Building Heavenly Jerusalem: Thoughts on Imperial and Aristocratic Construction in Constantinople in the 9Th and 10Th Centuries

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Chapter 3 Building Heavenly Jerusalem: Thoughts on Imperial and Aristocratic Construction in Constantinople in the 9th and 10th Centuries

Matthew Savage

If asked to identify major monuments from Istanbul’s Byzantine past, a first-time visitor to the city might name the two largest and most prominent structures that survive there today: the great defensive walls, passed when en- tering the old city from the airport, and Hagia Sophia, very likely our tourist’s first destination on arrival. What Byzantinists know that also once existed – imperial palaces, aristocratic estates, and large, urban monasteries – are largely gone or today overshadowed – literally – by the city’s grand Ottoman mosques. For the casual tourist, it is the city walls and Hagia Sophia – this is Byzantium. Interestingly, this impression is not at all removed from the manner the Byzantines themselves chose to represent their city. Both monuments – the walls and Hagia Sophia – appear in the 9th- or 10th-century lunette mosaic in the southwest vestibule of Hagia Sophia (Fig. 3.1): on one side, Constantine presents his city in the form of several houses enclosed within a walled fortress with a large golden gate; on the other, Justinian presents his church to the enthroned Virgin and infant Christ.1 On an elemental level, the image draws attention exactly to the two axes of power in Byzantium that it depicts, i.e. the ecclesiastical and the imperial realms, and it was set up in a physical space that, by the Middle Byzantine period when the mosaic was created, was almost certainly accessible to these powers exclusively: that is, to the Patriarchal and the Imperial courts.2 These two elements of walled city and church appear again, now integrated into a single image, in a manuscript likely produced in the mid-14th century

1 On the dating of the mosaic, see Thomas Whittemore, The Mosaics of St. Sophia at Istanbul: Second Preliminary Report; Work Done in 1933 and 1934; The Mosaics of the Southern Vestibule (Paris, 1936), pp. 30–1; Whittemore, “On the Dating of Some Mosaics in Hagia Sophia,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 5 (1946), 34–45; Philipp Niewöhner and Natalia Teteriat- nikov, “The South Vestibule of Hagia Sophia at Istanbul. The Ornamental Mosaics and the Private Door of the Patriarchate,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 68 (2014), 117–56, here p. 151. 2 For a good discussion of the function of the space, see Niewöhner and Teteriatnikov, “South Vestibule,” pp. 151–55.

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Figure 3.1 Istanbul, Hagia Sophia, southwest vestibule, mosaic depicting Emperor Constan- tine presenting the city of Constantinople and Emperor Justinian presenting Hagia Sophia to the Virgin and infant Christ, 9th or 10th century. Photo: public domain to commemorate the marriage of a Byzantine emperor to a foreign child bride (Fig. 3.2).3 The illustration depicts Constantinople as a large, domed church, recognizable as Hagia Sophia, surrounded by walls with towers and a large gate. Even though the illustration seems to rely on one kind of conventional medieval representation of a city, it shows precisely those two real structures that still today evoke the grandeur of Byzantine Constantinople – the city walls and Hagia Sophia.4 The image also reminds us that it was these two supremely

3 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 1851, fol. 2r; Cecily Hennessy, “A child bride and her representation in the Vatican Epithalamion, cod. gr. 1851,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 30.2 (2006), 115–50. Hennessy argues that the manuscript was produced to commemorate the marriage of Andronikos iv to Maria, the daughter of the tsar of Bulgaria, Ivan Alexander. 4 In discussing this image together with the Hagia Sophia vestibule mosaic, this point has been emphasized by Paul Magdalino, “Medieval Constantinople,” in Magdalino, Stud- ies on the History and Topography of Byzantine Constantinople (Aldershot, 2007); trans. of Magdalino, Constantinople Médiévale. Études sur l’évolution des structures urbaines (Paris, 1996), i, pp. 7–8; and Cecily J. Hilsdale, “Constructing a Byzantine Augusta: A Greek Book for a French Bride,” The Art Bulletin 87, no. 3 (Sept. 2005), 458–83, here pp. 461–63. On the concept of ‘ideograms’ of cities, both earthly and heavenly, in medieval art (with an