Download PDF | The Relational Spiritual Geopolitics of Constantinople, the Capital of the Byzantine Empire, By Jelena Bogdanović, 2016.
Book Title: Political Landscapes of Capital Cities Book Editor(s): Jessica Joyce Christie, Jelena Bogdanović and Eulogio Guzmán Published by: University Press of Colorado
pp. 97-154 (58 pages)
Strategically located on a peninsula on the European side of the narrow bosphorus strait that connects the Mediterranean and the black Seas (by way also of the Sea of Marmara and the dardanelles), Constantinople, the capital city of the medieval Roman Empire that we know as the byzantine Empire (324–1453), was the largest and most thriving urban center in the Old World.1 T he city was founded by the first Roman Emperor who embraced Christianity, Constantine i (d. 337), as the eponymous capital outside historically dominant urban centers and as the alternative to the city of Rome.
This chapter outlines the physical production of the geopolitical landscape of Constantinople. by highlighting the critical elements of Constantinopolitan spatial configuration this essay questions how the geopolitical landscape of Constantinople was then emulated at alternative sites of authority, in related capital cities of emerging medieval states that adopted byzantine cultural values and its Orthodox version of Christianity —in medieval bulgaria, Rus’, and Serbia (figure 3.1).2
Scholarly considerations of geopolitical landscapes often exclusively examine competing territorial orders at the expense of religious understanding of space.3 because medieval societies were focused not only on major political and military events but also on religion, here, the geopolitical landscape is closely intertwined with geo-religious concepts of space. Constantinople was founded as the “new Rome,” yet it had its own urban development that embodied the long-lasting, even if elusive, idea of the imperial Christian capital and, thus became a new prototype of a capital city in its own right. in this essay, the geopolitics of Constantinople is contextualized via experience, perception, and imagination—the three major categories that adam t. Smith uses in his model for the study of political landscapes.4
The spatial concepts associated with topography and faith-based developments were embodied in distinct architectural accomplishments, which confirmed their importance through ceremonies performed within the city, and provide a major platform for the study of the spiritual geopolitics of Constantinople. Such an understanding of Constantinople reduces the complexities of the actual city to the memorable image of it as the Christian capital, as a symbol of the Christian microcosm. a question is then posed about the mechanisms that expanded the city to the image of the byzantine Empire within and beyond its geographical and historical boundaries. Specific emphasis is placed on the role of a ruler as a leader but also as a perceived architect and planner, and divine authorities (the Christian God and the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God) as the perceived creators and designators of these capital cities as actual places.
The ciTy: reframing The geopoliTical landscape and esTablishing a neW proToType Constantinople emerged as a new capital city after the institution of tetrarchy (the governmental principle based on the co-equal rulership of four emperors), when each ruler literally needed a capital as the place of display of his reign.5 Through borrowing administrative, political, and civic references to the Roman Empire previously reserved only for the city of Rome, which embodied the archetypal capital city,6 each new capital gained Roman imperial authority. at the same time, Rome became the urban prototype that each new capital emulated.
This novel concept of tetrarchy introduced critical changes regarding the understanding of the capital city as a unique construct of ancient, universal, and sacred nature,7 while the place and spatial reality of each imperial capital became open to imaginative constructs in order to advance the overarching idea of the capital city. For more than 1,000 years, contemporaries knew Constantinople, the capital of the byzantine Empire, via various relational terms—new Rome, Second Rome, Queen City, royal city, great city (megalopolis).8 to affirm its presumed long-lived legitimacy, the fourth-century elite occasionally associated the city with new troy as “the legendary ancestral home of the Romans in the East.”9 as it became the capital of the Christian Roman Empire, Constantinople became a sacred capital city in its own right.
Known in sources as new Jerusalem, Constantinople was associated with the Heavenly Jerusalem both spiritually and physically as the byzantines brought sacred relics to their capital.10 With such multiple intertwinings of political and religious notions, the byzantines most often called their capital simply the City (Polis, Πóλις).11 This ancient Greek term polis also unified the notions of urbs and civitas for the city-state.12 Magdalino explains that the byzantines reserved the term the City not only for their capital, but also for the entire empire, which was not identified with its territory or ruling dynasty but with its capital city.13 The concept of the City and its pervasive associative meanings spread among other cultures.14 Even the Chinese used a phonetic counterpart of the Greek for the City—Fulîn via Polin, Polis—to denote the byzantine Empire.15 all these terms emphasized Constantinopolitan civic, ideological, and religious values but also the spatial and physical characteristics of the capital, both real and desired.16 T he making of Constantinople as the “Other Rome” enriched its identity through and in contrast to the ancient and pagan Roman imperial landscape. T he physical reality of byzantine Constantinople remains obscure due to its complex and long history; few texts survive that can adequately document urban transformations over time, and perhaps there are so few because of the byzantine religious concept of eternity that contradicted historicity and emphasized the city’s geo-spiritual rather than geohistorical reality.17 a modern understanding of the physical and cultural landscape is usually framed through mapping, which becomes in its own right a construct for intertwining geography, human presence, and memory.18
The only known surviving map that presents the Roman Empire and also shows Constantinople is the Tabula Peutingeriana, a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century copy of the late antique original (figure 3.2).19 This map confirms at least two critical facts for understanding Constantinople as a new prototype of the medieval capital city. Constantinople started as a disembedded capital—the center of political administration was outside the historically dominant urban centers.20 The apparent scarcity of other cartographic maps from the byzantines points to their cultural refocus from a geohistorical to a religious understanding of space.21 T he Tabula Peutingeriana shows the tripartite world known to the Romans and the geographic totality of the empire on three continents— Europe, asia, and africa clustered around the Mediterranean Sea. The byzantines, who identified themselves as Christianized Romans, would adopt and transform this view about the world. Seas, major rivers, lakes, and land masses reveal topographical features of the territories of the empire. Roman settlements are interconnected by a road-network with marked distances between settlements, and represented by functional place symbols, frequently twin-towered buildings and fortifications for larger sites.
The three most prominent cities— Rome, Constantinople, and antioch—are represented by personifications or “individualized city portraits” (figure 3.2). However, no major road leads to Constantinople. Moreover, the city is marked by a triumphal victory column, and not by city-walls and monumental architecture as in Rome and antioch. Here in the byzantine territory, the symbol for Constantinople, a city relatively uncontested and recently reclaimed as opposed to the more established urban landscapes of Rome and antioch with their long pagan and governmental traditions, seems inserted into the map. This uniquely surviving image supports the historical fact that Constantinople emerged as the product of new imperial and religious identities in the fourth and fifth centuries, most likely at the time of the revision of the original map.22
Within a wider geographic framework, Constantinople was strategically located almost in the geometric center of the territories of the vast empire it controlled: it was in close proximity to all three continents by sea or by land, and was open to commercial, economic, and political exchanges (figure 3.2).23 T he geographic location of the city on the tip of the peninsula also allowed for the possibilities of either its expansion or its complete isolation.24 The mountain ridges along the west-east axis were over time topographically enclosed by the expanded system of city walls. Similarly, roads and aqueducts not only provided urban counterparts to passages and rivers, but also enhanced the network of economic possibilities and settlement incentives.25
The cityscape, framed by the still-standing city walls and the partially preserved monumental public and religious buildings on the tops of the city hills, remains the prominent constitutive feature of the Constantinopolitan landscape.26 T he enclosing city walls defined not only the city proper but also its identity (figure 3.3).27 Following Hellenistic urban design principles, the first walls of ancient byzantium used the natural fitness of the rocky outcrop at the head of the peninsula, later recognized as the first hill of Constantinople.28 The enclosures created by King byzas and Emperor Septimius Severus (r. 193–211) followed. in the fourth century, Emperor Constantine i erased these previous walls and raised his own. Emperor Theodosius ii (r. 408–450) enlarged the city and built the second line of fortification walls some 1,500 m to the west of the line of Constantine’s walls.
These walls, still standing, stretch along a south-north axis from the Marble tower to the Golden Horn. by the fifth century, Constantinople was enclosed on all sides, from both land and sea.29 Constantinople consisted of an area approximately the size of Old Rome within the aurelian walls, or some 1,400 ha.30 Thus, the city of Rome, indeed, was a major urban prototype for the development of the city of Constantinople, not only in conceptual but also in physical terms.31 Even with later expansions and reductions of the city and numerous medieval changes in its morphology, the chroniclers continued to keep the memory of the foundation of Constantinople and to refer to the city proper from its foundation period.
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