EVANGELIZATION OF THE MESIA. - The name M., which appears only with the Roman conquest, did not have, in the course of the history of the Empire, a constant geographical value. Very roughly it can be said that the region so named was bounded to the south by the Haemus range (Balkans), to the north by the course of the Lower Danube, to the east by the Black Sea, and to the west by the course of the Drin and by the mountains that border Bosnia and Dalmatia.
The territory began to be traversed by Roman armies in the last century of the Republic, was constituted as a province by Augustus and then reorganized by Tiberius after the Pannonian insurrection. Domitian divided it into two provinces, Moesia Superior (Serbia) and Moesia Inferior (parts of Bulgaria and Romania as far as the mouths of the Danube). And later, when Aurelian, because of the persistent barbarian pressure, definitively abandoned the lands north of the Danube (Dacia), he brought south of the river not only the garrisons of that province but also, as a good omen, its name, creating at the expense of Moesia Superior two new provinces: Dacia ripuaria and Dacia mediterranea.
Christian preaching, as it is set forth in the Actus Apostolorum, did not reach as far as M., but since those Actus are essentially the Actus Pauli, the tradition recorded by Eusebius, which brings the evangelical mission of the apostle Andrew to these remote Danubian regions (Eusebius, Hist. eccl., III, 1), might also not be entirely rejected, without for that reason giving credence to the so-called Acts of Andrew, which are certainly apocryphal (J. Flamion, Les Actes apocryphes d'André, Louvain 1911). It can, moreover, very plausibly be thought that the ancient flourishing Christian communities of Thrace and Macedonia (Philippi, Beroea, Thessalonica) radiated into the not distant M.
It has even been thought that a Jallius Bassus, governor of Moesia Inferior in 161 (CIL, III, 6169), may have been a Christian, because his name was found as that of the father of a Jallia laid in a Christian sarcophagus in the cemetery of Callistus (O. Marucchi, Le catacombe romane, Rome 1933, p. 227). The first positive documents would rather be the Passiones of certain martyrs during the persecution of Diocletian. It is known that in that persecution much care was taken to eliminate Christian infiltrations in the ranks of the army, and therefore the martyrdom of six soldiers of the Danubian garrisons (Julius, Hesychius, Nicander, Marcian, Pasicrates, Valentio) seems admissible even to H. Delehaye (v. bibl.). The report of the martyrdom at Sirmium of a priest Montanus also seems trustworthy. Less worthy of belief are the circumstances narrated about the torture of the martyr Dasius, but the existence and condemnation of him are admissible; his body, venerated, was transferred to Ancona and provided with a Greek inscription judged to be of the 5th century (F. Cumont, in Anal. Boll., 27 [1908], p. 370). A last martyr of M. would be the soldier Aemilianus, condemned under Julian the Apostate for having damaged a pagan altar (F. Cabrol, v. bibl.). Even before the edicts of Galerius, of Constantine and of Licinius granting Christians the free exercise of their worship, Christian communities seem to have existed in several places of M. (Singidunum, Ratiaria, Durostorum, Axiopolis, Noviodunum, Tomi, Romuliana: Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum, XI, 1). Once peace was given to the Church by those edicts, fully constituted ecclesiastical hierarchies are immediately found in not a few cities of M. Episcopal sees are attested between the 4th and 6th centuries at Viminacium, Marcianopolis, Singidunum, Margum, Ratiaria, Aquae, Castra Martis, Oescus, Sardica, Naissus, Remesiana, Pautalia, Iustiniana Prima, Iustiniana Secunda, Neutina, Diocletiana, Mariana, Zappara, Stobi. Names of bishops are preserved in the signatures of the Councils of Nicaea (325), of Ephesus (341), of Sardica (343), of Constantinople (381) and in other documents.
Such a luxuriant flourishing of Christianity was not, however, immune from heretical deviations; the doctrines of Nestorius found sympathies and a following among some bishops of M., but above all Arianism took strong root here, as attests a letter of St. Ambrose (Epist., II), a passage of Sozomen (Hist. eccl., VII, 17) and the records of Arian bishops: Ursacius and Secundianus at Singidunum between 355 and 370, Dominus at Marcianopolis about the same time, Auxenius at Durostorum after 380.
Bibliography5 works
Roberto Paribeni