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Olympius and the ‘Saracens’ of Sicily

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

David Woods
David Woods*
Affiliation:
University College, Cork
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Extract

The purpose of this note is to indicate how a recently re-edited inscription may contribute towards the solution of a long-standing problem posed by a short notice in the Liber Pontificalis. This notice appears to report that, following his failure to force Pope Martin I to accept the Typus issued by the emperor Constans II (641-68), the cubicularius and exarch of Italy Olympius led an expedition against the Saracens living in Sicily. He then died of disease ca. 652. The standard edition, and a recent translation, run:

Videns ergo Olympius exarchus quia manus Dei circumtegebat Martinum sanctissimum papam, necesse habuit se cum pontifice concordare et omnia quae ei iussa fuerant eidem sanctissimo viro indicare. Quia facta pace cum sancta Dei ecclesia, colligens exercitum, profectus est Siciliam adversus gentem Saracenorum qui ibidem inhabitabant. Et peccato faciente maior interitus in exercitu Romano provenit. Et post hoc isdem exarchus morbo interiit.

So when Olympius saw that God’s hand was shielding holy Pope Martin, hewas forced to reconcile himself to the pontiff and disclose all his orders to that holy man. Now that he had made peace with God’s holy church he mustered the army and set out for Sicily against the Saracen people who were living there. The result of sin was that the destruction befalling the Roman army was all the greater. After this the exarch died of disease.

Type
Short Notes
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 27 , 2003 , pp. 262 - 265
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 2003

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References

1. Duchesne, L., ed., Le Liber Pontificalis I (Paris 1955) 338 Google Scholar.

2. Trans. Davis, R., The Book of Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis): The Ancient Biographies of the First Ninety Roman Bishops to AD715 (Liverpool 2 2000) 72 Google Scholar.

3. Stratos, A.N., ‘The Exarch Olympius and the Supposed Arab Invasion of Sicily in AD652’, JÖ 25 (1976) 63–73 Google Scholar reprinted in his Studies in 7th-Century Byzantine Political History (London 1983), X.

4. Stratos, ‘The Exarch Olympius’, 73.

5. E.g. Brown, T.S., Gentlemen and Officers: Imperial Administration and Aristocratic Power in Roman Italy, 554-800AD (Rome 1984) 91 Google Scholar; ODB, 1307, s.v. ‘Martin I’ and, 1892, s.v. ‘Sicily’.

6. Zuckerman, C., ‘Épitaphe d’un soldat africain d’Héraclius servant dans une unité indigène, découverte à Constantinople’, Antiquité Tardive 6 (1998) 377-82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The inscription was originally published by Kalkan, H. and Şahin, S., ‘Epigraphische Mitteilungen aus Istanbul II: Kreuzförmige Grabstelen aus Konstantinupolis’, Epigraphica Anatolica 24 (1995), 137-48, at 143-44Google Scholar who interpreted the key term Ζαρακιανος as a corrupt form of Σαρακηνός in much the same way, I will suggest, as the author of the life of Pope Martin I in the Liber Pontificalis did in the 7th century.

7. See Whitby, M., ‘Recruitment in Roman Armies from Justinian to Heraclius (ca.565-615)’, in Cameron, A. (ed.), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East III. States, Resources, and Armies (Princeton 1995), 61–124, at 114-16Google Scholar.

8. Davis, The Book of Pontiffs, xiv.