Saints in the Slavic Christian World

The Interaction Between the Slavs and Greek and Latin Christianity

The first Slavic Christian communities that appear in the source materials formed their churches and polities on models that arrived from either Byzantium or Rome. Dimitri Obolensky highlights the tension of this early period in history, where Slavic groups had to negotiate and form a tangible position between their own tradition and the pressure from East and West. Obolensky argues that a sort of “Byzantine commonwealth” was formed slowly between the Slavs and Byzantium in the Balkans and the Danube region.16 The Byzantine culture veiled great influence over what would become the base for medieval culture in these newly Christianized lands. This commonwealth is seen by Obolensky as a counter-sphere to the Latin western world, which had its influence on Great Moravia, Croatia, Bohemia and Poland.17 The Byzantine commonwealth’s influence can be found in early Christian Slavonic literature, as far away as Bohemia, which Svane underlines in his extensive study of the subject. Svane concludes that the early Slavonic literature was not only shaped by the encounter with the Byzantine world, but also contained a free creative innovation by those who have locally adapted it. The Slavs did not just copy the Byzantine Christian culture but perceived it in their own way and, rather, shaped it in a creative manner into their own,18 as the case is with the first Slavic hymn to St. Demetrios. The theme and form might derive from the Byzantines, but Demetrios is in the hymn slowly becoming a “Dimitri”—a new type of a warlike saint. A point often neglected, but so visible in Svane’s study of Slavonic literature, is how far beyond its Byzantine inspirational model the newcomers went. Svane concluded, of a vast study, that the early Slavonic literature did not take all from Byzantium, but only those elements that helped to stabilize the new faith. This religious purpose is no accident, because the new literature was, after all, mainly written by clergy.19 The Cyrillic script is perhaps the best reminder of this. It was shaped by clergymen with an outlook to the Greek world.20 It took its shape from the Greek alphabet, but at the same time is something quite different that created a whole new dimension to think and write in.21 Its main purpose was the translation of the Gospel, but its ramifications were far wider. Obolensky exemplified the creative reshaping of Byzantine culture in the areas influenced by the mission of Constantine and Methodius with the cult of St. Demetrios. Methodius and Cyril-Constantine did not only bring the Gospel and the basis of the future written language, but also the cult of the saint from their hometown of Thessaloniki. It is no coincidence that St. Demetrios appears in the first Church Slavonic texts, as he was the patron saint of Cyril and Methodius and their hometown.22 The historical roots of the cult in Thessaloniki are, however, debated.23 A comparable version of the saint’s hagiography made during the period of the Christianization of the Slavs was Anastasius the Librarian’s version from 876 A.D. This particular version was made and sent to the Carolingian Emperor Charles the Bald (d. 877). This version highlights both the broad appeal of the saint in Greek Christendom and also the lines of communication between the Carolingian empire and the Byzantine.

The hymns to St. Demetrios was one of the first translated and recrafted material in the new Slavonic language, which therefor became well known and widespread in the many Slavic-speaking lands.24 As Obolensky remarked, the spread of this cult is perhaps one of the best examples of the extent of cultural exchange between various newly established Slavic realms and Byzantium. However, Obolensky and Svane’s view on the early Christian conversion might have been too much under the influence of a romantic and pan-Slavic heroic image of Cyril and Methodius, whose impact might have been over-estimated due to a search for a common Slavic world in the making. The conversions of the Slavs were perhaps a much more gradual work where singular missionaries made little difference, as Tibor Živković indirectly point out in his analysis of the conversions of the Serbs and Croats during the reign of Byzantine Emperor Basil I (d. 886), shortly after Cyril and Methodius departure to Moravia. In the Greek sources of that time, there seems to be no recognition of Methodius and Cyril as the crucial personages behind the conversion of the Slavs.25

Although the Moravian mission of Cyril and Methodius abruptly came to an end, it had left a Christian legacy in the area26, reflected, among other things, in the development of local saints’ cults in the tenth and eleventh centuries. One of these new cults was devoted to bishop Vojtěch, also known as Adalbert of Prague (ca. 956–997), who was killed during his missionary activities among the Prussians. Despite his sainthood, his missionary effort seems to have been fruitless in the short term. In the long term, Adalbert’s martyrdom became the basis of a rich hagiography influencing the religious and lay culture of Bohemia, Poland and Hungary. Another example, Duke Wenceslaus I of Bohemia, also known as Václav, who is an important figure of Czech hagiography and history. The stories of his life and martyrdom in many of its variants, versions were widespread throughout the entire Central Europe. Saint Václav might be the oldest known Slavic saint that was venerated from Anglo-Saxony in the west to Kyiv in the east.

The murder of this probably petty duke became a crucial instrument in later dynastic claims to power—not only by hailing him as a symbolic Christian ruler, but also because of his Christian upbringing. This specific model of new modeled sainthood and conversion integrated both western and eastern traits. Notably, it was both recorded in the Slavic scripts and in Latin. Václav’s profile seems to be built on the model of warrior martyrs and rightful Christian rulers from the east. According to Gábor Klaniczay, he is a “pre-Christian model of anointed rulers”; as Norman Ingham added, he inspired a new model of sanctity linked to the newly Christianised lands lying to the north and north-east of the former Roman limes. This particular model seemed not only suitable to the Serbian, Bulgarian, Rus’ ruler martyrs hailed in a manner like Václav, but also to Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian rulers in the same period.

The profile of the ruler saints of the periphery of Europe makes a remarkable pattern of development in the ninth to –eleventh centuries outside the main centers of Latin and Greek Christianity. It shows not only the cultural and religious connection, but also independent reinterpretation of Christianity and power, especially after the Great Schism. As John Lind remarked, there does seem to be a cultural world shaped at these Northern and Eastern peripheries, which flowed back to the Greek- and Latin-speaking world. The rulers, who become saints, do not come only from the Slavic world. There are also Scandinavian kings, who became saints—Canute IV (d. 1086) and Olaf II Haraldsson (d. 1030). Their profiles were created following the Byzantine warrior-saints models and Germanic anointed kingship, which in turn became icons of both Rus’ and Byzantine churches, like the ones found in the Byzantine Church of Nativity in Bethlehem.27

Mihai Dragnea observed that after the Great Schism, the papacy tried to centralize and standardize the Latin rite in Scandinavia (and probably also in the Central European Slavic lands, to some extent) by rejecting all Orthodox influences in the Scandinavian churches. In this way, the cult of St. Olaf, perhaps the most famous saint in the North, was carefully instrumentalized. The Catholicization of the cult of St. Olaf was possible by passing over in silence any connection to the Byzantine Church. At the same time, the Byzantine influence was fading due to the new imperial political ideology focused mainly on Constantinople.28

The cult of the saint rulers originated at a time when the influence of Rome and Constantinople on the Slavs was great. Byzantine—as well as Latin—religious practice was not a single coherent form, but developed out of late Roman practice and Greek ideals of worship. The spread of martyr cults in Roman lands paved the way for later saints, the cults of which, in many ways, became the most widespread and popular form of Christianity in the medieval period. However, it was not an unproblematic religious practice with its popular forms of icons, hymns and adorations. The iconoclastic struggles in Byzantium in the eighth and ninth centuries underline this, but they also attest that the veneration of icons was such a deep practice among clergy, monks and the popular masses that it could not be removed by the emperors by force.29 The various Slavic communities came in contact with these traditions through diplomacy, trade and wars with neighboring Christian realms from the sixth to the tenth century.

The early Slavic cults develop from points of departure in the Greek and Latin world, like the cult of St. Demetrios, but also attest to a wide form of Christianization of what is now known as the eastern parts of Central Europe and the internal cultural bounds and communication that stretched from Kyiv to Prague and all the way onto the walls of Thessaloniki. The interplay between the various regions, as further discussed by several authors in this book, has for long been noticed by Norman W. Ingham, who continually argued in his many analysis of medieval historiography of that region that close interlinked cultural lines existed in this area. Ingham notes how the Slavic culture was not homogenous, but at least one with interdependence and communication across the vast geographical space of Eastern and Central Europe.30 In the early shaping of Slavic polities and ecclesiastical structures, this becomes clear through the new local saints. These saints played a major role, because they were new Christian symbols and mediated between the new faith and the local customs.31 Obolensky, Ingham and Svane, however, seem to overlook that the interplay is both between and within the Greek and Latin Christian culture of the ninth to –eleventh century and the many new local ones, which this work tries to nuance and discuss.

Saints as Symbols of Conversion and Popular Culture

Historiography of the early Slavic communities has often fixed on the chronicles and the external evidence of events imprinted in Latin and Greek sources. The hagiographies and religious stories have either been read too literally, as exact descriptions of what happened, or dismissed as stories without much basis in actual events. We would argue that the main point of this book is to support the following argument: that neither option is viable. Hagiographies, legends, vitae and other forms of religious literature are not history in a modern sense. These are sources born of a distinct religious and ideological points of view embedded into a specific context and way of thinking. It might say very little about what actually happened, if the vita is the only source. On the contrary, it says a lot about the author and the community that the said author was born out of. The sources tell of thoughts, imagination and norms that governed the societies—and perhaps even more, what the author wished their societies to be like. The virtues of the saints were modeled according to didactic image; in this respect, they were not so distant from the “mirrors for princes” (specula principum), which told the rulers how they should behave if they wanted to become true Christians. In this way, the religious literature is a witness to the conversion and difficulties in imposing a Christian moral and culture on the newly baptized communities. The stories of the saints seem to have been a strong weapon in the process. The deaths of rulers, as Václav, or clergymen, as Adalbert, were used as an opportunity to teach about Christianity. The violent deaths of these rulers and bishops, often by the hands of pagans, show that the process of conversion was not a smooth one. There were early set-backs, and there also seems to have been a constant fear that rulers might turn back to their old traditions. Alternatively, perhaps, this was a literary form that the medieval writers maintained from the Classic Roman period and stories of emperor Julian the Apostate’s turn back to the old ways. Nevertheless, it witness the transformation and the need to reaffirm the Christian norms.

Susana Torres Prieto observes how difficult it is to make a firm and coherent definition of hagiographies or a typology of the saints—both in Byzantine sources and Slavic one.32 In Chapter 7, Torres Prieto notes how hagiographies (and thereby saints) are often divided in two major categories—1) the martyrion on the trial and death of a saint and 2) the vita, which is often a more extended narrative. The martyrion and vita can secondly be subcategories according to the various shorter segments, such as stories of miracles, translation of relics or martyrdom that recast biblical models of death (such as Christ’s very own). In Eastern Roman hagiographical literature, this eventually develops into a more sophisticated system and hierarchy of saint ranging from the Apostles and equal to apostles to minor saints and monastic figures with limited appeal. Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen argues, in a study of the “The Elusive Quality of Saints” in Latin Christendom, that the saints also contained a various form of functions that can illustrate their role in this period.33 Wangsgaard Jürgensen notes three major dimensions and a whole series of subdivisions of saintly functions, such as 1) their transformative power 2) the use of them as arguments and statements and as metaphors. The transformative power is in short, the saint’s and their hagiographies “ability of saints to alter the mind and fabric of the location where they were introduced, or at least the belief that the saints were able to accomplish this.”34 This particular dimension is closely related to the ruler saints and missionary saints, who marked a shift from paganism to Christianity. Wangsgaard Jürgensen further argues that saints were not only “devotional foci, [focus of devotion]” but also part of “rhetorical discourses” as arguments and statements.35 They embodied the shift in religiosity, a local sense of identity or perhaps rather a perception of what a right identity (Christian) might be. However, the saint was also a metaphor for a world beyond the ecclesial one, as Wangsgaard Jürgensen notes. The saint was a

metaphorical way of thinking. Saints are conceived as representatives of something other than themselves, and their primary function is to create understanding. That is, they are concrete expressions of otherwise ungraspable divine qualities.36

Wangsgaard Jürgensen’s discussion also points to a gray area in our knowledge of early Slavic societies, which is the relation between the wider popular culture and that of the elite, who must have been behind the creation of written sources. It requires skill and resources to produce a hagiography. There must therefore be a community or elite behind the production to some extent—either within the Slavic societies or among a religious or political elite abroad. The questions is, therefore, if these sources reflects only the elite and their beliefs—or if it was an expression of a wider cultural phenomena.

The legends of a particular saint arose either from elite culture or more popular beliefs and rumors. The process might have run in various directions, such as how a saint’s life was read aloud in church services and then in turn became the background for local folk stories and toponyms. The precise process of canonization is better documented, as the medieval period’s progress and archaeological remains provide some clues to the puzzle. This is not the case for the early ones, where we hardly know how far and wide a saint was venerated among the general population. A few flickering clues include the toponyms, names of churches and material culture, which has been preserved. It is therefore crucial to recall that the sources are not a direct path to popular local beliefs and practice, and we might speculate about how oral history and folk tales shaped stories or shaped by hagiographies, but it will remain speculation.

Overview of this Volume

These difficulties do not change the simple fact that the study of locally venerated saints is a road into medieval societies. Saints exists and are sustained for a reason, which leads us back to centers of religious, cultural or secular power. Rulers and church-leaders alike need symbols and narratives to maintain and expand power. The hagiographies provide therefore an opportunity to study how power was brokered, shared and grasped by these elites. This book follows the idea that saints are an outward expression of how Christianity became embedded or “localized” in the newly Christianized societies in East-Central Europe. This localization requires raw power to not only break down former tradition, but also establish and maintain new ones. The saints appear for this reason. They are external evidence for the shaping of a new form of religious and secular power that seeks to turn Christianity into a pillar supporting their power-base. It is a two-way process. Christianity is a powerful ideology that provide rulers with allies and contacts, but at the same time needs rulers to invest into it in order to set deep roots. The local saints and their cult provide a tangible form of Christianity that can suppress older tradition and pave ways for new form of worship.

This is the point of departure for this work, which contains 12 chapters that explore this outlook across Eastern and Central Europe—the Slavic world. Chronologically the topics strech from the rule of the Macedonian dynasty in Eastern Rome around the eighth to ninth century and until the rise of the Muscovite rule in the sixteenth century. The main focus are Slavic religious traditions, but not exclusively, because, as this anthology demonstrates, Greek and Baltic traditions, among others, intermingled with the Slavic ones.

The opening Chapter 2 looks closer on the foundational line of Slavonic Christianity and sainthood in form of Cyril and Methodius (the Slavic apostles) theology. Ljubica Jovanović focuses on the iconophile (love of images, icons) theology, particularly in the context of crucial Slavic source known as Vita Constantini and its history. In this text, the iconophile theology is expressed emphasizes the sanctity of all human faculties and the material world due to divine revelation through incarnation. The chapter discusses the influence of Cyril and Methodius, on iconophile theology and through them is mediation into the Slavic world. In its analysis of Vita Constantini, Jovanović points out how this hagiographic text embodies iconophile theology and principles. Iconophile theology, according to the study, appealed to all social strata. This was possible because the theology insisted on the revelation in the material world, which appealed to the common folk and the intellectual theological elite. Jovanović argues that iconophile theology has been somewhat forgotten in narrations about the contributions of Cyril and Methodius, concluding that the iconophile theology’s influence on Slavonic library can be found not only in the content of the literature but also in how the manuscripts are formatted.

This is followed by the first case study in Chapter 3. In this chapter, Yanina Ryier delves into the conversion process of pagan rulers of Lithuania in thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The chapter underscores how religion and power were intertwined entities, with rulers often viewed as sacred figures chosen by God to safeguard their subjects. In Ryier’s opinion, the connection culminated in the sacralization of power, further creating and sustaining a system of symbols and rituals to glorify rulers. The chapter largely focuses on the ruling elite of Lithuania’s late embrace of Christianity, despite the prominent role Christianity played in increasing a ruler’s power and legitimacy in nearby countries, such as Poland or Ruthenian lands. Ryier argues that this late conversion might have been due to a fear of losing political independence. Therefore, pagan rulers exploited Christian doctrines for specific political aims while maintaining their beliefs. Moreover, Lithuania was highly multicultural and multiconfessional, with the ruling elite being pagan and the majority of the population Orthodox Christians. Despite that religious diversity, no strong political antagonism seems to be observed in the source material and the first rulers often manipulated religion for politics. Overall, this chapter sheds light on the complexity of religion, power, and politics in the historical context of Lithuania thereby highlighting the dualistic culture which allowed paganism and Christianity to coexist in a brokering of power and sainthood.

Ryier’s analysis is extended in Chapter 4, which is again dedicated to Lithuania and Ruthenia. In this chapter, Vytas Jankauskas argues that a member of the ruling Lithuanian elite, Prince Voyshelk, early on embraced Christianity to much resentment from other Lithuanian nobles. Jankauskas argues that Voyshelk might be the political and real figure behind the later popular saint Eliseus the Confessor. The sources to Voyshelk and Eliseus provides some historical context about Prince Voyshelk’s conversion to Christianity and his establishment of a monastery between Novogrudok and Lithuania called the Lauryshevo Monastery. Jankauskas further discusses Prince Voyshelk’s life at court, relation to his influential father Grand Duke of Lithuania Mindaugas (d. 1263) and Voyshelk’s eventual decision to become a monk.

A similarly influential, yet rarely discussed, saint is St. Parascheva of Epibatae the Younger, whose story and long trail of relics is detailed in Chapter 5. There are many legends and stories around the cult of St. Parascheva of Epibatae, a saint celebrated particularly in Southeastern Europe. Evelina Mineva documents the long journey of St. Parascheva’s relics and how they finally came to rest in Metropolitan Cathedral in Iași, Romania.37 The relics were moved under the Voivode of Moldavia, Vasile Lupu, who obtained permission from the Sultan for the transfer of the relics. The many legends regarding the relocation and certain events around the saint is further discussed by Mineva, who reassess them on a new examination of historical documents. In addition, Mineva points to a thus far unknown chapel, which contained the relics of St. Parascheva, St. Theophano, and Michael the Soldier of Potuka. Here, the relics were kept locked away, possibly because they were considered significant or because of their potential religious influence on local Muslims. Chapter 5 provides a case study of how the power and sainthood are brokered through relics, their transfer and the text revolving around the pilgrimages. In doing so, Mineva points to the dynamic between text, material and perception of sacrality among the Slavic and Romanian groups.

In Chapter 6, the focus is returned to the saints and their cults as symbols of conversion and power in the Northern Slavic region. Maria Starnawska discusses the role of Saint Adalbert and Five Brothers Martyrs in the integration of Poland into the Christian Europe. Despite the brief stay of the saints in Poland, their presence, following martyrdom and, later, their cult helped establish stronger ties between the Polish realm and Latin Christendom. Saint Adalbert emerged as a substantial patron of the Piast monarchy, who was the first historical ruling dynasty of Poland. Starnawska highlights the relation between the monarchy and the saint through an examination of the hagiographical texts and the Mass of St. Adalbert that was composed at Reichenau monastery in the early eleventh century.

The Rus’ perception of sainthood is discussed in the following three chapters. In Chapter 7, Susana Torres Prieto argues that early hagiography in Kyivan Rus’ point to a very characteristic typology of saints. Torres placed a group of monastic leaders close to the traditional starets, while other stories of saints life are more connected to the princely dynasty of the Rurikids. In Torres’ view, the Kyivian clerical authors initially imported all hagiographic literature from Byzantium when the new religion was gaining ground. Soon thereafter, the literary genre flourished, and local saints’ lives were eagerly produced in the newly created monasteries. Moreover, particular developments of the wider genre of the vita permitted the recategorization of the lives of princes and grand dukes as hagio-biographies. This specific local form of princely hagiographies does not adhere closely with a coherent adoption of Orthodox ideas on sainthood and on political theology, as formulated by the Eastern Fathers and the Eastern Roman. Torres provides further nuances to the Rus’ hagiographical genres by discussing the theological, textual and sociopolitical aspects that contributed decisively to the specific flourishing of a genre in Kyivan Rus’ aimed at legitimizing the sacrality of the ruling dynasty.

In Chapter 8, Dariya Syroyid further discusses the history of Kyivan Rus’ and dives into an evaluation of Nestor’s writing about Saint Theodosius. Nestor, often associated with the Kyivian Rus’ chronicles, used rhetorical strategies common in the hagiographical genre to legitimize and present Theodosius as a new Kyvian saint. Syroyid points out how hagiography is formed through the use of a rhetorical genre, aiming to persuade the reader of the holiness of the individual in focus. The techniques include use of certain rhetorical elements, biblical quotations, and topoi which can be seen in how Nestor frames Theodosius’ life. An example of this strategy is how Nester connects many miracles performed by Theodosius to ordinary, everyday life. Syroyid emphasizes the exceptional role of Nestor’s authorship, which seems to have been an ascetic exercise for him as well. Nestor wrote about Theodosius to show how he had reached a stage of divinity in which he was beyond human comprehension. Syrioyd frames Nestor’s attempt to do so as a specific practice of witnessing the great mystery of divinity and communicate its form through “speaking in light.”

The Rus’ and Northeastern Slavic hagiographic tradition is summarized and systematized by Karine Åkerman Sarkisian, who in Chapter 9 focuses on the transmission practices in the early hagiography of Rus’ prior to the sixteenth century. Sarkisian discusses the textual practices of Rus’ and Muscovy, and sums up the various streams of hagiographic production at large. In this chapter, Sarkisian notes that the volume of translated saints’ lives is significantly larger in comparison to the newly composed hagiographies of local saints. The production of hagiographies did, however, increase and intensified more systematically in the sixteenth century, particularly under the influence of the Metropolitan Macarius (d. 1563), who led a large-scale mapping of local candidates for canonization. Sarkisian notes how this process drew from various principalities in which the translated accounts of saint’s lives were received and gradually adapted by the Rus’ community. The Eastern Roman saints of the Meneologion became an integral part of the literary system and were later perceived as original Russian compositions.

Scholars have often argued that the hagiographic genre lacked room for originality and innovation—it was instead defined by fixed, recognizable characteristics, as Sarkisian summarizes. The narratives that justify a saints’ elevation often relied on known stories with recurring elements. Sarkisian further explores various methods of medieval scribes used when creating stories of saints, noting that a striking feature of Rus’ hagiography was its tendency to align the feast day of a local saint with that of an Eastern Roman saint of the same name. Eastern Roman vitae were considered an unquestionable model, being absorbed as prototypes and often used as sources of motifs, subjects and even exact biographic details for the creation of local saints’ lives. Sarkisian concludes that these practices reflect a cross-century pattern in hagiographic production in Rus’ before the sixteenth century.

A similar overarching process of absorbing and alignment can be noted in Chapter 10. In this chapter, Silvio Košćak and Kristijan Kuhar explore the translation of the Latin mass into Old Church Slavonic in the eleventh century. The authors discuss the evolution of the concept of sainthood and how it expanded from solely including martyrs to encompassing those who lived virtuous lives in these Latin inspired Old Church Slavonic texts. The chapter presents a historical and liturgical overview of the development of votive masses, which were considered to establish a stronger connection between heaven and earth. To underpin this, Košćak and Kuhar provide a textological analysis of the Glagolitic and Latin text, highlighting similarities and differences in both texts. They conclude that the Glagolitic translators used Latin liturgical books as exemplars for their translations of prayers and mass forms. In this western case, it was not the Greek Synaxarion or Menelogion but rather the liturgical Latin books that were used as the point of departure, which can be seen in the different approach to the Virgin Mary (rather than the Birthgiver-of-God, Theotokos, as the Eastern Churches often name her). Košćak and Kuhar present the newest methods of theological and liturgical treatment of Glagolitic texts, such as missals.

This western perspective is further unfolded by Aliaksandra Valodzina, who in Chapter 11 maps how the Waldensians, a medieval Christian movement, viewed the concept of saints. Valodzina identifies how the Waldensian movement did not accept nor venerate the saints recognized by the Catholic Church unless they were mentioned in the Bible, especially the Apostles. The Waldensians, as critics of the Catholic Church and self-viewed as the “real Church of Christ,” did not generally venerate Latin canonized saints. Their Waldensian doctrine was instead strongly rooted in Scripture, seen generally as something in opposition to the Roman Catholic Church. Valodzina notes how the Waldensians throughout Europe believed that saints in heaven could not hear the prayers of the faithful, nor intercede for them due to their state of heavenly joyfulness, which reflected in their lack of adherence to Catholic prayer methods like the Ave Maria. There were, however, different beliefs and practices among the Waldensian clergy and laity, with some lay believers still showing veneration for certain saints, particularly the Virgin Mary, while others refused to do so. Valodzina concludes with an emphasis on the nuances of the Waldensian perspective on saint veneration, which was a complex and diverse nature of beliefs. The movement from northern Italy to Slavic regions was diverse, and the position on saints reflect the tensions between organized doctrine of the Waldensians versus popular religion among the lay people.

The function and role of saints is further investigated in Chapters 12 and 13, which relates to Latin vitae of Slavic saints. In Chapter 12, Wawrzyniec Kowalski discusses and analyzes how sanctity was bestowed upon kings in medieval texts. Kowalski primarily focuses on the Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja, a highly discussed text, in which several holy kings appear, such as Svetopelek, Vladimir, and Zvonimir. In the chapter, Kowalski discusses the presentation and function of these saints. Svetopelek is, as an example, defined as a holy king due to his role in unifying the kingdom of the Slavs through religion and his ordering of ecclesiastical administration. This form of governance aligns with the idea of a rex sanctissimus (most holy king) model. On the other hand, Vladimir and Zvonimir, who are both described as martyr kings, are characterized by their devotion to their community, but each had different ruling styles. Vladimir is portrayed as a tragic ruler, while Zvonimir is closer to a rex iustus (just king) model. However, both figures were reportedly assassinated, leading to a change of power. Kowalski concludes by discussing different models of royal sanctity throughout the Chronicle and relates it to a wider scope of saintly model in Europe.

Emil Hilton Saggau continues the discussion in Chapter 13, where he explore military and ruler saints. Hilton Saggau discusses the various models and literary tropes of early Slavic military ruler saints in both Western-Latin and Eastern-Greek traditions by primarily examining hagiographies of saints Václav and Jovan Vladimir. In the Latin tradition, military saints seem mostly to have been depicted through biblical metaphors and therefore often portrayed as benevolent rulers. This function is often expressed through images in which the saint was protected by angels and was willing to make self-sacrifices for their people. A literary topos related to the shepherd motif of the Biblical tradition. The Greek tradition, however, veers toward a more military depiction of soldier saints as fearless warriors, who do not face persecution for their faith, but rather die due to internal power struggles. In the chapter, Hilton Saggau explores how Slavic traditions offer a mix of these influences, embodying imagery from both the Latin and Greek texts. A unique aspect found in these Slavic hagiographies is that they depict the struggle for power within the family, a theme absents in both Greek and Latin versions. Hilton Saggau concludes that the military saints are more often illustrations of the embodiments of Christ and his death, rather than as a form of a confessing saint. This stressing of the death might reflect an attempt to justify their sainthood, as they did not die as obvious defenders of Christendom. The chapter highlights distinct traditions and evolving perceptions of the entangled sainthood among Slavic, Greek, and Latin traditions, showing how these depictions served to justify the saints’ rule and position within their respective religious and cultural contexts.

Overall, this book offers a variety of perspectives and cases on saints in the Slavic world, where the literature and legends showcase the patterns of conversion, transmission of ideas and literary dependency. The book is the product of two lively online seminars on “The Saints in the Slavic Christian world (900–1400)–Assessing Culture, Power, Religion and Language in Slavic Hagiographies and Religious Literature,” jointly hosted by Lund University, Ghent University and the Balkan History Association in January 2022. The editors would like to extent thanks to all who participated in the online seminars during the COVID-19 lockdown and to Lund University’s Center for Theology and Religious studies for funding the editorial work, an editorial workshop in Lund, and the Open Access nature of this anthology. We would like to thank Professor Samuel Rubenson, Professor Stephan Borgehammar, and Professor Dieter Stern for their initial support and encouragement for this project.