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Cyril Mango

Constantinople: Capital of the Oikoumene?

From Conference Byzantium as Oecumene Athens, Greece 2001. Published by the Institute for Byzantine Research , Athens 2005.

Two linked features distinguish Byzantium from most other political entities of the Middle Ages:it remained throughout its existence a bureaucratic state no matter how much its administrativesystem changed over the centuries, and its centre or capital did not move from Constantinople

until it was shut down by force in 1204. I am saying that these features were linked because oneimplied the other: a bureaucratic apparatus, with its battalions of civil servants and the mounting

volume of papers they engender, requires a stable seat for its proper functioning.

In today's usage the word 'capital' reflects this linkage, for it means not necessarily the biggest ormost important city of a country (witness Berne, Ankara or Washington, D.C.), but the city which

houses on a permanent basis the administrative infrastructure of a sovereign state. It may beobjected that this shade of meaning was alien to the vocabulary of the Middle Ages - indeed, theGreek word (as a noun) is a modern coinage (1) - and when the Byzantines spoke of

, they evoked its imperial, not its bureaucratic character. But even if the appropriateword was lacking, the reality was there.

There has been much fruitless discussion as to whether Constantine did or did not intendConstantinople to be the 'capital' of the Roman Empire. The fact of the matter is that for most ofthe fourth century the Empire did not have a capital. The ministries accompanied the emperor as

he migrated from place to place. His court was usually referred to in Greek as 'the camp'() . Constantius II resided more often than not at Antioch, which was therefore called

civitas regalis and described as being endowed with all amenities thanks to the emperor's presence (2) . The Christian apologist Macarius Magnes likewise calls Antioch

(3), a clue, incidentally, to the rather indeterminate date of his work. The late A.H.M.Jones, who was not much given to vivid writing, presents nevertheless an arresting picture of theimperial comitatus on the move: "The roads must have been packed for miles with thousands oftroopers of the guard and clerks of the ministries ... and choked with trains of wagons piled with boxes of files (scrinia) and sacks of coins and bars of gold and silver" (4) . I leave it to historians

of Late Antiquity to explain how this acutely inconvenient system, devised by Diocletian,managed to function for a century, but I am sure that everyone concerned breathed a sigh of relief

when, in 380, the emperor along with his comitatus finally came to rest at Constantinople andremained there permanently.

That Constantinople had not been a proper capital before 380 - indeed, it took somewhat longerfor the transformation to take place -is indicated by several considerations. I shall mention two.

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The first concerns the Theodosian Code, promulgated in 438. The commissioners who compiledit sat at Constantinople, but made use of Constantinopolitan archives only from the reign of Arca-dius onwards. They would not have gone to the trouble of searching for eastern laws in provincialarchives if they could obtain them centrally. Secondly, John Lydus, speaking of the office of the

imtrumentarius , i.e. keeper of judicial archives of the Praetorian Prefecture at Constantinople,

informs us that one could consult there all relevant cases going back to the reign of Valens (d.378) (5), but evidently not earlier ones, which either had been lost or, perhaps, left behind atAntioch.

The relocation to Constantinople of the central bureaux as well as the highest courts of justicemust have had a major effect on the inflow of population on either a permanent or a temporary

basis. Speaking in 384, Themistius already proclaimed that Constantine's city was no longer half-empty, that its fields and hills had been filled with splendid buildings, that what had been a meresketch () had become a glorious reality (6) . Provincials no longer had to be cajoled tomove there by free bread rations: they came all the more willingly to obtain lucrative jobs in the

administration and the judiciary, to serve in the senate, thus evading more onerousresponsibilities at home, or, in a humbler capacity, to service the ruling class as craftsmen,

shopkeepers and teachers. They also came to pursue lawsuits and to lobby. Finally, they came asclergy and even as monks. The presence of the government, with its infinite powers of patronage,

was the main incentive for immigration, which, however, included very few foreigners (i.e. people from outside the Empire) apart from soldiers (mostly German) and slaves (mostly

Scythian).

In the process of 'capital creation' the approximate date of 380 marks, therefore, a clear boundary,and if Gilbert Dagron in his admirable book Naissance d'une capitate (1974) chose to continuethe story down to 451, it was largely, I believe, to take account of ecclesiastical developments

and the emergence of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Yet, the famous 28th canon ofChalcedon, which caused so much trouble, was presented as a confirmation of the third canon ofthe Council of 381, which had already granted to Constantinople second place after the Roman

papacy. It may be added that in terms of urban infrastructure (fortification, water supply,harbours, granaries) the Theodosian period marked a high point that was never exceeded.

If Constantinople had become a true capital, what was it capital of? In objective terms, of theeastern half of the Empire, i.e. of those provinces that were administered by the Praetorian

Prefecture of the East; ecclesiastically, since the Council of Chalcedon, of the dioceses of Pontus,Asia and Thrace. When Justinian reconquered North Africa and Italy, those regions did notdevolve administratively to Constantinople, but were organized into separate prefectures.

Similarly, when the seat of the Prefecture of Illyricum had to be withdrawn from Sirmium, itmoved to Thessalonica, not Constantinople. Only with the gradual formation of the system of

themes did some western lands come under central control, although in practice that control was pretty loose.

It would be interesting to enquire where at Constantinople the various ministries were located andhow much staff they employed. On this topic the existing bibliography gives little guidance andeven ignores the Praetorian Prefecture, which had its own extensive quarters and can be located

on the map (7) . After the disappearance of that department in the seventh century, it is myimpression that all the central bureaux were concentrated within the complex of the imperial

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palace and that the number of civil servants shrank very drastically (8) . I cannot deal with those problems here, although they have a direct bearing on the effectiveness of Constantinople's

control over the provinces and adjoining regions.

Yet, when historians today speak of Constantinople as a world capital, they usually have

something else in mind, something much loftier than bureaux and civil servants. That somethingelse has an ideological as well as a factual side. Constantinople, they say, was a world capital because it was Rome by another name. At the same time it remained for the greater part of the

Middle Ages the most populous and most cultivated city of Christendom if not of the entiredeveloped world (if I may use the modern expression). As Hlene Ahrweiler put it, "Face Romedvaste par les barbares, Constantinople devient le centre du monde civilise, la seule capitale delmpire rmain" (9) . This is not the place to discuss either the size of Constantinople in terms of population (for which there is no hard evidence before the fifteenth century) or the level of its

civilization at various times compared to other urban centres. It may be worth, however, saying afew words about the equation Roma/Constantinoupolis, which started as an official name and

gradually turned into a myth. We tend to forget that Constantinople was founded as an outpost oflatinity and that for the space of two centuries it was Roman not only in its emperors, its

officialdom, its judicial system and its army, but also in its monuments and, to an appreciableextent, in its culture. Our knowledge of early Constantinople rests largely on a Latin document,

the titia urbis Constantinopolitanae (c. A.D. 425), while the Chronicle of Marcellinus provides one of the fullest accounts of its urban history down to 548. Priscian's Institutio

grammatica, one of the most influential textbooks of the Middle Ages, was written atConstantinople as was one of the most famous Latin manuscripts in existence, the Codex

Florentinus of Justinian's Digests. Commemorative inscriptions were put up in Latin without aGreek pendant on the Golden Gate and Marcian's column amongst others. These facts have often been rehearsed (10) and there is no need to repeat them here in full. Rather less well known is theattempt made by Hesychius of Miletus to integrate Byzantium into an over-all scheme of Roman

history.

Although he took great liberties with the truth, Hesychius was no ordinary scribbler. Animmensely rich benefactor of his native city, a friend of the emperor (probably Anastasius) and

an advocate at the court of the Praetorian Prefect, he wrote, inter alia, a 'Roman and GeneralHistory' covering the timespan from Belus, king of Assyria (a common starting point for non-

Christian general histories) to the death of Anastasius (518). Its focus, as stated in the title, wason the story of Rome within a universal context, excluding, as far as we can tell, any biblicalelement. Alas, the Roman History, still known to Photius (11) , has since been lost except for afragment of about a dozen pages devoted to the origins of Byzantium (12) . It opens with the

words: "362 years having elapsed in the elder Rome from the sole reign of Augustus Caesar, andits affairs having come to an end ( ),

Constantine, son of Constantius, upon assuming the sceptre, raised the New Rome and decreedthat it should be equal to the first". Byzantium, therefore, naturally assumed Rome's succession.

But why Byzantium? Because, suggests Hesychius, it had been a mirror image of Rome from the beginning. Byzas and his half-brother Strombos were equivalent to Romulus and Remus, theseven strategoi of Byzantium to the seven kings of Rome. Byzantium, besieged by Philip, was

saved by barking dogs as Rome had been saved by quacking geese (13) . Furthermore, Byzantiumhad its Roman proto-Constantine in the person of Septimius Severus, who had initiated the

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monumental adornment of the city. This imaginative construction was picked up in the tenthcentury when the definitive account of Constantinople's antiquities was compiled (the so-called

Patria) and has since remained embedded in the scholarly tradition.

The latinity of Constantinople declined sharply by the end of the sixth century and thereafter

disappeared altogether, but the myth of Romanitas, which was the cornerstone of imperialideology and was still perfectly credible in the age of Justinian, could not be discarded. Indeed, itwas carefully nurtured even when it had come to bear no resemblance to reality. Doubtless,

medieval Constantinople, after its sharp decline in the Dark Age, grew again into a great city,increasingly more cosmopolitan, although its non-Greek inhabitants were no longer citizens of

the universal empire, but foreigners: Italian and Russian traders, Scandinavians, Turks. It excitedthe admiration of visitors and the praise of rhetoricians. It was 'the eye of the universe' (14) , but

how far and in what direction did that eye look? Paradoxically, an empire that called itselfRoman, that saw itself as standing in direct succession to Caesar Augustus, does not appear to

have shown much interest in Rome and the West. Or is that an illusion? For Byzantium still clungto bits of territory in Italy and on the Dalmatian coast, diplomatic missions to the papal andFrankish courts went to and fro, commercial relations were picking up, pilgrims (even from

newly converted Bulgaria) regularly visited the tombs of the apostles in Rome. Surely, we mightthink, the government at Constantinople, if not ordinary people, would have kept a keen watch on

what was going on in those parts. It may be accidental that the authoritative Chronicle ofTheophanes, which knows all about the Arab caliphs, should be so woefully ignorant of the popes

of Rome, and that at a time when the support of the papacy was being sought in the struggleagainst iconoclasm. Besides, Theophanes did not speak for the government, but Constantine

Porphyrogenitus did and, exceptionally, could draw on the accumulated documentation of hisministries. Furthermore, we are told, he missed no opportunity to question provincial officials

and foreign envoys (15) . What, then, does he have to tell us? As regards Rome, he says in passingthat it was no longer part of the empire: it was a separate state, an , ruled by the pope

of the day (16) . Its symbolic importance receives no comment. As for Italy, it used to be inhabited by Romans until such time when the seat of the empire was removed to Constantinople. Whenthe Romans disappeared from Italy is not made clear, except that the Lombards were let in by the

patrician Narses in the days of the empress Irene (sic), i.e. 200 years earlier (counting from949) (17) . Not only is the learned emperor hopelessly muddled about Italy; he is also, in what was

meant to be a comprehensive treatise on foreign relations and ethnography, only marginallyconcerned with the Mediterranean lands: the chapters on Spain (23-25) are merely a collection ofantiquarian snippets and even the Muslim world is given relatively little attention. Constantinople

is now looking in a northerly direction -towards the boundless Scythian plain, Russia, theCaucasus and the Balkans (even if Bulgaria is left out). This is not the classical world any more, but the incipient world of Orthodoxy, of which Constantinople is becoming the spiritual, not the

temporal capital.

Notes

1. It had, of course, been used earlier as a participle, meaning 'foremost', as, e.g., in Nicander of

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Corfu, Voyages , J.-A. de Foucault (ed.), Paris 1962, 42, who applies it to Ferrara.

2. Expositio totius mundi et gentium , J. Roug (ed.), Paris 1966, 158, 165.

3. Macarii Magnetis quae supersunt , C. Blondel (ed.), Paris 1876, 7.

4. The Later Roman Empire , vol. I, Oxford 1964, 367.

5. De magistratibus, III , 19.

6. Oral . 18, 222 c-d.

7. See my Studies on Constantinople , Variorum 1993, Addenda, 1-3.

8. W. Treadgold, The Byzantine State Finances in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries , New York1982, 111-14, estimates that the entire civil personnel of this period amounted to about 600 men,from which we should subtract the 100 or so employed in the bureau of the City Prefect. ThePostal Logothete, who had charge, amongst other duties, of communications and foreign affairs,appears to have had a mere 130 men at his disposal, including about 70 couriers. If these figuresare at all correct, it is no wonder that the central government was poorly informed of what wasgoing on in the wider world.

9. L'ideologie potitique de lEmpire byzantin , Paris 1975, 16.

10. See, e.g., B. Hemmerdinger, Les lettres latines a Constantinople jusqu'a Justinien ,Polychordia. Festschrift F. Dlger,1 = BF l (1966), 174-8.

11. Bibl. cod. 69. See also Suda , 611.

12. Scriptores originum Constantinopolitanarum , Th. Preger (ed.), vol. I, Leipzig 1901,1-18. Cf.Suda, K2287.

13. As pointed out by G. Dagron, Naissance d'une capitate , 14-15.

14. But so also was tiny Amastris: Nicetas Paphlago, Orat , in laudem S. Hyacinthi, PG 105,421C. We should not take rhetorical texts at face value.

15. Theophanes Continuatus, Bonn ed., 448.

16. De thematibus , 10.4, A. Pertusi (ed.), Studi e Testi 160 (1952), 94.

17. De administrando imperio , ch. 27.