I. Sixteenth-Century Context of the Regalia Privileges

The archbishops of Cyprus have sustained one of the most ancient narratives of church history in the successful defense of their ecclesial claim to autocephaly in relations with any external authority. This tradition has always been rooted in Alexander the Monk's sixth-century autocephaly-induced encomium on the miraculous discovery of St. Barnabas's remains in the late fifth century, which came thereafter to serve as an unambiguous declaration of the apostolic founding of the Cypriot Church.Footnote ¹ A second narrative has also existed moreover, this one in support of the archbishop's unique personal authority, which claims that in honor of the discovery of St. Barnabas's relics the Emperor Zeno (c. 425–491) did more than acknowledge the church's institutional autocephaly. He also granted to the archbishops of Cyprus certain personal imperial regalia privileges, which remain to this day alongside the autocephaly derived separately through the apostolicity of the church.Footnote ² The modern Cypriot church thus celebrates both autocephaly and the imperial regalia privileges in tandem as rights ab antiquo, and modern western scholarship has also embraced the late antique origin of the imperial regalia privileges as a constituent element of the right to autocephaly.Footnote ³

Recent research has shown, however, that there was in fact neither a late antique nor a medieval tradition of imperial regalia privileges for the archbishops of Cyprus.Footnote ⁴ This tradition did not exist ab antiquo but rather was the invention of Florio Bustron, a patriotic Greek Cypriot civil servant of the Venetian Secrète, who inserted the notion of such privileges into the St. Barnabas autocephaly story when retelling it in his own mid-sixteenth-century Italian-language history.Footnote ⁵ He wrote this version with hopes of both educating the Venetians about and inspiring his fellow Greek Cypriots with the imperial antiquity and cultural greatness of Cyprus. This seemed a necessary act, given the imminent threat of the Ottoman conquest of Bustron's beloved homeland, and so he fashioned an ex post facto imperial grant of privileges to an apostolic church prelate much like the Donation of Constantine had served for the papacy in a similar time of political instability and transition.Footnote ⁶ We can therefore consider the imperial privileges granted here as the Donation of Zeno.

Yet Florio Bustron's version of these privileges—imperial staff, cape with red cross, and numerous other unspecified immunities—still left much to the imagination, and in the end his textual creation of an ancient tradition did nothing to stem the tide of Ottoman conquest. Indeed, it did nothing to move Venetians or any other Italians toward a crusade to reconquer Cyprus out of respect for its ancient Christian pedigree. So how did Bustron's rather vague, briefly cited, and quickly obscured imperial privileges develop into their ritually elaborate forms by the early twentieth century? As they have no ancient history, this article is therefore dedicated to documenting their modern history.

The absence of a late sixteenth-century Latin crusade to recover Cyprus did not result from western ignorance of either the island's plight under Ottoman rule or the place of St. Barnabas in Cypriot history. Just as in the Greek Orthodox Church, so in the Latin Catholic Church there existed a consistent literary tradition from late antiquity onward remembering the miraculous fifth-century discovery of St. Barnabas's relics. As early as the sixth century Bishop Victor of Tunis includes the miracle in his chronicle with its negative consequences for the patriarch Peter of Antioch,Footnote ⁷ and the tale was popular enough in western Europe to make it into the medieval bestseller The Golden Legend (originally compiled c. 1260), which even cited an antique apocryphal source for the legends of St. Barnabas in Rome and Milan.Footnote ⁸ The cardinal and ecclesiastical historian Cesare Baronius (1538–1607) assured its continued place in the Roman Martyrology,Footnote ⁹ and the great keeper of the Vatican library and Greek scholar, Leo Allatius, who was thoroughly familiar with all the medieval Greek literary sources of the St. Barnabas miracle story, was careful to link it to Cypriot autocephaly when rehearsing the legend in his uniate pamphlet of 1648.Footnote ¹⁰ St. Barnabas and the Cypriot autocephaly tradition were very well known in the western Catholic Church.

Yet though the miracle story of St. Barnabas was remembered in conjunction with the autocephalic status of the church, just like all late antique, medieval, and early modern Greek and Cypriot sources except for Florio Bustron, premodern western sources never include any privileges of imperial regalia as a part of the St. Barnabas autocephaly tradition. Nor does such a bundling of the two traditions (i.e. autocephaly and imperial privileges), or even a mention of the St. Barnabas story for that matter, ever appear in any of the many documents passing between the Latin and Greek churches on Cyprus during the centuries of Lusignan and Venetian rule, including the Bulla Cypria.Footnote ¹¹ So how did a fully formed archiepiscopal claim to imperial regalia finally come into regular use on Cyprus, complete with a history that was thoroughly disseminated throughout the western world?

II. Ottoman Regalia Privileges of the Ethnarch-Archbishop

The status and role of the Cypriot Orthodox Church was transformed by the addition of the island to the Ottoman Empire in 1570–1571. Ironically, the Ottoman rulers liberated the Greek Orthodox Cypriots from Latin Catholic regulation (indeed, the Catholic Church with all its clergy was banished) and restored a Greek archbishop on the island after a hiatus of around 300 years. Thus the Orthodox archbishopric of Cyprus was literally given new life and a specific purpose, which would shape its need for a recovered past.Footnote ¹² Always functioning within the structures of Ottoman imperial authority rather than in opposition to it,Footnote ¹³ the Cypriot archbishops and their suffragan clergy were initially confirmed in their continued role governing the ecclesiastical court of family law, the institution that sustained the faith, traditions, and ethnic identity of Greek Cypriots.Footnote ¹⁴ Each archbishop and bishop was publicly affirmed by imperial berat before taking office, and they collectively served in ceremonial occasions as the community representatives of the Greek Cypriot majority on the island. Then about 1660 the Sultan, apparently in an effort to circumvent the corrupt governance of the pasha and his officials on Cyprus, enhanced the role of the archbishop (and by extension his suffragan bishops) by formally recognizing him as the ethnarch of the Greek millet,Footnote ¹⁵ henceforth responsible for stability within his ethnic community as well as for collecting the required taxes from the rayahs (the members of his Greek flock who were regularly shorn to support the Ottoman state).Footnote ¹⁶ It was then the archbishop's new role of ethnarchFootnote ¹⁷ that finally gave meaning to Florio Bustron's languishing claim to regalia privileges.

Kyprianos the Archimandrite, an influential member of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, produced a new Cypriot history to give institutional context for the newly reconstituted Greek Orthodox Church on the island, which was published in Venice in 1788. Kyprianos informs us of this first transitional century of Ottoman rule in Cyprus (1570–1660), about which “we have but dim and vague information,” and then he credits the Turkish Porte with redefining the archbishop as ethnarch along with interesting testimony for the Ottoman acknowledgement of this role:

And so we learn from Kyprianos that the administrative privilege of writing in red ink had its origins in the first generation of administrative and diplomatic dealings between the archbishop and the Porte in the second half of the seventeenth century, in which the former persuaded the latter of a longstanding practice of his using red ink and a red seal to confirm all formal imperial correspondence. There was no better time to claim lost ancient rights, even if unfounded, than when an office moribund for centuries is reconstituted. A red seal was as much a privilege claimed ab antiquo as using red ink. The claim to a red ink privilege in particular can be corroborated elsewhere as early as 1660–1678, since British diplomat and historian of the Ottoman Empire, Paul Rycaut had gotten wind of it during his postings in Istanbul (1660) and Smyrna thereafter.Footnote ¹⁹ Rycaut's diplomatic service from 1660–1678 comports very well with the archbishop's new role as ethnarch starting about 1660.

Further confirmation of a maturing archiepiscopal claim to the administrative privileges of scepter and red ink in the second half of the seventeenth century appears in two striking icons of St. Barnabas. The first was inscribed by the monk and well-known icon-painter Leontios of Limassol, who produced an icon of St. Barnabas in 1673 that originally hung in the Church of St. George in today's Turkish-controlled Nicosia but is now kept in the sacristy of the Royal and Stavropegic Monastery of Machaira.Footnote ²⁰ The icon displays St. Barnabas enthroned in episcopal vestments which include a red mantle, while holding a gospel book in his left hand and raising his right hand in blessing. The gospel, however, is not that of St. Matthew (which was located on St. Barnabas's chest when his remains were discovered), but rather of St. Luke, and is opened to chapter 10, verse 16. Here Christ commissions the 72 disciples (among whom tradition held was St. Barnabas) with the judgement whose words appear on the icon: “He that hears you hears me; he that despises you despises me.” This is the least of the iconographic innovations made by Leontios. The two upper corners each contain an archangel bringing to St. Barnabas an episcopal mitre, an imperial scepter, a gold inkstand with cinnabar, and an archiepiscopal staff topped with an orb. This is a case of hyper-correcting the scepter with globus cruciger invented by Florio Bustron, yet the privileges of imperial scepter and red ink are clearly portrayed here and now the red (or scarlet) mantle is also included. And what is more, in an astonishing cooptation of the traditional Majestas Domini iconography, St. Barnabas's cathedra rests upon a map of Cyprus. Thus St. Barnabas is seated in heaven and governs his homeland the autocephalous island of Cyprus, with apostolic symbolism befitting any terrestrial claims made by popes as the successors of St. Peter. Closely engaged with the archiepiscopal court, Leontios clearly knew both the history and hagiography of Cyprus and was no doubt commissioned to produce this icon by the archbishop Nikephoros along with other portraits of late seventeenth-century archbishops painted by him.Footnote ²¹

Leontios's innovative use of a map of Cyprus is also an important development.Footnote ²² It appears to have been added after the icon itself was finished, and its shoreline looks identical with a map available to him in the archiepiscopal archive: that of the Veronese engraver Paolo Forlani published in Venice in the year 1570. Perhaps the most interesting revelation here is the fact that Forlani's map was also used in some editions of Étienne de Lusignan's Chorograffia (1573), and one remains today in the Royal and Stavropegic Monastery of the Virgin of Kykkos.Footnote ²³ The continuities of the imperial scepter with orb (aureum pomum or globus cruciger) of Florio Bustron's Italian chronicle, St. Barnabas as apostolic founder-saint of the beloved homeland of Étienne de Lusignan's Italian-language chronicle contemporary with Bustron's, and the map of Paolo Forlani indicate a continued Italian influence on Cypriot notions of autocephalous temporal and spiritual rule by the archbishop as the successor of an apostle.Footnote ²⁴ Néophytos Rodinos (c. 1579–1669), a Greek Cypriot convert to Uniate Catholicism, student at the Greek College in Rome where he befriended fellow Greek uniate scholar and eventual keeper of the Vatican library, Leo Allatius, and subsequent missionary to Poland, Macedonia, and Greece, is another good example of continued Italian influence on Cypriot thought. Rodinos himself made good use of the St. Barnabas autocephaly story in his own Grecophone history of Cyprus published in Rome in 1658. Yet even though his avowed purpose in this history was to praise the glories of his home island, Rodinos did not include a grant of imperial privileges by the Emperor Zeno, which would suggest that assertions of these privileges at the archiepiscopal court in Cyprus were still of recent vintage.Footnote ²⁵

The timing of this icon's production, given its strong ideological and visual assertion of archiepiscopal autocephaly, no doubt reflects the threatened deposition of Archbishop Nikephoros of Cyprus in 1672 on the grounds of his sheltering the deposed ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, Parthenios IV. Nikephoros was called to Istanbul before Ecumenical Patriarch Dionysios IV (Parthenios IV's rival) to apologize, which he quickly did amid claims of being misled by the now false patriarch. Nikephoros was duly pardoned and reinstated as the legitimate archbishop of Cyprus.Footnote ²⁶ The assertion of disciplinary authority by the Ecumenical Patriarch was a direct challenge to the autocephaly of the Cypriot archbishops, and so it is no surprise that Leontios's St. Barnabas icon appeared in the following year. Archbishop Nikephoros was also hounded by his own bishops, who had already claimed equal status with him in 1651, which ultimately led to his resignation in 1674. Once again, claims to the imperial privileges were articulated most clearly at times when threats to archiepiscopal authority were the greatest. The fact that this icon had originally hung on the episcopal throne of the Church of St. George in Nicosia assured wide public access to its powerful iconographical message.Footnote ²⁷

Such archiepiscopal struggle for autonomy from both ecumenical patriarch and archdiocesan bishops continued under Nikephoros's successor, Ilarion Kigalas (1674–1678), whom rightly Marios Hadjianastasis labels as “one of the most controversial personalities in the island's history.”Footnote ²⁸ Though Cypriot by birth and Orthodox by birth and ordination, in 1635 he and his two brothers pursued their studies at the Greek College of Ayios Athanansios in Rome, an organization sponsored called Propaganda Fide which had been established by Pope Gregory XI in 1622 as a means of proselytizing of Orthodox Christian scholars and clergy. He was sent into Greece in 1648 as a Uniate missionary and spent considerable time in Epirus until he was recalled in 1657 for a three-year stint as rector of the Greek school of Padua; he left after controversy with the bishop of Padua over his manner of harmonizing Catholic and Orthodox traditions. It appears by all accounts that Ilarion's admixture of the two was defined by remaining thoroughly Orthodox in theology but Catholic in ecclesiology. Ilarion returned to the Ottoman Empire, therefore, founding schools in Lixouri (in Kephallonia) and Istanbul in 1660, where he came into the good graces of the Ecumenical Patriarch. He was very active in the 1668 synod of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus at which Calvinist doctrines were condemned, and this proved to be a springboard to his own election as Nikephoros' successor in 1674, despite the ardent opposition of many Cypriot clergymen because they considered him a dangerous “Latinizer” or “Romanizer.”Footnote ²⁹

Given his and his family's Uniate ties to the Roman Catholic Church, the Cypriot bishops made his episcopate difficult from the start. And it was in this context of continual disputation that Ilarion promulgated a remarkable letter in 1676 announcing the consecration of Nektarios as bishop of Tremithus (whose see Ilarion had revived for this purpose) and president (proedos) of Paphos. Though an ecclesiastical synod had duly elected him to the see of Paphos, Nektarios refused the office; thus Ilarion asserted autocephalic archiepiscopal power to appoint the hesitant cleric to another bishopric as well as to give him administrative authority as bishop-elect over the see he had just refused to serve. To justify such unilateral action, which assumed that any lay or episcopal participation was superfluous, Ilarion declared that as autocephalic archbishop he possessed such authority to appoint as well as suspend bishops (should any of them be planning to disobey his decree) because of the ancient privileges bestowed upon the archbishops of Cyprus.Footnote ³⁰ One simply has to conclude then that at some point in Ilarion's Uniate education at the Greek College in Rome, and certainly during his rectorship in Padua (where he likely read Néophytos Rodino's history), he imbibed western Catholic notions of archiepiscopal authority as well as Italian Catholic tradition of the archbishops of Cyprus's claims to ancient privileges. Indeed, he most assuredly also studied carefully Leontios of Limassol's icon of St. Barnabas whenever seated on the episcopal throne in the Church of St George. As George Hill has concluded, “The document is the only one of its kind surviving in the history of the Church of Cyprus,”Footnote ³¹ but it surely drew from the western Catholic concepts that had already begun to emerge in the sixteenth century. These Catholic ecclesiastical tendencies were the “Latinizing” aspects of his theology and ecclesiology that deeply troubled the Orthodox clergy on Cyprus.

Indeed, in this context it is striking to note that Ilarion also spent vast sums of money on the restoration of the church of St. Barnabas near Salamis, which had fallen into utter repair, becoming “a stable for cattle and a den of serpents.” Footnote ³² Once completing the restoration work, he then instituted an annual festival to commemorate the apostolic saint. Modern scholarship has yet to link this western Latinizing tendency with the rehabilitation of the cult of St. Barnabas, but it is clear by now that Barnabas was being fashioned as the apostolic patron saint of archiepiscopal autocephaly and authority on Cyprus not unlike St. Peter in Rome.

Such a policy was not well-received by the Orthodox clergy of the island to be sure, and thus within four years they had driven Ilarion out of his see and into exile, where he is said to have died in Constantinople of the plague in 1682. Yet despite this setback, his successors continued with his enterprising agenda. An even more intricate version of the Leontios icon clearly manifests archiepiscopal patronage of the notion of the regalia privileges as integral to the autocephalic church of St. Barnabas. Archbishop Iakovos I commissioned this second icon at the inauguration of his pontificate in 1691, which was then placed in the Panagia Pallouriotissa Church when the neighborhood was still a suburb of Nicosia.Footnote ³³ Archbishop Iakovos I (who only held office from 1691–1692) appears in miniature as the icon's patron, kneeling before the enthroned St. Barnabas robed in scarlet with the two archangels bringing the scepter-with-globus cruciger and the inkstand respectively. In lieu of the map, however, which does not appear in this icon, the relationship between saint and Archbishop Iakovos I is foregrounded in an unmistakable assertion of intimate benefaction flowing between both saint and archbishop. Since Iakovos I's short-lived pontificate was followed by Germanos II (1692–1705), who was brought before the Ecumenical Patriarch by his own bishops for “oppressing his flock,” this was obviously still an era of both internal as well as external conflict within the Orthodox church that placed the archbishop's autocephalous authority in continual jeopardy. When Germanos II overreached and sought to bring the Ottoman authorities against his bishops, they fled to the Porte and were successful in leveraging his replacement with Athanasios III.Footnote ³⁴ Therefore within the generation of 1660–1691 a sharply defined self-representation of the archbishops of Cyprus was fashioned through their own patronage as the autocephalous heirs to St. Barnabas and (now) possessors of the imperial privileges of red ink signatures, a unique orbed scepter, and a scarlet mantle. This troika of the sovereign symbols was put forward to bolster the archbishop's governing authority both as metropolitan as well as ethnarch in a time of ecclesiastical threats to the former and of inchoate emergence of the latter. This context puts the two St. Barnabas icons in an historical light quite different from their timeless depictions of apostolic spiritual presence on the island—especially in light of the episcopate of Ilarion and his own patronage of the cult of St. Barnabas.

Let us return now to Kyprianos the Archimandrite, who was one of the major Greek Cypriot intellectuals, writers, and clerics of the eighteenth century. He studied in Venice (where he published his history in 1788) and Padua (from 1794–1798) and then returned to Cyprus to serve in the archbishop's administration. Over time his recovered memory of the supposedly ancient imperial privileges became, in the context of the archbishop's modern role of ethnarch, the standard published authority confirming such administrative rights. In his Chronological History Kyprianos went straight to the source of the autocephaly claim by summarizing the St. Barnabas miracle story, and then he added the following coda (no doubt derived from Florio Bustron's history):

We find an evolution of the privileges themselves in this “second draft” of Florio Bustron's original account. The fundamental claim of ecclesiastical autocephaly remains intact (though now directed at the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople rather than at the Patriarch of Antioch) along with the royal scepter and the red ink signature privilege. All of this matches the St. Barnabas icons of the late seventeenth-century archiepiscopal court. Yet the red cross on the mantle has been transformed into a completely scarlet robe with liturgical purpose—there is still no imperial purple robe. Kyprianos makes clear, however, his interpretation of the meaning of these insignia of archiepiscopal power:

This powerful rhetorical recasting of St. Barnabas is easily the equal of that of Étienne de Lusignan's Renaissance remembrance of the saint,Footnote ³⁷ yet we find a new dimension to Barnabas's patronage here. One might say that, when fashioning St. Barnabas as the archetype for archiepiscopal leadership, Alexander the Monk first envisioned a monastic-ecclesiastical St. Barnabas and then Florio Bustron envisioned an administrative St. Barnabas. But Kyprianos the Archimandrite now envisions the saint-bishop as a nationalistic patriot and ethnarch who fights for his fatherland and calls his successors and their flock to do the same. It was clear by 1788 that the Latin West would never do the work of achieving Cypriot independence from the Ottoman yoke, and so it was time for the Cypriots to effect this liberation themselves.

By that time Kyprianos the Archimandrite had been extolling St. Barnabas for over thirty years as the source of the supposed linkage between autocephaly and the claimed imperial privileges. In 1756 he published a liturgical cycle of intercessory canons, other prayers, and hymns for some fifteen Cypriot saints and monastic patrons, and into this cycle he inserted the Akolouthia (Divine Office) of the “holy and glorious apostle Barnabas . . . thanksgivings on account of which Cyprus has through him enjoyed grace, autonomy and privileges [italics mine for emphasis].”Footnote ³⁸ Thus Kyprianos's first documented recovery of Florio Bustron's invented imperial privileges is this liturgy of 1756, and within thirty years the archimandrite had linked imperial scepter, robe, and signatures in cinnabar with the privilege of governing as the Cypriot ethnarch.

Thus the historical evolution of St. Barnabas and the privileges he secured for Cyprus have now reached their modern form through Kyprianos the Archimandrite (with the exception still of the mantle as scarlet red instead of imperial purple), and this archetype would subsequently prove to be a powerful force in Cyprus down to today given the clergy and laity's full embrace of this modern St. Barnabas as an ethnarcic Cypriot patron saint of their archbishops.Footnote ³⁹ Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greek historians of Cyprus maintained Kyprianos' patriotic vision of St. Barnabas without any critical evaluation of its modern historical origins.Footnote ⁴⁰

The archbishops of Cyprus would successfully consolidate administrative and ethnarchic political power throughout the eighteenth century, reaching their zenith of power and influence in the pontificate of Archbishop Kyprianos (born 1756, archbishop 1810–1821), whose personal insignia further reified the claimed imperial privileges as symbols of ethnarchic authority.Footnote ⁴¹ Kyprianos's silver-gilt inkstand from which the privileged cinnabar ink flowed, is the best surviving insignia we have for this. The lid is inscribed with a two-headed imperial eagle crowned with diadem and mitre and holding a royal scepter in its right foot and a serpent-headed archiepiscopal staff in its left. This eagle symbolizes the archbishop's dual roles of pastor and ethnarch—the latter the dominant image here, fortified as it is by imagery of Byzantine imperial authority. Flanking each side of the imperial eagle are also engraved two convex roundels in the form of medallions, the first containing a glass vessel for ink in the shape of a mid-eighteenth century flower vase which contains two quill pens and an inscription: “By observing the medallions you see the emblems.” This medallion signifies the privilege of signing documents in cinnabar ink. The second roundel represents the other imperial privileges: (1) a folded purple mandyas, (2) a scepter with finial orb wrapped at its midpoint, where it would be held, with a kerchief suggesting sacral status, and (3) and an archiepiscopal mitre surmounted with a cross and wreath, signifying autocephaly.

The sides of the inkstand are decorated with eight floral swags of semi-elliptical shape, which are joined by rings festooned with strips of cloth. Within the middle swag is a relief image of a nimbus-covered bishop with the inscription, “The Apostle Barnabas,” dressed appropriately in sticharion, phelonion and omophorion and holding in his left hand a gospel book and raising his right hand in benediction. To his right appears again the archiepiscopal scepter wrapped with a kerchief, above which one sees a cross-surmounted globe studded with precious stones. In the swag to the right of St. Barnabas the discovery of his tomb is depicted with a hill covered in bushes on which lies a coffin located under a tree. In the swag to the left of Barnabas stands the figure identified as the Emperor Zeno, bearded and wearing a crown and sakkos with thong and torque. He extends his right hand offering Barnabas (and thus his successors) the imperial scepter, and his left hand offering a quill pen and a piece of cloth (the mandyas). The adjoining swag contains a relief depiction of a codex bound with wooden boards and clasps inscribed “Matthew's Gospel” (which was found with Barnabas's remains), and in the swag to its left a map inscribed “The Island of Cyprus” in the style of French maps of the eighteenth century.

To complete this remarkably detailed and carefully crafted design, Archbishop Kyprianos himself is represented in the large central swag bearing a scepter in his right hand while he tries with his left to raise the recumbent figure of a poverty-stricken young woman depicted with a shabby long dress, disheveled hair, and bare arms. Lacking his ecclesiastical vestments in this scene, Kyprianos is clearly depicted here in his role of ethnarch of the Cypriot community. On the right side of the inkstand there appears a representation of a city bearing the inscription, “Leucosia” (Nicosia) as if it were a municipal seal as found in western cities, and on the left side a damaged and crudely repaired depiction of another city inscribed as “Famagusta.” The rear panel of the inkstand bears an inscription recording the donor of this sophisticated and detailed emblem of the archbishop of Cyprus as ecclesiastical and ethnarchical leader of Greek Cypriots: “In the archiepiscopate of Kyprianos, 1812.”

There can be no clearer conflation of the claimed imperial privileges with the St. Barnabas autocephaly tradition than Archbishop Kyprianos's own inkstand, fashioned as an ideological program in support of his role as leader of the political community as well as of the church of Greek Cypriots in the early nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴² Kyprianos own invention of this inkstand also surely served the purpose of exalting him as the ethnarchic savior, the father of his country, and for some even the long hoped-for restorer of Cyprus's independence from Turkish rule. Indeed, given the manner in which he succeeded to the throne in 1811 (through the forced resignation and exile of his aged predecessor, Archbishop Chrysanthos),Footnote ⁴³ he needed the ideological program that he articulated so clearly in the inkstand fashioned in 1812.

Though Archbishop Kyprianos's self-understanding and thus self-representation was that of a renewer and restorer rather than nationalist or ethno-martyr in the making,Footnote ⁴⁴ the Turkish government came to perceive him as an innovator and thus a dangerous political authority on the island. Kyprianos's accumulated political power as well as Cyprus's political responses to the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821 became intolerable to the Ottoman Porte, and thus he was hanged amid wholesale executions of hundreds of Cypriot ecclesiastics and prominent figures as rebels by the pasha Küçük Mehmet.Footnote ⁴⁵ The archbishop who sought to lead his people into a brighter future, would not be remembered as an ethnarch forever memorialized in his inkstand, but rather as an ethnomartyr. As Benedict Englezakis has aptly written, “The red cinnabar which justified him was his blood.”Footnote ⁴⁶

III. Archepiscopal Projection of Regalia Privileges to Western Europeans

This atrocity marked a new dynamic of political resistance in the relationship between the Cypriot church and the Ottoman government down to the end of the Russo-Turkish War in 1878. And thereafter during the subsequent century under British colonial rule (1878–1960) Cypriot archbishops continued to champion the nationalist independence movement, culminating in the dual role of Archbishop and President Makarios III (1913–1977).Footnote ⁴⁷ He bore the formal title of ethnarch, which however had by then been transformed in meaning from its original (ethnic representative of a millet before the Ottoman Porte) to that of nationalist political leader and father of the nation.Footnote ⁴⁸ In both of these modern imperial contexts, both Ottoman and British, St. Barnabas served as a political as well as a spiritual force on the island, and no more so after his city of Salamis and his monastery church found itself located on the Turkish side of a divided Cyprus since 1974.

This emergent modern ethnarchic vision of St. Barnabas was clearly and consistently communicated to European travelers, pilgrims, scholars, and diplomats from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth century. As early as the year after the fall of Famagusta to the Turks, the Italian Renaissance scholar, editor, cartographer, and translator Tommaso Porcacchi (who wrote in both Greek and Latin) had easily gathered information on the St. Barnabas autocephaly tradition in his research,Footnote ⁴⁹ and in the early seventeenth century the English humanist and globetrotter George Sandys heard the same story;Footnote ⁵⁰ however, at that time there was no mention of any imperial privileges, as these visits took place before the new ethnarch role of the archbishops began around 1660.

But by the early eighteenth century visitors to Cyprus were given additional information as the legend of the privileges was now bundled with the autocephaly tradition. A Slavic Orthodox pilgrim from Kiev, Vasyl Hryhorovyĉ-Bars'kyj († 1747), produced a very detailed travel journal in which he recounted the combined autocephaly-imperial privileges account told to him when visiting the pilgrimage church of St. Barnabas:

Such evidence confirms that, at least a generation before the Kyprianos the Archimandrite's account, stories were being told about St. Barnabas' miracle affirming autocephaly as well as about certain privileges granted by the emperor (though in this particular case Justinian is named instead of Zeno). The staff “with a golden apple on top” came straight out of Florio Bustron's text, and the red ink we have already seen confirmed by the Ottoman Porte as early as the 1660–1678. But the additions of a patriarchal crown (the tiara patriarchalis Graeca)Footnote ⁵² and honorific form of address bespeak a continued concern over status within the Orthodox hierarchy—a subject quite fitting when in conversation with a member of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Since patriarchs and independent archbishops are addressed as “Your Beatitude” with the sole exception of the Ecumenical Patriarch, who is addressed as “Your All Holiness,” one would think that our pilgrim had mixed up these two forms of address. Otherwise someone at the monastery church was exercising some one-upsmanship with the Ukrainian pilgrim (and the Ecumenical Patriarch). Apart from these intramural concerns of hierocratic status, the privileges of red ink and scepter remain constant throughout the eighteenth century, as did the emphasis on autocephaly within the Orthodox communion. Dutch diplomat Aegidius van Egmont, his traveling companion the orientalist John Heyman, and the peripatetic English prelate Richard Pococke were also shown the grotto of St. Barnabas's tomb and told the autocephaly miracle story during their mid-eighteenth-century visits to Cyprus.Footnote ⁵³

Further evidence of the continuity of the imperial privileges claimed alongside autocephaly still remains today in the cathedral church of St. John in Nicosia. Around the year 1736, as the archbishops were consolidating their ethnarchic temporal power alongside ecclesiastical authority, the privileges claimed to date were memorialized in a series of wall paintings in the cathedral church, located in the residential precinct of the archbishops in Nicosia. George Jeffery, architectural historian and founder of the Lapidary Museum in Nicosia (originally known as the Jeffery Museum), described them in the early twentieth-century as four collaged pictures of (1) St. Barnabas appearing to Archbishop Anthemios in a vision and indicating where his interment was, (2) the search for his body under a carob tree with spade and mattock lying in foreground, (3) Anthemios presenting the Gospel of St. Matthew to Emperor Zeno (Jeffery's account has the direction of the gospel's presentation backwards), and (4) Emperor Zeno conferring the scepter and pen as emblems of authority to the archbishop, who wears a new scarlet mantle while the suffragan bishops remain in their black mantles. In the middle of the four pictures an inscription reads:

Jeffery concludes with his assessment: “The style of these paintings is very poor and inartistic—rough work of the XVIII century.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Therefore, as the archbishops were well on their way to achieving singular temporal power on the island as ethnarch of the Greek Cypriot millet, the three imperial privileges depicted in this public space within the archiepiscopal residence were (1) the scepter (of Florio Bustron) and (2) the pen (the red ink of correspondence with the Porte), and (3) the scarlet mantle (the same as those in the icons of 1673 and 1691 as well as in the mantle later described by Kyprianos the Archimandrite in 1788).Footnote ⁵⁵

Nineteenth-century visitors to Cyprus, who take on a decidedly political cast, learned of the increasingly nationalistic version of St. Barnabas and his archiepiscopal successors in Cyprus. The Barcelona-born resident of Paris, Don Domingo Badia-y-Leyblich (a.k.a. Ali Bey) came away from his visit with the archbishop in the spring of 1806 with a clear message about the latter's supreme leadership position on the island,Footnote ⁵⁶ as did East India Company captain John Macdonald Kinnear in January 1814.Footnote ⁵⁷ Simultaneously William Turner, staff assistant to British Ambassador Sir Robert Liston to the Porte in 1812, heard in no uncertain terms of the peerless and privileged status of the archbishops of Cyprus:

This was the story told to Ambassador Liston by none other than Archbishop Kyprianos, at the height of his power, in the year of the manufacture of his aforementioned inkstand, and only nine years before his brutal hanging by the pasha in 1821. Kyprianos takes liberties with Alexander the Monk's original account by completely obscuring the three main figures (St. Barnabas, who is replaced by an angel; Archbishop Anthemios, whose identity is redefined as a “the priest of a convent;” and Patriarch Peter of Antioch, who is completely supplanted by an imperial manuscript request) as well as the once central claim to autocephaly in order to foreground the special imperial privileges granted in exchange for the St. Matthew Gospel. These are also curiously altered privileges: the red ink and red vestment remain familiar, but the patriarchal use of the Orthodox coat of arms on his episcopal chair in lieu of the imperial scepter are innovations, though perhaps apropos to a conversation with a British ambassador. It is worth noting that the current Greek Orthodox Church's coat of arms depicts the double-headed eagle with a patriarch's crown hovering above it while the bird clutches a globus cruciger in its left claw and a sword in its right claw, all of which are clearly Byzantine imperial regalia symbols. Hence we have here a parallel case of an appropriation of Byzantine regalia among the Orthodox hierarchy, which Archbishop Kyprianos was careful to employ, though with the curious flexibility to lose the long-claimed scepter in favor of the Orthodox Church's coat of arms (the last of which was claimed to have been granted by Zeno).

Kyprianos's sudden and violent end was remembered in 1853 by Louis Lacroix, professor of history at the Lycée, specifically in the context of the accumulated power of the archbishop at the time of his execution.Footnote ⁵⁹ The year 1821 was a violent reminder that the imperial governing privileges claimed by the archbishop of Cyprus may have been attached to a hazy Byzantine past, but they came in actuality from the hand of the Ottoman sultan.Footnote ⁶⁰ And so much is made clear by the imperial berat of 1865 by which Sophronios was installed as the new archbishop of Cyprus (and last of the period of Turkish rule),Footnote ⁶¹ which in part reads:

The irony here of course is that the custom existing ab antiquo was relatively recent and regularly re-authorized by the Porte at the accession of each archbishop.

IV. Orientalism and Regalia Privileges under the British Empire

But once the prospect of yet another transfer of empires on the island presented itself, the archbishops of Cyprus were quick to present their ancient credentials—and even to elaborate on them. Sir Robert Hamilton Lang, British consul in Cyprus at the time that the British protectorate of Cyprus emerged out of the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), was well instructed as his assessment of the island's past, present, and potential future as part of the British Empire indicates:Footnote ⁶³

With the addition of the purple silk robes here in 1878 we now have the final, mature set of privileges: purple robes, gold-orbed sceptre, signing in red ink, and the title of Beatitude. Surely it was hoped that this set of privileges and the now customary role of Cypriot ethnarch would give the archbishops of Cyprus standing before the British imperial government too, and so it did.Footnote ⁶⁴ Yet a dash of orientalizing could easily reinterpret the archiepiscopal claim as ethnarch to ancient secular privileges as a purely spiritual authority whose symbols were evidence of the empire's majesty and authority to deputize authority. The archbishop was a mere symbol of imperial greatness, not a sovereign of the island country. Such a view, which was not the view of the archiepiscopal court but rather that of British imperial authorities, was articulated by the globetrotting writer William Hepworth Dixon in his aptly titled 1879 book, British Cyprus:

In fact, British diplomats did more to spread and reaffirm these supposedly ancient privileges than either the Emperor Zeno or the Ottoman Sultans, as we see for example in the High Commissioner to Cyprus Sir William Frederick Haynes Smith's report to Parliament in April of 1902 concerning the death of Archbishop Sophronios III on 23 May 1900:

Under the thorough if sometimes jaundiced eyes of British civil servants in Cyprus, the imperial privileges became historically ancient, having continued for more than 1,500 years “in the unchanging Orthodox Church of Cyprus.” The Cypriot Church would succeed in preserving its ecclesiastical autocephaly within the Orthodox Church through encouraging such British orientalism, which projected the history of the privileges' development into a fixed timeless ancient truth. Yet imperial officials felt authorized to intervene in insular ecclesiastical affairs during the sometimes violent “Archiepiscopal Question” (an electoral dispute between the Kitian and Kyrenian factions over Sophronios III's successor lasting from 1900–1910). British government intervention finally affected a compromise favoring the Kitian majority in return for supporting the Cypriot church's autocephaly from interventions by the larger Greek Orthodox Church in deciding such matters.Footnote ⁶⁷ The relationship between the church and the British imperial government was further tested, however, during the European crisis era of 1931–1946, in which the latter sought to prevent any archbishop's election who was not a moderate, pro-British candidate. Thus the archiepiscopal see was left vacant for extended periods amid negotiations with the Foreign Office and parliamentary bills excluding undesirable candidates.Footnote ⁶⁸ This trend toward challenging the church's autocephaly culminated in the Provincial Court of Nicosia in 1948, which rendered an historic decision on March 13 confirming the autocephaly of the Church of Cyprus. The ancient claims to autocephaly and imperial privileges were judged to be precedents carrying more legal force than either English Common Law or Ottoman imperial Law.Footnote ⁶⁹ And in this early twentieth-century political and legal context, the list of claimed imperial privileges as part and parcel of Cypriot autocephaly entered into western scholarly footnotes and took on a modern life of their own.Footnote ⁷⁰

The admixture of British colonial diplomatic writing and orientalist scholarship may best be seen in the work of Sir Harry Luke (1884–1969). An official in the British Colonial Office, Luke served in Barbados, Cyprus, Transcaucasia, Sierra Leone, Palestine, Malta, the British Western Pacific Territories and Fiji. He also held an honorary D. Litt. from Oxford University and an honorary LLD from the University of Malta, since he authored over two dozen books on several of these countries. After serving as private secretary to the High Commissioner of Cyprus (1911–1912) and as Commissioner of Famagusta (1918–1920), he published a history of Cyprus under the Turks with Oxford University Press in which the fusion of the St. Barnabas autocephaly tradition with the imperial privileges was sustained.Footnote ⁷¹ But he was not the only one to do so. The scholarly genealogy of the St. Barnabas-based claim to autocephaly bundled with imperial privileges can be traced further back to Jacques Marie Joseph Louis, Count de Mas Latrie (1815–1897) and his multi-volume history of Lusignan Cyprus (1852–1861).Footnote ⁷² Award-winning professor of diplomatics at the École nationale des chartes,Footnote ⁷³ he took the imperial privileges to be an ancient matter though ironically, as a scholar of diplomatics he held no charter evidence proving this. He simply elided over centuries and took nineteenth-century archiepiscopal claims as of ancient origin, and given his academic reputation for Cypriot history and archaeology, his line of reasoning was readily adopted. John Hackett's History of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus (1901), which became a standard Anglophone history for most of the twentieth century, also perpetuated the undocumented privileges as ancient fact.Footnote ⁷⁴ A military chaplain who spent two tours of duty in Cyprus, he described his book thus: “Though it does not profess to much original research, sources of information have been used which are generally accessible to the ordinary reader.” He continued on to describe the book's purpose:

A priori concerns for peaceful ecumenical and colonial coexistence assured that there would be no historically critical investigation into the ancestry of the privileges within this particular British-Cypriot discourse. Furthermore, Hackett makes trusting use of de Mas Latrie, and his own interpretations of George Kedrenos and Alexander the Monk as sources (neither of whom mentioned the privileges) were made in the light of the eighteenth-century Kyprianos the Archimandrite, rather than doing the reverse. As a result, the story was passed on intact to generations of twentieth-century readers.Footnote ⁷⁶

V. Regalia Privileges in Twentieth-Century Historiography

A missed opportunity to address this elision arose in the otherwise thorough Handbook of Cyprus (1900) of Sir J. T. Hutchinson and Claude Delaval Cobham, in which the entire history of the Cypriot Church and its archbishops is neglected in their very brief history of the island.Footnote ⁷⁷ And thus the historiography of the twentieth century essentially repeated the scholarly version of the privileges legend laid down by de Mas Latrie in 1852 and sustained thereafter by both Cypriot Greek nationalist discourse as well as its anglophone propagation by British authors.Footnote ⁷⁸ There is barely a hint of uncertainty in Sir George Francis Hill's remarkably understated comment in volume one of his four-volume magnum opus on Cyprus's history first published in 1940: “These privileges, expressing recognition of temporal authority, seem somewhat excessive, and have had frequent repercussions down to the present day.”Footnote ⁷⁹ A classicist and numismatist by training, Hill (1867–1948) was the director and principal librarian at the British Museum (1931–1936) and an international authority on ancient coinage and medals and Italian Renaissance seals, yet he described himself as “an amateur of Cypriot history.”Footnote ⁸⁰ To be fair, there is an immense amount of sound historical analysis based on primary source evidence in this classic four-volume set. Yet when it comes to the St. Barnabas autocephaly tradition, once again an authoritative British scholar uncritically inserted the early-modern imperial privileges claim into the ancient St. Barnabas autocephaly story as though they too were bound together in antiquity. And as Hill's four-volume set was reissued in 2010 by Cambridge University Press, one can expect another generation of opinion shaping on this topic to continue.Footnote ⁸¹

In the entire twentieth century, there is only one dissonant voice among western European and North American scholars regarding the claimed imperial privileges, which was not located among British diplomat-scholars, numismatists, clergy, and academic administrators associated in some way or another with British Empire in Cyprus. Hans-Georg Beck (1910–1999) was known as the “Nestor of Byzantine studies” because of his long life and his longtime service as editor-in-chief of Byzantinische Zeitschrift.Footnote ⁸² Beck pointed out the anachronistic nature of Alexander the Monk's St. Barnabas autocephaly story in what became the international standard on the field of Byzantine church literary history, Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich, Footnote ⁸³ a view shared by the American classicist Glanville Downey.Footnote ⁸⁴ But the imperial privileges were not addressed until several years later, and only in a passing statement in an otherwise perfunctory book review notice that would get no public attention: “The protocol privileges of the archbishops of Cyprus, which the Emperor Zeno is supposed to have granted, are pure myths.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Within the historiographical range of British colonial acceptance and German Byzantinist rejection of the claimed imperial privileges, there is a more fully historicized middle position available to us. The privileges were legendary in nature but not timeless mythology. Each privilege was developed independently at specific moments in history in response to specific challenges facing the archbishops of Cyprus and their suffragan clergy. The privileges are neither timeless fact nor timeless mythology, but they have a real history.

A final word is needed concerning the purple imperial mantle, which is the latest of the three claimed privileges to reach its mature form. Florio Bustron was the first to claim some form of a privileged mantle by describing one surmounted with a red cross, which would have had a clear crusader resonance in Cyprus during the 1560s. Leontios of Limassol painted St. Barnabas with red robes in his 1673 icon, and the Archbishop Iakovos I's sponsored icon (1691) depicts similar red robes as well. The St. John's Cathedral fresco (c. 1736) definitely depicts Anthemios with a mantle distinctive from the other clerics standing behind him in black, and despite serious damage to the image Barnabas' mantle has a scarlet appearance. Kyprianos the Archimandrite (1788) then described it as a scarlet mantle, and Archbishop Kyprianos (1812) as a red vest. The constant here is the color of scarlet red, and so we can only conclude that whatever role the mantle plays today in contemporary usage, it emerged as the last privilege by the late seventeenth century as a scarlet red vestment alongside the Renaissance-era claim of the scepter (Florio Bustron) and the early Ottoman-era claim of the cinnabar ink. Its formal transition to a purple mantle had taken place by the beginning of British rule in Cyprus, as British Consul Sir Robert Hamilton Lang reported in 1878 that Archbishop Sophronios claimed the full set of privileges, including “purple silk robes.” It may be possible to identify this mantle with the mandyas, also known as the phelonion (chasuble), worn ritually by late Byzantine emperors (and which replaced the chlamys by the fourteenth century) following their coronations as they continued to participate in the mass through the Little and Great Entrance processions.Footnote ⁸⁶ But the term mandyas was also used to describe the black monastic mantle.Footnote ⁸⁷ So it seems simplest to indicate that this was originally a red tunic but ultimately became an outer garment (mantle) that took on the function of liturgical honor, since first scarlet red and then imperial purple color was used by the archbishops of Cyprus, whereas the other bishops of the island used black monastic mantles.Footnote ⁸⁸ The key then is the color, not the cut of the garment.

Later Byzantine frescoes do show a privileged use by the four Orthodox patriarchs and the metropolitans of Caesarea, Ephesus, Thessalonica, and Corinth of such mantles (mandyas/phelonion) covered with crosses, hence called polystaurion, with this version in time replaced by the sakkos, a garment that seems to have been modeled on the ceremonial tunic of the emperor himself.Footnote ⁸⁹ This sakkos was a sartorial innovation of Orthodox bishops in the fourteenth century, and it was employed along with the mitre in imitation of imperial court dress. There survive attempts by bishops to legitimate their use of imperial ritual dress as donations from the emperor, though most appear spurious. It is most likely then that Orthodox prelates simply began to appropriate imperial dress either from the emperor himself or other courtiers by the last years of the Byzantine Empire. As early as the Great Schism, however, the Ecumenical Patriarch Michael Keroularius (1043–1059) himself came in for strong criticism along these lines as if he were attempting to compete with the pope's appropriation of imperial insignia based on the spurious Donation of Constantine when he wore the emperor's blue shoes.Footnote ⁹⁰ But for most it appears to have been a sort of hierocratic competition for honorific insignia emerging in the later medieval and early modern eras. This could well explain then the admixture of red, scarlet, and purple colors with crosses, vests, and mantles in Cyprus as its archbishops jockeyed with others in the Orthodox hierarchy for relative status and prestige. Therefore we should understand the ideological import of the mantle as being consistent with that of the scepter and the use of imperial ink.

With all due respect kindly given to High Commissioner Sir William Frederick Haynes Smith, the Church of Cyprus has never been “unchanging.” It has a history, and therefore so do the imperial privileges claimed by its archbishops.Footnote ⁹¹ Each of the three privileges evolved over time and are reflective of the pressures their claimants experienced under often less than ideal conditions. As with the medieval popes in Rome, claims to imperial privileges and terrestrial sovereignty were voiced the strongest either when the archbishops' independence was threatened or their temporal leadership role was transformed out of necessity. And always the founding patron saint and an imperial patron were employed for both protection as well as voices to articulate the venerable roles threatened in times of trouble or rapid change. The British high commissioner was merely one of the last in a line of modern imperial authorities to give voice to the imperial privileges claimed ab antiquo and to bundle them with the autocephaly tradition. In this history of the imperial privileges, we find three archetypes of St. Barnabas: a late antique monastic-ecclesial protector of autocephaly (Alexander the Monk), an early modern territorial administrative archbishop in a collapsing Christian empire modelled on the Donation of Constantine (Florio Bustron), and a modern ethnarchic-patriotic defender of the fatherland against foreign occupation (Kyprianos the Archimandrite and Archbishop Kyprianos). Only in the latter two archetypes do terrestrial governing privileges matter, and so they are rightly located in early modern and modern history, not in the late antiquity of the first archetype where the autocephaly tradition began. The imperial regalia privileges can only be placed in the first age of Alexander the Monk by means of a later, anachronistic insertion one might justifiably call the Donation of Zeno.