Download PDF | Alexander Beihammer, Stavroula Constantinou, Maria Parani (eds.) - Court Ceremonies and Rituals of Power in Byzantium and the Medieval Mediterranean ,Comparative Perspectives, Brill 2013
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors would like to thank all those who made it possible for the contributors to visit Cyprus in late November of 2010 for the purpose of sharing their ideas about court ceremonies and rituals of power in Byzantium and the medieval Mediterranean. The Department of History and Archaeology and the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies generously funded the expenses of this gathering. The Director of the Archaeological Research Unit, Prof. Demetrios Michaelides, kindly allowed us to use his facility for hosting the three-day event. The secretary of the Department of History and Archaeology, Eleni Hadjistylianou, was as usual helpful and efficient, putting in many extra hours to make things run smoothly. The assistance of the students of both Departments and of the University’s technical support staff was much appreciated. Our special thanks go to Eugenia Hadjiloizou, who prepared the index and assisted us in the preparation of the bibliography of this volume. We would also like to express our gratitude to the series editors for accepting the book and to the anonymous reader for his numerous useful comments. Working with Marcella Mulder at Brill has been a great pleasure. Last but not least, Alexander Beihammer whishes to express his special gratitude to Prof. Christopher Schabel and Dr. Natasha Constantinidou (both University of Cyprus) for their much appreciated support in various linguistic matters.
The editors Nicosia, February 2013
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
PANAGIOTIS A. AGAPITOS is Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Cyprus. His research interests are the critical edition of Byzantine texts and the theory of editorial method, the history of manuscripts and education in Byzantium, the theoretical interpretation of Byzantine literature, Byzantine rhetoric and poetics, the representation and literary function of death in Byzantine literature. He has published Narrative Structure in the Byzantine Vernacular Romances (Munich, 1991), The Study of Medieval Greek Romance (Copenhagen, 1992), Theodoros Metochites on Greek Philosophy and Ancient History (Gothenburg, 1996), the first critical edition of the thirteenth-century verse romance Livistros and Rhodamne (Athens, 2006), and most recently Between History and Fiction: Medieval Narratives between History and Fiction: From the Centre to the Periphery of Europe, 100-1400 (Copenhagen, 2012), a volume edited with L. B. Mortensen.
CHRISTINE ANGELIDI is Research Director emerita at the Institute for Historical Research in Athens. She has written on hagiography, literature, cultural history, icons and cult, and Byzantine interpretation of ancient art. She has published Pulcheria. La castita al potere (Milan, 1998), has collaborated in A. Kazhdan’s, A History of Byzantine Literature, vols. 1-2, (Athens, 1999, 2006), and has edited the volume Byzantium matures: Choices, Sensitivities and Modes of Expression [Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries] (Athens, 2004).
STEFAN BURKHARDT is research fellow at the Academy of Sciences and Humanities and Visiting Professor at the University of Heidelberg. His research interests include political culture, political structures and forms of interaction between lay and ecclesiastical authorities in the Early and High Middle Ages, the Medieval Mediterranean and the history of technology and science. He has published Mit Stab und Schwert. Bilder, Trager und Funktionen erzbischéflicher Herrschaft zur Zeit Kaiser Friedrich Barbarossas. Die Erzbistiimer Kéln und Mainz im Vergleich, MittelalterForschungen 22 (Ostfildern, 2008) and is currently preparing the publication of his second monograph Mediterranes Kaisertum und imperiale Ordnungen. Das lateinische Kaiserreich von Konstantinopel.
ANTONIA GIANNOULI is Assistant Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Cyprus. Her research interests focus on hymnography and religious poetry, theological commentaries and homiletics, rhetoric, textual criticism and editorial practice. She is the author of a study on the Commentaries of Andrew of Crete on the Great Canon and coeditor of the collective volume From Manuscripts to Books. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Textual Criticism and Editorial Practice for Byzantine Texts (Vienna, 2011). She is currently preparing a critical edition of the Exegetical Didascalies of Leon Balianites.
Eric J. HANNE is Associate Professor of History, Florida Atlantic University, and conducts research on the development and manifestation of power and authority in the eleventh- and twelfth-century central Islamic lands. The author of Putting the Caliph in His Place: Power, Authority, and the Late Abbasid Caliphate (Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 2007), he is currently working on a project involving the Mazyadid dynasty of Hilla.
MarRTIN HINTERBERGER is Associate Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Cyprus. His research focuses on emotions in Byzantine literature, the language of Byzantine texts, autobiography and hagiography. His has recently published a book on Phthonos in Byzantine literature and is currently working on a study of the learned Byzantine language.
Mari KANTIREA is Assistant Professor of Ancient History and Epigraphy at the University of Cyprus. She is the author of Les dieux et les dieux Augustes. Le culte impérial en Gréce sous les Julio-claudiens et les Flaviens (Athens, 2007). Apart from her studies on the Roman imperial cult, her current research focuses on religion and urban development in the Eastern Roman provinces and she is preparing a book under the title Liewx sacrés en Orient romain (with the first volume referring to the provincia Asiae). She is also co-editor (with Daniela Summa) of the forthcoming IG XV.2 (Inscriptiones Graecae insulae Cypri: Inscriptiones Cypri alphabeticae).
HENRY Macurrz is Emeritus Professor at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. His most recent book is Nectar and Illusion: Nature in Byzantine Art and Literature (Oxford University Press, 2012). Among other topics, his research has concerned relationships between Byzantine art and literature, Byzantine secular art, and Byzantine attitudes to nature.
ANDREW MarsHAM is Lecturer in Islamic History at the University of Edinburgh. His publications include Rituals of Islamic Monarchy: Accession and Succession in the First Muslim Empire (Edinburgh, 2009) and various chapters and articles focusing on late antique and early Islamic political culture and on Arabic historiography. At present he is working on a history of the early Islamic world, The Umayyad Empire, to be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2014.
MARGARET MULLETT is Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C. Previously she was the Professor of Byzantine Studies at the Queen’s University Belfast. Her research interests focus on literary practices, the literary process in Byzantium, performance, dream, court culture and ceremony, muses and the monasteries. She is the author of Theophylact of Ochrid: Reading the Letters of a Byzantine Archbishop (Aldershot, 1997) and Letters, Literacy and Literature in Byzantium (Aldershot, 2007). She is also the editor of Dumbarton Oaks Papers.
WALTER POHL is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Vienna and Director of the Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He has taught at UCLA (Los Angeles, USA), Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, CEU Budapest and at the University of Ishevsk (Russia). He is fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and has been awarded the Wittgenstein prize (2004) and the ERC Advanced Grant (2010). His fields of study cover the transformation of the Roman world and early medieval history, especially the role of ethnicity, migration and identity formation, the history of Eastern Central Europe and of the Eurasian steppe peoples, Italian cultural and political history and early medieval historiography and its manuscript transmission. Books: Die Awaren (20027), Die Germanen (2000), Werkstédtte der Erinnerung—Montecassino und die langobardische Vergangenheit (2001), Die Volkerwanderung (20057), Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World (ed. 2012).
IOANNA RaPT! is currently Newton Fellow in the Centre for Hellenic Studies & Department of Classics at King’s College, London with a project on Armenian Cilicia during the Crusades. Her research interests are Armenian and Eastern Christian art, manuscript production and illumination in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia and its cultural interactions with the Christian and Islamic world. She has published on illuminated manuscripts as well as the material culture, architecture and topography of Armenian Cilicia, and co-edited the exhibition catalogues Armenia Sacra (2007) and Sainte Russie (2010) at the Louvre.
JONATHAN SHEPARD was for many years University Lecturer in Russian History at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Selwyn College and Peterhouse, and is Doctor Honoris Causa at St Kliment Ohrid University in Sofia. He is co-author with Simon Franklin of The Emergence of Rus (London, 1996), with whom he also edited Byzantine Diplomacy (Aldershot, 1992). His edited volumes include The Expansion of Orthodox Europe (Aldershot, 2007) and The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire (Cambridge, 2008). He recently published a collection of studies in Emergent Elites and Byzantium in the Balkans and East-Central Europe (Farnham, 2011) and is currently working on a general European history of the tenth and eleventh centuries.
Jo VAN STEENBERGEN is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Department of Languages and Cultures of the Near East and North Africa at Ghent University, Belgium. His research interests concern the history of the Islamic middle period (ca. 1000-1500 CE/400-go00 AH), mainly focusing on (semi)Turkic dynasties and social systems in Syria and Egypt (Seljugs, Zengids, Ayyubids, Mamluks), Islamic political culture, prosopography, and urban history, including comparative, trans-regional/-cultural perspectives. He was awarded a prestigious European Research Council Starting Grant and is author of Order out of Chaos: Patronage, Conflict and Mamluk Socio-Political Culture, 1341-1382. He is currently working on the history of the Mamluk Empire to be published by Edinburgh University Press.
ByORN WEILER is professor of history at Aberystwyth University. Research interests centre on the history of kingship, and on the historical culture of high medieval Western Europe. Key publications include King Henry III of England and the Staufen Empire (2006), Kingship, Rebellion & Political Culture (2007), England and Europe in the Reign of Henry III (edited with Ifor Rowlands, 2002), and Representations of Power in Medieval Germany (edited with Simon MacLean, 2006). He is currently completing a study of kingship in the high medieval Latin West. Political Culture in Three Spheres: Byzantium, Islam and the West (edited with Jonathan Shepard, Catherine Holmes and Jo Van Steenbergen) will appear in 2015.
COMPARATIVE APPROACHES TO THE RITUAL WORLD OF THE MEDIEVAL MEDITERRANEAN
Alexander Beihammer
Pleased to meet you Hope you guess my name But what’s puzzling you Is the nature of my game (M. Jagger/K. Richards, Sympathy for the Devil)
Modern ritual studies, a very young discipline going back to the late 1970s, define their research subject very broadly as “all kinds of symbolic acts.”! In contrast to older concepts which usually regarded rituals as secondary phenomena of specific social and psychological contexts, recent empiric and theoretical approaches examine them as entities sui generis embedded in a great variety of cultural milieux and social subsystems, such as politics, law, science, art, education, economics, and religion.? They are by no means merely ornamental ingredients of social relations, but very essential modes of human expression creating and confirming cultural meaning. Consequently, they are nowadays viewed in close connection with the notion of performance, which in this context refers to the conscious projection or ritualization of social acts.? A second key aspect in the study of ritual behaviour is its relevance for human communication, a perspective that resulted from the so-called linguistic turn in humanities and social sciences. A case in point is what is known as performative speech, i-e., strictly formalized forms of speech, as occur in greetings, oaths, formulas of investiture, prayers and so on and serve as tools to display concepts of order and to create social relations.* All in all, we may speak of rituals as culturally standardized and repetitive forms of action of symbolic character, which aim at exerting influence on human affairs and allow a better understanding of man’s position in the universe. In this sense they fulfil an essential function in creating or securing emotional and symbolic coherence, harmony, identity, and memory among members of a community, they mark ruptures and thresholds in a community’s social structure, they provide mechanisms for overcoming crises, and, not least, they help people communicate with a transcendent sphere of supernatural forces.
Of crucial significance for all topics discussed in the contributions of the present volume is the question as to what role rituals play in political life. On the basis of a broad and disparate set of cases extending from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, the anthropologist David I. Kertzer laid the theoretical foundation for understanding rituals as mechanisms producing and maintaining solidarity through a constant process of renewal engendered by people acting together. On a functional level, he argues, rituals serve as symbolic tools enabling individuals to identify with political regimes and supporting rulers to legitimate themselves and to maintain their grasp on power. Ritual, therefore, because of its neutrality regarding political ideologies, is a very efficient resource and weapon in political struggles.5 Another direction in modern sociology and political sciences applies theories of semiotics to the analysis of modern political systems by focusing on language as a form of political action and on the way political institutions and processes are organized as spectacles through dramaturgical elements and highly stylized and schematic forms of communication.®
It is well known that, in the framework of a general trend towards anthropological approaches and a re-interpretation of political mechanisms and practices,’ from the 1980s onwards the role and function of rituals in premodern societies has become a very prominent research topic among medievalists, producing an impressive range of studies related to aspects of verbal and non-verbal symbolic modes of expression and ritual forms of action during the Middle Ages. An early attempt to bring historians and anthropologists together in an interdisciplinary discussion on rituals of royalty consciously ignored the boundaries of geographical areas and traditional periodizations, juxtaposing case studies as dispersed in time and space as ancient Babylon, imperial Rome, tenth-century Byzantium, Carolingian France, China, Nepal, Madagascar, and present-day Ghana.° It became clear, thus, that the two disciplines, despite their different angles and methodological approaches, basically envisage very similar phenomena regarding the functional significance of rites and ceremonies for the legitimization, stabilization, display and ideological underpinning of royal authority and complement each other with respect to the analysis of symbolic forms of expression in the framework of their political context. The starting point and theoretical presupposition of all of these studies is the (supposedly) archaic character of medieval societies, which in contrast to the egalitarian thinking of modern systems is based on concepts of a strict hierarchical order in both worldly and transcendental spheres.? These, in turn, were framed and consolidated by a wide range of signs, symbols, gestures, and formalized patterns of action, which, as Jean-Claude Schmitt put it, give this strange and far removed society a “profoundly ritualized character,” enabling each individual to ascertain his belonging to a certain group and to project hierarchical relations within a group.!° Specialists also emphasize the crucial role of ritual acts in a society which, apart from a narrow elite of educated monks or court officials, did not show much sensibility for the subtleties of the written word and its validating force." Another aspect to be taken into account is the nature of political power and authority in the Middle Ages, which in many respects differs from modern concepts of statehood and centralized mechanisms of control. Medieval political entities did not dispose of the means to impose their will and exert full authority in all parts of their realm. The degree of a monarch’s actual power very much depended upon the equilibrium and consensus among the members of the ruling elite, as well as upon his ability to contain conflicts. The norms defining public authority and kingship certainly differed from those regulating the modern central state. It has been sufficiently demonstrated that under these circumstances rituals and symbolic forms of communication proved to be a highly efficient means of facilitating the functioning of political and social processes in general and the creation of cohesion and solidarity among political players in particular. These phenomena, therefore, form key features for a better understanding of the particularities of the exertion and manifestation of power in the Middle Ages.!
It is remarkable, however, that the overwhelming majority of these studies are centred on medieval western and central Europe, i-e., the territories of the Carolingian Empire, the kingdoms of France and England, the Holy Roman Empire, and some of the surrounding peripheries. In addition there is a strong focus on the high Middle Ages from the ninth to the thirteenth century; much less has been done in this respect on the period of the barbarian migrations and the early Middle Ages,'° while studies on the late Middle Ages, most likely because of the abundance of source material, are quite unevenly distributed in terms of geographical and thematic variety. Therefore, although the scholarly interest in ritual practices and forms of expression within the past two decades became something like standard knowledge and an indispensable prerequisite for further investigations of manifestations of power and political authority, it seems that most of the available results have been developed on the basis of high medieval European societies.
It would go beyond the task of this introductory chapter to provide a complete list of the theoretical approaches, diverging views, and stunning results brought forth by individual scholars and schools of thought over the past decades. Despite the fact that the areas of interest in stud-ies on medieval rituals widely differ and many opposing views have been expressed about the nature and actual significance of ritual acts in the framework of pre-modern political life, there certainly is a general consensus that the traditional way of describing medieval legal systems, institutions, and political processes can no longer be considered appropriate for an adequate interpretation of these phenomena. Instead of applying modern concepts of political leadership, public authority, and constitutional law on the Middle Ages, one has to analyze patterns of political behaviour against the conceptual and ideological background of the time in which they occur. Rituals, in one way or another, certainly formed an important aspect of the whole complex. Geoffrey Koziol, in his review article of Philippe Buc’s The Dangers of Ritual, points out that the latter, despite his scepticism towards the use of the term “ritual” and his insistence on literary reconstructions, still discusses and interprets rituals just as many other historians do.'® Rituals, thus, have gained solid ground in conceptualizations and categorizations of medieval social and political realities. The most rigorous revision of principles and working assumptions of political processes in the Middle Ages is certainly owed to Gerd Althoff and the school of thought he has inaugurated.!° In his view, ritual forms of behaviour constitute the key to a radical paradigm change from the German concept of “Verfassungsgeschichte” based on the analysis of legal principles and feudal institutions to new interpretative patterns grounded in the idea of a set of unwritten “norms, rules and customs” regulating the smooth functioning of structures of power as well as core elements of political life, such as the escalation and development of conflicts, the termination of hostilities, and the creation of consensus through counselling and negotiations. All these phenomena are closely connected with the specific characteristics of public communication, as expressed on the occasion of diets and other political assemblies. The mental and ideological framework of these processes is set up by a pronounced sense for rank and honour among the members of the ruling elite and by a strong network of interpersonal ties based on bonds of friendship and kinship.” In a somewhat overstated manner, thus, political power is conceived of as working “in the absence of state,” which is substituted by unwritten rules and generally accepted forms of behaviour with a ritual character. In this context communication plays a crucial role for both the secret process of decision making and the publication of political decisions.!® This latter aspect of communication, which is the best evidenced in the narrative sources, is closely related to the key concept of staging political decisions and agreements by the aid of forms of behaviour, signs, and gestures. This procedure entails a certain degree of self-assurance as to the existing status quo as well as the obligation to abide by publicly projected accords and, therefore, essentially contributes to a stabilization of the existing order through public control. To a great extent, political authority is exerted through and on the strength of its public representation.!9
As has been pointed out by Walter Pohl in his contribution to this volume, there is an ongoing discussion about how rituals or ritualized actions should be defined in the context of late antique and medieval political practices. Both qualitative and functional features of rituals, such as formality, repetition, reference to supernatural authorities, transformation, affirmation, etc., certainly do play an important role in the public manifestation of political acts and the strengthening of loyalties, as Althoff and his school have convincingly demonstrated, but it has to be further clarified to what extent all these constituents actually engendered or determined the outcome of political decisions. Was it the rituals themselves which created consensus and controlled transformative processes or were there other equally or even more decisive factors at work in the social network and communicative behaviour of hegemonial groups? Again it is the discrepancy between the ritual act as historical fact and its subsequent narrative interpretation in historical writing which poses problems of interpretation to modern observers. Medieval authors skilfully used rituals as a means to convey the message of lawful order and legitimacy of kingship—Bjérn Weiler’s chapter in this volume adds a number of inter-esting conclusions to this discussion—, but this does not automatically imply that the ritual action in the moment of its performance already had the same legitimating force. It is also important to understand that rituals obviously did not have the same prominence at all times and in all facets of political life. As regards the diplomatic relations between the Roman Empire and the barbarians in the fifth and sixth century, for instance, Walter Pohl arrives at the conclusion that the authors of that period certainly touched upon ritual and ceremonial aspects, but did not consider them a predominant integrative force within the framework of cross-cultural political encounters. Major impulses for a further methodological, thematic and chronological broadening of the original concepts and premises developed by the German school of historical ritual studies were provided by the two Collaborative Research Centres SFB 619 “Ritual Dynamics: Socio-Cultural Processes from a Historical and Culturally Comparative Perspective” and SFB 496 “Symbolic Communication and Social Value Systems from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution” funded by the German Research Foundation DFG and established at the Universities of Heidelberg and Miinster respectively.?° By the bundling of a great number of specialists and research programmes in various fields, disciplines, geographical areas, and periods, the investigation of human rituals with their manifold cultural ramifications is set on a very broad basis, allowing the verification or modification of results drawn from specific cultural and political environments in the context of a comprehensive comparative perspective. Approaching rituals and symbolic communication as historical phenomena of longue durée stretching from the early Middle Ages to the early modern period and as phenomena shared by different cultural and religious spheres is no doubt a forward-looking and future-oriented viewpoint which is also adopted by the authors of the present volume.
As a result of the impressive multiplication of scholarly output over the past decades, the field has split into several clearly discernible research areas.?! A first category picks up well-established lines of investigation concerning the ceremonial, symbolic language, and representative features of medieval courts and residences as points of reference of rulership and hegemonial groups.2” These studies, while drawing on older works focussing on the ideological, architectonical, functional, and decorative framework of residences, have significantly broadened their methodological approach by analyzing spaces of authority in conjunction with elements of performance, including physical gestures, court etiquettes, repetitive and stereotyped acts (rituals in the strict sense of the word), choreographed and scripted spectacles (ceremonies), forms of representation, structural and architectural aspects of spaces, symbols, and the public, consisting of aristocrats and officials present at a ruler’s court.?° All these elements served ruling elites as efficient tools to visualize their power and to project their self-awareness as bearers of sovereignty. Medievalist approaches to court cultures and the ceremonial setting of kingship certainly call for a comparison with ancient monarchies and their court societies. A collective volume published by A. J. S. Spawforth, for instance, presents structural, ideological, and organisational patterns of courts and palace complexes in antiquity stretching from Achaemenid Persia to Egypt, Rome, and China.2* These studies, in turn, enable medievalists to detect long-term continuities and common mentalities determining the behaviour and social organisation of ruling elites irrespective of time and space. In particular, the imperial court of the late Roman Empire, as it crystallized in the time following the reforms of Diocletian (284-305) and Constantine the Great (306/324—337), should always be taken into account as the place of origin for a great number of ideological patterns and ceremonial elements surviving in medieval Byzantium, partly until the Ottoman conquest of 1453, and partly even beyond in the context of the newly emerging Islamic empire centred in the ancient ChristianRoman metropolis on the Bosporus. Another line of continuity extends to the court cultures of the barbarian successor states, which integrated and ideologically elevated their own models of kingship through the adoption of Roman elements.”> It comes as no surprise, therefore, that one of the most recent publications on royal courts makes an attempt to put the subject in a global perspective, expanding the chronological and geographical frame to almost all empires in world history, from ancient Assyria to early modern China, Mughal India, Ottoman Istanbul, French Versailles, and Habsburg Vienna.2® Thus, apart from an ever-increasing amount of specialized literature on court cultures in certain periods and areas, there is a growing interest in continuities and long-term developments observable throughout the centuries from antiquity to modern times, as well as in parallels and comparative perspectives encompassing political entities in Europe and Asia. In this context, the outstanding position of Constantinople and the Byzantine imperial court as a centre preserving the heritage of Roman and Hellenistic ceremonial traditions and, at the same time, as a place of innovation disseminating new ideological features and forms of royal display to courts in Western Europe and the Muslim East has been broadly well perceived.?” Jonathan Shepard’s exemplary analysis in this volume of cross-cultural exchanges between Constantinople and potentates of tenth-century France vividly illustrates the potential and formative power of these networks of ritual cross-fertilization. More work has to be done with respect to the transmission and adoption of ritual elements in the realm of Mediterranean court cultures, which came to be established in the wake of the Norman conquests in Southern Italy and Sicily, the Crusades and the expansion of the Italian naval powers, especially after 1204. The chapters of Stefan Burkhardt and Joanna Rapti in this volume on rituals in the Latin Empire of Constantinople (1204-1261) and the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia form important steps in this direction.
A second category is concerned with specific rituals or chains of ritual, ceremonial and symbolic elements within a broader context of political events and situations of outstanding significance. Here one may also subsume various patterns of political behaviour which required certain forms of verbal and symbolic communication and thus were closely connected to ritual acts. Displaying emotional conditions through gestures, facial expressions, and bodily postures,?® visualizing decisions and goals, expressing hostile or friendly intentions and various levels of personal relations,2° and demonstrating superiority or inferiority in rank and status with the aid of a complicated system of symbolic modes of expression are some of the reoccurring phenomena mentioned persistently in the narrative sources. They occur, for instance, during the initial or closing phases of political conflicts,3° in the course of mediation procedures,*! in secret and public negotiations,®? in acts of submission through publicly projected signs of deference and rituals of self-humiliation and penitence,** in scenes of begging pardon and favour,** in official meetings of rulers*® or in certain key moments of a sovereign’s life, such as investitures, coronations, dynastic marriages, funerals, public appearances, diplomatic con-
tacts, and adventus ceremonies.*° Crucial aspects are the organization and staging of these acts, on the one hand, and the audience attending them, on the other. This includes the entire range of people who in one way or another were involved in the conceptualization, preparation, and arrangement of ceremonial settings and rituals in imperial capitals and palace complexes. Equally important are the goals that the choreographers of such events were pursuing and of course the messages they conveyed to the spectators. One may reconstruct the texture of ceremonial procedures and the semiotic layers of individual symbols and gestures, relating them to the ideological framework and self-awareness of ruling elites and their subjects in order to detect the functional significance of ceremonial languages in political systems. No doubt, these matters can be much better examined with respect to the later Middle Ages in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, where we dispose of a huge amount of documentary sources (council minutes, account books, administrative texts) and normative descriptions.*’ Things are more complicated regarding earlier periods in East and West, where, apart from a limited number of pictorial representations, the bulk of the available material consists of narrative sources pertaining to various historiographical traditions. The highly selective character of these descriptions, which usually focus on certain sequences and the main protagonists while obscuring preceding agreements, negotiations, and ceremonial features not supporting the author's argument, hardly allows a look beneath the surface. Nevertheless, what is still perceivable to a certain degree, even through the intermediary link of contemporary and later historical narratives, is the constellation of power relations and the identity and agency of factions within various political elites. This volume presents several cases of succession procedures in different cultural and political contexts as crucial moments in the transition of power or the stabilization of ruling groups. The projection of specific royal virtues during the elections of kings in eleventh- and twelfth-century Germany, Poland, and England are closely linked to the political concepts of the supporters of the respective incumbent. Mu‘awiya’s accession to the caliphate in 661 combined tribal Arab and Roman imperial rituals and thus was addressed to a mixed audience consisting of Arab nomads and the overwhelmingly Christian urban population of Jerusalem. The oath of allegiance enacting succession to the Abbasid court of Baghdad in the eleventh century had to be based on a subtle balance between the court bureaucracy, the local troops, and the Seljuk overlords. Successions to the imperial throne of twelfth-century Constantinople showed a gradual broadening of the circle of people immediately involved in these procedures in proportion to the decreasing central power of dynasty. While the competition among Alexios I’s immediate successors was restricted to the deceased emperor’s offspring, Andronikos I and the Angeloi family built their successions on conflicting claims and traditional rights of the Constantinopolitan aristocracy and the representatives of the urban population.3° All of these studies are based on the analysis of their respective historiographical traditions in Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic world and thus primarily focus on textual representations of ritual performance and their subsequent transformation and re-interpretation in the collective memory of later generations.
This leads us a to third group of text-oriented works focusing on certain categories of sources, literary genres, or individual narratives, which form especially fruitful objects of investigation either because of their high value as historical sources or because of their extensive narrative presentations of rituals.39 In this respect, there is a tendency among historians and specialists of medieval literature to collaborate and combine their analytical tools in order to arrive at a more comprehensive assessment of the results achieved by each of the two disciplines. As Horst Wenzel put it, historical and literary sources are not completely different from each other, but still exhibit diverging standards in intention, subject matter, and form. Drawing on Althoff’s binary opposition between interior and exterior spheres, he locates a crucial difference between the two genres in that historical texts are primarily concerned with events in the public sphere of political actions, while literary texts look behind the walls into inner spheres, relating intimate conversations, secret actions, and concealed thoughts.*° In this sense, historical and fictive texts in many respects complement each other, with the one granting access to aspects of medieval mentalities that the other passes over in silence.
Another subject of text-oriented studies of ritual forms of expression is given by non-literary texts, ie., medieval charters and official documents, which, apart from legal contents and formulaic material, include manifold symbolic messages, expressing timeless ideas of public authority as well as specific concepts of a given ruler’s self-awareness.*! Formulas, carefully selected epithets and titles, the quality and size of the paper or parchment, graphic signs, such as the royal monogram, corroborative elements and peculiarities of the diplomatic minuscule script, and of course the monarch’s seal can readily be interpreted as symbols of ritualistic value in the context of monarchic self-representation and as powerful signs underscoring the ruler’s preeminent position vis-a-vis the recipient(s) and the audience addressed in the document.*”
Interestingly, there is a certain tension between text-oriented and eventoriented studies in that the former frequently draw into doubt the reliability of the latter, arguing that the authorial thought-worlds, intentions, and modes of perception are not sufficiently taken into account. This critique was especially developed in Philippe Buc’s seminal Dangers of Ritual. Just as medieval actors often played with the ritual forms they had at their disposal, medieval authors too, the argument goes, were free to elaborate narrative descriptions of rituals according to their vision of the historical memory they intended to create.*8 Danger arises firstly in that rituals are frequently depicted as manipulated or failed (what Buc has labelled “bad rituals”) and thus, instead of creating order, cause just the opposite, and secondly in that rituals, after having been accomplished on a performative level, underwent a process of retrospective reconstruction, interpretation, and manipulation on a textual level in the framework of a historical discourse fluctuating between “good” and “bad” rituals pointing to order or disorder respectively.44 The second part of Buc’s argument, namely his attempt to deduce modern sociological and anthropological treatments of rituals from a set of theological and philosophical thoughts extending from the Reformation era to the aftermath of the French Revolution,** was met with severe criticism and by no means led to a decline of interest in a subject “just too fashionable to be given up,” as he himself admits.*® His focus on the literary reconstruction of rituals, instead, certainly contributed to a further refinement of methodological approaches to the analysis of narratives talking about rituals. Hence, scholars normally examine their material through a double perspective targeting both the level of performative reality and that of ritual imagination.
How then does the present volume fit into this rich and multifaceted landscape of theoretical approaches to and studies on the medieval ritual world? First and foremost, it intends to pick up a line of thought which was more systematically developed in the framework of the Heidelberg collaborative centre on ritual dynamics, but which since then did not find many followers to pursue this fascinating path of investigation. This is a cross-cultural, comparative view of rituals in a geographical area which, except for a few excellent, but isolated monographs, has been widely neglected so far by the mainstream of medieval ritual studies, namely the Mediterranean with a special focus on Byzantium and the Muslim East and some comparative glimpses into the medieval West. In doing so, the axis of investigation primarily turns around ritual and ceremonial aspects in Mediterranean court cultures and political life.
An important task regarding a comparative analysis of rituals is to define points of convergence and divergence between the results exacted from western material, on the one hand, and the particularities of Byzantium and the Muslim world, on the other. While it is more or less self-evident that eastern elites, in both the organization of power and the projection of authority, resorted to ritual and symbolic forms of communication just as much as their contemporary western peers did, it is questionable whether the specific occurrences of rituals and the way they were employed and perceived followed the same principles and evolutional patterns. Similar problems arise with respect to the available narrative sources. What can be said about the perception and narrative reconstruction of rituals on the basis of western authors like Widukind of Corvey and Thietmar of Merseburg is not necessarily applicable to works belonging to the Byzantine, Eastern Christian, or Muslim historiographical tradition. This is to say that in order to adequately assess the extent of comparability between western, Byzantine, and Muslim forms of ritual expression we have to aim at a clearer understanding of the peculiarities and characteristic features of each sphere, including the historical and conceptual foundations and preconditions, the religious and ideological discourse concerning the role of political leadership and hegemony, the forms and possibilities of public self-representation within the framework of court cultures and urban societies, and the perceptions and modes of description concerning ritual elements in normative and narrative texts. A certain obstacle to arriving at secure results is of course the fact that systematic comparative studies between western and eastern political spheres, despite some remarkable progress over the past few years, are still very few in number and unavoidably focussed on specific case studies. More specifically, the investigation of rituals in Byzantine and Muslim political cultures is still a far cry from the level western medieval studies have reached in their respective field. Hence, what we have at our disposal at the moment does not allow but a preliminary assessment of some core issues based on selected aspects of the ritual world in the medieval Mediterranean. Apart from the wellknown fact that the scholarly disciplines devoted to Byzantium and the medieval Near East are much younger than western medieval studies, it is also important to note that the available source material is culturally and linguistically extremely disparate, requiring a great number of specialists acquainted with the historiographical traditions, the literary conventions, and the terminology of various literary genres in Greek, Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Syriac, and Armenian, to mention just the most important languages. Research on political rituals in the areas in question, therefore, is still in its infancy.
Initiatives of German medievalists like the DFG Priority Program “Integration and Disintegration of Civilisations in the European Middle Ages” (SPP 1173) and the network “Pre-modern Monarchic Forms of Rulership in the Mirror of Trans-Cultural Comparison” established in 2007, but also the British-Belgian project “Political Culture in Three Spheres: Byzantium, Islam and the West, ca. 700-ca. 1450” coordinated since 2005 by Catherine Holmes, Jonathan Shepard (both Oxford), Bjérn Weiler (Aberystwyth), and Jo van Steenbergen (Ghent), clearly demonstrate the increasing interest in attempts to overcome the traditional dividing lines between scholarly disciplines and to include interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches.*” These projects provide a highly appreciated methodological framework for the discussion on trans-cultural aspects of political rituals in that they offer the analytical and terminological tools for an adequate understanding of issues related to hegemonial groups in the Middle Ages under the light of a comparative approach, including generic patterns of political behaviour, ideological attitudes, and specific aspects of given cultural entities. In this way, historians are able to analyze the processes through which historical conditions engendered specific cultural occurrences of shared concepts and patterns of political authority. Furthermore, it can be more accurately explored how elements of a common heritage originating in the Roman imperial tradition or phenomena of mutual exchange led to the adoption, rejection, or transformation of political concepts, ideological attitudes, and forms of monarchic self-representation in different cultural spheres. A prime example of a comparative approach to strategies of legitimization in early medieval Europe and the Muslim Near East is Wolfram Drews’s book Die Karolinger und die Abbasiden von Bagdad, which, starting from the historical coincidence of the years 750/1 as the moment of a parallel dynastic change, explored common ideological discourses and political practices consolidating dynastic claims, as well as historical continuities, and longterm collective memories related to the Carolingians and the Abbasids respectively.48 More focused on political rituals in the strict sense of the term is Jenny R. Oesterle’s monograph Kalifat und Kénigtum, which compares forms of monarchic self-representation, especially public processions on important festivities, in the Ottonian and early Salian Empire, on the one hand, and in the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt, on the other.49
The focus lies on the development, function, and role of processions, their structure, ritual components, and ideological implications in each of the two spheres; of special importance for the cross-cultural approach is the structural comparison of common spatial and temporal constellations as regards the landscape of palatial and sacred areas and the sequence of liturgical feasts. Given that in both Ottonian Germany and Fatimid Egypt an intensification of religiously-oriented rituals in the framework of monarchic self-representation can be observed, it becomes obvious that religion in both spheres was consciously used as an efficient means of legitimization. The choreographic arrangement of processions, the combination of palatial areas with mosques or churches, the adaptation of urban spaces to the needs of processions, and the possibilities offered by religious feasts to display monarchic power are some of the aspects allowing us to specify and differentiate the use of rituals in given cultural and political contexts.5° Byzantium with its intermediate position between western Christianity and Islam had the advantage that its ritual settings and imperial processions formed the subject of surviving reports written from the viewpoint of foreign observers, and thus allows the comparison of different culturally-determined forms of perception.5!
As for the current state of research in the field of political rituals in Byzantium and the Muslim world, it seems that the aforementioned scholarly trends and discussions have already stimulated a number of thought-provoking and innovative monographs and articles which are expected to raise increasing interest in the related topics and an awareness of the importance rituals may have for the interpretation of political procedures in the respective spheres. Martin Hinterberger and Michael Griinbart, starting from different perspectives and lines of investigation, have worked on the display of emotions, namely weeping and shedding of tears, in the framework of imperial politics in Constantinople.5* While Hinterberger primarily aims at categorizing the phenomenon of tears as an aspect of emotional expression in Byzantine literature, both authors arrive at the conclusion that under certain circumstances weeping served as a symbolic act often deliberately employed by emperors and high-ranking officials in order to visualize distress about a current situation, repentance about something that had happened in the past, and a fervent desire for future change. The audience to which the display of this emotional condition was addressed was alarmed by the messages conveyed through this act, and decision makers were put under pressure to comply with the crying person’s wish. Most intriguingly, these observations made on the basis of Byzantine narratives are fully consistent with the results brought to light from western sources.
Forms of verbal and non-verbal symbolism in Byzantine diplomacy were recently analyzed on the basis of interactions with Arab potentates. Beyond the political and religious dialogue and common patterns of ideological rhetoric, the two spheres apparently had a shared repertory of signs, gestures, and rituals facilitating successful communication and exchange on various levels.5? A full-length monograph on Byzantine forms of monarchic self-representation in a diplomatic context is Alexandru Anca’s work on Byzantine-Latin official encounters in the period of the twelfth-century Crusades.*+ The book explores the triumphal entries of John II and Manuel I in Antioch in 1138 and 1159, several meetings with Frankish lords, Rainald de Chatillon’s deditio as a case study for conflict resolution in Byzantine-western relations, and the famous 1196 Christmas reception of emissaries sent by Emperor Henry VI as an example for the construction of a failed ritual in western and Byzantine historiography. Once more, one easily notices how rich a paradigm the political life of Byzantium constitutes for a fruitful combination of methodological approaches developed by Althoff and Buc.
Regarding the ceremonial life of the Byzantine imperial court, most studies, in one way or another, centre around or draw on the well-known tenth-century treatise De cerimoniis aulae byzantinae commonly ascribed to Constantine Porphyrogennetos and to Basileios Lakapenos, who is held responsible for a later redaction dating to the 960s.55 A new edition and translation of this crucial text has been repeatedly announced, but work seems to have stagnated ever since the publication of a collective volume by Gilbert Dagron, John Haldon, and others, presenting the edition and translation along with extensive comments of the chapters 1.77—-82 and 2.44—45, as well as a thorough analysis of Byzantine relations with western, southern Slavic, Russian, and Caucasian potentates mentioned in 2.46—-48.5° Previous to that, Gilbert Dagron, in the framework of his seminal Empereur et prétre, had proceeded to a fresh analysis of succession principles, the protocols of proclamation and coronation procedures transmitted in De cerimoniis, as well as the function of the Great Palace and Hagia Sophia as central liewx de mémoire of the Byzantine imperial idea.5”? Other noteworthy contributions are a number of studies on the Great Palace of Constantinople published in the Istanbul volume on early medieval residences mentioned earlier and a slightly older collective volume edited by Henry Maguire on Byzantine court culture.5° Nonetheless, the numerous topics discussed in these works, such as space, architecture, music, relics, art, rhetoric, intellectual life, diplomatic and military matters, the imperial court’s social fabric and interchanges with foreign courts, reflect a more general interest in philological and interpretative problems posed by the Book of Ceremonies and the cultural phenomena related to Byzantine court life rather than a specific concern about rituals in the framework of Byzantine political culture. In this respect, the papers gathered in the present volume intend to combine traditional approaches to Byzantine court ceremonies comprising visual, literary, and ideological facets with the paradigm shift introduced by the concept of political rituals and the comparative studies of political culture in different spheres. As far as medieval Islam is concerned, except for the two monographs by Drews and Oesterle mentioned above, it is mainly Andrew Marsham’s book on Rituals of Islamic Monarchy*® that set new standards for exploring political rituals in the framework of Islamic monarchy. The focus of this study lies with the idea of allegiance, as it gradually appeared within the Arabic tribal society from Pre-Islamic times onwards, as well as with the succession procedures in the early Islamic caliphate up to the civil war that broke out upon the murder of Caliph al-Mutawakkil in 861. Iranian and Roman elements of royal accession, customs of the (semi-)nomadic social fabric of Arabia, and new religious and ideological concepts originating from the evolving Islamic tradition formed the idiosyncratic background of the monarchic principles in the Umayyad and early Abbasid empires. The pledge of allegiance and other rituals framing the caliphal succession procedure, though only thinly documented in the Umayyad period and frequently anachronistically distorted by later accounts projecting current discourses of their own time back to the formation period, exhibit clearly discernible lines of development with manifold ramifications for Islamic dynastic ideas and concepts of caliphal authority. The later decades of the Marwanid caliphate and the early Abbasid period appear as watersheds, in which the relationship between the caliph and other elite members underwent changes, the “symbolic language of Islamic monarchy” gradually came into being, and important transformations of caliphal rituals took place.®° Regarding the long-term evolutional patterns, Marsham’s study no doubt forms a model applicable not only to other areas and periods of the Muslim world, but also to other cultural contexts. One may think, for instance, of the sequence of the so-called dynasties on the imperial throne in Constantinople and their constantly changing methods and tools of maintaining their grasp on power and their control of the dominant political factors. A close analysis of all available data concerning the family of Herakleios, the Isaurians, the Amorians, and the Macedonians in all likelihood would bring to light equally noteworthy evolutionary patterns pointing to a gradual development of the Byzantine imperial concept in the context of the empire’s political culture. Dagron’s Emperor and Priest only took the first steps in this direction by expounding succession
principles and the sacred sphere of the emperor's self-representation. Practices of building allegiances and securing dynastic stability through oaths and other political rituals still need to be reconstructed in their diachronic dimension.
Another approach to Islamic political rituals lies in the context of religious and public celebrations, court processions, and the palatial, religious and urban spaces in which the related ceremonies and festivities were choreographed and staged. In this respect, Oesterle’s comparative study owes a lot to Paula Sanders’ book on Fatimid Cairo,®! which points out how Shiite and local public feasts served as a means to link the newly founded Fatimid residence city of al-Qahira to the first Muslim foundation of al-Fustat and how they affirmed and consolidated the caliph’s position as supreme lord of the Fatimid ruling class in Egypt. By elevating popular feasts to official celebrations, the caliphal court had the opportunity to promote ideas of the Shiite state ideology. A chapter in this volume devoted to the Mamluks tells the story of the further development of Cairo as sacred and commemorative space of ritual performances from the Ayyubid period up to the end of the fourteenth century. Again, one may think of parallels with various other urban centres in the eastern Mediterranean which offered the framework for the establishment of monarchic residences and their ceremonial appearances.
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The contributions collected in the present volume, in one way or another, closely follow the methodological and thematic trajectories outlined above. While focussing on a broad range of aspects related to ceremonies, rituals, and symbolic displays of political authority, each of them has its own disciplinary background and theoretical agenda. Four overarching subject-matters, which correspond to some of the crucial problems in the current research—(1) transformative processes, (2) succession procedures, (3) phenomena of appropriation and cross-cultural exchanges, (4) rituals in art and literature—form the thematic unities along which the articles of the present volume are arranged.
Celebrations at the Byzantine imperial court, elements of acclamations addressed to the emperor, diplomatic relations with barbarian steppe peoples, and the establishment of the Umayyad caliphate are crucial aspects suitable for exemplifying and exploring the gradual transformation of ritual and ceremonial elements over a long period extending from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. The Roman emperor’s birthday (dies natalis) is, as Maria Kantirea shows, a case in point for the long-term persistence of imperial rituals from classical Rome up to tenth-century Constantinople. The commemoration of a person’s birth based on the pagan idea of a quasi-divine guardian spirit appeared in the framework of imperial feasts as early as the origins of the Roman Principate under Augustus, being from the onset closely connected with the second important commemorative celebration, the emperor’s accession to power. The festivities held on the emperor's birthday had manifold ramifications for the public projection of imperial power on a ritual, social, and ideological level. As a result of the emperor's divinization in the course of the evolving imperial cult, the Roman monarch on his birthday received divine honours through sacrifices in both the capital and the provincial cities, which integrated these festivities into their own traditions of worship. The watershed of the fourth century obviously did not bring about disruptive changes as regards the sequence of traditional Roman feasts, imperial anniversaries, and commemorations, and pagan rituals continued to provide the ceremonial background against which the imperial power’s public appearances were orchestrated. What changed was the emperor's relationship to divinity accompanied by a gradual Christianization of imperial rituals, as is most conspicuously expressed in the abolition of blood sacrifices. Hence, one observes a process of assimilation between the ceremonial elements of birthday celebrations and other anniversaries, as well as a semantic equation between the dies natalis and the dies imperii, the day the monarch received the rank of Caesar or Augustus. By the tenth century, the emperor's birthday had become a less religiously charged ceremony. We are dealing with a pagan ceremonial substrate which through a process of gradual transformation changed its ritual components and religious context, but maintained its close ties with the imperial sphere, underscoring ideas of the God-chosen emperor’s pre-eminence.
Another aspect of transition is the semantic development of messages conveyed by Byzantine imperial acclamations, which, in turn, exemplify the dynamics of performative speeches in Byzantine court ceremonies. Formulaic patterns of acclamations summarize in very succinct slogan-like phrases basic premises of the Roman imperial idea, such as the emperor's piety, his belief in Christ and the Orthodox faith, his ability to restore peace, and God’s protection. The starting point of Martin Hinterberger’s analysis is the notion of phthonos, as expressed in a sharply restricted, but carefully positioned, number of apotropaic formulas employed in acclamations to emperors presiding over Ecumenical Councils from Ephesos (431) and Chalcedon (451) to the Iconoclastic Synod of Hieria in 754, as well as in the coronation of Emperor Anastasios I (491). By exploring the evolving semantic levels of the term, Hinterberger distinguishes between phthonos as an equivalent of a supernatural life-threatening force and as a synonym for the devil. In either case it is perceived as a negative power harming the emperor’s glory and bringing disaster and death. The blurring of the semantic boundaries between the two meanings has once more to be viewed in conjunction with the gradual penetration of Christian concepts into the pre-existing pagan thought world. The shift from an impersonal evil force to the devil also indicates changes in the ideological concepts of the imperial elite.
Official encounters in the framework of Byzantine-barbarian diplomatic exchanges illustrate the transformation of rituals in the realm of the empire's foreign relations. Starting from the 565 reception of Avar emissaries in Constantinople described in Corippus’s panegyric on Emperor Justin II, Walter Pohl notices the relatively infrequent occurrence of ritual elements in comparison to the overwhelming dominance of rhetoric. The available narrative sources certainly betray the existence of scripted procedures and “laws of friendship,” encoding the rules for diplomatic contacts and the integration of foreigners into the Byzantine imperial sphere, for instance through baptism or the conferral of honorary titles, but they rarely describe or comment on these acts. One reason obviously lies in the commonly shared knowledge of the diplomatic protocol, which regulated a broad range of ceremonial components, such as movements, dress, participants, acclamations, food, symbolic gestures and objects, leaving thus little space for profound reflections or diverging interpretations. Ritual elements, in order to be expounded more extensively, had to be unusual or in contrast to the norm. This especially applies to cases in which different religious creeds resulted in a lack of ritual concord. Likewise, it was the exotic character of ritual practices which caused astonishment or even criticism when Byzantine officials participated in them. The fact that the ceremonial life of foreign courts is always described from the viewpoint of Byzantine observers unavoidably narrows the perception of modern historians down to the limits of an interpretatio Romana, which is determined by the binary opposition between barbarian stereotypes and Roman superiority.
In the course of the seventh century, the Byzantine Empire encountered the challenge of the Islamic expansion and the emerging Arab-Islamic caliphate, which soon came to embody a sort of counter-concept of universal rulership. A decisive step in this direction was, as Andrew Marsham argues, the public accession of the first Umayyad caliph Mu‘awiya b. Abi Sufyan, which took place in 661 in Jerusalem upon the murder of his opponent ‘Ali b. Abi Talib. The details of this major event are known to us only through the perspective of an outside observer, a Maronite chronicle written in Syriac, but they can be corroborated by data provided by later Muslim sources. Elements of a specific Islamic ceremonial, like the pledge of allegiance (bay‘a) and the promulgation, were placed in sacred spaces of outstanding prominence, the congregational mosque constructed by Caliph ‘Umar on the Temple Mount and the churches at Golgotha, to which the newly proclaimed caliph moved by performing an act of pilgrimage. Before an audience mainly consisting of Arab nomads from the Syrian steppes and local Christians, the new caliph opted for a combination of Muslim-Arab ritual elements with imperial and Christian points of reference related to imperial associations, the cult of the True Cross, Christian pilgrimage sites, and local customs of Christianized Syrian Arabs. Mu‘awiya thus incorporated Christian conceptions of the sacred status of Jerusalem and elements of the Roman imperial tradition so as to assert his claim to rule the Christian population of Syria. This was a highly inventive form of adoption and re-interpretation of ritual elements originating from various cultural environments and translated into a new code of ritual communication.
The second part of this volume deals with a key aspect of medieval rulership, namely succession procedures and the ritual acts involved therein. From a comparative perspective it explores selected case studies dating to approximately the same period—the eleventh and twelfth centuries— but located in different geographical regions, such as the German Empire, France, Poland, Comnenian Byzantium, and Abbasid Iraq. The analyses focus, on the one hand, on the factual level of succession procedures comprising historical circumstances, ideological principles, political strategies, and public performances, and, on the other, on the narrative presentation and interpretation of these events in historiographical sources. Bjérn Weiler examines western models of accession to royal power, stressing the significance of shared norms, structures, and patterns of rule in conjunction with a common moral framework, determining the perception of exemplary royal action and demeanour. Narratives of the king-making process played a vital part in the debates related to an increasing tendency to define the nature of kingship and royal duties. Wipo, describing the election and coronation of Conrad II in 1024 in the framework of a wellestablished monarchy, primarily emphasizes his protagonist’s outstanding virtues and the spirit of unanimity prevailing throughout his election.
Acts of symbolic communication mainly serve to highlight key features of ideal kingship. The so-called Gallus Anonymus portrays the coronation of the first Polish king Bolestaw I by Emperor Otto III in 999/1000, focusing like Wipo on a catalogue of royal merits, but from a greater chronological distance, with a different ranking and fewer details concerning the succession per se. Stephen of Blois, having gained the English throne in 135 in opposition to Henry (II), is presented by the anonymous author of the Gesta Stephani as the most suitable candidate to rescue the kingdom from the turmoil into which it had fallen, to restore peace and to defeat the insurgents. Again, virtues and exemplary forms of behaviour are evoked, yet, as Stephen eventually was overthrown, his subsequent failure had to be explained by shifting the blame on corrupt advisors in his entourage. Do these models of royal successions collected from Germany, England, and Poland have any parallels and convergences with corresponding processes in the Mediterranean and Islamic cultural spheres?
The Muslim counterpart of coronations was the practice of bay‘, ie., ‘oath of allegiance’, by which a new ruler’s political authority was proclaimed, recognized, and legitimized and by which the idea of an investiture from God as the true source of rulership was affirmed. The particularity of the Abbasid caliphate lies, as Eric Hanne argues, in the fact that during the tenth century the caliphs were reduced to a state of dependency upon warlord dynasties like the Buyids and the Seljuks and thus lost control of the succession procedure within their own family. Periods of revitalization after 991 under al-Qadir and after 1092 brought about a partial restoration of Abbasid autonomy and a firmer grasp on the bay‘a process. The investiture of the caliph’s heir apparent (wali al-‘ahd), which was renewed during al-Qadir’s reign, and the succession procedure itself became a gauge for the degree of autonomy the caliphate was able to achieve while competing with the army and other political forces exerting control over Baghdad. Moreover, the bay‘a and other related ceremonies were important elements of the prerogatives the caliphs were eager to assert. The sequence of a two-step procedure of oath-taking by the religious and bureaucratic elite (bay‘at al-khdssa) and the people (bay‘at al-‘4mma), payments to the troops, and precautionary measures for the safety of the palace area were the recurring standard features of these ceremonial events. Baghdad and medieval Europe, despite all differences, do share a common concern about legitimacy which was to be secured through the consensus of the leading political factor and the performance of firmly established ritual acts. The caliph, however, in contrast to the European kings, does not appear as performing rituals in order to project his personal virtues as military commander and apt ruler, but rather as struggling for his claims to keep up the traditional ritual order as a symbol of the caliphate’s legacy as leading authority of Sunni Islam.
Succession procedures in Byzantium have to be viewed in the context of a political system characterized by an incessant antagonism between a weakly developed dynastic principle and a constant readiness for usurpation. Elements of dynastic thinking were certainly always at work, but the most decisive criterion ultimately was the claimant’s success, measureable on the basis of his recognition by the three political bodies, ie., the army, the senate, and the citizens of Constantinople as the dominant groups of acceptance. In this framework of organized instability usurpation was a commonly accepted mode of gaining the throne and thus legitimacy could not be created solely on the basis of a formally correct investiture. Ritual acts related to successions were hardly regulated and exhibit a high degree of flexibility according to constantly changing political circumstances. Niketas Choniates’s Chronike Diegesis, one of the most influential texts of twelfth-century Byzantium, provides an extensive narrative of succession procedures at the court of the Comnenian and Angeloi emperors, showing thereby an extraordinary sensibility in observing political rituals and perceiving their role within the innermost sphere of Constantinopolitan imperial power. Describing long developments over a period of almost ninety years, the author presents the gradual collapse of imperial authority from John II to the failed proclamation of Constantine Laskaris as an analogous decay of the empire’s ritual world, either by accusing his contemporaries of having abused and perverted the sacred ceremonies or satirizing them through the distortion of their original intentions. The macro-structure of this account is based on the idea of a three-step development: Comnenian successions, despite some serious inner-dynastic tensions, resulted in consensus and harmony; Andronikos I's rise to power (1182/3) is structured along a carefully orchestrated sequence of rituals, which originally certainly cemented his claims to the throne, but thereafter were presented by Choniates as a means of fraud and deceit used by a wily individual; a chain of five violent usurpations under the Angeloi, eventually, reflect the increasing immorality of the rulers who gradually lost the ability to perform valid rituals and to project legitimacy.
Antonia Giannouli’s analysis of coronation speeches in the Palaiologan period moves the discussion from a primarily historical to a philological approach. The question is whether three selected items of imperial panegyric, which in the older research literature are traditionally related to accessions to the throne of late Byzantine emperors, can actually be classified as a specific type of coronation speech. An oration of Maximos Planoudes delivered on the occasion of the coronation of Michael IX as co-emperor in 1294 obviously fulfils the required typological criteria in both form and substance; a short speech of John Kalekas addressed to Anna of Savoy and her newly enthroned son John V in 1341 and a speech by John Argyropoulos delivered on the occasion of Constantine XI’s arrival in Constantinople in 1449, however, cannot be directly connected with the emperor's accession to the throne, nor do they have specific references to the ceremonial act of coronation. What they actually do is affirm a catalogue of standard imperial virtues and combine these rhetorical conventions with allusions to and advice on current political challenges, such as the emperor's future role as monarch and the dangers emanating from internal and external threats. In this sense, the texts in question, because of their repetitive and standardized character, can be interpreted as ritualized speeches re-affirming elements of imperial ideology within the framework of late Byzantine court ceremonies, and this is the case with Argyropoulos’s text even a few years before the final downfall of the empire. Despite the difference of genre, one notices certain similarities in intention and substance between this kind of rhetoric texts and eleventhcentury western narratives of succession procedures with their strong focus on the projection of royal virtues.
Political elites were by no means isolated and self-contained entities, but stood under the constant influence of ideological patterns and governmental practices already existing in the territories under their sway. In addition, they availed themselves of symbols of power and ritual elements of foreign hegemonic groups with which they were communicating. This holds particularly true for powers which, because of their age, military strength, or ideological pre-eminence, were ascribed a highly prestigious position and a sort of supremacy important enough to serve as legitimating authority for smaller lordships. In the Christian sphere of East and West, it was the collective memory of the Roman Empire and the rivalling imperial concepts of Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire which were constantly employed by both arrivistes and well-established rulers as points of reference for strategies of legitimization and the propagation of ascendency. In Islam, rights of sovereignty and legitimacy were thought to emanate primarily from the idea of the imamate of the umma, i.e., ‘the Muslim community’, the caliphate and, from the middle of the eleventh century onwards, from the Seljuk sultanate.®? Apart from that, local rulers would incorporate features of self-representation from preceding dynasties with a strong bearing on local urban centres, disseminating thus the impression of royal continuity.
Jo Van Steenbergen explores the political rituals of the Egyptian Mamluks in the light of the urban transformation which was inaugurated by the transferral of the administrative centre from the Fatimid palace city of Cairo to the Citadel of the Mountain on al-Muqattam Hill. In this respect, Bayna |-Qasrayn, the very heart of the Fatimid residence, is interpreted as a Mamluk lieu de mémoire with different commemorative layers referring to the Fatimid past, to heroic martyrdom and victory, as well as to the dynastic concept of legitimating continuity. The ceremonial of investiture of the leading Mamluk military commanders, the amirs, with its processional elements accentuates the outstanding significance of the Salihiya madrasa, the monument of the last Ayyubid sultan, and the Mansiriya complex, the foundation of Sultan Qalawin, and other adjacent buildings, which came to be added during the fourteenth century. The Mamluks’ public image visualized through the integration of their court ceremonies into the spatial setting of Bayna |-Qasrayn included allusions to Fatimid luxury and riches, claims to championship in Muslim jihad, the hagiographic remembrance of the patron of the first generation of Mamluk rulers, and the accentuation of continuities through the gradual extension of the area’s sacred topography.
The Latin Empire of Constantinople established in the wake of the Fourth Crusade in 1204 is a fascinating example of ritual adjustments and innovations within the framework of the superimposition of western models of rulership on a pre-existing Byzantine social and political substrate. On the strength of its leading military and economic role and the prerogatives secured in the agreements with the other Crusader commanders, Venice was given the opportunity to lay claims to and to present itself as heir to the Byzantine imperial legacy regarding the empire’s administrative practices and authority symbols. On the other hand, the vacancy of the imperial throne caused by the violent seizure of Constantinople necessitated the projection of a legitimate transition of imperial authority from the Greek to the Frankish ruling elite. Stefan Burkhardt argues that this was achieved by combining the western concept of “Heerkaisertum”— the army represented by an electoral body as the source of the imperial office—with points of reference situated in the imperial topography of Constantinople, such as Hagia Sophia and the palaces, and with symbols and ceremonial robes of the Byzantine court. Visual intimations of the unbroken Byzantine tradition were linked with an altered perception of the imperial dignity, which was deemed to represent a primus inter pares drawing his legitimacy from his soldiers. Because of the serious destruction the city had undergone this new concept could hardly be integrated into the ritual landscape inherited from the Greeks. Another problem was the new emperor's inferior status with respect to many western authorities, such as the pope, Venice, and the king of France. The Latin emperor, thus, while heavily drawing on the Byzantine symbolic and ritual language of authority, never had the capacity to meet the requirements of the classical models of emperorship.
The Armenian kingdom of Cilicia founded in 198 with the coronation of Lewon I by the bishop of Mainz as representative of the Holy Roman Empire was another political entity based on manifold ethnic, cultural, and ideological roots. An Armenian ruling elite maintaining close ties with the Latin West, the Crusader states, and the Seljuk sultanate of Konya superimposed its authority on the local Byzantine substrate, established an ecclesiastical organization formally subject to the papacy, and combined its own heritage with numerous influences from Europe, Byzantium, and adjacent cultural layers of Anatolia and the Near East. Many of these elements are conspicuously reflected in the kingdom’s forms of ceremonial self-representation, which Joanna Rapti explores by focusing on two crucial points in a royal dynasty’s ritual sphere, i.e., coronations and funerals. Information on these matters can be drawn not only from a quite substantial number of narrative sources pertaining to the local Armenian historiographical tradition, but also from royal portraits in illuminated manuscripts commissioned by members of the ruling house for liturgical and commemorative purposes in the second half of the thirteenth century. The cathedral church of Saint Sophia in Tarsus and the feasts of Christmas and Epiphany jointly celebrated on 6 January form the framework of Cilician coronations in space and time, being thus linked with one of the most important sacred centres of the region and the idea of Christ’s incarnation symbolizing the rebirth of the Armenian kingdom. The ruling dynasty’s ideological and ceremonial discourse combines current concepts of kingship, as expressed in the royal insignia and the throne, with innovative approaches and re-interpretations of features provided by the symbolic language of royal garments and specific ritual acts. Byzantine-style courtly customs, imperial attributes, such as the loros, and crowns imitating Comnenian models point to adoptions of Byzantine elements and to certain imperial aspirations, especially in the time of the marriage plans with the Palaiologan dynasty. Likewise, symbolic elements of Seljuk origin may allude to an alliance with the sultanate of Konya while reproductions of European and, more specifically, French Gothic imageries illustrate a re-orientation towards Western concepts. According to Armenian traditions in which the reverence for the burial places of the ancestors always occupied a central position, the Armenian establishment in Cilicia entailed the creation of new lieux de mémoire as symbols of dynastic continuity. Burial places were usually related to royal foundations of monasteries, such as Akner and Drazark, adding thus to the residential town of Sis new points of dynastic reference. A striking case is the death of Lewon I who stage-managed the end of his life as a solemn procession from Sis to Akner in conjunction with a separate burial of the king’s heart and corpse in the said monastery and in Sis respectively.
The adoption by feudal lords in tenth- and eleventh-century France of Byzantine rituals of power and ceremonial elements is a case in point for phenomena of cross-fertilization between the hegemonic symbolisms of different political and cultural spheres. The shared legacy and historical memory of imperial Rome with its common repertory of political customs and symbols, the propagation of the Byzantine imperial idea in a period of expansion through adventus ceremonies, military triumphs, and other expressions of victory and predominance, and the successful diffusion of these attitudes through embassies, pilgrims, travellers, and mercenaries are, as Jonathan Shepard brilliantly demonstrates, the main determinants of this process. Hence, Duke William V of Aquitane (ca. 994-1030), in his attempt to establish a quasi-monarchical hegemony in south-western France, resorted to Roman-Byzantine models of rites of rulership; William IV Taillefur, count of Angouléme (988-1028), staged an adventus in his city of residence upon his return from a pilgrimage to the East; the arriviste Fulk Nerra, count of Anjou (987-1040), made use of adventus ceremonies for relics and the Roman rite of calcatio so as to visualize his authority in the Lower Loire region; ultimately, Duke William of Normandy, the famous victor of Hastings in 1066, refused an appropriate adventus by the citizens of London on the day of his coronation, employed connotations of Byzantine imperial imagery and a Byzantine-styled crown in compensation for the reverence lacking on the part of his future subjects.
The last part of this volume comprises six articles dealing with resonances and reflections of rituals and ceremonies in Byzantine art and literature. As has been repeatedly stressed by medievalists, a comprehensive treatment of pre-modern rituals presupposes an interdisciplinary approach taking into consideration the broadest possible range of source material, including data from material culture, handicrafts, works of art, and works of fiction. From this angle, Stavroula Constantinou examines Prokopios’s Secret History not as a historical source providing insights into sixth-century facts and realities, but as a work of fiction or “historical novel.” Starting with the observation that the author exhibits a remarkable obsession with violence and punishment, she applies Michel Foucault's concept of ritualized punishments on the narrator's discourse and his use of the topic in question within his narrative. These stylized forms of punishment designed to reaffirm Justinian’s and Theodora’s absolute power over their subjects correspond to a ritualized narration resulting from a repetitive textual structure based on detailed descriptions, short references or summaries. Satirical overtones and comic dimensions are further characteristics of the author’s narrative technique.
Panagiotis Agapitos’s case study on formalized expressions of fictive hegemony in the late Byzantine tale of love Livistros and Rodhamne shows that this romance with its extensive references and allusions to court ceremonies and rituals of empire is a carrier of specific and intentioned ideological and cultural meaning. More specifically, within a symmetrically organized narrative sequence describing Eros’s imperial domain in a series of four dreams, the text achieves a complex reconstruction of a contemporary imperial imagery which is projected back to a mythological Hellenic past. The underlying concept is a rite of passage which at first glance describes the hero’s emotional initiation into Eros’s dominion, but at the same time, on an allegorical level, reflects the hero’s political conversion into a vassal. The described coronation procedure, including the shield raising ceremony, points to the Nicaean Empire and the time of Theodore II Laskaris as the factual background against which the romance’s ritual repertory was construed.
In pre-modern societies, rituals and court ceremonies were by no means always blindly observed or applied, but frequently formed the subject of reflection, criticism, and even distortion. Expectedly, therefore, ceremonials also had their parodies and turned into rituals of mockery. Henry Maguire explores various facets of this topic by juxtaposing incidents of “inverted anti-ceremonials” mentioned in historiographical texts from the ninth to the twelfth century and their impact on Byzantine art, namely the central scene of the Mocking of Christ. This episode shows a diachronic thematic diversification by including dancers in the eleventh and musicians before the late thirteenth century. The slightly later images of the Mocking in the church of St. George in Staro Nagori¢ino exhibit the closest connection with Byzantine parodies of imperial ceremonial. Pictorial representations, thus, offer important insights into the ritual mentality of the Byzantines, even if we are dealing with conscious distortions.
An important material aspect of court ceremonies is given by the huge variety of robes worn by court officials in the course of public celebrations and processions. Maria Parani focuses on the attire of the palace eunuchs, certainly an especially prominent category of dignitaries, though not defined by rank or function, but by sexual neutrality. A number of derogatory views expressed in Byzantine literature notwithstanding, eunuchs also evoked positive associations related to the Archangel Michael and the angelic escort of God, which from the sixth century onwards is presented in the guise of eunuchs. Given that pictorial representations of eunuchs are not too numerous, the main source is the Book of Ceremonies with its detailed instructions for the changing outfit of dignities and offices reserved for eunuchs. From among the entire set of garments used for ceremonial purposes, only a few items seem to have been particularly associated with eunuchs, but the proximity to the emperor gave their outward appearance a special nuance within the entire arrangement of the imperial entourage. Obviously, there was a profound symbolic relationship between eunuchs and pearls as sources of light.
Chapter II.15 of the Book of Ceremonies is certainly one of the beststudied and most remarkable passages of the whole text. This is mainly due to the rich historical details mentioned in this chapter, which refers to a series of receptions held for emissaries of the Umayyad caliphate of Cordoba and the emirate of Tarsus as well as the Russian princess Olga in the Great Palace between May and October 946, as recent scholarship has convincingly proven. This period was also of crucial importance for the personal ambitions of Emperor Constantine VII who, with the coronation of his son Romanos II on 22 March 946, eventually managed to consolidate his lineage’s continuity. In contrast to the numerous historical analyses devoted to this chapter, Christine Angelidi focuses on its abundant ceremonial information regarding the equipment and decoration in the palace’s reception halls, the attire of dignitaries, and the procedure followed during the audiences.
Margaret Mullett’s discussion of “tented ceremonies” draws our attention to the fact that Byzantine imperial ceremonies, while usually closely connected with the imperial palace of Constantinople, also included elements of itinerant rulership employed on campaigns and other occasions of journeys and based on camps and tents as “compressed and portable imperial or aristocratic households.” While the Byzantine court ceremonial certainly differed from itinerant forms of kingship, as known, for instance, from medieval Germany, where the king’s wandering about his realm formed an immediate expression of the exertion of royal authority, Byzantium’s “mobile court” comprising huge amounts of equipment and a great entourage still had much in common with other Mediterranean and eastern court cultures, especially those of Arab and Turkish emirs up to the Ottomans. The manifold occurrences of imperial tents in military treatises, historiographical texts, and the eleventh- and twelfth-century poems of Archbishop Theophylaktos of Ohrid and Manganeios Prodromos illustrate the outward appearance and structural particularities of imperial courts “on the move” as well as the public and ceremonial function of tents as mobile settings for official acts carried out by emperors and highranking aristocrats. The Arab poet al-Mutanabbi’s description of Sayf alDawla’s tent suggests possible influences of the Arabs on Byzantine uses of tents as smaller versions of the emperor’s household. A broad range of ceremonies not bound to the ritual landscape of the imperial city, such as receptions, gift exchanges, acts of worship, death rites, baptisms, and marriages, could easily be applied to the framework of military camps and tented environments.
All in all, the contributions collected in this volume certainly cannot and do not intend to cover the entire range of topics related to court ceremonies and political rituals in the medieval Mediterranean. The usual constraints of time and money imposed the exclusion of numerous levels of political interaction and of many vital regions in the Mediterranean basin. Furthermore, the strong participation of authors specializing in various fields of Byzantine studies gave the volume a clearly discernible “Eastern Roman” focus, which, in turn, enabled us to reconstruct some lines of long-term development from Antiquity to the Middle Ages and to outline contact zones, mutual influences, and points of comparisons with other political and cultural spheres in the Latin West and the Muslim world. In this way, it is hoped that this volume will provide guiding principles for new approaches and further discussions of aspects relating to the topic in question and to point out trajectories for future research.
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