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Angel on earth and heavenly man: St. Sava of Serbia

Florin Curta

With the exception of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, there is no churchman in the history of Southeastern Europe who had a greater influence on that region than St. Sava of Serbia. Dimitry Obolensky even believed that his reputation in Eastern Europe was second only to that of Alexander the Great. The beginnings of the Serbian Church (as an organized, independent institution) are linked to St. Sava. He is regarded as the founder of Serbian monasticism, both in his own country and at Mount Athos. The earliest pieces of original literature written in Serbia in Old Church Slavonic are associated with his name. Sava is also the first original author at Mount Athos to write in that language. He is the earliest known pilgrim from the Balkans to the Holy Land. He was a contemporary of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and like him, he met with the Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil. Sava played a key role in the regional politics of the Balkans during the troubled period that followed the sack of Constantinople by Western crusaders (1204). His dealings with the Empire of Nicaea and with Bulgaria are fundamental moments in the political history of the region. However, outside Serbia, he has rarely attracted the attention of historians. The biographical vignette that Dimitry Obolensky dedicated to him almost thirty years ago remains unique. It was based on the attempts of the Yugoslav historiographical movement to shift the study of Sava from hagiography to biography. That, however, was done at the cost of neglecting the religious dimension of Sava’s life, particularly the interesting combination of monastic qualities and features that one would associate primarily with the secular clergy. Occasionally, Sava’s name appears in studies of Byzantine and Balkan history, but not in works dedicated, for example, to religious developments in Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth century. Some of Sava’s writings and actions have been compared to those of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, but outside a small group of scholars dealing with the medieval history of the region, few English-speaking historians know who Sava was and what he did. The European dimension of Sava’s personality has yet to be discovered.

The portrait that follows is therefore an attempt to depict Sava as a man of the Church. Much of what is known about him comes from the earliest of two biographies written by the Athonite monks Domentijan (in 1252 or 1253) and Theodosius (before 1336). Domentijan, a monk and a Serb, was Sava’s disciple and had followed him everywhere during the last years of his life, most likely on his pilgrimages to the Holy Land and Egypt. A fellow churchman is best to draw a portrait of Sava as a man of the Church. I have therefore used Domentijan’s biography to create an imaginary text, namely a letter from the Bulgarian Patriarch Joachim I to the Bulgarian emperor John Asen II. Joachim was appointed patriarch of Tărnovo (the capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire) in 1235, when, following his alliance with the Empire of Nicaea, John Asen II obtained the autocephaly (independence) of the Bulgarian Church. Joachim had been a monk at Mount Athos in his youth, and upon returning to Bulgaria in the 1220s, he established a cave monastery by the Danube. He became an adviser of Emperor John Asen II, who financed the enlargement of the monastery. I have set the timeline of the imaginary letter during the second half of the previous year (1236), several months after Sava had died in Tărnovo during his short visit at John Asen II’s court. During the months that followed Sava’s death a number of envoys came to John Asen from Serbia, all requesting that the body of Sava (who had been buried in Tărnovo) be returned to their own country. The Serbian king Vladislav (John Asen’s son-in-law) came in person to Tărnovo to beg the Bulgarian emperor to let him bring Sava’s body to Serbia. According to Sava’s biographers, Vladislav and his men eventually smuggled the coffin from the city, in what is one of the earliest instances in Eastern Europe of relic theft (furtum sacrum). Sava was re-buried in the exonarthex of the Monastery of Mileševa that Vladislav had built in 1224 in the valley of the Lim River (near the present-day border between Serbia and Montenegro). The imaginary letter of Patriarch Joachim would have reached John Asen before the relics were spirited away. The Bulgarian emperor, who had an enormous respect for Sava, could not understand why the Serbs were so bent on bringing the body of their former archbishop to their own country, and why they could not let it rest in its tomb in Tărnovo. This was an opportunity for Joachim to describe his fellow Athonite as a churchman of formidable spiritual and moral stature. I have inserted chronological markers between brackets in the text and added explanatory notes for person or place names.

Notes

1. An English translation of the biography of Patriarch Joachim is available in Kiril Petkov, The Voices of Medieval Bulgaria, Seventh–Fifteenth Century. The Records of a Bygone Culture (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2008), pp. 285–286.