Introduction

To define what a warrior saint was in the Byzantine tradition is seemingly simple: he was a saint who was a warrior. However, once one plunges into the enormous literature in which they figure, difficulties arise. The first is that authors are selective. They restrict their studies to a small number of warrior saints for evident reasons. Thus Hippolyte Delehaye in his magisterial work, Les légendes grecques des saints militaires, limited himself to the members of what he called the état-major. Miodrag Markovic´ published what is, to my mind, the best synthetical study of warrior saints, but it is focused on the echelon of them painted in the church at Decˇani. Paul Underwood also published a detailed study of warrior saints, but it is again focused on a single echelon, which is in the parecclesion of the Kariye Camii at Istanbul. Many studies are a section of a more comprehensive one, such as Anna Marava-Chatzinikolaou’s paragraphs devoted to warrior saints in her all-embracing article ‘Heilige’ in the Lexikon für byzantinische Kunst. Henry Maguire has also written important pages about the characteristics of their portraits in comparison with those of other categories of saints.