Christians, Jews and Muslims in Byzantine Italy

After a noteworthy decline in the production of hagiographic texts in Byzantium in the eleventh, twelfth and first half of the thirteenth centuries, the Palaiologan era (1261–1453) witnessed a revival in the composition of saints’ lives and miracle collections.¹ Assemblages of late Byzantine miracula² fall into two categories: the miracles of new saints and miracles that occurred at the well-established shrines of older saints or the Virgin. Examples of the latter are Maximos the Deacon’s narrative of miracles at the shrine of SS Kosmas and Damian just outside the walls of Constantinople (c. 1300); the accounts composed by Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos of miraculous cures that took place at the shrine of the Zoodochos Pege, also located just outside the Byzantine capital (c. 1308–20); and John Lazaropoulos’ collection of miracles that occurred at the shrine of St Eugenios in Trebizond (1360s).³ Only two assemblages of miraculous healings effected by new saints survive, one by Theoktistos the Stoudite on the miracles of the patriarch Athanasios I of Constantinople (1289–93; 1303–9), probably written in the 1330s,⁴ and the second on the miracula of Gregory Palamas, composed by Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos in the 1360s,⁵ and the subject of this essay. As we shall see, both collections were probably intended as dossiers to promote the canonization of the holy men they praised.