Download PDF | New Constantines: The Rhythm of Imperial Renewal in Byzantium, 4Th-13th Centuries, by Paul Magdalino, 1994.
310 Pages
Preface
This volume is the second in the series published by Variorum for the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. Like its predecessor, Byzantine Diplomacy, it consists of papers from a Spring Symposium; it is not, and was never intended to be, a complete transcript of the conference proceedings. A conference will almost always include some papers which are not destined for immediate publication, and where market forces prevail, as is usually the case in Britain and America, the printed outcome is bound to be a reduced version of the oral presentation — the egg that proceeds from the chicken. It has always been a strength of the British Byzantine symposia that they offer a richer and more varied spread than can be packed within hard covers at an affordable price. “Byzands”, the Twenty-Sixth Spring Symposium, held at St Andrews from Friday 27 to Monday 30 March 1992, was no exception. Five of the main papers and eleven of the short communications presented there are not published here, and the volume is correspondingly poorer in methodological, geographical and chronological coverage. It is hoped, however, that it preserves the thematic coherence that was acknowledged to be such a positive feature of the occasion, and will recapture the flavour of that occasion both for those who were there and for those who were not.
The present publication certainly owes an enormous debt to all those who made the symposium possible — the organizers, the participants, and above all the sponsors. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the generous financial support of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies, the University of St Andrews, the Hellenic Foundation, the British Academy, the Russell Trust, and the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. Without their generosity, the volume would have been appreciably slimmer. În registering my debt to the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies, | am also conscious that each symposium is driven to a large extent by the momentum built up by its predecessors, and by the enthusiasm of the loyal core of Society members who attend year after year.
1992 was an annus horribilis not only for British royalty but also for Byzantine studies, which suffered the premature loss of some of their brightest and best. St Andrews was the last Spring Symposium attended by Martin Harrison. It contained little archaeology, but there was a paper, published în this volume, which refined and advanced Martin's interpretation of the model for the church of St Polyeuktos in Constantinople, the monument with which all Byzantinists will forever associate him. It is therefore fitting to dedicate this publication to his memory.
Paul Magdalino St Andrews, May 1993
Introduction
Paul Magdalino
For Byzantines who wrote about their past, as for non-Byzantinists today, the history of Byzantium was the history of its rulers. Yet if one surveys the titles of major publications on Byzantine history over the past 20 years, one does not get the impression of a field in which emperors and empresses are right at the forefront of scholarly attention. Monographs of varying size, emphasis and interest have been devoted to Constantine, Julian, Theodosian empresses, Theodora, Maurice, Leo III, Constantine V, Constantine VI, Nikephoros I, Constantine VII, Manuel I, John III and Constantine XI. Some histories of longer periods — the seventh century, 780-842, 1025-1204, 1204-61, 1261-1453 — have been more or less emperor-centred, while important studies of imperial ceremonial and the dynamics of usurpation and legitimation have laid vital groundwork for understanding the basis of imperial power. Symposia have been devoted to the age of Constantine Porphyrogenitus and to Alexios I. The role of Byzantium as the medieval past of modern Greece continues to ensure a trickle of demand for, and supply of, popular writing on the more colourful figures. The extraordinary proliferation of academic journals devoted to Byzantine studies has also encouraged Byzantinists to publish much reinterpretative work on emperors, as on other subjects, in article form.
Despite all this, however, the impression remains that modern Byzantinists do not find that imperial reigns, persons and dynasties offer the most congenial framework for the resolution of their problems. This can hardly be because there is nothing left to say on the subject. There are no up-todate monographs on Heraclius, Basil I or Basil II, and the definitive study of Justinian I has yet to be written. Nor do trends in related subject areas suggest that the study of monarchy, or of individual monarchs, is intellectually played out. Ancient history now has a substantial study on the emperor in the Roman world,! for which there is no Byzantine equivalent; in the field of western medieval history, the 1980s saw new biographies of two thirteenth-century rulers, St Louis and Frederick II, who had hardly suffered from neglect in twentieth-century scholarship.? Is it that Byzantinists have been inhibited by lack of source material, or by the belief that “the time is not yet ripe'? Or has there been a fundamental reluctance to focus attention on famous men and women — a reluctance born, perhaps, not only of intellectual reaction against political narrative history, but also of politically correct distaste for the personality cult of the autocratic ruler?
Whatever the reason, the theme of the Byzantine emperor was well overdue for discussion when the annual Spring Symposium came to St Andrews in 1992. In choosing it, the organizers of the symposium decided to give it focus by combining it with another strangely neglected topic, that of renaissance and renewal in Byzantine history. On the one hand, the combination meant that neither theme could be treated exhaustively; on the other hand, it provided a line of approach long enough to cordon off a wide range of scholarly interests, and strong enough to point the familiar sequence of imperial reigns in an interesting and meaningful direction. Each emperor's accession was a conscious act of renewal of the imperial order instituted by Constantine the Great. Some acts were more dramatic than others, and Constantine meant more or less at different times. This volume is a sample of attempts to discern some patterns in the complex rhythm of the empire's existence over the nine centuries from the foundation of Constantinople in 324 to the recovery of the City from crusader occupation in 1261.
We begin at the very beginning, with a look at the social infrastructure that underpinned the rise of Constantinople as an imperial capital. We end not quite at the bitter end, but with the emperor whose dramatic renewal of the empire marked the beginning of the end. Michael VIII Palaiologos was the last emperor who could and did call himself New Constantine with any degree of conviction. His successors paid dearly for his enjoyment of this privilege. The last Byzantine emperor, who happened to be called Constantine, paid with his life, fighting the troops of Mehmet II when they breached the walls of Theodosius II on 29 May 1453. By his heroic action, he gave the idea of imperial renewal an afterlife which would run and run in the Greek world until 1922 and even beyond. But the political viability of the idea had been in doubt since 1261, if not earlier.
This volume therefore concentrates on the period when the mantle of Constantine was, on balance, more of an inspiration than a burden and imperial renewal solved more problems than it created. During this period, the themes of Constantine and renewal are tightly interwoven, and yet they are far from inseparable, as the present collection of studies makes plain. Those contributions with Constantine in their title relate mainly to the main title of the book. “New Constantines' invites us to consider the importance of Constantine as an imperial prototype, a point of reference, and a symbol of imperial legitimacy and identity. It is abundantly obvious why Constantine was important: he was the first Christian emperor; he founded Constantinople; he called and chaired the first ecumenical council of the church; he provided a paradigm of successful holy war; and he was written up as a model of Christian monarchy by a highly skilled publicist, Eusebius of Caesarea. But how consistently did Byzantines refer to him? It is no coincidence that all but one of the contributions with Constantine in their title relate to the period from the seventh to the tenth centuries. It was in the middle of this period that Constantine fully came into his own as a figure of hagiography — the phenomenon which Alexander Kazhdan has characterized as “Constantin imaginaire'.€ It is in the tenth century that we find Constantine Porphyrogenitus inventing pronouncements of Constantine the Great which placed an export ban on imperial insignia, technology and women.” And it was during the ninth century that emperors and failed usurpers made the most of the name Constantine as a symbol of imperial legitimacy. Leo V changed the name of his eldest son from Symbatios to Constantine ;$ Thomas the Slav renamed himselt Constantine; Basil | and Leo VI both gave the name to their eldest sons, and Basil | was hailed as “New Constantine by the assembled bishops of the council of 869.8
The idea of each new ruler as a new Constantine was implicit in the dynastic succession established by the founder of Constantinople. It was then made explicit in order to justify the accession of Jovian at the extinction of the dynasty in 363: Themistius assured the people of the city that what they were getting, after Constantine's son Constantius and Constantine's nephew Julian, was nothing less than a reincarnation of Constantine himself.? Although the statement was patently rhetorical, the argument it enshrined, that Constantine lived again in every emperor who looked after Constantine's city and pursued the correct religious policy, had a bright future. Thus Marcian was hailed as New Constantine by the council of Chalcedon in 451.10 Constantine was also remembered fondly in the western provinces where his career had begun; in 407 a usurper from Britain owed his very limited success to the fact of having the same name.]! Yet as with the Virgin Mary and the Christian icon, so with Constantine, there was a significant time-gap between the appearance of the symbol and the emergence of a cult. In the fifth and sixth centuries rulers had other imperial myths and models, including those which they made of themselves. It is true that the grande dame and empress manqute Anicia Juliana made a great deal of Constantine, as well as her own ancestor Theodosius I, in her ostentatious attempt to build the temple of Ezekiel in Constantinople.12 On the other hand the then emperor, Justinian, made remarkably little of Constantine in his own propaganda of imperial renewal and religious conformism. Constantine belonged, along with Solomon, in the company of rulers whom Justinian had left in the shade.1% After the publication of the Digest in 534, the streets of Constantinople and Beirut must have been teeming with New Justinians, for the emperor decreed that all freshmen law students should bear this name.!* But of New Constantines not a word, even in the fifth ecumenical council of 553.
The beginnings of a more permanent change become apparent under the emperor Tiberius II (578-82), who adopted the name Constantine in official documents.15 The main turning point, however, came with Heraclius, who established Constantine as the prevailing name of the dynasty that he founded. It is interesting, though, that the emperor of the fourth generation, Constantine IV, chose to name his son Justinian, and was acclaimed as New Justinian at the sixth ecumenical council. Viewed in the long perspective, what is striking is the revival of both old imperial names in the course of the seventh century. Three others, Theodosius, Anastasius and Leo, were shortly to follow. Such revival suggests that the emperors of this period were clutching at any name which could magically bridge the alarming gulf which was opening up between themselves and the empire of their nottoo-distant predecessors. In other words, Constantine and Justinian were being adopted as badges of identity because they signified the era of imperial greatness and orthodoxy that had begun with one emperor and ended with the other. A tendency to regard Constantine as the first in a series of larger than life antique emperors was certainly integral to the imperial ideology of the “Macedonian Renaissance'. Constantine is paired with Justinian in the vestibule mosaic of Hagia Sophia, and grouped with Theodosius, Arcadius, Leo 1 and Justinian in the Ekphrasis of the Church of the Holy Apostles by Constantine the Rhodian.16 After acclaiming Basil 1 as New Constantine, the fathers of 869 went on to acclaim him as New Theodosius, New Marcian and New Justinian.!7
The Book of Cerernonies lumps Constantine together with Marcian, Leo I and Justinian in a group of “great, renowned... Christloving emperors, whom Il would go so far as to call semidivine'.18 Looking ahead to the twelfth century, one finds Constantine in similar company. When King Amalric of Jerusalem and his entourage visited Constantinople in 1171, the emperor Manuel I treated them to a private viewing of the precious memorabilia in the Great Palace. After they had seen the relics of Christ's Passion, “there was no arcane and mystic object from the times of the blessed Augusti Constantine, Theodosius and Justinian lying in the sacred bedchamber, which was not familiarly revealed to them'.1? At the end of the century, Nicholas Mesarites included in his Ekphrasis of the church of the Holy Apostles a description of the adjoining mausolea of Constantine and Justinian. His catalogue of the imperial tombs there is a roll-call of semi-legendary names from an heroic past.20 It parallels his catalogue, in another work, of the Passion relics in the Great Palace, and it echoes the catalogue included in the Book of Ceremonies two centuries earlier?!
Constantine remained ideologically important to an extent which is not always immediately apparent from the major sources. Only when we take account of the tradition that the katholikon of Nea Moni on Chios was modelled on the mausoleum of Constantine do we begin to suspect that Constantine IX Monomachos (1042-55) might have been trying to be a New Constantine when he provided for the restoration of the church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, % and endowed a school for the academic study of Roman law.2% And without the evidence of reliquary inscriptions, we would not know for certain that Nikephoros II and Manuel I consciously imitated Constantine in fighting their holy wars under the sign in which the first Christian emperor had conquered.2
However, in respect of Constantinian mythology and nomenclature, it is clear that the recession had begun to set in under Constantine VII. Constantine named his own sons Leo and Romanos after the boys” grandfathers,26 and Romanos named his elder son Basil after the founder of the dynasty. The tension between reference to imperial tradition and reference to ancestral tradition was finally resolved in favour of the latter, and the resolution can be seen as symptomatic of a trend towards the privatization, or at least the segmentation, of imperial power in the tenth and eleventh centuries. There is a striking contemporary parallel in the abandonment of the old imperial mausolea of Constantine and Justinian. The last emperor to be buried there was Constantine VIII in 1028, but the search for alternative burial places had begun a century earlier, when Romanos 1 was buried at the Myrelaion, the first of a new type of imperial euages oikos.27 In this, as in imperial legislation, finance, justice and social patronage, Romanos I was the middle Byzantine emperor whose reign really marks the beginning of a new age.
Names were heavy with meaning, and only three major dynasties in the empire's history, the Heraclians, the Isaurians and initially the Macedonians, actually adopted imperial names in preference to family names. Very few new emperors identified themselves as New Constantines. Imperial renewal went on regardless of Constantine, which brings us to the other theme of this volume.
Reading the sources for any period of Byzantine history, beginning with Eusebius, one cannot but be aware of the “rhetoric of renewal' that runs through several genres of literature and through imperial art. This is the tendency to present the regime with which the writer identifies as a new start in imperial government — a renewal (âvakaivioic), correction (2rrav6pwoc), or cleansing (ăvakdapoic) aimed at restoring the empire to an optimum condition from which it has fallen away through the impiety, the tyranny, or at best the indolence (pavuia) of previous rulers. The rhetoric of renewal is most striking in respect of those emperors who founded successful dynasties by the forcible seizure of power — Heraclius, Leo III, Basil I, Alexios I, Michael VIII are the most obvious examples — butitiis a feature of all imperial reigns: not only usurpers desperate to prove their legitimacy, but also legitimate dynastic successors concerned to make their own distinctive mark.
The rhetoric of renewal has not been seriously confronted as an ongoing phenomenon of Byzantine culture, and this is a significant desideratum, for two reasons. First, the rhetoric of renewal is to some extent symptomatic of a genuine rhythm of renewal, produced by the efforts of one emperor after another to live up to a catalogue of traditional expectations. Second, however, and perhaps more important, the rhetoric of renewal is one of the more plausible facets of the distorting mirror presented by the sources. It is liable to distort our perception not only by the contrasts of light and shade, epainos and psogos, in which it casts the emperors, but also by the very fact of highlighting emperors and imperial initiatives. In other words, the rhetoric of imperial renewal may get in the way of seeing the deeper, non-imperial rhythms of Byzantine history. If so, the way forward is not to ignore or discard it, but to work through it sensitively with a broad and comparative sense of historical perspective. The Greek east experienced neither Renaissance nor Reformation. This was not just because it experienced a long Turkish occupation. The Renaissance and Reformation in the west were preceded by medieval movements of cultural and spiritual revival in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, movements which have no obvious counterpart in the east. It does not come naturally to Byzantinists to talk about eleventh-century reform or a twelfth-century renaissance. Why not? Is it that the rhythm of imperial renewal was, so to speak, the only beat to which Byzantium swung; that it remained locked into a cycle of imperial restoration and decline, which tied cultural and spiritual revival to imperial fortunes and imperial sponsorship? Or could it be that the imperial bias of the source material has prevented us from seeing that the cycle of change was broader based, and therefore more akin to western developments, than we may realize? The papers in this volume which are concerned with the eleventh century and later all emphasize the relativity of the traditional imperial image: its manipulation and deconstruction by intellectuals, churchmen and lawyers, and the emergence of female and “'constitutional” alternatives.
On a less theoretical level, there is much to explore in the question of how successive emperors perceived the task of restoration and renewal. What exactly were they trying to renew? What models did they look to apart from Constantine and his late antique successors? What was the pattern of reference to pre-Constantinian models of kingship: Alexander, David, Solomon, Marcus Aurelius, not to mention Christ himself? The Byzantine approach to royal and imperial exempla was undoubtedly eclectic, but was the eclecticism random or deliberate? And to what extent was the model a cumulative one? It is obvious that as time progressed, emperors had more and more great predecessors with whom to compare and identify themselves. It is also clear that many an emperor took over much from those predecessors with whom he was keen not to identify. Conceivably, then, the emphasis on getting back to a remote imperial past could be a smokescreen for the quiet assimilation of recent developments.
Renewal involves a view of the past, but it also implies a view of the future.2? What did emperors think was going to happen to the empire they were so busy restoring? What were they restoring it for? Being Christian, they knew that the world was going to end sooner or later, and that the end of the Roman Empire would spell the end of the world. Being human as well as Christian, they no doubt hoped that the end would come later rather than sooner, or that it would just go away. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the end of the sixth millennium (+/- 500 AD) was a time of intense apocalyptic expectation, and that the middle of the seventh millennium (i.e. the end of the tenth century) loomed equally large. The passing of these deadlines brought little comfort, because the signs that Christ had told His disciples to watch out for — wars, plagues, and the preaching of the Gospel to the entire world — recurred with alarming frequency. It is at the very least a curious coincidence that the emperors who made the most noise about imperial renewal cast themselves, or were cast, in distinctly eschatological roles: Heraclius, Leo [II and Basil 1 all attempted the forced conversion of the Jews; Alexios I believed a prophecy which told that he would die in Jerusalem after laying down his crown — in other words, he was meant to be the last Roman emperor of Pseudo-Methodius. Such apocalyptic behaviour is hard to interpret, especially since it seems rather at variance with the efforts of all these emperors to establish lasting dynasties.
Perhaps all we can say for certain is that the renewal of the empire was seen as a preparation for the coming of Christ's Kingdom on earth, and that the imperial view of this scenario envisaged a sort of realized eschatology whereby the emperor would reign in association (ovufaovieia) with Christ. In other words, the Roman empire was not to be superseded by the Kingdom of Heaven, but rather subsumed by it. This is the view adumbrated by “Cosmas Indicopleustes' in the sixth century and Anastasios of Sinai in the seventh, and developed more fully by a tenth-century bishop, Basil of Neopatras, in the reign of Basil II. And this was surely the thinking which led Heraclius to adopt the title 'basileus in Christ”, Justinian II to portray Christ on the obverse of the gold nomisma, and John I — the emperor who shortly before the middle of the seventh millennium came close to reconquering Jerusalem — to issue a copper coin bearing only the icon of Christ and the inscription “Jesus Christ King of kings'.
As we enter the second half of the eighth Byzantine millenniunma, it is worth reflecting on how the shape of the future would have appeared one thousand years ago to the emperor Basil II, as he brought the empire of New Rome to the peak of its medieval revival.
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