is independently attested as a Roman general who fell at the Battle of the Frigidus in 394 (Amidon, notes; cf. the prosopography of late-Roman officers). That the earliest narrator names a datable, historically real Iberian aristocrat as his informant is the single most important fact about the source’s standing, and it is taken up in the assessment file (see The Earliest Layer Assessed).

The Captive Woman

Rufinus’s protagonist is introduced simply as a certain captive woman — mulier quaedam captiva — a Christian carried off and held among the Iberians. She is given no name at any point in the account, nor in any of the Greek historians who retell it. She is known to Rufinus, and to the whole earliest layer of the tradition, by two things only: her captivity and her holiness.

Among the foreigners she kept, Rufinus says, a rigorous Christian life: fasting, vigils, and unceasing prayer, with a chastity and sobriety that drew the curiosity of the Iberian women, who asked her about the religion she practiced so single-mindedly. Her answer was simple — that she worshipped Christ as God. The pattern is the one the repository’s earliest-layer treatment values: not preaching from authority but holiness observed, prompting the question to which the Gospel is the answer.

The Healing of the Child

The first miracle turns on a local custom Rufinus reports as ethnographic detail: when a child fell sick, the mother would carry it from house to house to ask whether anyone knew a remedy. A woman brought her ailing infant to the captive. Professing no medical art, the captive laid the child on her own rough bed of haircloth (cilicium), prayed to Christ, and returned the child healed (Rufinus, HE 10.11). Word of the cure spread, and with it the captive’s reputation.

The Healing of the Queen

The report reached the queen of the Iberians, who herself fell gravely ill. Having heard of the cures, she had herself carried to the captive — for the captive, in humility, declined to come to the palace. The captive prayed over her, and the queen was restored to health. Pressed to name the reward she wished, the captive asked for nothing but gave the credit where, in the narrative, it belongs: the healing was the work of Christ, the God she served — “the God of the captive,” as the account repeatedly frames Him. The queen returned to the palace a believer, and began to urge her husband toward the same faith.

The King and the Darkness

The king remained unmoved by his wife’s urging — until the episode that became the heart of the whole tradition. While he was out hunting, a thick darkness suddenly fell over the forest at midday; the light failed, the path vanished, and the king’s whole company was blinded and lost. Having found the gods of his fathers useless in his terror, the king at last called upon the God of the captive woman, vowing that if he were delivered he would worship that God. As soon as he prayed, Rufinus says, the darkness lifted and the day returned (Rufinus, HE 10.11).

This is the founding theophany of Georgian Christianity in its earliest form. The king came home converted, summoned the captive, and from her sought instruction in the worship of the God who had heard him. Already in Rufinus the structure is fixed that the Georgian Life will later elaborate into the hunt on Mt. Thoti and the king’s prayer to “the God of Nino” (see The Darkness and the Prayer) — but in Rufinus the king is unnamed, as is the woman.

The Church and the Miracle of the Column

On the captive’s instruction, the king summoned the people and announced the new faith, and they set about building a church. The captive directed its plan. When the walls were raised and the columns were to be set in place, one of them — Rufinus specifies the column that was to be set after the others — could not be raised: though hauled by machines and by the strength of all the men and oxen, it would not stand upright on its base. Night fell with the column still down.

The captive remained alone in the church through the night in prayer. At dawn the king and the people found the column upright — not set by their efforts but raised of itself, hanging poised a little above its pedestal, suspended in the air, and then settling gently and exactly onto its base as the captive completed her prayer (Rufinus, HE 10.11). This miracle, more than the healings, convinced the whole people of the power of the captive’s God. It is the seed of the great Georgian tradition of the living pillar, Svetitskhoveli, treated in its own place (see The Living Pillar) — though the elaborate Georgian version, with the cedar over Sidonia’s grave and the myrrh-flowing column, belongs to the later layer.

The Embassy to Constantine

Finally, on the captive’s counsel, the king sent an embassy to the Emperor Constantine, asking that priests and clergy be sent to complete the conversion of the people and to consecrate the church. Constantine, Rufinus reports, received the request with joy and sent clergy to the Iberians (Rufinus, HE 10.11). This detail matters historically as well as devotionally: it ties the conversion of Iberia firmly into the reign of Constantine (died 337), which is one of the anchors of the contested dating of the event (see Christianity as State Religion and the dating note in The Darkness and the Prayer).

The Texture of Rufinus’s Telling

It is worth attending to how Rufinus tells the story, because the texture confirms the source’s character. He frames the whole account modestly, as something he learned from a man he knew, and he reports the ethnographic detail — the custom of carrying sick children door to door — with the curiosity of a writer relaying a foreign tradition rather than composing a hagiographic set-piece. The miracles, though wonders, are few and restrained: there is no genealogy for the captive, no vision, no named cast, no relic. The captive herself is drawn in a few strokes — austere, prayerful, humble, declining reward and even declining to come to the queen’s palace — and these strokes are precisely the marks of holiness, not the apparatus of legend. Rufinus is a writer of his age and believes the wonders he reports; but the manner of his report is that of a man passing on what he was told by an Iberian who knew, not that of a hagiographer building a cult. This is a large part of why the account carries the weight it does (see The Earliest Layer Assessed).

Bacurius and the Chain of Memory

The figure of Bacurius repays a closer look, because he is the hinge on which the source’s authority turns. He was an Iberian of royal blood who made a career in the Roman army, rising to command Palestine (dux Palaestinae) and later to high posts in the imperial military establishment, and falling at last in 394 at the Battle of the Frigidus, the decisive clash between Theodosius and the usurper Eugenius. Rufinus, living as a monk on the Mount of Olives in the 380s, knew him there and, by his own account, heard the story of his country’s conversion from his lips (Rufinus, HE 10.11; Amidon, notes). The chain of memory is therefore short and traceable: from the Iberian royal milieu in which the conversion was remembered, to a royal Iberian who became a Roman general, to a careful Latin historian who knew him personally and wrote within a generation. For a fourth-century conversion narrative this is an unusually well-documented transmission, and it is the reason scholars treat Rufinus’s account as preserving a genuine Iberian tradition rather than a free composition — even as they read its miracles as the hagiography they are (T. D. Barnes, “The Conversion of Iberia”; cf. the discussion in the Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database, Oxford, record E01402).

The Greek Historians

Within a generation Rufinus’s account passed into the Greek ecclesiastical-history tradition, where it is retold — abridged, but recognizably the same story, and with the woman still anonymous — by Socrates Scholasticus (HE 1.20, “How the Iberians received the Faith of Christ”), Sozomen (HE 2.7, same title), and Theodoret (HE 1.24, numbered 1.23 in the NPNF edition, “Conversion of the Iberians”). These depend on Rufinus directly or through the intermediate Greek tradition; none of them adds a name. That every independent witness of the earliest layer leaves the captive nameless is the decisive fact the next file weighs.

References

Rufinus of Aquileia. Historia Ecclesiastica 10.11. Latin: ed. Mommsen, in Eusebius Werke II.2 (GCS 9.2). English: Philip R. Amidon, trans., The Church History of Rufinus of Aquileia, Books 10 and 11. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 1.20; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 2.7; Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 1.24 (= 1.23 NPNF). In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vols. 2–3.
On Bacurius: prosopographical and historical notes in Amidon (1997); cf. T. D. Barnes, “The Conversion of Iberia,” and the discussion of Bacurius’s career as dux Palaestinae and comes domesticorum.
The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database (Oxford), record E01402 (collation of the Latin and Greek parallels).