The Middle Eastern refugee who transformed the English church

The remarkable career of Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury, shows how the political and religious turmoil in the seventh-century eastern Mediterranean had a direct impact upon the English kingdoms.

Asked to name the most significant archbishops of Canterbury, it is likely that few would name the seventh-century monk, Theodore of Tarsus, and yet he transformed the church in England. Bede, the Northumbrian monk (d. 735) in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, hailed him as ‘….the first of the archbishops whom the whole English church consented to obey’. He restored and reorganised the diocesan structure of the church, established the rule of ecclesiastical law and enhanced the authority of the see of Canterbury.

Theodore was an exceptionally learned man who educated monks and clergy from across England and Ireland at the school he set up in Canterbury, where the curriculum included biblical commentary, Roman law and the Greek language. How did a monk from the Byzantine Empire come to occupy such an important position in the English church? What can his career tell us about contacts between the early English kingdoms and the Eastern Empire?