CHAPTER FOUR
A Roman Colony
After having been give its freedom both by Lucullus and Pompey, and still breaking faith with Rome, Sinop should have suffered some consequences. However, Caesar met some Roman colonists in Nicea and decided to send them to Sinop. In 45 B. C., the new Roman colony named Colonia Julia Felix Sinopensis was founded. The people on the colony continued to be Roman citizens and they had full rights, complete ownership of their land, and exemption from payment of taxes to Rome. The community of Sinop had two magistrates called the duoviri, who were aided by two aediles and a council of decuriones. The new coins put out by the new colony were abbreviated with the letters, ‘C.I.F.’ or ‘C.I.F.S.’ (21) The community was under the governor of the province during the Republic and it suffered when it had a greedy one. Under Augustus, however, Bithynia and Pontus became a senate guardianship. The Roman senate appointed a proconsul once a year. When Augustus returned to Rome in 19 B.C., he invested the husband of his daughter Julia, Marcus Agrippa, as his deputy and proconsul of the eastern provinces. In 16 B.C., Agrippa, his wife Julia, and their two sons, set out for a tour of the East. To the Greek cities of the Asia provinces, Agrippa was considerably favorable. Agrippa was very interested at this time in Crimea, and when he heard that an insurgent calling himself Scribonius having overthrown Asander, (22) was falsely asserting Roman recognition, he decided to intervene for the sake of Roman prestige. When Agrippa arrived in Sinop in 14 B.C., the Crimeans had already assassinated Scribonius. Agrippa then selected Polemo to be their new king. But until Agrippa showed that he intended to install his candidate by force, the Crimeans did not accept him. While Agrippa was yet in Sinop, he was joined there by King Herod of Judea who had arrived by ship. The two personages then set out on a grand tour of Crimea and the rest of Asian Turkey. During the time of Augustus, the cult of emperor worship was instituted and was continued under the various emperors.
In 17 B. C., when Germanicus Caesar celebrated a triumph in Rome, his uncle and adopted father, Tiberius Caesar, conferred on him ‘Prince Extraordinary’, and gave him supreme command of all the Asian provinces. His travels took him as far as the Black Sea, where he visited the colony of Sinop, and the community erected there a statue to his wife, Agrippina. (23) (See fig. 20.)
CHRISTIANITY
After 35 A.D., after the first Christian feast of Pentecost, the disciples of Jesus Christ of Judea began to journey throughout the world preaching the new religion. To St. Andrew it was alloted to preach in Bithynia and Pontus. While he was in Amasein, he received a message from a Roman magistrate of Sinop by the name of Gratinus, whose son was very ill. St. Andrew left Amaseia in haste; and when he arrived in Sinop, found that the boy had been seized by a demon after he bad bathed in the women’s bath. St. Andrew drove out the demon and reprimanded his father, Gratinus, and his mother for their own loose lives, which had given scandal to their son. St. Andrew cured several other people, and converted them to the new faith. He celebrated the Breaking of the Bread giving it to the new Christians to eat and after giving thanks he departed for Nicea.
It is most likely that the reason that St. Paul and St. Luke did not travel into Bithynia and Pontus, is because of the fact that St. Andrew was preaching or had preached there already. St. Peter, mindful of the new Christians and wishing to confirm the preaching of St. Andrew and the rest, wrote two letters. Both of the letters were directed primarily to the province of Bithynia-Pontus of which Sinop was an important community. He wrote them from Rome saying, "The Church in Babylon salutes you." He seems to he speaking to the Gentile converts. He told them in his first letter that the prospect of eternal inheritance counterweighs present trials and sufferings, he also exhorted them to be faithful to God and their civic duties. In his second letter, he warned them against false teachers and immorality,
Under Trajan, Bithynia and Pontus were made into an imperial province with Pliny as governor, having been appointed about 110 A. D. Pliny was obliged to consult the emperor on matters of detail; and among his writings, we find that he was much concerned with the welfare of his subjects, including those of Sinop. In Sinop, he took contributions from its citizens to build an aqueduct to supply water for the city. The aqueduct was finally built and extended sixteen miles into interior. Today parts of it may still be seen built into the wall at the entrance into Sinop. Pliny was also concerned about the spiritual welfare of his province, because many of the people had adopted Christianity. In the first half of the second century, Sinop ranked high enough to have a bishop and at about the same time, one of its Christians by the name of Marcion went into heresy and was expelled from the city.
In the later persecutions of Decian in 250 A. D., and those of Diocletian, the Christians in the Asian provinces suffered greatly. The Emperor Decian ordered that all the members of the Roman Empire offer sacrifices to the official deities of Rome. This worship was performed before one or more commissioners. and those who complied, received certificates testifying to their act of loyalty. Those who did not comply were either imprisoned, exiled, fined, or put to death. Although Decius and many of the other emperors were scorned for their savage persecutions, they looked after the general welfare by building roads and public works.
BYZANTIUM
In 315 A.D., Christianity was established by Constantine the Great as the official religion of the empire. And in 333, he founded the city of Constantinople to become his new capitol. From that time on, Sinop was meshed with the rest of Byzantine history. Roman tradition persisted up through the sixth century. In the fifth century, the East was ravaged by all the great heresies of the time. In 518, Justinian came to the throne. It was probably during this time that a monastery and chapel were built in Sinop (see figs. 24, 25, & 26). Also a castle was built (see fig. 27). The frescoes that may be seen in the monastery today, date much later than its original frescoes that are not extant and the rest of the construction. Many Sinop youths enlisted in the Byzantine forces when Heraclius held the Persians back in the seventh century in the first crusade. In the eighth century, Sinop witnessed the wave of iconoclasm, in which its monastery was all but destroyed. By 832, the Arab invasions into the empire made it possible for Theophobus, a local general, to declare himself king of Sinop. The greater inability of Constantinople to cope with the invasions led to many other splits. In the ninth century, the monastery was restored and the city imported a beautiful copy of the gospels which was probably made in Caesarea. (24) The manuscript of the gospel of St. Matthew is extant and preserved in the Paris National Library. It was discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century, when a French naval officer went ashore to Sinop to buy some tobacco. The proprietor of the store wrapped up his tobacco for him with some of the pages of the illuminated manuscript. He quickly secured the rest of it under the counter. Today, it is known as the Sinop Codex and is one of the finest of early Byzantine manuscripts. In 863, Byzantine Amisus was sacked by the Arabs under Omar. However, the Byzantines under General Petronas from Sinop, intercepted and destroyed the Arab army and Omar was killed. When Basil II, the Byzantine emperor, died in 1025, the empire was at its peak of prosperity; for its territory and wealth had doubled during his reign. However, in 1101, the Byzantines received a fatal blow, when Emperor Romanus IV was defeated by the Seljuk Turks at Mantzikert. The Comneni dynasty then took the throne until 1204. Before then, the Seljuks were halted at Iconium. But in 1204, when the Latin rule was established with the Palaeologi family, the Greeks split and formed two separated empires outside of Constantinople, one at Trebizond, and the other at Nicea. With this division, the empire could not fight the Turks effectively. In 1205, Sinop was annexed by David Comnenus for the Trebizond Empire. Theodore Lascaris the Emperor of Nicea, held Sinop for a short time, but it was retaken again by David Comnenus. Finally, in 1215 A. D., Sinop witnessed a battle in which the Byzantine forces were destroyed and David Comnenus killed. The city had fallen into Seljuk hands.
EPILOGUE
After Sinop fell, its loss to the Byzantine was greatly felt; for it cut off the Byzantines at Constantinople from those at Trebizond. Sinop was glorified a great deal by the Seljuks who rebuilt the wall still standing today. It prospered to a very high degree until 1460, when it was taken by Mehmet for the Ottoman Empire and remained a part of that empire, except for a small period in 1654, when the Russians, after having sunk the Turkish navy in its harbor, held Sinop. The rest of Sinop’s history has been one with Turkey up to the present day.
The author sadly admits that though this picture of Sinop’s ancient history is as complete as he can make it, there is much lacking. Only segments of Sinop’s history come down to us, when the world was focused in that area; otherwise, Sinop was so isolated during other periods, that its history has thus been lost. However, with continued historical research and more archaeological work on Sinop, these dark periods will come to light. To the speculator, there are many monuments in Sinop today the origins of which are unknown. In the northeast section of the Sinop isthmus, along the coast, are tunnels of Roman origin which appear to be catacombs (see fig. 21), but this is again speculation. On the sacred hill of Harmene of the Ince Burun, are many deteriorated monuments; archaeology will some day reveal their origin. Most of the artifacts in the Sinop Museum have not been labeled; but again, each has its place, and each has a story to tell.
