Roman Constantinople in Byzantine Perspective / / Paul Magdalino.

• Superior document: Brill Research Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences
• VerfasserIn: Magdalino, Paul,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden ;, Boston : : Brill,, 2024.; ©2024
• Year of Publication: 2024
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Brill Research Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences.; Late Antiquity and Medieval Studies E-Books Online, Collection 2024.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (183 pages)

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.

Table of Contents

Contents -- Abstract -- Keywords -- Introduction -- 1 Historical Research on Constantinople, 330–600 -- 2 Memorial Literature and Research Culture, 6th–10th Centuries -- 3 Cultural Heritage and Tourist Disinformation 1000–1453. From Bureaucratic to Scientific Antiquarianism -- 4 The Rhetorical Rediscovery of Constantinople, Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries -- 5 The Byzantios of Theodore Metochites and Its Legacy -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index.