The church history of Amaseia cannot be separated from the city's place in Roman administration. The former capital of the Pontic kings had become, under Rome, first a free city and then the administrative centre of a wide region, and in the second century it also acquired the titles "metropolis" and "first city". Because the organisation of Christian communities largely followed the existing urban hierarchy, the bishop of Amaseia gradually became a metropolitan with authority over the bishops of the surrounding cities. The sources document this office from the third century onward, and in the early fourth century its bishop's name appears in the signature lists of the councils of Ancyra and Neocaesarea. The metropolitanate remained a living institution for well over a thousand years, until the population exchange of 1923. The lives of the saints and the churches carved into the rock belong to separate articles; here the subject is the office itself, that is, the succession of bishops, the suffragan sees, and the city's place in the councils.

A Metropolis under Roman Rule

As the capital of the kingdom of Pontus, Amaseia was the political centre of the region from 333 to 26 BC. It entered the Roman order when Lucullus took the city from Armenia in 70 BC and Pompey made it the administrative centre of the province of Bithynia and Pontus. Its fellow citizen Strabo gave a detailed description of the city and its surroundings for the years between 60 BC and AD 19. Around 2 or 3 BC Amaseia was attached to Pontus Galaticus within the province of Galatia, and under Trajan, around AD 112, it was counted as part of the province of Cappadocia. Later in the same century the city received the titles "metropolis" and "first city".

The Diocese of Pontus, created by Diocletian's reforms, lasted from 314 to 535 and again from 548 into the seventh century, and its capital was Amaseia. The vicarius at the head of the diocese resided there; among its twelve provinces were Bithynia, Paphlagonia, Helenopontus, Pontus Polemoniacus, Galatia, Cappadocia and parts of Armenia. Because the eastern frontier faced the Sasanian threat, military command was held separately by the dux Ponti et Armeniae. Justinian abolished the diocese in 535, but the arrangement did not give the results he wanted and the old order was partly restored in 548. This administrative weight formed the ground for Amaseia's position in the church's organisation. It is widely accepted that Helenopontus took its name from Helena, the mother of Constantine.

In the church's order Amaseia was the metropolitan see of the province of Helenopontus. Its principal suffragans were Amisus (Samsun), Andrapa, Euchaita, Ibora, Sinope (Sinop), Zaliche and Zela. Some sees rose in time to metropolitan rank, others were merged or disappeared; but the near coincidence of provincial and ecclesiastical boundaries, and the position of the bishop of Amaseia at the head of this structure, did not change.

Phaidimos and the Consecration of Gregory

The clearest early document for the metropolitan standing of Amaseia is an appointment made for Neocaesarea (Niksar). Gregory, later known as "the Wonderworker" (Thaumaturgus), was a law student from Neocaesarea; when he returned to Pontus around 238-239 after his studies in Beirut and Palestine, he planned to practise law. That plan changed, and Gregory was consecrated bishop of his native city by Phaidimos, bishop of Amaseia and metropolitan of Pontus. According to church historians he was forty years old at the time and governed his see for thirty years; his death is placed between 270 and 275.

The appointment is instructive for how the early church hierarchy worked. The Christian community of Neocaesarea is said to have been very small, according to tradition no more than seventeen people. Ancient canonical documents show that even a community of ten Christians could have its own bishop. Gregory's consecration was performed by a metropolitan who came from another city, Amaseia. The same tradition says that at his death only seventeen pagans remained in the city; these numbers belong to the narrative and cannot be tested. The order on which they rest is clear, however: appointing and consecrating bishops for neighbouring sees was among the powers of the metropolitan of Amaseia.

The Early Fourth Century: Ancyra and Neocaesarea

In the years when Christianity was emerging from the age of persecution into a new order, the church had to redefine both its faith and its institutional structure. Councils, in which bishops met and took common decisions, were the most concrete form of this effort. The councils of Ancyra and Neocaesarea were the first major gatherings to carry the voice of the region of Pontus, and therefore of Amaseia.

The Council of Ancyra

The council met at Ancyra (Ankara), the administrative seat of the province of Galatia, in 314, shortly after the fall of Maximinus II in 313 and soon after Easter. The clue to the year is that the first nine canons are aimed directly at repairing the damage done by persecution. Three surviving signature lists show between twelve and eighteen bishops; the lists may have been revised later, but most of the participants can be dated to the same period and some of them were also present at the later Council of Nicaea. Whether Vitalis, bishop of Antioch, or Marcellus, bishop of Ancyra, presided is uncertain; the Libellus Synodicus names the latter.

The council issued twenty-five canons. The first nine regulate the readmission to the church of clergy and laity who had compromised their faith under persecution, prescribing penances that vary with rank and with the nature of the case. The remaining sixteen concern discipline, jurisdiction, asceticism and the conflicts arising from episcopal appointments. The tenth canon permits the marriage of deacons who had reserved the right to marry before ordination; the thirteenth forbids country bishops (chorepiscopoi) to ordain priests and deacons and is the earliest known record of that institution. The eighteenth guarantees the people's right to object to the appointment of a bishop they do not want. These canons hold a special place in the history of penance, as among the earliest witnesses to a three-stage system that later grew into four.

The Council of Neocaesarea

The council held at Neocaesarea, one of the important centres of Pontus, was convened shortly after Ancyra, probably in 314 or 315, although Hefele inclines to a later date. Its main work was the adoption of fifteen disciplinary canons. Among them are the demotion of clergy who marry after ordination, the prohibition on clergy attending a second marriage, the refusal of ordination to a man whose wife has committed adultery, a minimum age of thirty for ordination (based on Christ's beginning his ministry at thirty), precedence for city priests over country priests, permission for country bishops to celebrate the sacraments, and the rule that every city should have seven deacons. These canons were accepted as ecumenical by the Council of Chalcedon in 451.

Together with the councils of Ancyra, Antioch, Gangra and Laodicea, the canons of Neocaesarea formed the nucleus of nearly all later collections of church law. They are the first great examples of scattered local practices being gathered into a common framework.

The Representation of Amaseia

In Mansi's collection, the name of Basil, bishop of Amaseia, appears among the signatures of the bishops who attended the councils of Ancyra and Neocaesarea. This shows that the city was not merely a local church centre but had a seat at the tables where decisions of wide regional concern were taken. It must be remembered that the signature lists may have been revised later; yet that Basil lived in this period, and is mentioned in connection with the events that followed, is confirmed by other sources as well.

Basil's Martyrdom and the Age of Nicaea

In Jerome's Latin version of Eusebius's Chronicle, the entry for the 275th Olympiad (321-324) states that Basil, bishop of Amaseia in Pontus, suffered martyrdom in the reign of Licinius. In the tenth book of his Church History, Eusebius reports that under Licinius Christians were treated with great cruelty, especially in Amaseia and the other cities of Pontus, and that the governor inflicted the ordinary punishments of criminals on several bishops. Athanasius, too, names "Basil of Pontus" among the bishops of the early fourth century who held that the Son is of like substance with the Father; the reference is evidently to the martyr-bishop of Amaseia. His death is traditionally held to have occurred at Nicomedia in 322, and his feast falls on 26 April, a date found both in the Greek synaxaria and menaia and in the Roman martyrology.

The Acts of Basil's martyrdom, attributed to an eyewitness, a presbyter named John, are held to be inauthentic and the narrative entirely legendary. The statement of Philostorgius that Basil attended the Council of Nicaea rests on a confusion; the Nicaean signature list of 325 gives the name of Eutychianus as bishop of Amaseia. The sequence of bishops that can be traced in documents is therefore as follows: Phaidimos in the third century, Basil in 314, and, after Basil's martyrdom around 322, Eutychianus at Nicaea in 325. Information about the lives of these bishops is very limited, and detailed biographies cannot be written.

Asterius and the Late Fourth Century

The name that made the bishopric of Amaseia known throughout the Christian world is that of Asterius, who took the see between 380 and 390. Born in Cappadocia, a lawyer before becoming bishop, he was a younger contemporary of Amphilochius of Iconium and of the three great Cappadocian Fathers. Little else is known of his life beyond the fact that he was educated by a Scythian slave; his birth is given as about 350 and his death as about 410, neither date being certain. He is not to be confused with the Arian polemicist Asterius the Sophist.

Sixteen homilies and panegyrics on the martyrs have survived from Asterius, and Photius mentions further sermons that are not now known. The texts are noted for their familiarity with classical literature and for an unusual wealth of detail about daily life in his time. The fourth homily is directed against the Kalends, the New Year feast, with its pagan customs and excesses, and refutes in turn what Libanius had said in its defence. Preached on 1 January 400, it is the main evidence for dating Asterius's career, together with a reference to his great age in another sermon. In the first homily, taking the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus as his starting point, he criticises the pictorial weaving that adorned the garments of the wealthy. He reports that these images showed the wedding at Cana, the paralytic carrying his bed, and the woman with the issue of blood touching the hem of Jesus's garment, and he urges his hearers to carry the image of Christ in their souls rather than embroider it on their clothes. The art historian Arnold Hauser took these words to make Asterius an iconoclast; this is a misreading, since the objection rests not on images as such but on extravagance and display.

One of Asterius's best-known texts is the eleventh homily, on the martyrdom of Saint Euphemia. It contains a description (ekphrasis) of a painting on canvas displayed in a church near the saint's tomb, and compares it with the famous Hellenistic works of the painters Euphranor and Timomachus. At the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, which closed the period of iconoclasm, the homily was quoted twice as evidence for the veneration of images. The painting shows the saint killed by fire, which has puzzled historians because the manner of death differs from other accounts. The audience appears to have been exclusively male, since it is addressed as "gentlemen" (andres). Thus the words of a bishop of Amaseia became, centuries later, a source consulted in the Christian world's debates on art and icons.

The publication history of the texts is informative in itself. Fourteen genuine homilies were printed with a Latin translation in volume 40 of Migne's Patrologia Graeca (columns 155-480), and the critical edition published by C. Datema at Leiden in 1970 covers the first fourteen. Two homilies found on Mount Athos by M. Bauer were first printed in 1914 by A. Bretz. Medieval Latin, Georgian and Church Slavonic translations of the texts have also survived. An English translation of five homilies was published in the United States in 1904 under the title Ancient Sermons for Modern Times. Philip Rubens, brother of the painter, also prepared an edition of the homilies, which appeared after his death in 1611 in a memorial volume. Asterius's feast day is 30 October.

Suffragan Sees and Regional Order

The metropolitan authority of Amaseia is best followed through its suffragan sees. Euchaita (in the Beyözü area of present-day Çorum) was originally subject to the metropolitan of the provincial capital, Amaseia. The town became famous as a pilgrimage centre of Theodore, a martyr remembered at Amaseia. Theodore's death at Amaseia is placed around 306 or at the latest before 319; his cult is attested by the late fourth century, and Gregory of Nyssa delivered a panegyric in his honour in the winter of 381, though it is uncertain whether the shrine stood at Amaseia or at Euchaita. According to a hagiography of the eighth or ninth century, Theodore's relics remained for a time at Amaseia, while the Christians of Euchaita pressed insistently for their transfer to their own city.

The see of Euchaita is also recorded in the fifth century as a place of exile for distinguished churchmen. In 515 the unwalled town was sacked in a Hunnic raid; it was rebuilt, fortified and raised to the rank of city by Anastasius I (491-518). Under Leo VI (886-912) Euchaita became a full metropolitan see, an example of how a bishopric subject to Amaseia could in time become an independent office. In the tenth century the metropolis of Amaseia ranked eleventh among the metropolises of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

A Shrinking See in the Middle Ages

From the twelfth century the Turkic migrations into Anatolia reduced the Christian population of the region and made the day-to-day running of the metropolitanate difficult. In 1315 Callistus was appointed to the long-vacant see, but in 1317, during a particularly violent Turkoman attack, he was unable to enter it. With the permission of Patriarch John XIII, the seat of the metropolitanate was moved to Limnia, considered safer because it lay within the Empire of Trebizond, on the ground that the arrangement should last until conditions improved and the Turks allowed him to enter. In 1384 the bishop of Limnia temporarily administered the metropolis of Amaseia because its metropolitan could not enter his own region. A record from this period says that the once famous and great metropolitanate of Amaseia had fallen into poverty, laid waste by the invasion of foreigners, and that, though illustrious as a metropolitanate at the beginning, it now appeared poor to those who looked upon it.

The Ottoman Period and the Last Metropolitan

Under Ottoman rule the Greek Orthodox metropolitanate of Amaseia continued to exist under the Patriarchate. The best-known metropolitan of the early twentieth century is Germanos Karavangelis. Born on Lesbos in 1866, educated at the Theological School of Halki and in philosophy at Leipzig and Bonn, Karavangelis served as metropolitan of Kastoria from 1900 to 1907; in 1907 he was removed from his post by order of the Sultan and was appointed metropolitan of Amaseia at the Patriarch's request. His seat was at Samsun. In this post he is said to have opened schools in villages and founded a high school. He was involved in the political conflicts of the period; in 1917 he was arrested and sent to Istanbul, and in 1921, during the Turkish War of Independence, he was sentenced to death in absentia by a military tribunal of the Turkish side.

In August 1922 he was in Romania; after the catastrophe in Anatolia he wished to return to Istanbul, but was not allowed to leave the ship. For his safety the Patriarch appointed him metropolitan of Ioannina. In 1924 he was transferred to the Patriarchate's metropolitanate in Budapest and then Vienna, where he died on 11 February 1935. He is remembered as the last metropolitan to serve the see in practice. Greek sources give the number of Orthodox Christians in the metropolitanate in 1922 as about 40,000 and say that half of them were Greek; with the Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923 the Greek community left the region and the metropolitanate effectively came to an end. On the eve of the First World War, 13,788 of Amasya's 30,000 inhabitants were Armenians and the city had four Armenian churches; this community too was forced to leave the city after 1915.

The Latin Titular See

Today Amaseia is recognised as a titular see by both the Eastern Orthodox and the Catholic Church. Rome formally suppressed the see around 1600 but at once redefined it as a titular archbishopric of the highest rank. Among those who bore the title were the papal diplomat Giovanni Battista Agucchia (1623-1632), Ferdinando d'Adda (1687-1690), papal representative to King James II of England and later made a cardinal, and Agostino Cusani (1696-1711), who served as nuncio in France. In 1742 the title was united with the bishopric of Pavia, in 1819 it was suppressed again and in the same year restored nominally. Among twentieth-century holders was Gustavo Testa (1934-1959), who was apostolic delegate to Egypt and Arabia and later a cardinal.

Chronology

333-26 BC: Amaseia is the capital of the kingdom of Pontus.

About AD 112: Trajan attaches Amaseia to the province of Cappadocia.

Third century: Amaseia is recorded as the metropolitan centre of Pontus; Bishop Phaidimos consecrates Gregory as bishop of Neocaesarea.

314: The councils of Ancyra and Neocaesarea meet; the name of Basil, bishop of Amaseia, appears in the signature lists.

321-324: According to Eusebius's Chronicle, Basil is martyred under Licinius.

325: The Nicaean signature list gives Eutychianus as bishop of Amaseia.

380-390: Asterius becomes bishop of Amaseia; on 1 January 400 he preaches his homily against the Kalends.

451: The Council of Chalcedon accepts the canons of Neocaesarea as ecumenical.

787: The Second Council of Nicaea quotes Asterius's homily on Euphemia twice.

Tenth century: Amaseia ranks eleventh among the metropolises of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

1317: Metropolitan Callistus cannot enter his see; the seat is temporarily moved to Limnia.

1384: The bishop of Limnia temporarily administers the metropolis of Amaseia.

About 1600: Rome redefines the see as a titular archbishopric.

1923: With the Greek-Turkish population exchange the Greek Orthodox community leaves; the metropolitanate effectively ends.

Bibliography

Other sources

  • Asterius of Amasea (Wikipedia article; Datema, C., Asterius of Amasea: Homilies I-XIV, Leiden 1970) en.wikipedia.org
  • Basil of Amasea (Kirsch, J. P., Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 2, 1907; Mansi, Coll. conc., II)
  • St. Gregory of Neocaesarea (Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent) newadvent.org
  • Synod of Ancyra (Rockwell, W. W., Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed.; Ohme, H., The History of Byzantine and Eastern Canon Law to 1500, 2012)
  • Synod of Neocaesarea (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed.; Hefele, C. J., History of the Councils of the Church)
  • Amasya (Wikipedia); Christopoulos, E., Diocese of Amaseia (Ottoman Period), Encyclopedia of the Hellenic World en.wikipedia.org
  • Diocese of Pontus (Wikipedia) en.wikipedia.org

Online sources