Download PDF | (The Medieval Mediterranean, 113) Shay Eshel - The Concept of the Elect Nation in Byzantium-Brill (2018).
234 Pages
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without the encouragement, advice and guidance of four outstanding scholars: Doctor Milka Levy-Rubin accompanied the research from its very first steps until the last correction of the doctoral dissertation. Her guidance, wisdom and friendship are imprinted in every word of this book.
Professor Doron Mendels supported the research with good guidance and thought provoking questions, enriching the research with wise and interesting insights.
Special thanks are due to Professor Avshalom Laniado of Tel Aviv University, who also accompanied the research from its hesitant beginning until its completion and improved and corrected every syllable and every Greek accent mark. For his generosity I owe him my warmest gratitude.
Professor Paul Magdalino was the first to assert my intuition, that the topic is worthy of a thorough research. His 2009 lecture at the Gennadius Library in Athens, “Byzantium as the New Israel’, gave me the initial basis for the research. Professor Magdalino was generous enough to give me his consent to write the dissertation, centering upon a topic he started researching several years earlier. Eight years later, Professor Magdalino edited the drafts of the book and helped me in transforming the doctoral dissertation into an academic Brill publication.
I wish to thank all four scholars, I was truly blessed to have an opportunity to work with every one of you. To Marcella Mulder of Brill, who accompanied the publication of this book with endless patience, and a smile. This book could not have been published without your guidance and assistance.
Thank you.
Introduction
Christianity has viewed itself from the very beginning of its existence as the ‘New Israel’, and so Christians from non-Jewish origins considered themselves at an early stage as members of the covenant of Israel according to the spirit and not the flesh.! This ‘New Israel’ was founded on a universal religious ideal which stood in strict contrast to the Old Testament paradigm of a single holy nation. However, the Old Testament model of a chosen people did not vanish; rather, it was transferred to the New Israel and influenced diverse ethnic and religious groups within the Christian sphere throughout history.
This book seeks to explore the ways in which the Old Testament paradigm of the Elect Nation influenced Byzantium and its history.? It endeavours to accomplish two objectives. The first is to argue that the biblical model of the ancient Israelites was a prominent factor in the evolution of Roman-Byzantine national awareness between the seventh and thirteenth centuries.3 Having established this conceptual basis, the research will pose several key questions related to the political sphere: How did the biblical model affect Byzantine political culture? Who used it, to what end, and for which audience was it intended? Did the biblical model have any influence on Byzantine foreign relations? What were the main changes in the use of the biblical model during this period regarding its content, the context of its use, the political identity of the user and the social character of his audience?
The Question of Byzantine Nationalism in Modern Research and the Approach of the Present Research
Modern historical research contains various attitudes towards Byzantine identities and the nature of its collective awareness. The spectrum moves from Obolensky’s perspective of a Pan-Orthodox East-European commonwealth,* to more recent assertions of the existence of a Byzantine ‘Roman’ nationality based upon the Greek language, Orthodoxy and a Roman historical awareness.® Kaldellis, the most outright adherent of this view, sees Byzantium as a ‘nationstate’.
Mainstream modern research links Byzantine ‘national’ awareness with the shift of the term ‘Hellenism’ and its derivatives (mainly the adjective ‘Hellene’) after 1204, from the realm of a classical elitist discourse to the realm of national discourse, and asserts that Byzantine nationality, based on the idea of a Greek ethnos, came into a distinct existence only at this point, mainly within the Nicaean and later the Palaeologan court circles.’
When historical research ties manifestations of Byzantine ‘Hellenism’ with the emergence of a recognizable modern nationality, the Greek one, it falls into the trap of terminology and its misuse by modern nations, whose aim is to enhance their own historical claims.® This, in my opinion, is due to two reasons. First, collective awareness cannot be sufficiently understood and traced by the analysis of adjectives (‘Roman ‘Hellene’) and their use.
Too many studies have made the use of these adjectives the main focus of their interest.? Collective identity is an elaborate structure constructed from elements such as common myths and historical narrative, a common hegemonic language, practices, religious beliefs, attachment to a common territory, and allegiance to a common political entity, which either exists in the present or as a collective memory, with a wish for future restoration. A terminology-focused research is in danger of stating only the obvious and of discerning an identity only when it surfaces in terms which the modern researcher is able to grasp as relevant. This leads to the second point: The fact that no Roman-Byzantine nationality exists today, and that modern Greek nationality often claims to be the direct heir of Byzantium, leads scholars to identify Hellenism with Byzantine nationalism, considered in its turn as an early, pre-modern stage of Greek nationalism.!° Thus, historiography is in danger of overlooking the emergence of Byzantine nationalism in the preceding centuries, a phenomenon which has little to do with the modern Greek one.
The hypothesis of the present research is that Byzantine national awareness existed before the use of ‘Hellenism’ as an identity denominator. I wish to assert that the biblical national paradigm played a vital role in the evolution of that Byzantine awareness.
To a great extent I share Héléne Ahrweiler’s view, asserting a historical evolution of Byzantine collective awareness, from imperial universalism in late antiquity, toward national consciousness, materializing in the wake of the seventh-century crisis.
But can this awareness be regarded a national identity? Can the term nationalism be used at all prior to the nineteenth century?
The underlying hypothesis of the present research regarding this question is, to use Doron Mendels’ words, referring to the question of the existence of nationalism in the ancient world, “Yes, but not in the sense it has in modern times”.!? The same historical attitude was taken by Adrian Hastings: “‘Nationalism’ means two things: a theory and a practice. As a political theory—that each ‘nation’ should have its own ‘state’—it derives from the nineteenth century In practice nationalism is strong only in particularist terms ... If nationalism became theoretically central to western political thinking in the nineteenth century, it existed as a powerful reality in some places long before that.”8
Below are some extracts from Hastings’ analysis of the properties of a nation, as opposed to the definitions of ethnicity.!+ In my view, all of these correspond to Byzantine national characteristics, as seen clearly by the ninth century:
1. “A nation is a far more self-conscious community than an ethnicity. Formed from one or more ethnicities, and normally identified by a literature of its own, it possesses or claims the right to political identity.”
A nation possesses or claims the right to “the control of specific territory.” “A nation state is a state which identifies itself in terms of one specific nation whose people are not seen simply as ‘subjects’ of the sovereign but as a horizontally bonded society to whom the state in a sense belongs”5
4. “Ideally, there is a basic equivalence between the borders and character of the political unit ... and a self-conscious cultural community.’ My assertion is that evolution toward this reality was set in motion in the Byzantine state as a reaction to the crisis of the seventh century.
5. In reality, “Most nation-states ... include groups of people who do not belong to its core culture ...” And so, the existence of Bulgarians or Armenians within the empire does not contradict its identification with the hegemonic Roman-Byzantine culture and the bearer of this culture, the Greek-speaking, Byzantine-Orthodox population.
6. Nationalism “arises chiefly where and when a particular ethnicity or nation feels itself threatened in regard to its own proper character, extent or importance.” In my view, this corresponds to Byzantium as of the seventh century.
7. Hastings argues that “The Bible provided, for the Christian world at least, the original model of the nation ... Biblical Christianity both undergirds the cultural and political world out of which the phenomena of nationhood and nationalism as a whole developed and in a number of important cases provided a crucial ingredient for the particular history of both nations and nationalisms”. This is a vital building stone for the present research, a general claim I intend to prove as corresponding with Byzantine reality.
Indeed, one of the aims of this research is to examine the emergence of Byzantine nationality not through ethnonyms such as Rhomaioi or Hellenes or even references to biblical terminology, but through the adoption of a national paradigm embodied in the Bible. This adaptation of the biblical paradigm might be traced in some texts through the use of direct biblical discourse and prototypes. Alternatively, it might be discerned in other texts, even with little or no use of biblical imagery, through the adoption of the biblical Israelite worldviews concerning the Byzantines’ own role in the world as an Elect Nation, the consistent and exclusive identification of Orthodox religion with the Roman nation, and the essence and role of the Byzantine state: a sacred universal empire or rather the sacred and exclusive polity of the Romans.
My hypothesis is that through this biblical discourse, the Byzantines were able to express their sense of common national identity. This identity was looking for the right vessel to carry it across the restrictions imposed by the universal imperial ethos, inherited from Rome and incompatible with the reality of the Middle Ages.
This reality changed after 1204, when the universal ethos was exposed as irrelevant, and the Byzantines’ view of their leading role in Christendom was shaken as well.
Some scholars, as noted above,!® viewed the Fourth Crusade as the birth of Byzantine-Hellenic nationalism. I wish to argue that although the Hellenic identity motif gained legitimacy in the Nicaean court circles, it stayed within the boundaries of court discourse, and even as such, it was used to describe an already existing nation, the Rhomaioi. Furthermore, the Hellenic identity motif enjoyed but a short-lived and much disputed existence: in the aftermath of 1204 two main elements of Byzantine identity began to disintegrate and to be per- ceived by many Byzantines as inherently contradicting each other, these two elements being the Greek classical heritage and the Orthodox world-view. The Nicaean revival between 1204 and 1261 is seen in this context as no more than a heroic attempt to cling to past narratives and ideologies, a brave, but in the end, a futile attempt to hold together the drifting elements of the Byzantine world. While the Palaeologan court circles clung to the classical heritage, most of the population began to identify it with the imperial ‘Unionist!’ government and alienated it from its own sense of Byzantine-Orthodox national identity. As a result, the allegiance to the Politeia was shaken because of the widening chasm between the ‘inner’, religious wisdom, and the ‘outer’, secular and classicist one, and between the different ‘Roman’ identities they represented.!®
For this reason the present research will end before the disintegration of Roman-Byzantine identity became apparent, and will focus on the period when most of the Byzantine population was under the empire's rule. A population which was considered to be the source of legitimacy to the empire’s common institutional symbols: the emperor of the Romans,’ the patriarch of Constantinople and the state’s apparatus with its various representations.
The Concept of the Elect Nation: Terminology
Elect Nation Various collectivities throughout history have believed themselves to be chosen by one or more divinities to be their terrestrial ‘tools’ or allies in those divinities’ meta-historical schemes.”! In the context of the present research, any collectivity which exhibits this belief is termed an Elect Nation, for the whole body of the group’s population is referred to as having a role in the divine plan.
The concept of an Elect Nation seeks to create an unbreakable bond between the divine and the terrestrial, between the power of the gods and the military and the political power of a certain group of people. This powerful idea has two main aspects: it seeks to mobilize the gods and harness them in man’s favour, in his attempt to overcome his rivals in God’s name, and on the other hand to mobilize people and lead them, united under a leadership which claims for itself a divine legitimacy. The idea is not strictly a religious one but rather a theological-political one, its main purpose is not to worship God but to harness religion in the service of politics in its broadest sense: the group endeavours to differentiate and unite itself vis-a-vis other groups, while at the same time the group’s inner politics is the realm of constant tension between contesting elites, striving to consolidate their power in God’s name, ina struggle for the domination of society. This conflict revolves around the representation of God’s will, and its outcome is to determine what is orthodoxy, what is heterodoxy and, especially, who has the authority to determine and differentiate between the two.
The Old Testament Paradigm of the Elect Nation The Old Testament paradigm is one manifestation of the ‘Chosen People’ idea. Diverse groups, believing themselves to be chosen by the divinity, existed in East Asia as well as in pre-Christian Europe hundreds of years before the Bible became known to these cultures.*? The Old Testament paradigm forms, how-ever, an extreme and uncompromising example of the ‘Elect Nation’ idea. God chose the Israelites from all the peoples of the earth to serve as a holy community, a kingdom of priests. The Israelites are promised a fertile land, a safe existence and victories over all their enemies, but this is a conditional promise: the people have to remain loyal to the one God only, to keep his commandments and to live up to the highest moral expectations. If the people fail to do so, they bring God’s wrath upon themselves, a wrath which is more severe than God’s treatment of other peoples’ sins. The biblical paradigm is a repeating history of the Israelites’ sins, God’s wrath, their remorse and repentance under a just leader and eventually their temporary salvation, until the next cycle. The destruction of the First Temple in 586 Bc and the Babylonian exile led the Prophets to predict an end to this cycle, a time when God will bring about the religious as well as the political salvation of the people.*? This is a crucial point: the biblical paradigm puts its emphasis on the inseparable unity of nation and religion; the political restoration of the nation and the religious eschatological salvation are one and the same. This unity of nation and religion served as a main source of appeal to other collectivities throughout history. Furthermore, the cycle of sin-wrath-repentance-salvation enables a collectivity to view its present state of dire straits as explicable and temporary, if only the people repent and do God’s will. At the same time it serves as a proof of the community’s unique ethos and of the importance of its existence as a distinct group, for why else would God rebuke and test the people in such a way?
Elect Nation versus Chosen People, Terminology and Context The question of terminology used in the present research concerns only the English terms, for in the Septuagint and the New Testament the verb éxAéyw denotes in its various linguistic forms both Elect (Isaiah 65:9, 1Peter 2:6) and Chosen (Deuteronomy 14:2). The verb to Choose in English translations is sometimes derived from the Greek mpoatpéw (Deuteronomy 7:6) although the primary meaning of this verb is to prefer. The choices of terminology used in this research are therefore dependent upon the uses of these terms in English and upon several other variables, as specified below.
In Deuteronomy 7:6 and 14:2 God declares that He chose the people of Israel over all the other people to be a holy and peculiar nation (King James’ Bible, Deuteronomy 14:2: “For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth”). From these passages the term Chosen People is derived.
The term Elect appears for the first time in Isaiah (42:1, 45:4, 65:22 and 65:9, which follows: “And I will bring forth a seed out of Jacob, and out of Judah an inheritor of my mountains: and mine elect shall inherit it, and my servants shall dwell there”). Christianity adopted this term to refer to the Christian believers, who are the true successors of the chosen Israel (1 Peter 2:6: “Wherefore also it is contained in the scripture, Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded’; see also Matthew 24:22, 24, 31 and more).
I have chosen to use the term Elect Nation—rather than Chosen People—to represent the Byzantine notion of a unifying ethos of Election for the following reasons:
— Several Christian collectivities have defined themselves as the Elect and Elect Nation.** These terms served Christian groups in order to define their identities vis-a-vis both Christian and non-Christian groups. Byzantine identity is part of this Christian discourse, and therefore I find the term Elect Nation to be more appropriate than Chosen People, which can also be applied to nonChristian collective identities.
— The Old Testament term Chosen People, referring to the Israelites, suggests a strong sense of ethnicity, for God’s covenant with the Israelites is dependent on his former covenants with the nation’s patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Genesis 15:18, 17:2-27; Exodus 2:24). The Byzantine collective identity does not rely mainly upon an ethnic ethos, but upon an institutional, religious and cultural ethos: the political loyalty to the Roman emperor and the adherence to the Orthodox faith under the leadership of the Constantinopolitan patriarchate. Ethnic chauvinism does of course play an important role in Byzantine history, but it is not a defining concept of Byzantine identity.
The Byzantine Concept of the Elect Nation: Religious and Historical Contexts
Christianity absorbed the chosenness concept from the very core of its identity: the Holy Scriptures. The traditional Christian reading of the Old Testament as prefiguring the Christian era, allowed different nations to see the Israelite history and heroes as a typological prefiguration of their own history and their own leaders.
Within the Christian world, the model of the ancient Israelites served as a mirror and a point of reference to almost every polity, ethnicity and nationality which was a part of its sphere. This crucial point forms an important explanation for the difference between the two great monotheist civilizations, the Christian and the Muslim, with regard to the evolution of local nationalities: “While both Muslims and Christians recognize their Abrahamic inheritance, Muslims did not incorporate the Hebrew Scriptures into their own as Christians did. This means that Muslims were never affected by the Old Testament state example in the way that Christians have continuously been ... While Christianity in consequence has always been politically ambivalent between nation-state and universal state, Islam has never been. It is ... far more politically universalist and exercises ... a religious restraint upon nationalism”.25 The Muslim ‘Umma’ (Nation, People) was therefore perceived as a holy community in its entirety,26 whereas the Christians had always shifted back and forth between the universalist pole, embodied mainly in the New Testament, and their ethno-nationalist pole, deriving mainly from the story of the people of Israel and their paradigmatic and complex relationship with God.
The French, Russians, English and many more nationalities and sects adopted at one time or another the title of New Israel.?” Though each one of them has done so in a way which best suited its heritage and evolution, they have also deeply affected each other’s Election myth. Each of them deserves a thorough research.
The present work concerns Byzantium and its own characteristics and relationship with the old Israel and the Abrahamic Election myth. It bears some peculiar properties, unique only to itself: it preceded the above-mentioned examples by centuries. Armenia is the only other Christian polity established as early as the fourth century. Byzantium, in contrast to Armenia, was the Roman empire: it confronted the opposite poles of universalism and particularism without a previous Christian model. Its hegemonic language, Greek, was the language of the New Testament, and as such it was conceived as a sacred language. From the seventh century onwards it competed over the ‘Elect Nation’ title with the Muslim caliphate, and later with Christian polities that sought to replace it, both as a holy nation, and as a universal holy empire.
Chronological Framework
The research will investigate the evolution of the Byzantine Elect Nation Concept between the seventh and the thirteenth centuries. I chose the seventh century as the starting point for the present research because, as I hope to demonstrate in the following chapters, the seventh-century crisis, with the loss of the Middle-Eastern regions to the Arabs, brought the Byzantines closer to the separatist model of the ancient Israelites, and further away from the imperial universal ideal. A majority of the population was by then Greek in language.
and Orthodox in religion. This created the conditions that encouraged the unity of the empire and provided, in addition to the growing sense of external threat, a fertile soil for the emergence of a particularistic Byzantine Election concept. The research concludes with the thirteenth century, when the Byzantine world lost its unity and the empire was torn into several states. The unity of state, emperor and people was never to be regained and Roman-Byzantine identity began a rapid process of disintegration.
The State of Research
The concept of the Elect Nation in Byzantium has drawn the attention of several Byzantinists, who mentioned this concept as a well-known feature of Byzantine thought, without however conducting an extensive research dedicated to its understanding. A few quotations which exhibit the notion of the Byzantines as being the Chosen People or the New Israel are cited in these historians’ works, but the concept is on the whole left unresearched as a kind of established axiom.?9
An important step toward paying due attention to the role of the Elect Nation paradigm in Byzantium, was taken by Paul Magdalino and Robert Nelson in their joint introduction to “The Old Testament in Byzantium”.®° In the introduction, Magdalino and Nelson present a chronological review of the sources, which exhibit Byzantium as the New Israel, including various biblical allusions and typology: the emperor as the embodiment of biblical leaders, Constantinople as Jerusalem, the Byzantine population as the Chosen People. The introduction focuses mainly on the seventh to tenth centuries, with a question mark as to the centrality of this idea in Byzantine thought after the ninth century.?! The present research wishes to follow Magdalino and Nelson’s lead, to give this motif in Byzantine thought the extensive and thorough investigation it deserves, and to argue that the Elect Nation Concept was a fundamental and ongoing aspect of Byzantine identity.
Several elements, which relate to the Byzantine concept of the Elect Nation, have been the focus of detailed research by different scholars. These elements were however studied without being placed in the context of the wider notion of Byzantine ‘Chosenness’. The next pages will be dedicated to an overview of these studies and their importance to the current research. My conviction, however, is that these works provide only a partial account of the phenomenon and its implications for the formation of Byzantine collective identity.
The Use of Biblical Imagery in the Construction of Imperial Image Dimiter Angelov conducted a thorough investigation of the imperial image and of imperial propaganda from 1204 to 1330, and drew a remarkably illuminating table that exhibits all the classical as well as the biblical figures which the different emperors were compared to by official orators: apart from classical figures such as Achilles, Alexander, Caesar and Augustus, the emperors were also frequently compared to Moses, Joshua, David and Solomon. The biblical figures of Moses, David and Zorobabel were extensively used as part of the political ideology of the Nicaean rulers and reached their peak with Michael vir and the return to Constantinople in 1261. The emperors of that period were frequently compared to those national Israelite leaders, and were urged by the orators to rescue their own people as those biblical figures saved the Old Israel. Angelov’s table shows, however, that the orators used more classical sources than biblical ones, at least between 1204 and 1330, although the frequent use of biblical imagery cannot be dismissed as marginal.*? Yet the intensity of biblical imagery used in the years immediately following 1204, raises the following question: was this imagery an innovation of the Nicaean orators, created by the pressure of harsh times in order to answer the needs of a people in exile?
Research of the last twenty years has shown that the biblical image of rulers was not invented in the Nicaean exile; rather, it was a traditional image called to the fore to answer the ideological needs of the Nicaean emperors. Paul Magdalino has asserted in his extensive research concerning Manuel 1 Komnenos, that the biblical comparisons were an important part of imperial ideology in the twelfth century as well: Manuel was especially compared to David in order to stress his piety and to legitimize his coming to power, despite his young age and the fact that he was the fourth and youngest son of John 11. In addition, the comparison with David augmented Manuel’s image as a warrior emperor, fighting courageously against all odds with the Lord on his side.
Shaun Tougher has shown that the Macedonian dynasty gave crucial impetus to the rise of biblical imagery in the service of imperial ideology: Basil 1 was described as the embodiment of David, thus legitimizing his usurpation of the throne as being in accordance with God’s will, who wished to replace the ‘sinful’ Michael 111 just as he replaced Saul for his wrongdoings. Basil’s son Leo v1 was fittingly named ‘The Wise’ in order to follow the biblical example of the wise Solomon, son of David.**
Claudia Rapp has demonstrated that Old Testament typology was frequently used as a source for political and moral models for the emperors as early as Constantine I and more extensively from the mid-fifth century onward.*> An important point for the present research’s chronological framework, beginning with the Heraklian age, is Rapp’s assertion, that “the late sixth and early seventh century represented a conceptual watershed” in the use of Old Testament typology and models. The “tentative and uneven roots” of the use of such models in early Byzantium became a “commonplace in the late Byzantine period”.6
An extensive and theoretical contribution to the study of the emperors’ biblical imagery and its power was made by Gilbert Dagron, who explored the emperors’ sanctity and quasi-priestly features and showed how the biblical kings’ paradigm affected the imperial office, and legitimized its claim for sanctity and rulership over the ecclesiastical sphere.”
The biblical typology was used to endow the ruler with sacred features and legitimacy. The present research focuses on the biblical typology applied to the Roman-Byzantine population as a whole, and wishes to explore the ways in which this typology effected the creation of a collective Byzantine identity. Furthermore, a question will be raised as to whether the Byzantines rendered any sanctity to themselves as a people. Did the sanctity of rulers correspond with the sanctity of the ruled? Was biblical typology left to the glorification of the ruler or did it contribute to a wider national consciousness? Can there be a David without an Elect Nation.
Constantinople as the ‘New Jerusalem’
Several Byzantine sources containing a comparison between Constantinople and Jerusalem or referring to the imperial city as the ‘New Jerusalem’ were well known to Byzantinists throughout the twentieth century. Sources like the Life of Daniel the Stylite (written c. 500) or Theodore the Synkellos’ homily on the Avar siege of 626 referred to Constantinople as substituting the ‘Old Jerusalem’ Justinian’s famous (and most likely apocryphal) saying “Solomon, I have surpassed you’, referring to the renovated Hagia Sophia, has often been cited in textbooks.3&
A breakthrough in modern understanding of the depth, diversity and cultural meaning of this comparison was made in the early 1960s with Paul Alexander’s article “The Strength of Empire and Capital as Seen through Byzantine Eyes”.39 Alexander analyzed various religio-political aspects of Byzantine thought, to show that the Byzantines attributed to their capital city a special role in the Christian meta-historical view of history. According to the Byzantines’ view, the capital replaced older cities such as Jerusalem and Rome with regard to sanctity and divine favour, and enjoyed divine protection mediated mainly by the Virgin Mary, the city’s protectress. Alexander drew scholarly attention to the importance of apocalypses, and showed how Jerusalem and Constantinople participate in a meta-historical relay race, passing the torch of divine role in human history from one to the other: Jerusalem during the Old Testament epoch, Constantinople during the Christian New Testament epoch until the consummation of time, then—with the last emperor coming to Jerusalem—passing the torch to Jerusalem again, as the kingdom of heaven on earth and the second coming of Christ are about to begin. In 2001 Marie-Héléne Congourdeau focused on the comparison of Jerusalem and Constantinople in apocalyptic sources, thus setting in order the sources and research devoted to this topic up to that time.*°
Archeological findings from Istanbul contributed greatly to the understanding of the apocalyptic tradition. In an excavation held during the early 1960's, remains of an imperial-size church were found and identified as the site of St Polyeuktos, built between 512 and 527 by Anicia Juliana, a lady of imperial descent. In 1986 and 1989 Martin Harrison, one of the two main excavators (the other one being Nezih Firatl), published his report and research regarding the significance of the site.*! Harrison argued that St Polyeuktos was built according to the measurements of Solomon's Temple, as given in 3 Kings, 6. Furthermore, the epigram inscribed prominently in the interior hailed Juliana for surpassing the renowned Solomon. The inscription and the imperial-size church might have motivated Justinian to surpass it with the renovated Hagia Sophia, while Juliana and all the other potential rivals of imperial descent may have been the intended recipients of Justinian’s famous boast that he had surpassed the biblical Solomon. In an article published in 1994,*” Christine Milner argued that St Polyeuktos was built not according to Solomon’s Temple, but according to Ezekiel’s visionary temple, and so Juliana’s church was not intended to transfer the older Jerusalem to Constantinople but rather to replace it, as a prefiguration of what the Christians perceived as a vision of the New Jerusalem of the Second Coming. Milner uses apocalypses of the fifth and sixth centuries, which unlike those of the seventh and tenth centuries mentioned by Alexander and Ryden, viewed the expected rebuilding of the older Temple of Jerusalem as a work of the Antichrist In 2006 Robert Ousterhout supported Milner’s substitution theory by adding architectural and geographical insights to show that Constantinople was never intended to imitate Jerusalem, but to replace it.4? Meanwhile Paul Magdalino incorporated the findings of St Polyeuktos and the apocalyptic tradition regarding the relationship between the Old and New Jerusalem in a view of a wide and long-lived apocalyptic ideology, intended not only to foresee the future, but to give the Christian empire a central place in the meta-historical and eschatological Christian doctrine. Constantinople as the New Jerusalem was an essential part of sixth and seventh-century Byzantine views of their empire as being on the verge of becoming one with the kingdom of heaven.** Thus, political and religious eschatological salvations became one and the same in Byzantium, just as in the prophetic biblical tradition.
In 2017 Jelena Erdeljan presented a thorough survey of the translatio Hierosolymi, or Jerusalimization of Constantinople, from its establishment in the fourth century to its fall in 1453, and explored Constantinople’s crucial influence on later New Jerusalems throughout the Orthodox sphere.*®
But did the sacred status of empire and capital, together with the sacred status of the imperial office mentioned earlier, diffuse into a wider metahistorical role of the Roman-Byzantine population as a whole? How did the concept of the ‘New Jerusalem’ affect the Byzantines’ view of themselves as the ‘New Israel’? Did it influence only Constantinople’s own inhabitants or have a wider impact on the whole Roman-Byzantine population? How could such a cosmopolitan city take on the role of a national symbol?
An acknowledgement of the Byzantine view of Constantinople as the New Jerusalem serves only as a basis for an enquiry into Jerusalem’s influence upon Byzantine identities and politics.
Theoretical Background: The Concept of the Elect Nation and Its Manifestations throughout History
A self-proclaimed ‘chosen’ society possesses several socio-political characteristics, which differentiate it from societies that are not oriented toward the idea of Election. The list below specifies some of those characteristics and their implications for society. The aim of this theoretical review is to emphasize several properties that are common to different ‘chosen’ societies, though these do not necessarily exhibit themselves as a whole in each and every historical case. The specific Byzantine manifestations of each of these general chracteristics, are discussed in the book’s concluding chapter.
A Fundamental Building Stones
1 Election Myth
An Election myth affirms and specifies the bond and the ‘terms of agreement’ between the deity and one or more individuals. The myth places the bond in the past—mostly a remote, mythical past—and establishes the continuation of this ‘treaty’ by an affirmation of an unbreakable chain of transmission between the collectivity’s mythical predecessor and the present religious and political elite.46
2 The Conditional Aspect
Any agreement indeed involves conditional aspects. However, in the context of the ‘Elect Nation’ it deserves special attention: the emphasis here is on the accountability of the whole community, and it makes the well-being of the people conditional upon their attachment to orthodoxy.*”
3 A Missionary Imperative
The first paragraph (above) concerns mainly the elite and gives it a sense of mission, as the heir to the mission God entrusted in the hands of the mythical predecessors: to spread his word, maintain orthodoxy in its own people and defend it, defeat the infidel and so on. This gives the elites and—by extension— their people, an exalted sense of mission and chosenness.
B Socio-political Implications
4 The Popular Force of the Elect Nation Concept
The Election myth imparts the legitimacy to oppose the authorities in the name of a greater loyalty to God’s will, which is supposed to be known, at least in its basic form, to all. The Election myth puts rulers under the constantly censuring eye of both adherents and rivals, and gives therefore at least a partial legitimacy to political intervention by the common population, either by direct social upheavals, or by giving social support for an usurper.*9
5 The Power and Centrality of the Priesthood
The idea of Election gives political and moral power to priests and religious organizations, both vis-a-vis the ruler and elites as well as the common population. In their relationship with the ruler, it consolidates the religious authorities’ status as an important source of legitimacy; a legitimacy which they can choose whether to bestow upon the ruler, or not. The priesthood often acts hand in hand with the secular authority in a mutually beneficial relationship, but the theoretical (and sometimes actual) possibility of criticizing the secular authority and taking away its legitimacy is always present in the priesthood’s dealings with the secular rulers. Vis-a-vis the people it gives them the ability to repeatedly call on them to repent and return to orthodoxy according to the high ideal of the Chosen People. In their religious repentance, the people tend to support the priesthood and its economic and political demands. The priest-hood is often the main beneficiary of the Election concept and its greatest advocate.5°
6 The Ruler’s Interests in the Promotion of the Elect Nation Concept The ruler’s prestige is also strengthened by the Election concept: what good is a ruler if he dominates a totally insignificant population? Being the leader of a chosen people, on the other hand, exalts his own self-image and serves him well both in the realm of internal politics and in his dealings with other rulers. In some historical cases, such as that of France, the concept of Election was diffused from above: first the kings were considered to be elect and to possess sacred properties, and in a slow process, this chosenness was bestowed upon their people by the ideological adherents of the king, be they secular officials or the clergy. Finally, this notion became commonly accepted as one of the pillars of the French nation.5!
Cc Meta-history and Identity
7 A Golden Age
The memory of a golden age or ages, in which the prototype of the good ruler ruled the people, a time of ‘honeymoon’ between the people and the gods. The concept of a golden age transcends the boundaries of the myth of Election and gives a presumably historical proof and prototype for a successful realization of the divine covenant.5?
8 Termination of Historical Time
Due to the importance of meta-history in the idea of Election, the self-proclaimed elect culture produces visions of the expected completion of the divine historical plan. Apocalypses and other prophecies regarding the termination of normal time and the coming of a final golden age or, in some cases, God’s rule on earth, are intrinsic properties of the Election theme, just as the vision of the inevitable rule of the proletariat is a crucial part of Marxism. If there is a historical plan, one should know what to expect, otherwise the present itself as well as the concept of Election are left without meaning.>?
D Central Attributes: Sacred Territory, Sacred Language
9 Sacred Territory
The Election myth, being concerned with specific individuals in a specific setting, generates the notion of sacred territory, whether it be the graves and other places attached to the mythic founders of the community, or entire geographical areas, which are attributed to the descendants of the ‘fathers’ of the community. The first case—specific holy places—gives birth to pilgrimage, but not necessarily to territorial demands except the religious right to worship. In this case the community strengthens its identity by revering those places and by reiterating the myths revolving around them. The second case, in which entire geographical areas are proclaimed as sacred, generates the fundamental territorial condition for the rise of Elect Nations.**
10 Sacred Language A basic pre-condition for the evolution of a community into an elect people, be it an ethnic or a multi-ethnic community, is the practice of worship in alanguage regarded as exclusive to the community, a language that entails the basic vocabulary for the transmission of both the Election myth (as written in a holy text) and the liturgy. Local communities in an empire paradigm might often come to their full identity as a distinct people only once their ‘high’ or spoken vernacular language becomes sacred, as a language of both liturgy and a holy canon.*®
E Hegemony versus Sub-cultures
1 The Power of the Hegemonic Sacred Language
A liturgical language in a multi-ethnic elect community gives dominance to a specific group which sees itself as the bearer, both of the high culture and of its language. This dominant group generates and maintains the language as sacred and liturgically exclusive, and tends to resist the claims of other languages to being equally sacred. Nevertheless, in the process of a political give-and-take or of missionary activity, the high culture might grudgingly accept other liturgical languages as legitimate, albeit it would continue to regard it’s own language as culturally and religiously superior.*®
12 The Role of Chosenness in an Ethnic Religious and Cultural Conflict
Asa result of the above, chosenness is frequently the tool of one cultural ethnic community to oppress other communities and dominate them. In time this high culture would absorb the other sub-cultures, or lose domination over them in their rebellion against the higher culture and their self-proclamation as distinct Elect Nations, according to the prototype against which they developed their own identity.5”
13 Chosenness’ Historical Role in the Creation of New Group Identities
Elect Nations tend therefore to cotnribute to the emergence of other Elect
Nations in a process of imitation, confrontation, and eventually substitution.
F The Superiority-Inferiority Complex
14 Does Election Imply Virtue?
The concept of chosenness in its basic theological form does not imply any moral or virtuous superiority of the Chosen People. The group as a whole is considered to be chosen and to act as the agent of the deity in human history. The individuals, who were merely born into the group, are not necessarily considered to be chosen or sacred by themselves or to enjoy any moral superiority over individuals of different origins. God did not choose the people on account of their virtues but merely because He decided to bestow His grace and knowledge upon those people through His unexplainable will. The community’s founders are more usually elected for their virtue; a virtue which in a way defends the entire people as an advocate before God. According to this view the individuals need to live up to their heritage and to endeavour to be worthy of their supposed collective superiority.
15 Individuals’ Superiority
Nevertheless, and in contrast to the above, individuals in self-elect societies more than often regard themselves to be inherently superior to outsiders, relying on the basic superiority of the group as elect, and on the notion of being a higher culture with exclusive knowledge and affinity to the divine will.58
16 Universalism versus Particularism
The idea of Election bears intrinsic tension between universalism and particularism: The deity chose one people, yet it did so in order that this people should play a part in the deity’s all-embracing plan for humanity. How can the Chosen People fulfill the plan if they set themselves apart from other peoples? The self-proclaimed higher culture might draw these other peoples to its sphere, but more than often they would be rejected by its snobbery. And if the ‘Chosen People’ are not embodied with a sense of mission, does their existence in itself ensure the well being of the whole world? The answers to these questions are numerous and vary even within a specific culture.5?
17 Hostility toward the Self-Proclaimed Superior Community
The notion of chosenness carries therefore intrinsic tension and hostility between a chosen people and other communities, which object to the Elect Nation’s pretension of being closer to and more favoured by God.
18 Ambition and Self-Confidence
One can discern two basic kinds of chosen cultures: a culture which is selfassured of its Election and superiority, and one which is in a constant need to prove and establish its self-proclaimed superiority. More often than not, the first kind of confident Election produces in its neighbours the second type, eager for recognition and often more aggressive and with higher barriers of exclusiveness.©°
19 The Election Complex and Historical Destiny
All the above might often result in a superiority-inferiority complex in the Elect Nation, both politically and culturally. This hard to define complex manifests itself in various ways, both in the realm of foreign affairs—the enthusiasm or lack of it for military expansion, commercial activity abroad and pure exploration of the outside world—as well as the ability or inability to absorb tech-nological developments coming from abroad. Thus, the chosenness concept is a basic factor in a society’s achievements as well as its failures, and often plays a crucial role in its rise and fall in history.
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