From "Bounteous Flux of Matter" to Hellenic City: Late Byzantine Representations of Constantinople and the Western Audience (original) (raw)
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The church of the Virgin of Skripou, in Boeotia, offers a remarkable instance of the potential layering of history as realized in a Byzantine monument. This is initially discernible in the hybrid character of the building, composed as it is of remnants from an earlier time, re-ordered and invested with new meaning at the time of its construction. The subsequent reception of the church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries likewise serves to highlight the variety and complexity of attitudes projected by contemporary beholders over time. Finally, the church's role within the popular imagination, first as the inheritor of famous antiquities and later as the site of miraculous intervention, has been crucial to its survival and preservation at the hands of a community that has actively cultivated notions of local identity and collective memory.
Always in Second Place: Constantinople as an Imperial and Religious Center in Late Antiquity
City of Caesar, City of God. Constantinople and Jerusalem in Late Antiquity (Millennium-Studien 97). Edited by Konstantin M. Klein and Johannes Wienand, Berlin, 2022
This paper investigates the political and religious impact of the new capital on the Bosporus and its complex relationship to Jerusalem: Constantinople became the center of the (East) Roman socio-political system which was characterized by an almost unbreakable bond between city and emperor. For Constantinople being the city of Caesar went hand in hand with aspiring to become the city of God as well. As Constantinople lacked a distinctly pagan or Jewish character (as in Rome or Jerusalem respectively), a Christian impregnation faced fewer obstacles than elsewhere, and an important stimulus was the fact that the inhabitants of Constantinople persistently constituted themselves as a Christian community. In the process of becoming a city of God, Constantinople took more than it gave: It imported relics, eschatological meaning, and finally even the True Cross. Jerusalem received less in return: above all, it did not become a political or administrative center. While Constantinople assumed functions that originally or primarily belonged to Jerusalem, the opposite did not occur. In fact, Constantinople did not become a model for any other city. In spite of all the importance and all the originality of its development, its political power was seen as having been transferred from Rome. Likewise, Constantinople’s growing holiness and its importance for salvation only resulted in a Second, New Jerusalem.
The period between the two falls of Constantinople, namely the Crusader conquest of 1204 and the Ottoman conquest of 1453, witnessed the radical transformation of Byzantium from empire into a mosaic of autonomous and semi-autonomous polities. The fascinating survival and transformation of Byzantine identities in a world dominated by Latin Christian and Muslim powers was the result of complex dynamics, with Constantinople functioning, more or less, as a magnet for the Orthodox populations beyond its narrow political borders. Theodoros Metochites’ (d. 1332) rhetoric eloquently captures the ideological, spiritual and cultural radiance of the “Queen City”. In his laudatory oration on the Byzantine capital, Metochites describes Constantinople as “the citadel of the whole world” (ἀκρόπολιν τινὰ τῶν ὅλων) and the “shared homeland of all people” (κοινοπολιτεία πάντων ἀνθρώπων), stressing the city’s role as a centre, in both geographic and symbolic terms. Over the past two decades, there has been a remarkable progress in the way scholars approach the history and culture of former Byzantine areas under Latin Christian and Muslim rule in the period between 1200 and 1400. The picture emerging from these studies embraces unity and diversity, interaction and contention, synthesis and conservativism, new identities and old. Research on the history of Mediterranean has also shown that the political, religious and cultural fragmentation of the Eastern Mediterranean increased, rather than restrained, the development of multiple connectivities, among the peoples inhabiting this vast liquid area. Yet, the nature and degree of bonds of unity between Late Byzantium and the former Byzantine lands —encompassing the physical mobility of humans and objects, as well as institutional, ideological, religious and cultural links— requires a more systematic and in-depth exploration. The aim of this Colloquium is to re-address questions related to Byzantine connectivities, experiences and identities in Latin- and Muslim-ruled Mediterranean areas once belonging to the Byzantine Empire. Borrowed from graph theory, the term connectivities has been employed by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell to describe the networks connecting microecologies with similar structures in Mediterranean landscapes and seascapes, society and religion, politics and culture. Focusing on religion and culture as the main strands of identity preservation, negotiation and adaptation, our Colloquium wishes to examine the threads waving the tapestry of a “Late Byzantine Mediterranean”: a fluidly-defined κοινοπολιτεία under the enduring influence of Constantinople, but in constant communication and exchange with the religious and ethnic Other. The main themes of the Colloquium include, but are not necessarily restricted to, the following: • Byzantine legacies in the Eastern Mediterranean after 1200 • Worlds of interaction and conflict (e.g., Asia Minor, the Holy Land, Cyprus and the Aegean) • The role of Byzantine culture as a transcultural language of communication • The impact of intra-Byzantine conflicts in the Eastern Mediterranean • Experiences of colonisation and foreign rule • Instrumentalisation of identities in historiography (inclusions and exclusions) Our speakers represent a variety of scholarly fields and methodological approaches, navigating the sea of Byzantine encounters in the Latin and Muslim worlds from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. By paying close attention to the continuities and discontinuities that (re-)shaped Byzantine identities in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Colloquium aims at providing fresh and stimulating perspectives on the sense of belonging to Byzantium and its broader significance. The Colloquium is dedicated to the loving memory of two great scholars, Speros Vryonis, Jr. and Elizabeth A. Zachariadou, who transformed our perception of the Byzantine legacy in the Eastern Mediterranean. Registration necessary at: https://ics.sas.ac.uk/events/late-byzantine-mediterranean-byzantine-connectivities-experiences-and-identities-a