Seminar CLXXXII: John of Nikiû on persecution

I promised something more substantial and so here it is, a note about a paper of late May 2021 that is, I think, still interesting stuff. Two levels of background you need: first, that what with our seminar series at the University of Leeds being forced online like everything else we did in that time of pandemic, the then-Director of the Institute of Medieval Studies, Dr Alaric Hall, took the chance to broaden our reach a bit, both in terms of nationality of speakers and of topics of discussion, which is how on 25th May we were hearing from Dr Felege-Selam Solomon Yirga, then and now at the University of Tennessee, with the title, “The Chronicle of John of Nikiu”. Second, John of Nikiû—who?

There are basically no images of either John of Nikiû or of anything of his era left from his old city, so the fact that Dr Yirga has given a paper or two about him now means that he himself is the main response to image searches for John. So I thought, why not. Here is Dr Yirga at Dumbarton Oaks ahead of giving a different paper about John there the year before.

OK, you have possibly just heard of Bishop John of Nikiû if you studied the era of Islamic conquests for more than a week but otherwise chances are poor. Nikiû is in Egypt, and a history that John wrote, a universal history in good Church tradition (though which Church? coming to that) running from Adam to the arrival of Islam in Egypt, is one of the earliest sources we have for that latter event. Unfortunately, it also exists only in quite a late Ge’ez version of an Arabic translation of what was probably originally a Coptic text based on Greek sources, and we don’t have all of it.¹ Phew. But better than nothing, am I right?

Now, Dr Yirga did his Ph. D. on John and his chronicle and so is better equipped to answer that question than most, and the way he chose to go about it was to say, let’s stop for a moment trying to work out what John was doing in his text about the events for which he is the immediate primary source, and see what he does with older events where we have some outside idea what happened and can thus work out his agenda. And that proves to be interesting, if not very conclusive.

There are several busts and statues supposedly of Diocletian, which show at least three clearly different men, so as is my wont, I’m going for an inarguably contemporary, if stereotypical, image of him, in the form of this billon nummus struck at Heraclea in 295-296 CE, which is in the University of Leeds Brotherton Library, Thackray Collection, olim CC/TH/ROM/IMP/812

The episode that Dr Yirga took for examination was the persecution of Christians under the Roman Emperor Diocletian, the only Roman emperor ever, I think, to retire and die peacefully at home.² (Tetricus I might also count, but I digress.³) Naturally you would not expect Diocletian’s persecution to receive a neutral press in Christian sources written after the eventual victory of their religion in the empire, and indeed it usually does not, because apart from anything else it has historically been an excellent period in which to situate the careers of martyrs whose lives need, um, filling out for lack of information.⁴ But John went somewhere else with it. Firstly, he made Diocletian himself Egyptian; secondly, he originated the persecution in a rebellion against Diocletian in Alexandria, making the anti-Christian measures part of how Diocletian suppressed this rising in his homeland; then thirdly he gave him this Nebuchadnezzar-like divine madness and illness which sent him off to the West as a hated exile, from which he returned when cured but never to rule again. (Actually he just went on and off with the persecutions until his retirement and in most other respects is regarded as one of Rome’s great reformers and generally a success.⁴) Now, some of this has at least some connection, either to history as we currently reckon it or at least to sources John had: thus, though Diocletian was from the Balkans by birth, I believe, he did face a rebellion in Egypt in 284 by one Domitius Alexander (though there was nothing Christian about it as far as we know, but John’s spin is coming here partly from older chronicler John Malalas); and of course, from a point of view in Egypt he did head off to the West and stop ruling as a result, even if the causation John put in there was all his own.⁵ But mostly, not.

So where did this leave the search for agenda? This was where most of the questions went, because the answer seems to be: to understand this bit you have to know the rest of the text as well. An awful lot of its agenda elsewhere appears to be to defend Christian Orthdoxy as it was mostly seen from Coptic Alexandria (that is, the Maiophysite persuasion of Christianity) against the deviant creed of the wider Empire (what is usually called Chalcedonian Christianity, including modern Catholicism and Orthodoxy both). How either Diocletian or the Islamic conquests fitted into that for our chronicler thus became slowly less clear. Matters were complicated here by one of the other people who does, Philip Booth, turning up in the virtual audience and giving a short spontaneous response, which suggested apart from anything else that the whole thing might really be an older Greek chronicle given only a gloss and translation by John of Nikiû. Dr Yirga thought that the work was all John’s and his sources’, but that this gave him a very complex identity, whose general position was roughly to reject Chalcedon but really want the Empire back, and thus try to make Egypt, and Alexandrian Christianity, central to its history where possible. And I could buy that, though I’d need to, you know, read it to be sure. And this has definitely pushed John’s Chronicle up my reading list, just because overall it sounds considerably odder than I’d expected!

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1. You can read it as John, Bishop of Nikiu, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, translated from Zotenberg’s Ethiopic Text, trans. R. H. Charles (London 1913), on the Internet Archive here.

2. There are many works on Diocletian and his colleagues, because one of the things he did was recruit trusted co-emperors, another thing of which he seems to have been uniquely capable until Constantine I succeeded one of them. Of those I’ve seen I’d recommend Roger Rees, Diocletian and the Tetrarchy, Debates and Documents in Ancient History (Edinburgh 2004), on JSTOR here, over most of the others.

3. There isn’t actually much on the Gallic Empire as a phenomenon, oddly, so you might have to start with John F. Drinkwater, The Gallic Empire: separatism and continuity in the northwestern provinces of the Roman Empire AD 260-74, Historia 52 (Stuttgart 1987).

4. For the normal representation of Diocletian in Christian sources, see Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum, trans. J. L. Creed, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford 1984). Nonetheless he has the reputation as a grand reformer with a true vision for the empire who may have saved it, if not from either of almost-caste-like restrictions on social mobility or hyper-inflation. See as samples of the new panegyric Stephen Williams, Diocletian and the Roman Recovery (London 1985); Bill Leadbetter, Galerius and the Will of Diocletian (London 2009); Alan Bowman, “Diocletian and the First Tetrarchy, A. D. 284-305” and Elio Lo Cascio, “The New State of Diocletian and Constantine: From the Tetrarchy to the Reunification of the Empire”, both in Alan Bowman, Averil Cameron & Peter Garnsey (eds), The Crisis of Empire, AD 193-337, The Cambridge Ancient History 12, 2nd edn. (Cambridge 2005), pp. 67–89 and 170–183; and as an answer to one of my sidewipes there, A. J. Boudewijn Sirks, “Did the Late Roman Government Try to Tie People to Their Profession or Status?” in Tyche – Contributions to Ancient History, Papyrology and Epigraphy Vol. 8 (Vienna 1993), pp. 159–175.

5. Malalas can be found (if you’re lucky) in John Malalas, The Chronicle of John Malalas: a Translation, transl. Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael Jeffreys & Roger Scott, Byzantina Australiensia 4 (Melbourne 1986).

Some of what’s been going on

Hullo again; we might be back on air…

So, if you’re still reading after all this time, I want to firstly to thank you for that; thankyou all, you are my reassurance that I have some kind of an interested public at times when this is otherwise hard to determine. Secondly, I want to say something very brief by way of outline about what was behind this hiatus; and then thirdly I want to reflect, likewise briefly, on the utility of this blog. And then I want to get another post up pronto so as to move all this depressing stuff off the top! But some kind of account, all the same, is probably required.

I can and probably should be very short about the reasons behind the hiatus, and as it happens they probably can be summarised as, in recent years (as readers here know well) I have been seeing less and less future in the life academic, at least in the UK, and have been working up side hustles. As yet, these have not been going very well, probably only an extra couple of grand a year, but to find time to make them go I cut down my hours at work at the beginning of the academic year. My workload was accordingly cut down in proportion to that reduction in hours, but, well, it doesn’t feel as if that made much difference except that now I had one fewer days in which to manage it, or else didn’t do the new stuff. The point at which I declared hiatus was roughly when January marking landed, and I’ve been trying ever since then to get out from under that and still keep the other stuff going. Various family problems or needs have also arisen – the one I reported here was the unexpected one – and in the middle of it we’ve had to give up our car which, of course, means a whole range of things become more difficult or expensive or both, not helped by the fact that my bike has been out of commission for most of that time as well and I’ve had no time to fix it. So, blogging has come a perpetual fourth in a race where only three runners can place.

Now, some of this difficulty, I admit, I have made for myself, because I’ve also been trying to keep research projects alive. I have been told both to stop this and to carry on by different people in authority, admittedly – but because no-one else outside Leeds will stop work if I do, I have nonetheless slowly been co-editing a journal issue, though my co-editor is sadly having an even worse time than I am. We’re running late, consequently, but it’s still moving. So that has also been going on behind the scenes, and when it reaches some definitive stage I will write about it on the project blog and signal that here. Alongside shepherding that to press, I now have only one article left to finish, hopefully both done by the time of the International Medieval Congress, and then I might even be able to return to Borrell!

But, when you have to overcome so many obstacles just to do that stuff, and it’s so unclear that anyone will read it when it does come out – I’m watching my H-index drop, my royalties for reproductions shrink and what few other indications there is that one has an audience dwindle likewise – it is very hard to see the point. I am of course temperamentally inclined to see the worst in everything, a known problem for which help is being sought, but why in this day and age anyone should care about my corner of tenth-century Europe, or even the other corners of the tenth century and its neighbours in which these days I take an interest, I honestly don’t know most of the time. And if I don’t, how’m I gonna convince anyone else?

Now, in time past a lot of the answer to that question has been this blog. Over the, erk, nearly eighteen years this blog has been running, it’s been a perpetual reassurance that at least some people are interested. And it still is, and I’m grateful for your readership, I am, but the sad fact is that you are a fraction of what there used to be. In fact, that fraction is about a fifth: in 2012, at its peak, this humble blog drew in 191,727 page views, and saw 641 comments. I know (I have published saying) that that is a very empty statistic, especially since half the comments will have been my replies and actually it’s sometimes been a busier conversation since then, but in 2023 the Corner got 37,617 views, total, and that on a steady downward trend from 2012 bar a drop and bounce during 2020-2021, presumably because of the pandemic.¹ I do, admittedly, now have 700+ subscribers as well, and I guess that those of them who are not selling something or just hoping I will link back are the real core audience; hi folks! And I suppose that you fine and discerning people probably rarely actually load the site, so that my stats are really only capturing second-level engagement. Still, 700+ extra page views per post, so about 3,000 a month, 36,000 a year, would not, sadly, turn back the clock very far.

So I have been thinking hard about how far this platform still serves me in my quest for public intellectualhood. By way of perspective, one of the postgraduates at Leeds runs a Substack newsletter on early medieval stuff. Their focus is trendier than mine, and they put much more time into networking on X and elsewhere than I ever would; but they publish on average between once and twice a month, and have over 30,000 subscribers. And y’see, that looks like an audience in a way that this, by now, does not. The interest is out there, but this isn’t finding it. But of course I hardly have the time to start a third blog when I can’t manage to keep up my first (or second), and neither is it clear why a new one would fare differently… (One of my colleagues also has a Substack on early medieval matters or even earlier, for example, and they have been going for a year and a half, posting weekly pretty much, and have, I understand, about 20 subscribers, no typo.² So I don’t mean to suggest that Substack is a magic bullet.)

None of this, as you see, resolves yet into an answer. But the general place I find myself is "this isn’t working", whether it be the academy, my own work in it, my side hustles or this here blog. And this has made it harder than I would have liked to break this hiatus. But still: I have a queue of stuff I wanted and mostly want to write about, and some people who want to read it, and while I definitely do need to find some more of those, you are still here and I wouldn’t wish to disappoint you! So, shortly – tomorrow, in fact, I’ve just scheduled it – something more substantive and less whiny. But I thought you ought to know at least some of what’s been going on, and when it becomes clearer what is going to go on, of course, I will let you know that too.

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1. Jonathan Jarrett, "Views, Comments and Statistics: Gauging and Engaging the Audience of Medievalist Blogging" in Literature Compass Vol. 9 no. 12 (Oxford 2012), pp. 991–995, DOI: 10.1111/lic3.12016.

2. I haven’t provided links here, against my habit, because for various reasons I can’t go into I deem it safer not to in one of these cases and therefore not fair to only in the other. But the successful one is pretty easy to discover even with such search terms as this gives you. The other one, not so much, and therein is some of the rub.