Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 65, pp. 13-66, 2016/04/05
The letters of the imperial court of Constantinople, sent to the 2nd Council of Lyon in 1274 with regard to the union of the Latin and Greek churches, have survived in a complex transmission. A new finding of a parchment scroll with the union dossier in the Austrian Haus-, Hof und Staatsarchiv demands a revision of the recent reconstruction of the process of disseminating these documents. The scroll, originating from the archbishopric of Salzburg, is compared with the text tradition of the two known versions of the documents and another unique scroll from Durham, written during the Council and not taken into consideration for the recent text constitution of these documents. Additionally, a supplement to the chronicle of Martinus Polonus, interpolated from the Annales sancti Rudperti, in two manuscripts of and from the monastery of Vorau (Austria) witness the same text transmission as in the scrolls. A collation of these texts classifies this tradition in comparison to the scrolls and the revised Lyon version of the documents. Abstracting from the results of the collations and the text transmission through direct text witnesses from the time of the Council, the paper critically re-discusses the recent theory of two translations (in Constantinople and Lyon) and argues in favor for only one Constantinopolitan version and a partial linguistic revision of the Latin text in Lyon.
