17 Introduction plenty of dangers to be worried about when travelling in the Mediterranean: natural dangers, such as storms at sea, but also dangers due to political instability or the lack of law and order enforcement, such as danger from robbers or pirates.22 A medieval Greek prayer copied in multiple manuscripts, including an early tenth-century version copied in southern Italy, illustrates that these dangers were indeed on travellers’ minds.23 This prayer may thus illustrate the negative perception of mobility that has been taken as the dominant Byzantine view in scholarship so far. Εὐχὴ ἐπὶ ἀποδημούντων24 Ὁ Θεός, ὁ Θεὸς ἡμῶν, ὁ συνοδεύσας τῷ θεράποντί σου Ἰακώβ, καὶ συγξενιτεύσας τῷ δούλῳ σου Ἰωσήφ, συνόδευσον καὶ τῷ δούλῳ σου τούτῳ, Δέσποτα, καὶ ῥῦσαι αὐτὸν ἀπὸ πειρατηρίων καὶ ληστηρίων καὶ πάσης χειμασίας καὶ ἐν εἰρήνῃ καὶ εὐρωστείᾳ ἀποκατάστησον πάσης δικαιοσύνης πρόνοιαν ποιούμενον κατὰ τὰς ἐντολάς σου καὶ πλήρης τῶν βιωτικῶν καὶ ἐπουρανίων σου ἀγαθῶν γενόμενον πάλιν ἐπανελθεῖν εὐδόκησον. Ὅτι σοῦ ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία καὶ ἡ δύναμις.25 A prayer for those setting off to travel God, our God, who travelled together with your servant Jacob, and who shared exile abroad with your servant Joseph, travel along also with your servant here, Lord, and save him from pirates and robbers and from every storm and let him return in peace and with strength, provided that he [your servant] is mindful of every [act of] righteousness according to your commandments, and be pleased that he [your servant] will return again, full of your worldly and heavenly goods. For yours is the kingdom and the power.26 This prayer confirms that a perception of travel as dangerous was one of the responses to mobility. Storms and piracy were on travellers’ minds and prayers were uttered to call upon 22 For a study on banditry in the ninth- to fifteenth century Balkans, see Sophoulis (2020). 23 The prayer has survived in multiple manuscripts, including a southern Italian one (see footnote 25 below). Throughout the dissertation I use the term ‘medieval Greek’ only to refer to the language in which the texts studied were written (‘medieval’ is used to distinguish the language from ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ Greek, while recognising that there was great variety between registers, genres, written and spoken ‘medieval Greek’). The term does not refer to notions of identity or ethnicity. 24 For all Greek citations I will provide the edition used in the footnotes when discussing the text for the first time and indicate how I will refer to the texts thereafter. I will render the citations as presented in the editions, with the exceptions of capitals and iota adscript: for consistency reasons, I will use capitals at the beginning of a sentence, even if they are not represented as such in the editions (e.g., in the edition of Schwartz (1933) of the Canons of the Council of Chalcedon and the edition of Schöll and Kroll (1959) of Justinian’s Novels), and I have changed an occasional iota adscript (also in the edition of Schwartz) to the more conventional rendering of the dative with iota subscript. 25 Prayer 199 in the Ms. Crypt. Γ.β.VII (=gr. 16), in Passarelli (1982), p. 128. My gratitude goes to Claudia Rapp for pointing out these prayers as sources that reveal what aspects of daily life Romans were occupied with. For the team project ‘Daily Life and Religion: Byzantine Prayer Books as Sources for Social History’, see Rapp et al. (2017). 26 Translations throughout this thesis are my own unless otherwise indicated. The translations are as close to the Greek as possible, rather than prioritizing idiomatic English. I
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