ABSTRACT
The monastery of the Zoodochos Pege at Constantinople, erected outside the Land Walls on the site of a natural spring, was a place of worship much favoured by the Byzantines. The spring was identified with the Virgin, who bestowed her grace on the water which possessed miraculous qualities for the healing of many types of disease.1 A tenth-century text describes forty-eight miracles effected at the monastery of the Mother of God ‘at the spring’; many of these involved the cure of emperors or members of the imperial family or the court.2
Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos, writing in the early fourteenth century, adds another fifteen miracles which occurred in his own time.3
