Daniel Berardino
Fordham University
Since the first Slavic migrations into the Balkans around the sixth century, Byzantium’s relationship with the Slavs was contentious and varied. Two of the principal sources for understanding that relationship are the vitae of the first Archbishop of Bulgaria, Kliment of Ohrid (d. 916). While scholars assume that Kliment’s original vita was composed in Old Church Slavonic, there are only two versions of the Vita Clementis extant—a Long Life and a Short Life—both, both written in Greek by two Byzantine archbishops of Ohrid in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. These texts demonstrate how in the process of translating, writing, and re-writing hagiographical texts, ethnic identities, and imperial ideologies could be negotiated and reified. I argue that in redacting the Long Life heavily and centering it around the character of St. Kliment himself, while at the same time emphasizing the classical origins of the Bulgarians, limiting theological controversies, and removing agency from Bulgarian secular leaders, in the Short Life Chomatenos advances a paradigm of a paternal relationship between the Byzantines and Bulgarians. This was a rhetorical response to the ongoing conflict between the Despotate of Epirus and the Second Bulgarian Empire. Chomatenos’ re-writing project was in support of the political project of the Doukid regime based first in Epirus, and then in Thessalonike, to unify Bulgaria with the Byzantine successor states and claim universal authority by ultimately seizing Constantinople. Furthermore, in these two texts, we see the suppression of the official, Roman identity of the Byzantines and the articulation of their emerging “Greek” identity.