So the servants took Rhipsime by force, now lifting her, now dragging her … But when they had shut her in the chamber she began to beseech the Lord.
—Agathangelos, History of the ArmeniansIt is said that during this reign the Iberians, a large and warlike barbarian nation, confessed Christ … A Christian woman, who had been taken captive, induced them to renounce the religion of their fathers.
—Sozomen, Ecclesiastical HistoryAnd after his death the people of Yemen received the knowledge of God … by means of a holy woman named Theognosta. Now she was a Christian virgin who had been carried off captive from a convent on the borders of the Roman empire.
—John of Nikiu, ChronicleThe significance of captives in the history of empire has come to the fore in several recent books and articles. Linda Colley starts her intriguing study of this theme with the stories of two famous, if legendary, British captives—Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver—explaining how each represents a different conception of empire: the former a shipwrecked ex-slave turned conqueror and colonizer; the latter an overseas adventurer who is captured, humiliated, and terrorized but ultimately transformed by the values of his captors into a critic of his own society.Footnote 1 Far from the heroes of Defoe and Swift, female captives featured in conversion accounts on the east Roman frontiers represent another response to captivity in a very different imperial world—that of the Roman and Iranian empires of late antiquity. These protagonists neither came to dominate the kingdoms in which they were held nor assimilated the culture of their captors but maintained their identity, their customs, and their religion in captivity. Indeed, these captives went further still, actually transforming the peoples and governments under which they were held from their very positions of subordination.
Though stories of captive women missionaries have a romantic ring, it is well known that hostages, slaves, and prisoners of war were crucial to the spread of cultures and exchange of ideas across the borders of the ancient world. In fact a more thorough examination of the role of captives in transmitting religious ideas and practices in late antiquity is long overdue.Footnote 2 Bearing witness to one aspect of this broader phenomenon, a remarkable group of historical texts attribute the conversion of whole nations on the east Roman frontiers to the influence of captive women. My focus in this essay will not be the status or treatment of these female captives, much less the history of slavery, but rather their portrayal as evangelists and what these descriptions suggest about notions and practices of mission in the Christian east. To set the stage for our consideration of these peculiar missionaries, we will begin with a review of scholarship on the interrelated themes of mission, conversion, and Christianization in late antiquity,Footnote 3 especially in relation to the historiography of east Roman or Byzantine mission.
I. Mission, Conversion, Christianization: Historiographical Trends
The history of conversion in late antiquity, like the study of the era as a whole, has undergone considerable revision in the past generation of scholarship. In his classic treatment of the subject, A. D. Nock defined conversion as “the reorientation of the soul of an individual, his deliberate turning away from indifference or from an earlier form of piety to another.”Footnote 4 Far from Nock's dramatic turning point, a newer wave of essays has examined conversion as social process.Footnote 5 Scholars have interpreted the phenomenon as “a sequence of action and response … at times stretched out over years,” as a spectrum, or at the least, as both “moment and process.”Footnote 6 Archeologists have contributed to these reassessments by pointing to deeper, longer-term consequences of conversion in transformed landscapes and new aspects of material culture that illuminate the social and political dimensions of religious change.Footnote 7
The subject of Christian mission in late antiquity has received considerably less attention than the related theme of conversion. To be sure, for the earlier centuries of Christian expansion we are better served. From the pioneering work of Adolf von Harnack's Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten (1902), to Ramsey MacMullen's Christianizing the Roman Empire (1984), to the best-selling study of sociologist of religion Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (1996), the spread of the Christian movement in the pre-Constantinian era has continued to inspire fresh scholarly enterprise and debate.Footnote 8 While some continue to affirm an “intensive sense of mission” that characterized the early church,Footnote 9 a growing number of scholars have argued that neither Jews nor Christians were especially concerned about proselytism in the pre-Constantinian centuries and that once Christianity became the state religion the very idea of mission loses its meaning.Footnote 10 Indeed, common to most treatments of early Christian mission is relative inattention to developments beyond the fourth century. This neglect is curious since, as W. H. C. Frend observed in 1970, once Christianity had assumed the character of the official religion of the empire, “the missionary situation changed completely.” He concluded his own brief overview of Christian missions from 180–700 with the observation that “no detailed survey of the conversion of the Greco-Roman world in the fourth and subsequent centuries has yet been attempted.”Footnote 11
Since this offhanded challenge to new research in the field, the Christianization of the late ancient and early medieval West has been the subject of several excellent studies.Footnote 12 The subject of eastern mission has been less studied, although the tide is beginning to change,Footnote 13 and literature on regional or national Christianity has grown tremendously in recent years providing a surer foundation for broader comparative studies. Debate about the missionary nature of the early church only rarely touches on the post-Constantinian period in the east for it is largely assumed that mission was simply part of the political program of the newly Christian Roman Empire and what became Byzantium. Even missiologists devote little attention to the east acknowledging the problematic nature of the Eusebian legacy: an empire in which monotheism and monarchy were inextricably intertwined.Footnote 14 Jonathan Shepard encapsulated the dominant perspective that has shaped historical scholarship on Byzantine missions for the past fifty years:
The Byzantine emperor, as successor to Constantine the Great, was acclaimed as ‘equal of the apostles’ in court acclamations and rhetoric. An emperor, not a patriarch or any other sort of churchman, had been chosen by God to bring about the conversion of the inhabitants of the Roman world, and proclaiming one's willingness to spread the Word was a useful political prop.Footnote 15
Though Shepard is describing a later period of Byzantine history, similar emphasis on imperial motives and initiative in Christianization has influenced studies of the fourth to the sixth century as well. In a recent monograph, Russian medievalist Sergey Ivanov added a more provocative twist to standard representations of Byzantine mission. Arguing that mission was coterminous with the borders of empire, Ivanov attempts to document the Byzantines’ unconcern with evangelizing “barbarians” unless those outsiders had come to settle on Roman territory.Footnote 16 Not only was Byzantium's Christianizing activity of a “passive character,” he argues, but the Byzantines viewed the call to spread Christianity among the barbarians with loathing, even as a blasphemy or sin.Footnote 17
Underlying these studies are at least two assumptions, seemingly well supported by the evidence, which I would like to revisit and revise in a limited manner in the present essay. The first is the notion that there was very little theological reflection on the task of mission in the Christian Roman Empire. As recent studies of western Christianization have indicated, we are certainly far from a developed “theology” of mission in these centuries. Accordingly, “Christianization,” most often linked with political power and religious coercion, has been the domain of historians of the post-Constantinian empire, while “conversion” remains largely the realm of patristic theologians, scholars of ancient religion, and historians of the early church.Footnote 18 A second, related assumption is that Christian mission after Constantine was almost exclusively a “top-down” affair, sponsored by emperors and directed primarily toward ruling elites. Indeed, the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium affirms that “characteristically, Byzantine missionary activity worked ‘from the top down’ by focusing on the rulers and leaders of society who then arranged the conversion of their people en masse.”Footnote 19 Although he covers a fairly broad swath of missionaries, Ivanov's main focus is imperially-sponsored mission, and missionaries “from below” are deemed “accidental” or “unintentional” evangelists.Footnote 20 A broader conception of what constitutes mission and missionaries might lead to different or more nuanced conclusions.
As the reaction against Nock's “psychological maximalism” is beginning to subside for the first few centuries, the study of mission and conversion in the post-Constantinian era deserves renewed attention as well.Footnote 21 Based on histories composed from the fifth to seventh centuries, we will consider here three interrelated accounts of conversion from lands on the borders of the East Roman Empire: Armenia, Georgia, and Yemen. I hope to show that accounts of female evangelistic activity suggest more missionary initiative on the part of eastern Christians and more theological reflection on this process than is generally acknowledged in treatments of Byzantine mission. Moreover, by analyzing narratives of unofficial mission I will attempt to assess both the ideal and the reality of mission “from below.” Though but one phase in a longer process of Christianization that spanned several centuries, it is an aspect of Christian expansion that has received far less attention than it merits.Footnote 22 While traditional histories of Christianity have focused on doctrines and institutions, some recent scholars have approached the Christian movement as “a people's history,” sensitive to the ways in which it has “effectively subverted elite privilege and imperial authority, even in the post-Constantinian period.”Footnote 23 Building on and drawing inspiration from such approaches, this study will examine the contribution of female captives to the conversion of lands on the east Roman frontiers. Such analysis should help to illumine the relation between empire and religion as well the nature of Christian mission in this pivotal age.
II. Three Narratives of Conversion
Situated between the Black and Caspian Seas and straddling trade routes to the east, Greater Armenia in late antiquity was poised between the Roman and Iranian Empires. The Christianization of this region owes much to both Syrian and Greek Christian traditions, but the earliest account of the conversion of Armenia is attributed to a churchman who wrote under the pseudonym “Agathangelos.” His History of the Armenians focuses on the missionary role of Gregory the Illuminator, a Christian in the service of the pagan king Trdat (Tiridates) III.Footnote 24 According to this account, a long confrontation began when Gregory refused to worship the Armenian goddess, Anahit, described by King Trdat as “this great lady … the glory of our race and our savior.”Footnote 25 For spurning the deity and confessing his Christian faith, the king subjected Gregory to cruel torture and threw him into a deep snake-filled pit to die. Some thirteen years later the king was possessed by demons, went mad, turned into a pig, and began pasturing in the grassland and wallowing naked in the plain outside the city. A series of dreams revealed that Gregory (assumed long dead) was the only hope for the king's restoration. Rescued from his pit, Gregory preached the gospel to the king and his court, whereupon King Trdat shed his pig-like skin, tusks, and snout, was restored to vigor, and was soon baptized in the Euphrates River along with his nobles. After overthrowing the pagan shrines throughout the land, Gregory was sent to Caesarea in Cappadocia to be consecrated bishop, and Armenia, just beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire, became the first state to adopt Christianity as its official religion.Footnote 26
Closely connected with Gregory's missionary work in Armenia is the role of the captive woman Rhipsime, a beautiful and pious Christian virgin who enters the scene while Gregory is languishing in the pit.Footnote 27 Having received unwanted attention from the Roman emperor Diocletian, Rhipsime, along with her abbess Gaiane and their entire convent of nuns, had fled Rome to Armenia only to fall prey to the wiles of King Trdat. They hid temporarily in “vat-stores” in the vineyards at the edge of the capital city, Valarshapat, but the king's spies soon discovered the virgins’ hiding place and were sent to retrieve Rhipsime. Amidst loud prayers recounting the history of salvation from Abraham to the cross, the virgin was forcibly dragged to the king's palace and imprisoned in the royal chamber in preparation for her wedding to the Armenian king.Footnote 28 As she prayed, King Trdat entered the chamber and “seized her in order to work his lustful desires. But she, strengthened by the Holy Spirit, struggled like a beast and fought like a man.” They wrestled for seven hours until the king, though renowned for his strength, was overcome—“vanquished and worsted by a single girl through the will and power of Christ.”Footnote 29 Rhipsime temporarily escaped to relate to her companions what had happened and pronounce a final scripture-filled prayer exalting God's victory and providence. For her resistance to the king, however, Trdat's nobles had Rhipsime recaptured, tortured, and killed along with thirty-six other virgins who had accompanied her in her flight to Armenia. King Trdat went into deep mourning for the beautiful virgin, and after he set out for the hunt a short while later, madness befell him as a “punishment from the Lord.” Central to Gregory's long sermon calling for the king's conversion is the faith, witness, and supernatural power of Rhipsime.Footnote 30 He claims that God had sent Rhipsime and the other martyrs for the Armenians’ salvation, and he eventually had their bodies enshrined in the first chapels built in the newly Christian land.Footnote 31
Linked with this narrative of Armenia's conversion is the story of the Christianization of neighboring Georgia, known in antiquity as Iberia.Footnote 32 The earliest account appears not in the Georgian Chronicles, the compilation of which began no earlier than the seventh century, but rather in the work of Rufinus, the Latin monk and ecclesiastical historian who wrote from Bethlehem just after 400 and who is the main source for the earliest Greek versions of the conversion. The account follows his narrative of the roughly contemporaneous Christianization of Axum (modern Ethiopia), which is also attributed to the efforts of captives, specifically two Christian Roman boys who were spared when “barbarians” attacked their ship on the Red Sea coast.Footnote 33 The pivotal missionary figure in Georgia was a female captive who amazed the “barbarians” with her ascetic piety and devotion to Christ. When her prayers effected the restoration of a hopelessly sick child, the queen of Iberia, who suffered from a grave physical illness, summoned the woman. Though she “declined to go, lest she appear to pretend to more than was proper to her sex,” the queen is brought to the captive's hovel where the woman's prayer immediately restores her to health and vigor.Footnote 34 The captive attributes the healing to Christ and entreats the queen to acknowledge him. Grateful for his wife's restoration, the king sends the captive gifts as payment, but the woman returns them and urges him instead to recognize the true God whom she has declared. On the hunt a short while later, the king is suddenly engulfed in impenetrable darkness and despairs for his life. He calls upon the captive's god, who instantly rescues him from his plight. On his safe return to the city the king summons the captive, who teaches him about Christ. He then gathers his subjects, recounts what happened, and exhorts the Iberians to worship him. After the captive woman performs another miracle enabling the placement of a hitherto immovable column in the construction of a church, the whole nation is said to have acknowledged the true God. At the woman's advice, an embassy is sent to Emperor Constantine requesting priests to instruct the Iberians in their new faith.
A similar account of a captive woman missionary is set on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula in the early fifth century. The author of this brief narrative is the seventh-century anti-Chalcedonian leader and monastic administrator, John, bishop of Nikiu, a fortified island in the Nile delta of Egypt. John ignores the traditions of the apostle Bartholomew and the missionary Theophilus, a captive converted in Constantinople and sent out by Emperor Constantius,Footnote 35 and focuses instead on a holy woman named Theognosta. He describes her as
a Christian virgin who had been carried off captive from a convent on the borders of the Roman Empire and had been conducted to the king of Yemen and presented to him as a gift. And this Christian woman became very rich through the grace of God and wrought many healings. And she brought over the king of India to the faith, and he became a Christian through her agency as well as all the people of India.Footnote 36
Eventually the king and his subjects requested that the “Godloving emperor Honorius” appoint them a bishop, which he did with great joy. This “holy bishop,” Theonius, instructed and strengthened the people of Yemen in their new faith, yet their eventual baptism, or “second birth,” is attributed to “the prayers of the holy virgin Theognosta.”Footnote 37
III. Mission from Below: Inverting Imperial Paradigms
The prominent place of women in accounts of national conversions is certainly not unique to the east Roman frontiers in late antiquity. Especially pertinent to mission is the reputed role of early medieval queens in the conversion of their pagan husbands and hence their entire realms. The Burgundian princess Clothilde, wife of King Clovis of the Franks, and Queen Bertha, wife of Anglo-Saxon King Ethelbert, provide the most famous examples of this process.Footnote 38 In the east the pious empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, advanced the spread of the Christian faith, and she and her son are honored together as the prototypical Christian rulers; similarly in the Arabic Christian tradition Queen Mavia has been hailed as the “first Christian Arab queen.”Footnote 39 Such examples lend support to the “top-down” definition of mission that appears in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium.Footnote 40 However, although rulers have a function in each of the national conversions recounted above, it is female captives and not ruling women who are central to narratives of evangelization.
To be sure, accounts of captive women were also a topos in earlier Greco-Roman literature in antiquity, and variations on this theme, often involving religious choice, appeared throughout the Middle Ages.Footnote 41 Among patristic exegetes, the motif was developed in interpretations of Deuteronomy 21:10–13 on the treatment of a non-Israelite woman taken captive in war. Building on Origen's interpretation of this passage, Jerome used the image of the female captive to represent non-Christian literature and learning as both potentially dangerous and alluring. Like the captive woman, however, foreign pagan wisdom can be purified and “made a captive and servant to Israel,” that is, to the Christian reader.Footnote 42 Similarly the rabbis of late antiquity adapted the topos of the sexually alluring captive woman to some of their own purposes, as “a kind of myth or foundational story that helped them explain to themselves their place in the pagan world.”Footnote 43 Yet in such examples of early Christian exegesis or rabbinic midrashim, captive women protagonists appear more often as tempters or seducers who need to be converted themselves than as missionaries converting others. None of these exegetical motifs explain the peculiar apostolic role of captive women evangelists or the distinctive theological assumptions that underlay accounts of their missionary activity on the east Roman frontiers.
Closer examination of the late ancient conversion accounts presented here, however, challenges, or at least significantly qualifies, reigning paradigms of mission and adds nuance to standard presentations of empire and religion in Byzantium. The narrative of Agathangelos, the “received tradition” of Armenia's conversion, presents intriguing ambiguities regarding political and cultural orientation, religious allegiance, and missionary identity. Agathangelos wrote or redacted his account during the second half of the fifth century, most probably around 460.Footnote 44 Since 387 Armenia had been divided between the Roman emperor, Theodosius I, and the Iranian shah, Shapur I, but the territory of Greater Armenia came under Iranian suzerainty. In 427 the Arsacid monarchy came to an end, and amid the feuding of various noble families, the patriarch emerged as the symbol of Armenian unity and resistance to increased Sassanian control, which included attempts to enforce Zoroastrianism. After an Armenian revolt in 450–451 in which the moral authority of the patriarch undergirded the resistance movement, Sassanian religious oppression subsided. In this setting Agathangelos composed his History exalting the missionary work of Gregory, Armenia's first bishop.Footnote 45 Parthian by birth, yet raised in Cappadocian Caesarea and thus connected with Rome, Gregory served as a model patriarch for Armenians on both sides of the Roman–Sassanian border.
Agathangelos's narrative of Armenia's conversion has definite political overtones, and the author clearly had diplomatic relations in view. Unlike later Armenian historians, Agathangelos reveals a distinctly Greek cultural orientation and pro-Roman political tendencies. Though the work was written in Armenian, the author of the History introduces himself in the prologue as “one Agathangelos,” literally “messenger of good news” in Greek, “from the great city of Rome, trained in the arts of the ancients, proficient in Latin and Greek,” and commissioned by the king to compose a historical narrative of the Armenian people.Footnote 46 After Armenia's conversion, he describes a journey of King Trdat, Bishop Gregory, and a vast embassy of magnates, courtiers, and troops to visit the recently converted emperor, Constantine, in Rome. The encounter serves to seal the lifelong friendship of the two lands.Footnote 47 This episode is absent from other Armenian histories that concentrate on the Pahlavian background of the ecclesiastical hierarchy—all descendants of Gregory's noble family of Parthian Iranian origin—and maintain a definite distance from the structures of east Roman political and ecclesiastical power, though Constantinople maintains its allure for culture and learning.Footnote 48
Despite pro-Roman leanings, however, Agathangelos's History was not primarily a political text, and diplomatic factors remain in the background. Much more prominent in his narrative are hagiographic motifs. Scholars have long recognized the novelistic character of the work, mediated through acquaintance with apocryphal literature which gained popularity in Armenia in the fourth and fifth centuries.Footnote 49 Robert Thomson, eminent scholar of Armenian Christianity and translator of Agathangelos, places much of the History in the realm of hagiography and traces its indebtedness to hagiographical sources, particularly the Lives of the Edessene martyrs. Indeed, the work bears all the marks of an “epic passion,” showing familiarity with standard scriptural and patristic models of both Greek and Syrian provenance.Footnote 50 For example, the structure of Agathangelos's narrative parallels the Thaddeus-Abgar account in Syrian literature.Footnote 51 Likewise Rhipsime's struggle with the king to protect her virtue recalls another virgin, St. Thecla, whose resistance to the amorous advances of a noble suitor resulted in her being thrown to wild beasts. Indeed, the Acts of Thecla in both Greek and Syriac translations were extremely popular in fifth-century Armenia, and the figure of Thecla would soon be assimilated by Armenian authors.Footnote 52 If the imitatio Thecla inspired diverse forms of piety as her cult spread throughout Asia Minor and Egypt, one can well imagine the potential influence of her role as evangelist and protomartyr in representations of Rhipsime in Armenia.Footnote 53
In light of both the political context and the hagiographical precedents, we do well to consider what role the captive woman Rhipsime and the other martyred virgins played in Agathangelos's History. To be sure, Rhipsime was not a typical “missionary.” She neither was sent out by the Roman church nor formed part of a diplomatic embassy but rather arrived in Armenia as a refugee from persecution in the Roman Empire. She did not present the gospel to the king or his people in any official ecclesiastical capacity but remained largely sequestered in captivity, passing much of her time in prayer and fasting. Far from suggesting any diplomatic role, Agathangelos emphasizes Rhipsime's captivity, weakness, and humility; yet these characteristics are transformed by the Spirit of God into vehicles of strength and ultimately salvation for the Armenian people. Rhipsime and her companions functioned as true martyrs, that is, “witnesses” to the faith (recalling the original connotation of the word), as Agathangelos affirms at several points in his account. Through their martyrdom they “bore witness” to God and “made their death a faithful and firm seal of the truth of their faith.” Moreover, “because they died for God they can turn the death of many into life.”Footnote 54 The martyrdom of these captive virgins has rendered them apostles to the Armenian nation alongside St. Gregory.Footnote 55
While on the surface the women seem to have performed no public teaching or preaching function akin to Gregory's long sermon before the king and his nobles following the martyrdom, the prayers of Rhipsime and the other virgins were largely a concatenation of scriptural quotations announcing God's victory over foreign idols and proclaiming the message of salvation in Christ. Moreover, these prayers were always uttered aloud, and often before crowds.Footnote 56 Agathangelos also notes that “some of the noble servants of the court ran to tell the king all their words, because there were there secretaries who wrote down all that was said, and they read it before the king.”Footnote 57 The word for secretaries in this passage, nshanagirk‘, is the same term used for the “scribes” who are said to have recorded and brought before the king the words of Gregory's lengthy biblical and evangelistic prayers, pronounced over the course of seven days while suspended upside down from one foot.Footnote 58 These passages raise intriguing questions about the evangelistic function of public prayers as well the language in which the Christian captives pronounced their message to their captors. There is very little commentary on the biblical and liturgical texts that form the subject of the virgins’ intercessions. Nonetheless, an emphasis on the loud and public utterance of these prayers, written down by royal secretaries and read before the king just like those of Gregory, suggests that for Agathangelos the women, too, served as preachers of the gospel to the Armenian people.Footnote 59
Another indication of the theological reflection underlying this account is the virgins’ connection with vineyards and winepresses at several junctures in the text. When Rhipsime and her companions arrived in Armenia they took refuge outside the capital in certain “vat-stores,” a term for the buildings that housed winepresses.Footnote 60 One martyr was killed on this very spot; and after the martyrdom, one of the first four chapels built by Gregory was placed on the site of the winepresses that had temporarily housed the female refugees,Footnote 61 soon to be martyred in preparation for Armenia's conversion. Patristic exegetes, both Greek and Syriac, used the vineyard and the winepress as symbols of the church, and the winepress was interpreted with reference to both the passion and the ascension of Christ.Footnote 62 The coincidence of symbolism in these accounts seems less fortuitous than intentional, linking the suffering of these captive missionary-martyrs with the very foundations of the church in Armenia.
Narratives of Iberia's conversion reveal similar political and cultural ambiguities. Archeological evidence demonstrates the presence of Christians in Georgia already in the second or third century, but the earliest written descriptions of the nation's conversion appear in the fifth-century church histories of Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret.Footnote 63 All three Greek historians follow the outline of Rufinus, but they modify details in keeping with slightly different perspectives on the connection between empire and religion, Christianization and Romanization.Footnote 64 Rufinus himself claims to have heard the account from a Georgian king and one time comes domesticorum, Bacurius, with whom he became acquainted in Palestine and whose religious character and trustworthiness he emphasizes: “Bacurius, a man outstanding in faith, piety, and strength of mind and body.”Footnote 65 While Sozomen and Theodoret mention neither Bacurius nor Rufinus as the source of their information about Iberia's conversion, Socrates adds details to Rufinus's description of his source. He was an Iberian prince (βασιλίσκος) who had served as commander of soldiers in Palestine, Socrates explains, and he later led the war against Maximus the Tyrant assisting Emperor Theodosius.Footnote 66 This same Bacurius is also known to us from other Latin, Greek, and Armenian sources for his military and diplomatic role.Footnote 67 Despite slight discrepancies in these accounts, there is little reason to doubt his identity or relationship with Rufinus, although the precise period of his rule in Iberia is difficult to determine.Footnote 68
If Bacurius's dates are uncertain, the identities of those involved in the conversion of his homeland are even more obscure. The names of the Iberian royal couple are absent from all four of the earliest accounts, but evidence from other sources strongly suggests the reign of King Meribanes (Mirian III, according to local tradition), a contemporary of Constantius II rather than his more orthodox father. While the Roman Emperor Constantine comes into the picture toward the end of all four narratives, we must bear in mind Rufinus's penchant, followed by the other orthodox church historians, for attributing everything good to the reign of the Nicene Emperor Constantine rather than his pro-Arian successor.Footnote 69 Ammianus Marcellinus specifically notes Constantius's diplomatic efforts to maintain the loyalty of “Arsaces and Meribanes, kings of Armenia and Hiberia respectively … since it was feared that they could gravely injure the interests of Rome if at this critical moment they went over to the Persian.”Footnote 70 Moreover, Constantius is known to have sponsored missionary efforts as part of his imperial strategy in sensitive areas on the frontiers.Footnote 71
The principal agent in the Christianization of Georgia, however, is no Roman emperor or Iberian king but an anonymous captive woman. Although she became known in later Georgian tradition as St. Nino, she remains unnamed in all the fifth-century accounts.Footnote 72 None of the narratives even specify that this female captive is a Roman. Indeed, this would have been unlikely since Iberia was in this period a kind of Roman protectorate, though apparently without abandoning connections with the Sassanians.Footnote 73 While kings on the eastern frontiers had long maintained relations with both empires, the terms of the Treaty of Nisibis in 298 put Iberia more squarely within the Roman sphere of influence. Iberian kings received their symbols of office from Rome, and Iberia remained an ally of Rome through most of the fourth century. In this context the presence of a Roman captive in Iberia would be hard to explain. Moreover, while the woman is repeatedly referred to as a “captive” (Latin: captiva; Greek: αιχμάλωτος) or even a “prisoner of war” (δορυάλωτος) in Theodoret, there seem to be no limitations on her activities. Rather she is characterized by fasts, prayer, vigils, chastity, and scorn for riches—that is, by the virtues of monastic life with which Rufinus himself was so well acquainted. Following Rufinus, Socrates speaks of her “holy and chaste life” adding that “she practiced much moderation and serious fasting, and she devoted herself to earnest prayer.”Footnote 74 Sozomen explains that “she did not slacken her accustomed way of life among the foreigners. It was important to her to fast and night and day to pray and to praise God.”Footnote 75 Theodoret is even more explicit in connecting the captive's ascetic practices with her apostolic ministry: “She continued instant in prayer, allowing herself no softer bed than a sack spread upon the ground, and accounted fasting her highest luxury. This austerity was rewarded by gifts similar to those of the Apostles.”Footnote 76 Although she is remiss to leave her hovel on account of her modesty, there is no indication that the woman is literally imprisoned. Indeed, she seems to represent a “captiva Christi,” paralleling the Apostle Paul's self-description as a “slave” or “prisoner of Christ” rather than the captive of any empire or kingdom.Footnote 77
Descriptions of the captive woman in these texts have given rise to diverse interpretations of her identity and function. In her penetrating study of pagans and Christians in Rufinus's church history, Françoise Thelamon analyzed at some length what she believes to be the underlying Georgian source of such a concept. Although the term is anachronistic for this period, in ancient Georgian paganism, the kadag, or shaman, was a man or woman who was possessed by a divinity, served as a healer, and was associated with the foundation of pagan religious cults and rituals. The ancient Georgian equivalent of the kadag was designated by the term daç’erili, the very meaning of which, Thelamon suggests, denotes captivity. Hence, Rufinus's account of Iberia's conversion through the mediation of a captive woman represents his attempt to translate a Georgian foundation myth related by Bacurius into language that made sense to him and would be acceptable to his Latin Christian audience.Footnote 78 While Thelamon's theory is intriguing, Philip Amidon has noted that it would be difficult to prove or disprove her hypothesis, and others have raised questions about the application of data drawn from modern Georgian shamanistic practices to the late ancient pagan setting. Both Cornelia Horn and Eva Synek pose the simpler explanation, with which I concur, that the Christian captive was following instructions about healing the sick derived from the New Testament.Footnote 79
Other studies of Christian origins in Iberia lend support to this less exotic and more biblically-based interpretation of the captive woman's actions and identity. Several scholars have argued for the Jewish character of early Christianity in Georgia well before the influence of Hellenistic Christianity came to dominate through the conversion of the Iberian royal family. Analysis of archeological data, particularly burial practices and inscriptions, suggests that a sizeable community of Jews settled in Kartli from the end of the first through the second century a.d. and that some of these Jews had already embraced Christianity, particularly in Urbnisi and the capital city of Mtskheta.Footnote 80 Moreover, later Georgian and Armenian texts explicitly link the female captive with Jerusalem and the Jewish community.Footnote 81 Whether or not Rufinus knew of the earlier Judeo-Christian background to Iberia's conversion or however much he may have understood the shamanistic function of the kadag or daç’erili in ancient Georgian paganism, neither he nor his Greek counterparts reveal any knowledge of such influences. Like Rufinus, these early Byzantine historians use biblical motifs to describe the woman's way of life and miraculous deeds. Moreover, they present their female protagonist as a humble captive and ascetic, accentuating the weakness of her position. She was a woman of low estate with no apparent connection to a Christian or Jewish community in Iberia, and she certainly held no imperial or high social position. Indeed, her point of contact and initial influence in the Georgian community was not with the king and queen but through the healing of another woman's child.Footnote 82
As with the account of Armenia's conversion, apostolic and hagiographic topoi are rife. For example, the evangelistic role of the captive parallels that of the apostle Thaddeus in the conversion of King Abgar of Edessa that Rufinus had just translated from Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History. Here too, the king's healing is effected through the prayers of a wandering preacher and evangelist.Footnote 83 What set the female captive apart from such apostolic figures, however, was her sex. In every other way the woman exemplified the traits that Rufinus attributed to apostles of his own day, primarily bishops and monks: they speak in the name of God and are orthodox in faith, they perform the same miracles as the apostles (signa apostolica), and they are involved in evangelization. Yet neither the anonymous female captive nor any other woman appears among those he deems “apostles and prophets of our time.”Footnote 84 Moreover, it is not the captive woman but the Iberian king who, “before even being initiated into sacred things, became the apostle of his nation,” or in Socrates’ rendition, “a preacher of Christ.”Footnote 85
Although fifth-century historians attempted to make the captive woman conform to contemporary gender roles—humility and reserve before the queen, instructing the king in the faith only “as far as it was lawful for a woman to disclose such things,”Footnote 86 and advising that the emperor be asked to send priests—they did not try to hide her major function as an evangelist and preacher of the faith to the Iberians. In this capacity she bears resemblance to St. Thecla, whose possible influence we have already noted with regard to Armenia. The Acts of Thecla were well known throughout the late antique world by the fifth century and very likely a model for accounts of women missionaries. They present an ascetic female evangelist who inspired men as well as women not only to acts of piety and asceticism but also to apostolic activity.Footnote 87 Like Thecla as well as Rhipsime, the female Iberian captive is clearly an ascetic, resembling the parthenos theou of ascetic literature, and her ascetic virtues are the basis of her apostolic gifts.Footnote 88 Yet while Rhipsime allegedly came from a convent in the Roman Empire, the captive ascetic apostle of Iberia remains anonymous in our fifth-century sources, unconnected with any monastery or political realm.
None of the fifth-century accounts of Georgia's conversion suggests imperial initiative in sending a mission, diplomatic or religious, until after the people had converted, and only then at the captive's advice. As for Emperor Constantine's response, Rufinus claims that he “was made far happier” by the news of Iberia's conversion “than if he had annexed to the Roman Empire unknown peoples and kingdoms.”Footnote 89 Thelamon has suggested that this statement reflects the contemporary view that the conversion of a barbarian nation was equivalent to a new conquest.Footnote 90 In the account itself, however, quite the opposite is affirmed. Constantine does not respond to Iberia's conversion in terms of an annexation or as an extension of Roman influence but rejoices in the news of the spread of the Christian faith. Though Constantine does send priests to “complete God's work begun among them,” Rufinus downplays the imperial connection. To be sure, both Socrates and Sozomen add the information that alliances were sought, suggesting that acceptance of Christianity implied a particular political relationship with the Roman Empire. However, Sozomen concludes not simply with a summary statement regarding the Iberians’ Christianization but with more precise vocabulary concerning what had occurred: “Thus did the Iberians receive the knowledge of Christ, and until this day they worship him carefully.”Footnote 91 Here as elsewhere in his church history, Sozomen minimizes the role of the emperor in the process of Christianization.Footnote 92 Although Theodoret also affirms that the captive woman convinced the Iberian king to send an embassy to Constantine requesting a “teacher of religion,” he does not explicitly discuss the political implications of Iberia's conversion. Rather he concludes by describing the emperor's solicitousness for the spread of the faith and the well-being of Christians both on and beyond the frontiers of the empire.Footnote 93 Judging from our Greek historians as well as Rufinus, then, political alliance consistently followed rather than preceded religious conversion.
Medieval Georgian and Armenian narratives identify Rufinus's anonymous captive as St. Nino, a companion of Rhipsime who fled Rome with the other virgins, thwarting the emperor's plan to take Rhipsime as his wife. Most of the virgins were martyred, but St. Nino escaped and was commissioned in a vision to preach the gospel to the pagans of Georgia. Passages of scripture reassured her that her gender posed no obstacle to this missionary call.Footnote 94 Based on these later accounts, especially The Conversion of Kartli, Fairy von Lilienfeld has detailed the apostolic characteristics and activities that clearly placed St. Nino in the category of a wandering apostle and evangelist.Footnote 95 Oddly enough, however, Georgian sources themselves were silent about their female apostle until at least the seventh century, even though Latin and Greek church historians related the same basic information about her role in the conversion of the Iberian royal family more than two centuries earlier.Footnote 96 We must bear in mind, however, that St. Nino had several strikes against her in the context of late ancient Iberia: she was a foreigner, she was a captive, and she was a woman. Any one of these aspects of her identity would have rendered her inferior in the eyes of the nobility, and all three together would have likely proved embarrassing for the apostle or enlightener of Georgia.Footnote 97 Moreover, as a foreigner she would have likely faced linguistic limitations in attempting to translate the Christian message to another culture. Consequently, when medieval Iberian writers began to reshape the story of their nation's Christianization, they tried to conceal or compensate for Nino's low social status. No longer a captive, they suggested instead that she was the niece of the patriarch of Jerusalem, who gave official ecclesiastical confirmation to her missionary vocation in Georgia. Several authors added to their accounts of Nino's dream-vision commissioning clear scriptural sanction for female apostleship, and they tried to counterbalance the scandal of female leadership by placing Nino in the context of a broader list of formidable women in positions of authority and influence.Footnote 98 Our fifth-century Greek historians are much less precise about the identity of the anonymous captive woman, but they are no less affirmative of her central role as a missionary, even an apostle, to barbarian peoples on the borders of their empire.
The seventh-century anti-Chalcedonian chronicler, John of Nikiu, similarly affirms the apostolic agency of a captive woman beyond the Roman frontiers in South Arabia. The narrative of Yemen's conversion through the medium of the holy virgin Theognosta contains several puzzling features. John of Nikiu's Chronicle is believed to have been originally composed in Greek but has come down to us through only two extant Ethiopic manuscripts, which are translations from Arabic. None of the three Greek chroniclers on whom John heavily depended includes this account of the Christianization of Yemen.Footnote 99 Another odd element in John's account is the king's request for a bishop from Emperor Honorius, who from 395 had come to rule the western half of the Roman Empire while his brother Arcadius ruled the east. Yemen had no significant diplomatic relations with the west, and it was situated ecclesiastically and politically between the Axumite kingdom of Ethiopia and the east Roman emperor in Constantinople. In fact Axum had already launched missionary work in southern Arabia, most often referred to as India in this period.Footnote 100 In light of the struggle for independence from both nearby Axum and Byzantium, however, it is not surprising that the king might try to circumvent authorities closer to home.Footnote 101 From John of Nikiu's anti-Chalcedonian perspective, the connection with Honorius and the church in the western empire may also have seemed more judicious from an ecclesiastical point of view, even if the events he describes took place well before the Council of Chalcedon had fractured the unity of the eastern Christian world.Footnote 102 Either way, John's narrative of Yemen's conversion implies the underlying importance of diplomacy in the Christianization process—whether oriented toward or away from the Byzantine ecclesiastical capital. Yet it is certainly not the focus of his brief account of the land's conversion.
An account of St. Theognosta in the later Copto-Arabic Synaxarion, containing biographies of saints and martyrs for each day of the year, first compiled in the ninth century based on earlier texts, also connects the captive woman with the western Roman emperor, Honorius.Footnote 103 In this version, envoys of the king of India have just delivered gifts to Emperors Honorius and Arcadius when they come upon the virgin Theognosta, seize her, and take her back to their country; but when the need for priests arises later in the narrative, it is Emperor Honorius alone to whom appeal is made. In this account we also see more clearly the significance of the saint's name “Theognosta” (she who has known God), for the woman is reading a book when she is taken captive and placed in charge of the king's wives and attendants.
This variant more closely resembles late Roman accounts of the conversion of Iberia. Indeed, Theognosta is known to the Copts as the saint who introduced Christianity to Georgia, though the Synaxarion, like John of Nikiu, mentions only India. Here the king himself falls sick and is immediately restored when the captive woman makes the sign of the cross over him. The Coptic redactor has the king's crisis occur while he is waging war rather than on the hunt, likely replacing symbolism that would have been highly significant for the Caucasian lands in their Sassanian setting but had little meaning for the desert contexts of Arabia and Egypt.Footnote 104 Upon his return from war, the king bows at the saint's feet requesting baptism for himself and his people, but Theognosta explains that it is not her place to baptize. After a priest sent by Honorius administers this sacrament, the former captive “builds a convent for herself and for the many virgins who desired the monastic life.”Footnote 105 The captive woman's connection with monastic life is explicit in this later account of Theognosta's apostolic activity while such an association is only implied in the Latin and Greek narratives of Iberia's conversion.
The secondary nature of political factors in all these accounts adds nuance to reigning paradigms of Christianization. The emperor's role in converting the Roman world has shaped scholarship on Byzantine missions for the past fifty years, and no one would seriously question the interconnection of mission with imperial political ambitions. Indeed, each of the narratives examined here gives a role to the Roman emperor; yet none features imperially sponsored missionaries as the principal evangelists. Imperial initiative is generally minimized in these accounts, coming only as a response to requests for priests and only after the local rulers and the people have already turned toward the Christian God, that is, after they have converted. Of course such petitions to the emperor could be used to legitimize imperial intervention on the basis of more noble spiritual goals. However, even the pleas for aid are initiated in the first place not by the royal converts but rather by the captive women missionaries who have effectively evangelized the nation despite their confession of inadequacy as females to instruct the people or administer the sacraments.
Whether martyr, thaumaturge, or teacher of the faith, each captive woman served in an apostolic or evangelistic capacity despite the general reluctance of our historians to ascribe the title “apostle” to their female protagonists.Footnote 106 Even the stereotypical hagiographic and missionary topoi employed could not obscure the provocative role these women played as agents of the conversion of whole nations. Thus, although diplomatic elements are present in each account and a shared Christian religion almost inevitably presumed a political orientation toward Rome or Constantinople, these narratives also reflect theological ideals of mission and conversion in late antiquity. It is not the aggressive imperial or political dimension of the missionary process that our historians emphasize, but the lowliness of the slave, the miraculous spiritual strength of the virgin, and the evangelical zeal and prayer of the humble captive turned missionary. We see here mission from below preceding and complementing more typical reports of conversion from above.
IV. Captive Women Evangelists: Rhetoric and Reality
These accounts of captive evangelists do not stand alone in the history of eastern Christian mission. The Christianization of the Goths, Ethiopia, and pre-Islamic Arabia feature similar involvement of captives, both male and female, in converting kingdoms to the Christian faith.Footnote 107 Such narratives present a very different picture of Christianization from that which has typified scholarly treatments of eastern missions. Because of the legendary or romantic quality of this topos, historians have tended to neglect such accounts; and to be sure, on one level they do not take us very far in unraveling the historical details of these nations’ conversions. Nor are we able to balance our narrative sources with the kind of quantitative evidence that has been used to challenge assumptions about women's active roles in the conversion of the western Roman aristocracy.Footnote 108 While the intricately interwoven threads of text and event may never be unraveled in our episodes of female captive missionaries, the inclusion of such miraculous or semi-legendary accounts in chronicles and histories introduces another layer of discourse in the study of Christianization and the history of religion and empire in late antiquity. In concluding, then, I would like to offer some reflections on the genre of these conversion narratives, the rhetoric of female evangelists, and the evidence of real women and captives as forces of Christian expansion on the east Roman frontiers.
Given the relative paucity of historical records of Byzantine missions from the eighth to the tenth century, Ihor Ševčenko has pointed to the import of “imaginary reports,” that is, hagiographic novels and “hybrid mission reports,” which present actual events in a miraculous setting.Footnote 109 Similarly, late antique conversion narratives may represent a mixed genre or a “blending of genres,” which, as Scott Fitzgerald Johnson recently argued, characterized late antique literature as a whole.Footnote 110 Apocryphal and hagiographic elements combined with narrative history to make the genre of ecclesiastical history more flexible or “elastic” than has sometimes been assumed. Embedded in historical narratives, specifically in the newly evolving genre of church history, these accounts of mission and conversion stood alongside Lives and Apocryphal Acts as “stories that people liked to hear.”Footnote 111 Shaped by the revival of apostolic history that particularly marked the fourth and fifth centuries, they were stories invested with meaning, stories that might inspire imitation.Footnote 112 Yet because they formed part of historical narratives, they were intended to be taken as trustworthy and true. An emphasis on simple, unadorned style, eyewitness reports, and hence “intrinsic truth-value” that marked the storytelling of late antique hagiographers characterized the conversion narratives included in these histories as well.Footnote 113 Indeed, although Rufinus has been criticized for his emphasis on the miraculous and for chronological errors, he describes his own work in translating and thereby passing on Eusebius's church history as an example of “apostolic tradition;” and each of the other fifth-century historians make similar claims about the trustworthiness of their accounts.Footnote 114 Moreover, even hybrid reports or semi-legendary accounts of captive women evangelists may illumine our understanding of mission in late antiquity. At the least they suggest what the authors and their contemporaries expected the process of mission and conversion to be like: some of the goals, the methods, and the potential missionaries.
Unfortunately the motif of the female captive who converts others tells us frustratingly little about the actual activities of Christian women, whether the powerful or the lowly, as missionaries on the east Roman frontiers. As in texts concerning earlier Christian and Jewish women, the divide between rhetorical construction and historical reality remains problematic.Footnote 115 Like Josephus's portrayal of Gentile women converts to Judaism as over and against Hasmoean, Herodian, and biblical women, or Luke's juxtaposition of the respectable noblewoman Lydia to the demon-possessed slave girl proclaiming her message publicly on the streets, the portrayal of women may well be part of an author's apologetic or propagandistic strategy.Footnote 116 It may be used to convey particular ideals of Christianization as much as real evangelistic activity. The representation of female captives as evangelists in our accounts of mission underscores the power of the powerless, God's choice of the weak and the despised of the world as ambassadors (1 Corinthians 1:28).Footnote 117 This message is sometimes explicit, as in the victory of the girl Rhipsime over the mighty King Trdat, or in Gaiane's words of encouragement regarding God's grace to the humble and strength to young David in overcoming the giant.Footnote 118 At times it is implicit in the story as a whole. Although each narrative recounts the conversion of a king or royal couple, we should not forget that the principal instruments of conversion were foreign female captives. Indeed, the evangelization of Iberia began with a humble female ascetic whose faith and devotion to Christ first attracted the interest not of monarchs but of other “weak women.”Footnote 119 Such accounts of captive women missionaries communicate a consistent if subtle message. It is not only the emperor or his bishops who are invested by God with an apostolic mission to convert the ethnē, but the lowly, too, may embody and proclaim the good news of salvation.
Although we lack systematic treatises on evangelism and mission in this period, the study of Christianization must be attuned to theological as much as socio-political ideals implicit in such accounts. As the mighty God could take on lowly human form for the salvation of the world—the paradoxical claim of orthodox Christianity—so the lowly of the world—women and captives—could be exalted and might themselves become agents of transformation. While churchmen might have demurred at the practical application of such socially provocative principles, they were not adverse to using women to “think with.”Footnote 120 In this light, both the actual roles of captive women and the use of such paradigms in late antique narratives of conversion deserve renewed attention, for descriptions of their ministry reveal not only contemporary views about women but also assumptions about mission, conversion, and the very nature of the gospel.
Despite apocryphal elements in these semi-hagiographic narratives of mission,Footnote 121 various other sources provide supporting evidence of the prominent role that women played in complex and multi-layered processes of Christianization. Well known are the complaints of Celsus that the weakest and lowest members of society—slaves, stupid women, and little children—are both the targets and the agents of Christian proselytism.Footnote 122 While pagan critics of Christianity frequently maligned the new religion for attracting and corrupting women, the details Celsus supplies of women and children drawing others to certain “private houses” or shops where they persuade them concerning “the right way to live” and how to “make their home happy” underscores the centrality of household life in the expansion of early Christianity.Footnote 123 Similarly, Cornelia Horn's recent analysis of the function of children in hagiography from the Caucasus presents substantial evidence for the centrality of the family rather than the individual or the ruler in decisions about religious adherence.Footnote 124 She presents a convincing case for the role of the weakest members of society—women and children—in the conversion of their households, perhaps even legitimizing on the popular level the ruler's decision to convert. Although Horn focuses on later Georgian and Armenian hagiography, these long-standing Caucasian traditions are reflected in the earlier narratives of Iberia's conversion recounted by Rufinus and the fifth-century Greek historians.
While I have noted material evidence of Jewish or Judeao-Christian roots of Christianity in Iberia, for the ministries of women, we must also reemphasize the formative influence of Syrian Christianity in all the frontier regions mentioned in our narratives.Footnote 125 Both the Acts of Thomas and Pseudo-Clement's Letters to Virgins promoted a paradigm of apostolic wandering that was clearly practiced in Syria already in the third century and continued to inspire fourth-and fifth-century Christians to a life of rigorous asceticism combined with missionary endeavors.Footnote 126 The influence of such apostolic models is all the more pertinent in light of the important roles that women played in the Syrian Christian tradition. From the circulation of the tales that eventually formed the Acts of Thomas,Footnote 127 the gifts of women, whether noble or lowly, and the themes of virginity, martyrdom, and critique of the social order, were prominent in Syriac hagiographical literature. But women's active participation in ascetic pursuits, service within the Christian community, and ministry to the sick and poor were not mere literary tropes.Footnote 128 Indeed, beginning in the third century, Syriac legal as well as patristic sources attest to women's public offices as well as personal involvement in apostolic ministries.Footnote 129
If the evidence of specific female evangelists is scant, the role of captives in Christian expansion is hard to contest. Latin and Greek sources attest both to the conversion of barbarian soldiers in the Roman army and to the role of Roman prisoners in converting their captors.Footnote 130 Indeed, Sozomen suggests it was a fairly regular occurrence in barbarian lands.Footnote 131 Due to almost constant warfare, captives and prisoners of war were an ever-present reality in the Roman–Sassanian border area. The function of hostages as a cultural force may have been relatively minimal since they were generally exchanged as temporary guarantees of a truce in the process of formal peace negotiations;Footnote 132 but the involuntary transfer of whole civilian populations was a constant feature of life on the east Roman frontier in late antiquity. These cross-frontier civilian movements in the form of captives, refugees, deportees, and exiles provided long-term occasions for cultural assimilation and exchange, which often involved religion.Footnote 133 Under Shapur I (241–272) many of the Roman captives taken from Syria and Cappadocia and deported to Mesopotamia and Iran were Christians. Armenian, Syriac, and Arabic sources attest to the spread and flourishing of Christianity under the shah's generally tolerant rule.Footnote 134 Among the deportees were women, some of whom were destined for the shah's harem. A favorite concubine of Bahram II (276–293), for example, was the female captive Candida, a Roman Christian whose faithfulness to her religion under pressure to convert to Zoroastrianism resulted in a gruesome martyrdom.Footnote 135 Indeed, the young woman's beauty, the king's attraction to her, and the goriness of her torture and death are reminiscent of the story of Rhipsime.
In the fourth century Ammianus Marcellinus describes the horrendous sieges of Roman cities under Shapur II (339–379). He details the failed negotiations of bishops, the massacre of citizens that followed a successful siege, the pillaging and destruction of the city, and the captivity and deportation of whole populations.Footnote 136 Despite Shapur II's reputation for persecution and cruelty, however, hagiographical sources recount the continued expansion of Christianity through individual captives and whole captive communities resettled in new Sassanian foundations. While military personnel were often slaughtered following a Persian siege, Roman clergy and bishops were allowed to accompany the deported prisoners on their long, arduous journey into the Iranian heartland, and they often played important leadership roles both during and after the resettlement. Christian prisoners spread their faith among non-Christian Roman captives, made converts at the highest levels of the Persian court, and even wielded influence beyond the Sassanian frontiers.Footnote 137
Nor should we assume that evangelistic activity was limited to Roman prisoners of war. It has been suggested, for example, that conflicts between Armenia and Georgia, exacerbated by Roman–Persian disputes, may provide a clue to the identity of Iberia's anonymous Christian captive. Generally assumed to be a Roman, she was quite possibly carried off to Iberia from Armenia amidst the wartime turmoil on the borders.Footnote 138 Thus, while multiple narratives of captive women missionaries suggest a topos that was adopted and modified to accommodate different cultural settings as the stories spread among Christian communities on the eastern frontiers, the seeming romantic quality of such accounts must not obscure the reality of captives and slaves as major transmitters of cultural and religious ideas in late antiquity. Indeed, the “constant circulation of specialists or populations” and “exchanges of women and goods and knowledge” were fundamental to the creation of cultural “empires” that encompassed much more than a single center and periphery.Footnote 139
Narratives of captive women evangelists provide evidence that imperial ideals and ambitions are far from sufficient to account for missionary expansion on the eastern frontiers. These accounts demand closer attention to the direct agents alongside the subjects of conversion and consideration of religious motivations alongside political and social factors that have often completely overshadowed them. Examining the motives and methods of missionaries themselves, whether officially commissioned or self-initiated, helps to expose the multi-layered stages in which the process of Christianization occurred. Such analysis suggests that “bottom-up” evangelism often preceded and prepared the way for the “top-down” conversion that was subsequently imposed by rulers and emphasized by most historians, both Byzantine and modern.Footnote 140 Alongside imperial and cultural dimensions of the missionary process, the identities and practices of evangelists as well as the theological perspectives of their chroniclers form an integral part of our narratives of captive women.Footnote 141
Finally, using female captives as a lens through which to view the later Roman Empire, we discover shifting attitudes toward barbarians, just as the captives in Linda Colley's book, with which we began, reveal the changing British outlook on the Islamic world as the empire's power grew vis-à-vis the Muslims. But the change in perspective is quite different. While Britain's perspective shifted from awe and apprehension to condescension and disdain for the Muslim “other,”Footnote 142 late Roman accounts of captive women evangelists reflect a transition from fear to potential conversion of barbarians.Footnote 143 Hailed as a model of history from below, Colley's book incorporates a laudable collection of first-hand accounts of men and women of all classes. By contrast, our late antique narratives are the work of established churchmen and scholars, and the history is therefore told from above even when describing the work of mission from below. Like saints’ Lives of this period, however, such conversion accounts appealed to readers and hearers of all educational levels and presented ideals and patterns for Christians to emulate; indeed, the frequent repetition of such popular narratives made them all the more powerful as models of behavior.Footnote 144 In this light, accounts of captive women missionaries may tell us more about both popular conceptions and concrete realities of evangelization than has normally been recognized in presentations of Christianization as a tool of late Roman and Byzantine imperialism.
