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THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO CONSTANTINOPLE
From its foundation in the fourth century to its fall to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth, “Constantinople” not only identified a geographical location but also summoned an idea. On the one hand there was the fact of Constantinople, the city of brick and mortar that rose to preeminence as the capital of the Roman Empire on a hilly peninsula jutting into the waters at the confluence of the Sea of Marmora, the Golden Horn, and the Bosporos. On the other hand there was the city of the imagination, the Constantinople that conjured a vision of wealth and splendor unrivaled by any of the great medieval cities, east or west. This Companion explores Constantinople from Late Antiquity until the early modern period. Examining its urban infrastructure and the administrative, social, religious, and cultural institutions that gave the city life, it also considers visitors’ encounters with both its urban reality and its place in the imagination.
Sarah Bassett is Associate Professor in the Art History Department at Indiana University and author of The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Her research interests include late antique urbanism, collecting and display in the late antique world, and the historiography of late antique and Byzantine art.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Sarah Bassett is Associate Professor of Art History at Indiana University. She has published on installations of public sculpture in Constantinople, the materiality of late antique sculpture, and aesthetic issues in early Byzantine art.
Albrecht Berger is Professor of Byzantine Studies in the Department for Cultural Studies and Studies of Antiquity at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He is the author of numerous publications on the monuments and topography of Constantinople, and editor of the Byzantinisches Zeitschrift.
Annemarie Weyl Carr is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art History at Southern Methodist University. She has published widely on Byzantine icons and the art and architecture of medieval Cyprus, and is currently working on a study of the afterlife of Byzantine icons, especially those in Cyprus.
James Crow is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, where he teaches Roman and Byzantine Archaeology. He has published widely on the Anastasian Wall and the water supply of Constantinople. He is also interested in the application of archaeology to the study of urban history in the early medieval period and historic landscape studies especially in the Aegean and Anatolia.
Koray Durak is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Bogazi¢i University. His publications address Byzantine-Islamic relations, the economic history of the middle Byzantine period, and Byzantine pharmacology. He is currently at work on a book about trade in pharmacological commodities between Byzantium and the Near East in the early middle ages.
Niels Gaul is A. G. Leventis Professor of Byzantine Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on education and the classical tradition, social performances, and scholarly networks in Byzantine society. He is currently working on a monograph on the sociology of classicizing learning in the Byzantine Empire.
Andreas Gkoutzioukostas is Associate Professor of Byzantine History and Institutions in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman, Byzantine and Medieval History of the School of History and Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His research addresses the institutional history of the Byzantine Empire. He is particularly interested in the administrative structures and officials of the Byzantine state, Byzantine seals and inscriptions, the administration of justice, and the Byzantine prosopography.
Mark J. Johnson is Professor of Ancient and Medieval Art at Brigham Young University. His work on late Roman and Byzantine art and architecture includes publications on Roman imperial mausolea in late antiquity, the Byzantine churches of Sardinia, and octagonal churches in the late antique world. He has also published articles on the eleventh- and twelfth-century art and architecture of Norman Italy.
Cigdem Kafescioglu is Professor in the Department of History at Bofazici University. She writes on the urban, architectural, and visual culture of the Ottoman world in the period between 1400 and 1700. Her interests include spatiality and urban imagination, urban water, vernacular architecture and residential patterns, and Mediterranean cartography.
Anthony Kaldellis is Professor of Classics at Ohio State University. He has published many books and articles on aspects of Byzantine culture and history, along with many translations of Byzantine texts.
Nike Koutrakou is an independent scholar and an external collaborator with the Late Byzantine Hagiography Database Program of the Institute of Historical Research at the Hellenic National Research Foundation, Athens. Her scholarly interests include the history of ideas and mentalités, diplomatic history, and foreign relations in history (in particular Byzantium and the Arabs), strategic studies and war, women’s studies, and hagiography. She has written on political, social, and military history with a focus on propaganda and perception issues. Currently she is working on Byzantine North Africa.
Dirk Krausmiiller studied Classics and Byzantine History at the universities of GieBen and of Munich where he obtained a master’s degree, and at Queen’s University of Belfast for his doctoral degree. He has been a temporary lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, Cardiff University, and Mardin Artuklu University, and was a member of the ERC Project 9SALT at Vienna University. Currently he is working for the Moving Byzantium project, also based at Vienna University. His research interests are Byzantine monasticism and Byzantine theology.
Paul Magdalino is Emeritus Professor of Byzantine History at the University of St. Andrews and a fellow of the British Academy. His numerous publications address questions related to the society, culture, and economy of the Byzantine world from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries. He has worked especially on the city of Constantinople; the interface between magic, astrology, and religion in the Byzantine world; and Byzantine religious and political ideology.
Vasileios Marinis is Associate Professor of Christian Art and Architecture at Yale University. He has published on a variety of topics, ranging from early Christian tunics decorated with New Testament scenes to medieval tombs, graffiti, and visions of the Last Judgment. He has written two books, both published by Cambridge University Press. His current research interests include the textual construction of sacred space and the cult of the martyr Euphemia in Byzantium.
Eric McGeer holds a PhD from the University of Montreal. He teaches in the School for Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto and serves as consultant for Byzantine sigillography at Dumbarton Oaks. His publications include books on Byzantine military history and law, his most recent being Byzantium in the Time of Troubles: The Continuation of the Chronicle of John Skylitzes (Brill Press, 2020). He has also published on Canadian military history.
Timothy S. Miller is Professor of History at Salisbury University. His work focuses on the history of medicine and philanthropic institutions in the Byzantine Empire. His publications include monographs on the Byzantine hospital and child welfare in Byzantium. He is the coauthor, with John Nesbitt, of a study of leprosy in Byzantium and the medieval west.
Philipp Niewéhner is Privatdozent in the Department of Christian Archaeology and Byzantine Art History at Georg August University of Gottingen. He has worked and excavated at Istanbul and in Turkey for over twenty years and edited a volume on the archaeology of Byzantine Anatolia. His current research engages with the interior decoration of Byzantine churches, including early Christian aniconism in Constantinople and Asia Minor and a book on architectural sculpture and liturgical furnishings.
Marcus Rautman is Professor Emeritus of Art and Archaeology of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages in the Department of Ancient Mediterranean Studies at the University of Missouri. A specialist in the material culture of daily life in late Rome and early Byzantium, he has carried out a survey and excavation at the village site of Kalavasos-Kopetra in Cyprus and has worked for many years at Sardis in western Turkey.
Sean Roberts is Lecturer in the School of Art at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and past president of the Italian Art Society. A specialist in the arts of Renaissance Europe, his research explores interactions between Italy and the Islamic lands and the place of prints in the histories of art and technology.
Thomas Russell earned his doctorate at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford before taking up a position as Lecturer of Classics and Ancient History at Balliol College. He subsequently became a Classics school teacher, and is Head of Classics at the Royal Grammar School Worcester. He is the author of Byzantium and the Bosporus (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Raymond Van Dam is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Michigan. His publications include Rome and Constantinople: Rewriting Roman History during Late Antiquity (Baylor University, 2010), as well as books about late antique Gaul, late antique Cappadocia, and the emperor Constantine.
Enrico Zanini is Full Professor of Methodology in archaeological research in the Department of History and Cultural Heritage at the University of Siena. He excavates at Vignale in Italy and at Gortyn on Crete. His publications include work on technology in late antiquity and the fate of cities in the early Byzantine period.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No book comes about without the help of a variety of individuals and institutions, and one of the great pleasures at the completion of any long-term project comes from the opportunity to thank those who contributed to its realization. This volume is no exception. The project began its life at the suggestion of Beatrice Reh] at Cambridge University Press. I thank Beatrice, not only for the opportunity to put this volume together but also for her steady oversight, patience, and good humor as she guided the project from its first stirrings to completion. Those stirrings took place while I was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, during the academic year 2015-16, and I thank the institute and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for support during that time. Further work was completed at Williams College during the spring of 2017, where I was a Visiting Croghan Bicentennial Professor in Biblical and Early Christian Studies. My hosts in the Art History Department, Guy Hedreen and Elizabeth McGowan, merit special thanks.
No less important has been the support of my home institution, Indiana University, and my colleagues in the Art History Department, most especially the chair, Diane Reilly, for her endorsement of a sabbatical leave in the 2019-20 academic year that facilitated completion of the project. Amelia Berry and Amy Welch provided logistical support, and I am grateful, as always, to Brian Madigan. Finally, my thanks to the contributors without whose work this book would be nothing. Together we offer our labors to the memory of Ruth Macrides, whose untimely death in 2019 has been a loss not only for scholarship but also to her friends and colleagues, many of whom are contributors here. Although previous commitments prevented her from contributing directly to the volume, her advice and counsel as the project was taking shape were invaluable. Moreover, as references to her work throughout the volume make clear, her scholarship has played no small part in shaping the understanding of things Byzantine in general and Constantinopolitan in particular. With this in mind, we dedicate the project to her.
INTRODUCTION
Sarah Bassett
From its foundation in the fourth century, to its fall to theOttoman Turks in the fifteenth century, the name “Constantinople” not only identified a geographical location, but also summoned an idea. On the one hand, there was the fact of Constantinople, the city of brick, mortar, and marble that rose to preeminence as the capital of the Roman Empire on a hilly peninsula jutting into the waters at the confluence of the Sea of Marmora, the Golden Horn, and the Bosporos. On the other hand, there was the city of the imagination. To pronounce the name Constantinople conjured a vision of wealth and splendor unrivalled by any of the great medieval cities, east or west. The commanding geographical location together with the city’s status as an imperial capital, the correspondingly monumental scale of its built environment, the richness of its sacred spaces, and the power of the rituals that enlivened them drove this idea, as its urban fortunes waxed and waned in the course of its millennial history. The devastations of earthquakes, fire, plague, and pillage notwithstanding, the idea of Constantinopolitan greatness prevailed. If there was one thing about which the diverse and often quarrelsome populations of the Middle Ages could agree, it was on Constantinople’s status as the “Queen of Cities.”
Although tempered by time, the conviction that Constantinople holds pride of place among medieval cities persists, as evidenced by the steady pace of scholarly production devoted to its understanding over the course of the last half century. As if taking its cue from medieval ideas about the city, two basic strands characterize this work. On the one hand, scholarship is archaeological in nature, focusing on the study of the physical place, its overall plan and infrastructure, and the shape and place of individual monuments within the whole. On the other hand, grounded in the evidence of texts, it looks to the written word to identify and understand the events and institutions associated with the city.
Traditionally, both of these exercises in reconstruction have coalesced around the desire to uncover and describe the city as the stage on which the events of Byzantine history have played out, with the result that Constantinople has been conceived almost exclusively in terms of the luster of imperium. While this interest persists, recent work has begun to explore other aspects of urban living with an eye to understanding other sides of life in the capital. As well, there is a growing desire to approach Constantinople less as an isolated entity, and more within the larger context of ancient and medieval Mediterranean life. Thus, new approaches drawing on interest in the medieval Mediterranean together with theories of networking and globalization have combined with old methodologies and new archaeological discoveries to give Constantinopolitan studies a new slant. As a result, a much richer understanding is beginning to emerge, one picturing the city not simply as the blank canvas upon which to paint a description of Byzantine history, but also as a place with a dynamic population whose built environment represented a response to varieties of human experience.
This Constantinople, a multifaceted center built on interlocking tiers of human experience, is the focus of this volume. Its chapters address both the time-honored issues of infrastructure and the newly developed understandings of the city’s people and their institutions. It examines the rapport between people and place, with the latter understood to encompass both the natural and the manmade environment. With the exception of Chapter 1, which sets the stage with a discussion of Constantinople’s pre-fourth-century history, and Chapters 20 and 21, which conclude with the exploration of early modern antiquarian interest in the city and Ottoman approaches to the Constantinopolitan past, the volume focuses squarely on the period between the city’s foundation by Constantine the Great (306-37) in 324 and its capture by the Ottoman Turks under the leadership of Mehmed II Fatih (1444-6/1451-81) in 1453.
As these chronological boundaries suggest, Constantinople began life as an ancient city, founded and built along the lines of late Roman urban tradition, and ended its Byzantine run as a fully medieval urban center. Part of this volume’s mandate is to consider both the different ways in which this passage is manifest and the implications of this change. To this end, each chapter pursues its topic along chronological lines, noting aspects of continuity and disruption across the millennium of the city’s history.
HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS: ORGANIZING THE NARRATIVE
History is a matter of storytelling, and all good stories need to organize their narratives. In the case of Constantinople, two dates define the city’s history: its foundation by the emperor Constantine on the site of the old Greco-Roman town of Byzantion on November 8, 324, and its collapse in the face of the Ottoman siege on May 29, 1453. This history, derived largely from the testament of Greek literary sources and the sporadic input of archaeological investigation, exists within the larger context of Byzantine studies, and constructs the city’s story on the armature of Byzantine history’s modern periodization. This volume is no exception. Although period designations are nothing if not artificial, modern historiography’s division of late Roman and Byzantine time offers a generally understood structure around which to build discussion of the Constantinopolitan past. The late antique or early Byzantine period (32-c.700), the Dark Age of the eighth and early ninth centuries, which also overlaps with the period of Iconoclasm in which religious images were banned, the Middle Byzantine period (843-1204), the Latin Interregnum (1204-61) in which western powers controlled the city, and the Late Byzantine or Palaiologan Period (1261-1453), named for the empire’s last ruling dynasty, constitute its chronological units. Thus, during the first of these phases, Constantinople became the center of Roman imperial court life and increased in population. The city’s physical structure both shaped and responded to these developments. This period saw the establishment of the city limits and an effective infrastructure for feeding, watering, and defending the capital together with the creation of a monumental armature of streets and public spaces that would organize the rhythms of public and private life. When, in the sixth century, an outbreak of plague beset the capital, Constantinople experienced a decline, a Dark Age, which saw a decrease in population and economic, social, and cultural activity, and from which it emerged only in the middle period. From the second half of the ninth century, population growth and renewed economic prosperity led to the restoration of extant infrastructure and social institutions as well as to the construction of new facilities in both the public and private sectors. This resurgence came to a halt in 1204 with the capture of the city by the army of the Fourth Crusade and the establishment of western, Latin rule that not only wrested control of the city from the Byzantines, but also divided the empire. An initial sack destroyed large swaths of the urban building stock, and in the aftermath of the invasion a significant portion of the population fled, leaving the city and its institutions bereft of their customary guidance for the next several decades. Restoration of Greek rule in 1261 introduced the final phase of the capital’s Byzantine history, a period that saw renewed, if modest, population growth and with it a concern to revive the institutions and traditions left to languish during the Latin interregnum. While the restoration of these institutions and the infrastructure that supported them came from the imperial house, financial constraints also meant that private initiative was crucial in steering the fortunes of the capital in these last centuries.
DISCOVERING AND WRITING CONSTANTINOPOLITAN HISTORY
Modern interest in reconstructing a Constantinopolitan past began within a hundred years of the Ottoman conquest. The initial concern, driven by the antiquarian traditions of Renaissance humanism, was to recover the city’s monumental architectural past. Subsequent inquiry aimed to bind this building legacy to the larger subject of Byzantine history. These two strands of inquiry, the one rooted in the pursuit of the city’s physical structure, the other in historicist thought, continue to shape the study of Constantinopolitan history.
The reconstruction of this history began in 1544, when the French humanist, Pierre Gilles (1490-1555), traveled to Ottoman Constantinople at the behest of his patron, Francis I Valois (r. 1515-47) with the mandate to purchase Greek and Latin manuscripts for French royal collections. Gilles remained in Constantinople for three years, until 1547, exploring the Ottoman city and the dwindling evidence for its Byzantine past in light of his reading in Greek and Latin sources. The enduring legacy of this enterprise, De topographia Constantinopoleos et de illius antiquitatibus libri quattuor (Lyon, 1561), represents the first attempt at a systematic description of Byzantine Constantinople. '
The interest driving Gilles’ study was the basic question of identification. Already in the sixteenth century the Byzantine city was fast disappearing. Only a handful of monuments survived as testament to the city’s former status. His concern was therefore two-fold: to recover Constantinople’s ancient topography and to identify individual monuments. To do so he used Byzantine sources as his guide, prime among them the document known as the Notitia Urbis Constantinopoleos.” Written in the fifth century, the Notitia offered a summary description of each of the capital’s fourteen administrative regions. Walking the city, text in hand, Gilles established the lay of the land, marking the boundaries of each region and identifying the monuments within them. Although he inevitably made mistakes, the project was important because, for the first time, it gave Byzantine Constantinople, to this date known only through the written word, a physical shape and structure.
Gilles’s antiquarian interests established the terms by which Constantinopolitan history would be explored over the course of the next several hundred years, most notably in the work of Charles Du Fresne Du Cange (1610-88). An indefatigable editor of Byzantine texts, Du Cange is probably best known for his medieval Greek and Latin dictionaries; however, his Historia byzantina duplici commentario illustrata (Paris, 1680) represents an important contribution to Constantinopolitan studies. Written in two parts, Constantinopolis Christiana, and De familiis byzantinis, the book is at once a topographical study of the city and a genealogical account of Byzantine aristocratic families. Unlike Gilles, Du Cange never visited Constantinople, and his own topographical study, produced in the haven of his own library, relies on that of his predecessor for content and organization. It also provided a model of how close textual analysis could expand upon Gilles’ initial contribution, thus cementing the role of purely philological approaches to the city’s topographical reconstruction.*
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the identification and description of the overall topography and individual buildings within remained the primary concern. In large measure these studies were noteworthy for persisting with a philological approach that located and identified buildings and other elements of the urban infrastructure on the basis of textual reference. This methodology was conducive to the nature of the surviving evidence. Throughout the city, survival of material evidence from the Byzantine period — everything from the great city walls of the fifth century to the ruined or repurposed churches of the early, middle, and late periods — invited above-ground survey and identification of the sort undertaken by Alexander van Millingen in two comprehensive studies, Byzantine Constantinople, the Walls of the City and Adjoining Historical Sites (1899) and Byzantine Churches in Constantinople: Their History and Architecture (1912). The goal in such ventures was, as Van Millingen saw it, to identify “the historical sites of Byzantine or Roman Constantinople with the view of making the events of which that city was the theater more intelligible and vivid.”*
Eventually, archaeological excavation came to complement these early surveys. Sir Charles Newton undertook the first excavation, a three-day dig around the Serpent Column in the Hippodrome, in 1855,° and there was sporadic discovery attendant upon construction projects throughout the later nineteenth century; however, it was only in the twentieth century that any large-scale systematic excavation took place. By and large the areas targeted were those identified with the monumental imperial core, among them the Hippodrome and the Great Palace. As a result a fair picture of the city’s central district had emerged by the middle of the century, confirming Constantinople’s status as an imperial capital. This, together with sustained interest in the identification and description of individual structures around the city, set the stage for production of a series of mid-century encyclopedic publications designed to offer the latest word on topographical issues: Raymond Janin’s Constantinople byzantine: dévelopment urbain et repertoire (Paris, 1964); Rodolphe Guilland’s Etudes de topographie de Constantinople byzantine (Berlin/Amsterdam, 1969); and Wolfgang Miiller-Wiener’s Bildlexikon zur Topographie Istanbuls: Byzantion, Konstantinupolis, Istanbul bis zum Beginn d. 17. Jh. (Tubingen, 1977).
Given that so much of the Byzantine city remains a cypher, the interest in topographical study first sparked by Gilles over 400 years ago continues, with the result that much of the most interesting and important work of recent years may be said to stand in a direct line of descent from his efforts. Among the most visible projects of the last two decades have been the excavations at the Great Palace® and the archaeological rescue operations at the Theodosian harbor.’ No less interesting and important is recent work documenting the city’s water supply and defense systems.” Although less glamorous, the hard work of rescue archaeology has also borne fruit.” Finally, above ground, major restoration projects associated with the city’s churches, most notably Hagia Sophia, the Chora Monastery (Kariye Camii) and the Pantokrator Monastery (Zeyrek Camii), have shed light on the some of the more historically important and familiar Constantinopolitan monuments. °
Although the focus on topographical study became synonymous with the idea of Constantinopolitan history, the emphasis on individual places and buildings that characterized it brought with it an unintended consequence: the city’s atomization. Because monuments were identified and described in isolation from any urban or historical context, the history of Constantinople seemed to be little more than a series of disconnected dots on the map. The challenge, then, was to integrate these dots and to consider the city in unified, historical terms, a task first undertaken by Hans-Georg Beck and Gilbert Dagron. Beck did so in an edited volume that included a series of individual essays addressing topics such as urban infrastructure, administration, and housing." Dagron, by contrast, offered a systematic institutional history of the city in the first centuries of its formation.'~ His study cast a wide net, examining Constantinople as an imperial residence, the formation of its senate, and the office of the urban prefect together with issues such as the church, population, patterns of residence, and the food supply.
Together Beck and Dagron built a firm foundation for the historical study of the city in the early centuries of its development, one that pointed to the possibility of a more integrated approach to urban history. They did so, however, largely without recourse to archaeological materials, building their studies in time-honored tradition on philological foundations. A correlation of textual and archaeological evidence was thus in order. That project became the work of Cyril Mango.'* Without denying the continued importance of topographical or philological inquiry, Mango argued that the time was ripe to build a synthetic approach that would pull observations about individual monuments and places together to construct a history of the city’s physical development. Drawing on the combined testimony of words and archaeology, he identified and tracked the growth of the built environment over the early centuries of the city’s history, noting not only developmental sequences, but also the political, social, and economic forces that shaped them.
Mango’s ability to step back and look for the big picture sparked a new fire in Constantinopolitan studies. Paul Magdalino picked up where Mango had left off to pursue a similar line of inquiry for the city in the middle period.'* Subsequently, two major conferences and their attendant publications expanded upon these initiatives: “Constantinople: The Fabric of the City,” organized by Henry Maguire and Robert Ousterhout, the annual Spring Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks in 1998, ° and, in the following year, “Byzantine Constantinople,” directed by Nevra Necipoglu in conjunction with Bogazici University and the Institut Francais d’Etudes Anatoliennes in Istanbul."® At both venues papers directed at specific questions related to urban life — streets, housing, commerce, and the like — worked to integrate topographical observation with historical discussion in an effort to see the nuts and bolts of physical evidence in terms of historical contexts.
Although initial studies considered Constantinople as the accumulation of monuments within its walls, the interest in developing a more integrated and historicized understanding of the capital also fostered a desire to see it in a larger context. This interest derives in no small measure from the urge to understand such practical aspects of urban living as the water supply and defense, two issues that not only bind the intramural city to its extramural hinterland, but also profit from the combined study of archaeological materials in their historical context. Mango and Dagron joined forces to spearhead the exploration of this relationship with the organization in 1993 of the Oxford Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, “Constantinople and __ its Hinterland.”'” Papers examined the relationship between intramural Constantinople and the surrounding territory in terms of food and water supply, administration, defense, communication, inhabitants, manufacture, export, and cultural relations. Some of the most interesting and important work on Constantinople in recent years comes as an outgrowth of this expanded view. Archaeological survey of the entwined structures of the Long Walls of Thrace and the infrastructure of the water supply has established a concrete basis on which to address both the mechanics of provision and defense, as well as the historical and administrative relationship between city and country."*
Scholarship on Constantinople has also profited from the interest in the more integrated approach to the medieval Mediterranean world that began to take shape in the 1990s. The result has been to refine the sense of Constantinople’s place within the larger orbit of the Mediterranean and territories beyond. For the Byzantine Empire and the Mediterranean world beyond, the investigation of networks of exchange has replaced a model that spoke in the binary terms of one-way interactions between center and periphery. Thus, the city’s monumental infrastructure has been studied in comparison to the design strategies of other late antique cities, with the result that it no longer stands as an isolated example of urban development.’ Individual buildings and institutions have also benefited from this approach. This is especially the case with the Great Palace of the Byzantine Emperors, a complex whose architecture and court culture have been considered in the context of a larger Mediterranean orbit that includes the medieval west and Islam.“° Other studies have considered the role of the Constantinopolitan church in the promotion of monasticism within the territories of the larger empire. ”*
TEXTUAL STUDY AND CONSTANTINOPOLITAN HISTORY
As Pierre Gilles well understood, one of the more profitable avenues into the study of Byzantine Constantinople was that of texts, and written sources have remained crucial to the city’s study. During Gilles’s own lifetime, the process of identifying, transcribing, and producing editions of Byzantine historical texts had only just begun. The initial centers of this sixteenth-century editorial activity were at Augsburg in Germany and Leiden in the Netherlands, where interest in the Byzantine past was fueled by commercial trading interests with the Ottoman Empire. In the seventeenth century the interest in Byzantium and with it the editorial hat passed to the French, who, under the patronage of Louis XIV (1643-1715), began the production of the series known as the Corpus Byzantinae Historiae.
Comprising twentyeight volumes and as many as ten supplements, the Parisian corpus formed the basis of what was later to become the most comprehensive attempt to edit the texts of Byzantine history, the nineteenth-century series known as the Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae (CSHB) or the Bonn Corpus, after its initial publication venue. The brainchild of the historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831), the project was directed after his death by the philologist Immanuel Bekker (1785-1871) under the aegis of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. At fifty volumes, the CSHB represented the most substantial publication enterprise to date. That said, the editions produced after Niebuhr’s death were flawed, many of them representing little more than a reprinting of the earlier Parisian texts. In an effort to remedy the situation the International Association of Byzantine Studies (Association Internationale des Etudes Byzantines), has, since 1966, been working to produce improved editions of materials from the Bonn Corpus together with new editions of unedited texts in a subsequent series, the Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae.~~ In addition, new translations of important texts into modern languages on a range of subjects has opened many sources to a wider readership.”
Because so much of the study of Constantinopolitan history relies on the evidence of written sources, these philological labors have provided a crucial foundation for the reconstruction of the city’s history. Traditionally they have done so by offering the means to identify, locate, and describe monuments, people, and events. Thus, the sixthcentury writings of Prokopios of Caesarea have allowed reconstruction of the rebellion that nearly brought down Justinian’s reign together with documentation of the emperor’s Constantinopolitan building activity in the aftermath of its quelling, while two tenth-century texts, the Book of the Eparch and the Book of Ceremonies, have been used to examine two poles of Constantinopolitan life: its commercial practices and court environment. *
Recent scholarship makes it clear that these written materials can also be a source of information about contemporary mindsets and the attitudes they express toward the city, its monuments, and its history. For example, beyond documenting the nuts and bolts of construction activity, a text such as Procopius’ On Building may also be understood as an encomium of imperial greatness, which in turn describes larger aspects of Byzantine mentalities.
This understanding of the capacity of texts to document intellectual ideas and attitudes occurred in tandem with the interest in developing a more historicized understanding of Constantinople. It was first manifest in the study of the cluster of texts known as the Patria Konstantinopoleos, a set of commentaries on the city of Constantinople with dates ranging from the sixth century through the tenth. Renowned for their problematic language and curious commentary, and dismissed as the poor cousins of more orthodox historical texts, the Patria saw a reversal in fortune in the 1980s. A new publication of the eighth-century text known as the Parastaseis syntomoi chronikai, together with synthetic studies of the larger collection of Patria, looked at these written documents as resources for understanding contemporary ideas and attitudes toward Constantinople and its monuments and through them larger ideas about Byzantine society and civilization.*° Subsequent study of some Constantinople’ more familiar literary resources has proceeded along similar lines to expand the understanding of the Byzantine’s own view of their monuments and institutions, together with the use of their city.~”
As this necessarily superficial overview suggests, recent trends in Constantinopolitan scholarship have continued to build on traditional methods of inquiry while branching into new areas for discussion, with the result that there is much new material that can be brought to bear on the understanding of the city’s history. Important advances have been made with respect to the study of the urban infrastructure. Perhaps even more compelling has been the groundswell of interest in the city’s populations and institutions, a trend that has invigorated the study of Constantinopolitan history.
Given the ups and downs of the city’s fortunes and the long and winding nature of its history, there are many subjects a companion volume might have addressed. Ultimately, the impulse guiding the selection of topics has been the desire to explore the ways in which urban structures and institutions entwined with human lives in this most evocative of late ancient and medieval cities. Cities are arguably one of the great expressions of human experience. They exist because of human beings: populations create their physical environments in response not only to the exigencies of survival, but also to the mandates of social structure, communal identity, and aesthetic vision. As such, the shape and structure of every city reflects both the needs and priorities of its population together with its hopes and aspirations. To understand the nature of an urban population is therefore to understand something of the form and structure of the city and the way it both molds and is molded by its residents. With this idea in mind, this volume aims to examine Constantinople as a vital urban center, a place that informed and responded to overlapping layers of human experience in boom times and bust, across the thousand-year span of its history. To accomplish this task the book is organized in four parts. Part I, “The Place and Its People,” has three chapters.
The first discusses the history of the site in the period before Constantine’s foundation, the second, the development of the urban infrastructure in late antiquity and the middle ages, the third, population. These chapters are designed to introduce the protagonists of the discussion: the environments natural and built and the people who interacted with them. Part II, “Practical Matters,” considers the nuts and bolts of urban living in individual chapters devoted to the supply and consumption of water and food, the organization and administration of urban building and maintenance, and urban defense. Part II, “Urban Experiences,” looks at different aspects of Constantinopolitan life by focusing on four interconnected spheres of activity: the residential, imperial, commercial, and sacred. A chapter examining the various types of urban populations and the housing solutions available to them opens the section. A closer examination of specifically imperial residences and their implications for Constantinopolitan life follows.
A third chapter offers an overview of commercial activity, its participants and venues, and the ways in which such activity shaped the urban experience in both physical and social terms. Three final chapters address the spiritual and sacred experiences of Constantinopolitan life by focusing on the relationship between church building and ecclesiastical practice, monastic experience, and death and burial. Part IV, “Institutions and Activities,” includes chapters devoted to urban administration, social services, philanthropy, education, and learning, and, lest we forget that the Byzantines as much as anyone else loved a good time, entertainment. Part V, “Encountering Constantinople,” examines the views and expectations of outsiders. Two chapters, one devoted generally to travelers, another specifically to pilgrims, consider the topic from the point of view of medieval visitors. The final two chapters track emerging historical appreciation of the Constantinopolitan past in the early modern period, one from the point of view of western antiquarian interest, the other from the Ottoman perspective.
The picture of the city to emerge from this collection is in many respects familiar. Without doubt it confirms Constantinople as an imperial city, a status made clear not simply by the presence of the emperor and court, but also by the way in which this imperial presence infiltrated all aspects of urban living in ways obvious and unexpected. The population itself was large, perhaps 500,000 in its more prosperous moments, with a healthy portion of aristocrats and administrators to staff the imperial administration and contribute to the tax base. Its infrastructure was nonpareil. An extensive water system supplied fountains, baths, and private residences.
Ports on the Marmora shore and the Golden Horn facilitated the food supply and commercial trade, while a network of streets and public gathering places allowed the distribution of these goods throughout the city. Its public amenities and entertainments were unrivalled, as was its status as an educational center. All of this was overseen by the Prefect of the City, an office appointed by and responsible to the emperor. In these ways and others, Constantinople stood out among the cities of the empire as the emperor’s city. At the same time, beneath the imperial gloss, it was a profoundly human city, a collection of neighborhoods in which residents and visitors haggled at the market and complained about their neighbors; where builders needed permits; where monks pursued a life of prayer; where professors bickered with one another about who had greater claims to status; where orphans, lepers, the infirm, and the elderly were in need of succor; where children and adults entertained themselves not only by visits to the Hippodrome, but also with games in the privacy of their own courtyards.
In navigating these chapters, readers may find that some discussions overlap with one another. For example, although the food supply has a designated chapter, that subject and the allied issues of diet and food consumption also find a place in the discussions of monastic, commercial, and philanthropic activities. Such repeated appearances should be viewed not as redundancies, but complementary discussions offering insight into the ways in which institutions and activities were intertwined within the urban context.
On a practical note, discussions of things Constantinopolitan often force readers to grapple with the alien terminology of medieval Greek: administrative offices, court titles, and ceremonial practices all had their names. In many instances it is possible to translate these titles. There are, however, occasions when it is impossible to do so. Court titles are particularly intractable, as there is nothing like them in our modern lexicon. In such instances, terms should be understood as a generic aristocratic honorific title. Transliteration of the Greek alphabet and orthography for all names and titles follow the conventions of the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Unless otherwise indicated, abbreviations of classical and Byzantine sources follow those of the Oxford Classical Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium respectively.
Many are the subjects that might have been covered in a companion volume, and many the ways in which individual discussions might have been addressed, with the result that some readers may feel dismay upon noting the absence of a particular subject or an individual author’s approach to material. At the same time, as with all good companions — a friend who accompanies us on a journey, a person with whom we share a meal, someone with whom we share an ongoing correspondence — the goal of this volume is not to provide all of the answers, but to extend the conversation by opening the door to further inquiry. In this spirit, the authors, without whom this volume would be nothing, and I wish you happy reading!
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