Download PDF | Christopher James Sprecher - Emperor and God_ Passion Relics and the Divinisation of Byzantine Rulers, 944-1204-Heidelberg University Publi 2024.
264 Pages
General Introduction
1.1 Thematic preamble
On the eve of the Fourth Crusade, Constantinople was not only known by the sobriquet of “Queen of Cities” and the capital of the Roman Empire, but could also boast of possessing one of the greatest collection of relics in Christendom. Yet when the Crusaders turned aside in 1204 from their planned (re-)conquest of Jerusalem and brought instead calamity upon the imperial capital, most of these treasures ended up leaving the palace and city, never to return; this plunder and destruction is narrated in both Byzantine and Latin Crusader sources.” Though sovereignty over Constantinople and its dwindling imperial holdings was wrested from the Latins by the Palaiologan dynasty in 1261, the holy relics once preserved in the palatine precincts remained lost, scattered amongst the monasteries, great houses, and palaces of the Crusaders’ homelands.?
For centuries prior to this significant loss, Constantinople was a veritable treasury of relics.* The altar of every church in the city was required to contain at least some portion of saints’ relics, and several prominent houses of worship—such as the church of the Holy Apostles® or the Great Church of Holy Wisdom’—contained large collections of sacred bones and artefacts. Yet no ensemble rivalled the hoard of holy objects housed not in any patriarchal church or urban monastery, but rather in the Great Palace of the Byzantine emperors.
The churches within the palace complex contained relics of saints from both the Old and New Testaments, but amongst the numerous palatine chapels and temples, one stood out for its priceless treasures: the church of the Theotokos of the Pharos or Lighthouse, in which the most precious relics of the Christian faith—those holy objects connected to the Passion and person of Jesus Christ as well as his closest associates, such as the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist—were safeguarded.® From the fourth century onward, emperors in every century sought to raise the spiritual and sacral profile of the city by means of relic translations, importing into the capital the spiritual riches it lacked in contrast to the earlier Christian centres of Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch.
Not all of these sacred treasures came to the Great Palace, yet increasingly in the Middle Byzantine period—from the mid-ninth-century “triumph of Orthodoxy” under Theodora and Michael III until the apogee/cataclysm at the start of the 13th century under Alexios V’—imperially occasioned relic translations resulted in the augmentation of the treasures within the Great Palace, especially by means of the most sacred ones: relics pertaining to the Passion and to Christ himself. It is the concentration of these treasures within the palace and in close proximity to the emperor, rather than within the cathedral and near the patriarch, that is the primary occasion for this study and its concomitant questions.1?°
1.2 Aims and research questions
My work in the present volume elucidates the influence and impact of the presence of holy relics, and in particular relics connected to the Passion of Christ, in the Great Palace on the understanding of the imperial office and the figure of the emperor in the Middle Byzantine era, taking as chronological reference points the year 944 (when the Mandylion was translated to Constantinople) and 1204 (when the Pharos chapel was plundered).
This dating is significant because, although the translation of relics and antiquities to the Queen of Cities had already begun under the founding emperor Constantine I in the 330s, we begin to find with the arrival of the Mandylion sources that speak in detail about the relationship between these relics and the emperor, whereas after the departure of these relics from the city in 1204, Byzantine sources fall silent on them and the interactive matrix of palace/Passion relics/emperor ceases to exist in the same full way as it had before the calamity of the Fourth Crusade. A central theme of this thesis, demonstrated across the following chapters via close studies of three key Passion relics, is that the sacrality of these objects—which sanctify spaces and protect persons by contact and veneration in Byzantine theology—served to sacralise and sanctify the office of emperor, as well as the emperor himself, via the close contact and connection of these sacred objects to the emperor in his domicile and private apartments.
In order to determine if this supposition holds true, the research behind this study poses several questions as to the objects and agents participating in this palatine connection in the Middle Byzantine period: What sources from this time period speak of relics pertaining to Christ and the emperor? How do these sources speak of this connection? Can we trace themes of continuity or change in how this connection between ruler and relic is understood during the time period under study? Is the emperor truly understood to be a sacred and holy figure, or merely the holder of a sacred office? And in the former case: does such imperial sacrality derive purely from Christian theology and sacred objects, or are other sacralising elements that pre-date the Christianisation of the empire also at work?
These questions and the search for their answers take place in this study wholly within a Byzantine context; and while the sources examined and methodologies employed are various and interdisciplinary, as will be explained below, the study is firmly grounded in the Roman, Greek-speaking, Byzantine orthodox Christian world and the ways in which the relationship between these relics and the emperor were understood in this specific context. The present work thus does not aim to provide a comprehensive study of what Byzantium’s many neighbours thought—or did not think—of the emperor, the empire, and the treasures of church and palace in Constantinople, which study is nonetheless a worthy subject of inquiry in need of further investigation.
1.3 Sources
Key to this study are the relics connected to Christ that were kept in the Great Palace and for which we have visual and textual sources that mention and reflect upon these objects and their relation to the emperor. Three such relics received this kind of extended literary, artistic, and/or theological reflection: the Mandylion or Holy Face; the Limburg Staurotheke, a complex ensemble of relics, inscriptions, and art; and the Holy Stone, upon which Christ’s body was believed to have been anointed for burial after the crucifixion. For these relics, we have various primary source texts including: contemporary historiographical sources such as chronicle narrations; guides to court ritual, such as the Book of Ceremonies; liturgical texts composed for the translation of these relics to the Byzantine capital; theological reflections on the objects; inscriptions and poems juxtaposed with the relics being investigated; and artistic depictions of the relics in question or else presented in conjunction with the relics and figures studied. For some of these source texts, in particular for the liturgical offices of relic translation studied here, an appendix containing English-language translations is provided.
1.4 Methodology
Given the interdisciplinary nature of this study, involving texts and objects traditionally viewed through the distinct lenses of the disciplines of history, art history, and theology, several different methodological approaches are employed in pursuit of the aim of understanding the relic-ruler relationship in Middle Byzantium. With all written sources examined—chronicle texts, inscriptions, liturgical texts, poems—close readings of the texts have been made, with detailed attention to syntax, vocabulary choice, and possible syn- and diachronic polyvalences in word meanings.1! These close readings have been accompanied by an awareness of the linguistic turn in the historical disciplines and the fundamental differences in pre-modern texts compared to those of our own day.!2
In the case of inscriptions in particular, issues of location and reading order are also investigated, which opens up the study to using approaches familiar from the social sciences and the material turn, in which the performance(s) and affordance(s) of objects are considered in their spatio-chronological contexts.13 In the case of the iconography and artistic depictions studied and for both historiographical and liturgical texts examined, this study also makes use of Christian patristic methods of reading texts: hearing and reading words, seeing images, and seeking out possible resonating connections and associations to these from within the Christian scriptures and hagiographical tradition, an allegorical method famously exploited in the early patristic era by Origen of Alexandria and a foundation of much later Christian exegesis and theological interpretation.1* Such a ‘patristic’ or allegorical method of reading and interrogating texts and art is fitting for this study, inasmuch as it involves objects that were believed to be imbued with sacred power and which were commented upon in highly theological and theologised contexts, which in turn made use of such ‘patristic’ allegorical or associative readings to interpret these relics and situate them in a larger cultural and imperial setting—a method of reading quite widespread in Middle Byzantium and deployed across literary genres.1 It is thus my belief that applying this kind of exegetical and associative/allegorical reading of the texts and images studied here can help uncover more of the resonances these sacred objects possessed vis-a-vis the emperor in a time and place where such a manner of reading and interpreting objects was common, if not primary and preferred.1®
1.5 Summary history of research
While hagiographical texts and saints’ lives began to be edited and critiqued as early as the mid-17th century by the Bollandists,1” and the vast multilingual body of patristic literature first encountered serious sustained editorial activity in the Patrologia Graeca and Latina series founded by Jacques-Paul Migne in 1857,18 relics and their study remained hidden from academic view until the end of the 19th century, when some individual studies of relics began to be written. One such case is that of the Limburg Staurotheke, the focus of the second chapter in this present work, on which the first scholarly article was published in 1866 by Ernst Aus’m Weerth.?® This study, however, was firmly grounded in a purely art-historical, descriptive school of analysis, seeking to understand and explain styles, images, and techniques visible on the Staurotheke without investigating deeper connections to court, church, and city, given the historical context of the object; this approach also marks the later article by Jakob Rauch.?°
Scholars of the zoth century began to pay more sustained attention to relics as objects, phenomena, and key nodes in historical, religious, and interpretive networks. Included in this engagement with the relics themselves was also an examination of the reliquaries containing them. Before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Italian scholar Silvio Giuseppe Mercati published his findings on shrines and relics in Constantinople before the Fourth Crusade in 1936,21 while Joseph Braun published in the midst of the wartime hostilities his encyclopaedic study on reliquaries, which attempted to categorise relic containers based on size, shape, material, and function.?2 Braun admits that his study was focused more on the then present-day state of affairs in terms of available reliquaries rather than on offering a comprehensive historical retrospective on such objects;2? he does mention the Limburg Staurotheke?* but the emphasis in the work leans heavily on Western Europe and Western relics/reliquaries, with Braun explaining (or perhaps excusing) this imbalance by alleging a paucity of Eastern sources on relics#5 and the dearth of such relics themselves.26 Another mid-century (and again, more Western-based) study on relics proper in the early medieval period can be found in an essay by Heinrich Fichtenau,?’ with another key study on relic translations in the West (both in terms of these being actual events as well as being a new literary genre) in the West published by Martin Heinzelmann in 1979.78 A turn eastward, however, did take place in the work by Anatole Frolow on the relics of the True Cross and their associated containers,?° and a dedicated examination of Eastern reliquaries was published in 1957 by Rainer Rtickert.?°
More scholars began to investigate the origins of relics and their veneration, with Peter Brown’s groundbreaking book The Cult of the Saints, published in 1981,31 firmly setting holy persons and their holy bodies at the centre of late antique and medieval studies. Yet much subsequent research on relics and reliquaries remained firmly focused on saints, objects, and locales in Western Europe,*? with notable and important exceptions being the scholarship of Enrica Follieri, Rodolphe Guilland,** and Raymond Janin®5 in the mid-1960s; Otto Meinardus in the 1970s; and Johannes Koder in the 1980s.” Only in the late zoth century do we see Byzantinists and other scholars turning their gaze to relics of the Byzantine East and shifting their interpretive lens to speak of these objects in their native Eastern Mediterranean contexts. Consciousness of the Byzantine heritage of the Mandylion is displayed in Isa Ragusa’s 1991 article on the object,?® and Eastern perspectives on the Mandylion also appear in the 1998 volume edited by Herbert Kessler and Gerhard Wolf?° as well as in the volume edited by Gerhard Wolf and Giovanni Morello accompanying an exhibition of art and iconography of the Holy Face in 2000-2001,*° with a 2002 article by Giovanni Zaninotto exploring the role and meaning of the Mandylion in its Constantinopolitan context in the Middle Byzantine period.*!
The turn of the century continued this momentum towards more work being done on the Great Palace of Constantinople, the Pharos Chapel contained therein, and the relics housed in the chapel. The Limburg Staurotheke is the focus of a 1994 article by Nancy P. Sevéenko,*? who later studied in detail the Holy Stone relic ina 2010 essay.*? The 1997 tome edited by Henry Maguire on Byzantine court culture** gathered together a number of essays on ritual, rhetoric, and relics at the imperial court, addressing various aspects of the interaction of sovereign and court with one another, with sacred spaces, elite objects, and even clothing. Edina Bozéky and Anne-Marie Helvétius edited a volume appearing in 1999 on relics as cult objects; +5 these published conference proceedings mainly focused on the Western medieval context, but a section on relics throughout the Christian world is included, containing an essay on the role of relics in the development of the cult of the saints in Byzantium by Michel Kaplan.** Bozoky later connected the topic of relics more specifically to politics and political power (already addressed in the Byzantine context in 2001 by Sophia Mergiali-Sahas*”) in her publication from 2006.48 The ripples in the waters of academe caused by the material turn reached the shores of Byzantine studies in the 1980s and 1990s, with various studies on the depiction of material goods in medieval art and on domestic tools and utensils in the Byzantine world.*9 Maria Parani focused on the textiles and couture of the Byzantine court in her 1999 dissertation and 2003 book,®° while theoretical considerations more generally speaking were examined in an article by Michael Grtinbart and Dionysios Stathakopoulos in 2002.51 2004 saw the publication of the proceedings from the 20th annual International Congress of Byzantine Studies edited by Jannic Durand and Bernard Flusin, which focused specifically on relics connected to Christ in Byzantium and included important articles on the Passion relics and the Pharos chapel by Paul Magdalino, Holger Klein, Sysse Engberg, and Sandrine Lerou.52
The first decade of the 21st century saw several important articles on relics and reliquaries at the Great Palace by Holger Klein, heralded in 2004 by his comprehensive study of the True Cross relics of Byzantium.5? One of his essays appeared in the important volume edited by Franz Alto Bauer on early medieval visualisations of dominion and rule,°* which further spurred research and interest on the interplay of space, objects, and ritual in the Great Palace of Constantinople, having taken up the mantle of the important 2oth-century studies published by David Talbot Rice®> and Cyril Mango.°® The fruits of such focus on sacred spaces and the Pharos chapel in particular can be seen in the copious outputs by Bernard Flusin5” and Alexei Lidov,5* while new translations and editions of the important tenthcentury Book of Ceremonies have appeared in the last decade in English by Ann Moffatt and Maxeme Tall,5° and most recently in French by Gilbert Dagron and Bernard Flusin.®°
The issues of relic/reliquary performance(s) and affordance(s) have been studied extensively by Roland Betancourt,*? Brad Hostetler,®? Bissera Pentcheva,® as well as by Cynthia Hahn and Gia Toussaint (the latter two albeit with amore Western focus),°* while essays on Byzantine religious culture, including relics in conjunction with the emperor, appear in a volume published in 2012 and edited by Dennis Sullivan, Elizabeth Fisher, and Stratis Papaioannou.®® Recent years have seen both a new focus on the sacrality of palaces and courts themselves, often by means of sacred rites and objects (including relics)®* as well as a new return ad fontes to re-examine and better understand the origins and importance of the cult of relics in the earliest Christian centuries;®’ the links between the divine and the imperial/cultic that originate in classical antiquity and endure into early and medieval Christianity;®* and the survival and development of classical ideas about divine inspiration in Byzantine theological discourse and iconography.®°
Across this history of research, one finds a movement from recognising and recording inventories of Byzantine relics and reliquaries, to investigating the material reality of the objects via their concomitant art and inscriptions, to striving to understand the impact the location of the relics had on the places where they were kept, and culminating in recent decades with the extensive studies on the Passion relics in Constantinople and how these relics can be seen to transform the city/palace into a New Jerusalem. My study focuses the lens of inquiry onto how the presence of these holy objects in the Great Palace affected a change in how the emperor himself was understood to be a sacred, even divine, figure. This change occurred in progressive stages, made visible in how the texts and art surrounding three key Passion relics—the Mandylion, the Limburg Staurotheke, and the Holy Stone—single out the emperor as having a special connection to the relics and elucidate imperial sacrality by means of the juxtaposition of relics and ruler.
As I show in the close case studies presented below, this proximity of sacred objects and sovereign seems to allow for an increased direct association, first of relics with the office of emperor and then of specific relics with specific rulers, imbuing the Byzantine emperor with an aura of divine election and even divinity, as comes to be expressed in the textual sources on these relics examined in the chapters to follow. The acquisition of relics and the manufacturing of new relic ensembles in the Middle Byzantine period can thus be seen to act as an engine that generates new meanings and understandings of imperial sacrality on an increasingly personal level, up to the zenith of this development, culminating in the blurring of lines between Emperor Manuel I Komnénos—the Lord’s Anointed on the terrestrial throne—and Jesus Christ, the Anointed One par excellence and Emmanuel in heaven—and coming to a halt at the dispersal of these objects in the fall of the city to the Crusaders in 1204.
1.6 Structure of the study
The present investigation of the links between relics and emperors and the influence of the former on the latter in the Middle Byzantine period focuses on the three relics mentioned above in the passage on sources, for which we have surviving evidence of extended reflection on both sacred object and sovereign. Chapter 2 discusses the Mandylion, brought to Constantinople in 944. The Limburg Staurotheke, a complex amalgam of relics and reliquary datable in form to the late tenth century, forms the focus of Chapter 3. Finally, Chapter 4 centres around the Holy Stone of unction, translated to the imperial capital in 1169. Following some concluding remarks on the answers this research provides to the guiding questions posed above as to change, continuity, and manner of how imperial sacrality was understood against the backdrop of these relics, the abovementioned appendix of translated texts and the bibliography are presented.
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