Policy and prophecy. The legend of the Last Emperor and the iconography of the ruler crowned by angels in Wallachia

The article analyses the occurrence of the iconography of the ruler crowned by angels in Wallachia in the mid-sixteenth century, a late revival of a Byzantine iconographic model with no examples known in Wallachia prior to this date. In the nave of the infirmary chapel of Cozia Monastery (1543), voivode Radu Paisie is depicted crowned by an angel and blessed by Saint Methodius of Patara, an iconographical hapax. The key for decoding the scene is provided by the Pseudo-Methodian Apocalypse, where a coronation by angels episode is found in the legend of the Last Christian Emperor. The frescoes were made in a political climate when anti-Ottoman war plans in-tensified in Central Europe following the occupation of Buda.

grace Metropolitan Varlaam, under the hegoumenos Hilarion the hieromonk. And again I, the servant of Christ, hieromonk Maxim the Magister (majstor), who was also a teacher (učitel), <I pray> to be for my rest. Painted by the very sinful David the painter and by his son Raduslav in the year 7051". 1 The inscription mentions only the Byzantine year as the completion date of the frescoes, but the presence in the narthex of a portrait of Stroe the protospatharios, who held this dignity starting from 18 May 1543, 2 suggests a precise dating of the frescoes to the summer of 1543. The two painters who signed the frescoes, David and Raduslav, scrupulously recorded the names of the officials of the time but if and how each of those contributed to the foundation is unclear, leading to different interpretations. A common older opinion was that voivode Radu Paisie had been the main founder and the hieromonk Maxim of the Magister may have been the "teacher" (učitel) of the iconographic program. 3 Others have lately speculated that hieromonk Maxim might have been the real initiator of the foundation and/or of the paintings, who wanted to remain inconspicuous and whom the voivode Radu and the protospatharios Stroe, whose portraits were depicted in the church, helped with donations. 4 This last interpretation may be more correct, as we shall see from the further analysis of the donor portraits.
The voivode Radu Paisie -by his birth name Peter 5 -is painted in the nave holding a model of the church 6 172 ( fig. 1), accompanied by his wife, Lady Ruxandra, and by Marko, his eldest son and co-ruler ( fig. 2). Both Radu Paisie and Marko are portrayed crowned by an angel. The depiction has a different structure from the votive compositions commonly used in Wallachia in the first half of the sixteenth century: the voivode holds the church alone and not together with his wife or even with his co-reigning son. Although the portraits should be understood as a unitary group, Marko and Lady Ruxandra, together with the youngest daughter Zamfira, do not seem to actively participate in the presumptive votive act; they do not hold painted dedicatory inscription in the narthex fails to clearly indicate the contribution of the voivode, only mentioning that the work was made "in the days of Radu Paisie's reign". donor crosses, 7 but instead stretch their hands towards the voivode in a gesture of prayer.
The western bay of the nave has a window to the south and another one to the north; the two windows are attached to the western wall and their western jambs form a continuous plan with the western wall of the nave ( fig.  3). On the intradoses of the southern window are depicted Saint Methodius the Bishop of Patara (west) and Andrew Stratelates (east; fig. 4), and on those of the northern window, the martyr Lupus (east; fig. 5) and the venerable Theodosius the Koinobiarches (west; fig. 6). Both the elder warrior saint Andrew Stratelates facing the portrait of Radu 7 Handheld crosses in votive portraits are usually interpreted as symbols of ktetorship (ibid., 53).  Paisie and the young armed saint Lupus placed in front of the group led by the young Marko are turned towards the interior of the church and are depicted in ostensive bellicose positions. The two are the only figures in the mural ensemble wearing body armour and engaged in martial gestures, with the other martyrs being depicted in court garments. Saint Methodius, the only holy bishop depicted in the nave, is turned to the nearby silhouette of Radu Paisie and, holding the Gospel in one hand, makes the sign of blessing towards the voivode. Also Saint Theodosius, the sole holy monk inserted into the register of martyrs, is turned towards the western wall and blesses the group in front of him, formed by Marko, Lady Ruxandra, and Zamfira. The saint holds a phylactery with the inscription: "If you want to save yourself, cease the empty talk (praznoslovie) and love the truth", 8 a paraenetic text which seems to refer specifically to the young voivode Marko, but also to the two female family members. 9 The presence of a bishop in the nave, although not completely unencountered in Byzantine and early post-Byzantine painting, is nevertheless unusual. Moreover, Saint Methodius of Patara, likely the one and the same with Methodius of Olympus, 10 is a hierarch rarely represented per se other than in synaxaria and in the registers of busts of holy hierarchs in sanctuaries. He is not always easily recognizable either, as inscriptions sometimes ab- Syria in the early seventh century, 13 seemingly in a Christian community with a strong link to Late Judaism, 14 was falsely attributed to Methodius of Olympus (in the Syriac text) and respectively to Methodius of Patara (in the Greek translation). 15 The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Method-13 P. J. Alexander, The Byzantine apocalyptic tradition, ed. D.
deF Abrahamse, Berkeley -Los Angeles -London 1985, 13-60. 14 Idem, The Medieval legend of the last Roman emperor and its messianic origin, JWCI 41 (1978) 9. An earlier form of this legend which was later reformulated in the Christian milieu influenced by Jewish Messianism can be traced to the Prophecies of the Tiburtine Sibyl (ibid., 14-15). 15 The multiple Greek recensions of the text were indexed in: BHG III, 10-11, no. 2036 a-f. The first critical edition of the entire manuscript evidence was made available by A. Lolos The Apocalypse of Saint Methodius was widely disseminated from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century in Byzantium and the Balkans, in the context of the Tatar invasion 18 and then of the Ottoman conquest, 19 whereas its prophecies appeared to coincide with the times of adversity and tribulations that marked the last centuries of Byzantium. 20 The eschatological prophecies and the exegesis of the Bible shaped a framework of historical writing structured on the seven ages and four empires model of world history derived from the Old Testament Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation, which had a great influence on the Byzantine chroniclers like Joannes Zonaras and Constantine Manasses, whose chronicles were widely spread in the Balkans and continued to be copied even after the fall of Byzantium. 21 History was read through an eschatological lens, a fact that fuelled a strong belief that the sultan's empire existed through God's grace because of the sins of the Christians. 22 By expressing the belief that the defeat which the Christians had experienced contained a divine lesson, eschatological literature offered hope in the promise of God's salvation. Pseudo-Methodius' story of the last Christian emperor who would defeat the Muslims and bring forth an age of peace prior to the 16 V. Μηναίον Ιουνίου, Παρὰ Νικολάῳ Γλυκεῖ τῷ ἐξ Ἰωαννίνων, Venetia 1820, 83: "This true servant of God, archpriest and martyr, left us scriptures, fruits of his struggles, full of knowledge and spiritual benefits, and prophesised purely on the future things, on the changes of kingdoms, the battles of tongues, the perishing of cities, the orthodox and heretic emperors, the end of the world, the Antichrist and his kingdom and the general corruption of the last humans; all these were foretold by this godly man" (our translation). 17  end of the world 23 thus gained an even deeper meaning and greater popularity after the fall of Constantinople. 24 The Apocalypse of Saint Methodius inspired other Byzantine eschatological writings: the Vision of Daniel, 25 the Vision of Andrew Salos, 26 Pseudo-Chrysostom, 27 and the Oracle of Emperor Leo the Wise. 28 One of the earliest versions of the Vision of Daniel, dating from the ninth century, tells that the emperor of Byzantium who will release the Christians from the Ishmaelites will be appointed and crowned by angels 29 . The mutual influences between these texts resulted, from the thirteenth century on, in an interpolation of the coronation of the last emperor excerpt from the Vision of Daniel in the text of Pseudo-Methodius. 30 Despite its popularity, the Last Emperor legend had very rarely been a source of inspiration for artists in Byzantium prior to the fall of Constantinople. It was in the two centuries after the fall of Constantinople and in the context of the Ottoman menace that eschatological literature, in the variant of the Oracles of Leo the Wise, attained its greatest popularity through a large production of manuscript copies. 32 Some of them were illustrated. The first manuscript (Paris, Codex Bute, private collection) was made in Crete by the painter Georgios Klontzas in 1575-1577, shortly after the victory of Lepanto; 33 a more lavish copy of it, seemingly subsequent, 32 39 It also displays a depiction of a coronation by angels of the last emperor of the Christians, whom Klontzas, in his enthusiasm for the Holy League's victory, identified with Pope Pius V (fol. 155v; fig. 8). The scene was not illustrated only by Klontzas; it was already present in previous miniatures illustrating the same scene in the Oracle of Leo the Wise. 40 Crowning angels also appear in depictions of the emperor with a scythe and a rose described in the fifth Leonine oracle 41 -and labelled by Klontzas in his Chronography as Sultan Suleiman 42 (figs. 9, 10), all very possibly stemming from earlier manuscript illustrations that have not survived.

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The appearance of the crowning angel at Cozia has been speculated upon as having been dictated by Radu Paisie's obsession with proving his legitimacy as a ruler, as a result of the consecutive plots organized against him by several pretenders to the throne in 1536, 1538 and 1539. 43 However, this new element did not appear in the years when the complots were happening in quick succession, but towards the end of his reign, as late as 1543, when his power had been already consolidated. It was also argued that, since Radu Paisie seems to have been the first Wallachian ruler crowned at the Patriarchate of Constantinople (1535) The mural paintings at Cozia, with their emphasis on the depicted warrior saints in martial postures standing in front of the voivode's portrait, coincided chronologically with a significant shift in the foreign policy of the voivode Radu Paisie starting with 1542. The first part of his reign was consequently disturbed by the attempts of several pretenders to take his throne, which he succeeded in keeping with the help of the Supreme Porte. The manoudi, C. Maltezou, Venezia 2008, 118-120]. Lately, some have even tried to demonstrate, with credible arguments, that the liturgical ritual of unction and coronation had been in fact absent from Wallachia from the fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century and a coronation at the Ecu- voivode showed a constant attitude of submission to the Ottomans: in 1540, he was forced to cede the Danube port of Brăila to the Sultan, and in the autumn of 1541, Radu crossed Transylvania and assisted the Ottoman army during the ongoing siege of the city of Buda. 48 But after two years in the service of the Ottoman Empire which brought heavy losses to Wallachia, Radu Paisie turned decisively against the Supreme Porte. 49 As a war between the Holy Roman and the Ottoman empires was being planned following the fall of the Kingdom of Hungary, in a letter of January 1543 the voivode promised to King Ferdinand of Habsburg help against the "infidel Turks". 50 Ferdinand responded with similar promises of military support. 51 In 48 E. Hurmuzaki, Documente privitoare la istoria românilor II/1 (1451-1575), București 1891, 231 doc. CC (22 Sep. 1542), 235 doc. CCIV (20 Oct. 1542). 49 Radu Paisie declared at the beginning of his reign his aversion towards the "unbelievers", i.e the Ottomans, who "rose against the Holy Cross and the Christian Law", trying to make an alliance against them with the Transylvanian voivode János Zápolyai (G. G. Tocilescu, 534 documente istorice slavo-române din Ţara Românească şi Moldova privitoare la legăturile cu Ardealul, 1346-1603, București 1931. But he began to take concrete actions for participating in an anti-Ottoman war only when a Habsburg war plan started to emerge, following the occupation of Buda in 1541 [v. C. C. Giurescu

Fig. 12. Gračanica Monastery, entrance to the nave. Coronation of King Milutin and Queen Simonida
ЗОГРАФ 43 (2019) [171][172][173][174][175][176][177][178][179][180][181][182][183][184] 180 the year 1544 the voivode's war plans were still unknown to the Porte, and the Sultan helped Radu to regain the throne after a short encroachment of a pretender, against whom the voivode came "with a lot of Turks and Tatars", managing to suppress his opponent. 52 The changing of Radu Paisie' policy in favour of Ferdinand of Habsburg was finally discovered by the Ottomans at the beginning of the next year, leading to his removal from the throne in March 1545 and his exile to Egypt. The representation of Saint Methodius of Patara blessing the voivode Radu Paisie crowned by an angel at Cozia appears, thus, all the more interesting as there is no reason for his presence in the iconographic context other than as an allusion to the Methodian Apocalypse. However, although the text had circulated in Bulgaria, Serbia and on Mount Athos since the thirteenth and fourteenth century, 53 no such manuscript or any of its related apoca- 52  lyptical narratives seem to have reached Wallachia prior to the eighteenth century, 54 when a very brief excerpt of the Methodian Apocalypse (the prophecies on the end of the world) was translated into Romanian. 55 It is possible that A. Miltenova, Historical and apocalyptic literature in Byzantium and Medieval Bulgaria, Sofia 2011, 218-256. 54 But the Pseudo-Methodian text, along with the Vision of Daniel and the Vision of Andrew Salos, was copied in the sixteenth century in Moldavia -Sl. Ms. 649 (the first part of the sixteenth century, The Romanian Academy Library, Bucharest), Sl. Ms. 309 (ca. 1547-1556, The Romanian Academy Library, Bucharest) and Sl. Ms. 741 (ca. 1544-1561, The National Archives of Romania, Bucharest) -cf. A. Mareş, Moldova şi cărţile populare în secolele al XV-lea -al XVII-lea, in: Floarea darurilor. In memoriam Ion Gheţie, ed. V. Barbu, A. Mareş, București 2006, 140-141;Dragnev, Literatura profetico-escatologică, 171-177 fol. 18r-v, v. G. Ștrempel, Catalogul manuscriselor românești IV: B. A. R. 4414-5920, București 1992, 104, no. 4731. A fragment is also found in a late eighteenth century miscellany, fols. 46-48v (idem, Catalogul manuscriselor românești II: B. A. R. 1601-3100, București 1983, 39, no. Fig. 13. Snagov Monastery, near Bucharest, 1563  On the occasion of Radu Paisie's alliance with the Christian powers, Maxim probably intended to dedicate an iconographical enkomion to the ruler, using as a source 1701). Nineteenth century manuscripts: 1808, fols. 230-234v (idem, Catalogul II, 452, no. 3092), 1825-1828, fols. 295v-309 (idem, Catalogul II, 296, no. 2509), 1832, fols. 256-261v (idem, Catalogul manuscriselor românești III: B. A. R. 3101-4413, București 1987, 56, no. 3229), 1837, fols. 134v-145 (idem, Catalogul II, 81, no. 1852), 1853, fols. 30v-35 (idem, Catalogul manuscriselor românești I: B. A. R. 1-1600, București 1978, 355, no. 1515. The text circulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth century also in a few Greek manuscripts (v. C. Litzica, Catalogul manuscriptelor grecești I, București 1909, no. 754, 502, no. 758, 504;M. Caratașu, Catalogul manuscriselor grecești din Biblioteca Academiei Române III, București 2004, no. 1087, 41-42, no. 1181 the emperors' painted portraits that one could still see in the Athonite catholicons. The frescoes at Cozia seem to interweave multiple sources, such as fourteenth-century portraits of rulers coronated by angels from the Balkans, but possibly also the tradition of representation of the emperor crowned by angels from the fifteenth-and sixteenth-century manuscripts of the Oracle of Leo the Wise. The portrait was depicted in the church dedicated to St. Peter -the patron of the voivode, newly built in the voivodal monastery of Cozia. The iconographer intended to put an emphasis on the ruler, which is probably why the other members of the family, including the heir Marko -although he is also represented crowned by an angel -were separated from his portrait. The crowning angel next to St. Methodius blessing appears to be a key element taken from the Pseudo-Methodian legend of the Last Byzantine Emperor and used in an unconventional manner to emphasise the Wallachian voivode Radu Paisie as a virtual vanquisher of the Muslims and saviour of the Christians, in a time which many were seeing as fulfilling the prophecies of Pseudo-Methodius' narrative that only five sultans were destined to rule over Constantinople, 58 with the contemporary Suleiman I being the fourth. The iconographical reference to the legend of the Last Emperor seems to be as elusive and equivocal as the content of the dedicatory inscription; allusion and ambiguousness may have been occasional style strategies of the iconographer in an uncertain political context.
In Byzantium and the Balkans, the representation of a coronation by angels was not very common in frescos. The original variant, in which the act is performed by Christ directly, was used more frequently. The coronation by angels became nevertheless a motif used in Bul- 58 Istrin, Otkrovenie, 324; Mango, Byzantinism, 35. The depiction at Cozia inspired by Pseudo-Methodius' text demonstrates that the elites of Wallachia in the first half of the sixteenth century were preoccupied with the same general eschatological feeling which had also led Western Europeans to revisit eschatological prophecies and apocalyptic literature following the fall of Constantinople and for at least a century afterwards. 61 The origins of the motif of the coronation by angels in Wallachia are intricate; they are linked with the political climate of the time, when a coalition around the Holy Roman emperor against the infidel Ottoman Turks was hoped for and awaited by the Wallachian voivode. But the Christian crusade ideal in Europe against the infidels had already begun to fade by the 1530s 62 following the conquest of Hungary, the siege of Vienna episode in 1529, and particularly with the disturbance generated by the birth of Protestantism, which made a potential large European coalition against the Ottoman Empire less achievable at that point. It was only Pope Pius V who managed to reignite the idea for a short time with the conclusion of the Holy League for the Mediterranean in 1571.
The iconographical innovation introduced at the infirmary church of Cozia in 1543, although created for a specific moment and person, had a rather long posterity in Wallachia due to its easy adaptability. After the midsixteenth century, the coronation by angels motif was detached from the prophetical and eschatological framework elaborated at Cozia and came to be used to support the idea of political dynasty, becoming the standard for the iconography of the Wallachian ruler up to the end of the sixteenth century (figs. 13-15) 63 and inspiring the iconography of the ruler also in the seventeenth century. 64 As a motif which aptly illustrates the idea of a Christian ruler elected and sanctified by God and the manifestation of the divine will in history and in political affairs for that matter, it could develop multiple significations concerning historical and eschatological expectations in the minds of its contemporaries, which is why the temptation to provide a precise and exclusive interpretation of it is more often than not slippery ground for the art historian. 65