Thoughts and thinking on graduate study at Oxford

Having been at the University of Calgary for four and a half years now, I am nearly done my degree. Hopefully it will all be good at the end of the term and they’ll let me graduate. Although I have been told by the department’s undergraduate advisor that everything is set to go, I won’t believe it until I have the degree itself. Since I plan to graduate at the end of the year it meant that I started to look around at graduate schools more seriously last summer. Byzantine Studies is a pretty limited field. Oxford is the centre of it in the Anglophone world. Birmingham has a small department, as does Belfast. Princeton has a few notable experts, and the University of Ottawa has a whole department of late antiquity people. I looked around at a few other places as well: Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario has a Byzantinist, and Toronto has a massive medieval history department, but somehow doesn’t have a Byzantinist and has very few specialists on the early middle ages. Since application fees typically run around $100, I decided to put in only a few applications. The Oxford one was due back in November. I’m currently working on the Birmingham and Ottawa applications, and the due date for the Princeton one passed quite a while ago.

To much excitement, I received an acceptance letter from the Late Antique and Byzantine Studies department at Oxford last Thursday. While I’m really going to miss skating next year as it has been a central part of my life for the last decade, my focus has been on school, and now it seems to have finally paid off. This place is the centre of the world in the study of Byzantium, so I was absolutely thrilled to be admitted. Of course, it is conditional upon graduating and getting an upper second-class honours’ degree. While the graduation is part out of my hands at this point, the grades shouldn’t be a problem. Even if I got a B- in Latin (a distinct possibility, as I haven’t studied it in three years and it is not coming back well), I should still average in at first-class honours this year. Nowhere outside of Oxford can I get the training in the physical disciplines (sigillography, numismatics, ceramics, etc.) of Byzantine Studies, nor is there such a fantastic selection of renowned scholars elsewhere. This is where people like Averil Cameron, Chris Wickham, and J.D. Howard-Johnston work and teach. The university also has experts in all of the ancillary languages (Armenian, Syriac, and Arabic) of which I’ll probably need to pick up one, as the Greek sources for the period I’m interested in are quite poor. They have some of the best libraries in the world and vast artefact collections. On top of that, I was assigned Dr. Mark Whittow to be my supervisor. His book The Making of Byzantium is easily the best survey of the Eastern Mediterranean world during the early middle ages that specifically focuses on Byzantium. On top of its actual physical and intellectual resources, the town of Oxford is incredibly beautiful, and many of its notable buildings are several centuries older than the country I live in.

Somewhat more impressive than the TFDL

There is, however, one major problem. Oxford is obscenely expensive for foreign students. At the time of writing, I’m still waiting on a college offer. I’m thinking that I’ll be getting at least some funding, but I doubt that it’ll be anywhere near the almost $24,000 CDN that tuition alone would cost per year. On top of that there are college fees, books, food, and rent. I think I could cobble together the resources to afford the M.Phil degree while only going into a bit of debt, but the issue is that the M.Phil is not the end of the road. The D.Phil at Oxford is the ultimate goal, and that would be several years of study after the M.Phil. Generally, there is more funding at the doctoral level just about everywhere (although I’m not sure about Oxford), but even then the M.Phil would have completely drained my resources. The other consideration is the EU fee status. I am eligile to get a German passport. All this would get me for now is the benefit of not needing a student visa to study in the UK, which does not seem very hard to get anyway. However, after two years of doing the M.Phil degree at Oxford, I would meet the residency requirement and thus be categorized in the Home/EU group for tuition at the doctoral level. So spending a lot now would make the D.Phil cheaper, but whether it is enough to make up the difference is unclear at this point. The last point is that the institution of my second choice, the University of Ottawa, seems to have generous funding. Between the departmental funding, a possible SSHRC grant in my second year, and TA work, I don’t think it would cost me much at all to go to Ottawa and I could come out ahead.

I now have until the 17th of February to let them know at Oxford as to whether or not I am accepting their offer. On the one hand, it is Oxford. It seems foolish to turn them down. On the other, it is very expensive and I plan on going there for the doctoral degree anyway. I got in once, and I can do it again. Thoughts on this matter would be much appreciated.

Notes on the genesis of Byzantium

I wrote this yesterday for two reasons. Someone asked me a question on a forum that deserved a good reply, and I was teaching my thesis supervisor’s class the next day, so I thought that it would be useful. I’ve preserved it here in its unedited form. The reason that I did not post it last night was in observation of the anti-SOPA blackout day. I did not actually black the blog out, despite probably receiving just a few less visitors than Wikipedia’s 160-odd million. This did help me arrange some of my thoughts, and the feedback I received from today’s lecture has been extremely positive. It was my first time teaching a university class, and it was a lot of fun. If only I could have gone into iconoclasm. Anyhow, here’s the ramblings:

In brief, I think we see the genesis of what we define as Byzantium appearing over many centuries. Some of the military reforms, concepts of emperorship, and religion can be directly tied back to Diocletian. Constantine was an extremely important part of the formation of Byzantium through the toleration of Christianity, and so was Theodosius I for making it the state religion. Eusebius of Caesarea’s ideas of the connection between the divine realm and the state and the re-writing of Roman history to make the Romans God’s Chosen People are absolutely indispensable to the process. In the west this died out due to the lack of centralized authority and the high place given to the writings of Augustine, but in the east, if anything, the state became even more closely allied to the church during the crisis period. Under Justinian we saw the weakening of the landholders and the senatorial class. He re-arranged the elite to centre them firmly on Constantinople and away from the provinces, which helped to solidify the power of the emperor as the dispenser of all imperial titles and ensure the primacy of Constantinople.

I don’t see any fundamental break with Rome, but rather gradual change that started at the end of the third century. The state was thoroughly “Byzantine” in our loaded sense of the term by the death of Herakleios, but this transformation was a long process, and is certainly less rapid and less marked than the transition from the Roman Republic to the Principate under Augustus. In the same way, Byzantium was never static: iconoclasm became an important part of its identity even long after that period had ended, and we see significant changes in how the empire was ruled under the Komnenoi in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Towards the end of Justinian’s reign, the Empire begins to enter a period of crisis. The state seems to have had a hard time paying their soldiers, unrest breaks out, and the frontiers on the Danube collapse. Keeping in mind that the fifth and sixth centuries were periods of peaceful transitions of power, we have to look at Herakleios and Phokas in this concept. As military usurpers, they had to justify themselves. We don’t know what Phokas did, if anything. The record slanders him excessively, so any sort of certainly is impossible. However, we have a very judicious sample of Herakleios’ propaganda, and this is one that strongly emphasizes the connection between God and the state and brings up Old Testament images frequently. This is the point, moreso than before, where we really begin to see a transition of the identity and the culture into one centred very strongly on God and the state, and concerned very much with their own survival (which looked bleak throughout much of the seventh and eighth centuries). If any single event sums up the change, it was probably Herakleios’ spectacular victory over Persia in 628. Only two years before, the Persians had attacked Constantinople with the aid of the Avars. The story was that the Virgin Mary’s robe had saved the city (acting in a manner very similar to that of the Roman palladia), and the regime actively promoted this idea. When the Persian government collapsed, all of the ideology about the Romans being God’s Chosen People was confirmed. They had been on the brink of destruction, and yet they had been delivered in a move so spectacular that it must have appeared divine to many people (and was actively promoted that way by Herakleios’ government). This helped to solidify the worldview that the Empire’s fortunes hinged on God’s favour, which was contingent with the sinfulness or lack thereof of the people and its rulers. This further meshed politics and orthodoxy together, and was a major component in the beginning of iconoclasm.

Turkey 2011: Byzantine Heritage in Istanbul II

I’m going to start off with a surprise: the church of St. Theodosia, today the Gul Camii. I was unable to get in and thus have no pictures of the interior, but Van Millingen makes it sound like I am not missing much (I apologize to the art historians; Alexander Van Millingen’s Byzantine Churches of Constantinople is the only book in my library dedicated to the churches of Constantinople. I know that it is a century out of date.) In fact, I do not even have decent pictures of the exterior as evidenced here.

The upper parts of the church seem to have been rebuilt by the Turks later on, as you can see from the change in the masonry.Trying to get a decent picture of this proved really difficult, and the high angle here led to some serious washout.

The date of the church is totally unknown. I cannot find anything concrete, but it seems to be a rather late Byzantine foundation. The name of the church should not be taken to indicate a foundation that was immediately after the end of iconoclasm. The story of St. Theodosia is told to us by Theophanes. She was apparently a pious woman who witnessed the removal of an icon of Christ from the Chalke Gate, near the imperial palace and the Hagia Sophia. In an attempt to prevent this, she pushed the ladder over which the soldier removing the icon was on, sending him plummeting to his death. She was then murdered by the other soldiers. The problem with this story is that it is a total fabrication. The Council of 787 accused Leo III, the emperor who began the iconoclastic movement of just about every heinous crime under the sun, but this never appears in the indictment. Considering that they seem to have invented many of the charges, it is surprising that they would not include a real a martyrdom that steadfastly supported the cause of the iconodoules. Eirene may have put an icon of Christ on the Chalke Gate at the end of the eighth century. It is possible that she fostered this legend to increase her own rather feeble support. Either way, there is really no contemporary evidence that Leo took anything down from the Chalke Gate, and thus no evidence that anyone was martyred. However, the Restoration of Orthodoxy became an extremely important feast in the Byzantine church to celebrate the end of imperial iconoclasm, so it is not surprising that a cult grew up around the legend of a Constantinopolitan saint.

St. Theodore Tiro is another Byzantine church that does not seem to get many visitors. It’s now the Molla Gurani Camii and seems to only be open for Muslim prayers so you’ll have to time it right (and be quiet and respectful) to get in and get a chance to look around. This does not seem to have been an important church, and even the association with St. Theodore Tiro is uncertain. This picture was taken from inside a nearby Ottoman-era cemetery. The minaret is obviously a later addition to the church.

I never actually managed to get into the church itself, but I got into the narthex. In the narthex I made an interesting discovery: the interior of the small domes had not been whitewashed over. Although most of the figures had been scrapped away, you can still clearly see a figure of Christ on the top of the dome amidst the general damage.

The windows around the dome are still in decent shape, and the mosaics, while small, are still quite pretty.

Given the sloppy job that was done in whitewashing this church as this pillar suggests, one can only hope that more of the Byzantine heritage of Istanbul awaits to be discovered under the plaster.

For such a large building, I have very little material on the Pantokrator Monastery. It was built by the Empress Eirene of Hungary, wife of John II Komnenos (r. 1118-1143). It became an important imperial religious foundation, and served as the tomb for John II and his wife, as well as their son, Manuel I (r. 1143-1180). Under John II, it had a hospital attached to it. Unlike many medieval hospitals, its doctors attempted to use the best knowledge of their day to actually treat illness, instead of providing a place for the ill to stay. It was funded by the state. Since its typikon (foundation document) survives, we also know that it was stipulated that it employ a certain number of female doctors to treat female patients. Today it is the Zayrek Camii. If you decide to visit, keep in mind that you are likely to be a bit of a novelty to the locals. Not many tourists go far from Sultanahmet (the eastern tip of the old city where some of the most magnificent structures are) but the Zayrek district is definitely a different Istanbul. It’s exceptionally poor. The buildings are run down, and you do not have to walk far before seeing the abandoned and dilapidated remains of old Ottoman houses, which Turkish law requires the preservation of. Sadly, the money is not available to keep all of these old buildings in a decent state of repair, and many are abandoned. It is also not uncommon to see empty lots full of rubble from burned and collapsed buildings. The Pantokrator Monastery is also not far from the Sultan Selim Mosque and the Fatih Mosque, the former situated beside the Cistern of Aspar, which is now a park, and the latter occupying the location of Justinian’s Church of the Holy Apostles. This is the district in which Istanbul’s fundamentalist Muslim community lives, and it is very uncommon to see a woman not wearing a burkha. It was definitely an uncomfortable place to be in, as the locals seem extremely surprised to see a tourist out so far from the main sites. I never had any trouble in the district. The people seemed very typically Turkish and were very eager to give (usually bad) directions. It was just uncomfortable, which may say more about me than the area of Istanbul. Still, if you’re going go up the Fatih Mosque, you now have some idea what to expect. Anyway, the Pantokrator Monastery/Zayrek Camii was closed for major renovations. I had a chance to wander around the work site a bit on the exterior. While I was disappointed that I did not get to go in, the fact that such an important church from the Komnenian area was receiving major work is very encouraging. Here’s a picture of it all fenced off.

Exterior of the main apse, which is pointing east. Work seems to be ongoing on the exterior here, explaining its sad appearance.

Kalenderhane and the sea walls tomorrow, I promise.

Turkey 2011: Byzantine Heritage in Istanbul I

It occurred to me that despite having been back in North America for sixth months, I haven’t really posted anything on my trip. This summer I spent a month in Turkey, primarily visiting late Roman and Byzantine sites, and a vast number of them. I was continually impressed by the quality and size of the Roman ruins in Turkey. They certainly dwarf anything that I’ve seen in Italy, and there are numerous Pompeii-sized cities just about everywhere in the western half of the country. The first week was spent in Istanbul. Then we flew down to Antalya (ancient Attaleia) on the south coast, rented a car, and headed east, before returning to the western half of the country and thoroughly exploring the southwest coast and parts of the central Aegean coast.

Istanbul was an incredible experience, although it was also sad to see the state of preservation of many of the Byzantine monuments. For the sake of this post, I am going to concentrate on the Byzantine buildings. This is not to suggest that there are not other things worth seeing in Istanbul. The major Ottoman mosques are quite impressive on the outside, even if on the inside they are almost entirely identical to each other and it is hard to get a good view of the elaborately painted ceilings on account of the vast number of cables coming down that hold up the lights. The St. Stephan of the Bulgars church is also worth stopping in, purely to see a hideous pre-fabricated metal Austrian church in all of its rusting glory.

The first church up is no longer a church. The Church of the Theotokos Pammakaristos actually has a bit of important history behind it, as it served for about 130 years as the Greek patriarchate in Constantinople after Mehmed II decided to bulldoze Justinian’s Church of the Holy Apostles. (While that act certainly caused a serious loss to posterity, the church seems to have been utterly decrepit when the Ottomans took the city in 1453.) Pammakaristos may have been a Komnenian foundation, and there is some slight evidence that Alexios I Komnenos, the emperor who called the First Crusade, was buried there. The church is still a mosque today, but the parekklesion (side church) has been restored and is now a museum. Although its interior is quite small, it is an absolutely brilliant building and it is covered in gold mosaic. The decorations inside date from the early 14^th century.

Central dome and apse. Old Testament prophets flank the dome, and a large Christ dominates the apse.

Sure, the curve seems a little odd, but it never alters the perspective of the figure.

Look carefully, and you can see some fresco hidden behind a crack in the brick, just there to make us wonder what sort of beautiful art remains covered in the mosque itself. You’ll probably have to look at the full size image to see the fresco.

The Christ Pantokrator from the dome. Since there was no one else there, I managed to get such a good picture by laying on my back beneath the dome and resting my arms on the floor to create a sort of tripod for my camera. It got a good picture, but the experience of laying the cool stone floor with golden Byzantine mosaics all around me was fantastic. This exact image now adorns my wall in gorgeous 8″x10″.

South wall of the church. Much of the decoration is gone, but most of the lower mosaics are intact, and the marble still looks good seven hundred years later.

The Küçuk Ayasofya is another mosque that was once a Byzantine church. It was a particularly famous Byzantine church, for this was Justinian’s church of Sts. Sergios and Bakchos. Most of its Byzantine decorations are gone, but even as a mosque today it remains an important part of the Byzantine heritage in Istanbul. The marble floor is now carpeted, something that you can hardly fault the Muslims for because it just feels so nice to take off your shoes and wander around mosques in your socks after long walks from site to site. The plan of the building is still very evident, and you can see why the Turks call it Küçuk Ayasofya, “Little Hagia Sophia.” It is a miniature version of that monumental structure, albeit with less of a nave and more of a centralized plan. In the Hagia Sophia you can at least see the basilical base to the church, but Sts. Sergios and Bakchos is much more rounded. How much of the original decoration lies under the Turkish plaster is anyone’s guess, and as far as I know no art or architectural historians have yet had the opportunity make some experimental cuts in the walls to see what might be underneath.

Part of the fun of exploring this building was hunting down its Byzantine heritage. The column capitals, at one point as elaborate as those supporting the Hagia Sophia, have suffered whitewashing, but their original intricacy is still visible underneath.

The carvings that wrap around the interior are also original, but are particularly notable for two things. The first is that their Greek inscriptions remain. The second is that the despite the church being dedicated to two saints, St. Bakchos seems to have got the shaft when it came to getting his name carved in. Only St. Sergios is mentioned.

Another great part about this mosque is the gallery. Unlike some troublesome churches in Europe, they let you go up into the gallery in this mosque for a different view.

Compared to the Hagia Sophia, the dome has an odd shape to it.

Not much remains of the grand hippodrome of Constantinople other than its shape and some of the decorations on the spina. Still, we should consider ourselves fortunate, because there is more of it left than the Circus Maximus in Rome, which is nothing more than an earthen depression. Because of the hilly nature of Constantinople, the hippodrome had to be built up quite a ways on the sphendone end to accommodate the massive size of the track. Modern construction has been built over one end of the hippodrome so even though you can wander into it and appreciate how big it is, you aren’t really getting the full size unless you go to the far end to see the exposed substructure of the sphendone. This isn’t even my picture of it. 6000 Turkey pictures, and I don’t have a decent one looking down to the hippodrome, probably because it was getting paved while I was there and thus filled with bright orange fencing, piles of bricks, and construction workers. I was forced to steal this picture from Wikipedia. The green spaces around the obelisks no longer exist. The entire area in front of the Blue Mosque is covered with large bricks. The Blue Mosque is the building to the right, and the Hagia Sophia is the more distant red building. The nearer column was erected by Constantine VII in the tenth century. The further one was brought from Egypt by Theodosius I in 390, and contains some carvings of his court.

This is the famous bronze serpent column from Delphi, originally cast after the Battle of Plataea in the 5th c. B.C. It was brought to Constantinople by Constantine I. One of the heads is in the Istanbul Museum. Amazingly enough, they lasted into the seventeenth century, only to be allegedly damaged by a drunken Polish nobleman. We have a sixteenth century Ottoman miniature that depicts the heads still on the column.

Theodosius’ obelisk, with a picture of one of the reliefs. And me.

Unfortunately, the obelisk of Constantine VII was undergoing repairs and covered in scaffolding, so I don’t have a good picture of it. So here’s some pictures of the substructure of the sphendone. This is construction allowed the hippodrome to be much bigger than topography would allow, and was constructed in the typical Roman style of using massive vaults to shape the land however they wanted it. Today some sort of school sits on the end of the hippodrome where seating and the hairpin turn that the chariot racers had to be make would have been.

That’s enough for today. Next time, I’ll post some pictures of St. Theodore Tiro, Kalenderhane, the Pantokrator Monastery, and the sea walls.

Christmas break 2011 reading

The reading this Christmas break was pretty light. I kept it easy for a couple of reasons, the first being that the fall term was absolutely brutal, and the second being that Christmas break was really short this year. I’ve had good luck with the exam schedule for the past several years and this has resulted in extremely long Christmas breaks. I did not get so lucky this year, as thesis work and studying kept me busy right up until I had my first (and also last) exam, which was also on the last day of exams. This is why most of what I’ve read this break is short and not heavily academic. I wrote brief Amazon reviews for some of these books, and the link to that can be found in the lower sidebar on the right. I typically only review books that I can critically comment upon but these were a bit of an exception, since going back as far as the fifth century in the west is not something I’m terribly familiar with. I gave it a try though, and I liked the climate book so much I figured it deserved a five-star review, even though I am not an historian of early modern Europe or climate.

I was quite disappointed in this book. It sets itself up as a survey of how the world looked in 428, making a complete circle around the Roman Empire. Perhaps the problem was with my expectations. I was expecting a book that was written for a popular audience (as the price point and the fact that you can find this book in Chapters seems to indicate) but instead it was a rather dry academic book with a good fifty of pages of endnotes for only 130 pages of text. It’s not a bad book, but it fails to really bring life to the Roman world. This was the age of Augustine, Symeon Stylites, Aetius, and barbarians encroaching upon Rome, and yet it never feels alive. The view of the book is perhaps too academic and detached for something that isn’t really an academic work because it does nothing to advance our understanding of the period. It’s too godlike and too impersonal to really seem vibrant.

This was a much better book. Ward-Perkins’ premise is that the fall of the Roman Empire in the west was a much uglier thing than it has been taken to be in recent years, as much of the data comes from the east. It’s a lively account of the last years of the Roman Empire in the west and the barbarian kingdoms as much as it is an excellent complement to certain trends in the study of late antiquity. More advanced students will find the first half of the book pretty useless and Ward-Perkins sets up his late antique context, but the latter half of the book is concerned with the archaeological trends in which he sees decline following the end of the Empire. It’s a convincing book, even if it has a few holes. For example, Britain gets a disproportionate amount of page space, and one would think that Gaul never existed if this was the only book they ever read on the Roman Empire. The increasing sophistication of the barbarians beyond the Rhine and Danube frontiers is also curiously ignored. Still, it is a welcome wake-up call and easily accessible to a popular audience due to Ward-Perkins’ excellent writing.

This book intrigued me from the first time I had laid eyes upon it, so once I got it for Christmas I eagerly started reading and finished it rather quickly. The premise is that climate affects human civilization, and Behringer takes a broad historical look at climate change and what it does to cultures. While I wish more of the book was devoted to the ancient and medieval periods, its rapid sweep through human history provides example after example of how climate aided or destroyed human civilizations, as well as forcing them to adapt to changing conditions. Behringer makes a few particularly important points that only come about from looking at climate from a historical perspective, namely, that we are still in an ice age, and that for the vast majority of the time in which there has been life on Earth, the planet has had significantly higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. This is not an attempt to either shift the blame or indict humanity for anthropogenic global warming, but rather to put it in the grand perspective in which climate always changes, and that the cultures which are able to adapt best to those changes come out ahead. It may be a simple lesson, but it is one that humanity would best heed. This book has definitely given me some things to consider when working on the changes of the fifth through seventh centuries in the Roman world.

This was something that I needed to read for my honours’ thesis. It was a nice change from the usual Gesta Francorum based accounts of the First Crusade. The text focuses around Tancred, the nephew of Bohemond, the famous Norman leader who took part in the First Crusade. The story is not terribly different from the other accounts, so it is the little details that make it particularly interesting. For example, the other sources make no mention of Byzantine aid at Antioch, but Ralph of Caen does. There are also some interesting details on the capture of the Dome of the Rock by Tancred when the crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099. The real value of the account besides that it is not another iteration of the Gesta Francorum is that it extends beyond the capture of Jerusalem until about 1108 detailing Tancred’s activities around Antioch. This information is far more incomplete and less detailed than the earlier sections concerning the First Crusade, but there is still some important details on the battles with the Danishmend Turks and the ongoing struggle with the Byzantines over Cilicia and the port of Latakia south of Antioch.

Another book which I got for Christmas. Cities have fascinated me for a long time, and this book was particularly interesting, if overly American and rather repetitive. The crux of the book is that cities are actually better for humanity, because they allow for the rapid sharing of ideas, face-to-face communication that the internet does not allow, and that urbanites are greener because of their smaller homes and limited driving habits. The author never does much to convince his audience that city-dwellers are actually happier or healthier, despite what the book’s cover claims, but many of the his other ideas (particularly Jevon’s Paradox as applied to traffic in cities) are quite interesting. The ideas of cities as potential intellectual hotbeds is definitely something I’ll be considering more in the future when working on the end of antiquity.

It’s been on the shelf for a while. I haven’t finished it yet, but so far it really hasn’t said anything new. Good maps, though. If anyone happens to identify the location/date of the fresco on the cover, please let me know.

A quick note on Theodora

The empress Theodora is one of the most famous figures in late Roman and Byzantine history. There is good reason for this, largely because we have a good quantity of highly-controversial source material. The brilliant sixth-century mosaic from the San Vitale basilica in Ravenna helps bring her to life as well.

Her background is also atypical for that of a great woman. Theodora was born as a commoner, and her father worked for one of the circus factions in Constantinople. At a very early age, Theodora seems to have followed her sister into low-class theatrical entertainment which essentially constituted prostitution. As a friend of mine likes to remind me, Theodora must have had some charm to be able to attract the eye of Justinian, for not every day do “go-go dancers” seduce emperors. To be fair, Theodora did not actually marry an emperor in name at this point, since Justinian first had to remove the law prohibiting the marriage of a noble citizen to a prostitute.

Justinian had little trouble doing this since his uncle was the emperor. Both were born as low-class rural peasants in Illyria. Justinian had followed his uncle Justin when he had gone to Constantinople to enroll in the army. Justin must have done something to impress the then emperor Anastasius or arrived at a good time, because he managed to secure a position in the imperial guard. Even better for Justin, he somehow managed to convince Anastasius to name him as his successor. (The details of this are murky; although it is worth noting that several generals bloodlessly assumed power in the sixth century: Justin I, Justin II, Tiberius II, Maurikios. This is definitely an avenue for further study.) Now Justin was illiterate and never bothered to learn his letters (so that he could sign imperial documents, the chancellery had a stencil made so Justin could trace his name), but he still valued education and made sure that his nephew Justinian received one. It was during the 520s that Justinian met Theodora and prompted his uncle to change the laws.

In 527 AD, Justin died, and Justinian finally took over power in name, since he had clearly had an enormous amount of influence over his uncle. The Roman Empire at this point was rather reduced in size from a century earlier. Gaul was under the control of the Franks. Ostrogoths ruled Italy. The Vandals had seized Africa and even sacked Rome in 455 AD. Spain was occupied by the Visigoths, and Britain had been left to fend for itself since the early fifth century. There was no time for the west, however, as Persia, an extremely potent adversary necessitating a lot of military attention since a dynastic change in the third century anno domini, was stirring up trouble.

But there was soon trouble in Constantinople, too. In an attempt to curb the violence between the circus factions (there were four circus factions, but only two really mattered: the Blues and the Greens. Chariot racing in the hippodrome was a huge spectator sport, and these partisan organizations grew up around it. They have been associated with a lot of violence and troublemaking in the streets, and frequently compared to modern football hooligans) some quarrelsome members had been sent to jail. The factions got together and broke them out. Violence escalated, and soon Justinian was blockaded in his own palace with the populace of the city trying to dethrone him. His own soldiers guarding the palace seem to have decided to wait it out and side with the victorious party.

During this crisis, Justinian suggests that those few loyal members of his household take the royal treasury and flee on ships. Theodora interrupts and delivers a famous speech, which ends with the line “Royalty is a good burial shroud.” She argues that she would rather stay and die as she is than run, in opposition to her husband. This passage has been picked up by all sorts of feminists who look for woman-power in the ancient and medieval worlds. Here they see a great example of a strong woman who climbed from poverty and prostitution to the top of the imperial hierarchy. They see a woman who is ready to stand, fight, and die while her husband runs away with the money.

The problem is, they’re wrong. The issue of gender in Prokopios’ works is an important one because he frequently uses it to contrast people who are not behaving as they ought to, and while they should give it more attention to that issue it is not where they have erred. It is possible that Prokopios himself was present in the palace when the decision to stay was made. He was the secretary of the general Belisarios, who was in the city at that time and would play a role in ending the riots. However, Prokopios was highly critical of both Justinian and Theodora, he was highly intelligent, and he had a good education in the classics. Prokopios was so critical of the emperor and empress that he actually wrote a secret companion volume to his major work, the Wars, which was publicly published. He desired to fill in all the details about the scandalous behaviour of the sovereigns and anyone else who managed to irritate him over the course of his career.

However, it has been proposed that Prokopios’ works are not really all that different, and that his history of the wars is also full of more subtle criticism of his enemies. This is one of those examples. On the surface, by having Theodora declare that “royalty is a good burial shroud” he makes her look strong and independent, especially in light of her husband, who as Roman Emperor is supposed to be strong and independent. However, Prokopios is cleverly and subtly misquoting an incident recorded by classical historians in which Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, was besieged in his palace by his rioting populace. Dionysius is quoted as saying, “Tyranny is a good burial shroud.” Thus to a few well-read individuals, the parallel between the imperial couple in Byzantium and the Sicilian tyrant would be made. They would recognize the deliberate misquote and see that instead of making Theodora the hero of the day, he was calling both her and Justinian tyrants in a clever manner.

Review: Rome and Constantinople: Rewriting Roman History during Late Antiquity

This term ensures that I won’t be posting much of anything, but I decided to put up a book review to prove that I’m still alive.

Raymond Van Dam masterfully sketches out how two of the greatest cities of the later Roman Empire, Rome and Constantinople affected emperorship, imperial ideology, and history writing and how they in turn affected the cities. The central premise of this book is that imperial history had to be re-written at the end of antiquity. The city of Rome had a long and glorious heritage, but no longer looked the part as it was depopulated and falling into ruin. The city of Constantinople, on the other hand, was a grand city with an enormous population, but no real Greek, Roman, biblical, or Christian history behind it. The first chapter describes Rome and Van Dam argues that much of the grand construction was designed in a city associated with the Roman Republic and created to imitate that. However, in late antiquity the means of imperial power for emperors changed from that of “safeguarding” the Republic to appealing to the armies for power, and as such Rome itself lost some of its significance. It lost even more under the Christian empire, because the places of interest and locations of intercession with the divine were not closely tied up with the old city itself, and many of the important Christian sites were located on the periphery. Many of its civic festivals were associated with paganism as well, making association with such things in the city dangerous for emperors. The second half of the book moves on to Constantinople, a city which Van Dam argues was forced to steal heritage from sites around the Graeco-Roman world and adorn itself with Christian relics in order to create a history. However, things were noticeably different in Constantinople because it was not designed around pagan monuments and its precise lack of a Roman Republican past allowed for a creative break with that system of power for emperors. As such, churches were integrated into imperial ceremonial, and it was not even necessary that any pretenses of power be kept up: the senate was always weak and the emperor was God’s vice-regent on earth. Finally, Van Dam discusses the textual rewriting of history in Hesychius of Miletus’ world history that combines Greek mythology, Greek history, Roman history and divine intercession to firmly establish Constantinople as the New Rome. It’s a very convincing argument, although it is one that he could take a bit further by applying it to early Byzantine chronicle writing and worldviews.

While I think that this book is masterfully argued, there are a few little quibbles. For one, his cramming of all of a page’s citations into a single footnote is a bit of a pain. I would much rather individual notes behind each citation, purely because it is simply cleaner and easier to find specific references. There are a few arguments that also do not seem to be terribly convincing, or simply need a little more evidence or explanation. For example, Van Dam briefly discusses imperial involvement in the late antique doctrinal conflicts and how emperors may have chosen to side with particular theological schools associated with major cities like Antioch and Alexandria for the sake of controlling them. It is an interesting argument, although how exactly control of the theological schools in Antioch has any sort of impact on Antioch’s ability to act as a hub in defending northern Syria and Mesopotamia from the Sassanids is unclear. Another example of an argument that he may take too far is the idea of the actual concern in the east about representing a capital without Roman Republican institutions. I simply do not see how such ideas would have had much currency or relevance in the late antique Greek east, and how many people would have been aware of them. Regardless, none of these are central to his argument.

This is a very good book. It’s brevity means that you can read the entire thing in an evening, but anyone interested in the trappings of imperial power in late antiquity shouldn’t be able to put it down. Van Dam’s writing is very engaging, and his scholarship is good. Highly recommended.