The Latin Leo/'Umar

Per Arthur Jeffery's introduction to the famous Leo III / 'Umar II Armenian text, In [JP] Migne's Patrologia Graeca, CVII, cols. 315-324, we find the Latin version of an Epistola Leonis Imperatoris Augusti cognomento Philosophi ad Omarum Saracenorum regem de fidei christianae veritate et mysteriis et de variis Saracenorum haeresibus et blasphemiis, printed among the works of Leo VI (886-912) the Philosopher. Jeffery notes also that the Latin tracks close to the Armenian. The Latin is shorter although - pace Hoyland - still in the form of a rebuttal to argument previously written "to me": scripsisti mihi, dictum est mihi.

Jeffery deemed our Latin text a misfile from Leo III, presumably misfiled well into the tenth century AD by men ignorant of the Byzantine kings. Hoyland, 498-9, follows Jeffery and also 'Âdel Théodore Khoury, Les théologiens Byzantins et l'Islam (Paris: 1969), 201-2. Although, as a misfile, some features of the Latin look more anachronous than the Armenian.

Jeffery's footnotes follow a nineteenth-century discussion about this work. Jeffery notes that the Latin is a pro-Toledan text which filioque formula Leo VI, good Byzantine as he was, refused. The whole filioque controversy had grown out of the Monotheletic drama; that debate calmed down with the Romans' rehabilitation of Maximus Confessor, then re-arose under Constantine V once that strong emperor wrested peace from the 'Abbasids and started looking west again.

Charlemagne and the Aquileians seem to have been the most gung-ho on filioque. Rome herself refused a side until AD 1014 which, notoriously, set Rome on that track to break from Constantinople.

Another contemporary controversy was that over icons. The Armenian version mentions - on the Arabs' side - some words apropos of the Cross and images, Jeffery 321-2. The Armenian text accordingly starts by defending the Cross, moving on to the images. As I read what Jeffery brings as parallel, in the Latin, here also is a defence of the Cross. But for images I do not find in the Latin even a mention.

Leo III was no iconodoule himself, for instance dismantling the Pantokrator (seen in Justinian II's coin) off the City gates. But he also wasn't an iconoclast like Constantine V. It seems in character - as Hoyland implies - that Leo preserves a vestige of an earlier version. Come the Latin version, icons no longer pose a controversy between Christian and Muslim. The abbreviation - I think - gave this author his opening to skip all that talk entirely. Much as the Romans didn't want to talk filioque.

I would, then, propose a western author, aligned with the Latins although assuredly a Greek speaker, running a parallel Latin defence of the faith. He was doctrinally Toledan so probably not writing in Rome. This westerner wasn't much for icons so agreed with the Byzantines on that much. To this day, we Catholics prefer stained-glass and statuary; they can be lavishly done, as we may observe in the Sistine Chapel, but they are an afterthought in our venerations.

I'd put our man in northwestern Italy rather than the Adriatic. The Catalan / Marseilles littoral looks promising.