Departments & Disciplines – Page 4 – Medieval Studies Research Blog: Meet us at the Crossroads of Everything

May 7, 2025May 12, 2025

Why Fortify? A Short Introduction to Four Byzantine Fortifications in the Maeander Valley

I chose these four fortresses as representations of the observable differences between Byzantine fortified sites. Not all fortifications were made equal. Differences lie not only in the choice of how walls and towers are constructed, but also in the placement of these fortified sites in the landscape. Careful analysis of these features can reveal the underlying assumptions and motivations of the builders. I have chosen among these four fortifications a military base, a refuge, a center for agricultural exploitation, and a fortified residence within the Maeander River valley.

The Locations of the Fortresses, made by author in QGIS.

Kadıkalesi[1]

Kadıkalesi is a great example of a military fortress likely built and used by the Byzantine armed forces. The entrances, not just the main one but the two postern entrances too, had a bent gate, which denies an attacker a good view inside the fortress (see Figure 2). The towers project from the walls and include a larger circular tower which is more resilient to projectiles than a square tower. Throughout the entire circuit of walls, platforms known as battlements were built for soldiers to be able to view the landscape. The walls were caped with crenulations, which provided coverage for those soldiers from fire from below (see Figure 3). This fortress was found on a small hill above a road, about 50 meters above sea level. On the one hand, this elevation gave the soldiers good visibility of the surrounding countryside, but, on the other, it was low enough that the soldiers could quickly do something about a threat (see Figure 2).

The Bent Gate of Kadıkalesi, photo by author.

The Battlements of Kadıkalesi, photo by author.

Fındıklı Kalesi[2]

Fındıklı Kalesi was a large fortress on the top of a mountain, enclosing an area of seven hectares at an elevation higher than 600 meters above sea level. Like Kadıkalesi, the walls were built with military concerns in mind; a series of towers and periodic battlements defend the portions of wall spanning the gaps between rocks, while a double gate fortifies the most vulnerable part of the fortress in the southeast. The size of the fortress was partly determined by geology; the walls follow the edges of a massive rock outcropping. Unlike Kadıkalesi, however, the fortress was isolated from the Byzantine roads that cross the mountain and unable to serve in the policing of routes. I agree with scholars who see Fındıklı Kalesi as a refuge for times of invasion with only a small permanent peacetime population.[3] This was a fortress, not of lords or soldiers, but of farmers and shepherds, who needed its great size to house flocks of sheep and its isolated location to keep just far enough away from any potential raiders that this ‘bluff in stone’ may appear like a formidable military fortress.

View North from Inside Fındıklı Kalesi, photo by author.

Mersinet İskelesi[4]

The impressive fortress found on the southern coast of Lake Bafa appears to be a military fort like Kadıkalesi. The use of blind arches to support the battlements even shows an improvement over the thick walls of Kadıkalesi. However, I argue that military effectiveness was not the main concern of this fortress. The defining element of the fortress is a great tower bisected by the enceinte wall. However, there is no communication between the walls and the tower; anyone stationed in the tower could not advance into the battlements in response to a threat. Second, the tower does not protrude from the wall, which decreased its visibility and potential range of fire. While Mersinet İskelesi’s position does provide a good view of the eastern half of Lake Bafa, nearby hills could provide a better view. Instead, this fortress has more in common with the isolated towers found around Lake Bafa and in the wider Maeander Valley. Mersinet İskelesi is an isolated tower with an increased budget. I suspect that this fortress and the other towers have something to do with the exploitation of agricultural estates as these towers lie at the edge of the most plentiful area of farmable land adjacent to Lake Bafa, even if this fortress is usually interpreted as a fortified monastery[5] or military base.[6]

View of Tower of Mersinet İskelesi from Lake Bafa, photo by author.

Central Tower of Mersinet İskelesi from inside the Fortress, photo by author.

The Monastery of Stylos[7]

The final fortress is the monastery of Stylos. Its walls aided the defense of a community which resided in isolated places like a type of fortified residence. However, this monastery was never intended to operate like a military fortress. For instance, the battlements were limited to walls located at known entrances on the north and south side. They were only interested in watching visitors who intended to use a proper gate and not in observing the wider region. Nor was it a refuge. While the monastery was deep in its mountain like Fındıklı Kalesi, Stylos is near a branch of an ancient road network, which gives the monastery a greater ability to interact with others on and off the mountain. Finally, the division of interior fortification betrays a uniquely monastic concern: the proper veneration of the founder of the monastery. The inner bastion of the monastery contains the hermitage of Saint Paul the Younger cut in a tower of rock and decorated with a painted program of religious images (see Figures 6 and 7). I suspect the fortification of the hermitage likely served to encourage the veneration of their founder and to connect that founder with the builder of the walls, likely Christodoulos of Latros who would go on to found the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian on Patmos. Whatever the purpose of the inner gate was, it is hard to imagine it served the defense of the monastery.

The Inner Gate of Stylos Leading to the Hermitage, photo by author.

View of the Hermitage of Saint Paul the Younger, photo by author.

Tyler Wolford, PhD
Byzantine Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

[1] Wolfgang Müller-Wiener, “Mittelalterliche Befestigungen im südlichen Jonien,” IstMitt 11 (1961): 19-23.

[2] Hans Lohmann et al., Survey in der Mykale 1, Bonn: Rudolf Habelt, 2014-2017, II.510-513 (MYK 65).

[3] Jesko Fildhuth, Das byzantinische Priene, Berlin: DAI, 2017, 96-98; for an opposing view see Lohmann et al., Survey in der Mykale, I.284-290.

[4] Müller-Wiener, “Mittelalterliche Befestigungen,” 17-19.

[5] Urs Peschlow, “Latmos,” Reallexikon zur byzantinischen Kunst 5 (1995): 695-696.

[6] Müller-Wiener, “Mittelalterliche Befestigungen,” 18-19.

[7] Theodor Wiegand, Der Latmos, Milet III.1, Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1913, 61-72.

March 26, 2025May 12, 2025

Notaries in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland

In June of 2023, I arranged to meet my friend and fellow historian Caoimhe Whelan for a short breakfast during one of my rare trips to Ireland. I had given the rest of the day over to research, a concession of one day in what was supposed to be a family holiday. At breakfast, Caoimhe introduced me to Stuart Kinsella, Christ Church Cathedral’s Research Advisor; he was chasing down the scribes and notaries of the Cathedral’s later medieval manuscripts, and had run across a few pages at the back of my dissertation – an appendix cataloguing all of the notaries I had found in the process of investigating the life and career of Anglo-Irish author and notary James Yonge. In introducing me to Stuart, Caoimhe inadvertently cancelled my vacation. Breakfast was consumed. We talked. We ordered coffee. Stuart got out his carefully compiled list of notaries. We talked some more. Soon we were ordering lunch. We compared images, debated the merits of early 20th-century drawings of documents lost in a catastrophic 1922 fire a half mile from where we sat, and began making plans. By the end of the morning, we had explored several possibilities for a project far wider than my study of James Yonge or Stuart’s study of Christ Church scribes and notaries. Every spare moment I could get for the rest of my time in Ireland was given over to notaries. (Caoimhe would go on to destroy my summer holidays the following year with a grainy image of a notarial signum taken at Sarah Graham’s lecture at Leeds, but that is a tale for another time.)

Notaries were specialized legal scribes used principally by the ecclesiastical courts to record proceedings and produce official documents. Notaries could be found in every corner of medieval and early modern Europe, and were particularly prevalent on the Italian and Iberian peninsulas where they also played a role in civil courts. In England and English-controlled Ireland, English civil law did not provide for notaries, and as a result they were far fewer in number. Notaries found their way, however, into civil procedures, particularly in cases where an official witness was needed. Notaries not associated with the church were paid by laypeople to produce documents that might be helpful in future cases in the ecclesiastical courts, particularly those regarding marriage or legitimacy.^[1] In Anglo-Ireland, these specialized scribes also created new, authenticated copies of documents that had become faded or damaged. Notaries also served as official witnesses in disputes, creating documents functioning similarly to a sworn deposition; their instruments record in a matter-of-fact way dramatic moments in the lives of ordinary people. For instance, a 1406 instrument of James Yonge records that Robert Burnell wanted John Lytill to place his seal on some documents; Lytill refused, and Burnell responded by seizing Lytill in a Dublin street and holding him hostage until he acquiesced.^[2] Another instrument by Thomas Baghill records an attempt to interfere in a will. On his deathbed, William Moenes was approached by his brother, Robert, who attempted to claim William’s property, despite the objections of William himself, who even in his extremity protested that he wished his property to go to his uncle’s daughters.^[3] Both of these instruments were probably intended for later use in civil cases regarding the disposition of property.

Notarial instruments are most easily identified by their signa. Each notary developed his own unique signum manuale, a pen-and-ink drawing that he used to authenticate the documents he created. These frequently looked like altar crosses. During the Tudor period, notarial signa became panels of knotwork.

*Signum manuale* of William Walch (fl. 1525-1538) on a document created in 1525 in the Waterford area and now housed at the National Library of Ireland, D.2129. *Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.*

Once developed, a notary’s signum remained fixed; he would use the same signum for the rest of his career. On an instrument, the signum manuale is also accompanied by an eschatocol, a formulaic attestation that the notary has heard and witnessed what is recorded in the document and that the contents are true to the best of the notary’s knowledge. Eschatocols frequently begin with an E that can be quite plain or highly ornamented, depending on the notary. Again, notaries’ Es tended to remain somewhat fixed. The signum and eschatocol provide a key to identifying a notary’s handwriting in other contexts. For instance, James Yonge was also the scribe of over one hundred surviving documents, signed and unsigned. Notary William Somerwell, who worked for the archbishops of Armagh, was also one of the principal contributors to the registers of archbishops Nicholas Fleming (1404-1416), John Swayne (1418-1439), John Prene (1449-1453), and John Mey (1443-1456).

*Signum manuale* of William Somerwell (*fl.*1422-1459), on a document bound into the Registrum Iohannis Mey, PRONI DIO 4/2/6, Book 3, fol. 393, *reproduced by permission of the Deputy Keeper of Records, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI).*

Signa have also been instrumental in identifying groups of notaries. For instance, James Yonge’s student Thomas Baghill borrowed portions of his master’s signum when developing his own.^[4]

*Signum manuale* of James Yonge (*fl.* 1404-1438), deeds of the Guild of St. Anne, Royal Irish Academy 12.S.22–31, no. 343 (12 December 1432). *By permission of the Royal Irish Academy © RIA.*

*Signum manuale* of Thomas Baghill (*fl.*1419-1439). Note Baghill’s imitation of Yonge’s cross outline. Deeds of the Guild of St. Anne, Royal Irish Academy 12.S.22-31, no. 253 (27 January 1431). *By permission of the Royal Irish Academy © RIA.*

We’ve also discovered signa in contexts outside of notarial instruments. Of particular note is the signum of an as-yet-unidentified notary in the margins of a Hiberno English translation of Gerald of Wales’ Expugnatio Hibernica.^[5]

Our survey of Anglo-Irish notaries is still in its infancy, and we are seeking sources of funding. We are currently trying to document as many notaries from medieval and early modern Ireland as possible as an entry into a larger exploration of notaries’ training, scribal networks, and documents. We hope to create a searchable online database of notarial marks and scribal hands for Ireland as a starting point for a more extensive resource cataloging the marks of medieval and early modern notaries of the British Isles. We would also love to see a future collaborative database of European notaries.

Ian Doyle once wrote of palaeography that “the jigsaw puzzle we are all working on is so big that it may need the help of every eye to try to fit a piece in it.”^[6] We believe the same is true of medieval and early modern notaries. This is where you, dear reader, come in. We heartily invite researchers in any area of medieval and early modern Europe to let us know about any notaries or notarial signa you encounter in your own research. The project’s email address is notarius.ie@gmail.com. We welcome your comments and contributions!

Theresa O’Byrne

Associate Researcher, Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland

Latin and history instructor, Delbarton School

^[1] C.R. Cheney, Notaries Public in England in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, p. 56; Patrick Zutshi, “Notaries Public in England in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Historia, Instituciones, Documentos 23 (1996), pp. 421-33, at p. 426.

^[2] Trinity College Dublin MS 1477, no. 69, 16 March 1406.

^[3] Royal Irish Academy 12.S.22-31, no. 826, 17 April 1434.

^[4] Theresa O’Byrne, “Notarial Signs and Scribal Training in the Fifteenth Century: The Case of James Yonge and Thomas Baghill,” Journal of the Early Book Society 15 (2012): 305–18.

^[5] Trinity College Dublin MS 592, fol. 6v.

^[6] A.I. Doyle, ‘Retrospect and Prospect’, in Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 142–6 (pp. 145–6).

March 12, 2025March 12, 2025

Eastern Liturgical Rite(s) under Pope Innocent III

The Roman Pontiffs, over the course of the second half of the Middle Ages, were not noteworthy for their enthusiasm for the liturgical rites of the Eastern Christian Churches. In few cases was this made clearer than in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, an especially distasteful moment of intra-Christian violence that left the Latin crusaders, originally destined for the Holy Land, instead governing the capital city of the Eastern Roman Empire. Although he initially decried the violence, Innocent III, then the Pope of Rome, quickly attempted to eradicate some of the liturgical differences that had plagued relations between the Roman and Constantinopolitan Churches for the previous century and a half, ever since the ill-fated trip of Cardinal Humbert and his co-legates to Constantinople in 1054. Among other changes, all new bishops, whether Greek or Latin, were to be consecrated according to the Roman rite, Latin clergy were to be appointed to those churches that had been abandoned by Greek priests fleeing the crusaders, and those Greek clergy who remained were to be encouraged to switch to the Latin rite for the celebration of the Eucharist [1]. Although he was not privy to the election of Thomas Morosini as the (Latin) Patriarch of Constantinople in the wake of the city’s conquest, he quickly confirmed him in his office and clarified that he would have the traditional jurisdictional authority of the Constantinopolitan See [2]. All of this transpired prior to the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, with its famous canon dealing with “the pride of the Greeks against the Latins.”

Pope Innocent III, from the Monastery of Sacro Speco of Saint Benedict – Subiaco (Rome).

Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

This policy, in fact, marked a sharp deviation from Innocent’s prior treatment of the Greek rite. Too easily forgotten is the fact that the Greeks had a substantial presence in much of the Italian peninsula (and to this day there exists in Italy a few thousand people who speak Griko, essentially a dialect of medieval Greek). Alongside this substantial Greek population were Greek-rite monastic establishments and a number of dioceses served by Greek prelates, all of which were under the ultimate jurisdiction of the See of Rome. Innocent III, in his dealings with these communities prior to the Fourth Crusade, was noticeably less aggressive, balancing his apparent preference for the Latinization of ordination rites with a policy of non-interference on the matter of clerical marriage and active support for Basilian monasteries under his jurisdiction [3].

It has been popular with some modern commentators, Joseph Gill being perhaps the foremost example, while admitting that Innocent III had a distinct preference for the Latin rite, to argue that he was primarily concerned with enforcing (Latin) canon law. In this reading, the chief concern of the papacy was the allegiance of the Eastern clerics; once that had been secured, the secondary priority was to extirpate practices that were actively contrary to the law of the Roman church while at the same time tolerating, to a greater or lesser degree, ritual aspects that didn’t interfere with canonical norms [4].

To see whether this was in fact the case, helpfully, there are two other points of comparison. The activity of the crusaders in the Levant occasioned a resumption of active communication and communion between the Papacy and the Maronite Church. As part of this exchange, Innocent III issued a papal bull in January of 1215 in which he formally accepted the Maronite Church and confirmed several of its privileges. At the same time, though, he demanded certain changes: the Maronite Church must maintain the truth of the filioque, that only a single invocation of the Trinity be made during the rite of baptism, that the sacrament of Chrismation/Confirmation be done only by a bishop, and that the bishops wear vestments according to the Roman use [5]. In Bulgaria, facing a tsar and a primate eager to secure legitimacy for their positions and the autocephaly of the Bulgarian church, the subordination to Rome likewise came with a demand. As in Constantinople following the Latin conquest and in some of the Greek communities in the south of the Italian peninsula, the Roman rite was to be used for the ordination of priests and bishops [6].

These distinct differences in approach gives rise to the obvious questions: Did Pope Innocent III have a consistent stance toward the liturgical rites of the Christian East and, if so, what was it? Is it really fair to suggest that the pope was motivated first, by the question of allegiance, and second, to matters of ritual? Perhaps this was the case, but my sense is that the matters were more closely linked than many commentators assume. My suspicion is that, for Innocent, the willing submission of various Greeks, Bulgarians, and Lebanese to aspects of the Roman rite was itself the proof that they also accepted papal authority more broadly. I think that modern scholarship often fails to appreciate the intimate connection between practice and belief — lex orandi, lex credendi, after all — and that this is especially the case when it comes to the ritual differences that divided the churches of Rome and Constantinople. By requiring concrete changes in ritual practice, down to the style of vestments to be worn by the Maronite clergy, Innocent III caused these churches to give physical, tangible proof that they accepted the teaching, jurisdictional, and legal authority of the Apostolic See.

Nick Kamas
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

Summarized by Alfred Andrea, “Innocent III and the Byzantine Rite, 1198–1216,” in Urbs capta: La IVe croisade et ses conséquences, ed. Angeliki Laiou (Paris: Lethielleux, 2005), 118–120.
Jean Richard, “The Establishment of the Latin Church in the Empire of Constantinople (1204–27,” in Latins and Greeks in the Eastern Mediterranean after 1204 (London: Routledge, 1989), 49.
Andrea, “Innocent III,” 116–118.
Joseph Gill, “Innocent III and the Greeks: Aggressor or Apostle?,” in Relations between East and West in the Middle Ages, ed. Derek Baker (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973), 103–105.
No. 216, Acta Innocentii III, ed. P. Theodosius Haluščynskyj (Rome: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1944), 459–460.
Andrea, “Innocent III,” 117. See also Francesco Dall’Aglio, “Innocent III and South-Eastern Europe: Orthodox, Heterodox, or Heretics?” Studia Ceranea 9 (2019), 20.