Over the last 15 years, Christopher Schabel's name has become synonymous with the history of Medieval Cyprus. His translations and editions of important sources for the history of Cyprus and his numerous articles, many of which have been collected in a single volume also published in 2010, have not only expanded the documentary base for Cypriot history, but also pushed scholars to reconsider the complex relations between Greeks, Latins, and other groups on the island. In light of the island's recent, troubled political history and the scholarly tendency to approach the island's distant past through a post-colonial lens, Schabel's contributions, while conservative in approach, nevertheless have immediate, contemporary relevance to the study of Cypriot history.
The two volume Bullarium Cyprium marks Schabel's third major contribution to the documentary foundation for the Medieval history of the island and complements the two other Lusignan period collections by the Cyprus Research Center: Schabel's and N. Coureas' The Cartulary of the Cathedral of Holy Wisdom of Nicosia (Nicosia 1997) and Schabel's Synodicum Nicosiense and Other Documents of the Latin Church of Cyprus 1196-1373 (Nicosia 2001). The former concerns matters of ecclesiastical authority and property on the island and the latter focuses primarily on the various legal matters involving the status of the Latin church and clergy. The dearth of secular documents from Cyprus makes the ecclesiastical texts edited in these volumes central to any understanding of political and religious life in Medieval Cyprus and indispensible to any research collection with an emphasis on either Cyprus or the history of the Crusader States. While this review will focus on the Bullarium Cyprium, Schabel's introduction to the Synodicum still represents the best introduction to the entire corpus of Latin documents on Cyprus and should be read in conjunction with his fine introduction to the Bullarium Cyprium. In the Synodicum, he places the reading of all these texts within the colonial history of the island and argues that the only path to reconsidering the island's history is to return to the documents themselves.
The two-volume Bullarium Cyprium should be understood in the context, then, of these two earlier collections. This newest contribution collects nearly 600 Papal letters involving ecclesiastical and political affairs on the island of Cyprus from 1196 to 1314. Schabel argues that these letters may represent less than 20% of the total number of correspondence between various officials on Cyprus and the Papacy (1.77). The reason for the substantial quantity of Papal correspondence with the political and ecclesiastical elite on the island stems from the Papacy's recognition of the island's ecclesiastical independence from the Patriarchal authority of Antioch or Jerusalem. As a result, the Latin church and by extension the Greek clergy on the island were direct papal dependencies. The historical and textual context for this unique collection of correspondence is provided by Jean Richard and by Schabel respectively.
Schabel's introduction to the texts is model of methodological and critical clarity. He lists five goals to his work. First, he sought to prepare editions for most of the papal letters concerning to Cyprus from 1191-1314, to produce English summaries of these letters, to provide critical notation on all extant manuscripts of the letters, to reference all previous editions of the letters and their summaries, and finally, to include historical commentary as a guide for future research. His introduction makes clear the tedious process involved in the discovery and editing of the letters (which he claimed to represent the work of 8 months of 100 hour weeks!). Schabel conducted a massive search of the Vatican's digitized holdings, the letters of Innocent III published in the Patrologia Latina and the Pontifica Commissio ad redigendum codicem iuris canonici orientalis (CIC0), as well as various editions by Horoy, Pressutti, Mas-Latrie, La Porte du Theil, and BEFAR (Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d'Athènes et de Rome). This exhaustive research enabled Schabel to correct the sometimes significant problems preserved in earlier editions; now, scholars should regard his editions as definitive. Schabel notes that the letters preserved in the Papal registers and a small number of outside sources (like the Cartulary of the Nicosia Cathedral), are representative of Papal attitudes and policies regarding affairs on the island (1.78).
Jean Richard provides a historical introduction to these texts and will edit a third volume in this collection focusing on the letters dating to the period of the Avignon Papacy (1316-1378). Richard's introduction is an admirable survey of the history of the Papacy and Cyprus organized around the content of the newly edited letters. The introduction organizes the letters thematically, centered on the relationship between the papacy and the Latin Church, the role of the papal intervention in the distribution of benefices on Cyprus, papal role in managing the expansion of Latin religious orders on Cyprus, and the papal policies on relations with the Greek and other Christians. Outside of the realm of ecclesiastical politics, Richard also looks at the place of papal intervention into aristocratic Christian society on the island and the role of Cyprus in the history of the Crusader states. While it is clear that the letters included in these volumes significantly expand our view of both papal involvement in Cypriot affairs and the role of Cyprus in regional politics, it is unfortunate that Richard's introduction did not explicitly consider the impact of this collection of letters on scholarly debate. As Richard makes clear, these letters expand incrementally our knowledge of the relationship between the Papacy and the political and ecclesiastical elite in the Holy Land, but the tendency of the Pope to avoid interfering in the life of Greek communities means these letters provide little additional material concerning the majority of the population on the island (1.48).
The letters will continue to discourage any view of Latin involvement on the island that is not complex and dynamic. Papal attitudes toward both the Greek clergy and religious on the island varied from attempts to accommodate their traditional practices within Latin expectations to attempts to marginalize their influence over the local population and the Latin elite. The most explicit effort to limit the power of the Greek church appears in the he famous Bulla Cypria (f-35 in Schabel's collection) which circumscribed the authority and number of Greek bishops and placed the Greek church and clergy under Latin control. This created tensions and sometimes rebellion among the Greeks, although little evidence for this appears in the Papal letters which generally show the Papacy as reluctant to become involved in Greek affairs below the episcopal level. Papal concern does extend, however, to the various Crusading orders active on Cyprus, the Templars and Hospitalers in particular, as well as the Franciscans and Dominicans friars. These groups not only controlled significant resources and influence on the island, but did not fall under the control of local episcopal authority.
As the political and military situation in the Latin East deteriorated, Papal letters reflect the growing concern for the secular situation in the region. The letters show efforts to prevent the deteriorating political situation in the Levant from destabilizing the dynastic or social situation on Cyprus. At the same time, the correspondence reveal how deeply embedded Cyprus was in the affairs in the Holy Land. The Pope saw Cyprus as a bridgehead for re-establishing Latin authority in the region especially in the second half of the 13th century. At the same time, he recognized the deep involvement of the Lusignan family in the politics of both the East and West and paid constant attention to dynastic affairs. By the later 13th and early 14th century political conflicts centered on the rights of the dispossessed Latin feudal aristocracy who sought to retain some titular authority either in the remaining Latin possession in the Levant, like Cyprus, or elsewhere. The repeated efforts of the papacy to resolve certain issues in dynastic politics provide clear illustrations of the limits of Papal authority in the later Middle Ages.
While little in these letters will force a wholesale re-evaluation of Medieval Cyprus, they will provide the basis for more nuanced reading of the encounter between the Latin west and the Greek east in the Middle Ages. The ad hoc and reactive character of many of the Papal responses, remind us that any effort to seek a coherent policy in Western influence in Cyprus must be tempered by the realities of pre- modern statecraft and the inability to project power consistently over the complex machinations of dynastic and ecclesiastical politics. In the context of modern colonialism, in which scholars have often read Lusignan affairs on Cyprus, the letters reveal the persistent absence of any sustained colonial policy per se.
The letters in the two well-produced volumes are organized according to pope and then in chronological order. Each text includes a summary of the text followed by the texts in Latin. For some documents only the relevant sections of the text are included. Schabel includes information about the original copy of the text (if known), citations to the Papal Register, and any copies that exist outside of that collection, references to editions of the summary of the letter and to any known published editions. Following the text in Latin, the apparatus criticus and apparatus fontium appear short notes on some of the texts. These notes were rare and dedicated to very specific historical issues concerning the in the texts themselves. In some cases, a read might have benefited from a slightly more expansive approach to possible historical significance of the individual letters. Considering the vast and important body of interpretative work that Schabel has produced, he was in a strong position to offer a uniquely insightful body of interpretative complements to the documents. The limited character of his notes represents an opportunity missed.
The rather superficial and sporadic notes represent only one area where these volumes could have been expanded. While the quantity of letters would have made a thorough commentary of these texts a monumental task, some additional materials like maps and the chronologies of prominent figures in the text (Kings, Popes, etc.) would have produced a practical context for these letters. The indexes, while thorough, reference the letter numbers rather than the page numbers. This is a longstanding system for documents of this type, but the absence of letter numbers at the tops of the pages and the length of the letters made the system inefficient. The text itself appears to be carefully edited with only a few typographical errors mostly confined to footnotes.
Schabel's edition of the Bullarium Cyprium is a significant and substantial contribution to the documentary foundation for the history of Medieval Cyprus and will stand alongside his earlier works as basic texts for any student of the Middle Ages.