Download PDF | Paul Magdalino - Roman Constantinople in Byzantine Perspective_ The Memorial and Aesthetic Rediscovery of Constantine’s Beautiful City, from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance By Paul Magdalino, Brill 2024.
183 Pages
Abstract
Literate Byzantines made sense of the wonder and spectacle that was Constantinople both by researching the legendary memories that gave meaning to the city’s cultural heritage, and by explaining the aesthetic appeal of the urban ensemble, which was known from the beginning as Constantine’s ‘beautiful city’. At first, the memorial mode predominated, finding expression first in a now lost epic narrative written c.500 and then in a bureaucratic research culture that culminated in an encyclopaedic gazetteer (989–990). Thereafter, commemoration switched to the aesthetic mode, developing a rhetorical vision of the city as a theatre of cosmic excellence. Constantinople finally met its literary match after 1305, almost a thousand years after its foundation, in the monumental Byzantios of Theodore Metochites.
Introduction This contribution to the Brill series ‘Research Perspectives on Byzantium’ is concerned with the single most definitive feature of the polity that we conventionally refer to as the Byzantine Empire. As recent scholarship has emphasised, this Byzantine Empire was nothing other than the Roman Empire with its capital at Constantinople.
In other words, the only thing that essentially distinguished Byzantium from the Roman Empire of the first three or four centuries AD, and the only thing that justifies the use of the words ‘Byzantium’ and ‘Byzantine’ to describe this polity, whose inhabitants called it Romania and identified themselves as Romaioi, is the fact that it was ruled not from Rome on the Tiber, but from the New Rome on the Bosporus that the emperor Constantine (305–337) had created by upgrading the ancient Greek city of Byzantion into a megalopolis bearing his own name: Konstantinoupolis.1 My mandate is therefore to offer a research perspective on the history of this city from its inauguration by Constantine on 11 May 330 to its capture by the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II on 29 May 1453.
In fulfilling this mandate, I have been guided by three considerations that will undoubtedly differentiate this study from others in the series. First, I have chosen to focus on the process of research and the research culture behind it rather than on the research results that provide the historical narrative. Secondly, I have adopted a working definition of research into the ancient and medieval past that prioritises not the process of ‘scientific’, post-Renaissance investigation, but rather the ‘pre-scientific’ discovery of that past by the people who chose to identify with it. My study therefore offers a research perspective on a research perspective of a different kind.
Thirdly, in consequence of the point made in the first paragraph, the object of study in this case is virtually indistinguishable from the broader subject field to which it belongs, so that it becomes very difficult to disentangle research on Constantinople from research on Byzantine history. My decision to privilege the research process over research results, and pre-scientific over scientific research has been driven by the sense that what Byzantine studies need is not another book on what Byzantium really was and how we need to approach it, but a study of what the people who experienced it, both insiders and outsiders, really thought about it. What did they think was the secret of its appeal and its success?
What questions did they ask of the urban environment, and what answers did they come up with? What did they look for when contemplating Byzantine civilization’s greatest asset, Constantinople, and how did they seek to explain the effect that it never ceased to produce on observers? How did the views of natives and residents compare with those of visitors and outsiders? How did they prepare the way for modern scientific investigation of the wonder that was Constantinople? Twenty-first century scholarship is achieving an up-to-date synthesis of recent studies on the society, culture and built environment of Constantinople, but the full story of how we arrived at that synthesis remains largely untold.
The sum of current knowledge about Late Antique and medieval Constantinople is being made available in two ‘Companion’ volumes issued by major academic publishers,2 and one of those publishers has launched a series of short monographs on ‘Elements in the History of Constantinople’.3 The late Cyril Mango’s long-awaited monograph on the built environment in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages is now being edited for publication. These works will include surveys of the history of scholarship on the subject that outline the scientific exploration of Constantinople from the fifteenth century.
They will also undoubtedly have something to say about the mentality and the motivation behind that exploration. But they will pay less attention to what the explorers thought they were doing and wanted to find, than to what we can retain and use from their findings. And while they will contain surveys of the written sources for Byzantine Constantinople, they are unlikely to devote much attention to the genesis of those sources – to the research agenda of the people who wrote about Byzantine Constantinople while it was still Byzantine. Indeed, the very idea that these writers had a research agenda that deserves the modern researcher’s attention may seem counterintuitive.
Their method is rarely scholarly and their information gathering infrequently involves much intellectual effort; their purpose is literary or polemical rather than scientific, and they often take astounding liberties with ‘the facts’. Nevertheless, their writings are an indispensable part of the modern researcher’s database. Given the destruction of most Byzantine buildings above ground, and the sporadic nature of archaeological excavation, texts constitute, and for the foreseeable future will continue to provide, at least 90% of our evidence for Byzantine Constantinople. It is important to recognise that this evidence is not simply a mass of raw and random data; the texts are all, in varying degrees, the result of data processing by literary composition, which in Byzantium usually involved a high degree of linguistic and stylistic artifice.
The processing has traditionally been deplored as a distortion that gets in the way of objective analysis, but however we look at it, it must be seen as part of the evidence: evidence for how the ancient or medieval writer or editor chose to present the information to be assimilated by the reader. The writer’s agency discovers, collects, selects and interprets the material, thus inducing the reader to share the writer’s interest. It makes the reader an accomplice to the familiarity and fascination with the city that motivated the author to write.
The Late Antique and medieval literature on Constantinople represents the ongoing effort by literate Byzantines and foreigners to explain the origins and status, as well as to express the wonder and spectacle, of an extraordinary city that seemed to be sui generis, whose very existence was a miracle. In short, the native Byzantines who presented Constantinople, primarily to each other and secondarily to visitors, and the outsiders who added their own take on this presentation, formulated in terms of their own ancient and medieval values the basic issues that have driven modern research.
They invented Constantinople as a research topic, and deserve recognition for that. We may thus speak of a pre-scientific research agenda in the premodern literature on Constantinople, and we may legitimately set this literature in the framework of a research perspective, even a research culture. This study will therefore be devoted to discussing the relevant Greek texts not as a quarry of hard factual information, but in terms of their effort to satisfy the curiosity that the Queen of Cities evoked in the viewer, whether resident or visitor, and to make sense of its extraordinary magnetism.
The other consideration that may give the present study an individual twist in relation to its companion volumes is the necessity and the difficulty of separating Constantinople as a subject of research from Byzantium as a whole. In a recent handbook I contributed a chapter on Constantinople, to which the volume editor added the title ‘Byzantium = Constantinople’.4
This oversimplification was rightly criticised,5 but the basic notion is inherent in the subject and pervasive in scholarship on Byzantium, especially those studies whose focus is on the middle Byzantine period (c.650–1204), when Constantinople was the unchallenged centre of political, economic and cultural life. The result of this usually tacit assumption is that general surveys of Byzantine history have traditionally shared the perspective of the Byzantine history writers who are the backbone, and at times the entire surviving body, of our written evidence from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries.
These historians all lived and worked in Constantinople, where they wrote for a local readership. The political history of Byzantium was largely the outcome of decisions and power transfers made and recorded in the imperial capital. The Byzantine economy was powered by the central government’s demands for taxes and resources – and the central government usually stayed put. The visual arts were led by the tastes of the metropolitan elite, and fed by the production of artists and craftsmen active or trained in Constantinople. Advanced literacy was almost entirely the monopoly of the Constantinopolitan elite, so that almost any study of medieval Greek literature, at least before 1204, is concerned primarily with the literary culture of Constantinople. In fact, the only components of Byzantine civilization that escape the silent identification with Constantinople are those that had to function primarily in the provinces: the military, the rural economy, and, to some extent, monasticism.
The identification of Byzantium with Constantinople also works the other way, so that Constantinople is habitually treated as a function, albeit the main one, of the larger entity of which it was the nucleus, and not as a social and spatial unit with a separate organic existence that was independent of its role as the seat of government. Thus it is possible for studies with Constantinople in their title to ignore the local, topographical specificity of the people, events and objects they deal with, and it is even possible for self-styled histories of Constantinople to focus on imperial and ecclesiastical politics with a minimum of reference to the urban context – just as today ‘Washington’, ‘Moscow’ and ‘Beijing’ can be used as shorthand designations of governments and regimes without any connotation of the cities as such.6 At the other end of the scale, Constantinople is ‘atomised’, in that its monuments tend to be discussed “in isolation from any urban or historical context”.7
The result is to create an impression of Byzantine Constantinople as no more than the sum of its parts: a set of loosely related individuals, or social groups; an ensemble of institutional, social and cultural units that did not merge, and whose connections to the provinces and to the world beyond were just as important as their connections to each other; the hub of a wheel that was essentially defined by its spokes and its outer rim; the peak of a steep hierarchical pyramid culminating in the emperor, in which the vertical lines of dependence linking superiors and subordinates throughout both urban and rural society counted for more than the horizontal proximity of sharing the same urban space. In short, the essential tendency of both Byzantine and Byzantinist discourse has been to elide the city of Constantinople with the entire organism of a state that encompassed, at different times in its history from the seventh to the thirteenth century, the whole of Asia Minor, the greater part of the Balkan peninsula, the islands of the Mediterranean, and parts of Italy, Syria and the Caucasus.
The elision has worked to the disadvantage of both the capital and the provinces (including the frontiers) as objects of research focus.8 In the past it was natural to deplore the scholarly neglect of the provinces, and this led, from the middle of the twentieth century, to a proliferation of regional studies.9 Although Constantinople was one of the regions concerned, receiving detailed study of its topography, its hinterland, and preliminary study of its urban development,10 it is still, in the eyes of most Byzantinists and the non-Byzantinists who read them, first and foremost a capital and only secondarily a city.
However, a number of works recently published or in the pipeline are shifting the balance, and putting Constantinople more prominently on the map as an urban space. The present study attempts to complement these efforts, by looking at Constantinople as a literary construct of the long Byzantine search for a specifically Constantinopolitan urban identity.
The search sought to explain, as we have seen, the unique phenomenon of wonder and spectacle that Constantinople presented to the observer. As such, it had two modes of operation, the memorial and the aesthetic. The memorial mode was focused on the city’s past: the memories of its origins and crises, the stories behind its monuments and the meaning of its enigmatic antiquities, especially the statues and relief sculptures that decorated its public spaces. The aesthetic mode rationalised the perception of the sensational qualities, above all the beauty (kallos) and size (megethos), that the city exhibited, whether in its natural setting and built ensemble or in its individual components. The two modes corresponded to different types of literature, which satisfied different intellectual expectations: curiosity on the one hand, sublimation/idealization on the other.
The one represented research, the other rhetoric. It is obviously the former that concerns us most immediately, particularly since the memorial mode was the more dominant in writing about the city for the greater and most formative period of its Byzantine history, from the fifth to the tenth century. Yet between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, the memorialization of Constantinople’s past gave way to the rhetorical rediscovery of its ever-present beauty and vitality.
This was the research perspective from which the intellectuals of the last two centuries of Byzantium sought to define the identity of their habitat, by reconfiguring the reality of late medieval Constantinople through the lens of the Late Antique urban ideal. This rhetorical turn deserves equal consideration in our analysis, because it also involved a search for the genetic and cultural heritage of Constantine’s ‘beautiful city’. It did not mark a break with the perspective of the memorial literature, but rather the foregrounding of a complementary vision that had never entirely disappeared.
The memorial and aesthetic modes of approach to the wonders and spectacles of Constantinople were not incompatible but inseparable, for both were rooted in the civic culture of the Greek world in which the Reigning City had come into being. Both were articulations of civic identity and pride in an ‘empire des cités’ where the cities were challenged by the growing autocracy, bureaucracy and militarism of the Roman imperial regime: the regime that created Constantinople.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق