Download PDF | Jonathan Harris, Constantinople Capital Of Byzantium Bloomsbury Academic (2017)
301 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The second edition of this book comes at the end of a journey. The first edition was largely the idea of Martin Sheppard and Tony Morris and was commissioned for their publishing house, Hambledon. After Hambledon had been acquired by Continuum, Michael Greenwood smoothed the path to the publication of the first edition in 2007. When Continuum was absorbed into Bloomsbury, Rhodri Mogford was very receptive to the idea of a second edition.
I am indebted to him for the efficiency with which he set the process in motion and his generosity in the matter of word limits. I am also greatly obliged to Grishma Fredric and Ian Buck who saw the book through the production stage. The new edition is therefore larger and I have taken the opportunity to correct a number of errors in the original version. I am grateful to Mark Lehnertz for correcting the number of square hectares in the first edition, to Toby Bromige and Joseph Munitiz for providing me with new information, to Jonathan Phillips for permission to use his Venetian roundel photograph, to four anonymous reviewers whose helpful comments and corrections allowed me to see the book from a reader’s point of view.
The following publishers and institutions kindly gave permission for the reproduction of the passages in the textboxes: Bloomsbury Publishing, the Department of Languages and Humanities of the University of Brussels, the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Oxford University Press and the Taylor and Francis Group. I have made every effort to contact the copyright holders of the other extracts and I hope that the inclusion of these passages will be accepted as constituting fair use. Finally I am hugely indebted to the History Department at Royal Holloway for giving me two terms of sabbatical leave, which allowed the process of rewriting to go ahead unhindered, and particularly to Stephanie Surrey for her patience in sorting out my expense claims.
For the rest, the book is my own understanding of the subject and reflects my preferences and idiosyncrasies. Turkish readers will, I hope, forgive me for using ‘Constantinople’ up to 1926 and ‘Istanbul’ only thereafter, and Greek ones for my giving the Byzantines the anglicized versions of their first names. I trust that the latter will also overlook ‘Porphyrogenitos’, as opposed to ‘Porphyrogennetos’, as this form simply looks better to me.
City of wonders
In around the year 1110, King Sigurd I Magnusson of Norway and a band of followers were sailing home in their longships after a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Cruising up the Aegean, they planned to reach their distant northern home by a land route across Russia. So before they reached the Black Sea, they piloted their vessels into the broad harbour of a city that they called Miklagarth. There they were accorded a magnificent reception.
The ruler of Miklagarth, whose name was Kirialax, had covered the streets from the harbour to the palace with precious cloth in their honour and, as they rode along these richly adorned thoroughfares, the Norwegians were serenaded by choirs and lute players. On reaching Kirialax’s palace, the visitors were ushered into a lavish banquet and, as they took their seats, purses full of gold and silver coins were thrust into their hands. As if this largesse were not enough, the servants reappeared shortly afterwards bearing great chests filled with gold which were distributed in the same way.
Finally they brought in a cloak of costly purple cloth and two gold rings for King Sigurd who stood and made an elegant speech, thanking Kirialax for his generosity. When the Norwegians were finally ready to leave, Sigurd presented Kirialax with all of his longships and then continued his journey by land. Many of his men, however, chose to remain behind and to enter the service of the ruler of this splendid city.!
One might be forgiven for thinking that this entire episode was just another of the fantastic and implausible tales that fill the pages of the Norse sagas. Yet in its essentials, the story is probably true. For Miklagarth was a real place. Its proper name was Constantinople and it was the capital city of what is known to history as the Byzantine Empire or Byzantium, which in the early twelfth century dominated the Balkans and much of what is now Turkey. The inhabitants of the city who welcomed the Norwegians so cordially were the Byzantines, a Greek-speaking, Christian people who regarded their state as a continuation of the old Roman Empire. Likewise their ruler, ‘Kirialax’, was a real person, the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos (1081-1118). His odd name in the saga no doubt arose from his being referred to by his subjects as Kyr Alexios, ‘Lord Alexios’.
It is not just the place and its ruler that can be verified from the saga’s account. Its tale of the wonders and wealth of Constantinople is reproduced in a host of written records from the Middle Ages, left behind by pilgrims, soldiers and diplomats, many of them more sober and convincing than the Norse biographer of Sigurd yet often breathless with astonishment at what they saw. The almost universal reaction was that recorded by a French soldier who noticed that, as his ship drew near to Constantinople in 1203, those who had never been there before ‘gazed very intently at the city, having never imagined that there could be so fine a place in all the world’.
Another visitor recorded that when he had arrived and had looked around, he was stunned by the sight of so many wonderful things. They all said the same: an ‘excellent and beautiful city’, ‘rich in renown’ and ‘the noblest of capitals of the world’.? Constantinople had the same impact on its inhabitants who had spent all their lives there. ‘The city gives light to the world in marvellous fashion with its wonders, wrote a Byzantine poet. So magnificent a place did he and his contemporaries consider it that they seldom even referred to it by name. They preferred to use epithets such as the ‘Queen of Cities’ (basileuousa), the ‘Great City’ (megalopolis) or simply ‘the City’ (polis), there being no possible doubt as to which one was meant.?
Perhaps the most striking feature to visitors was Constantinople’s sheer size. Those coming from the Islamic world would have been familiar with large and prosperous cities, notably Baghdad, the seat of the Abbasid Caliphate, and Cordoba in Spain, although Muslim visitors were still impressed by what they saw in the Byzantine capital. Those who, like Sigurd and his followers, hailed from Scandinavia, western Europe and Russia, on the other hand, would never have seen such a vast urban area before.
Their world was an undeveloped one where much of the land was still covered in primal forest. Those cities that existed had a population of no more than about 20,000 people at the very most, and the stone churches in villages would have been the largest man-made structures that most people would ever see. By contrast, Constantinople had a profusion of houses, churches, monasteries and palaces, many built on a colossal scale. The area enclosed by its walls was almost 30,000 hectares (115 square miles) and within that area lived a population which, it was asserted at the time, outnumbered that of the whole of England between York and the Thames. More sober modern estimates put it at around 375,000 inhabitants in the twelfth century but that was still many times larger than any city in the Christian world.
Then there was the city’s conspicuous wealth that featured so prominently in the account of King Sigurd’s visit. Those from societies where coinage scarcely circulated and whose only movable possessions were their drab, homespun clothes and a basket to put them in, gazed in open-mouthed astonishment the sight of people walking around in brightly dressed silks and of exotic goods that they had never encountered before changing hands in the city markets. On the stalls of the money changers, piles of gold and silver coins and precious stones could be seen and richly dressed noblemen with flowing beards and tall hats would have passed by on horseback or been carried in a litter on their way to or from the emperor’s palace.
But there was more to it than that. Alongside the size and the wealth there was a kind of a supernatural aura to match. The saga of King Sigurd’s adventures recounts how the Norwegians were treated to a display of horsemanship, music and fireworks on a flat plain surrounded by banks of seating. Above the seats were statues cast in metal that were so skilfully wrought that they looked as if they were alive, some watching the performance, others riding in the air. The Norwegians had no idea how they could have been made.
Every medieval account of Constantinople records some similar cause for wonder and awe. An angel was believed to stand on perpetual guard in the city’s great cathedral of Hagia Sophia. The twelve baskets of crumbs left over from the feeding of the five thousand were said to be buried under one of its columns. It was even held that the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, extended a special protection over the city, keeping it safe from its enemies. When the khan of the Bulgars threatened to attack in 917, the patriarch of Constantinople wrote to warn him off, threatening him not with military force but with the Virgin who, he insisted, was the commander-in-chief of the city and would not take kindly to any presumptuous assault.®
From the perspective of a later century, the juxtaposition of the miraculous and the supernatural with the physical and the quotidian may seem rather curious. After all, the world has had plenty of holy cities, such as Jerusalem, Mecca or Varanasi, and even more centres of political power and economic muscle but it is rare for a large urban settlement to claim to be both as Constantinople did. It would be easy to dismiss all these myths and legends as so much medieval superstition that simply obscures the true political and socio-economic picture. On the other hand, these elements were clearly extremely important in the minds not only of medieval visitors to Constantinople but also of the Byzantines themselves. Indeed, the rulers of Constantinople assiduously cultivated them and went out of their way to promote the spiritual aura around their city.
Of course, these myths often masked a reality that was greatly at variance with the ideal but that does not lessen their significance. The ideal played a vital role in justifying the reality. Far from being completely unrelated to Constantinople’s wealth and power, the myths and legends were the main way in which the Byzantine emperors bolstered their political and diplomatic position and were a major factor in Constantinople’s extraordinary success in preserving itself and its empire for over a thousand years. For when the myth evaporated, so did the power and so did the wealth.
The best way to appreciate the heady mixture of worldly glamour and religious awe experienced by visitors to Byzantine Constantinople is to follow the path that they would have taken through it in around 1200 cr, when the city was in its heyday, and to consider what they would have seen and, perhaps more importantly, what they would have felt. There were, and are, two ways to approach Constantinople: by land and by sea. Both offered a striking foretaste of what was to come. King Sigurd and his companions came by sea, and would have been greeted by the sight of a skyline punctuated by tall columns and by domes of churches and surrounded by the defensive Sea Walls.
Most visitors, however, came by land, and their first inkling of the city beyond would come when the towers of the immense defensive Land Walls rose into view and barred any further progress. These visitors would have to apply for entry through one of the eight main civil gates, usually the one known as Charisios or the Gate of Adrianople. There was a ninth, the Golden Gate, an impressive structure topped with two bronze elephants at the far south of the fortifications but that was reserved for emperors returning from victorious campaigns and normally remained closed.” Formalities at this stage could be tedious, since the authorities forbade any weapons to be carried inside the walls and only allowed a certain quota of people to enter at a time.
It would perhaps have been now that the more prudent and affluent among the new arrivals would have employed the services of a guide. As one returning visitor advised, Constantinople was like a great forest and it was impossible to see anything without a local to steer you in the right direction. Eventually permission would be given and the visitors would emerge through the Gate of Adrianople into the broad Middle Street or Mese that ran through the centre of the city.®
Those who entered through this gate would have found themselves close to the district known as Blachernae at the extreme northwest of the Land Walls. The area was dominated by one of the two main imperial residences, the Palace of Blachernae whose tall towers would have been visible for miles around. It was presumably here that King Sigurd and his retinue were feasted by Emperor Alexios. Humbler folk would not have been able to visit the palace but they did have access to Constantinople’s churches and monasteries. Although much of the outlying area of the city close to the Land Walls and south of Blachernae was given over to vineyards, orchards, vegetable plots and cornfields,’ guides would have pointed out to new arrivals that there were several important ecclesiastical buildings in the vicinity.
In Blachernae, they would have been able to enter the Holy Saviour in Chora and the Church of the Mother of God which served as the chapel of the Palace. The latter was a beautiful building whose soaring roof was held up by slender columns of green marble. To the south lay the Virgin Peribleptos, St John Stoudios and St Mamas which all lay near or on the way to the Golden Gate. The Church of the Virgin outside the Pege Gate boasted a healing spring that had allegedly cured numerous Byzantine emperors and empresses.!°
Unlike most tourists today, medieval visitors did not enter churches and monasteries like these just to look at the decoration and architecture. Indeed although plenty of the travellers’ accounts do describe these aspects, others scarcely mention them. They were much more interested in something else: Constantinople’s reputation as a holy place. Now at first sight, it is not immediately obvious why it should have been accorded any spiritual significance by medieval Christians. After all, the city had played no part in the Gospel story, for it had not even been founded in its present form at the time of Christ.
The Byzantines did make the claim, albeit on rather scanty evidence, that their church had been founded by St Andrew, one of the original twelve apostles or companions of Christ, just as that of Rome had been founded by St Peter. Moreover, Constantinople did occupy an important place in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Three ecumenical councils, whose decisions were considered to be binding on the whole church, had been held there in 381, 553 and 680. It was one of five cities in the Christian world whose bishops were honoured with the title of patriarch (the others being Rome, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem).
The patriarch of Constantinople enjoyed huge prestige and authority not only in the Byzantine Empire itself but far beyond its borders as far as Russia and he was regarded as second only to the pope in Rome, so that the Byzantines were fond of using ‘New Jerusalem’ as a poetical way to refer to their capital.'! Nevertheless, while pilgrims to Jerusalem could visit the very places where Jesus had walked and taught, and those to Rome could follow in the footsteps of the Apostles Peter and Paul, there was nothing of that kind in Constantinople.
What the Byzantine capital did possess was the next best thing to the personal presence of Christ: an unrivalled collection of relics, built up over the centuries. Relics could be either mortal remains of saints and holy persons or objects closely associated with them or with the Virgin Mary or even with Christ himself. It has been reckoned that there were some 3,600 body parts stored in Constantinople in 1200, representing about 476 different saints. Such objects were regarded with intense veneration by medieval Christians because they represented a tangible link to the sanctity of the person with whom they were connected.
It was believed that prayers made in a place sanctified by the presence of such an object would be all the more efficacious and that in some cases they might even be rewarded by a miraculous healing. The pick of the collection, which included what was believed to be the Crown of Thorns and other instruments of Christ’s passion, was locked away in the chapel of the Holy Virgin of Pharos within the Great Palace and was only shown to very high-ranking visitors. There were, however, plenty of others available to public view, although inevitably, the locals made sure that they profited from the tourist influx and money changed hands before any relics were put on display.
The chief draw of the Church of the Mother of God at Blachernae was its famous Maphorion of the Virgin Mary, a garment that covered the head and shoulders, which was also sometimes referred to as a veil or as a robe. It was kept with a wall painting of the Virgin in a smaller, round chapel to one side of the main church.” Few Christian visitors would have passed up the opportunity to pray before an object that was believed to be so closely linked to the very heart of their faith. Their reaction when confronted with such relics was one of touching enthusiasm, undiluted by any scepticism as to their authenticity.
Having left Blachernae and the vicinity of the Land Walls, it would have taken travellers some time to pass through the less heavily built-up western quarters of the city on foot and to reach the centre of things, a distance of over four and a half kilometres or some three miles. As they moved east along the narrowing promontory on which Constantinople was built, visitors would have soon been aware of the proximity of the sea. They would have smelt the salt in the breeze, heard the cry of seagulls and glimpsed the blue water between the buildings. This was Constantinople’s harbour, the Golden Horn, whose waters would have been crowded with ships, their masts and rigging standing out against the sky. Alongside the Golden Horn were the crowded districts that housed the city’s working population and the quarters where the Venetian, Genoese and Pisan merchants lived. Western European visitors might lodge in this area where Latin and western vernacular languages were understood.
Walking east along the Mese, they would have arrived at one of Constantinople’s major monuments. A very large church would have stood on the left-hand side of the street, cruciform in structure and topped by five domes. This was the Holy Apostles, the second largest church in Constantinople and dedicated to Christ’s original twelve companions, minus Judas but including St Paul. It stood at the centre of a complex of buildings that included a theological college and public baths. Its roof commanded a magnificent view over the Golden Horn, the Sea of Marmara and the countryside beyond the Land Walls.’ The main doorway gave access to a cavernous interior, lined by a gallery. The lower walls were clad with marble slabs of different colours.
The roof and domes were supported by columns whose capitals were carved to resemble leaves and fruit, and almost every available space was covered in glittering mosaics depicting the life of Christ and the deeds of the Apostles. There were important relics on display too. One could see two stone pillars, one of which purported to be that against which Christ had been scourged, the other the one on which St Peter had wept bitterly after he had three times denied that he knew Jesus. There were also the tombs of the apostle St Andrew, St Luke the Evangelist and St Timothy." Beautiful though the interior of the church was and significant though its relics were, its greatest attraction lay in a separate building joined on to its east end, a round mausoleum, known as the Herdéon.
It housed the tombs of the emperors of Byzantium who had been regularly buried there until 1028 when it had become full up. In pride of place was that of Constantine the Great (306-37), the founder of Constantinople and the first Christian emperor. His magnificent sarcophagus of purple porphyry marble was covered with a sumptuous cloth of gold cover, while those of lesser rulers were grouped around it in a semicircle.'* A second mausoleum on the north side of the church housed the tomb of Justinian (527-65) who had been responsible for rebuilding the Church of the Holy Apostles in its present form.'® Here in their imposing marble sarcophagi, these imperial personages awaited the last trump while awestruck groups of visitors were ushered through.
Back on the Mese, the road continued its progress eastwards into the busy and heavily populated quarters. By now, some sections of the street were porticoed on either side, providing a sheltered pavement for pedestrians and for shops behind. Tall mansions belonging to Constantinople’s great and good fronted onto the thoroughfare. To the left marched the arches of the aqueduct of Valens, bearing water into the city from the streams and rivers of Thrace.!” As they went, their guides might have enticed them to make a quick detour to the right to visit the Kyriotissa convent where a wonder-working icon of the Virgin Mary could be seen.'® There was also the monastery of the Pantokrator whose church was noted for its elaborate mosaic pavement and painted glass and boasted the slab of red marble on which Christ had lain after his crucifixion. It supposedly still bore the marks of the tears shed by the Virgin Mary.”
As they continued along the Mese, they would have seen nearby a ninemetre-high column of pink granite, protruding above the roof tops, one of many scattered around the city standing, as one contemporary claimed, higher than the clouds. Erected in honour of Marcian (450-7), the column was topped by a statue of the emperor on horseback, the hoof of his steed on the head of defeated enemy.”° Another column could be seen in the distance, that of Emperor Arcadius (395-408). It was taller than that of Marcian with a doorway in the pedestal and a spiral stairway of 233 steps to give access to the top and fifty-six windows to admire the view on the way. Rather like Trajan’s column in Rome, the outside was decorated with spiral reliefs depicting military victories.*! These and other columns helped to give Constantinople its distinctive skyline but they also typified the city in another way.
Such was its antiquity and so many centuries had passed without it having been captured or sacked by any hostile power that Constantinople had come to acquire a mystical quality in its own right, and a host of myths and legends had become attached to many of its monuments. Even the most everyday objects had become imbued with a kind of spiritual significance and had acquired some element of legend or lore. These columns were no exception. It was said that the spiral reliefs that ran from their bases to their capitals, depicting soldiers and battles, were visual prophecies of what would befall Constantinople. Unfortunately, their usefulness as a guide to the future was limited since the meaning of the reliefs would only become comprehensible once the events had taken place.”
By now the Mese had joined up with Constantinople’s other main street, the Triumphal Way which ran up from the Golden Gate. The route then led into a large square known as the Forum of Theodosius, also called the Forum of Tauros. It was entered through a colossal triumphal arch held up by Corinthian columns that were carved with a distinctive teardrop pattern and adorned with carvings of marching soldiers (Figure 1).
Once through the arch, visitors would have found themselves in the largest public square in Constantinople. Encountering such a wide open space in the centre of a city would have been a novelty to those from western Europe where such towns as there were possessed no public space to speak of, the houses being packed in tightly within the walls. In all probability, the forum would have looked something like Trafalgar Square in London or the Place Vendéme in Paris, because it was dominated by a stone column that stood at its centre, this one bearing the name of Emperor Theodosius I (379-95). This column was the tallest in the city, standing over forty metres (120 feet) high. It must have towered above the square and there can have been few visitors who did not crane their necks to peer up at it. If they hoped to get a glimpse of the statue of Theodosius on his horse, they would have been disappointed, for in the year 480 an earthquake had brought it crashing down and it was never replaced.”
There was something else in the Forum of Theodosius which would have attracted the attention of those passing through it for the first time in 1200, just as it had the Nordic companions of King Sigurd. All around the square and on the triumphal arch itself were lifelike statues, mainly of past emperors, empresses and their families. Most striking of all was a huge bronze man on horseback, set on a white marble plinth. Like the statue of Marcian, his horse was crushing a small bound and kneeling man, but in this case, by 1200, no one could remember who it was that the statue was supposed to represent. Some said that it was the Old Testament hero Joshua, others that it was Bellerophon from Greek mythology, mounted upon Pegasus.” Statues such as these were to be found not just in the Forum of Theodosius but scattered everywhere around the highways and squares of Constantinople and they were as much a feature of the cityscape as the columns and the domes. Some, like the nameless horseman, were made of bronze. Others were marble, like the group of four men in red porphyry clasping their arms around each other, known as the ‘Philadelphion’ or brotherly love.> Some of them had been made during the Byzantine period in the city itself but many more were much older and had been brought to Constantinople from elsewhere.
One depicted the Hellenistic king Seleucus I (c. 358-281 Bc), his head adorned with horns. Guides explained the horns with a story that Alexander the Great had tried to sacrifice a bull, the animal had run away and only Seleucus had been able to catch it by grabbing its horns. Somewhat incongruously in such an overtly Christian city, many of these older statues were of pagan gods and goddesses. There was a winged figure of Hermes, the messenger of the gods, holding a golden pouch and a seated Zeus, chief of the gods, naked to the waist, a sceptre in his left hand and an eagle on his right. There was even a Priapus, his hallmark feature proudly held in his left hand.?° These works of art seem to have been preserved and cherished by the Byzantines of the twelfth century for their aesthetic merits, regardless of their pagan connotations. To visitors from remoter parts of the world, unused to realistic portrayals of the human figure, they must have been a source of wonder. Hence the remark of the author of the Norse Sigurd saga that the bronze statues of Constantinople were so cleverly made that they looked as if they were alive.?’
On leaving the Forum of Theodosius, the Mese led on to another open space, the Forum of Constantine, named after the founder of the city, Constantine the Great. The forum was oval shaped, with a shady portico along the entire length of its periphery, and its centrepiece was another towering column, this one made of reddish porphyry marble (Figure 2). It was under this column that the two thieves’ crosses, the twelve baskets of leftovers from the feeding of the five thousand and other relics were said to be buried.”*
The column had originally been surmounted with a bronze statue, with seven rays emanating from its head. It had probably first served as an image of the pagan god Apollo but it had later been recycled to depict Constantine the Great. Like the statue of Theodosius, this had now vanished, although it had met its end relatively recently. On a spring day in 1106, a particularly strong gust of wind had toppled the statue and sent it plummeting into the forum below where it had killed several unfortunate passers-by. It had since been replaced by a simple cross. The column itself was also showing signs of wear and tear and for some time had had to be held together with stout iron hoops to prevent it from falling down.” All around it stood statues of pagan goddesses. There was a nine-metre-high bronze image of Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom, helmeted with her hand stretched out towards the south, possibly the work of the Athenian sculptor, Phidias (c.490-c. 420 BcE). Nearby was a colossal representation of Hera, the queen of heaven and wife of Zeus, along with Tyche, the goddess of fortune, and a depiction of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, being presented with the Apple of Discord by Paris, the episode that was said ultimately to have led to the Trojan War.*°
From the Forum of Constantine, the Mese progressed rapidly towards the monumental heart of Byzantine Constantinople and opened into the last of the great squares, the Augousteion. Probably smaller than the Forum of Theodosius, the Augousteion was laid out in much the same way with a tall column at its centre. Unlike those of Theodosius and Constantine, this one had its bronze statue intact. Emperor Justinian, whose tomb was at the Holy Apostles, was depicted seated on a horse, facing east and holding in one hand an orb surmounted by a cross, while his other hand was raised in warning to his enemies. Menacing though Justinian looked, he was decidedly exposed up on his column to the prevailing wind that gusted around the Augousteion and would whistle mournfully around him. He was a favourite with the local herons who regularly built their nests on his head and along his horse’s back.*!
Quite apart from column, the Augousteion was filled with curiosities. There was the Anemodoulion or ‘the servant of the winds’, a four-sided structure that was as tall as many of the city’s columns and whose sides were intricately carved not only with animals and birds but also with a riotous scene of naked women pelting each other with apples. On top of it stood the bronze figure of a woman that served as a kind of weathervane and turned with the direction of the wind. Nearby was the Milion, a triumphal arch, which was surmounted by statues of Constantine the Great and his mother Helena, standing on either side of a cross. The arch covered a milestone from which all distances were measured. At the Milion stood the Horologion, a mechanical clock, one of whose twenty-four doors flew open at the appropriate hour of the day.” To one side of the square stood the Senate House, which was decorated with ancient columns and statues. On another was the Brazen Gate, a domed structure that formed the main entrance and vestibule to the Great Palace of the Byzantine emperors that lay beyond. There was a large mosaic image of Christ over the gateway and a church, dedicated to Christ the Saviour, precariously balanced on top.
When the gates were open, passers-by would have been able to glimpse the mosaic portraits of Emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora in the vestibule. Beyond that, most of the Great Palace would have been inaccessible but its gardens were open to the public during the early morning and again after three in the afternoon.**
To the south of the Augousteion stretched the Hippodrome, an extensive stadium some 400 metres in length which could seat up to 100,000 people. It had originally been designed for the staging of chariot races, and so at the Augousteion end it had twelve gates that could be opened simultaneously at the start of the contest. From there, the chariots raced to the far end of the track, wheeled around the central spine and galloped back to head for the winning post. By the twelfth century, the Hippodrome provided the venue not just for chariot races but for all kinds of public happening, from music and fireworks to displays of tightrope walking. In the year 961, it had been used to display the booty brought back by the successful expedition to reconquer the island of Crete. It was also where executions of prominent people took place and it played a key role in imperial ceremonial. That was why it had a special box for the emperor, known as the Kathisma that could be reached by a covered walkway from the Great Palace. Evidently the Hippodrome was the flat plain with banks of seating described by the author of the Norse saga of Sigurd.
Like the Augousteion, the Hippodrome was filled with curiosities. At one end of its central spine stood a four-sided, twenty-metre-high Egyptian obelisk. Made of a single piece of red granite, it was decorated with hieroglyphs and stood on a marble plinth that depicted Theodosius I surrounded by his family and courtiers.*° At the other end of the spine, the obelisk was mirrored by another, built of masonry and put there to match the Egyptian one. No one could remember who had originally set it up but Emperor Constantine VII (945-59), who usually had the epithet ‘Porphyrogenitos’ or ‘born in the purple’ added to his name, had decided to improve its appearance. He had covered it with gilded plates of bronze and added an inscription recording his generosity, so it was often referred to as the column of Constantine Porphyrogenitos.** There were statues and monuments everywhere. Some honoured successful charioteers and inscriptions underneath celebrated their victories, like this one:
Constantinus, having won four and twenty races in one morning, changed his team with his rival’s and, taking the same horses that he had formerly beaten, won twenty-one times with them!°”
There were ancient statues too, including some of the most whimsical and intriguing in the entire city. There was a colossal Hercules, so gigantic that a man’s belt would fit comfortably around its thumb, the work of Lysippus of Sicyon, the famous sculptor of the fourth century Bcr. Some observers were rather perplexed by the statue, as Hercules was portrayed in a pensive mood, resting after his labours:
Hercules, where is thy great club? Where thy Nemean cloak and quiver full of arrows, where thy stern glower? Why did Lysippus mould thee thus with dejected visage?
There was an appropriately lovely Helen of Troy and, by way of contrast, some hideous sphinxes who had the bodies of women to their waists and those of animals below it. A plethora of animals complemented the usual gods and mythological figures. They included an elephant waving its trunk, an eagle which doubled up as a sun dial, and the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. On a tower above the starting gates, stood four gilded copper horses yoked together to draw a chariot, ‘their necks somewhat curved as if they eyed each other as they raced around the last lap’, as one contemporary put it. Most celebrated of all was a frighteningly realistic bronze statue of the Calydonian boar, with bristles down its back, which according to legend was sent to ravage the lands of the king of Calydon after he neglected his sacrifices to Artemis.*?
Some of the monuments in the Hippodrome had long histories behind them. The Serpent Column, a bronze sculpture of three intertwined serpents whose heads looked out in different directions, was on the central spine, between the two obelisks. It had originally been dedicated to the god Apollo at Delphi in Greece in 478 BcE to commemorate the resounding defeat of the Persians by the Greeks at the Battle of Plataea. A bronze statue of an ass being driven by its keeper had originally been set up by the Roman emperor Augustus (31 BcE-14 ce), close to the site of his victory over Mark Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BcE. On the eve of the battle, Augustus had met with a man and his ass and on asking who he was and where he was going, received the answer ‘I am Eutychus (i.e. “Prosper”), my ass is called Nikon (i.e. “Victory”) and I am going to Caesar’s camp. With hindsight, Augustus decided that this must have been an omen from the gods and commissioned the statue as a thank-offering. Both artefacts had been moved to the Hippodrome from their original homes centuries before.*°
Like the columns, the classical statues of Constantinople had accumulated their share of strange lore over the centuries. Much of it concerned those which no longer existed in 1200. It was said that there used to be a statue of the goddess Aphrodite outside a brothel which had a peculiar power. Whenever an unchaste woman walked past, her skirts would fly up, whereas virtuous women were unaffected. The statue had long since been smashed on the orders of a senator’s daughter who had been caught out as she passed by. Then there was an enormous bronze ox that used to bellow once a year and when it did, disasters were sure to follow. In the end, an emperor ordered it to be thrown into the sea.*! Those statues that still stood were also objects of awe, fascination and superstition, especially, for some reason, the Calydonian boar in the Hippodrome. One emperor came to believe that it was his alter ego and provided it with new sets of teeth and genitals in the belief that this would have a restorative effect on those parts of his own body. Another moved it into his palace during a period of civil unrest in the hope that it would protect him against the rioting mob.”
Intriguing though the Hippodrome was, for most visitors the most memorable sight of Constantinople was its cathedral of Hagia Sophia, also known as St Sophia or the Holy Wisdom. At thirty-two metres across and over fifty-five metres high, its immense single dome was higher even than the columns of Theodosius, Arcadius and Constantine, so that the building dominated the Augousteion and was visible to ships far out at sea. Inside the cathedral, the sense of size and space was even more striking. So vast was the area enclosed with no apparent means of support that the dome seemed almost to float in the air.
Natural light was provided by forty small windows that ran around the base of the dome but when that failed, there were over a hundred chandeliers hanging from silver chains, each of which held some twenty-five lamps. Just as in the Holy Apostles, mosaic decoration covered the entire space of the dome, and columns of different coloured marble, red, purple and green, supported the gallery that ran around the nave. Sunlight suffused the building from different angles at different hours of the day, shining in from the upper windows and illuminating the gold mosaics and marble columns with dazzling light. A ‘golden stream of glittering rays’, as a poet wrote, ‘strikes the eyes of men, so that they can scarcely bear to look’. At ground level there was plenty of evidence of the conspicuous wealth for which Constantinople was famous. The altar was made of gold and studded with jewels and covered by a gilded canopy. The altar rail, sanctuary doors and pulpit were overlaid with silver and the numerous icons of the saints were mounted in frames of precious metal.
In common with most of Constantinople’s churches, Hagia Sophia had its share of relics and they were of a significance to match that of the cathedral. Visitors could gaze upon the stone well cover upon which Christ sat when he conversed with the woman of Samaria and the table on which the Last Supper had been laid out. Locked away in its treasury were the swaddling clothes of the infant Jesus and the gold that had been offered to him by the three magi. The great entrance doors were said to be made from the wood of Noah’s ark.** Quite apart from the relics, even the very fabric of the building was perceived to have some kind of supernatural power. The pillars that supported the galleries were supposed to have special healing properties when rubbed by afflicted persons, particular columns specializing in certain ailments. The bolt on one of the main doors was believed to have the power to cure dropsy when the sufferer placed it in his mouth.*°
Emerging from the cathedral into the daylight and the broad space of the Augousteion, visitors in the year 1200 would then have sought out some of the other attractions in the area. They might visit the church of the monastery of St George in Mangana, a large and impressive imperial foundation or the monastery of the Hodegoi which housed an icon of Christ that had supposedly been painted by the evangelist St Luke.** Even smaller and more obscure churches had some claim to fame. The Church of the Forty Martyrs was home to an icon of Christ whose frame was covered in gold and gems. It had once astonished an emperor by speaking to him and predicting the imminent end of his reign. The Church of St Romanos was the resting place of the Old Testament prophet Daniel and of St Niketas the Goth who was martyred for his Christian faith in 372.4”
The churches, the relics, the icons and the statues would have preoccupied most visitors but for those who came or diplomatic business from friendly powers there was an extra dimension to the experience. Constantinople’s wealth was as much part of its myth as everything else and to perpetuate it, the emperors ensured that their important guests never departed emptyhanded. The gifts showered on Sigurd of Norway and his party were by no means unprecedented. The Turkish sultan Kilij Arslan II received ‘gold and silver coins, luxuriant raiment, silver beakers, golden Theriklean vessels, linens of the finest weave and other choice ornaments’ when he visited Constantinople in 1162. For the Norman prince Bohemond of Taranto, an entire room was filled with gold, silver and silk garments. An envoy from Italy had only to drop a hint to be presented by the emperor at once with a large cloak and a pound of gold coins.** For those from regions where money did not circulate widely and gold coins were something that most people would never see, the Byzantine emperor’s ability to shower bagfuls of them on his guests must have seemed little short of a miracle much like the talking icon or the healing pillars.
To medieval visitors then, time spent in Constantinople was not just a tourist visit but a kind of religious experience. The tales and superstitions were every bit as real as the physical grandeur that they saw around them and in some ways clearly much more important, for many travellers’ accounts are simply lists of the relics that they had seen and miracle stories that they had heard. Many came specifically to see the relics rather than the city itself and were often passing through as part of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The chances are that by nightfall, visitors who had entered through the Gate of Adrianople at dawn and made their way from there to the Augousteion would have visited several churches on the way and reverently kissed the relics that they were shown there on payment of the usual fee. They would also have been regaled with all kinds of stories about the monuments and statues that they passed. Even so, they had only experienced a fraction of the wonders of Constantinople. As one of them concluded, ‘Even though the visitor should day by day return, seeing all he could, yet always on the morrow there would be new sights to view.’?? It would have taken a lifetime to see them all.
TEXT BOX 1: A DESCRIPTION OF CONSTANTINOPLE BY AN ANONYMOUS WESTERN VISITOR
This account was written in Latin in the late eleventh century by an unknown individual who seems to have spent time in the Byzantine capital with a view to learning Greek.
Constantinople is a certain city, sited between Asia and Greece, the capital of the eastern empire, and the noblest city in the whole Roman world. Most people say and believe that a third of the gold and silver in the world is there. Some say half of it is in Constantinople and others two thirds, with a third left to the rest of the world. Which of all these might be the most accurate, however, is for those who want to inquire about such things to consider.
For one such as me, who has travelled through many tracts of land and has seen many things in many regions, it seems that as far and as wide as the boundary of the west at Jerusalem, there is not as much gold and silver as there is in the city of Constantinople. Thus when IJ arrived there and looked around me, I was caught up in a stupor of the mind by the wonderful vision of so many amazing things. There I was seeing things that I had not seen [before], that is to say countless churches of marble decorated inside with gold, covered with lead on the outside; marble palaces, these too roofed with lead; images of four-footed and winged animals of every kind, wonderfully and skilfully made from stone or metal; and what exceeded each and every one of these things in admiration, the theatre that the Greeks call the Hippodrome and the Church of Hagia Sophia.
There are to be seen many thousands of men dressed in garments made entirely of silk and also many people of different faith and speech. Here Greeks live, there Armenians, in this area dwell the Syrians, in that the Lombards. The English, who are also called Varangians, live in another place, the Dacians in another, further on are the Amalfitans. The French, the Jews and the Pechenegs also have their dwellings in the same city. However, the Greeks have the largest and best part of the city and the rule of it and all the other races that live there are subject to them. Thus this noble city is made wondrous above all other cities in the world with gold and silver, marble and lead, cloaks and silk and great worldly glory and it is made more glorious by the bodies of the saints which it possesses and especially on account of the sanctuaries of our Lord Jesus Christ of which there are believed to be more there than anywhere else in the world.
I will speak briefly and concisely about these things. It is said that the cloths in which the blessed child of salvation was wrapped are kept there, the gold also that the Magi offered which, when held to the ears, always makes a ringing noise and in a wonderful way because it is heard to whisper. These things are held in the treasury of Hagia Sophia. In the palace of the emperor, on the other hand, is held a large part of the True Cross of the Lord, a genuine nail with which the Lord was crucified, the Crown of Thorns with which he was crowned, the reed that he held in his hand, the sandals that he wore on his feet, the lance with which he was pierced, the stone that he had at his head in the tomb, the basin in which he washed the feet of his disciples and the letter which he wrote with his own hand and sent to King Abgar. Furthermore in a place in the city are said to be the twelve baskets together with the fragments of bread that were left behind by the five thousand people who were filled by the Lord Jesus with five loaves and two fishes ...
The right arm of the blessed John the Baptist is held there and at Epiphany water is blessed by it. The head of the blessed Paul, as the Greeks say, is held there and on the feast of the Martyrdom of the two Apostles [i.e. 29 June] it is taken from the palace, where it is served by priests, accompanied by a throng of people with the highest honour and chanting to the Church of the Apostles. There that same day is made a great gathering of all the people of the city, the patriarch celebrating a solemn, sacred Mass ... In the same Church of the Apostles inside the altar lies the body of the blessed apostle Andrew and with him the body of the blessed Luke the Evangelist and of the martyr Timothy, the disciple of Paul the Apostle. Moreover in front of that holy altar the bodies of saints lie concealed in the earth, namely John Chrysostom and Gregory Nazianzus who is also called the Theologian.
At the head of the church is a round chapel of marble which is called the chapel of Emperor Constantine, in which reposes the said Constantine along with his holy mother Helena in a huge and costly tomb of porphyry. The tombs of many not unworthy emperors and patriarchs are to be seen in that church. There is not time to discuss this church’s size and beauty. For it is second in size after Hagia Sophia which is unequalled among all the churches of the world. For there are among the many churches of the city of Constantinople three that are more costly and of greater worth among all the others, that is to say Hagia Sophia, the Holy Apostles and the Holy Mother of God which is called of Blachernae.
Translated by the author from K. N. Ciggaar, ‘Une description de Constantinople dans le Tarragonensis 55’, Revue des Etudes Byzantines, 53 (1995): 117-40 at 119-22.
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