Alexandria as a "City Full of Heresies"

 If you only read Roman-centered church history, you could come away thinking “Mark in Alexandria” is basically just a line in Eusebius and a PR stunt to justify Venetian souvenir-hunters carting a body off to the lagoon. Rome has Peter and Paul, real topography, real shrines, real liturgy; Alexandria just has “tradition says Mark was here.”

Except that when you actually look at the sources, there is a very concrete, very stubborn trail of evidence for a cult of St Mark in Alexandria – a trail that late antique authors treat exactly the way they treat Peter’s martyr shrine in Rome.

Start with Palladius of Helenopolis, writing his Lausiac History around 420. In chapter 45 he sketches the life of Philorhomos, a man of mixed status (son of a slave mother and free father), who under Julian becomes a confessor, lives an insanely strict ascetic life, and spends decades fighting demons in monasteries, tombs, and solitude. This is not someone easily impressed by tourist traps. And where does he walk?

“Ὃς πεζῇ τῇ πορείᾳ καὶ μέχρις αὐτῆς Ῥώμης ἀπῆλθεν εὐξόμενος εἰς τὸ μαρτύριον τοῦ μακαρίου Πέτρου· ἔφθασε δὲ καὶ μέχρις Ἀλεξανδρείας, εὐξόμενος εἰς τὸ μαρτύριον τοῦ Μάρκου.”

“He went on foot as far as Rome itself, in order to pray at the shrine (martyrion) of the blessed Peter. He also reached as far as Alexandria, in order to pray at the shrine of Mark.”

The parallelism is brutal and obvious. For Palladius, there are two big martyr shrines on Philorhomos’s agenda: Peter’s in Rome and Mark’s in Alexandria. Both are “martyria,” both are destinations for serious ascetics, both are worth walking across the empire for. Nobody stops to explain or defend the existence of Mark’s martyrion; it’s simply there, part of the mental map of holy places.

Fast forward (or sideways) to Adomnán of Iona, writing On the Holy Places in the late seventh century, reworking the travel report of Arculf for an insular audience. When he gets to Alexandria, he doesn’t just call it a city “traditionally founded by Mark” or some vague nonsense. He gives you building, layout, and tomb:

“Item de parte Aegipti aduentantibus et urbem intrantibus Alexandrinam ab aquilonali latere occurrit grandis eclesia structurae, in qua Marcus euangelista in terra humatus iacet; cuius sepulchrum ante altare in orientali eiusdem quadrangulo loco eclesiae memoria superposita marmoreis lapidibus constructa monstratur ...”

“Further, when approaching from the direction of Egypt and entering the city of Alexandria from the northern side, one encounters a church of considerable size, in which Mark the evangelist lies buried. His sepulchre is on view in the eastern portion of this square church, before the altar, with a memorial placed above it built of marble stones ...”

This is not a theological metaphor. It is a physical description: big church, northern approach, Mark buried “in terra,” his tomb visible in front of the altar, crowned by a marble memoria. It matches, down to the detail, the way late antique writers describe Peter’s shrine – monument over the grave, altar in axis with the tomb, a basilica wrapping the whole apparatus so that liturgy and martyr’s body are tied together.

So by the time you get to the seventh century you have at least two independent traditions that assume: (a) there is a sanctuary of Mark in Alexandria, (b) it is on the same conceptual level as Peter’s martyrion in Rome, and (c) it is anchoring real devotional traffic.

This helps make sense of Leo the Great’s anxiety in the mid-fifth century. In Letter 9 (to Dioscorus of Alexandria) Leo is not inventing Mark as a founder; he is trying to discipline and domesticate a Markan church that has its own history, its own rhythms, and – as we know from other sources – its own theological profile. Leo’s line is famous:

“Cum enim beatissimus Petrus apostolicum a Domino acceperit principatum, et Romana Ecclesia in ejus permaneat institutis, nefas est credere quod sanctus discipulus ejus Marcus qui Alexandrinam primus Ecclesiam gubernavit, aliis regulis traditionum suarum decreta formaverit.”

“The most blessed Peter received the headship of the Apostles from the Lord, and the church of Rome still abides by his institutions; it is wicked to believe that his holy disciple Mark, who was the first to govern the church of Alexandria, formed his decrees on a different line of tradition.”

Leo isn’t arguing for some abstract Petrine “honor”; he is explicitly subordinating Mark – and with him, Alexandria – to Peter’s “principatus.” The premise behind the rhetoric is precisely that Alexandria has a real, Mark-based claim: Mark as first bishop, Mark as founder, Mark as carrier of a line of tradition. Leo’s move is to say: of course Mark exists, of course he founded your church; but anything distinctive you do is automatically illegitimate because Mark, as Peter’s disciple, cannot possibly have established a different pattern.

In other words, Leo presupposes a living Markan identity in Alexandria strong enough that he has to neutralize it by appeal to Peter. You do not bother to argue that “it is wicked to think that Mark legislated otherwise” unless someone, on the ground, is living out a sense that Mark did precisely that.

One more piece of the mosaic. Later pilgrim literature can’t stop describing Alexandria as both holy and dangerous. One account summarizes the city like this:

“Alexandria is a beautiful city, but its people is reckless, though they welcome travellers. It is full of heresies. Saint Athanasius lies buried there, the bishop of this city who, in the times of the emperor Constantine son of Helena, steadfastly endured many dangers of death, when fighting for the faith of Christ against Arius, a heretic presbyter of the same city. There lies saint Faustus and saint Epimachius, and saint Antony, saint Maurus, and many other saints.”

The writer sees Alexandria as literally littered with saints’ graves: Athanasius, Antony, others. The city is “full of heresies” but also full of martyr shrines and graves of confessors, a kind of dense, competitive sacred topography. Slot Adomnán’s Mark basilica into that landscape and it is obvious what Alexandria is: a rival holy city, with its own founding evangelist, its own martyrion, its own saintly dead, its own liturgical gravity.

Put all this together and the older picture comes into focus. Long before Venice started telling stories about smuggling Mark’s body under a pile of pork, there was a functioning, well-attested cult of St Mark in Alexandria. Pilgrims like Philorhomos walked there on purpose, parallel to Rome, “to pray at the martyrion of Mark.” Geographers like Adomnán describe the basilica and the tomb as givens: big church, northern gate, marble memoria over the grave in front of the altar. Roman bishops like Leo knew that Alexandria’s identity was Markan enough to require a theological smackdown: yes, you have Mark, but Mark is chained to Peter.

That is not the profile of a vague, paper-only founding legend. It is the profile of a real cult, anchored in stone, ritual, and travel.

And once you admit that, it becomes much harder to keep pretending that the only “apostolic city” that mattered was Rome. In late antique Christian geography, Peter in Rome and Mark in Alexandria are parallel focal points. The difference is that the Roman story won, and the Alexandrian one was slowly suffocated under charges of heresy and layers of later erasure. The sources that survive still whisper what the official narrative tried to forget: Alexandria once had its own evangelist, its own martyr, and its own claim to be the place where the story of Mark – and not just Peter – defined what it meant to be the Church.