Polemic peaks at the peace table

Status: Anticipated · untested

Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

Byzantium produced a large literature of anti-Latin polemic — treatises on the errors of the Franks, the azymes, the filioque. Instinct says such writing surges when Latins do their worst, above all after the sack of Constantinople in 1204. This conjecture says the copying record peaks instead around the moments of attempted reunion — the councils of Lyon (1274) and Ferrara-Florence (1438-39) — because polemic is a negotiating brief, not a war cry: you copy the dossier of differences when your side must argue them at a table, not when the enemy has already burned your library. Hatred needs no bibliography; diplomacy does. If this holds, spikes in the manuscript production of any controversy literature are a proxy for negotiation, not for conflict, which reverses how we read copying surges across medieval polemical corpora.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Dated witnesses of the core anti-Latin corpus in Pinakes will show production peaks in the windows 1265-1295 and 1425-1455 that each exceed the 1200-1230 window by at least a factor of two, counted as securely dated or datable witnesses per thirty-year bin normalized by overall Greek manuscript production per bin. Primary clause: the Ferrara-Florence window (1425-1455) is the absolute maximum.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: in-house Pinakes Greek works-by-witnesses counts with witness datings for the anti-Latin dossier (works of the Contra Latinos tradition).

Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

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Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Blind fresh claude-fable-5 subagent (max effort), single-Write discipline, 2026-07-09. W07, first wave of the operator-directed medieval-European block (W07-W10).

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Searched anti-Latin polemic and the union councils. Composition of polemical dossiers around Lyon and Ferrara-Florence is well documented, anticipating the negotiating-brief mechanism, but dated-witness copying curves per thirty-year bin have not been produced.

A.E. Siecienski, The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy (OUP)

Predictions

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