ST SABAS AND THE PALESTINIAN MONASTIC

NETWORK UNDER CRUSADER RULE

by ANDREW JOTISCHKY

T
HE monastery founded in the fifth century by St Sabas,
in the Kidron Valley a few kilometres south-east of Beth-
lehem, has been described as 'the crucible of Byzantine
Orthodoxy'. 1 The original cave cell occupied by Sabas himself grew
into a monastic community of the laura type, in which monks lived
during the week in individual cells practising private prayer and
craft work, but met for communal liturgy on Saturdays, Sundays
and feast days. The laura, which differed from the coenobium in the
greater emphasis placed on individual meditation, prayer and work,
was the most distinctive contribution of the Palestinian tradition
to early Christian monasticism. The first laura had been founded in
the Judean desert in the fourth century by Chariton, and cenobitic
monasteries had been in existence in Palestine both in the desert
and on the coastal strip since the same period. Nevertheless, partly
as a result of an extensive network of contacts with other founda-
tions, both laurae and cenobitic monasteries, partly through Sabas s
own fame as an ascetic, and partly through a burgeoning reputation
for theological orthodoxy, St Sabas became the representative insti-
tution of Palestinian monasticism in the period between the fifth
century and the Persian invasion of 614.2 The monastery's capacity
to withstand the Persian and Arab invasions of the seventh century,
and to adapt to the cultural changes brought by Arabicization,
ensured not only its survival but also its continued importance as

1
Andrew Louth,'Palestine under the Arabs, 650-750: The Crucible of Byzantine
Orthodoxy', in R. N. Swanson, ed., The Holy Land, Holy Lands and Christian History,
SCH 36 (Woodbridge, 2000), 67-77.
2
Joseph Patrich, Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism: A Comparative Study of
Eastern Monasticism, 4th to 7th Centuries (Washington, DC, 1995). On Judean desert
monasticism more generally, see Yizhar Hirschfeld, The Judean Desert Monasteries in
the Byzantine Period (New Haven, CT, 1992); Derwas Chitty, The Desert a City: An
Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire
(London, i966);John Binns, Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Pales-
tine, 314—631 (Oxford, 1994); Lorenzo Perrone, 'Monasticism in the Holy Land: From
the Beginnings to the Crusades', Proche-Orient Chretien 45 (1995), 31-63.

9
 ANDREW JOTISCHKY

a disseminator of monastic practice throughout the early Middle

Ages.3 In 1099, when the first crusaders conquered the Holy Land,
it was almost the sole survivor of the 'golden age' of Palestinian
desert monasticism of the early Byzantine period. The monastery
continued to prosper under crusader rule. It was an important
landowner and its abbot was in the twelfth century a confrater of
the Knights Hospitaller. Moreover, it is clear both from varied
genres of external documentary sources - for example, pilgrimage
accounts and hagiographies — and from the surviving manuscripts
produced in the monastery between the eleventh and thirteenth
centuries, that the monastery's spiritual life also flourished in this
period. 4 The role of St Sabas and Palestinian monasticism within
the broader scope of Byzantine monastic reform of the eleventh
and twelfth centuries suggests that the continuing function of the
monastery at the centre of a wider network of practices and ideals
across the Orthodox world engendered a revival of early monastic
practices in a period more often associated with decline and the
struggle to preserve the integrity of monastic life.
The first signs of renewed interest in Palestinian monasticism
within the wider Orthodox world occur in the eleventh century,
with the biography of Lazaros of Mount Galesion (966/7—1053).5
Lazaros, a native of Asia Minor, abandoned his local monastery
as an adolescent to pursue his destiny by setting off for the Holy
Land on pilgrimage. Despite obstacles in the form of local wars
and a fraudulent spiritual mentor, Lazaros not only completed the
pilgrimage but stayed in the Holy Land to become a monk at St
Sabas. Called back to his homeland eventually in a vision, Lazaros
founded his own monastic communities centred on the pillars that
he successively occupied for possibly thirty years. Although the
time he spent in the Holy Land was relatively short in comparison

3
See the collected articles of Sidney Griffith, Arabic Christianity in the Monasteries
of Ninth-Century Palestine (Aldershot, 1992); Milka Rubin,'Arabization versus Islamiza-
tion in the Palestinian Melkite Community during the Early Muslim Period', in Guy
Stroumsa and Arieh Kofiky, eds, Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and Conflicts in
the Holy Land, 1st to i$th centuries (Jerusalem, 1998), 149-61.
4
Andrew Jotischky, 'Greek Orthodox and Latin Monasticism around Mar Saba
under Crusader Rule', in Joseph Patrich, ed., The Sabaite Heritage in the Orthodox
Church from the Fifth Century to the Present (Leuven, 2001), 85-96.
5
The Life of Lazaros of Mt Galesion, an nth Century Pillar Saint, ed. and transl.
Richard P. Greenfield, Byzantine Saints Lives in Translation 3 (Washington, DC, 2000).

10
 St Sabas and its Monastic Network

to the rest of his career, in the structure of the Life his monastic
experiences at St Sabas and the Judean desert coenobium of St
Euthymius form the basis for his later foundations. Had he been
content to stay in the monastery of his youth in Bithynia, he
might have lived out a worthy monastic life indistinguishable from
countless others; it was the Holy Land, and particularly the desert,
that set him apart.
The pull to the east attracted two other Byzantine monks in
slightly different ways. Leontius, a Macedonian by birth, spent most
of his career, from the 1120s until his appointment as patriarch of
Jerusalem in 1172, as a monk at the monastery of St John on the
Aegean island of Patmos.To Leontius, the progression from monk
and abbot of St John to the patriarchate of Jerusalem appeared
a natural one — so much so that he turned down appointments
to bishoprics in Kiev and Cyprus, in the knowledge that a more
fitting call awaited him. Indeed, the call of the Holy Land forms a
leitmotif throughout his life, from conversion to the monastic life
in adolescence, through his stint as a miracle-working 'holy fool'
in Constantinople, and youthful attachment in monastic disciple-
ship to the exiled bishop of Tiberias in Galilee, culminating in his
elevation to the patriarchate ofJerusalem and his public pilgrimage
to his see in 1176—7. 6 Why should a monk whose origins lay in a
Macedonian provincial town, and who had spent most of his life
in an obscure island monastery, see the Holy Land as his natural
destiny?
The same question might be asked of another twelfth-century
provincial Byzantine, Neophytos. As a young man Neophytos
absconded from his village in Cyprus in order to escape marriage,
and entered the monastery of St John Chrysostom in the north
of the island. After eighteen months he abandoned the monastery
to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Subsequently he wandered
around the Holy Land in search of a mentor in the monastic life —
a figure rather like the bishop to whom Leontius attached himself,
from whom he could learn not simply how to live a monastic
life, but more specifically how to be a monk in the tradition of

6
The Life of Leontius, Patriarch of Jerusalem 3-6, 7-8, 10, 66, ed. and transl. Dimitris
Tsougarakis,The Medieval Mediterranean 2 (Leiden, 1993), 34—40, 45, 108.

II
 ANDREW JOTISCHKY

the Palestinian desert.7 Neophytos never found such a mentor,

but achieved his aim by returning to Cyprus and constructing his
own version of the career of the archetypical Palestinian desert
monk. Settling in a cave near Paphos in western Cyprus in 1157,
he later recalled that the day he chose to begin constructing his
cell was one of the pre-eminent feasts of the church in Jerusalem,
Holy Cross Day, 14 September; moreover, when he later came to
dedicate his lauritic monastery, the Enkleistra, the dedicatee was
the Holy Cross.8 A later hermitage that he built for himself higher
up the cliff, he dedicated to the New Zion. Similarly his eleventh-
century predecessor, Lazaros of Mount Galesion, who had been a
monk in Palestine in the early years of the eleventh century, had
named the third of his later foundations in western Asia Minor
'Anastasis' (Resurrection), in memory of the Anastasis Church in
Jerusalem. 9
Neophytos's monastic enterprise was largely built on his recol-
lection of the months he had spent in the Holy Land. Among the
surviving sermons he wrote for his monks are two for the feasts
of the Anastasis Church in Jerusalem and for Holy Cross Day.10 In
many of his panegyrics of earlier monastic exemplars, the theme
of 'flight to the Holy Land' - a motif on which he consciously
modelled his own career — is explicit.11 He also wrote panegyrics
that have specific connections to the Holy Land: one bemoaning
the loss of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187, and another on St Sabas.12
For Neophytos, the monastery of St Sabas was the living emblem
of the desert, and the desert was the birthplace of monasticism
itself.
In this symbolic sense, the Holy Land functioned as the centre
of a web of ideas and associations that lay at the heart of a revival
of Orthodox monasticism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

7
I. E. Stephanis, ed., Ayiou Niopvnv mv Evxtettrrov T,vyy%a./jjMt,Ta,, 3 vols
(Paphos, 1996-9), 2: 6-16; Nicholas Coureas,'The Rule of Neophytos the Recluse',
in The Foundation Rules of Medieval Cypriot Monasteries: Makhairas and St Neophytos,
Cyprus Research Centre Texts and Studies in the History of Cyprus 46 (Nicosia,
2003), 129-68, at 135-8.
8
'Rule of Neophytos' 6 (Coureas, Foundation Rules, 138).
9
Life of Lazaros 230 (ed. and transl. Greenfield, 327).
10
Catia Galatariotou, The Making of a Saint: The Life, Times and Sanctification of
Neophytos the Recluse (Cambridge, 1991), 262-3.
11
Ibid. 77-81.
12
Ibid. 265.

12
 St Sabas and its Monastic Network

In a more tangible way, St Sabas lay at the heart of a genuine

network through the dissemination of certain monastic practices.
I raised the question earlier why Leontius should have regarded
the elevation to the patriarchate of Jerusalem as a natural progres-
sion. The eleventh-century founder of Leontius's monastery of St
John on Patmos, Christodoulos, had, in his own words, 'flown like
a sparrow' to 'lodge in the wilderness' of the Judean desert, on
first deciding to adopt the monastic life. Like Neophytos about
a century later, Christodoulos was escaping a marriage his family
had arranged for him. The Holy Land represented sanctuary; more
particularly, the Judean desert was the heart of monasticism as a
profession.13 When he wrote the liturgical typikon of his monas-
tery on Patmos, Christodoulos specified that daily psalmody was
to be conducted exactly according to the custom at St Sabas, and
that the Sabaite liturgy was also to be followed on great feasts and
on Sundays in Lent.14 Thus, although when he became Patriarch
of Jerusalem in 1172, Leontius had never been to the Holy Land,
he had in fact been following the liturgical practices of its monas-
teries for most of his life. Neophytos, though as far as we know
never himself a monk of St Sabas, wrote an account of the struggle
against demonic possession undergone by a contemporary monk
of St Sabas, Gabriel, for the instruction of his own monks of the
Enkleistra in Cyprus.15 Before founding the Enkleistra, Neophytos
had hoped to enter a monastery at Mount Latros, in south-western
Asia Minor, which had been founded by refugee monks of St Sabas,
and which followed Sabaite practices.16 What was true of Patmos
was also demonstrably so for other monasteries throughout the
Orthodox world. Another late eleventh-century foundation, the
monastery of Nikon on the Black Mountain (Jebel Lakoum) near
Antioch, relied heavily on Nikon's reading of the ascetic works of

13
'Rule, Testament and Codicil of Christodoulos for the Monastery of St John the
Theologian on Patmos' A3; transl. Patricia Karlin-Hayter, in Byzantine Monastic Foun-
dation Documents, ed. John P.Thomas and Angela Hero, 5 vols (Washington, DC, 2000),
2: 564-606, at 579. For an earlier example of the theme, in the career of Hilarion the
Georgian (b.820), see Elisabeth Malamut, Sur la route des saints byzantins (Paris, 1993),
51—2. For some 12th-century western examples, see Andrew Jotischky, The Perfection of
Solitude: Hermits and Monks in the Crusader States (University Park, PA, 1995), 153-74.
14
'Christodoulos'A17 (transl. Karlin-Hayter, 587).
15
Narratio de monacho Palaestiniensi, ed. Hippolyte Delehaye, 'Saints de Chypre',
AnBoIl 26 (1907), 162-75.
16
'Rule of Neophytos' 4 (Coureas, Foundation Rules, 136—7).

13
 ANDREW JOTISCHKY

Antiochus, a seventh-century monk of St Sabas. Nikon maintained

contact with a Sabaite monk, Gerasimos, to whom he referred
in his own writings as his 'spiritual father'. Nikon's typikon for
the Black Mountain specified that his monks were to follow the
regulations of the monks of the Spoudaion in Jerusalem and of
St Sabas.17 The same pattern can be found in the career of the
thirteenth-century Serbian Savas, who became a monk at St Sabas
before returning to found his own monasteries in Serbia, which
followed the Sabaite typikon and even imitated the architecture
of St Sabas itself18
The Sabaite network operated in both directions. St Sabas drew
monks from all parts of the Orthodox world to itself, through
whose mobility Sabaite liturgical and governmental practices could
be disseminated across the oikoumene as they in turn stamped the
imprint of Sabaite practices on their own subsequent foundations.
But St Sabas also needed the rest of the world. Neophytos's account
of the Sabaite monk Gabriel was probably supplied by refugee
monks of St Sabas who came to Cyprus after Saladin's invasion of
the Holy Land in 1187, and who may have joined the Enkleistra.
Another Cypriot monastery, Makhairas, was also founded by a
refugee Palestinian monk in the mid twelfth century.19 Similarly,
over a century earlier Lazaros maintained connections with St
Sabas and its monks even after his domicile on Mount Galesion,
and received visits from Sabaite monks. 20
The extent of the Sabaite network is, on one level, hardly
surprising. From its origins, the monastery was ethnically pluralistic,
drawing on recruits from across the Near East. Sabas himself was a
Cappadocian, while his own mentor as a monastic founder in the
Judean desert, Euthymius, came from Armenia. When he arrived in
the Judean desert, Sabas was welcomed by a fellow Cappadocian,

17
'Regulations of Nikon of the Black Mountain' 29, transl. Robert Allison, in
Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents, ed. Thomas and Hero, 1: 377-424, at 392. On
the influence of the Sabaite typikon on Byzantine monasticism more generally, see
John Thomas, 'The Imprint of Sabaitic Monasticism on Byzantine Monastic Typika',
in Patrich, ed., Sabaite Heritage, 73-84.
18
D. Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits (Oxford, 1988), 115-72; S. Popovic,'Sabaite
Influences on the Church of Medieval Serbia', in Patrich, ed., Sabaite Heritage, 385-408.
19
Coureas, Foundation Rules, 20.
20
Richard P. Greenfield,'Drawn to the Blazing Beacon: Visitors and Pilgrims to
the Living Holy Man and the Case of Lazaros of Mount Galesion', DOP 56 (2002),
207-35, at 230-1.

14
 St Sabas and its Monastic Network

Passarion. Following Sabas's own stipulation, his monastery catered

for Armenian, Greek and Aramaic-speaking monks, all of whom
were given licence to say the daily offices in their own languages.21
By the eighth century there were also native Arabic-speaking
monks at St Sabas, and a twelfth-century redaction of the typikon
of the monastery even envisaged the possibility of Latin-speaking
Frankish monks. 22 This 'internationalism' was an inevitable result
of the location of the monastery in the Judean desert. Palestinian
monasticism coincided from the beginning with pilgrimage to the
Holy Places, and the growth of pilgrimage from the mid fourth
century onward made the expansion of monastic houses neces-
sary. The 'desert founders' — Chariton, Euthymius, Theodosius the
Coenobiarch and Sabas being the most prominent — were drawn
to the Palestinian desert initially because of the presence of the
Holy Places ofJerusalem. The character of Palestinian monasticism
was to some extent shaped by the need to provide pilgrims on
their way across the desert — for example, from Jerusalem to the
Jordan — with xenodochia (guest houses).23
The career of Lazaros of Mount Galesion at the end of the
tenth and beginning of eleventh centuries shows that the pattern
of the pre-Arab period still existed in outline at St Sabas. Lazaros
left St Sabas around the time of the persecution of Christians
in and around Jerusalem by the Khalif al-Hakim; the journey of
Christodoulos from Bithynia to the Holy Land in the mid eleventh
century suggests a revival in the fortunes of desert monasticism
after the rebuilding of the Holy Sepulchre from the 1020s onward,
but just as Lazaros fled from al-Hakim's persecutions, Christo-
doulos fled from the Seljuq invasion of the 1040s.24 Haifa century
later, the Russian abbot Daniel (1106-8) found the Judean desert
largely a memorial to an age of past monastic glories. Of the ten

21
Lorenzo Perrone, 'Monasticism as a Factor of Religious Interaction in the Holy
Land during the Byzantine period', in Stroumsa and Kofiky, eds, Sharing the Sacred,
67-95-
22
Patrich, Sabas, 257, 274.
23
For example, the xenodochium excavated at the monastery of Martyrius at Ma'ale
Adumim: H. Sivan, 'Pilgrimage, Monasticism and the Emergence of Christian Pales-
tine', in Robert Ousterhout, ed., The Blessings of Pilgrimage (Urbana, IL, 1990), 54-64;
E. P. Hunt,'The Itinerary of Egeria: Reliving the Bible in Fourth-Century Palestine',
in Swanson, ed., Holy Land, 34-54, esp. 44-54.
24
Life of Lazaros 19-20 (ed. and transl. Greenfield, 101-4); 'Christodoulos' A3
(transl. Karlin-Hayter, 579).

15
 ANDREW JOTISCHKY

monastic sites he mentioned in his account of his pilgrimage, only

St Sabas was still functioning. 25 During the course of the twelfth
century, however, under crusader rule, the desert once again came
to life. Comparing Daniel's account of deserted monastic sites in
1106-8 with the 'account of the desert' in the pilgrimage of the
Cretan monk John Phokas in 1185, one finds most of Daniel's
monastic ruins described as functioning communities. 26 Phokas's
account, indeed, is characterized by the pilgrims quest for the
living traditions of monasticism. For Phokas, the history of Pales-
tinian monasticism was an extension of the biblical narrative of
salvation; moreover, the 'holy fathers who had lived their glorious
lives in the desert' continued to make the biblical sites efficacious.
Phokas's description of the conditions undergone by the monks
of Choziba, in the wadi Qilt, is intended to link the heroics of
the 'golden age' with his own day: 'the cells of the monks are the
mouths of caves, and the church itself ... has been excavated out
of the solid rock, and is heated to such a degree by the rays of the
sun that one sees pyramid-shaped tongues of flame bursting out
of the rock'. 27 What Neophytos failed to find when he made his
pilgrimage to the Holy Land - a suitable guide to the monastic
life — Phokas discovered living in the ruins of the monastery of
St Gerasimos by the Jordan. Here Phokas visited and talked with
a Georgian hermit who appears to have been, to this twelfth-
century monastic pilgrim, a contemporary version of the desert
monks of the heroic age of Palestinian monasticism.28
The revival of Palestinian desert monasticism in the twelfth
century owed much to political circumstance. The founding of
the kingdom of Jerusalem made it easier for Orthodox, as well
as western, pilgrims to travel to the Holy Land, and the twelfth
century saw an exponential increase in pilgrimage to the holy sites
from across the whole of Christendom, from Byzantium to Scan-
dinavia.29 Moreover, the alliance between the Byzantine Empire

25
The Life and Journey of Daniel, Abbot of the Russian Land 27—39, in John Wilkinson,
ed.,Jerusalem Pilgrimage 100,9-1185 (London, 1988), 136-41.
26
John Phokas, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae 16-24 (PG 133, cols 945-53).
27
Ibid. 19 (PG 133, col. 949).
28
Ibid. 23 (PG 133, col. 952).
29
See, most recendy, Colin Morris, The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West
(Oxford, 2005), 180-253; for Scandinavian pilgrims, see P. Riant, Expeditions et peler-
inages des Scandinaves en Terre Sainte (Paris, 1865).

16
 St Sabas and its Monastic Network

and the kingdom of Jerusalem from 1158 to 1180 had a benefi-

cial effect on the Orthodox Church under Frankish rule. After
an initial period of hostility and suspicion, the Latin ecclesiastical
authorities adopted a policy of laissez-faire toward the indigenous
Orthodox Church, and particularly to monasteries. 30 Some of the
restored monasteries visited by Phokas had received patronage
from Emperor Manuel Komnenos, who was encouraged by the
Latin authorities to see himself as the guardian of Orthodoxy in
the Holy Land.31
Political conditions, however, cannot wholly explain the health
of Palestinian Orthodox monasticism in the twelfth century. They
do not explain, for example, why Phokas was so struck by the
solitary Georgian monk he met at the ruins of St Gerasimos, or
why Neophytos chose to relate to his Cypriot monks the story of
Gabriel, the monk of St Sabas assailed by demons while living on
a column in the Judean desert. In order to understand why these
examples in particular were so meaningful to twelfth-century
monks, we must first recall the general conditions of Orthodox
monasticism in this period. During the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, Byzantine monasticism was undergoing a fundamental
reforming shift comparable to that in the West.32 The founders
of 'private' or 'self-governing' monasteries show, no less than
'reforming' foundations, a concern to establish a set of basic prin-
ciples and models according to which monasticism should be lived.
One such model, adopted by many reforming institutions, sought
a balance between solitary and cenobitic living such as that char-
acterized by the Palestinian laura. Thus, Christodoulos's monastery
of St John on Patmos encouraged solitaries as well as monks living
in the community; indeed Leontius, as a postulant, was instructed
to spend some time in solitude.33 Neophytos's Enkleistra was

30
Bernard Hamilton, The Latin Church in the Crusader States: The Secular Church
(London, 1980), 159-87.
31
E.g. St Mary Kalamon, St George Choziba, St Elias, St John Prodromos and
probably St Theodosius: Andrew Jotischky, 'Manuel Comnenus and the Reunion of
the Churches: The Evidence of the Conciliar Mosaics in the Church of the Nativity
in Bethlehem', Levant 26 (1994), 207-23.
32
John P. Thomas, Private Religious Foundations in the Byzantine Empire (Wash-
ington, DC, 1987), 157-240; Rosemary Morris, Monks and Laymen in Byzantium
843-1118 (Cambridge, 1995).
33
'Christodoulos' A23 (transl. Karlin-Hayter, 590-1); Life of Leontius 18.52-4
(transl. Tsougarakis, 93-4).

17
 ANDREW JOTISCHKY

governed by a solitary recluse, and Neophytos's typikon specified

that the custom be enshrined in monastic practice after his death. 34
Fluidity between solitary and cenobitic monasticism would have
been familiar to any reader of the accounts of Palestinian desert
monasticism in the fifth to seventh centuries: Sabas himself had
progressed from coenobium to laura, a pattern repeated in the careers
of Lazaros and Neophytos. But in the eleventh and twelfth centu-
ries this feature was also part of the same living tradition of monas-
ticism that Orthodox pilgrims like John Phokas or Neophytos
sought in the Holy Land. Thus, elements of 'reform' in twelfth-
century Byzantine monasticism were always present in Palestinian
monasticism through the continuity of custom and practice over
many centuries at St Sabas.
The significance of this continuity as part of a network of prac-
tices can be demonstrated in two examples. One concerns the
anonymous anchorite monk whom Phokas discovered living in
the ruins of St Gerasimos by the Jordan. This monk, according to
Phokas, had tamed a pair of lions, whom he had taught to fetch
pieces of wood that he fashioned into crosses to sell to pilgrims. 35 As
Phokas was surely aware, the lion-taming monk was a stock motif
of early Palestinian monasticism, from the story of Zosimos, who
induced a lion to dig a grave in the sand to bury Mary the Egyp-
tian, to Gerasimos himself, founder of the monastery in whose
ruins the twelfth-century monk had settled, who had healed a
wounded lion's paw.36 Here we have a highly self-conscious imita-
tion, or revival, of earlier practice, as part of Phokas's attempt to
demonstrate the continuing efficacy of Palestinian monasticism.
The other example concerns a failed attempt at solitary living
on the part of a Georgian monk of St Sabas — the story of Gabriel
told to Neophytos by refugee monks from St Sabas and recast by
him as a moral exemplum for his own monks of the Enkleistra.
Gabriel's attempt to leave the laura of St Sabas for the solitary
Hfe foundered when he was unable to resist demonic attack, and
he was led back to St Sabas by a fellow monk for remedial treat-

34
'Rule of Neophytos' 14—15 (Coureas, Foundation Documents, 146—9).
35
Phokas, Descriptio 23.3-14 (PG 133, cols 952-3).
36
John Moschus, Pratum spirituak 107 (PG 8, cols 2965-8). Other examples of
lion-taming monks are discussed by John Wortley, 'Two Unpublished Psychophelitic
Tales', Creek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 37 (1996), 288-300.

18
 St Sabas and its Monastic Network

ment. 37 A striking feature of this episode is the light it sheds on

institutional relationships between monastic communities in the
twelfth-century Judean desert. The hegoumen of St Sabas sent
Gabriel for punishment to the monastery of St Euthymius: in
effect, a demotion from a laura to a cenobitic community. This
takes us back several generations to Lazaros of Mount Galesion,
who as a Sabaite monk at the beginning of the eleventh century
was disciplined in the same way.38 The demotion of recalcitrant
monks to St Euthymius was introduced by Sabas himself in the late
fifth century; it was thus still in use as a disciplinary practice in the
early eleventh century, and revived in the late twelfth century after
the restoration of the monastery of St Euthymius.
It is not only the continuity of practice itself that repays our
attention, but the fact that these examples indicate the dissemina-
tion of indigenous Palestinian practices across a wider network of
Orthodox monasticism. Lazaros's experience of Sabaite practice
informed his later foundations on Mount Galesion in Asia Minor,
while Neophytos used the same practice as the basis for the spir-
itual teaching of his monks in Cyprus. In such ways, St Sabas,
though geographically and politically far from the centre of the
Byzantine world, remained at the heart of Orthodox monastic
practice. Perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the centrahty of
St Sabas in the wider Orthodox oikoumene occurs at the culmi-
nation of Abbot Daniel's pilgrimage in the Holy Land. At the
ceremony of the descent of the holy fire on the vigil of Easter,
Daniel was invited to join the monks of St Sabas who had travelled
up to Jerusalem for the feast. Daniel's account demonstrates an
acute sense of privilege at this invitation, but also of responsibility
for his own people. As he places his lamp at the tomb of Christ,
remembering in his prayers the Russian princes and bishops, he is
conscious of membership of a wider Orthodox community linked
by shared ideals and traditions.39 The traditions of desert monasti-
cism were not only to be found in Palestine, but wherever the web
of Sabaite influence reached.

Lancaster University

37
Narratio de monacho Palaestinensi, ed. Delehaye, 171-2.
38
Life of Lazaros 17 (ed. and transl. Greenfield, 97).
39
Daniel 97 (Wilkinson, ed., Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 166—71).

19