So long as imperial rule had survived in Italy Constantinople could not be the true capital of the empire, but by endowing it with a senate, one of the empire’s two consuls, and its own grain supply (the annona) on the Roman model, Constantine had ensured that it was the natural successor to Rome as government in the west collapsed. At first Constantinople had few Christian buildings but the announcement after the Council of Constantinople (381) that its bishop was second only to the bishop of Rome, a decision which offended Rome and Alexandria in particular, gave it the status of a Christian capital. This was enhanced by the steady accumulation of relics. Those of the first Christian martyr, Stephen, were welcomed into the city with great ceremony in 419 and the emperors also accumulated an impressive collection of relics from the Passion of Christ. Pulcheria, the saintly sister of the emperor Theodosius II, had an especial veneration for the Virgin Mary who absorbed the attributes of the pagan goddesses of the city. (See Vasiliki Limberis, Divine Heiress: The Virgin Mary and the Making of Christian Constantinople, London and New York, 2012.)
Under the long reign of Theodosius II (408-50) in particular, Constantinople was consolidated as the centre of administration for the east. The population grew steadily and Theodosius built a massive line of walls, one of the most impressive surviving constructions of the ancient world, to defend the larger city. For the first time the emperors come to reside permanently in the Great Palace and court ceremonies become part of the life of the city. The most tumultuous of these ceremonies were the settings for the meetings of the emperor with his people in the vast hippodrome that had been built by Constantine alongside the palace. Gladiator fights had by now died out and the races were of chariots, but the games had a serious political aspect. The emperor was on display and could be acclaimed or derided by the city’s population. The integration of the crowds into political life, particularly in the charged atmosphere of the races, where two factions, the Blues and the Greens, championed opposing teams of charioteers, brought an explosive element to city life and several emperors found themselves the focus of massive unrest when they misjudged the popular mood.
In the fourth century Eusebius, the historian of the reign of Constantine, had developed a model of Christian kingship. The emperor was God’s representative on earth. God regulates the cosmic order, the emperor the social order, bringing his subjects together in a harmony that mirrors the one that God has designed for all creation. This was the ideology adopted by Constantine’s fifth-century successors. In Theodosius’ reign the image of imperial sanctity was reinforced by Pulcheria, who, while her brother (aged 7 at the time of his accession) was a minor, took the traditional Roman title of Augusta and maintained her position on Theodosius’ death by marrying his successor, Marcian (emperor 450-7). The continuing importance in the eastern Orthodox churches (a capital ‘O’ denotes the distinct eastern churches, e. g. Greek or later Russian Orthodox churches which were now emerging) of a single ruler as one chosen by God contrasted strongly with the situation in the west where bishops of Rome such as Gregory (see earlier, p. 648) were determined to consolidate their authority independently of state control.
Marcian had no heir and it was the magister militum, a German, Aspar, who determined his successor, Leo I (457-74). There was still, after all these centuries of imperial rule, no agreed procedure for arranging the succession. The emperor could be the nominee of the armies or German strong men. Leo was the first of the emperors to be crowned by the bishop, now officially Patriarch, of Constantinople, a ceremony that took place before ‘the people’ in the hippodrome. Leo was far-seeing enough to try to reduce the dependency of the empire on ‘barbarian’ troops by recruiting a native mountain people, the Isaurians, instead. It turned out to be a choice fraught with its own difficulties. The Isaurians had long been ostracized for their lawlessness and had been highly disruptive during the troubles of the third century. (The ‘sophisticated’ citizens of Constantinople had the habit of assailing visiting Isaurians with stones.) Even so, Leo married his daughter Ariadne to one of their military leaders, Zeno, who then succeeded Leo as emperor in 474. Zeno’s was a particularly unstable reign. He faced major challenges from rival factions of his native Isaurians as well as renewed pressures in Thrace from the Goths. As seen earlier, it was during his reign that the western empire slipped out of imperial control.
When Zeno died in 491 his widow made the choice of emperor. It was of a courtier, Anastasius, who was already 61 years old. Anastasius came from Epirus, on the fringes of the Latin-speaking world. He was a fine administrator whose career had included a period in Egypt. He married Ariadne and then consolidated his position by crushing the Isaurians. He proved a devout man described in one source as ‘the good emperor, the lover of monks and the protector of the poor and afflicted’, in short a truly Christian emperor. Spiritually, he was drawn to Mono-physitism (for which see below) but reluctant to impose his beliefs on others. The people of Constantinople, however, who always expected the emperor to be their own, were offended by his lack of religious orthodoxy and the clear preference he showed for the eastern provinces, in particular Syria.
Anastasius’ most impressive achievement was the steady accumulation of capital. Gold was the favoured metal of the empire drawn from sources in the Balkans, Armenia, and apparently, in the sixth century, from the Sudan. One pound of gold was made up of 72 solidi, the coins first minted by Constantine that were to survive as a stable unit of currency for several hundred years. When Anastasius died there were 32,000 pounds of gold in the imperial treasury. The cache was the result of an effective and steady administration of an empire that remained relatively prosperous. Although the evidence for this prosperity remains fragmentary, archaeological research has uncovered a flourishing area of olive oil cultivation along the Syrian limestone massif, for instance, while in the Hauran and Negev areas in Syria and Palestine there are signs of new areas being taken into cultivation as population increased. Trade continued along an axis from Egypt and north Africa to Constantinople even after the collapse of the west. Solidi have been found on sites from Sweden to the Ukraine and in Ceylon they were said to be favoured above Persian silver. The levels of economic activity seem to be as high in ad 600 as they were 200 years earlier. (See the good overviews by John Haldon, ‘Economy and Administration: How Did the Empire Work?’ and Kenneth Holum, ‘The Classical City in the Sixth Century, chapters 2 and 4 in Michael Maas (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, Cambridge, 2005.)
This prosperity was tapped through an effective consolidation of the administration, with a shift of power towards provincial governors at the expense of the town councils, which were by now in decay. The classical city entered a period of decline and disintegration, similar to that seen in the west. The sources talk of the vigour being sucked out of urban life. ‘Now we have no more meetings, no more debates, no more gatherings of wise men in the agora, nothing more of all that made our city famous, lamented Basil of Caesarea in the late fourth century. A city such as Aph-rodisias, always vulnerable to earthquakes, was able to repair the damage caused by them in the fourth and fifth centuries. In the seventh the resources and will to build have evaporated and the buildings are left to lie in ruins. By the eleventh century Venetian captains are being encouraged to pick up discarded columns from among the detritus of dead classical cities—many of them still embellish the portals of St Mark’s, the city’s opulent basilica. There was a corresponding rise in the influence of the church, by now in itself a major landowner.
The taxation system remained unbalanced and harsh. Senators were exempt from some taxes while the heaviest burden seems to have fallen on the peasantry. There are accounts of recalcitrant taxpayers being flogged or imprisoned and their children sold into slavery. Through sheer ruthlessness the system worked well enough to transform surplus produce (payments of which could be commuted into gold) into the means by which the army and administration could be financed. A supply of free corn to Constantinople was also maintained, much of it coming from Egypt.
World History
