2 The “Dark Age” of Middle Eastern Monasticism
Decline and Revival of the Palestinian Monasteries in the Late Mamluk and Early Ottoman Periods
In: Arabic Christianity between the Ottoman Levant and Eastern EuropeSearch for other papers by Constantin A. Panchenko in
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Abstract
The Late Middle Ages were a period of decline for the Middle Eastern Christian peoples in general and their monastic movement in particular. Most of the Palestinian monks were of Balkan or Caucasian origin. They had few ties to the local Christian population and crucially depended on material and demographical support from their distant metropoles. The collapse of the Orthodox states of the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea regions in the 15th century caused a gradual abandonment of the monasteries in the Judean Desert. The Sinai Monastery of St Catherine was in a deep crisis in the last decades of Mamluk rule because of the lack of security and order in the sultanate. Around 1505, the monastery was captured and sacked by nomads. In the Middle Ages, the Monastery of St Catherine had been multiethnic. In the Ottoman period, however, the monastic community became almost exclusively Greek. In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the political structure of Greek Orthodox civilization changed drastically. The Ottoman conquest of Syria and Egypt in 1516–1517 promoted an influx of monks and alms from the Balkans and the Romanian Principalities which caused the revival of the Judean Desert monasteries. In the late 1520’s and early 1530’s, the famous Mar Saba convent, which had been abandoned in the late 15th century, was resettled by a group of Slavic and Greek monks, with financial support from the rulers of Wallachia. The first head of Mar Saba was the former abbot of the Sinai Monastery Joachim Vlachos (the Wallachian). The brethren of Mar Saba—which had been multiethnic, albeit with a predominance of Serbs—received permanent support from the rulers of Moldavia and Wallachia, who belonged to the same Slavonic culture as the majority of the Sabaite community. Accumulating all these alms, the community of Mar Saba managed to survive in the barren desert among the aggressive nomads for another century.