Cities as Palimpsests?

Responses to Antiquity in Eastern Mediterranean Urbanism

Elizabeth Key Fowden, Suna Çağaptay, Edward Zychowicz-Coghill, Louise Blanke, Elizabeth Key Fowden, Edward Zychowicz-Coghill, Louise Blanke, Suna Çağaptay

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2022
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789257694
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: Social Sciences

The metaphor of the palimpsest has been increasingly invoked to conceptualize cities with deep, living pasts. This volume seeks to think through, and beyond, the logic of the palimpsest, asking whether this fashionable trope slyly forces us to see contradiction where local inhabitants saw (and see) none, to impose distinctions that satisfy our own assumptions about historical periodization and cultural practice, but which bear little relation to the experience of ancient, medieval or early modern persons. Spanning the period from Constantine's foundation of a New Rome in the fourth century to the contemporary aftermath of the Lebanese civil war, this book integrates perspectives from scholars typically separated by the disciplinary boundaries of late antique, Islamic, medieval, Byzantine, Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern studies, but whose work is united by their study of a region characterized by resilience rather than rupture. The volume includes an introduction and eighteen contributions from historians, archaeologists and art historians who explore the historical and cultural complexity of eastern Mediterranean cities. The authors highlight the effects of the multiple antiquities imagined and experienced by persons and groups who for generations made these cities home, and also by travelers and other observers who passed through them. The independent case studies are bound together by a shared concern to understand the many ways in which the cities' pasts live on in their presents.

The new and the old

Chapter 11

From Byzantion to Constantinople

Paul Magdalino

The foundation of Constantinople was undoubtedly the most spectacular and the best-recorded act of urban transformation in the ancient world.¹ It cannot, however, be regarded as a typical case study of urban evolution in late antiquity. While the object of transformation, the city of Byzantion, was in terms of size and status a fairly average example of a middle-ranking Greek polis under Roman imperial rule, the result of the transformation was exceptional by any standards and surpassed only by Rome itself. It is therefore without any pretence of providing or describing a paradigm of urban change in the late Roman world that this paper sets out to analyse the scale and the scope of the process by which Byzantion became Constantinople – how the city of the mythical Byzas turned into the city of the historical Constantine.

The scale of the operation is clear. We know more or less the line of the new land wall that Constantine built, enclosing a space that more than tripled the surface area of the pre-existing settlement;² we know too that he instituted grain imports from Egypt on an industrial scale that emulated the food supply of Rome.³ But the scope of the foundation of Constantinople is more difficult to evaluate. We have practically no archaeological evidence, and sparse written evidence, for the articulation and typology of the built environment with which Constantine covered, or planned to cover, the intramural space. Moreover, the shape of Constantine’s foundation, not to mention the pre-Constantinian city, was rapidly subsumed and superseded, in the following two centuries, by the prodigious expansion of Constantinople as an imperial and Christian capital. The narrative of the city’s existence developed in the light of this expansion. The first and only systematic description of the city, the Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae, was written one century after the foundation, and what it documents is not so much Constantine’s transformation of Byzantion as the upgrading of Constantine’s megalopolis into the even greater megalopolis of Theodosius I and his dynastic successors.⁴

It is possible, nevertheless, to bring some clarity to the narrative of the foundation by comparing the city that Constantine found on the shores of the Bosporus in 324 with the city that took shape in his mind, as well as on the ground, over the next thirteen years of his life. The evidence for both is more informative than we might think, if we examine it without preconceptions. We can get a fairly precise idea of the layout of Roman Byzantion at the beginning of the fourth century, and we can get a fairly clear sense of how and why Constantine wanted the city that bore his name to differ from Byzantion and the kind of city that Byzantion represented.

Byzantion before Constantine

Ever since the Greek colonisation of the Propontis and the Black Sea, Byzantion had played a prominent role in the history of the region, owing to the strategic and commercial importance of its site.⁵ Apart from its exceptional maritime position, however, there was little to distinguish Byzantion before Constantine from many another Greek polis that had flourished under Roman imperial rule. Like many cities throughout the East, it had benefitted from the patronage of Hadrian, who provided an aqueduct,⁶ and of at least one of his successors, whom later Byzantine tradition identified as Septimius Severus, although modern scholarship has been sceptical.⁷ Like every Greek polis, the city was composed of acropolis and agora, and as in some cities in Asia Minor, the latter was further duplicated into an upper and lower agora.⁸ Otherwise, Byzantion was a classic example of the topographical and functional division between acropolis and agora. The agora area comprised, in addition to the market place, administrative buildings, schools, gymnasia and baths. The acropolis housed the temples and, on its lower slopes, the theatres and the stadium; the other main entertainment venue, the Hippodrome, was a late addition and its location outside both the acropolis and the agora area was determined by the physical geography of the site.

The approximate layout of Roman Byzantion has long been known to scholarship, but a closer, comprehensive, contextual reading of the textual sources in relation to the physical geography of the peninsula and the sporadic archaeological evidence can help us to identify, locate and interrelate some sites more exactly, and thus to visualise more clearly the place of the ancient city in Constantine’s vision of the future city (Figure 11.1). This has been demonstrated most recently by the work of Dimitris Chatzilazarou on the monumental centre of Constantinople.⁹ A key point in his analysis is the identification of the Basilica or ‘Royal Portico’, the large colonnaded courtyard whose site is marked by the Yerebatan cistern, as the upper agora of Roman Byzantion. As we shall see, this has important implications for the significance of the ensemble into which Constantine integrated the Basilica complex. It also indicates that the upper agora stood in a meaningful visual and axial relationship to the lower agora, the monumental square known as the Strategion. Although the site of the Strategion has not been pinpointed by archaeological finds, an emerging consensus locates it somewhere to the east of Sirkeci Station.¹⁰ This brings it very close to the axis of the Basilica, which follows the prevailing street alignment of Byzantion. In any case, the Strategion would have been clearly visible from the top of the grand staircase (72 steps) of the Basilica, which as Chatzilazarou, developing an observation of Cyril Mango, has argued, must have been on the north-eastern side.¹¹

Apart from the Basilica, only two pre-Constantinian structures can be located on the basis of their physical remains: the thermae of Zeuxippos,¹² in the monumental centre, and the monument to Tyche/Fortuna on the Acropolis, whose site is marked by the column of the Goths.¹³ However, a number of other structures can be mapped more exactly by closer scrutiny and coordination of the textual references. Byzantion had four main temples on the Acropolis, that of Poseidon at the foot of the hill,¹⁴ and those of Apollo, Aphrodite and Artemis on the hilltop.¹⁵ The second-century Anaplus Bospori of Dionysios of Byzantion indicates that the temple of Poseidon lay right beside the sea close to the tip of the peninsula. The subsequent fate of the building allows us to locate it more exactly. According to the Patria of Constantinople, the temple of Poseidon was replaced by the church of St Menas.¹⁶ Two later sources state that St Menas lay close to the complex of the Mangana,¹⁷ whose exact location beside the Bosporus was determined by the French excavations of 1921–1923.¹⁸ It is therefore on the eastern shore of the peninsula, between the Mangana and the Acropolis point, though closer to the latter, that the temple of Poseidon must be sought.

Fig. 11.1: Byzantion excluding the Hippodrome (adapted from W. Müller-Wiener, Bildlexikon von Byzantion-Konstantinopel-Istanbul, 497). Blue: pre-Constantinian structures, locations approximate except for the Basilica, the Baths of Zeuxippos and the Temple of Fortuna Redux (column of the Goths). Red: constructed or planned by Constantine. Yellow: schematic lines of streets corresponding to the boundaries of the urban regiones in the fourth-century Notitia. Green: hypothetical line of other streets.

The other major pagan sanctuary that left a detectable trace in the topography of the Acropolis area was the temple of Aphrodite. According to Malalas, Theodosius I had it converted into a carriage house for the Praetorian Prefecture of the East.¹⁹ As Cyril Mango has noted, it is clear from the Chronicle Paschale’s description of the great fire of the Nika Riot in 532 that the Prefecture building was close to the church of Hagia Eirene (Aya Irini).²⁰ The location of the temple of Aphrodite in this area (the first court of the Topkapı palace), and that of the temple of Artemis further north on the ridge (the second court) can be confirmed by the evidence for the two theatres of Roman Byzantion. Malalas and the Chronicon Paschale record that Septimius Severus rebuilt both temples, ‘building a very big amphitheatre [κυνῆγιν] opposite the sanctuary of Artemis, and a theatre opposite the sanctuary of Aphrodite’.²¹ ‘Opposite’ (κατέναντι) here must mean ‘to the east of’ (on the assumption that their entrances faced the sunrise), or ‘directly downhill from’. In the Notitia of c. 425 both theatres are c...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Accumulation and juxtaposition
• Erasure and selective memory
• The new and the old
• Whose past?