Ivan Martinov and the Latin Sources on Cyril and Methodius: Restoring a Forgotten Nineteenth-Century Contribution
Ivan Martinov and the Latin Sources on Cyril and Methodius: Restoring a Forgotten Nineteenth-Century Contribution

Summary/Abstract: This article reclaims Ivan Martinov’s (1821–1894) contribution to the study of Latin sources concerning Sts Cyril and Methodius, thereby restoring his place in Cyrillo-Methodian historiography. Several of these Latin testimonies were first brought into scholarly circulation by Martinov himself. A critical reading of his publications between 1863 and 1894 traces a sustained analytical project that treated the Latin texts as an autonomous tradition embedded within their own Roman institutional context, rather than as mere derivatives of the Slavonic vitae. The article recovers and reassesses Martinov’s principal arguments: his reconstruction of papal policy towards the Slavs from the letters of John VIII and Stephen V; his attribution of the Italian Legend to Gauderic of Velletri; and his demonstration that the Legenda aurea draws upon the Italian Legend rather than the reverse. Furthermore, the study highlights his 9th-century dating of the Italian Legend against the late-compilation theses of Voronov and Lavrovskij, as well as his critical classification of the Slavonic vitae. Martinov was among the first to synthesise Latin, Slavonic, and Greek evidence into a coherent reconstruction of the early Roman perspective on the mission of Sts Cyril and Methodius. The 1894 publication of the Anastasius letter to Gauderic provides the missing link that completes this reconstruction. Ultimately, the article argues that Martinov’s framework conceptually anticipated the textual conclusions of P. Devos and P. Meyvaert (1955) and supplied the methodological foundation for modern scholarship on the Italian Legend. Yet, despite this implicit continuity, Martinov’s contribution has remained largely unacknowledged in post-1950s historiography. This neglect has allowed certain distortions to persist in current scholarship – most strikingly the recurrent presentation of the elogium of Constantine in the Chronicon Casauriense as a discovery, despite its publication by Muratori in 1726 and its analysis by Martinov in 1884. Restoring Martinov to the historiographical narrative is therefore offered not as a retrospective corrective but as an essential step towards reclaiming the methodological depth required to interpret the Latin Cyrillo-Methodian tradition accurately.

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