The Church of Baghdad

FAIN: FEL-281479-22

Michael Philip Penn
Stanford University (Stanford, CA 94305-2004)

Research and writing leading to a history of the Christian church in early medieval Syria, drawing on the recently published letters of Patriarch Timothy I (d. 823).

For almost a thousand years, the most geographically expansive church was the Church of the East. It stretched from Turkey throughout the Middle East to India and even China. But because its leaders wrote in Syriac, a language which few modern scholars can read, this richly documented case of pre-modern globalism has been largely ignored. My project explores a 400-page corpus of recently published letters from Patriarch Timothy I (d. 823), the man who—quite literally—moved the Church of the East to Baghdad. The Church of Baghdad uses the networks of places, people, books, and memories surrounding Timothy to argue that, far from being an early modern phenomenon, global Christianity was well underway by the eighth century. Combining traditional humanistic approaches with digital tools such as social network analysis, GIS, and visual analytics, The Church of Baghdad explores just how big “the global middle ages” must be in order to accommodate first-millennium Christianity.