Saint Domitian of Melitene

Domitian (Latin: Domitianus, Greek: Δομιτιανός; c. 550 – 602) was the nephew of the Roman emperor Maurice and the archbishop of Melitene in Roman Armenia from around 580 until his death. He was renowned as a diplomat and is regarded as a saint by the Chalcedonian churches for enforcing orthodoxy in the northeast of the empire. He unsuccessfully tried to convert the Persian king Khosrow II to Christianity when he helped restore him to his throne in 590–591. In the monophysite tradition, however, he is remembered for his brutal persecutions. Domitian is the subject of a short biography in the Synaxarion of Constantinople and another, probably sourced from the Synaxarion, in the 11th-century Menologion of Basil II. These were written centuries after his death and their reliability is suspect. According to the Synaxarion, he was thirty years old when he became bishop, and this fact may be accurate. This would place his birth around 550. He was certainly young at the time of his appointment. According to the Chronicle of 1234 and Michael the Syrian, Domitian was the son of Maurice's brother Peter. John of Nikiu says the same in one passage, but elsewhere contradicts himself by making him Maurice's cousin, the son of his paternal uncle. Many other sources—e.g. Evagrius Scholasticus, Theophylact Simocatta, Nicephorus Callistus—describe him as a relative without specifying further. The Synaxarion names his father as Theodore and his mother as Ecdicia, describing them as pious and wealthy. No brother of Maurice named Theodore is otherwise known, and it may be accepted that his father was Peter. According to the Synaxarion, Domitian received both a secular and a biblical education. He befriended the future Pope Gregory the Great when the latter was an apocrisiarius in Constantinople between 579 and 585. They apparently studied the Bible together. According to the Synaxarion, Domitian married, but his wife died not long after their marriage.