Everyday Life in Byzantium Read online

  1 The Emperor Constantine the Great (306-37)

  From a fourth-century bronze

  Everyday Life in

  BYZANTIUM

  TAMARA TALBOT RICE

  Drawings by Helen Nixon Fairfield

  To David, with love and gratitude for his unfailing help

  CONTENTS

  The Illustrations

  Acknowledgment

  1 Constantinople, Jewel of Byzantium

  2 The Emperor, his Family and Court

  3 The Church and Churchmen

  4 The Administration and its Officials

  5 The Army and Navy

  6 Traders and Artisans

  7 Town Life

  8 Country Life

  9 Schools, Scholars and Musicians

  10 Artists and Architects

  Chronology of Emperors of Byzantium

  THE ILLUSTRATIONS

  Note: The italicised numerals in parentheses in the text refer to the figure-numbers of the illustrations

  1 Emperor Constantine

  2 Map of Byzantine Empire

  3 Virgin Hodighitria

  4 Plan of Constantinople

  5 Reliquary of True Cross

  6 Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus

  7 The Golden Gate

  8 Enamel cross

  9 Raising of an Emperor

  10 Imperial procession

  11 Double-headed eagle

  12 Ravenna mosaic

  13 Great Palace

  14 Lion hunt

  15 The Blachernae Palace

  16 Empress Ariadne

  17 Emperor in regalia

  18 Emperor at the Games

  19 Church Council

  20 Bogomil tombstone

  21 Prelate with a model church

  22 The Pala d’Oro

  23 Interior of Haghia Sophia

  24 Monastery on Mount Athos

  25 Priest

  26 Stylite

  27 Abbess and nuns

  28 Dish of Paternus

  29 High Admiral Apocauchus

  30 Consular diptych

  31 Emperor Justinian

  32 St Michael as a soldier

  33 Roman consul

  34 An eparch

  35 Torture scene

  36 Consul Areobindus

  37 Infantrymen

  38 A horseman

  39 David armed for battle

  40 A Romano-Byzantine battle-axe

  41 Cavalry assaulting a town

  42 Boat builders

  43 A quadriga

  44 A weaver at work

  45 A weaver and an embroidress

  46 Meleager and Atalanta

  47 Earrings

  48 Table-ware

  49 Coins

  50 Masons working

  51 Fishing boat

  52 Children playing

  53 Circus scene

  54 Crown of Constantine IX

  55 Theodore Metochites

  56 The Cistern of 1001 Columns

  57 Veroli casket

  58 Marriage scene

  59 Wedding ring

  60 Honorius and Maria

  61 Silk fabric

  62 Rouge pot

  63 Gold cup

  64 Sauce boat

  65 John VIII

  66 Belt buckle

  67 A family meal

  68 Spoon and fork

  69 Oil lamp

  70 Balance and weight

  71 Fourth-century fashions

  72 Palace of Stobi (ground-plan)

  73 Shepherd

  74 Harvesting

  75 Goatherd

  76 Ploughing

  77 A smith at work

  78 A village well

  79 A water mill

  80 Working in the vineyard

  81 Labourers receiving wages

  82 Hunting scene

  83 Gospel cover

  84 Scribes

  85 Lyre player

  86 Page from a herbal

  87 Priestess at an altar

  88 Pair of dividers

  89 A piper

  90 Sixth-century bard

  91 Musician playing his instrument

  92 Digenis Akritas

  93 Rural scene

  94 Domed church at Mistra

  95 Ivory reliquary

  96 Scene from a mosaic

  97 Icon of St Eudoxia

  98 Mosaic of a water mill

  99 Sidamara sarcophagus

  100 Capital in Haghia Sophia

  101 Gold cup

  102 Samson wrestling with a lion

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  The Author and Publishers wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce the illustrations appearing in this book:

  The Church of St Eusebius, Auxerre for fig. 61

  The National Museum, Belgrade for fig. 1

  The Trustees of the British Museum for fig. 31

  Cleveland Museum of Art for figs. 62 and 64

  Cortona Cathedral, Italy for fig. 95

  The Marquis de Ganay for fig. 52

  The Greek National Tourist Office for fig. 24

  The Hermitage Museum, Leningrad for fig. 73

  The Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna for fig. 84

  The Metropolitan Museum for figs. 63 and 74

  The Cathedral Treasury, Monza for fig. 85

  The Pushkin Museum, Moscow for fig. 6

  The Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris for figs. 30, 75 and 76

  The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York for fig. 86

  Miss Josephine Powell for fig. 96

  The Gallerie delle Marche, Urbino for fig. 5

  The Victoria and Albert Museum for fig. 87

  2 Map of the Byzantine Empire in the sixth century

  1 - CONSTANTINOPLE, JEWEL OF BYZANTIUM

  The Byzantine or East Roman Empire lasted for over a thousand years—from AD 330 to 1453. During this period it often ranked as the foremost power of its day and it played a most important part in shaping European culture. Byzantium was the first of the great nations to accept Christianity as its official religion, and the first to set out both to live, and to govern others, in accordance with Christian teaching. Thus, even though the Byzantines often acted with cruelty, harshness and meanness in both their private and their public affairs, Christian principles nevertheless remained all-important to them, and the respect with which they regarded the virtues on which Christianity was based was handed down from generation to generation to form the framework of Europe’s essentially Christian civilisation. But for Byzantium our own way of life would have developed along very different lines from those which it has followed. This is especially the case with regard to the Orthodox countries—Russia, Greece, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia—all of which have followed the same branch of the Christian Church as that of the Byzantines, and which, from an early date, developed independently of Rome.

  Great changes always seem to occur suddenly, and this must have appeared especially true to many of those who witnessed the establishment of Christianity in the Roman Empire. It may have been as early as the year AD 323, and probably before the year 325, when Constantine I (the ‘Great’) convened the First Council of Nicaea, that Roman citizens learnt that Christianity was to contend with paganism as their official religion, because their caesar, Constantine (306-37), had seen a vision which had convinced him that the change had become necessary. The event is believed to have taken place one October night in the year 311 when Constantine had encamped with his army outside the walls of Rome intending to engage Maxentius in battle on the following day. He saw—and some accounts state that his men also saw—a symbol in the sky and heard a voice telling him that his men were to paint it on their shields before engaging in battle. Constan
tine appears to have doubted whether he had really seen the symbol, but, according to Eusebius, shortly afterwards Christ appeared before him telling him to paint the device on the personal pennant he was to use when leading his army into battle. In his vision Constantine had seen the sun, Apollo’s symbol, which had also been adopted as such by Rome’s caesars, and which was thus, by right, Constantine’s emblem. Silhouetted against its rays was an immense standard lavishly decorated with gold and intersected near the top by a cross-piece, from which flowed two purple streamers shot with gold and studded with jewels. It was surmounted by a coronet of gold containing a gold cross, the arms of which formed the Greek letters Chi Rho, the initial letters of Christ’s name with, according to some accounts, the words hoc vinces also appearing. The purple streamers, like the rays of the sun, indicated that Constantine was involved because purple garments—the most expensive and rarest of all materials, since the dye could be obtained only from the relatively scarce murex shell—had, by order of Diocletian, been reserved for the exclusive use of the ruling family.

  The meaning of what he had seen could not be doubted: it clearly indicated that Byzantium was to become a Christian state with Constantine ruling it as God’s representative. Constantine lost no time in carrying out the dictates of his vision. His troops defeated Maxentius and Constantine gave orders that the Eagles, which had been used by the Roman legionaries as their standards, should be replaced by the emblem of his vision; at the same time he put an end to the Roman practice of using the cross as an instrument of torture: henceforth it should be regarded as the symbol of Christianity. Eusebius states that he actually saw the pennant bearing the new design which Constantine had used when fighting Maxentius. Though Constantine continued to use it as his labarum, that is to say, as his standard, he nevertheless remained a pagan, worshipping the sun till he lay dying, and only then did he ask to be received into the Church. Yet Constantinople, the city which he made his capital, was from the start dedicated to the Trinity and the Virgin; when, in the fifth century, Eudoxia sent the empress Pulcheria the icon which St Luke had painted of the Virgin Hodighitria, or Pointer of the Way, the panel came to be regarded as the capital’s protective genius.

  In reality changes as drastic as the rejection of one faith in favour of another are seldom introduced as the result of one man’s personal experience; they tend to grow out of a changing outlook and attitude to life developed by thoughtful people during periods of trouble and unrest. Ever since the start of the Christian era Rome had gone through just such a period. As a result, on the one hand, of the Jewish belief in one god and, on the other, of the popularity of mystic faiths of eastern origins, many Romans had started to question the validity of their old pagan faith, based as it was on the irrational behaviour of a multitude of gods, many of whom suffered from the worst human foibles. Rome’s increasing economic and political difficulties also helped to aggravate such doubts. Furthermore, with its vast population of slaves, whose work enriched their owners without greatly benefiting the state; with its enormous territories stretching from Northumberland in Britain, across Gaul and Spain, to North Africa and from there spreading across the whole of Italy, Greece, Turkey, Syria and Egypt; and with the immense diversity of nationalities that this implies, the Roman Empire had become too large to be manageable. Its ruling classes were too self-indulgent to be efficient, its administrators had become indolent, its intellectuals increasingly critical of the government, while Rome itself was torn by dissensions. Caesars had replaced caesars, but to no avail. The device of co-rulers was introduced in an attempt to stop the rot. Diocletian (284-305) came to believe that matters would improve if regional centres of government were formed to take the place of the administration centred in Rome. He therefore moved his court to Nicomedia, in what is now Asiatic Turkey, and set himself up there as ruler of Rome’s eastern territories, surrounding himself with all the pomp and ceremony of an eastern, or rather a Persian, potentate. At the same time he appointed three co-rulers, assigning one, Maximian, to reign over Italy and Africa from Milan, another, Constantius, to rule over Gaul, Britain and Spain from Trier (in modern Germany), and lastly, Galerius, to govern Illyria (present-day Dalmatia and Transylvania), Macedonia and Greece from Salonica. However, these measures failed to improve the situation. Instead, this principle of co-rulership introduced the idea of division to peoples who had prided themselves on being part of a single entity. Despondency, corruption and indolence continued to prevail in Rome and, when civil war broke out, Diocletian turned his back on his difficulties and retired to live his own life in the magnificent palace he had built for himself on the shores of the Adriatic, in what is now Split. Fourteen hundred years later the great British eighteenth-century architect Robert Adam was to examine its ruins with wondering admiration and to adapt many of their features to the taste of his own times.

  3 Icon of the Virgin Hodighitria

  Constantius, ruler of Gaul, Britain and Spain, had been obliged by Diocletian to divorce his wife Helena—daughter, according to tradition, of the English King Cole of Colchester, and mother of his son and heir Constantine. In her loneliness Helena seems to have turned to the intellectuals of her day and to have pursued a course of religious and philosophical studies. She may even have become converted to Christianity at this early date, though there is no proof of this. On Constantius’ death Constantine succeeded him as ruler of the western provinces. Helena must have remained in close touch with Constantine after her divorce and may well have been chiefly responsible for winning him over to Christianity. In 324 when, as a result of his own efforts, Constantine became sole ruler of the vast Roman Empire, he published an edict designed to protect Christians from persecution. Twelve months later, by convoking a Council of churchmen at Nicaea, he made the practice of Christianity legal within the Empire. The step was not only wise but virtually inevitable, for by then two-fifths of the Empire’s population was probably Christian, seeing in Christianity the sole hope of relief from the hardships of their daily lives. To these people Helena became the embodiment of the Christian way of life. She was among the first to set out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, at Constantine’s express wish bringing back with her a piece of the true cross. The fragment became Byzantium’s most venerated relic. It was kept in the Great Palace of the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople, but, in 565, Justin II granted the request of St Radegonda, the forsaken wife of Chilperic, for a small piece of it; she had it mounted in the superb reliquary of St Croix, which is still kept at Poitiers, but from then onwards the original fragment was gradually frittered away in gifts. Although it was the Emperor Theodosius I who, in AD 381, adopted Christianity as the Empire’s official religion, it was Helena and Constantine who were both given the rank of saints in the Orthodox Church as a reward for the services they had rendered to Christianity; that is why they are often represented in paintings or on other works of art standing side by side, Helena usually holding a cross between them.

  In Rome Christianity had been introduced and spread by missionaries, converts and fathers of the Church, all of whom, whilst fighting to establish the new faith, had followed the directions of their leaders; as a result, when once the Church became established in Rome, the first clerics were automatically drawn from among these leaders. But this was not the case in Constantinople. There the religion had been sponsored by Constantine who held a supreme position in both the political and the religious sphere, for he was both ruler of the state and protector of the Church, a secular emperor and also God’s vicar on earth. His successors on the throne continued to regard themselves as divinely inspired and, as such, took precedence over the clergy, the emperor alone among laymen being entitled to enter the most sacred parts of the church normally reserved for the ordained. It was due to the emperor’s dual functions that, when the Grand Duchess Olga of Kievan Russia decided, whilst on a state visit to Constantinople, to become a Christian, her baptism in 957 was performed during a magnificent ceremony conducted jointly by the em
peror of Byzantium and the patriarch of Constantinople.

  Well-informed people in Rome were probably not surprised by Constantine’s decision to legalise Christianity, nor astonished by his wish to re-establish his capital in some city other than Rome. They must, however, have been startled when, in 324, he made it known that he had decided to set up his headquarters in the small town of Byzantium which occupied a triangular promontory at the northern end of the Sea of Marmora, at a point where Asia and Europe are within finger-tip distance of each other. Apart from the emperor few men were at the time aware of the site’s numerous geographical advantages or of the splendid harbour which could be made from the pocket of water lapping the triangle’s northern edge. The Byzantines were aptly to name the inlet the Golden Horn, for such it was to prove when merchants of all nations started to use it, quickly turning it into the world’s richest port. Not only could Byzantium keep in touch with the western world by means of a network of roads running inland into Europe, but, by sailing northwards up the Bosphorus, contact could also be maintained with the many ports ranged along the shores of the Black Sea. Thus, by way of what is now Russia, trade could be developed with the Scandinavian countries on the one hand and with Central Asia, India and China on the other. In addition, by turning southwards the Aegean could be reached through the Dardanelles and shipping could enter the Mediterranean, while merchants, merely by crossing a short expanse of the Marmora, could reach Asia Minor and from it establish contact with the whole area which we now refer to as the Near and Middle East.

  4 Plan of Constantinople at the time of Emperor Theodosius

  Those who failed to appreciate these geographical advantages were not the first men to misjudge the value of the site. Centuries earlier, at a time when Greece, though a leading power, was beset by economic difficulties, many of her city states encouraged their citizens to seek their fortunes in places from which they could ship food-supplies and other essentials back to the motherland. As a result many Greeks had founded independent, self-governing coastal cities, known as colonies, along the shores of the Black Sea. During the seventh century BC a group of emigrants from Megara placed themselves under the leadership of a man called Byzas. Before departing from their native town they consulted their favourite oracle, hoping for advice as to where to found their colony. In the manner of oracles the reply took the form of a riddle: ‘Go, settle opposite the city of the blind’. The Megarians embarked and in due course reached the southern entrance to the Bosphorus, where the Greek colonial town of Chalcedon stood on the Asiatic shore of the Marmora (near present-day Moda). As they gazed with delight upon the splendid landscape unfolding before them their eyes rested upon the triangle of land projecting into the sea from the opposite (i.e. the European) shore. As quick as Constantine to appreciate its possibilities, the Megarians concluded that the inhabitants of Chalcedon, who could well have chosen that site in preference to their own, must have been the blind people referred to by the oracle. They founded their townlet on the promontory. Yet in spite of its advantages the city, when Constantine saw it, was still too small to serve as a capital. In the year 324, therefore, he delineated new boundaries for its defensive walls and set workmen to build a palace, essential administrative buildings, a forum and a church which he dedicated to Haghia Sophia, the Holy (or Divine) Wisdom. These indispensable works were completed in six years, and in AD 330 Constantine proclaimed the town his capital.