In this research study, Jacobs made an extraordinary discovery. It was long believed that Byzantines, the inhabitants of the Eastern Roman Empire, generally had a negative attitude to travel. As a result, monks in the ninth and tenth centuries in particular would have been required to stay in their monasteries. This was justified by an ideal of immobility, also known as 'stabilitas loci'. However, a re-examination of the sources sheds a different light on the matter. “The sources used to demonstrate this ideal turned out to be a lot more ambiguous than thought and also more context-dependent,” Jacobs explains. “As a result, you could argue that in the Byzantine Empire, there was not a single ideal concerning travel: I have found more differences in opinion around this in the sources than similarities.”
Nuanced picture
Among other things, Jacobs studied several biographies of Byzantine monks who did travel during this period. These monks’ biographies are also called ‘saints' lives’. She also studied several other sources, leading her to the new insight that the long assumed ideal of immobility needs to be nuanced. “Take the rules of Bishop Basil of Caesarea,” she says. “He advocated that monks should stay together out of loyalty. Based on new insights, it appears that he insisted not so much on physical immobility, but rather on community building. This meant that monks could in fact travel, as long as they returned.”
Another dubious underpinning of the immobility ideal, according to Jacobs, were the canons of the Council of Chalcedon: a number of ecclesiastical provisions written by bishops in the fifth century. “In these provisions, the bishops tried to establish their own authority as spiritual leaders by limiting the powers of monks. If you read carefully between the lines, this did not, however, mean that monks were physically restricted in their movements: they were allowed to travel, as long as they had permission from their bishop and did not interfere with matters of church and state. Later, in the sixth century, came Justinian's laws, which required monks to seek permission from the abbot, the head of the monastery, to travel. But a closer look at the sources reveals that in practice, those laws still left a lot of room for travelling.”
Still, the long-held belief that Byzantine monks were subject to an immobility ideal is understandable, according to Jacobs. “Indeed, that ideal would have held true in Benedictine monasticism, which was highly influential in Western Europe. Later, this ideal was also projected onto the Eastern context, and sources were probably sought to substantiate it for the East as well.”
Positive instrument and fear
Although travel was much debated within the Byzantine Empire in the ninth and tenth centuries, the journeys of travelling monks did have a function. At least, that much is apparent from the stories in the saints' lives, says Jacobs. “For example, in the biographies of two monks, travel is presented as a positive tool for spiritual development. By separating themselves from the community during their journeys, they were able to come closer to God and then return to the community to offer advice. In another saint's life, it was strongly emphasised that the spiritual peace that a monk must have was not affected by frequent travel. This was probably emphasised so strongly to prevent readers from thinking that travelling posed problems for the monk's inner peace. The same saints' life also emphasises why it is good to sometimes go on pilgrimage, even though God is everywhere and therefore need not be sought in any specific place. Apparently, the author of this saint's life felt the need to counter public resistance to pilgrimage.”
Better understanding
Jacobs also concludes in her research that in the saints' lives of travelling monks, travelling is used as a non-standard narrative element. “Normally, saints' lives tell the story of a monk based on a kind of standard template, with descriptions of the virtues of the monks’ parents, the search for a teacher, and prophecies, for example. In the saints' lives of travelling monks, however, the authors take more liberties in emphasising the role the monk's journey plays in his spiritual development.”
All in all, Jacobs says the new insights show that even within the Byzantine Empire in the ninth and tenth centuries, people did not always agree with each other on travel behaviour. “Nowadays, people have very diverse ideas about travel, and this was also the case back then. Conversely, it still often happens today that people undertake journeys to find inner peace, think of retreats or the Camino to Santiago de Compostella. Thanks to these similarities, we can use the present to better understand the past.”
Photo: Raimond Klavins via Unsplash