Greek Protopapas of Malta

Among the precious manuscripts held by the Biblioteca Palatina of Parma there is a Tetraevangelio (The Four Gospels) with a very interesting Maltese connection. This liturgical text complete with the Canon Tables of Eusebius (a concordance of the four gospels), Menologion and Synaxarion (liturgical calendar of saints’ feasts), consists of 286 sheets of fine parchment, beautifully written in Perlschrift and fully illuminated.

The Tetraevangelio (The Four Gospels) has a very interesting Maltese connection- Stanley Fiorini

It is datable to c. 1100 and can be shown to have been produced in the Imperial scriptorium of Constantinople. Early in the 12th century, it was donated by the Chartophylax (archivist) of Hagia Sophia, the Deacon Michael Autoreianos, to some unidentified monastery, whence it came to these islands at about the same time.

From here it found its way to the Basilian monastery of San Salvatore de Lingua Phari in Messina by the mid-15th century before its acquisition by the Palatina of Parma in the early 19th century.

This history of the manuscript has been reconstructed from information written on the nearly-blank verso of fol. 285 by Paolo Eleuteri and other scholars who have studied the codex in depth under several aspects.

Michael Autoreianos, a very prominent Byzantine personality and future Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael IV (1208-1212), was Chartophylax of Hagia Sophia between 1199 and 1206. His donation during this period is recorded.

The Messinese connection transpires both from the monastery’s extant inventories as well as from the manuscript itself where there is recorded the name of a Frate Athanasio and of the Sicilian notary’s name – Antonio de Carissimo – active between 1457 and 1470, who was probably responsible for the drawing up of some deed of donation whereby the monastery acquired the codex.

That the codex’s tortuous itinerary –Constantinople, monastery, Messina, Parma – actually intersected Malta is, likewise deducible from the same f. 285 where, immediately below the last entry for August 31 of the Menologion, two interesting obituaries are inserted in a semi-literate hand. They read:

(column A) In memory of Mil[as], the wife of Nicolaos, priest and Papas of Malta, who passed away in blessedness on the 21st day of the month of November of the year 6738 of the IIIrd indiction [=1229], in the fifth hour;

(column B) In memory of Nicolaos, priest and Protopapas of Malta, who passed away in blessedness on the fourth day of the month of December of the year 6739 of the IVth indiction [=1230], in the first hour.

One concludes that Malta had a GreekProtopapas called Nicolaos, with ties to the Byzantine Church. He died on December 4, 1230, was married, and his wife Milas had died a year before he did.

The implication for Malta’s ecclesiastical history of this entirely new information is highly significant. The title Protopapas implies the existence of a Greek parochial structure with various diocesan priests, under the Protopapas, taking care of the Greek Christian community.

The fact that Nicolaos was married (as allowed by the Greek Church) shows that he was no celibate Basilian monk. The fact that he died in 1230 places him at the head of the Maltese Christian community (which was still a minority of the population) decades before the first ever mention of a Latin cleric in these islands (apart from the bishop, that is); the Latin cleric – Canon Joannes Zafarana, mentioned first in 1244 – was definitely Sicilian and, as will be shown in a forthcoming publication, had only tenuous links with Malta, living as he did in Palermo.

This information corroborates fully the thesis propounded in my recent joint-publication (with Mgr Joseph Busuttil and Professor Horace C.R. Vella) Tristia ex Melitogaudo, where it is shown that the Maltese Church continued to be Greek, as it had been since before the Arab conquest, and was only gradually taken over by the Latin Church in a process that spread itself over a good couple of centuries.

Another important marker in this process are the names of four witnesses authenticating, c. 1300, the copy of the poem Tristia: two Greeks, the deacon Philippos Gautes (that is, the Gozitan) and Notary Bartholomaios Falcón, son of the priest Joannes, and the two Latin priests, Odo and Jacobus.

This is highly suggestive of how, at the end of the 13th century, the Greek Church was still vigorous but already being superseded by the Latin. By the end of the following century, in exactly the same way as was happening in Sicily at the time, the Greek Church had petered out. The Tetraevangelio was then no longer needed here and it found refuge in one of the last bastions of the Byzantine Church in Sicily.