Roman Constantinople in Byzantine Perspective : The Memorial and Aesthetic Rediscovery of Constantine’s Beautiful City, From Late Antiquity to the Renaissance

This book studies the research perspective in which the literary inhabitants of Late Antique and medieval Constantinople remembered its past and conceptualised its existence as a Greek city that was the political capital of a Christian Roman state. Initial reactions to Constantine's foundation noted its novel Christian orientation, but the memorial mode of writing about the city that developed from the sixth century recollected the traditional civic cultural heritage that Constantinople claimed both as the New Rome, and as the continuation of ancient Byzantion. This research culture increasingly became the preserve of the imperial bureaucracy, and focused on the city's sculptured monuments as bearers of eschatological meaning. Yet from the tenth century, writers progressively preferred to define the wonder and spectacle of Constantinople in the aesthetic mode of urban praise inherited from late antiquity, developing the notion of the city as a cosmic theatre of excellence. Contents Abstract Keywords Introduction 1 Historical Research on Constantinople, 330–600 1.1 The Research Perspective of the Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae 1.2 The Development of Memorial Literature, 300–600 1.3 The Christian Narrative 1.4 The Pagan Narrative: the Extant Sources 1.4.1 Zosimus and Hesychius 1.4.2 John Malalas 1.4.3 John Lydus 1.5 The Pagan Narrative and the Eclipse of Rome 1.6 Cultural Heritage 1.7 The Lost Patria of Constantinople 1.8 The Patria of Christodorus 1.9 Shared Syncretism 1.10 Other Sources of the Pagan Narrative 1.11 From City to State, from Poetic to Bureaucratic Memory: Lydus and Malalas 2 Memorial Literature and Research Culture, 6th–10th Centuries 2.1 The Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai 2.2 Patria CP: the Reinvention of the Genre 2.3 The Lives of Niphon, Andrew the Fool and Basil the Younger 3 Cultural Heritage and Tourist Disinformation 1000–1453: from Bureaucratic to Scientific Antiquarianism 3.1 Medieval Tour Guides 3.2 Critical Latin Visitors, from Liudprand to the Renaissance 3.3 Manuel Chrysoloras on Rome and Constantinople 4 The Rhetorical Rediscovery of Constantinople, 10th–13th Centuries 4.1 Constantine of Rhodes and Theodore Prodromos 4.2 The Theatre of City Life and the Literary Generation of 1204 4.3 The Rhetorical Perspective of Exile, Loss and Recovery 4.4 Imperial Restoration and Urban Rediscovery: the Orations of Manuel Holobolos, (1265, 1266 and 1267) 5 The Byzantios of Theodore Metochites and Its Legacy 5.1 Model and Comparison 5.2 Theatre 5.3 The Ideal City 5.4 Nature 5.5 Hellenism 5.6 Constantine and Imperial Power 5.7 Orthodoxy and Piety 5.8 Antiquity and Renovation 5.9 Wisdom and Learning 5.10 The Originality of the Byzantios 5.11 The Legacy of the Byzantios 5.11.1 Nikephoros Gregoras 5.11.2 Manuel Chrysoloras (Again) 5.11.3 Isidore of Kiev Conclusion Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Literature Index