Download PDF | (Variorum Collected 855) Paul Magdalino - Studies on the History and Topography of Byzantine Constantinople-Ashgate (2007).
333 Pages
INTRODUCTION
In my preface to an earlier Variorum volume,' I explained that my interest intwelfth-century Byzantium grew out of my work on Thessaly in the thirteenthand fourteenth centuries. My interest in medieval Constantinople was similarlykindled by studying the towns of northern Greece in the period after the FourthCrusade, and wondering how the local capitals of the Byzantine successor states - Arta, Ioannina, Neopatras, Trikkala, and Thessalonica - related to the great imperial megalopolis.
To what extent did their buildings imitate those of thecapital? Was the relationship between ruler's court, bishop's cathedral, fortress, monastery and market at the regional level similar to that which obtained at the centre? Was it an essentially urban relationship, and were these truly urbaninstitutions? While asking such questions, I became intrigued by two particular social and cultural units that were mainly, though by no means exclusivelyurban: the house and household (oikos) of the social elite, and the bath-house. At the same time, I developed a fascination with buildings and works of art that are known only from descriptions or epigrams. What did the lost artefacts looklike, and why were the texts written? These concerns were already well represented in the earlier Variorum volume.
They are pursued further in the present collection, which leaves the provinces toconcentrate exclusively on Constantinople, and also, while not abandoning thetwelfth and later centuries, moves back to the `Macedonian Renaissance' andearlier. Three pieces, those on the Nea Ekklesia (V, supplemented by VI) and thefountain of the Evergetis monastery (VII), pick up the theme of reconstructinglost monuments on the basis of textual evidence. Another (XII) includes the first attempt to set out and make sense of the evidence for the main palace buildingsused by the Palaiologan emperors in the fourteenth century. However, neither the reconstruction of lost artefacts nor the interpretation of textual descriptionsof works of art is the connecting theme of this volume. I have chosen not toreprint my studies of two literary ekphraseis ofbuildings in Constantinople: Paul the Silentiary's poem on Hagia Sophia,' and Leo Choirosphaktes' anacreontic verses on the palace bath constructed, or restored, by the emperor Leo VI.3 Onthe other hand, I have included all the articles that look at the topography and theneighbourhoods of medieval Constantinople, as well as those that consider thecity's status within the Byzantine state and society.
To these I have added threeother pieces that have not previously appeared in their present form. Two arepublished here for the first time: no. IV discusses the impact on Constantinopleof the reign of the iconoclast emperor Constantine V, while no. XII examinesthe topography of the imperial court and its ceremonial movements in the fourteenth century, as documented in the contemporary treatise on court protocolby the author known as Pseudo-Kodinos. The remaining piece (I), which is thefirst and longest in the collection, originated as a book published in French tenyears ago under the title Constantinople medievale. Etudes sur 1'evolution desstructures urbaines (VIIe XIIe siecles). Substantially revised for publication inEnglish, it defines the theme of this volume as a whole: the urban developmentof Constantinople in the Middle Ages. Antiquarian interest in the early monuments of the Byzantine capital existedeven before the Ottoman conquest, and scholarly study of the city's topography,pioneered by Pierre Gilles a hundred years after the conquest, has been uninterrupted since the late nineteenth century. But use of the evidence of buildings andtopography to write the urban history of Constantinople has been much slowerto develop. For one thing, the importance of Constantinople as the capital of aterritorial empire tended to obscure its role as a discrete social and spatial unit,whose buildings and institutions were not just functions of church and state,but linked to each other as parts of an urban ensemble.
For another thing, thesheer continuity of Constantinople as the embodiment of Byzantine identityand survival was not conducive to distinguishing the different phases of itsevolution from the fourth to the fifteenth century. It was too easily assumedthat the great fortress city of the Middle Ages, teeming with monasteries, iconsand relics, was exactly the same city as the last great urban foundation of theancient world, created by a Roman emperor newly converted to Christianity. TheByzantinist's view of Constantinople for much of the twentieth century was notessentially different from the Byzantine's, as exemplified in the tenth-centuryvestibule mosaic of Hagia Sophia. Here, Constantine presents his walled city tothe Virgin and Christ-child, while Justinian simultaneously presents his church, recognisable by its dome. Both emperors have identical features, and both areidentically attired in medieval imperial costume.
The social and ideological evolution of Constantinople was studied in the1960s and 1970s by H.-G. Beck4 and Gilbert Dagron,5 but it was not until 1985that its physical development as a late-antique city comparable to other late-antique cities was literally put on the map, with the publication of Cyril Mango's Ledeveloppement urbain de Constantinople (IVe-VIIe siecle). This book was just part of a still-ongoing project to write the history of the site from the third to theeleventh century. It has been supplemented by numerous articles, and it inspired, directly or indirectly, other initiatives, including three major conferences duringthe 1990s on the city of Constantinople, at Oxford in 1993, in Washington, at Dumbarton Oaks, in 1998, and at Bogazigi University, Istanbul, in 1999.
Theseconferences and the volumes resulting from them were major contributions tothe study of Byzantine Constantinople. All three involved Cyril Mango, andeach occasioned one of the pieces reprinted in this volume (nos I, II, IX). Cyril Mango's work on Constantinople also determined the subject of no. VIII, which I contributed to a Festschrift in honour of his seventieth birthday. Most fundamentally, his Developpement urbain set a precedent in more thanone way for the French original of piece no. I. Both books originated as lectures given at the College de France, and both were published in the same monograph series. My work was conceived as a sequel to his analysis of the first three centuries of the city's existence. In it, I posed the question of continuityand change from the sixth to the twelfth century. Did the crisis and contractionof the seventh and eighth centuries actually mark a decisive break in the city'sstructures and functions? And did the four centuries of revival that followed takethe urban development of Constantinople in new directions though the creationof new oikoi? In particular, did the dynastic regime of the Konmenoi impose anew urban configuration through the enormous privileges and resources it bestowed on the extended imperial family, allowing them to finance an ambitious programme of palace and monastery building, located mostly at the corners of the urban triangle? Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself answering these questions in thenegative.
It seemed to me that the main buildings and institutions that servedthe medieval city were all in place by the end of the end of the sixth century; the decisive change from the late-antique city of Constantine and Theodosiusoccurred in the period 450-600 with the proliferation of churches which nowconstituted the main public spaces, not only as places of worship but also asproviders of social welfare and as owners of the buildings where, by the ninthcentury at the latest, Constantinopolitans took their baths, had their wills and contracts drawn up by notaries, and sent their children to school. What mainlychanged after 600 was that no new additions and large-scale restorations weremade to the city's classical fabric of fora, colonnades and sculptured monuments,while these structures, especially the statues, increasingly became the stuff oflegend and magic. At the same time, there was a shift in the city's maritimetraffic away from its original port area on the Golden Horn towards the newerharbours on the Sea of Marmara - the Harbour of Theodosius and, more importantly, the Harbour of Julian, also called the Harbour of Sophia after the wifeof Justin II (565-574) who had it renovated. Not until the tenth century did theGolden Horn begin to regain its importance, which is reflected in the documentsof the Italian maritime republics, Venice, Pisa and Genoa, who were grantedtrading quarters in the area from the end of the eleventh century.
I attempted toexplain these changes in the maritime neighbourhoods of Constantinople, bothin Constantinople medievale and in a subsequent article. I also concluded thatthere were few other major relocations or new foundations that substantiallyaltered the map and the fabric of the city before 1204. The evidence for the aristocratic houses and the urban monasteries that constituted the nuclei. of growthand development from around 800 rarely seemed to prove that such units werecreated where nothing had existed before; in a striking number of cases, it waspossible to infer the re-use of older structures, or to find earlier mentions of oikoiat apparently the same locations, albeit with different names. Viewed in thislight, the building and endowment programme of the Komnenoi did not seemexceptionally drastic or innovatory; an equally if not more significant momentin terms of the re-constitution of urban oikoi and the revival of the Golden Hornarea was the reign of Romanos I Lekapenos (920-944). Constantinople medievale attracted few reviews. Whether this silence wasdue to general acceptance or to a reluctance to engage with the book's denseFrench prose, an English translation seems to be in order. But in one importantquarter, the book failed to convince completely. In an addendum to the thirdedition of his Developpement urbain, Cyril Mango stated his disagreement on anumber of points which he is reserving for more detailed discussion elsewhere.' As might be expected, his objections mainly concern the degree of continuitybetween early Christian Constantinople and the medieval city.
It remains to beseen whether the difference is one of emphasis and interpretation with regard tothe same body of evidence, or whether there are other pieces of evidence to fitinto the picture. In the first case, it is a question of the relative value one attachesto the continuity of early Christian institutions as opposed to the discontinuity in the tradition of monumental civic decor; it also depends on whether ornot one regards the re-use of sites and buildings as more significant than their conversion and reconstruction for new, mainly monastic use. A further issue of interpretation is raised by the contraction and impoverishment of the city in the`DarkAges'. Was this quantitative decline extensive enough to cause qualitativechange? In Constantinople medievale I perhaps placed too little emphasis onthe severity of the crisis and the impact of the revival that the city underwent inthe reign of Constantine V (741-775). No. IV in the present collection attempts, accordingly, to evaluate this moment of discontinuity whose significance mayhave been obscured by the damnatio memoriae of the controversial iconoclast emperor. Explanations of Constantinople's urban development are fragile not onlybecause they involve the subjective evaluation of well-known and unambiguousevidence, but also because they build on deductions that can easily be upset by the objective adduction of previously ignored or misplaced data about thetopography, chronology and functions of individual sites.
The proper identification of one small piece in the jigsaw can mean that whole sections of the picturethat have been already assembled, or wrongly assembled, fall clearly into their proper place - sometimes in an unexpected way, and with far-reaching implications. Familiar archaeological finds take on a whole new significance when thecontext of their discovery is reconsidered along with a critical re-examination of equally familiar written sources. Thus, Cyril Mango has plausibly identified theobelisk seen by Pierre Gilles inside the Seraglio enclosure in 1544 with the oneknown to have stood in the Strategion, the square near the waterfront of ancient Byzantion on the Golden Horn.' This could mean that the Strategion was located`some 300 meters east of Sirkeci station'; a location which has considerableimplications for our understanding of both the commercial and the ceremonial use of this part of this city in the Middle Ages. Even more significant conclusionsfollow from Denis Feissel's recent identification of a fragmentary inscription ona mutilated statue base that has stood unrecognised for over sixty years in thegarden of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.' By identifying the inscriptionwith epigrams in the GreekAnthology and linking it to other well-known texts, Feissel has convincingly confirmed several points about the Capitol of ancient Constantinople: its situation near the modem Laleli mosque; the probable appearance of its monuments; and the fact that the `University' of Constantinoplelocated there was also known as the `Mouseion' and still functioning in the reignof Tiberius II (574-582).
This was one connection between texts and material remains that Mango had missed, but otherwise his knowledge of both, maturedover a career of more than sixty years, is unrivalled, and will give the study he is engaged in a comprehensiveness and a depth that will be difficult to surpass.' The present volume is published with that proviso. But with that proviso, itis published in the belief that it presents a picture of the urban developmentof Constantinople that deserves to be better known, and updated, before it issuperseded, both in its general conclusions and in its details. The amount of recorded but neglected evidence capable of yielding newinsights is limited. However, the unrecorded evidence sealed beneath the surfaceof modem Istanbul, and waiting to be discovered in the countryside aroundthe city, is potentially infinite and its potential to alter existing conceptions isenormous.
The chance to investigate occurs so rarely that it is all too easy tobecome resigned to forever being denied access to this material. Yet resignation- or complacency - is not in order, despite or indeed because of the massivemodernisation of Istanbul. In the 1950s and 1960s, the building of the newmunicipal headquarters and the Atatiirk boulevard led to significant discoveries, notably the excavation of the remains of the church of St Polyeuktos atSarachane.10 Since the late 1990s, a planned extension to the Four Seasons hotel has led to the excavation of substantial remains of the Great Palace south eastof Hagia Sophia; they include the base of a monumental gateway in the areawhere Cyril Mango located the Chalke, the main Palace entrance. Since 2005, preparations for work on a Bosphoros tunnel and metro-rail link complex haveuncovered the remains of the harbour of Theodosius at Yenikapi on the Sea ofMarmara. The intensive rescue excavation of this huge site has already yieldedspectacular finds that vastly enrich and to some extent transform our knowledgeof an important sector of the Byzantine city's infrastructure.
They include theremains of a massive coastal wall datable to the time of Constantine, the quaysideof the port and rows of wooden posts presumably remaining from the jetties, some vaulted tombs from the middle Byzantine period, and the sunken wrecksof twenty-three Byzantine ships, some of them complete with their anchors andcargoes of amphorae. At the very least, these discoveries demonstrate that verylittle can be concluded from the silence of the written sources on any aspect ofurban topography: in this case, the fact that no urban sea wall is attested before439, and that no commercial activity at the Harbour of Theodosius is recorded inthe medieval period. So far, moreover, the few burials found at the excavations are not sufficient to confirm my hypothesis that the harbour area was a major cemetery in the twelfth century. At the same time, archaeological work in the suburbs and the surroundings of Istanbul is throwing light not only on the hinterland of Byzantine Constantinoplebut also, by extension, on the city itself. Investigation of Byzantine substructuresat Kucukyah," and field surveys of church remains on the southern coast of the Sea of Marmara, are revealing that the network of monasteries associatedwith the capital on the Asiatic side was if anything even more important thanthe written sources suggest.
An earlier field survey of roads and bridges inBithynia mapped the network of communication routes from the capital to itseastern provinces." On the European side, a proj ect to survey the Long Walls of Thrace, the city's outer line of defence running from the Sea of Marmara to theBlack Sea some 90 km to the west, has turned into a survey of Constantinople'selaborate water-supply system, one of the greatest engineering projects of theancient world.
Mapping the catchment areas and aqueduct networks outside thecity necessarily leads to a very precise projection of the water channels withinits walls, according the gradients and contours involved, and this in turn hasimplications for the location of cisterns and residential areas. The historian of Byzantine Constantinople is working with a limited but far from finite body of evidence. He can expect what he writes to have a short shelf life, and that is as it should be. The important thing is to keep the shelf well stocked, and with more than one brand. PAUL MAGDALINO Istanbul May 2007
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