Claudiopolis (Bithynia)

Claudiopolis

A titular see of Asia Minor. It was a city in Cilicia Tracheia or Byzantine Isauria. The old name is perhaps Kardabounda; under Claudius it became a Roman colony, Colonia Julia Augusta Felix Ninica Claudiopolis. None of its coins are known. It was situated at the lower end of the central Calycadnus valley, before the river enters the narrow gorge which conducts it to the coast lands. Laeke (Journal of a Tour in Asia Minor, 107 sq.) has identified it with Mut, the chief village of a caza in the vilayet of Adana, a view which has since been confirmed by epigraphical evidence (Hogarth, Supplem. Papers, Royal Geogr. Society, 1893, III, 651). It was a suffragan of Seleuceia. Only six bishops are mentioned by Lequien (II, 1027); the first, Ædesius, was present at Nicaea in 325; the last John, was present at Constantinople in 533, and is probably identical with the prelate who was a friend of Severus in 508-11 (Brooks, The Sixth Book of the Select Letters of Severus, II, 4, 7, 11). In the tenth century Claudiopolis is mentioned by Constantine Porphyrogenitus (Them., xxxvi), as one of the ten cities of Isaurian Decapolis. It figures still in the "Notitiae episcopatuum" in the twelfth or thirteenth century. Mut has about 900 inhabitants, and exhibits vast ruins.

Ramsay, Asia Minor, passim; Ruge in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyk., III, 2662; Headlam, Eccl. Sites in Isauria. in Soc. For The Promotion Of Hellenic Studies, Supplem. Papers, I, 22 sq.; Cuinet, Turquie d'Asie, II, 78.

S. PÉTRIDÈS