Pembroke College : Letters

Theophylact of Ohrid (c. 1055-c. 1126)

Pembroke College

<p style='text-align: justify;'>This manuscript, copied in the late 16th or early 17th century, contains 61 of the <i>Letters of Theophylact of Ohrid</i>, Metropolitan of Bulgaria in the late 11th and early 12th centuries. Originally from the Greek island of Euboia, Theophylact was appointed in 1078 to the see of Ohrid, which covered the whole of the former Bulgarian Empire conquered by Byzantium earlier in the century. His letters, addressed to a variety of other clerics, imperial officials and members of the imperial family, are a major source for the history of Bulgaria under Byzantine rule. He was also the author of a range of religious texts, including homilies, biblical commentaries and hagiography.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>This manuscript was copied from a 14th-century manuscript in the Vatican, which belongs to a group of copies derived from a single exemplar and containing the same set of 64 letters, ending incompletely. Three of the letters from this set are not included here, due to the loss of much of a folio from the Vatican manuscript.</p>