Download PDF | Constantinople In The Age Of Justinian University Of Oklahoma Press ( 1960)
204 Pages
This third volume in the Centers of Civilization Series has been written, as the author succinctly states, “to provide the general reader a picture of Constantinople as the center of the Byzantine Empire during the reign of Justinian, a.p. 527565.” It is intended to show how the city became the setting for a new synthesis of culture, which radiated from it over the Greco-Roman world and beyond.
It is the period of the Great Law-Giver, for Justinian prompted and encouraged the restatement of classical law which remains today one of the monumental achievements in its field. It is one of many fruits of the civilization which combined and transformed the classical Greek and Christian traditions.
Justinian was completing the process begun by Constantine the Great (died A.D. 337) of forming a new state, a new society, and a new culture which would replace the now disrupted Roman Empire. As the chief center of the new civilization, Constantinople served as the place in which the government, literature, art, and architecture of the new epoch found their fullest expression.
PREFACE
Tuis BooK has been written to provide for the nonspecialist reader a picture of Constantinople as the center of the Byzantine Empire during the reign of Justinian, A.D. §27565. In accordance with the purpose of the series of which it forms a part, the account is intended to show how, at a particular period, the city had been the setting for the development of a new synthesis of culture, which radiated from it over the Greco-Roman world, and beyond. Out of the considerable material which is available, I have tried to construct a portrayal and an interpretation, based on the original sources and on the results of modern research, which I hope will show the significance of Constantinople in an epoch which is still not sufficiently familiar to the modern world. It is during Justinian’s reign that the different elements that formed the civilization of Constantinople—and of the Empire—can be most clearly perceived, and it was during this age that the enduring characteristics of Byzantine culture were being shaped. This epoch, looking both backward to classical antiquity and forward to the Renaissance and the modern history of Europe and the Slavic states, has much to teach us today about the origins and antecedents of our own world.
It is significant that not all scholars are in agreement as to when “Byzantine history” begins—whether in the time of Constantine the Great, for example, or the reign of Justinian, or even later. Equally significant is the use of dif-ferent terms to describe the period—Late Roman, East Roman, Byzantine. These variations are natural reflections of the continuity between Byzantium and the classical world of which the Byzantines themselves were so keenly aware, and in which they found such important elements of strength.
In a treatment which does not make use of illustration, an attempt to describe and discuss in detail the art and architecture of the period could only be ineffective, and it would be pointless for this study to compete with the excellent picture books and histories of art and architecture which are readily available. In these the reader will find a pictorial supplement and commentary on the account and the interpretation offered here.
A work of this kind inevitably profits from the labors of many others and I must here record my debt to the scholars whose works I have consulted, as well as to colleagues and students from whom I have learned much. The book has benefited from the generous permission of several publishers to quote translations. ‘The passages from Paul the Silentiary (pp. 111, 112) are reproduced from the translation in W. R. Lethaby and H. Swainson, The Church of Sancta Sophia, by courteous permission of Macmillan and Co., Ltd. The Faith Press, Ltd., generously granted permission for use of passages (pp. 122, 124-26, 129) from The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom: The Greek Text with a Rendering in English, third edition. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge kindly permitted use of quotations (pp. 125, 128-31), from The Orthodox Liturgy, Being the Divine Liturgy of S. John Chrysostom and S. Basil the Great, published by the Society for the Fellowship of SS. Alban and Sergius. The map is adapted, with grateful acknowledge-ment, from that printed in J. B. Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire, London, Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1923, Vol. I, facing p. 67.
My sincere thanks go to three friends who have read the manuscript, Dr. J. Elliott Janney of Cleveland, Professor Hugh Graham of the University of New Mexico, and Mr. Marvin C. Ross of Washington. Their generous criticisms and suggestions have done much to improve the book.
G. D. Dumbarton Oaks Washington, D.C. February, 1960
PROLOGUE
THE CITY IS FOUNDED
OF THE visiTors who came to Constantinople in the reign of Justinian (A.D. 527-565), perhaps the most fortunate were those who made the journey by ship through the Sea of Marmara, for they would first see the city as it rose above the water on its triangular peninsula, and the mass of buildings and the skyline, seen across the water, was a view never to be forgotten. The people of the city themselves had a deep love for their waters, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosporus, and the Golden Horn, which surrounded Constantinople on three sides. When Procopius, at the command of the Emperor Justinian, wrote his panegyrical account of the buildings which the Emperor presented to the city of Constantinople, he took many occasions to speak of the way in which the city was beautified by the sea, which, he says, “surrounds Constantinople like a garland”; and everywhere in Procopius’ description there is evident the care which was taken to improve and embellish the shores of the city and its suburbs.
It was in fact as a maritime colony that the site had first attracted settlers, almost twelve centuries before the time of Justinian. Byzantion, the colony planted by the Greeks on the Bosporus, had been built around the acropolis which rose at the tip of the projecting triangle of land which commanded the southern end of the passage. This hilly promontory offered an incomparable site. From it, commerce to and from the Euxine Sea—including the grain shipped to Greece—could be controlled, and the harbor of the Golden Horn, the northern side of the triangle, was one of the finest anchorages in the ancient world. The old Greek Byzantion became the Roman city of Byzantium, and when the Emperor Constantine the Great (A.D. 306337) determined to found a new capital of his Empire in the East, Byzantium was transformed into Constantinopolis, the City of Constantine, the Second Rome or New Rome. Writers sometimes called it “the ruling city.” People often referred to it simply as The City.
The visitor sailing up the Sea of Marmara would have his first view of the southern shore of Constantinople, which ran for something over three miles between the land walls, at the west, and the tip of the promontory at the east. He would see the massive sea wall, broken by two small protected harbors. Above the wall rose houses and palaces, and beyond one saw the skyline of the city—domes of churches and monumental columns bearing statues. The skyline as one approached would resolve itself into a series of hills and valleys; for like the old Rome, the new one was built on hills—though there was a little difficulty in making the number seven. The acropolis on the promontory stood about one hundred forty feet almost directly above the sea. Elsewhere the land sloped back from the water more gradually. Each hill had a different shape and a different height; the highest of the points stood about two hundred thirty feet above the level of the water.
If his vessel sailed round the eastern promontory toward the celebrated harbor of the Golden Horn, the visitor would be carried past one of the most magnificent sights in the empire—the first hill, the old acropolis, on which stood the Great Palace, the Hippodrome, the Senate House, and the broad public square of the Augusteum with its column bearing a statue of the Emperor. Towering above everything else was the great Church of St. Sophia, its dome rising one hundred eighty feet above the ground. The palace, occupying the slope from the Augustzum down to the water, seemed to personify the magnificence of the sovereign who dwelt in it.
Passing the tip of the promontory, and leaving behind the sight of the woods and meadows which lined the Asiatic shore of the Bosporus in Justinian’s time, the visitor’s ship would turn west and sail into the Golden Horn, the narrow bay which ran along the northern side of the city. The harbor had taken its name from its shape, which had been likened to the horn of a stag. Its advantages were remarkable. Nearly four miles long, it was in most places about a third of a mile wide. Its greatest depth, in the center, was over one hundred feet. Lined by hills and set off from the Bosporus by a bend in its lower course, the Golden Horn was protected on all sides from the winds. Procopius, in his description of Constantinople, wrote that this bay was always calm: even in the winter, when the Sea of Marmara and the Bosporus were struck by high winds, the Horn was peaceful and ships could enter it without a pilot. This ample and safe anchorage for both warships and commercial vessels proved throughout the history of Constantinople to be one of the chief reasons for the city’s prosperity and security.
With two sides of the peninsula surrounded by water, the third side, which formed the base of the triangle, was closed by the land walls which ran from the southern angle of the peninsula to a point half way along the Golden Horn. Protected on two sides by water and defended on the third side by the massive walls of Theodosius II, the city would have been virtually impossible to capture by assault. Theodosius’ defenses were not a single wall, but a set of three parallel walls, each higher than the last. The inner wall, which was the highest, and the middle wall were strengthened by towers placed at intervals. In front of the outer wall was a moat, sixty to seventy feet wide and over thirty feet deep, which could be flooded. At intervals along the four mile course of the walls were a series of gates, some designed for ceremonial, others for military purposes. The inner wall was from forty to seventy feet in height at various points and from twelve to forty feet thick.
Having seen only so much of the city, in the brief tour which has been sketched, a visitor could understand why Constantinople had been chosen when an eastern capital of the empire was needed; for in addition to its rare combination of natural advantages for defense, it was a center of communications for the empire and the countries beyond, north and south, east and west, by land and sea. It lay at the point where the crossing between Europe and Asia was easiest and it controlled shipping between the Euxine Sea and the Aegean and the Mediterranean.(Commercially, it was a central point to which both raw materials and finished goods could be brought from all over the world; and the merchants of Constantinople were in an excellent position to export their goods not only to the empire but beyond its boundaries. The city’s value as a military center was comparable. It could receive communications directly and by the fastest routes from the eastern or the western divisions of the empire, and it was a central point from which orders or troops could be dispatched most efficiently and most directly to any part of the empire.
The need for such an eastern capital was by no means a new development in the time of Constantine the Great. Constantine’s task had been the continuation of the labors of the Emperors Aurelian (A.D. 270-275) and Diocletian (A.D. 284-305) to save the empire from the crisis through which it had been passing in the third century. A number of circumstances had worked together to bring the Roman state almost to collapse. Decline of manpower, decline of production and commerce, inflation, inability of the army to defend the boundaries, which extended from Britain and the Rhine and Danube to the Euphrates— all these, coming at a time when the power of Persia was revived and growing, had strained the Roman military and economic systems, which were not capable of the extra exertion required in a sudden crisis of such magnitude. In the middle of the third century a series of weak emperors, succeeding each other at brief intervals, had to deal with repeated invasions of Syria and Asia Minor by the energetic King Shapur of Persia.
In part this state of affairs had come about from the dependence of the empire upon a single man—the sovereign. The emperor, as emperor, could win much or lose much; and from this time on the history of the Roman state was often chiefly a reflection of the personality of the ruler. Each emperor—including Justinian—was inevitably the heir of his predecessors. In this sense the preparation for Justinian’s reign began in part in the third century. After the great crisis of the 260’s, when the Emperor Valerian was actually captured by the Persians and died a prisoner, it was the good fortune of the Roman people that men like Aurelian and Diocletian were able to take over the state. Aurelian arrested the decline, and Diocletian began the process of restoration which was continued by Constantine.
After the perils through which the empire had passed, people began to look to the ruler for protection. In some ways, a supreme autocratic authority was welcomed. Under Diocletian and Constantine, the army was strengthened and a determined effort was made to save the economy which was being strangled by inflation and shortages in production. The civil administration was overhauled completely. The chief reform—growing out of the problems which led to the foundation of Constantinople—was the institution of the Tetrarchy, Diocletian had perceived that the empire had become so large, and its needs so complex, that it could no longer be governed safely or effectively by one emperor. It was also obvious that the Greek East and the Roman West each needed constant attention. Moreover, the differences in civilization and outlook that had always characterized Greeks and Latins were becoming progressively more manifest. Diocletian’s plan—itself a practical one—was the division of East and West between two senior emperors (Augusti), each assisted by a junior (Cesar) who would in due time, on the death or retirement of the Augustus, succeed him as emperor. These four rulers, the Tetrarchs, could, it was thought, save the empire; and Diocletian, who had chosen the East, did by incessant travels restore order and prosperity so far as was then possible. Though he built palaces at Thessalonica and Antioch, he chose as his capital the city of Nicomedia, at the head of a gulf opening east out of the Sea of Marmara.
For a time the Tetrarchy worked as well as anyone could have expected; but after the abdication of Diocletian (a.p. 305), rival ambitions resulted in a series of wars among the tetrarchs, as a result of which Constantine the Great emerged as sole emperor (A.D. 324).
Under the Tetrarchy, Nicomedia had served as capital of the eastern division of the Empire. In the West, a major change had to take place. With the needs of its world so radically altered, Rome could no longer be the center of the government, as it once had been. Something more directly in touch both with the other parts of the West and with the East as well was obviously needed. Various cities (Trier, Aquileia, Milan) served at times as headquarters of the administration in the West, but it was Ravenna, the “city of the marshes” on the Adriatic coast, that came to be regarded as the permanent western capital. Rome retained its traditional dignity, but the north Italian city, just below the Alps, had obvious advantages. It was a sign of the changes going on in the Roman state that it was possible to abandon the ancient capital, which had for centuries been the symbol of the empire’s greatness, and to try the merits of other cities as possible capitals.
Such was part of what lay behind Constantine’s decision, in A.D. 324, to found Constantinople, on the site of Byzantium, as a new single capital of the empire. Constantine concluded that the imperial headquarters needed to be much closer to the eastern provinces than Milan, Aquileia, or even Sirmium, which had served for a time as headquarters. But this eastern capital, of course, had to be in such a place that it was in direct and ready communication with the West. The situation of Byzantium answered the requirements. Its geographical, topographical, and military advantages over Nicomedia were obvious. (It may be that Diocletian would have preferred the site of Byzantium if he had wished to build a new capital; in Nicomedia he could establish himself in a large city better prepared to receive his court than Byzantium.) Whether the decision to found a new capital, and the choice of the site, had been taking shape for some time in Constantine’s mind, we can- not now determine. In any case he acted promptly. The final battle that made him sole emperor took place on September 18, 324, at Chrysopolis (modern Scutari), directly across the Bosporus from Byzantium, and it was on November 8 of the same year that the work of transforming Byzantium into Constantinople was begun with a ceremony of the consecration of the site. Rome would have to be abandoned but its position of prestige would be maintained. Its ancient Senate could continue to function, and the emperors would pay the old capital fitting signs of respect on great occasions of the state. Constantinople would be a second Rome.
But the changing needs of government and war, and the benefits to commerce, were not the only reason for the origin of Constantinople. Constantine’s new city was to be a Christian city, a Christian capital of an empire that had been pagan. For so great a change as this, a new foundation was required. Obviously an old and famous pagan city, such as Nicomedia or Thessalonica or Antioch, with long pagan traditions and associations, could not serve. Nicomedia itself, for example, might be unacceptable because of its associations as Diocletian’s capital. On the other hand Byzantium was small enough so that it could be absorbed and disappear beneath the splendor of the new capital.
Thus Constantinople, as a new Christian city, represented both an end and a beginning—the end of the pagan Roman Empire and the beginning of the Christian Roman Empire. In the ending of one development, and its absorption into another process, lay the roots of the Constantinople of Justinian.
Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, and the triumph of his army under the sign of the God of the Chris-tians—‘“‘In This Sign Conquer”—gave a new direction to the history of the Roman Empire and to the development of western civilization. Some details of the process are not clear—some modern historians have challenged the reality and sincerity of the Emperor’s conversion and the purity of his motives—but it is certain in any case that the emergence of Christianity as a tolerated religion, and then as the official state religion, could mean nothing less than a turning point in the history of Europe.
Part of the reason for some modern skepticism concerning Constantine’s conversion had stemmed from the fact that the Emperor, on becoming a Christian, did not at once do away with the pagan forms of worship which had come to be associated with the imperial office. The Roman emperor had come to be regarded as a quasi-divine being, officially deified after his death, and he had received a formalized worship which had played an essential part in the unification of the diverse national elements which the empire embraced within its wide boundaries. At the time of Constantine’s conversion, Christians were by no means the majority in the empire, and in particular, many of the chief officers in the army and the government were pagans, and their prompt adherence to the new religion was not to be expected. It is no wonder that Constantine felt he must proceed cautiously. It would be injudicious, as well as impossible, to do away with paganism at once. It was a sufficiently radical change for the empire to find itself governed by a sovereign who, from having ruled under the protection of Apollo, had become a Christian. This fact alone presented a problem of political theory such as the empire had never faced. How was the Christian emperor to receive the homage—and hold the loyalty—of both his pagan and his Christian subjects? What was to be the relationship of Christians, both as a church and as individuals, with paganism? How were Christians, no longer a persecuted class, to stand in relation to pagan culture and pagan literature? What would be the future status of paganism itself?
These were truly formidable questions, and it is not surprising that Constantine did not attempt to find immediate answers to all of them. Paganism, obviously, could not be killed with one stroke. At the same time the Church discovered that it had questions of its own to face. Suddenly, almost without warning, the Church stood in a position of power and responsibility, forced to deal immediately with issues, which it had not had to settle so long as it lived by itself in an alien society. What would be the official relationship of the emperor and the Church? The answer to this question of Cesar and God had to take into account the traditional theory upon which the Cesar’s rule of his pagan subjects was based. After that came the question of the Christian and pagan society. This was a question as old as Christianity itself; but would the old answers to it be sufficient now that Christians found themselves in a wholly new status? How would the new status affect the answer?
These were the questions before Constantine and his people when Constantinople was founded. The city was in fact founded in order to provide answers to some at least of the questions. But one thing was plain, and that was that however bright the new era promised to be, the era would not—certainly could not—come into being all at once. Constantinople was a symbol, and a mighty symbol, of the beginning, but the creation of the new Christian state was not to be completed promptly. It was, in fact, not until two hundred years later that the sovereign was found who could undertake to organize and proclaim the fulfilment of the process. And so it was that the Constantinople of Justinian was the completion of the Constantinople of Constantine. Constantine’s city was a magnificent creation, as splendid an imperial capital as could then be built; but it was founded in a time of troubles and designed to lead a transformation which could only grow slowly; and in some ways it could do no more than provide the setting for the final achievement of the vision as Justinian saw it. But Justinian’s work could not have been done without Constantine’s beginning. So the city itself provided the focal point which would serve each of these two emperors as the symbol and embodiment of his concept of the empire.
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