Monastic Euergetism

Roman elites traditionally were patrons of cities, through various forms of legal protection and in financial investment in buildings, statues, and infrastructure. Whole families could tie themselves to particular cities. Civic euergetism, the practice of investing private money in public space to gain prestige, was a pinnacle of the urban face of the Roman Empire.Footnote ⁴⁴ This activity was not limited to men, but female patrons were significantly less frequent.Footnote ⁴⁵

Patronage was not only about status but also about economic stability, career opportunities, and building a political base. Cities could only offer those benefits if they remained stable and were seen as a place of opportunity. Urban patronage remained a calculation of economic and symbolic values. The arrival of Christianity did not upend this paradigm – if anything, it offered new avenues and possibilities.Footnote ⁴⁶ But soon a new actor appeared that offered a parallel option, both rooted in the city and present in the rural landscape: the monastery.

In the lives of the two Melanias – the Elder (c. 350–410) and the Younger (c. 383–439) – we see how an aristocratic family through three and possibly four generations could use monasticism as an alternative for what urbanism had offered. Both Melanias were among the richest women in Roman history who became important figures in the Roman Empire and the Christian church. They were also active patronesses of monasteries and monasticism in general. Their commitment is probably the best example of how Roman aristocrats could continue to fulfil their roles as benefactors and maintain their status – yet in a new, monastic, reality.Footnote ⁴⁷ Crucially, most of our information concerning the two comes from monastic sources – the Vita Melaniae by Gerontius, and Palladius’ Historia Lausiaca, both from the early fifth century.

What did they do? The Melanias frequented cities but also stayed formally on top of their families and fortunes. They continued to pull profit from the vast agricultural enterprise that had sustained the family for centuries but chose to stabilise their social positions by investing in monastic communities. Both Melanias appear to have been pious Christian women and monasteries provided them with a form of prestige that supplanted the effects of civic euergetism. The returns on their investments appear to have been considerable: the status and wealth of the younger Melania was in no way diminished by the course of action of her grandmother. Her own choice of spending all the money and not retaining a family fortune did stop the traditional view of aristocratic continuity,Footnote ⁴⁸ but it did not make her any less of a central figure of the empire.

Melania the Elder’s involvement in monasticism allowed for multiple opportunities. The foundation of a brotherhood on the Mount of Olives enabled the patronage of a prolific Christian writer, Rufinus of Aquileia. At the same time, neither of the two women lost their connection with urban spaces, both intellectually and practically. Their pedigree as Christian benefactresses led them to travel frequently to Rome, Jerusalem, or Constantinople. Melania the Younger still managed to visit Constantinople shortly before her death to convert her uncle Volusianus, an important official at the imperial court.Footnote ⁴⁹ We should not discount the piety behind that move. But we can also not ignore the importance of this conversion for cementing their family’s monastic empire. The fact that Augustine (354–430) had chastised Melania the Younger for continually giving her monasteries cash and not estates, speaks volumes both about the prominence of Melania, and about her active role in the management of her fortune.Footnote ⁵⁰ This was also a Broad Mediterranean enterprise: the family estates stretched from Britain to Africa. A massive fire sale of many of these estates was initiated in 408 due to the political crisis in Italy and the desire for greater asceticism. Endangered estates were converted into ready cash that went almost immediately into supporting monastic foundations.Footnote ⁵¹ As a result, Melania’s influence only increased, and assets were withdrawn from regions immediately threatened by crisis like Britain or Italy. There is a potent metaphor in scions of the richest Roman families investing hundreds of thousands of solidi into monasteries, on the eve of Alaric’s three-day-long organised divestment of urban riches in Rome. The actual rules of how this patronage should look were forged on the fly.Footnote ⁵² Overall, the family of both Melanias had a consistent strategy for a period of over sixty years – a strategy that was based on monastic euergetism.Footnote ⁵³ Its success was possible not because monasteries were an opposite to the city but because they were so alike.

The Christian monastic matrix awarded the Melanias a kind of freedom and prestige that were otherwise unattainable to them as women. For them, the monastery was the better city. Female patronage of monasticism became an opportunity not to be missed, seized by other important women as well.Footnote ⁵⁴ Paula (347–404) – the benefactress of Jerome and contemporary of Melania the Elder – had built Jerome a city in miniature. To further the stature of her protégé and the value of her investment, she furnished his monastery with its own library, school, scriptorium, and even defensive walls. This was a ‘city’ over which she exerted unprecedented influence. She also founded a similar establishment for herself and her nuns.Footnote ⁵⁵

In fact, noble women stood on the forefront of a development that made monasteries the pillars of elite sustainability.Footnote ⁵⁶ They extracted symbolic and actual capital from the city, while never leaving the city behind. Marcella’s suburbanus ager where she lived with her friends was only rhetorically outside of the city: in fact, it was right on the Aventine and served as a lynchpin of elite connections.Footnote ⁵⁷ This new strategy and behaviour found ready reception in broad circles of the aristocracy in the Latin West as well. The initial – and sporadically recurring – resistance to it highlights how monasteries supplemented cities as anchors of influence. The reality in southern Gaul was not that different: John Cassian (c. 360–435) was a stark defendant of sincere asceticism and seclusion in the first decades of the fifth century, and one of the most recognised propagators of monasticism in the West.Footnote ⁵⁸ As one would expect, he loudly praised efforts to make Gallic monks follow the ideal of anchoretic life and leave the city.Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet, Cassian was part of a network of noblemen, abbots, bishops, and prolific Christian authors. This network was reliant on urban infrastructure and monastic foundations. John himself, building on the patronage of his peers, founded two monasteries in the city of Marseille.Footnote ⁶⁰ Even if monastic patronage was on the rise, and money going away from civic infrastructure, the city was here to stay.

This form of patronage would go on in the post-Roman period. Gregory of Tours’ (c. 538–594) account of the life of Gallus (c. 489–553), a first-born son of a senatorial family from Clermont-Ferrand, is a vivid example.Footnote ⁶¹ When young Gallus decided to go to the monastery, his father, although he wanted him to marry, was more than happy for this to happen. While we read here the thoughts of Gregory, who was inclined to portray monastic life as an uncontroversial choice, we cannot help to wonder why that was. To mention the worry of the father yet have him give in to his son’s vocation made perfect sense when you wanted to further Christian asceticism. There is a second layer to the story, though. The monastery of Cournon, where Gallus eventually became a monk, lay in the spiritual suburbs of Clermont, barely 10 kilometers from the city’s centre and offered an attractive investment into his son’s future. Cournon presented fabulous prospects for ambitious and well-to-do regional noblemen. One could become abbot but there was more on the line: if everything went well, there was also the possibility of the bishop’s see. Apart from education, spiritual perfection, and a network of influential churchmen, Cournon was a viable route to high office that could sustain a noble family. For Gallus these hopes were fulfilled: he did not take his eyes off the prize and became the bishop of his city, Clermont. This was the expected outcome: money and status were as easily transferable to an ecclesiastical (and monastic) career as they were useful for an old-fashioned civic one. A new model of domus management was being forged.Footnote ⁶² Did it work in the long run? Apparently yes: after all, Gallus was Gregory’s uncle.Footnote ⁶³

Here we need to remind ourselves that monasticism and its traditions were heavily literarised. The story of Gallus is more telling if we read it as an example of the idealised harmony between secular elites and the world of the church. Yet if Gregory describes the interaction between the elite and Cournon in such detail, it was relatable to his audience. The willing father of Gallus is then not only a stand-in for a pious aristocrat. He is also a signal for Gregory’s audience that the civic and urban solutions were not contradictory to monasticism, nor was the aristocratic way of life.Footnote ⁶⁴ Building and sponsoring monasteries was propagated as both furthering your standing and shortening your way into ecclesiastical office by the end of the sixth century.

The proof for this hypothesis comes to us in the form of a lamentation. Pope Gregory the Great (c. 540–604) complained to Gallic bishops how building monasteries was misused as a way of atoning for simony and facilitating getting into office, a practice he deemed illegal.Footnote ⁶⁵ He was terrified that such a pragmatic approach to holy institutions might spread in the West.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the East, the bishop of Neapolis on Cyprus, Leontius, attests to the normalisation of noble patronage. He saw the building of monasteries as part of the regular public service, on par with endowing almshouses and houses for the old.Footnote ⁶⁷ These were framed as services to the poor in the city, once more highlighting that monasteries had become part of the urban landscape, even if they were often situated in its outskirts. Patronage of monasteries thus became the bread and butter of the late antique Christian rich and powerful.

From the end of the fourth century, many facets of monasticism were not only bound to cities but also began to offer attractive and viable symbolic investment opportunities. They offered income, career options for multiple members of the family (including, for more or less the first time, women who could become abbesses), and the possibility of monastic euergetism. For ambitious and rich aristocratic families, monasteries could be stand-ins for cities. This is true for the intellectual level as well: patronising monasteries gave those families close access to important literary and spiritual circles of the day.

In the late sixth- and early seventh-century West, monasteries might have overtaken most of the practical urban functions. We observe a progressive institutionalisation as monasteries supplanted civic euergetism, offered educational possibilities for the elite and an alternative or continuation of a secular career. They also increasingly played a role in other areas traditionally connected with the urban space like health care.Footnote ⁶⁸ This unique position of being like a city soon started to influence another area of life: economy.

Economy and Law

Sometime in the fifth century, somewhere in Palestine, perhaps in the Great Laura of St Sabas, a monk named Gelasius lost his book (see Figure 3). It was not an ordinary book – it was a parchment codex of the Bible ‘containing both the Old and the New Testament’ worth eighteen solidi. One solidus could buy you enough bread for a year.Footnote ⁶⁹ The book lay in the church of the monastery for all brothers to read (which means they were able to read it or were at least expected to). But a monk visiting the monastery stole it to sell it. What follows is a slapstick story of back-and-forth visits and negotiations framed as an educational tale about monastic property and the virtue of poverty. More important for us is the fact that the monk-thief went straight to the city with his booty where he sought out a bookseller to fence the goods. The bookseller was unsure of the price, so he needed someone to evaluate the book; and who better than… Gelasius to do this job! At the end, the monk-thief ends up giving the book back and staying at the monastery of Gelasius.Footnote ⁷⁰

Figure 3 The monastery of St Sabas in the Judean desert.

Photo: Mateusz Fafinski

This anecdote from the Apophthegmata Patrum is telling. Monks in this episode are bound economically to the city – and not just through the purchase and sale of simple wares but through a rather specialised activity like bookselling. Gelasius ends up being an appraiser for the urban bookseller, who goes to the monk without a particular divine intervention. The anonymous author of the episode is well informed about the prices and particularities of urban trade. The economic connections between the city and the monastery were rich, diverse, and completely normal. They were not problematic in a text that would be the spiritual bedrock for many late ancient monks.Footnote ⁷¹

In the late antique context, especially in regions like Palestine, Egypt, or southern Gaul, monasteries had to be included within the existing economic networks and those centred on cities. Papyri evidence confirms that for Egypt Pachomian-style communities (koinobia) were socially and economically integrated in their neighbouring villages and towns.Footnote ⁷² The oldest Gallic rules also mention how brothers are supposed to prepare themselves for business on the outside. Monasteries from the onset were not separate from the urban economies, just as the individual monks themselves were tied to their secular communities.Footnote ⁷³ Augustine’s rule provided for business to be done in the city, specifically referencing the sale of monastic products.Footnote ⁷⁴ There is an early understanding that monastic establishments had a symbiotic relationship with the city.

This put monasteries in a seemingly complicated situation. While anticipated to be places of retreat they in fact quickly became integrated in the urban economy. In Egypt, they started to administer estates and became hubs of pilgrim related economy, which influenced even the form of their buildings.Footnote ⁷⁵ Economic necessities soon shifted the spiritual conventions of the social genre of Egyptian monasticism.

If we go back to the Historia Monachorum, in the life of abba Sarapion (fl. 4th c.), we encounter a glimpse of this process. Apart from giving spiritual guidance, Sarapion took on the role of an estate administrator. His monks were working in the fields, both those of their monastery and of neighbouring properties. He himself oversaw their activities and kept the accounts and organised regular shipments of produce – mostly grain and ready-made clothing – to Alexandria.Footnote ⁷⁶ Already at the end of the fourth century, economic achievements were a laudable thing for monks. At the same time, the monastic economy needed cities as market outlets. Even the Regula Benedicti stipulates that goods from the monastery were to be sold – if slightly beneath the market price.Footnote ⁷⁷

In the sixth century, a monastery in Palestine housing twenty monks was expected to produce a sizeable surplus. The monastery at Khirbet es-Suyyagh was founded on the site of an earlier agricultural productive site.Footnote ⁷⁸ It lay in a triangle between the cities of Nicopolis (Emmaus), Eleutheropolis, and Jerusalem. The monastery welcomed pilgrims and was equipped with a church, storage units, and an impressive outer wall with a tower. Its most important economic features were several oil and wine presses. The presses were used as a communal facility for peasants in the area, yet the monks also had olive groves and vineyards of their own. Used to capacity, the presses allowed for an annual surplus of many thousand litres of both wine and oil.Footnote ⁷⁹ Additionally, the monastery owned a small quarry and pastured animals. It sold its surplus in cities. We know nothing about this monastery from written sources but given the archaeology, it is fair to say that the abbot was in a similar position as abba Sarapion. He was (also) a manager of an agricultural enterprise that was intertwined not only with its surrounding peasant communities but also with the surrounding cities. Monasteries became a crucial link in the economic chain, processing local produce and passing it on to urban markets.

Now, the question is why monasteries became productive bodies so soon. As our discussion of monastic euergetism and sponsorship suggests, this could have had to do with secular donors who wanted to draw all kinds of profit from their investments. Another important factor was the motivation to help the poor and act as stabilisers for communities. This presupposes a strong link to secular society that monastic rhetoric often denied. But when we look closely, the sources show strong hints that many monks, nuns, and monasteries cared a lot, and that active concern was one of their main traits. Nothing shows this better than a short letter from our dear friend Barsanuphius. Upon being asked by someone whether it was important to ‘keep the accounts of the church’, Barsanuphius responded:

If you keep the accounts of a church, you are actually keeping the accounts of God. For you are God’s steward. Therefore, you are obliged to keep the accounts in such a way as to feed the poor and the orphans, should there be any surplus. After all, God is their Father and nurturer, and you are administering their goods. If there is no surplus, you should do whatever you can to produce one. Otherwise, you are not keeping the accounts of a church but only intending to take care of yourself.Footnote ⁸⁰

We do not know the position of the person who is asking about the ‘accounts of the church’, but they did ask a monk for advice. Barsanuphius was a hermit in the hills of Gaza, connected to the larger monastery of Seridos. His honest opinion: if you were busy with producing anything, you should be a scrupulous bookkeeper, and you should of course make a profit. It would be sinful not to do so. As a faithful Christian, your task was to take care of yourself and your surroundings and you could only do that if you were turning a profit as it could be used charitably.

This openness towards the different roles a monk could take on was by no means restricted to the eastern Mediterranean. John Cassian was one of the first monastic authors to propagate a multivocal vision of being a monk. Following the example of St Anthony was but one way to achieve humility and perfection. Monks with different talents could choose different paths as well: offering hospitality, educating and guiding their brothers, or treating the ill and the poor. All those were valid fields of engagement that did not stand in conflict with strict eremitism.Footnote ⁸¹ All of these activities required access to money and people.

It made perfect sense to treat monasteries as economic entities bound to both rural communities and cities. The fact that large medieval monasteries like Fulda, Cluny, or Murbach would turn out to hold large and productive properties is, then, partly the consequence of this early development. Despite their established rhetoric, monasteries would want to be involved in secular society, and want to emulate the possibilities of cities. A grand showing of their economic prowess, like the famous bronze doors of Monte Cassino from the early twelfth century, depicting all its estates and meant to prove its wealth, should be read accordinglyFootnote ⁸² – not as a deviation from the true form, but as an expression of the capabilities of monasticism. Moreover, these monasteries were functioning as cities, as focal point of their own territorium, with their own agricultural hinterland. Be it the monks of Sarapion, the peasants near Khirbet es-Suyyagh, or the estates of Monte Cassino, they were all organised around a monastery. If it were not for those monasteries, agricultural production would need another point of distribution and processing. This also differentiates monasteries from villas, even though they retained elements of this form of economic organisation as well.Footnote ⁸³ Monasteries were axes of communities, market outlets, brokers, and centres of population – they were analogous to small towns.

Assuming social roles usually considered to be urban also had a legal aspect. The coenobitic form of monasticism was quickly and radically treated like cities in the legal world of the imperial bureaucracy. The first legislation about monasteries and monks is not ecclesiastical but secular. In the 370s, Valens legislated against ‘devotees of idleness’ deserting their service in municipalities and joining ‘bands of hermit monks’.Footnote ⁸⁴ The first laws dealing with monks have to do with the city: the laws first prohibiting and then allowing monks to live in the city are an early example of the secular legislators trying to come to terms with the new movement.Footnote ⁸⁵ They tell us that monks started to be a frequent sight on the city streets and that the position of secular authority vis-à-vis this phenomenon was still being negotiated.

This was happening long before the Council of Chalcedon delivered a preliminary position of the church on monasteries and monks in 451. We should not view the inactivity of the institutionalised church as indifference.Footnote ⁸⁶ The leaders of the church were very much interested in monasticism; yet they seem to have expressed their concern first and foremost to the imperial bureaucracy. The Theodosian law limiting free movement of monks appears as a product of heavy lobbying by those in the imperial entourage keen on exerting their considerable influence on the development of monasticism.Footnote ⁸⁷ They did not, however, try to achieve their goals through ecclesiastical legislation. Even the canons of Chalcedon concerning monasticism are mainly due to local imperial and urban influence and not internal considerations of the church. When it comes to law, monks until the sixth century appear mostly in societal and not in spiritual contexts. Indeed, Justinian still felt it was necessary to legislate against monks wandering the city streets at night and frequenting taverns.Footnote ⁸⁸

Monks appear in legislation either as dwellers of cities or of town-like corporations, that is, monasteries. Monasteries had by the end of the fifth century started adopting the same legal procedure vis-à-vis secular authority as cities.Footnote ⁸⁹ It has been observed that monasteries could act as collegia giving them privileges of corporate bodies both in law and in acquiring wealth.Footnote ⁹⁰ This system shows unprecedented stability in both East and West, surviving way into the Middle Ages and beyond. The durability of this arrangement has to do with corporations, legal fictions, and the activities of the monks themselves.

In antiquity, cities could petition the emperor for a rescript – as such they possessed the ability to act as a corporative legal entity to ask for a resolve of a dispute or to obtain privileges, exemptions, or immunities for their inhabitants. Perhaps the most celebrated case of such activity is the petition and the subsequent corruption scandal involving Leptis Magna and emperor Valentinian.Footnote ⁹¹ In the legal landscape of Christianity’s growing independence, the importance of monasteries helped them achieve almost similar ability: either acting on their own or through their founders or benefactors.

There is a telling analogy to pinpoint the similarity of monasteries and cities in this context. Synesius of Cyrene was, among other things, a nobleman in northern Africa around the year 400. While he would later serve as bishop of the whole province, he was sent to Constantinople in 398 as a representative of his hometown’s secular elite. His goal was, predictably, to petition the emperor to grant certain tax exemptions to Cyrene (and probably the province as well). He would then stay in Constantinople for several years engaging in court politics.Footnote ⁹² Fast forward a hundred years, and here we have Sabas (439–532) going to Constantinople to petition for a tax relief for monasteries in the Judean desert and for the whole diocese of Jerusalem in 511 and 530. He would also stay for a longer time, lobbying the most important women of the court of Anastasius over the winter. Just as Synesius seems to have been part of a group of representatives, so was Sabas originally only one of several monks and abbots that were sent to Constantinople by the bishop of Jerusalem. These missions were providing for a new legal footing of monasteries. Not only did Sabas take a mediatory role that had been reserved for lay provincial elites before but he also makes clear the factual legal equivalence of the city and the monastery. He even goes as far as to petition Justinian for military protection and is sent home with corresponding rescripts.Footnote ⁹³

Acting like a city or being treated like one by the law were all pathways available to monasteries. They were inhabiting a legal fiction of Roman law. But they were also legally integrated with the territoria of late antique cities. This plethora of arrangements is stunning. Geographically, monasteries found themselves in cities, at their outskirts, or at a considerable physical but not practical distance. This made flexible options necessary and led to interesting results.

The famously rich and influential monastery of Corbie acquired from the Merovingian kings exemptions in the Mediterranean haven of Fos. Fos had been used as the port of Arles in the late Roman period, and later seems to have been integrated into the territorium of Marseille. From the middle of the seventh century, Corbie (over 800 kilometres to the north) was allowed to import numerous goods including pepper, cinnamon, papyrus, leather, and rice through Fos. Corbie secured the rights to import those goods tax-free first from Childeric II and then again from Chilperic II in 716 (see Figure 4).Footnote ⁹⁴ Apart from an almost representative example of acting like a city (asking and being granted tax exemptions), the story of Corbie’s trade mission also shows how a monastery could be integrated into a territorium of a city – in this case Marseille – located many days travel away. It thus turned Corbie into a strangely familiar phenomenon: a separate, spiritual suburb that was partly integrated into Marseille, partly an independent city-like legal and economic entity.

Figure 4 Copy of the privilege of King Chilperic to the monastery of Corbie, listing good as diverse as papyrus and cinnamon, preserved in a cartulary from the early tenth century. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Ms. Phill. 1776, fol. 124v

The Built Environment

Monasteries, with their patrons, their para-urban position in law and economy, and their corporately organised inhabitants also resembled cities in their built environment. Monasteries in the Judean desert were so densely placed that in most cases one did not need to walk longer than a couple of hours to stumble upon one. Since Derwas Chitty made those observations over fifty years ago, we have made significant steps towards better understanding both the internal structure of the monasteries and their relationship with cities.Footnote ⁹⁵ Most monks needed less than a day to reach the city of Jerusalem and the monasteries were connected by a network of paths and roads.Footnote ⁹⁶ Larger establishments, like the Martyrios monastery, resembled small towns. This was of course still nothing compared to the largest monasteries in Egypt. While even monasteries in remote locations like St Catherine in Sinai resembled small towns (see Figure 5), the famous White Monastery comprised an area of over seven hectares.Footnote ⁹⁷

Figure 5 St Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai; it was almost a small town, with one of the most influential libraries.

Photo: Mateusz Fafinski

The situation in the West was no different, even if the scale was smaller. In places like southern Gaul there were multiple examples of the co-relationship of monasteries and cities. The monastery of Saint-André-le-Bas in Vienne was founded in 543 in the corner of the Roman walls of the city. Other monasteries that existed in the urban context, like the two foundations of John Cassian in Marseille, still await their discovery and archaeological survey.

Almost all urban-monastic phenomena remain mostly invisible for us archaeologically even if we know about their existence from the written sources. Small monastic communities existing in private town or suburban houses remain almost untraceable.Footnote ⁹⁸ There are, of course, exceptions – like the monasterium Boethianum in Largo Argentina, right in the middle of late antique Rome (see Figure 6).Footnote ⁹⁹ Or the monastic complex constructed by Augustine next to the cathedral of Hippo through merging a number of houses into what can be called a monastic half-insula.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Family-centred foundations are only detectable to us if they reached larger proportions. We might also miss them or question their identification because the monastery form is so compatible with that of the normal, garden-variety Roman domus.

Figure 6 The Monasterium Boethianum incorporated the structures of the Republican temple precinct, right in the middle of Rome.

Photo: Mateusz Fafinski

Luxeuil, a foundation of Columbanus, an Irish monk in Gaul, is where rhetorical posturing meets reality in a visible way. Jonas of Bobbio, Columbanus’ hagiographer, describes Luxeuil as a desert foundation, meant to provide a stark contrast with the inhabited environment. But the archaeological excavations from the beginning of the twenty-first century revealed a rich settlement and funerary landscape centred around a castrum of the former vicus of Luxovium, with a sizeable funerary basilica and a continuous use from the late Empire up to the Merovingian period. Jonas mentions that the baths and hot springs were still functionalFootnote ¹⁰¹ and that the Irish community moved within a landscape of late Roman Christian settlement. Columbanus gets arrested in atrium of a church in Luxeuil, a feature absent from any Irish foundations but often found in late antique episcopal churches in Gaul.Footnote ¹⁰² For the standards of late sixth-century Merovingian Gaul this was at least a para-urban landscape.Footnote ¹⁰³ In this respect, Luxeuil seems to be more like the monastery of St Maximin in Trier: founded in the sixth century around a late Roman funerary basilica directly outside the city walls.

In the East, there existed other, and quite different, para-urban monasteries. Kellia (literally: ‘the Cells’) was a large monastic complex west of the Nile delta at the entrance to the Libyan desert. It has been extensively excavated from the 1960s onwards, revealing a vast landscape of largely standardised hermitage dwellings that formed a joined organism housing upwards from 1,500 monks in the best of times.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The monks lived in small clusters, furnished with latrines, plumbing, and numerous communal spaces, with a church and commercial quarter as well as hostels for pilgrims and storage facilities. Those ‘fora’ where monks met and interacted with each other as well as with the visitors are reminiscent of Roman cities. This was a settlement of incredible stability, with generations of masons and builders expanding, rebuilding, and maintaining it between the fourth and the ninth centuries.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ With time, Kellia attracted pilgrims and celebrity monks. For monks accustomed to the metropolitan world of Constantinople and Jerusalem it might have seemed to be a backwater in the desert.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ But the built environment of Kellia reveals a settlement that truly was a monastic town.

The monastery of Hilarion near Gaza is another good example of this phenomenon. Hilarion is one of the famous (and notorious) examples of early monasticism. After his death, he was buried in the cave that he had chosen as his first solitary enclosure. Near Maiuma, the port of Gaza, a monastery was subsequently built and thrived in the sixth century. It lay close to the road from Egypt to Gaza and was a natural attraction for pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. Apart from a mosaic with an inscription that sealed the tomb of Hilarion in the crypt of the large church, the monastery had a number of cells, a large wall, an atrium, and an accompanying guesthouse with baths. It is reasonable to suppose that this monastery was able to sustain itself through agriculture, services to the surrounding rural community, and the hospitality to a constant flow of pilgrims. This was not an assemblage of hermits’ cells, or the meeting point of lonely anchorites. It was more concentrated, more focused than Kellia. Both in terms of commodities, and of function, the monastery of Hilarion was a small city with its own hinterland, its own origin story, and its own citizens.

A Better City

The decline of the Roman city is a widespread and prominent issue with a remarkable longevity.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Many factors contributed to this process. It might be argued that monasteries did play a role in taking away the economic and sociopolitical pre-eminence of cities.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Solving the correlation between the city’s decline and monasticism’s surge is not the goal of this Element; but one needs to stress that monasteries were probably not the decisive factor in this process. Rather, they were a parallel development in many regions fulfilling the same functions.

The process of replacing cities by monasteries as hinges of local and trans-regional networks is by no means a given. Other options were available in Late Antiquity, like large secular or episcopal estates. But monasteries had a number of advantages. They were more reliable, they offered more stability than estates; they were more like cities, both on a practical and a conceptual level. They were a perfect compromise between the continuation of urban functions and the innovation in production and distribution systems. They offered solutions for a problem that a lack of cities brought: organising and regulating productive rural space. They were so successful in this respect that when we look over the chronological border of our period, especially in the West, they had essentially taken over much of what cities did in this regard even inside the urban spaces. Where monasticism met the actual desert, it has been so successful that we can call it an urbanising factor.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This is true even technologically – monks in the desert often had the same amenities as city dwellers.Footnote ¹¹⁰

It might therefore look tempting to relate the success of one model with the decline of the other. But this is a teleological argument, and the results of both forms coexisting was never predetermined. Monasteries did not kill the Roman city. In singular cases they may have cannibalised on its foundations. Sometimes the two forms competed for the same resources and their scarcity might have put them in direct competition. But those, we stress, were local and limited instances.

In fact, monasteries would often act like cities. They petitioned for tax exemptions directly to the emperor or king, they saw themselves often as being a part of the territorium of the imperial capital, and in many ways they were seen legally as cities. Conceptually, they started to be the ‘image and likeness’ of a city. Their form also often resembled that of towns. This was such a potent image that when an anonymous monk in Alemannia sketched the ideal plan for the monastery of St Gall in ca. 810, what he drew was a perfectly gridded and planned (Roman) city. The roots of this process were much earlier than the Carolingian era.

Eremitism and Its Audiences

After the material afterlife of Hilarion, which closed the previous section, it is tempting to have a look at his ascetic career as well. The details of this life were told by Jerome, deeply embedded in the urban world. For all the merits of desert ascesis, the fame of the great figures of monasticism relied entirely on authors and readers – for whom cities were crucial elements of their networks. This is visible in the case of Hilarion. He was revered for his asceticism and for the introduction of Egyptian-style eremitism to Palestine. Over time, he became a much-visited exorcist and miracle worker, who felt the world encroaching onto his private path to spiritual perfection.Footnote ¹¹³ This is why, in his later days, he tried to flee from both Egypt and Palestine. In a string of astonishing moves, he chose first south-eastern Sicily, then Salona in Dalmatia, and then Cyprus as refuges from the onslaught of worshippers. To his own surprise, his fame did not remain a secret in these densely populated areas. Both Sicily and Dalmatia had been heavily urbanised over the centuries of stable Roman rule. Even Hilarion’s final recluse in the mountains of Cyprus was not as remote; he ended up in a regularly tended orchard.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Hilarion’s journey never really was about fleeing fame and followers, even if this is something that Jerome stresses.Footnote ¹¹⁵ It is more fruitful to think about the reasons for the apparent disconnect between words and actions: to disentangle the actions and motives of the historic Hilarion and Jerome’s representation thereof. If Hilarion did travel to these places, this may have been a stunt to attract the public rather than to avoid it. After all, Jerome wrote close to Hilarion’s life, so his account is bound to be less fanciful than his other vitae while still tailoring his literary representation for subsequent generations. It makes no sense to leave a perfectly fine desert to try and find loneliness in the outskirts of Syracuse, Salona, or Paphos. Jerome must have altered Hilarion’s motives to change his perception by the audience. And although the world (and its temptations) found him everywhere he went, Hilarion still overcame all obstacles. This was an effective way of framing Hilarion’s travels as a remarkable and truly monastic endeavour.

Alternatively, we can entertain the possibility that Jerome freely changed or invented the Mediterranean travels of Hilarion. The disconnect between action and motive would thus be even more pronounced. This allowed Jerome to prove two things at once through fruitful contradiction: that Hilarion was a great eremite and that he was universally acclaimed as a great eremite. And since the acclamation of some peasants in the wilderness of rocky Palestine was not worth much in the circles that interested Jerome, situating Hilarion in settings that his audience was invested in was a logical choice. Jerome did not care that strict eremitism and universal acclamation were mutually exclusive. Both furthered his cause, namely, the propagation of an exceptional monk.

Whatever we think of the amount of creative writing of Jerome, we can see how he was establishing the literary paradigm of the fleeing ascetic.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The inclination of his Hilarion to seek loneliness in the close vicinity of cities is not a hindrance in this respect. The conundrum sketched here is crucial for the monastic movement in general: monasteries are tied to cities by social and literary conventions and against their own rhetoric. Yet, this is also true in the lived experience of monks and nuns: the monk or nun who is driven to leave society but can never escape is a ubiquitous literary phenomenon.

The example most closely linked to Hilarion is Anthony, his teacher and literary model.Footnote ¹¹⁷ According Athanasius, Anthony was constantly sought out once he had gained his reputation as a lonely desert dweller. First, he founded a monastery, from which he then retired to live on a mountain – to be left alone and not to be revered.Footnote ¹¹⁸ There he was constantly accepting visitors, from generals to virgins, and casually corresponding with Emperor Constantine. He visited Alexandria twice, once to publicly stand up to pagan persecution, and once to fight against the Arian heresy.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Athanasius builds a fruitful contradiction: Anthony is both fleeing attention and seeking it. This contradiction is complemented by Anthony’s stark opposition to letters and learning: he appears as illiterate, yet also propagates ‘asceticism though the Scripture’.Footnote ¹²⁰ This ‘illiterate’ Anthony was also the author of at least seven extant letters.Footnote ¹²¹ Athanasius and Jerome have the same concerns as their urban audiences. They reconcile these concerns with the ascetic ideals that lie behind the whole endeavour.

In his Historia Religiosa, Theodoret (393–460), bishop of Cyrus and a former monk, tells us about a certain monk Peter, a Galatian, who lived as a hermit in the outskirts of Antioch. One day, he got a surprise visit by no other than the mother of Theodoret himself. The mother learned about Peter from the wife of Pergamius, magister militum per orientis. That elegant lady, clad in pearls, silk and golden jewels, is chastised by Peter for wearing ostentatious clothing – using an elaborate metaphor about late Roman portraiture.Footnote ¹²² The ascetic is well acquainted with the world of late Roman art. Thus, Theodoret makes it clear what kind of audience he is interested in: rich, well-educated city dwellers, who were the perfect spectators for the kerbside ascetic. It is not that important if Peter actually lived in the outskirts of a metropolis. What is important is that Theodoret has placed him there in his narrative. The tension between the monk withdrawn from the urban world and a rich lady of the city’s elite only works in this setting. There are elements of differentiation at play but also gender representation – a male ascetic discussing art with a female aristocrat. This use of gender is a feature of Theodoret’s monastic narrative.Footnote ¹²³ To us, the knowledge that Peter has about various fashions in painting might sound absurd, but for the contemporary readers it was what they expected.

In the West, the simultaneous holding in contempt and embracing the city is the trademark of Sulpicius Severus (c. 363–425) in his life of Martin of Tours (316–397). Admittedly, Martin’s legacy is in large parts due to his actions as bishop of Tours, but he was also a prime example of an ascetic who was dragged into the city (supposedly) against his will. What we know about his life and the way it was put into text by Sulpicius Severus replicates many patterns we have already encountered. Martin fled the urban environment at every turn – so successfully that he ended up becoming bishop of Tours. Martin was born into a solid middle-class family tied to urban and military careers, which he also followed. He deliberately left this world behind when he became an eremite. Yet, he was dependent on urban space his entire life and as we shall see, in death. Martin was not very popular among his fellow bishops due to his lack of noble background, making him even more dependent on his local urban community.Footnote ¹²⁴

After his first experiences as a hermit in Gallinara he moved to Ligugé which lay in the spiritual suburbs of Poitiers. This was a Gallo-Roman villa that Martin got as a gift from his mentor Hilary, bishop of Poitiers. His position as abbot in Ligugé also stemmed from the fact that he could build upon Hilary’s personal network. Ultimately, Martin had to be tricked into accepting the bishopric of Tours. This is a literary motive similar to what authors like Jerome or Cassian do, where their protagonist’s reluctance signals true monastic vocation, while also allowing for increased influence in the ‘real world’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Martin’s tenure as bishop shows a person well-integrated in the urban milieu as well. His coup de grace of monasticism, the Maius Monasterium on the other side of the river from Tours, was said to have been ‘so sheltered and remote that it did not lack the solitude of the desert’.Footnote ¹²⁶ In reality, it is a half hour stroll from Marmoutier to Tours’ city centre (see Figure 7).

Figure 7 Martin of Tours’ monastery of Marmoutier just on the other side of the river from the city. Here, in an eighteenth-century painting, we can see it from the other bank. Charles-Antoine Rougeot, Vue de l’abbaye de Marmoutier, musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours

© Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours

Perhaps though the most important lesson about the audiences for monastic stories is what happened to Martin after he died. Gregory of Tours describes how the people of Poitiers and Tours fought for Martin’s body: ‘Ours he is as a monk, an abbot among us’, said the people of Poitiers. ‘But he was our bishop’, replied the people of Tours, and added that if the conflict should be sorted according to where Martin was first in a monastery, then his body should go to the city of Milan. Tours won in the end because the ‘almighty God did not want to deprave the city of Tours of its patron’.Footnote ¹²⁷

The effects of Tours winning the legacy of Martin would prove noticeable soon enough. Gregory tells us in his Lives of the Fathers about just one woman: Monegundis, a saintly hermit, and his near contemporary. She was born in Chartres, to a modestly affluent urban family, and turned her life around after the death of her two children. She chose to enclose herself in her own house, and only talk to a single maid who was to bring her flour, ashes, and water on a regular basis. However, the maid left her and Monegundis then decided to go to Tours, to revere the relics of Martin. After tribulations and miracles, she retreated to a cell adjacent to Martin’s basilica. By then she was also the head of a community of women which continued to work miracles in her name.Footnote ¹²⁸ Even Sulpicius himself could not have imagined a more ideal consequence of Martin. Stories and biographies like his own would reach non-monastic, urban, and well-to-do people and lead them towards Martin’s example. Urban audiences read his ascetic ventures as a suitable foil for their own situation. Even better, these people could themselves become the object of even more stories and biographies that would work in the same way. They would strengthen monastic ideals, further the monastic ‘text’, and furnish their movement with followers and donors. For bishops like Gregory there is an added benefit to the story because Monegundis is a case of empowerment and containment: she leaves her husband’s house and hegemony and becomes empowered by Martin. But her enclosure near the basilica would ensure that her version of asceticism was always under the bishop’s control.Footnote ¹²⁹

Monasticism Coming to Terms with the City

So far, we have acknowledged that monasticism’s earliest proponents had never left the city behind, and that monks and nuns had become an accepted feature of urban spaces by the sixth century. What we are lacking is an inspection of monasticism actively dealing with its fateful relationship to the city. For this we can turn to a pair of authors of the fifth and sixth centuries: Rabbula of Edessa (fl. 411–435) and Caesarius of Arles (c. 470–542). Both were monks-turned-bishops, on different ends of the Mediterranean. Their lives and careers already hint at the potential internal conflicts that we can find in their writing.

Rabbula’s anonymous biographer wrote a couple of decades later, perhaps coming from the next generation of Edessenian clerics. Rabbula was born in a small town called Chalcis not far from Beroia (modern-day Aleppo).Footnote ¹⁴⁷ He believed in pagan deities before turning to Christianity, and became a city magistrate, coming from a wealthy family background. After his conversion the bishops of Chalcis and Beroia convinced him to live as a monk. He swore to ‘abandon the world completely’,Footnote ¹⁴⁸ went on a pilgrimage and settled down in a monastery near Chalcis. He sold all his goods, freed his slaves, divorced his wife, and put his mother and his children into the care of another monastery. He soon attracted visitors and admirers – whom he fled by becoming a solitary hermit in the inner desert, like his role model Anthony. We can see how Rabbula’s life is shaped by the literary movement. He was also traced and found by his monastic fellows. Then, ignoring his will to leave the world, he went to Baalbek with a companion and publicly denounced the pagans. This is again an emulation of Anthony and his visit to Alexandria to denounce the heretics. Both were seeking martyrdom yet were spared. Both left the world for good, yet chose a big, urban, stage to profess their creed.

Once he was elected bishop of Edessa in 411, Rabbula started a campaign to transform the city and its monastic landscape (see Figure 8). His hagiographer stresses that Rabbula wanted to stop all episcopal building activities in Edessa.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ His own monastic rule limited the free movement of monks and cut their involvement into everyday lay activities.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ It seems that Rabbula saw the city as an antagonist, as something that should disappear and not disturb the minds and souls of good Christians. The only thing he apparently cared for were the poor, and the controlled ascesis of his monks. It is critical, however, to put his actions into their proper context.

Figure 8 Jesus, beleaguered by monks in a sixth-century manuscript of the Rabbula Gospels. Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ms. Plut. 1.56, c. 14r, Su concessione del MiC. È vietata ogni ulteriore riproduzione con qualsiasi mezzo

As with all hagiographic texts, we should be wary of the hagiographer’s agenda. Aristocratic wealth and its transfer to the poor is a recurrent theme of the text. Rabbula’s familial wealth and status are highlighted to make his conversion to asceticism more pronounced. But Rabbula was just one actor in conflict-ridden Edessa. His vision of ‘pure’ Christian belief and praxis stood in opposition to the aristocratic circles that had dominated the city with their politics and their self-representation. Rabbula’s successor Ibas (fl. 435–457) was backed by this aristocratic faction, and was all too ready to discredit Rabbula, on grounds both theological (Ibas would later become infamous as one of the three ‘chapters’ that the second council of Constantinople banned) and societal.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Before he was bishop, Ibas led the School of Edessa, a position formally subordinated to the bishop, yet also the nucleus of a network of important clergymen. Ibas becoming Rabbula’s successor was a logical step that ensured the autonomy of the school, its theology, and the aristocratic-leaning clergy that supported them. The hagiographer was therefore also part of the controversy, and his text should be understood as anti-aristocratic in this sense.Footnote ¹⁵² When the text claims that Rabbula never used any money to build something in the city, it should be read as a rejection of the classical practice of noble civic euergetism. And in fact, we do see him investing money in the building of almshouses for both men and women.Footnote ¹⁵³ Rabbula is portrayed as transforming the role of the city towards the ideal Christian one, where the rich and powerful (including the bishop) would spend their money to help the poor, without any representative inclination. Rabbula could well have been a proponent of a new euergetism that favoured (ecclesiastically controlled) monasticism and its ideals. His natural enemy was Ibas as champion of traditionally aristocratic interests.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Rabbula’s vision was not so different from John Chrysostom’s vision of Antioch as a city of household ‘monasteries’, focusing on the city’s Great Church.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The city was to be like a monastery (which in turn was closely based on a city, as we have seen with Kellia). This feedback loop paved the way to a new understanding of Christian urbanism.

A narrative mechanism is at play in Rabbula’s rules for monks as well.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ They must be read as part of a larger discourse about the state of integration of monks into lay society. These rules tell us in the first place that monks were part of the social fabric of cities. Rabbula forbids individual monks to visit inns, get treatment in hospitals, give testimony in judicial courts, buy and sell at markets, and attend lay burial ceremonies. He would not have forbidden actions that nobody considered doing. His concern was with monasticism’s distinction and its role in the city. As with the aristocratic circles and their habits, Rabbula wanted monks to refrain from certain behaviours normal to most contemporaries. In the same vein, he also condemned monks who possessed books ‘outside of the faith of the church’ – or their own horse. He was writing rules for men who had not changed much of their lifestyle when they had become monks. Added to his desire for monastic distinction was also his episcopal drive to control the monks. The precept that monks were to abstain from trading relics makes a lot of sense: monks were acting individually with spiritual objects and capital, without the supervision of the bishop. The apparent spread of these characteristics and behaviours in his diocese led to the design of very short regulae, lacking many of the typical aspects of the genre but weirdly specific in limiting the social role of the monks. Rabbula tried to reverse the existing symbiosis of monasticism and urbanism in Edessa, ultimately but predictably failing. His radical programme collapsed on many fronts: he was superseded by a bishop of less radical views concerning monks and lay society. His views were evidently not popular. Neither his rules nor his vita created a stable invented tradition that following generations of monks and bishops in Edessa were ready to fall back on.

The literary unease with the city is also a common trope for Caesarius, bishop of Arles from 502 to 542. He was ready to use anti-urban metaphors in his writings. In an exemplary sermon he stated that the ‘worldly city’ was where good Christians labour but are unhappy. Prideful monks, on the other hand, would be thrown into the ‘city of the devil’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ He made sure to close all the gates of the nunnery that he had founded in Arles, to prevent external influences.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Caesarius’s attitudes stem from his time as a monk in Lérins, a monastery that remained mistrustful of the outside world and itself was anything but an urban centre.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Situated on an island off the southern coast of modern-day France, Lérins was geographically remote from urban centres. But this did not make the island a recluse: Lérins had supplied a whole generation of Gallic bishops and Caesarius was, in essence, a product of a ‘monk to city bishop’ pipeline with a tradition spanning as far back as Hilary of Arles (c. 403–449) and the monastery’s founder Honoratus (c. 350–429). The latter two became bishops of Arles as well. For both, coming to the city was the logical conclusion to their monastic lives – the desert was but a phase.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The city is not an antinomy here – it is the last career stage.

Caesarius uses the genre-typical mistrustful language but remains committed to monasticism in the urban context in practice. In fact, Arles served a picturesque backdrop in Caesarius’ Vita. His monastery for nuns is founded first in the spiritual suburb of Arles, and then refounded in the city after it was destroyed in the aftermath of the war in 507/508 to provide better protection.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Caesarius gets chastised by the pope for selling church property to fund his monastery. Yet, his nunnery is adjacent to the former cathedral, linked with it by a door never to be opened and entrusted, in a move to ensure family fortunes, first to his sister Caesaria the Elder and then to his niece, Caesaria the Younger. With the establishment of the nunnery in the city comes not only the feeling of safety, the integration with the visible structure of the city, but also its invisible, sociopolitical fabric. For obvious reasons, then, is his rule for nuns engaging civic behaviour. It limits displays of civic duties and status, both from the nuns itself, and from potential visitors, and other urban actors.

Caesarius’ monastic practice is fully capable of functioning within the context of Roman urban space because this is the tradition he is coming from. He knows the mechanisms of urban life just as well as those of the aristocracy and he can delineate the lives of nuns and monks accordingly. But it is nonetheless obvious that monasticism for him was never meant to leave both concepts behind entirely: status and the city were to be regulated, but they were also a reality Caesarius was ready to accept.

A paradox appears: building a cloistered female community inside a city is bound to cause numerous problems that could be avoided outside of it.Footnote ¹⁶² The ideal separation, the distance to worldly temptations or the avoidance of interference from the city’s rich and mighty (all problems that Caesarius tries to tackle in his rule) are much easier to achieve if you just move away. But the advantages of the integration with the urban fabric outweigh the possible points of friction. In a way, this friction is also a literary opportunity: it requires a written rule that will develop strategies to deal with said frictions, both real and theoretical. It also creates the potential for distinction and highlights moral and theological superiority of said community. Ultimately, placing the nunnery inside the city solidifies the rule as an invented tradition. Caesarius’ rule achieved that goal – abbess Rusticula (d. c. 632) still ran the place according to his rule in the seventh century.Footnote ¹⁶³ The nunnery was to be a place where women were governing themselves without the influence of men. It was also a place of learning, a path to the fulfilment of the ideal learned Christian woman. Caesarius’ vision is clear: ‘Let them all learn to read. And in all times they should spend two hours, that is from dawn to the second hour, on reading.’Footnote ¹⁶⁴

Worried about the fate of his most cherished creation, Caesarius commends the nunnery not only to the protection of the future bishops, but to the entire city of Arles. After his death, Arles was to stand guardian over Caesarius’ nuns (see Figure 9). The city itself, understood in a late Roman sense as a familial unity of ‘the clergy, the office of the prefect, the counts, and the citizens’,Footnote ¹⁶⁵ replaces Caesarius as the caregiver of the nunnery. A monastery becomes finally integrated into the urban familia.

Figure 9 Arles was place of one of the most interesting monastic experiments of late antiquity: Caesarius’ monastery for virgins.

Photo: Mateusz Fafinski

Caesarius and Rabbula show us that strict anti-urban rhetoric is not determined by career and upbringing. Both knew the positives of the city and both had profited from urban settings. Yet neither Caesarius nor Rabbula held back their fervour against urban amenities. Social distinction had benefitted both, yet they pleaded to prevent all kinds of gatherings where their monks and nuns might profit from their own or see other people’s social status.

Nevertheless, there must be a limit to rhetoric: if you try too hard to make your rhetoric a reality, the tension between your ideal and the situation on the ground will become too great to bear. But tension is necessary for monasticism’s relationship with the city in Late Antiquity: it guarantees distinction and keeps the monastic movement on its toes. Caesarius seems to understand that well – he knows the limits of the material with which he works. Hence his strategy is ultimately successful and long-standing. Rabbula seems to have driven the tension beyond the breaking point. His rules, fragmentary and disjointed as they were, and the testimony of his vita paint a picture of someone who did not see the limits of his own rhetoric. Preciously little remained in practice after Rabbula died and his successor Ibas had taken over. The community and the monks were apparently not euphoric about Rabbula’s programme of applying anti-urban and anti-social rhetoric in practice. Such rhetoric can uphold a movement only if those who use it know how far they can take it.

Gangs of New Jerusalem

John Moschus (c. 550–619) relates in his Spiritual Meadow (written in a city, in Rome) how the whole spiritual philosophy of a certain abba Marcellus was based on his experience in the circus. When Marcellus was young, he witnessed in his hometown of Apamea how famed charioteer Phileremos (‘lover of the wilderness’; the whole analogy is laid on rather thick) failed to win an important race. The crowd of his frantic fans began to chant ‘Phileremos takes no prize in [this] city.’ From that day on, Marcellus, every time he felt the need to go to the city, would tell himself ‘Marcellus, Phileremos takes no victor’s crown in the city.’ And this strategy worked for thirty-five years until his monastery was devastated by invaders and he was sold into slavery.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Should we be surprised that Marcellus was more motivated to stay in the monastery by what is in essence a pretty good sport anecdote than by some pious writings of the desert fathers? We can see him, murmuring under his breath ‘Marcellus! Phileremos takes no victor’s crown in the city!’ as he paces the courtyard of his monastery just as today an ambitious young athlete might put a poster on their wall with the Michael Jordan quote ‘You must expect great things of yourself before you can do them.’ We should not, therefore, be surprised for Marcellus is of course both, the abbot and the charioteer ‘lover of the wilderness’. He might have left the physical urban space, but his point of reference remained in the city. Deep down he was a product of the circus-going urban crowd – and of urban politics.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Marcellus takes us to a different place: to a world where monks and nuns appear as group protagonists in urban politics. Marcellus is not only actively trying to get away from the races. He is also stopping himself from getting involved in the movement behind the races: the circus factions. And with them inevitably came local, and imperial, politics. In a world where questions of succession, disputes about faith, and fights for regional autonomy became more and more entangled, monasticism was quickly made into a civic force.

In the East, monks were connected with urban political factions and the disturbances that followed from their discontent. Monks were present both in the city crowds asking for the deposition of Ibas – Rabbula’s rival and successor in Edessa – as well as in the judicial proceedings leading to his (short-lived) deposition in 449. The report of the imperial comes Chareas before the synod of Ephesus in 449 treats monks as an integral part of Edessa’s society.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

Monasticism’s notorious involvement in education and church politics played a role in the events that led to the destruction of the Serapeum in 391.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Monastic influence was also felt in the anti-pagan actions in Alexandria in 486. Monks played a heavy role in the disturbances in Antioch in 511 and 512, and in the prelude to the Nika Riot in 531.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ On the pages of Cyril of Scythopolis (c. 525–559), the Sabaite movement’s unofficial record-keeper, historian, and apologist, we meet gangs of monks fighting in the streets of Jerusalem with hired cut-throats, including an appearance of rather mysterious Thracian monks.Footnote ¹⁷¹ We also learn that in about 513, the current archbishop made an alliance with the monks of St Sabas and St Theodore to deny the combined will of Severus of Antioch and emperor Anastasius. In the end, their alliance overcame the dux palaestinae and repelled Severus with supposedly 10,000 monks and the support of the emperor’s nephew Hypatius. The riot was successful: the emperor was furious, but too busy to react with force, and had to accept the victory of the bishop and his monastic following.

Monks did not press their will against the empire alone. Instead, one should look towards the involvement of local officials who were eager to preserve their own interests, and the intersection of court politics through Hypatius, ecclesiastical politics (the dioceses of Antioch and Jerusalem fighting for supremacy), and of course theology. Crucially, however, Cyril voluntarily built up the role of his desert monks in this decidedly urban affair. He wanted to portray his brothers as a civic force, able to shut down an imperial magistrate, and to gather for an assembly in Jerusalem. It is less relevant for us whether the Sabaites actually made the difference. They claimed for themselves to be an urban faction, while never losing sight of their status as a community that had retreated from this world and embraced the desert.

Monks and nuns shared then many features with other urban ‘groups of influence’.Footnote ¹⁷² Even if they were living outside of the city walls, that did not stop them from taking part in city politics. These sorts of troubles antedate the Council of Chalcedon in 451 – troubles that likely played their part in triggering the first episcopal regulation concerning monks.Footnote ¹⁷³ A prominent example of this is the epic struggle between John Chrysostom, in his function as patriarch of Constantinople, and one Isaac, leader of the capital’s monastic faction.

Monks had been established in the capital for several decades before, and they had played their part in the regional offshoot of the Arian controversy. At the start of the fifth century, however, things began to get out of hand for the highest figure of the imperial church. Isaac seems to have been born into an unknown family in the Aramaic east. Chrysostom’s close acquaintance Palladius called him a little Syrian knave.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ For the Greek-speaking upper class, this alone was probably reason enough to wish Isaac’s influence in Constantinople be minimal. Yet worse, Isaac took sides in a highly charged affair: the patriarch of Alexandria had successfully lobbied to depose Chrysostom in 403, with the support of Constantinopolitan monks.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Even though Chrysostom soon regained his position, he was keen to get back at those who had undermined him. Especially so, since the monks had rioted after his return, and killed several of the patriarch’s followers. Tensions were relaxing only after both Isaac and Chrysostom left the city in the following year.

The most glaring issue between them had been on a structural level. Isaac had acquired the patronage of important noblemen after Theodosius, who had built him a monastery in the spiritual suburbs, had officially ‘ended’ Arianism. In the following years, Isaac continued to court his benefactors, and established himself as almsgiver and caretaker of the poor on their behalf. He stayed until late at aristocratic parties to raise money, which he then spent on his underprivileged following and the poor masses. This may sound like a noble undertaking, but John Chrysostom saw himself threatened by a movement that had established itself as a hinge between the wealthy city elites and the people, bypassing the church structures altogether. The patriarch watched his practical and spiritual authority waning – in his own backyard! He consequently preached against the pastoral care that monks gave (something he had done already in Antioch in the years prior), and tried to monopolise hospitals and other, formerly monastic, institutions. However, the monks were not priests and he could not bind them to his ecclesiastical rule.

Monastic leaders like Isaac were promoting the incorporation of their movement into the city’s social fabric. The mechanism of patronage was a key element. It allowed the monks to acquire a dependent clientele below, and to appear as useful clients above. City magnates could therefore see monks as spiritually useful, but also as ready tools to manage mass engagement. This trick would prove useful in the turbulent years immediately before the Council of Chalcedon. Bishops like Dalmatius and Eutyches had caught on and understood their own role as patrons. They consequently turned Chrysostom’s rejection of monks around, and instead utilised their numbers and discipline to showcase their public support and to intimidate their ecclesiastical opponents.

After Chalcedon, Isaac’s business-model would get ruled out, as monks were placed under the aegis of their bishop. After emperor Justinian’s further interventions in the sixth century at the latest it would be impossible to stir up monks or nuns against the bishop in a similar fashion.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ By that time it had become clear to everybody that monasticism was part of city life. The inhabitants of the monasteries inside and outside of the city walls were engrained in its social relations and its daily politics. They were yet another group to account for in the handling of Late Antiquity’s complex urbanity.

The West leaves us dearly wanting when it comes to urban-monastic factions even if monks and monasteries quickly gained political and ecclesiastical influence. There are but traces of their possible subversive activity, and those are in sources as unreliable as the early Liber Pontificalis which is hard to be trusted before the sixth century. Pope Hormisdas (514–523) through his legates Ennodius and Pelegrinus apparently used a network of monks dispersed in different cities of the empire to distribute his nineteen letters of faith under the very nose of emperor Anastasius. If we are to trust this account, it tells us little about the monks in the West, but it does confirm that the pope could rely on thoroughly urban-monastic networks to defend his vision of orthodoxy. The chronicles in Gaul, Spain, or North Africa tell us little about local city politics, and even less about possible monastic factions. We do get some glimpses though. Gregory of Tours described a mutiny by the nuns of Poitiers against their abbess. The nuns left their monastery and moved from one city to another, from Poitiers to Tours, where Gregory helped them. Finally, they stormed their monastery in Poitiers together with a band of ‘thieves, killers, libertines and every sort of criminal’.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Marius of Avenches described in his chronicle how in 565 a group of monks from St Maurice d’Agaune tried to kill their bishop Agricola over a privileges dispute and how a pitched battle developed between the ‘citizens’ and the monks.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Additionally, surely there were groups of wandering ascetics or spiritual beggars, who might have considered themselves monks. The rule of Benedict of Nursia in the sixth century lists two species of them, differentiating between the behaviour of legitimate monks and other ‘obscure’ ascetics.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ These groups might have been partly an urban phenomenon as well. In the variety of socio-religious movements prior to the institutionalisation of monasticism, the West did probably not differ much from the East. But monks as a coalesced urban faction are not to be found in the late antique and early medieval West.

All in all, the image we get is of monks and nuns being integrated in the urban fabric already in the early fifth century, and progressively gaining in importance. Both urban monks and monks of the spiritual suburbs played their role in the urban politics of the late antique East. Sometimes their behaviour was similar to the circus factions and resembled that of violent mobs.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Their presence in this urban context was perhaps surprising at first; what they tried to achieve in practice was not. In the West, the political culture and the urban fabric began to differ from the eastern examples before monasticism developed into a ‘force in the streets’. Its political impact was to be more subtle but no less important.

A great story in the life of Saint Lupicinus (composed in Gaul in the early sixth century) illustrates well how the tables had turned. A certain count Agrippinus must go to Rome in order to save his skin (of course with the spiritual help of Lupicinus). Due to a series of unfortunate events, he finds himself on the run from prison on the streets of Rome. Desperately wanting to get to Saint Peter’s, he asks a monk on the street for the shortest route. The monk duly obliges and seeing that Agrippinus cannot navigate the city at all gives him detailed instructions and tells him about ‘all the squares and intersections he would have to cross; since Agrippinus was ignorant of these places, the monk left no detail of the correct route uncertain’.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Now it is the monk who shows a count around the city. And not just any city – Rome itself.

We Don’t Need No Education?

Monastic rules give us major insight into how various authors imagined the functioning of monasticism as a genre of society as well as into their authors’ expectations of what kind of people their monks and nuns would or should be. For Augustine, deeply rooted in the ‘elite monastic withdrawal’,Footnote ¹⁸⁶ literacy was something of a given – he could hardly imagine his educated monks living without books. In his Praeceptum, he does not stipulate how monks should learn to read and write (something he takes for granted) but rather wishes to organise how they ask for books.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ The same expectation underpins numerous Latin rules. The early Gallic Second Rule of the Fathers in the fifth century reserves time for reading,Footnote ¹⁸⁸ and St Benedict in the sixth assumes enough knowledge of reading that each monk would be able to read aloud.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Shenoute informs us that the default mode of communication between male and female communities was of course through letters.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ He naturally assumed a level of practical literacy among both monks and nuns.

Even in the Egyptian desert and in the milieu of the first-generation of monks, it appears that Anthony was literate. He knew enough Greek to understand the complicated writings of Origen – even if his biographer Athanasius stressed that he tried to stay away from schools and books.Footnote ¹⁹¹ This, of course, does not mean that all monks and nuns were able to read and write. They also did not necessarily take part in any literary activity, passively or actively. But it does show that monks were expected to be educated enough to do so. The reality might have been less uniform in this regard, more along the lines of ‘many were called, few were chosen’. Nevertheless, for a movement that depended so much on the effects of literarisation, this expectation had to have been at least partly fulfilled. It was by no means a coincidence that the highly literate Anthony became the model for so many monastic ideas.

Christian and civic education did, at least in part, happen in the same places. Initially, their shared space was the urban space. Authors like Jerome, Augustine, or John Chrysostom attended urban schools of rhetoric, and although they postured a lot later on to gain a form of literalised distance (when they switched their societal genre from bureaucrats to theologians), their education was that of the urban elite. But this common position of urban and Christian education was not limited to bishops or theologians. A whole strand of institutions shared elements of monastic character with the framework of a rhetoric or philosophy school. Already Didymus the Blind in fourth-century Alexandria was seen as an ascetic leading a quasi-monastic community, even if he remained technically a layman all his life.Footnote ¹⁹² Didymus went on to educate a whole generation of thinkers, among them Palladius, Rufinus, and Jerome. If we look closely, we see an entire section of quasi-monastic practices connected with cities, which greatly influenced monasticism’s maturity. And yet we note that this urban-based, grammar-school-framed form of education was already becoming Christianised in the fourth century. The Tura Papyri, which contain works of Didymus and questions from students, show that grammar was taught using Christian writings and the Old Testament.Footnote ¹⁹³ One did not have to leave the city and the grammar school to get an education based on Christian texts. While monks and nuns might have had a varied level of literacy, those who wrote down their stories and shaped their image in the imagination of subsequent generations were certainly literate.

Civic and Monastic Frames of Education

In the West, Julius Pomerius (fl. c. 500) is a prime example of blurring lines between monastic and civic education. He is a bit of an enigma in the world of late antique and early medieval monasticism. Coming from North Africa, he was a grammarian and a teacher of rhetoric, who finally settled in Arles. In Gaul, he was probably ordained a priest. His contemporaries praised him and among his correspondents were Ruricius of Limoges and Ennodius of Pavia, both of whom tried to convince him to visit their cities. His ‘educational practice’ in Arles attracted aristocratic pupils. It is hard to think about a personage better integrated with the urban tissue of the late fifth century. He wrote his own spiritual guide, De vita contemplativa, arguing for a shift of a model for clerics and bishops alike – they should be less aristocrats and more monks.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ He corresponded with Ruricius, who saw him as a spiritual guide, referring to him, with typical hyperbole, as ‘lord of his soul’ and abbot.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ The confusion about the status of his establishment has led some to believe he was an abbot already in Africa.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ His school attracted monks – Caesarius landed there after his stint at LérinsFootnote ¹⁹⁷ – and in general, seemed to have existed conceptually between a monastic community and a school of rhetoric. This form seemed to have been not only acceptable but also praiseworthy for leading clerics of the day.

There is no fundamental contradiction between the urban and monastic aspects of Pomerius’ initiative in Arles. The dichotomy is purely rhetorical. His writings and his monastic praxis in the city engage with the crucial aspect of monastic vocation. Those who can devote their lives to seek salvation full time – that is, monks and nuns – have a responsibility for other Christians. They need to look for them and care for their spiritual well-being there where they can be found, also in towns. Monks had to follow rules but could also engage in pastoral care. This notion will have a great impact on writings of people like Gregory the Great and his Regula Pastoralis but also later in works like those of Chrodegang and other Carolingian writers.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ The city was not simply a pragmatic choice but an element of the salvific mission.

Pomerius’ enterprise is remarkable. We have here a classical rhetorician and grammarian from North Africa, running a school for wealthy urban and rural aristocrats in Arles of the 490s, who wrote manuals of ascetic living. The author of the vita of one of his pupils, Caesarius, displays true shock and horror at Pomerius’s views and the curriculum of his school. Clearly there was not only some ‘worldly knowledge’ involved but also Augustine.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ And it is all fine! Bishops write to him, monks attend his school, his works are read and copied. The city is not only a place where a manual of ascetic life can be written; it is also a place where monks can come for learning. The fact that the author of the Vita Caesarii utilised the well-known literary trope of a justifying dream for Caesarius’ residence with Pomerius is wholly appropriate. This was a form of literary polemic, stylised after the example of Jerome in the desert, and further shows how literarisation fuelled monasticism’s rhetoric of distinction. The city and its urban institutions were necessary antagonists and essential partners.

Looking East, education and learning seem to have been a sphere where even those monks most vocal in their critique of the city seem to allow monastic presence in towns. ‘This very Ganus tells us then that you are living in a monastery and that if you ever come into town, it is only to consult books, and so much of their contents as pertains to theology’, writes Synesius of Cyrene.Footnote ²⁰⁰ This is not surprising at all – where else should the monks come for books? The sheer logistics of late fourth-century Cyrenaica (and other provinces) meant that one needed to go to the city occasionally. The alternatives – burgeoning monasteries in the spiritual suburbs – were at least at the beginning not numerous and not focused on copying enough to produce a steady stream of books. This was to change in the upcoming centuries, but even this change also had to do with cities.Footnote ²⁰¹ We can already see that cities produced ascetic and Christian forms of communal living that were half a step from traditional urban schools of rhetoric. The curricula of those establishments seem to have been mixed in content. They were founded where the books and the teachers were – in the cities. But this is more than just about books and teachers: it is about an intermediate form of monasticism between a school and a monastery. This form has hardly a more prominent example than the School of Nisibis.

This centre of learning moving between Nisibis and Edessa and between the Roman Empire and Persia from the mid-fourth to the early seventh century, is an extraordinary example of the diversity of monastic-like practices in the city.Footnote ²⁰² As an institution, it was an urban phenomenon that adopted progressively stringent forms of monastic behaviour but never lost its urban roots. At some point, probably towards the mid-sixth century, it developed monastic rules for its students while never changing their status to ‘full’ monks.Footnote ²⁰³ They could come to the school for a fixed period and pursue other interests during their holidays.Footnote ²⁰⁴ Lest this shock us, we know that in Egypt, for example, early monks left their monasteries to get some money on the side helping with harvest or other agricultural work.Footnote ²⁰⁵ The school was always a hub for the closely-knit network of the Eastern church, a ‘common mother’ of its most prominent protagonists,Footnote ²⁰⁶ proving again that the church, monasticism and urbanism were inseparable elements in a durable system that would continue to thrive even after the Islamic conquest.Footnote ²⁰⁷ There is a remarkable unity of the ‘town and community’ in the Statutes of the School of Nisibis. The phrase ‘expelled from the community and from the town’ in various wordings appears in it ten times.Footnote ²⁰⁸

Nisibis is, therefore, like Pomerius’ establishment in Arles, an intermediate state: halfway from the philosophical schools of Athens and Alexandria to monastic centres and their libraries. The school was inside the city but also a bit of a city of its own, with a social separation, its own baths, and its own rules. The roots of this practice might have to do with the influence of rabbinic centres, and it continued under the Abbasid caliphate.Footnote ²⁰⁹ This is then not a simple linear evolution but rather one of the branch outs of monasticism. In this branch, urban schools of rhetoric coexisted and mingled with quasi-monastic educational institutions for monks and laypeople. Under a theological hardening used as a function of distinction, they become models for monasteries. This hardening in the case of Nisibis led to its demise – a group of around 600 students adhering to stricter theological argumentation and a limit to free exegesis refounded the school as a monastery outside of the city.Footnote ²¹⁰ The school, as it was known before, stops being referenced afterwards. But even its successor, the monastery of Abraham of Kashkar (d. 586), does not leave the spiritual suburbs of the city of Nisibis.Footnote ²¹¹

The examples of Nisibis and the school of Pomerius show that there can be no clear-cut distinction between urban secular and ‘monastic’ Christian learning. Even if both sides polemicised against each other, one must see this as a rhetorical strategy of distinction. On the ground, the differences could be marginal, and both ‘sides’ profited from shared examples and a shared community of students. The differences between such establishments like the school of Pomerius and a monastery were fuzzy enough to allow both to be seen as compatible. Nisibis and Arles are also more similar than we think at first glance: both are quasi-monastic institutions in a city, run by someone who, in the eyes of his contemporaries, was an ‘abbot’, and their pupils could be considered monks. As the example of Caesarius shows, they were also frequented by active monks who could come and go.

Those side branches of late antique and early medieval monasticism did not become extinct but were incorporated into more distinctive forms. They also left durable traces in the more successful variations of the phenomenon. Their genetic code is discernible both in immediate successors like Caesarius or Abraham of Kashkar, and the writings they have produced were read centuries after those forms had died out. Their gene of learning made monasticism more robust but also more versatile.

This influence of the intermediate forms of monasticism only strengthened the expectation of education that we have encountered at the beginning. The nuns in Caesarius’ rule for virgins were expected to read for two hours a day. There is no biblical or ascetic reasoning for it, but the school heritage can provide an explanation. Pomerius supposedly also wrote a rule for virgins.Footnote ²¹² We will never know what provisions he included in it, but maybe in the words of his pupil, Caesarius, we are hearing an echo of the views of his teacher. This shows us that not only urban schools influenced monastic rules but also that this transfer, at least in the realities of the fifth and early sixth century, happened in the urban milieu.

We must not think of those monastic or quasi-monastic schools as a replacement or a simple direct continuation of paideia. They are a parallel, equivalent phenomenon, running for some time alongside other forms of civic education. That the School of Nisibis was seen by its contemporaries as an equivalent of urban teaching or at least very much resembling it is also confirmed by the preface to Junillus’s Instituta Regularia, where he writes in mid-sixth-century Constantinople about Paul the Persian that he ‘was educated at the Syrian School in the city of Nisibis, where the Divine Law is taught in a disciplined and orderly fashion by public teachers in the same way in a secular education grammar and rhetoric are taught among us [in the cities]’.Footnote ²¹³ All the essential features seem to have been fulfilled here: the teachers were ‘public’, there was a curriculum which ensured ‘a disciplined and orderly fashion’, and the form of teaching was the same as in the cities. Nisibis and the whole Syriac school movement were not only intertwined with monasticism but also seen as a form of it.Footnote ²¹⁴ These were connected, parallel movements that fed each other and sometimes were indistinguishable, even if at times they found themselves in conflict. Their connections to urban space were often similar.

Monastic Education with and without the City

We have already seen that those establishments can be spotted across the Broad Mediterranean, but they are also connected. Cassiodorus in Italy was fascinated by Nisibis as an idea, even if he did not know any precise details about it. His knowledge was filtered through the urban milieu of Constantinople and the work of Junillus.Footnote ²¹⁵ Nisibis was attractive enough to consider it as a model for Cassiodorus’ city-university planned together with pope Agapetus. The failure of this project was not due to the cities being too urban, too distracting, and too spiritually dangerous to run such an institution within them. It was rather due to cities failing at what they were supposed to do in the first place.

As Cassiodorus made clear, the cities became too insecure in Italy; the wars of the sixth century made them unsuited for a Western version of Nisibis. Monastic learning needed to go elsewhere (see Figure 10). But we should not interpret this move to the countryside as an antagonism to the city. Instead, it highlights once more the fragility of urbanism in Late Antiquity which prevented the cities (surely temporarily, according to Cassiodorus) from fulfilling their educational functions. At the same time, the choice of the countryside has a lot to do with Cassiodorus’ personal decisions and his retirement from politics.Footnote ²¹⁶ Monasticism’s rhetoric of the search for the desert was a more than welcome distraction from a possibly pragmatic decision.

Figure 10 Cassiodorus envisaged Vivarium as a better city. We do not know how the monastery actually looked, but this is how a late eighth-century illuminator envisaged it – including a fishpond. Bamberg Msc.Patr. 61, fol. 29v.

Photo: Gerald Raab / Staatsbibliothek Bamberg

Cassiodorus is fascinated both by the idea of an institution dedicated to learning and the ideal of educated cives. He cannot realise both simultaneously, but he still tries to fuse both concepts in a monastery. He gives us his ‘precise’ models for his plan: the schools of Alexandria and Nisibis. Alexandria had a problematic doctrinal relationship to Rome and Constantinople, to say the least. Nisibis, on the other hand, might seem strange at first glance. Not only is this school in the Persian Empire, but Cassiodorus bizarrely claims that the school is run by and for Jews. The literarisation of the movement shows itself: the precise lineage was necessary as long as it fulfilled the rules that monasticism as a genre prescribed. By taking Alexandria and Nisibis as examples, Cassiodorus was, paradoxically, making his institution less controversial.

Cassiodorus did not limit himself to promoting city academies as an example for monasteries. He also paid special attention to the activity of copying books. In the late Roman context, this was an urban pursuit – the necessary education, resources, and clientele were concentrated in cities.Footnote ²¹⁷ As we have seen at the beginning of this Element, for Jerome in the desert of Chalcis, it was necessary to bring a team of scribes and students to keep up the scribal activity. But this proto-scriptorium was not yet an approved monastic practice. It was but a transplant of an urban activity into the ‘literary desert’. For Cassiodorus, Jerome’s emphasis on copying and correcting books was an important model. But the true innovation he brought was the institutionalisation of this pursuit as a necessary monastic practice. If monasteries were to survive in the age of weakening urban systems and crisis, they had to create an environment where it was possible to continue urban pursuits like copying books. The monastery fulfilled urban functions that the cities could not guarantee anymore. Moreover, for Cassiodorus and his monks, the monastery did it better. ‘You have received a kind of city of your own, pious citizens’, he promised his monks.Footnote ²¹⁸

This process of convergence gained momentum in the second half of the sixth century. Only a few years after Cassiodorus, Gregory the Great pursued his spiritual and educational goals similarly. He turned his family’s villa suburbana, on Caelio close to the Circus Maximus, into an exclusive monastery that was supposed to strengthen his network and to produce both an impressive library and a place of learning. He did not forget to include lavish portraits of himself and his parents on its walls in the process.Footnote ²¹⁹ It is difficult to say why he deemed Rome a suitable place for this institution when, twenty years earlier, Cassiodorus had shied away from staying in a large city. It could come down to a more secure and politically stable situation in central Italy, but also to specific interests of both actors. Maybe Gregory wanted to strengthen his influence on Rome’s urban elite networks and was bound to Rome anyway. Cassiodorus might have considered his political ambitions over and chose to abstain from potentially disruptive local politics.

Gregory’s establishment paid equal attention to the pursuits that were important to Cassiodorus and to Benedict, including a focus on learning. A close look at his over 200 letters concerned with matters of monastic discipline and organisation shows that he remained a pragmatic interpreter of tradition.Footnote ²²⁰ His monastery became a school for the missionary clergy and monks; in many ways, it is the place where the idea of the Christian mission in the West was developed. The cadre of the mission to Britain in the 590s was educated here. St Andrew’s monastery, a former urban villa of Gregory’s family, produced books as well. It is possible that Augustine of Canterbury (d. 604) took manuscripts with him to Britain which were connected to or produced in Gregory’s ‘laboratory’. Canterbury itself, with a monastery in the spiritual suburbs of a former Roman city, became an important centre of learning and copying books. Bede muses how in the late seventh century monks in Canterbury could use Latin and Greek like native speakers, due to the influence of bishop (and former monk) Theodore (602–690), who came from Tarsus in Asia Minor, and abbot Hadrian (d. 710) from North Africa.Footnote ²²¹ The networks of the Broad Mediterranean were still very much active, and monasteries were slowly playing the same role in them as cities did.

In the late seventh century, in the territory of Astorga, an urban centre in Leon, an extraordinary monastic writer was active. Valerius of Bierzo (d. c. 695), who came from the Visigothic elite, was well-educated and left a rich body of work. In his twenties, he decided to pursue a monastic life but could not see himself fitting in with any existing monastic institution. Instead, he ostensibly opted for an ascetic life in the mountains. He never left the immediate vicinity of Astorga, and his hermitages were located on estates near public roads.Footnote ²²² He maintained access to a rich library that included the works of Jerome, Athanasius, and Isidore, which seems to have fallen victim to book robbers more than once.Footnote ²²³ He also practised a form of autobiographical confessional literature and left as many as three such texts.Footnote ²²⁴ Cities and their territories geographically delineate his world.Footnote ²²⁵ They offer us an unprecedented insight into how he wanted to project his ascetic persona onto a literary public sphere. His autobiographies maintain direct links to the Life of Anthony and are therefore poignant examples of monastic identity as a literary genre. In many ways, they also betray how well informed Valerius was about the world he professed to abscond.Footnote ²²⁶

Valerius’ life was full of the apparent tension between the life of the holy hermit and the pressure for increased institutionalisation. He fought with his patrons who wanted him to become a priest, and bishops who tried to entice him to come back to the city.Footnote ²²⁷ He instructed monks and stylised himself as the last man standing of the true, desert-driven asceticism. We might even conjecture that he enjoyed the constant attention.Footnote ²²⁸ The crucial element is another part of his persona: that of a teacher, an involved pedagogue, keen on developing or perfecting various learning techniques. He taught boys how to read and write, boasting that his divinely inspired methods allowed them to master all psalms in six months. After instructing a well-off young boy in letters, he gave him a book, a gift written especially for the boy. This literary guide to life is symptomatic of Valerius’ understanding of education. We do not have any proof but this text could have been a version of his De vana saeculi sapientia, his tractate on ascetic living in the secular world. Simply put, he ran a school and received pupils. He was, for all purposes, an ascetic version of a rhetor. One cannot help but think of Nisibis and Pomerius (and Libanius for that matter) when Valerius describes how his disciples came for the summer and left him in the winter.Footnote ²²⁹

This is a time when monasteries start to play an important role in education, but also a time when they begin to change. Maybe the time was up for self-professed ascetics and freelance teachers. Under the influence of such writers like Isidore of Seville (d. 636) or Fructuosus of Braga (d. 665), organised and institutionalised monasteries gained the upper hand in education. Clerical authorities organised monastic space in such a way as to facilitate teaching and spiritual formation.Footnote ²³⁰ It is not only about being separate from ‘the world’ (while, lest we forget, being in practice intertwined with it). Now the monastic space needed its own spatial hierarchy to fulfil its educational functions. Cities had had spaces for education and now monasteries developed their own. In this world, Valerius, a highly educated ascetic freelancer, had understandably met with pushback. His struggles to get to the desert remind us of Jerome, whom he read, and for whom chasing that topos was in no way contradictory to making full use of his urban education and socialisation. Valerius was closer to Didymus or Pomerius than to the monastic world of Isidore’s rule. Still, in the late seventh century, if you wanted to partake in monasticism, an urban education and rhetorical practices gave you a front-row seat. Valerius’ world, rarely more than a day’s journey from a city, and full of books and literary allusions, is a perfect spiritual suburb. But increasingly, there is a change in the air; monasteries can now do what the cities cannot. The epoch of parallel development draws to a close.

***

In 679–680, Ceolfrith, prior of Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria, like the good monk that he was, travelled to Rome to get some books. He acquired the so-called Codex Grandior, a massive Bible produced in Vivarium under the direct supervision of Cassiodorus.Footnote ²³¹ The codex is lost to us, but a copy made in Northumbria and derived from it survives: the Codex Amiatinus (made of circa 515 dead animals). On folio 5r, there is a full-page miniature of the prophet Ezra, copying a book in front of a cupboard filled with nine volumes of the Bible. In a twist of fate this image was once Cassiodorus himself, reinterpreted as Ezra by the monks of Wearmouth-Jarrow. But this thread of monastic tradition is not all: the Codex Amiatinus shows how monks from the periphery of the Broad Mediterranean would now use their connections and substantial resources to go to cities to look for books. They saw themselves in the same literary community as their predecessors in Italy and beyond. Moreover, the monasteries had become so rich that they could go back to Rome and present the codex as a gift to the pope. Ceolfrith set out to Rome in 716 with the richly decorated book. He died on the way in Burgundy and the book never made it to its destination. Monasteries, in the spirit of the pupil that became the master, were now rich centres of education that connected the Broad Mediterranean.