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Fotii, a Rus pilgrim to Constantinople

Monica White

Rus had close ties to Byzantium from at least the eighth century, when adventurous Vikings began collecting slaves, fur and other forest products to sell in the rich markets of Constantinople. Despite the length and danger of the journey, this trade was extremely lucrative and continued into the late middle ages. Following the official conversion of Rus to Orthodox Christianity in the late tenth century, the north-south traffic expanded to include people on church business, including bishops, monks, and pilgrims. Constantinople had long attracted pilgrims from all over Christendom thanks to its vast collection of relics – fragments of the bodies of saints or objects touched by holy people, such as clothing worn by the Virgin Mary (known in the east as the Mother of God). These items, which were believed to effect cures and bring the faithful into the presence of the divine, were highly prized. Constantinople had the best collection in the world of both saintly and Christological relics (the True Cross, Crown of Thorns, etc.). Thus, Christians from Rus, both lay and ecclesiastic, travelled to Constantinople to venerate relics starting in at least the early twelfth century, when the oldest surviving pilgrimage account (khozhdenie) was written, and probably earlier.

A rich pilgrimage literature survives from Rus and early Muscovy, which provides a great deal of important information about the treasures of Constantinople and pilgrims’ religious experiences. It says very little, however, about most other aspects of pilgrims’ journeys: their companions, accommodation, other business in Constantinople, etc. This is because the authors of the accounts assumed that their readers were interested only in the relics, and would either already know or not care about other details. This is, of course, not the case for modern historians, who find the omission of so much information regrettable. The following account has therefore been conceived as a “photographic negative,” which relates the experiences of a pilgrim other than the veneration of relics.

Our pilgrim, a monk named Fotii, visited Constantinople in 1277, a time of turmoil in eastern Europe. Rus had endured destructive invasions by the Mongols in the 1230s, although four decades later the newer cities of the northeast, such as Fotii’s native Tver, were prospering through trade. Constantinople, which was conquered by Latin crusaders in 1204, had been retaken in 1261 by the Greek Orthodox emperor Michael VIII, who was still ruling during Fotii’s sojourn. However, Michael was forced to agree to a widely reviled and short-lived union of the churches (known as the Union of Lyon) in 1274 to stave off another crusade. The traditional trade in northern products such as fur and slaves was as lively as ever, but the Venetians and Genoese were rapidly establishing trading colonies around the Black Sea, cutting off older Byzantine trade centers.

In the account below, unfamiliar terms and the historical accuracy or significance of certain remarks are explained in the endnotes. Supplementary information which Fotii would not have included is given in square brackets. The text in italics is taken from primary sources (actual pilgrimage accounts and a late medieval Greek-Slavonic phrase book), with references in the endnotes. The manuscript containing Fotii’s account is imagined, like many others, to have suffered damage and is missing the sections describing Fotii’s tour of the relics of Constantinople and his journey back to Tver.