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The Relational Spiritual Geopolitics of Constantinople, the Capital of the Byzantine Empire

The City: Reframing the Geopolitical Landscape and Establishing a New Prototype

Constantinople emerged as a new capital city after the institution of Tetrarchy (the governmental principle based on the co-equal rulership of four emperors), when each ruler literally needed a capital as the place of display of his reign.⁵ Through borrowing administrative, political, and civic references to the Roman Empire previously reserved only for the city of Rome, which embodied the archetypal capital city,⁶ each new capital gained Roman imperial authority. At the same time, Rome became the urban prototype that each new capital emulated. This novel concept of Tetrarchy introduced critical changes regarding the understanding of the capital city as a unique construct of ancient, universal, and sacred nature,⁷ while the place and spatial reality of each imperial capital became open to imaginative constructs in order to advance the overarching idea of the capital city.

For more than 1,000 years, contemporaries knew Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, via various relational terms—New Rome, Second Rome, Queen City, royal city, great city (megalopolis).⁸ To affirm its presumed long-lived legitimacy, the fourth-century elite occasionally associated the city with New Troy as “the legendary ancestral home of the Romans in the East.”⁹ As it became the capital of the Christian Roman Empire, Constantinople became a sacred capital city in its own right. Known in sources as New Jerusalem, Constantinople was associated with the Heavenly Jerusalem both spiritually and physically as the Byzantines brought sacred relics to their capital.¹⁰ With such multiple intertwinings of political and religious notions, the Byzantines most often called their capital simply the City (Polis, Πóλις).¹¹ This ancient Greek term polis also unified the notions of urbs and civitas for the city-state.¹² Magdalino explains that the Byzantines reserved the term the City not only for their capital, but also for the entire empire, which was not identified with its territory or ruling dynasty but with its capital city.¹³ The concept of the City and its pervasive associative meanings spread among other cultures.¹⁴ Even the Chinese used a phonetic counterpart of the Greek for the City—Fulîn via Polin, Polis—to denote the Byzantine Empire.¹⁵ All these terms emphasized Constantinopolitan civic, ideological, and religious values but also the spatial and physical characteristics of the capital, both real and desired.¹⁶

The making of Constantinople as the “Other Rome” enriched its identity through and in contrast to the ancient and pagan Roman imperial landscape. The physical reality of Byzantine Constantinople remains obscure due to its complex and long history; few texts survive that can adequately document urban transformations over time, and perhaps there are so few because of the Byzantine religious concept of eternity that contradicted historicity and emphasized the city’s geo-spiritual rather than geohistorical reality.¹⁷ A modern understanding of the physical and cultural landscape is usually framed through mapping, which becomes in its own right a construct for intertwining geography, human presence, and memory.¹⁸ The only known surviving map that presents the Roman Empire and also shows Constantinople is the Tabula Peutingeriana, a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century copy of the late antique original (figure 3.2).¹⁹ This map confirms at least two critical facts for understanding Constantinople as a new prototype of the medieval capital city. Constantinople started as a disembedded capital—the center of political administration was outside the historically dominant urban centers.²⁰ The apparent scarcity of other cartographic maps from the Byzantines points to their cultural refocus from a geohistorical to a religious understanding of space.²¹

Figure 3.2. The Tabula Peutingeriana, a medieval copy of a Roman road map, revised in the late fourth or early fifth centuries. Details: Constantinople and environs, Rome, Antioch, and Constantinople. (Facsimile edition, image in the public domain: “TabulaPeutingeriana” by Conradi Millieri, Ulrich Harsch Bibliotheca Augustana; licensed under public domain via Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TabulaPeutingeriana.jpg#mediaviewer/File:TabulaPeutingeriana.jpg)

The Tabula Peutingeriana shows the tripartite world known to the Romans and the geographic totality of the empire on three continents— Europe, Asia, and Africa clustered around the Mediterranean Sea. The Byzantines, who identified themselves as Christianized Romans, would adopt and transform this view about the world. Seas, major rivers, lakes, and land masses reveal topographical features of the territories of the empire. Roman settlements are interconnected by a road-network with marked distances between settlements, and represented by functional place symbols, frequently twin-towered buildings and fortifications for larger sites. The three most prominent cities—Rome, Constantinople, and Antioch—are represented by personifications or “individualized city portraits” (figure 3.2). However, no major road leads to Constantinople. Moreover, the city is marked by a triumphal victory column, and not by city-walls and monumental architecture as in Rome and Antioch. Here in the Byzantine territory, the symbol for Constantinople, a city relatively uncontested and recently reclaimed as opposed to the more established urban landscapes of Rome and Antioch with their long pagan and governmental traditions, seems inserted into the map. This uniquely surviving image supports the historical fact that Constantinople emerged as the product of new imperial and religious identities in the fourth and fifth centuries, most likely at the time of the revision of the original map.²²

Within a wider geographic framework, Constantinople was strategically located almost in the geometric center of the territories of the vast empire it controlled: it was in close proximity to all three continents by sea or by land, and was open to commercial, economic, and political exchanges (figure 3.2).²³ The geographic location of the city on the tip of the peninsula also allowed for the possibilities of either its expansion or its complete isolation.²⁴ The mountain ridges along the west-east axis were over time topographically enclosed by the expanded system of city walls. Similarly, roads and aqueducts not only provided urban counterparts to passages and rivers, but also enhanced the network of economic possibilities and settlement incentives.²⁵ The cityscape, framed by the still-standing city walls and the partially preserved monumental public and religious buildings on the tops of the city hills, remains the prominent constitutive feature of the Constantinopolitan landscape.²⁶

The enclosing city walls defined not only the city proper but also its identity (figure 3.3).²⁷ Following Hellenistic urban design principles, the first walls of ancient Byzantium used the natural fitness of the rocky outcrop at the head of the peninsula, later recognized as the first hill of Constantinople.²⁸ The enclosures created by King Byzas and Emperor Septimius Severus (r. 193–211) followed. In the fourth century, Emperor Constantine I erased these previous walls and raised his own. Emperor Theodosius II (r. 408–450) enlarged the city and built the second line of fortification walls some 1,500 m to the west of the line of Constantine’s walls. These walls, still standing, stretch along a south-north axis from the Marble Tower to the Golden Horn. By the fifth century, Constantinople was enclosed on all sides, from both land and sea.²⁹ Constantinople consisted of an area approximately the size of Old Rome within the Aurelian walls, or some 1,400 ha.³⁰ Thus, the city of Rome, indeed, was a major urban prototype for the development of the city of Constantinople, not only in conceptual but also in physical terms.³¹ Even with later expansions and reductions of the city and numerous medieval changes in its morphology, the chroniclers continued to keep the memory of the foundation of Constantinople and to refer to the city proper from its foundation period.³²

Figure 3.3. Map of Byzantine Constantinople. Rectangular structures with apses to the east represent churches. (Drawing Jelena Bogdanović)

The Imperial Authority and the Making of Constantinople

The transition of Constantinople from a pagan to a Christian landscape lasted at least two centuries.³³ In addition to the gradual building of churches and shrines that eventually mapped the religious space of the city, the unifying element through all physical transformations of Constantinopolitan landscape was the emperor and his imperial authority intertwined with the concepts of Roman polity.³⁴ According to a legendary fifth-century account, using his imperial, visionary, and tectonic authority, Constantine I established Constantinople by widening the boundaries of the ancient town and erecting new fortification walls: “On foot, spear in hand, the emperor traced the limits of the future capital in person, and when his courtiers, surprised at the compass of the circuit he set himself to describe, inquired how far he would proceed, he replied, ‘Until He stops Who goes before me.’ ”³⁵

Constantine’s tectonic authority was anchored in his ability to produce the urban fabric of Constantinople on a place sanctified and legitimized by divine intervention. Moreover, Constantine used the spear— simultaneously a weapon and the tool of authority, and also an architectural device to measure and set the foundations of the city.³⁶ Thus, he established himself as the architect and builder of the urban landscape as a manifestation of the divine order.³⁷

When Constantine erased previous fortifications, he built the new ones in a recognizably imperial idiom, which was, as Smith demonstrates, a twofold act—to reconquer and reclaim the city and polity and to establish a new rule and authority in the urban place.³⁸ Constantine reestablished the monumental fabric of the typical Roman city including fortifications, agoras, and honorific columns.³⁹ The honorific porphyry column on the second hill (figures 3.2 and 3.3) marked the center of the New City and “the very spot where Constantine ordered the city to be built.”⁴⁰

Despite all urban, physical, and demographic changes, the city walls defined a millennium-long life of the capital.⁴¹ Theodosius’s still-standing defensive system, which expanded upon the now-lost Constantinian walls, consisted of two lines of walls with ninety-six towers and double-towered gates and was built in stone and brick with a rubble and concrete core.⁴² Remarkably, this construction technique in stone and brick became a recognizable “Constantinopolitan” building idiom over time. The enclosing walls defined the coherent and unified space of the city, fixed in microcosmic plan, and legitimately called forth by the authority of the emperor according to divine guidance. The perception of continuity, the unchangeable unity and focus of community, were centered on the emperor in urban space marked by monumental architecture and public statuary.⁴³ Chroniclers of Byzantine emperors would recurrently use the topos of divine authority and protection for massive fortification works based on the act of Constantine.⁴⁴

The mosaic on the lunette above the southwest vestibule doors of Hagia Sophia shows the enduring image of Emperor Constantine as the founder of the Capital.⁴⁵ Constantine is represented offering the city to the Mother of God and the Christ Child. In the mosaic the city walls are square in plan although the city’s geographical location on the tip of the peninsula gave a triangular shape to the Constantinopolitan walls. On the opposite side of Emperor Constantine, Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565), acclaimed as the New Constantine, is offering the domed church of Hagia Sophia to the Mother of God and the Christ Child.⁴⁶ The church in Justinian’s hands is almost a blueprint of the still-standing sixth-century building (figure 3.4). The Byzantine domed church with its associated symbols of Christianity and metonyms for the cosmos was often understood and represented through spherical and domical shapes. Therefore, the domed church, symbolizing the cosmic and heavenly, is in concord with the square-based city walls, referring to the mundane. Together, in deliberately chosen geometric and visual terms they symbolize perfect order and reinforce the concept of a sacred and divinely protected Christian city. Moreover, they suggest the unifying role of the church and emperor in the two-centuries-long unification (from Constantine until Justinian) of the Roman imperial landscape with a Christian one. During this period, the Constantinopolitan cathedral of Hagia Sophia defined the religious centrality of New Rome. The city acquired fourteen administrative districts like old Rome. During the enlargement of the city, not only did the city approach the size of Rome, but its artificially raised hills also matched the number of the seven hills of Rome.

Figure 3.4. Church of Hagia Sophia, 532–537, Constantinople, modern Istanbul, Turkey; Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus, architects. Insert: Detail of the golden mosaic above the southwestern entrance of Hagia Sophia, showing Emperor Justinian presenting the church. (Photograph Jelena Bogdanović)

The production of the geopolitical landscape of Constantinople can be additionally framed via the imagination, perception, and experience of those who recorded their accounts of the city. Fortification walls, and natural and artificial hills became the major elements that comprised the Constantinopolitan landscape, along with cisterns, aqueducts, and fountains, because the city itself, though surrounded by water, was scarce in supply of freshwater.⁴⁷ All these urban and natural elements were devoid of any specific references to Christianity at the time of Constantine. Since its inceptions, however, Constantine’s foundation was a visionary and long-term project, which included its spatiality. Around 375, the beauty and glory of the capital was praised for its human-made and built environment that replaced the voids and uncultivated land:

Emperor Constantine’s porphyry column, which marked the center of the city, was initially crowned with a statue of Constantine in the guise of the pagan sun-god Helios (Apollo). In addition to the Roman Palladion, relics such as the believed fragments of the True Cross, or the axe Noah used to build the Ark, were inserted into this imperial column.⁴⁹ By encompassing pagan Roman and Old Testament references into a new Christian construct, the long-lived sanctity of the city of Constantine was reinvented and emphasized in a public civic space. Christian liturgical celebrations at the chapel dedicated to Constantine, which abutted the base of the column, lasted at least until the tenth century.⁵⁰ Thus, as Nelson posits, the column marked not only the principal public space and major ceremonial route from the imperial palace and Hagia Sophia down the streets of Constantinople during the great liturgical feasts and the celebrations at the beginning of the liturgical year on September 1st and city birthday on May 11th, but also anchored the performative sacred space of the city.⁵¹

Over time, numerous chapels were built within the proximity of the city walls.⁵² Christian relics inserted in public monuments and commemorative inscriptions and reliefs with crosses embedded in the city walls, strengthened the intended sacredness of the city (figure 3.5). This spatial imagery of the fortified Christian capital was reinforced in the building campaigns of Byzantine emperors who included inscriptions and spolia while repairing the fortifications in order to emphasize the seemingly unchangeable unity and perpetual continuity of their long-lived capital.⁵³ For the Byzantines, the Christianized city space, fortified by city walls, outlined the urban landscape of Constantinople and transformed it into a transcendent one—the Christian stronghold.⁵⁴

Figure 3.5. The Third Military Gate, also known as the Gate of Rhegium or the Gate Rhousiou (“of the Reds”), within the Theodosian walls of Constantinople contains the dedicatory inscription in honor of Emperor Theodosius II (r. 408–450) and the Prefect Constantine in Greek and Latin, and the inscription in Greek on the lintel about the repairs of the gate under Emperor Justin (r. 565–578) and his wife Sophia; the lintel also has centrally inscribed two cross reliefs. (© 2015 by David A. Michelson and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.)

The Construction of Constantinopolitan Sacred Topography

Thus constructed Constantinopolitan topography provided further opportunities for Byzantine authors to attach philosophical and theological digressions to the topography in order to support the claim of Constantinople as the Holy City.⁵⁵ Starting in the fifth century Constantinople was identified with New Jerusalem.⁵⁶ At this point, the seven hills that had initially referenced the Seven Hills of Rome acquired new meanings. The hills were associated with Mount Sion and became a metonym for the sacred city.⁵⁷ Simultaneously seven was an important theological number making references to the earthly realm. Water fountains, streams, and aqueducts were associated with notions of streams of everlasting life, which were then by theological extension associated with the Mother of God as the fountain of Life.⁵⁸

A special veneration of the Mother of God developed in Constantinople. At Blachernae, a suburb of northwestern Constantinople at the point where the land walls meet the Golden Horn, the healing, “holy water” spring was enshrined by the church and dedicated to the Mother of God (figure 3.3).⁵⁹ Sometime by the beginning of the sixth century, the Byzantines established a similar shrine of the “holy spring” in the vicinity of the gate within the Theodosian walls, today known as Silivri gate. The “life-giving” healing waters of the spring, its shrine, and the monastery of the Zoödochos Pege (Mother of God of the Life-giving Spring), as well as its location within cypress groves, flower meadows, and an imperial hunting park, effectively combined the natural and the spiritual landscapes of Constantinople.⁶⁰ Procopius, a sixth-century court historian, claimed that “both these two churches . . . erected outside the city-wall” were built so that they “may serve as invincible defenses to the circuit-wall of the city.”⁶¹

By the seventh century, Byzantine texts praised the Mother of God as the heavenly protector of Constantinople.⁶² Pentcheva advanced the understanding of the Byzantine veneration of the Mother of God as the Constantinopolitan patroness by associating the intercession of the Virgin in times of war with the holy spring, the relic of her robe (maphorion) kept in a chapel at Blachernae, and icons of the Blachernitissa type showing the Mother of God stretching her arms out in prayer on behalf of the Byzantines.⁶³ The defeat of the enemy during the unsuccessful invasions was attributed to the miraculous appearance of the Mother of God on the city walls. When the Rus’ attacked Constantinople in 860, the maphorion of the Mother of God was paraded along the walls and ceremonially dipped into the sea to hold off the siege.⁶⁴ The icon of the Mother of God Blachernitissa was used as a kind of Byzantine imperial military standard. The church of Blachernae became an important shrine and was enclosed within the city wall after the siege of the Avars of 628 during the reign of Emperor Heraclius (r. 610–641).

By the tenth century at the latest, the Byzantines referred to the city gate on the opposite side of the Blachernae, in the vicinity of the Zoödochos Pege shrine, as the Gate of the Spring (Πύλη τŋς Πηγŋς).⁶⁵ The first tower of the city walls on its southernmost tip, just north of the Marble Tower, still preserves its christogram (the monogram of Christ, XP) and is known as the Gate of Christ.⁶⁶ The fifteenth-century commemorative inscription above the gate confirms the enduring belief that this city gate was protected by God: “This God-protected gate of the Life-giving Spring was restored with the cooperation and at the expense of Manuel Bryennius Leontari, in the reign of the most pious sovereigns John and Maria Palaeologi; in the month of May, in the year 1438 [or 1433].”⁶⁷ Similar inscriptions were embedded in the city walls and gates, formulaically calling upon divine protection: “O Christ, God, preserve Thy city undisturbed, and free from war. Conquer the wrath of the enemies.”⁶⁸ This acclamation recalls the liturgical hymn Troparion of the Holy Cross: “O Lord, Save your people, and bless your inheritance! Grant victory to the Orthodox Christians over their adversaries, and by virtue of your cross, preserve your habitation,” thus suggesting interpolation of liturgical and ceremonial meanings of the inscriptions in the city walls.⁶⁹

City walls with inscriptions, christograms, and reliefs with Christian symbols strengthened by religious chapels and shrines and related ceremonies, thus became divinely protected walls. Orthodox hymns, literature, monumental painted programs, and even coins (figure 3.6) framed the Mother of God of the Blachernitissa type by the city walls she defends; she was described and depicted as the “Gate of the World,” the “unshakeable” and the “impregnable wall.”⁷⁰ Within such a context that closely intertwined physical and sacred realms making strong allusions to the virginity and power of the Mother of God herself, the resulting perception of Constantinople was of an authentic, ideal, pure, and impregnable Christian City, which despite all upheavals could never be truly destroyed.

Figure 3.6. Virgin Orans framed by Constantinopolitan walls. Coin of Michael VIII Palaeologos, ca. 1261–1282. (Dumbarton Oaks Collection)

Not only within the religious and ceremonial contexts but also within the experiential context of the city, the walls were crucial for framing Constantinopolitan urbs and orbis that expanded the image of the city beyond its territorial confines. By the sixth century, visitors coming from the north would pass several lines of walls and thus would perceive the City to be larger than it actually was. Built under Emperor Anastasius I (r. 491–518) the so-called Long Walls of Thrace created the expanded fortification system of Constantinople (figure 3.7).⁷¹ The Long Walls were envisioned as the front line of the City’s defense since they were erected some 65 km (40 miles) west of the city and stretched from the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea (some 56 km, approximately 35 miles, or a “two-day walk”).⁷² Though significantly thick and tall, completed with towers, gates, and forts, the military effectiveness of the Anastasian Long Walls was limited and relatively short-lived.⁷³ The Long Walls, however, secured within the city an elaborated water-supply system and the expanded territory also functioned as an agricultural area. Together this agricultural area and the Constantinopolitan urban core (or inner city) formed a kind of an early version of a “garden city” based on a concept of self-perseverance and sustainability.⁷⁴ Simultaneously, the forts, gates, and towers of the Long Walls expanded the memorable image of the capital beyond its actual territorial and administrative limits, giving it even greater significance. Such a monumental fortification, unseen in medieval Europe, must have astonished the outsiders approaching the City, and for most of them it became the first reference to the civilized world.⁷⁵

Figure 3.7. The expanded fortification system of Constantinople with the so-called Long Walls of Thrace. (Drawing Jelena Bogdanović)

The walls protected the City and marked its boundaries. They also made a division between settled and uninhabited areas, as well as a distinction between urbs and provinces. Both land and sea walls also defined highly fragmented experiential landscapes.⁷⁶ Visitors who came to Constantinople by ship, through the Sea of Marmara, would first see the city across the water with its cityscape on a series of hills and valleys. These visitors would see the southern shore of Constantinople, which ran from the land walls at the west end to the tip of the promontory at the east. The massive sea walls, broken by two protected harbors, would emphasize the perceived diversity and large size of the city. Above the sea walls, tall aristocratic houses with balconies and palaces set on artificial terraces with gardens,⁷⁷ combined with the cityscape beyond them marked by church domes, monumental columns, and honorific architecture, would create memorable images of the City.

Those sailing from the Black Sea would first see the first hill crowned with the Great Palace, the Hippodrome, the Senate, and public squares with honorific columns.⁷⁸ Towering above everything else would be the dome of Hagia Sophia. Therefore, these visitors would immediately experience the architecture that personified the emperor and the Christian empire. Passing this highest point, both literally and symbolically, and leaving behind the Asiatic shore, the ship would turn west and sail into the Golden Horn, the narrow bay along the northern side of the city. Lined by hills and set off from the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn was protected on all sides from the winds.⁷⁹ This safe anchorage for both warships and commercial vessels was one of the reasons for the city’s prosperity and security.⁸⁰

Therefore, the city walls created a diversity of experiences of the city in contrast to the imagined and perceived city of continuity and coherence, while the center and periphery of the empire were not necessarily defined in terms of physical distances. Magdalino demonstrates how in the twelfth century, Balsamon, the principal Byzantine canonist and regulator of imperial and ecclesiastical laws, used the term legal fortifications to describe the existence of one law for Constantinople and another for the provinces.⁸¹ The fortifications also defined the concept of insider and outsider, and the City as the place where outsider becomes insider.⁸² Often the citizens of Constantinople degraded the province as inferior, even though the provinces in terms of geography could be the islands just outside the city walls. While on the Princes’ Islands, in the vicinity of Constantinople, twelfth-century Byzantine historian and theologian John Zonaras lamented that he was “in the place at the back of beyond” that lacked books.⁸³ Therefore, the empire could have expanded over three continents territorially yet it would have been imaginatively restricted to the city walls because its identity was framed by the city of Constantinople. In short, everything outside the walls—other cities, provinces, and countryside—was understood in complement or contrast to the City, territorially or culturally.⁸⁴

Since the construction of the Constantinopolitan landscape was rendered as a political act, materialized in stone and brick and complemented by nature, the destruction of the City was regarded as an ultimate tragedy.⁸⁵ Urban architecture and ceremonials, which communicated the politics of production and reception of authority, also defined the performative place of conflict, resistance, and renewal on multiple levels.⁸⁶ A sixteenth-century fresco in the Romanian monastery in Moldoviţa exemplifies cultural perceptions of the siege of Constantinople (figure 3.8).⁸⁷ Emperor, empress, and their entourage parade along the city walls with gospel books, icons, and relics, while the chaos of war and destruction is actually shown outside the city walls. The prominently displayed hills of Constantinople within the city walls seemingly anchor the sacred space of the “indestructible” Christian empire, while a storm of hail and sea outside the city walls reflects its historical destruction. This particular image depicts the Avar siege of Constantinople of 626. Nevertheless, the attackers are depicted as contemporaries, the Ottoman Turks and Janissaries, the sons of the Balkan Christians who were converted into an Islamic standing army, thus emphasizing the importance of the city space while making the image anachronistic but also a memorable typological reference to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople more than 800 years later.

Figure 3.8. Siege of Constantinople, fresco, Moldoviţa, Romania, 1532. (Photograph Elena Boeck)

In the monastic, non-urban context of Moldavia, in the last territories beyond the northern fringes of the former Byzantine Empire that remained unconquered by the Ottoman Turks at the time of their greatest power in the sixteenth century, this exterior church wall with its monumental dramatic image functioned as more than a mere political statement that the fall of Constantinople marked the end of the empire. Addressing Smith’s question of whether and how architecture can speak about the reception of authority, this “wall of resistance and renewal” provides a peculiar cultural syntax that posits the survival and potential for the renewal of Byzantine religiosity and imperial values elsewhere, outside the City.⁸⁸ By depicting Janissaries, who were forcefully taken from their Christian parents at a young age and converted to Islam, the exterior walls of the church publicly display the controversial issue of both the loss and the potential for the renewal of human capital in times of conflict. The Janissaries, the subversive destroyers of Constantinople and its values, are also represented in another section of the church walls as being offered a second chance within the eschatological, universal image of the Last Judgment. In the monumental image, in front of the massive River of Fire, Moses opens the scroll (“This is whom you crucified” John 5:45–46) and invites all non-Christians to recognize Christ and receive the ultimate salvation.⁸⁹ The “walls of resistance and renewal” in Moldoviţa make an exceptionally powerful political and religious statement by addressing both Christians and the encroaching Islamic army, heavily constituted of converted Christians. Within the Byzantine cultural and religious context of the Heavenly Jerusalem and the otherworldly, the image of the imperial capital and its recognizable architecture and performative space embraced and supplanted the concept of time and historicity.

Nevertheless, as Smith explains, the temporality prevailed at the expense of spatiality in scholarly discourses.⁹⁰ The millennium-long politics of the medieval capital that prevailed in modern historiography is distorted by its own concepts of geohistorical assessment. Thus, we still learn that the Byzantine Empire ended in 1453 with the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, despite the fact that other territories of the empire like those in the Middle East diminished long before 1453, some already in the seventh century, while some other territories such as Trabezond remained under Byzantine control several decades after 1453.⁹¹ At the same time, the surviving political landscape of Constantinople in the territories that embraced Byzantine spirituality remains understudied and occasionally oversimplified, either by drawing a linear division between Christian West and East—Rome and Constantinople—or by disregarding the idiosyncratic features and the spatial depth of the Constantinopolitan spiritual and geopolitical landscape within vast territories labeled Eastern Europe.

The Relational Constantinopolitan Landscape in the Capitals of Medieval Eastern Europe

Because of its highly religious identity, the geopolitical landscape of Constantinople was not necessarily tied to its geography, topography, urban design, and architecture. Just a few Byzantine pictorial maps survive that could help us understand these issues, and their original distribution, function, and use remain hypothetical because most likely they served exclusively religious, anagogical purposes.⁹² Yet the physical reality or rather the perceived memorable elements of the City—such as its triangular shape of fortifications surrounded by water on two sides, seven hills, fourteen administrative regions, and monumental architecture and dominant churches—were pervasively connected to the great political authority of Constantinople. Remarkably, the capitals in medieval eastern Europe such as Preslav and Veliko Tŭrnovo in Bulgaria; Kiev, Vladimir, and Moscow in Rus’; and Belgrade and Smederevo in Serbia are perceived to be triangular in shape, on two sides framed by rivers, set on several hills, enclosed by walls, built in the Constantinopolitan architectural idioms, marked by city gates, domed churches, and monumental buildings raised on prominent locations (figure 3.9). The pertinent questions are to what extent these capitals were complementary copies of Constantinople, whether and how the performative aspects of Constantinopolitan geo-religious landscape were transferred to alternative sites, and what the distinctive characteristics of these emerging capitals could be.

Figure 3.9. Medieval capitals in the Balkans and eastern Europe (drawn in the same scale): Constantinople, Veliko Tŭrnovo, Kiev, Vladimir, Belgrade, and Smederevo. Black symbols point to important structures in the city. (Drawing by Jelena Bogdanović)

The Case of Medieval Bulgarian Capitals: Territorial Conquest and Appropriation of Sacredness

The capital cities of the First Bulgarian Empire (ca. 681–1018) are difficult to study because of the complex developments of the empire, which accepted Christianity under controversial circumstances from the Byzantines in 864–865 and acquired their own autocephalous church in 927.⁹³ This is further convoluted by hazy textual and archaeological reports and their interpretations. Some scholars claim that the first capitals were repurposed Byzantine fortifications; others claim that Bulgarian cities were built anew.⁹⁴ What is certain is that the Bulgarians constituted a major power in the medieval Balkans.

The religious and civic authority of the ruler played an important role in the Bulgarian political landscape even in pre-Christian times. Revealed by stone inscriptions, the khan’s formulaic title was “from God ruler.”⁹⁵ A comparative analysis of four Bulgarian chronicles—the Name List of the Bulgarian Khans (eighth century), the Bulgarian Chronograph (tenth century), the Bulgarian Apocryphal Chronicle (eleventh century), and the Brief Bulgarian Chronicle (fourteenth century)—confirms the pervasive seminal role of a ruler for the formation of Bulgarian states.⁹⁶ Thus, this constitutive thread between the religion and the state—from khanate to empire—was conceptually similar to those of the Byzantines. This notion of sacred ruler and sacred state was especially propagated in the Brief Bulgarian Chronicle. The chronicle incorporated biblical history and the Bulgarian translation of the Byzantine text originally written by Constantine Manasses (ca. 1130–1187), in order to present the Bulgarian state as the legitimate Christian state equal to the Byzantine Empire.⁹⁷ The Bulgarians were at odds with the Byzantines; they often attempted to claim Constantinople as their own capital. During its existence, the First Bulgarian Empire even had four capital cities: Pliska (681–893), Preslav (893–972), Skopje (972–992), and Ohrid (992–1018) (figure 3.1).

Though some scholars maintain that Pliska was originally a Bulgarian foundation, it was probably an early Byzantine fortification that was enlarged with an impressive double enclosure that defined the inner and outer city and an area 1.6 times larger than that of Constantinople.⁹⁸ It remains speculative as to whether or not the selection of such an enormous fortification for medieval standards reflected the Bulgarian experience of Constantinople, which they would always attack from the north, thereby facing first the Anastasian Long Walls. Building activities in Pliska revealed the coexistence of pagan and Christian buildings side by side, which may have resulted in the changing perception of spiritual geopolitics and in the eventual transfer of the capital to Preslav, a new, exclusively Christianized site.

Preslav (literally, “The Most Glorious” in Old Slavonic), was also known as Veliki Preslav (Great Preslav). It was territorially considerably smaller than Pliska and Constantinople, but emerged as a new capital under the Bulgarian Tsar (Emperor) Symeon (r. 893–927), the major figure for the development of medieval Bulgarian Christian identity and culture.⁹⁹ Built as a double-enclosure in the vicinity of Pliska on a hilly terrain at the Ticha River, it was comparable in administrative offices as well as in economic, intellectual, and artistic activities with Constantinople; Preslav also became known as the City (polis) in textual sources.¹⁰⁰ Ćurčić demonstrates how Preslav is both a physical and conceptual replica of the glorious Constantinople.¹⁰¹ More than seventy buildings excavated at the location reveal elements of Constantinopolitan architecture. The architecture within the inner city points to the Great Palace in Constantinople, where Tsar Symeon himself received his education, and to the patriarchal complex and administrative, commercial, and residential areas raised on artificial terraces, all strikingly coinciding with the legal and economic regulations from the tenth-century Constantinopolitan “Book of the Prefect.” Even the famous “Round Church” at Preslav, also known as the “Golden Church” in the primary sources—presumably due to its gilded dome glittering atop the hill above the river Ticha—may be compared either with the now-lost centrally planned church of the Prophet Elijah within the Great Palace or with its major throne-room Chrysotriklinos (“Golden Hall”).¹⁰² After Rus’, Mongol, and Byzantine conquests, Preslav ceased to function as the capital city.¹⁰³ Subsequent Bulgarian capitals, Skopje (ancient Scupi) and Ohrid, were conquered Byzantine towns.¹⁰⁴

This type of geopolitics based on territorial conquest and cultural appropriation of Byzantine towns and officially raising them to the status of capital also marks the Second Bulgarian Empire (1185–1393).¹⁰⁵ Veliko (Great) Tŭrnovo was established within an earlier Byzantine fortification and loosely combines topographical and architectural models from Preslav and Constantinople. Veliko Tŭrnovo was situated on the three hills by the Yantra River—Tsarevets (literally, the “Imperial” in the Old Slavonic), Trapezitsa (perhaps from Old Slavonic for “dining table”), and Sveta Gora (literally, “Holy Mountain”) with corresponding imperial, residential, and religious centers.¹⁰⁶ The political landscape of Tŭrnovo replicated the Constantinopolitan, in formal terms of court ceremonies and offices, and ideologically as the capital was understood as the city divinely chosen—its independence and strength providing for the existence of the country itself.¹⁰⁷ The capital was enclosed by strong triangular walls that followed local topography but also suggested the memorable image of the triangular walls of Constantinople enclosed by water on two sides (figures 3.3, 3.10). This semantic image was materially strengthened by the construction of the Tŭrnovo walls in a recognizable stone-and-brick Constantinopolitan building technique. The topography of the Bulgarian capital again approached the Constantinopolitan model, although topically. The cultural and physical landscape of the city was additionally enriched with numerous churches and relics, especially under Tsar Ivan Asen II (r. 1218–1241), who claimed the title of emperor after the fall of Constantinople in 1204.

Figure 3.10. Veliko Tŭrnovo. Black symbols point to important structures in the city. (Drawing by Jelena Bogdanović)

Erdeljan demonstrates how the relics of fragments of the girdle of the Mother of God and of the True Cross, presumably from the time of Emperor Constantine I, were potent symbols in transferring the religious landscape of Constantinople to this new Christian capital in the Balkans.¹⁰⁸ Medieval narratives record that during the decisive battle between the Byzantines and Bulgarians in 1190, the Byzantines hid the imperial golden reliquary with the True Cross and the holy girdle in the river. It was miraculously recovered by the victorious Bulgarians who thus reclaimed imperial power. This act of raising the relics from the water and their “elevation” marked the theophanic event of the “baptism” of this new “God-chosen” empire. The relics that stood for the Constantinopolitan identity were ceremonially transferred and consecrated in Tŭrnovo. This highly complex construct of the transfer of geopolitical and sacred landscapes to the new Christian capital of the competing medieval empire is further attested to after the Crusader conquest of Constantinople in 1204. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Bulgarian sources praised Veliko Tŭrnovo as the City (polis), “New Constantinople,” “The Queen of the Towns,” and “The Imperial Town/The Reigning Town” (basileusa polis, literally translated in Old Slavonic as Tsar’grad).¹⁰⁹ The Bulgarian capital was also commended as “New Troy,” the attribute reserved for Constantinople in elite Byzantine manuscripts since the fifth century, here anachronistically transferred into a new cultural context. References to Tŭrnovo as the “Third Rome” and “New Jerusalem” were never direct but can be inferred by metaphorical extension from the laudatory texts of the laudes Constantinopolitanae type.

The Case of Medieval Rus’ Capitals: Conceptual Incorporation of Byzantine Models

Russian examples reveal distinctive notions about capitals, as political and religious constructs, especially after their conversion to Christianity in 988–989, which was crucial for their acceptance into the Byzantine commonwealth.¹¹⁰ The information about these cities comes from limited archeological evidence and various medieval Russian, Byzantine, Arab, and Western European texts.

No verifiable architectural evidence remains of organized early polities along the Volga River, a major thriving artery for trade and the prosperity of the nomadic peoples. This lack of evidence may be partially connected to their talismanic sacred rulers of the vast Euro-Asian territories who were focused on the heavenly realm.¹¹¹ For example, early medieval Rus’ rulers referred in their titles and aspirations to Khazar khagans (“the khans of khans”), “who never touched the ground and for whom real power is wielded by a deputy.”¹¹² The capital city of Khazaria that the Rus’ attempted to conquer may have been the source of inspiration for subsequent Rus’ capitals. Medieval chroniclers mention Atil or Itil (literally “the Big River”), the multiethnic and multireligious capital of Khazaria as a tripartite city separated by the Volga River into administrative, commercial, and residential sections, the island on the Volga being reserved for the palace of the khagans and his deputies.¹¹³ This city was destroyed, leaving no archaeological evidence that can be used for comparative analysis with the Rus’ capitals.

Nevertheless, to the west between the Black Sea and the Arctic Ocean, the Rus’ had several capital cities during medieval times, such as Novgorod, Kiev, Vladimir, and Moscow. The information about these cities—stemming from the Russian Primary Chronicle (По́весть временны́х лет), first compiled in Kiev in the twelfth century, and complemented by tenth-century Byzantine chronicles such as On the Governance of the Empire (De Administrando imperio) and On the Ceremonies of the Byzantine Court (De Ceremoniis aulae byzantinae) as well as by various medieval Arab and Western European annals—has long been studied and contested.¹¹⁴ In contrast to the earliest Bulgarian capitals or Atil, the archaeology of these Rus’ capitals is studied and understood better, ultimately illustrating the unique Rus’ aspirations toward Constantinople.

The oldest capitals, those of Novgorod and Kiev, developed from trade centers in the north and south of the Rus’ territories and resemble descriptions of polycentric Atil rather than Constantinople.¹¹⁵ Novgorod (literally meaning “New City” in Old Slavonic) started as a Viking-cosmopolitan trade center on the Volkhov River (figure 3.1). This is the only fully excavated medieval city in eastern Europe, and it also reveals the oldest archaeological layer from the time of the Rus’ Christianization and contact with the Byzantines.¹¹⁶ Immediately after their conversion, the Rus’ built their own Hagia Sophia, first in regional, timber construction, which was replaced by the masonry church after the fire of 1045.¹¹⁷ Focusing on international trade from the Vikings to the Byzantines and on the cultural epicenter in Constantinople, the Rus’ transferred their capital to the geostrategically better-situated Kiev that had easy access to the Black Sea via the Dnieper River.

Founded as a polycentric trade town, Kiev was set within the plains at the now nonexistent Pochaina (literally “to start”) River, flowing into the Dnieper, one of the major rivers of Europe.¹¹⁸ The town had a developed street system and riverfront, similar in urban design to Novgorod and other merchant towns of the North European type. Under Byzantine influences, Kiev changed its geopolitical landscape. New administrative offices and the introduction of Christianity in the late tenth century resulted in the building of the so-called upper town. This then became the center of the capital and other hills were enclosed within the fortified city. The churches built on top of the hills additionally strengthened the changing landscape of the city, shifting focus of identity from princely palace in the upper town to the entire city.¹¹⁹ Similar to the tenth-century Preslav, by the time of Yaroslav (1019–1054), Kiev had the eponymous, crucial buildings that are linked to Constantinopolitan Christian identity: both had prominent churches dedicated to Hagia Sophia and Hagia Eirine, both had a major ceremonial entrance into the capital—the Golden Gate in Kiev, literally topped by the Church of Annunciation.¹²⁰ Boeck shows how Yaroslav’s patronage of the building program in Kiev embodied a sophisticated knowledge of the Byzantine capital city and its religious and urban ceremonials, including the meaning of Byzantine institutions such as the Hippodrome, which staged urban entertainment, and public confirmation or contestation of imperial authority.¹²¹ In particular, she focuses on St. Sophia in Kiev as a successful exemplar of “compressing and reconfiguring Constantinopolitan loci of power [that] showed an understanding of the levels of Byzantine imperial power”¹²² and resulted in the perception of Kiev as “Constantinople-on-Dnieper.”¹²³ Such a perception was due not so much to a literal copy of Byzantine architectural models but rather to a mature understanding of the critical elements that constituted the spatial syntax of Constantinople.

Figure 3.11. Kiev. Rectangular structures with apses to the east represent churches. (Drawing by Jelena Bogdanović)

The Kievan churches were built following both regional and Byzantine traditions. They had modular timber construction with tall pinnacles (verkhs) and Byzantine domes covered in metal tiles, resulting in uniquely tall churches with glittering bulbous domes raised on the “seven hills” of Kiev (figures 3.1, 3.11).¹²⁴ In addition to intermediary cultural exchanges through texts and images, it seems that the modeled topography of Kiev also reflects the Russian perception and experience of Constantinople. The city on seven hills with the safe harbor of the Golden Horn certainly would have been memorable to the Rus’. In the tenth century they circumvented the chain pulled across the Golden Horn to keep Constantinople safe in times of siege, but even if they eventually failed to conquer the city under Kievan prince Oleg (r. 882–912), the Rus’ gained the right to participate in Byzantine imperial campaigns and established regular trade with the Byzantines.¹²⁵ Coming to Constantinople from the Black Sea, each time the Rus’ would first observe above the city walls the imposing dome of Hagia Sophia and the glittering metal roofs of the imperial sacred palace,¹²⁶ including its ceremonial Chalke (“Brazen”) Gate, that presumably acquired its name due to its bronze roof tiles.¹²⁷ Boeck demonstrates how in Rus’ rhetoric, the Mother of God Blachernitissa, the divine defender and “unbreakable wall” of Constantinople, also became the patroness of imperial Kiev.¹²⁸ Thus rhetorical images and spatial paradigms embodied within Kiev exemplify the perceived reversal of the position of Rus’ from being outsiders to becoming insiders of the Constantinopolitan landscape; “the same supernatural power that had repelled their pagan ancestors was adopted by the Christian Rus’ for their protection.”¹²⁹ Arguably it may be claimed that Kiev’s landscape in a way reflected the Constantinopolitan in both its sacred and material dimensions. In addition to being compared to Constantinople, Kiev was also praised as the “Mother of Rus’ Cities,” making dual reference to the capital city as the most important of all cities as well as to Jerusalem, “mother of all” (cf. Galatians 4:25–26);¹³⁰ these latter comparisons certainly remained within theological if not physical realms.

Common people would have probably recognized the capital by the name of its ruler as the place of the display of his power and preeminence, and particularly because of his crucial role in urban planning, construction, and promotion of the capital.¹³¹ Moreover, in Kiev, each time the ruler changed, the upper town with a palace would take his name. Thus, the upper city developed on the Zamkova (castle, fortified residence) and the Starokyivs’ka (Old Kievan) hills and would have been known successively as “Town of Volodymyr,” the “Town of Yaroslav,” the “Town of Izyaslav,” and the “Town of Svyatoslav.”¹³² This characteristic of the Rus’ capital can be associated with the emulation of the Byzantine concept of Constantinople, “the City of Constantine.”

Figure 3.12. Model of the Old City, Vladimir. (Photograph by Jelena Bogdanović)

In the twelfth century subsequent Rus’ rulers continued the tradition of distinctive conceptual and symbolic emulation of Constantinople, which can be exemplified by the polycentric capital city of Vladimir and its nearby princely residence, Bogolyubovo.¹³³ Prince Andrey Bogolyubsky (ca. 1110–1174), son of Yuri Dolgorukiy (ca. 1099–1157) moved the capital from Kiev to Vladimir (figures 3.12, 3.13), which thrived until the Mongol invasion of 1237. The city of Vladimir was again named after Rus’ rulers—either Vladimir I, also known as the Great (r. 980–1015), who converted the Rus’ to Christianity in 988–989, or Vladimir II the Monomakh (r. 1113–1125), the grandfather of Andrey Bogolyubsky. Vladimir II is credited with bringing the famous Constantinopolitan icon of the Mother of God to the Rus’ capital. In Vladimir, this miraculous Marian icon became known after its toponym as Vladimirskaya (the icon of the Mother of God of Vladimir) and protected the city in times of siege and need, similarly to the icon of Mother of God Blachernitissa, palladium of Constantinople.¹³⁴ The city of Vladimir, named after a God-loving ruler and protected by the Mother of God, thus conceptually and spiritually became yet another “Constantinople.” Its urban architecture was also reminiscent of the Constantinopolitan landscape, marked by the wall enclosure, the Golden Gates, and numerous churches.¹³⁵ The ruler’s residence in Bogolyubovo, literally the “God-loved,” most likely took its name directly from the Greek “Θεοφύλακτος πóλις,” “theophylactos polis” (“city guarded by God”) an epithet for Constantinople mentioned in Byzantine panegyric texts.¹³⁶ However, archaeological evidence of Bogolybovo reveals monastic rather than recognizable palatial architecture, disclosing a peculiar arrangement of a city and a monastery as sites of authority.¹³⁷ The architecture of Vladimir and Bogolyubovo, as in Novgorod and Kiev, once again remained unique; its “Byzantine” identity was filtered through innovative design invariance of Byzantine concepts of urban and performative space that acquired its meaning through established ceremonials framed by topical buildings that were often built by regional workshops (figure 3.12).¹³⁸ The massive ceremonial Golden Gate in Vladimir comprised a religious chapel, as in Kiev and potentially in Constantinople.¹³⁹ With their attenuated glittering golden domes, the churches of Vladimir and Bogolyubovo were built in white stone with numerous reliefs on their exteriors. While it remained Byzantine in conceptual design, the architecture of Vladimir and Bogolyubovo reveals construction techniques of Romanesque Europe.¹⁴⁰

Figure 3.13. Vladimir. Rectangular structures with apses to the east represent churches, double black lines represent a gate, and solid black symbols point to other important structures in the city. (Drawing by Jelena Bogdanović)

Moscow (literally, the city by the Moskva River) was first mentioned in the twelfth-century chronicles of Rus’ under Yuri Dolgorukiy.¹⁴¹ Like Vladimir, Moscow was destroyed during the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion. The city emerged as the new capital in 1327, though the Byzantine sources mention its ruler Ivan II (r. 1353–1359) as the great rhex of Moscow and all Russia in the mid-fourteenth century.¹⁴² This almost one-hundred-year break in Rus’ urban history interrupted the tradition of Rus’ capital cities. Moscow became the new capital of increasingly unified Rus’ lands in the fourteenth century, yet it was only in 1480 and almost thirty years after the fall of Constantinople, that Moscow under Ivan III (r. 1462–1505) broke free from Tartar control and became a power center.¹⁴³ The city was not named after the ruler nor did its architecture and urban fabric recall Constantinople or Bulgarian double-enclosure cities. Rather, Moscow resembled the old polycentric capitals of Novgorod and Pskov that were never conquered by the Tartars and that had the fortified urban core (kremlin), or the inner city, associated with the government, and surrounding areas. This concept is also relatable to the visionary ideal cities designed by Renaissance architects. Ivan III invited Italian architects to work on the Moscow Kremlin, its churches and palaces in contemporaneous Renaissance idioms possibly also emulating the surviving models from Novgorod, Vladimir, and Pskov.¹⁴⁴ Moscow developed on “seven hills” and its kremlin, set on one of the hills, acquired a triangular walled enclosure marked by the glittering domes of the churches, here only loosely reminiscent of the Constantinopolitan cityscape.

Perhaps Ivan III’s marriage to Sophia Palaeologina (1455–1503), a niece of the last Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI Dragaš (d. 1453) and thus the legitimate descendant of the Byzantine imperial dynasty, resulted both in definite Russian adherence to Byzantine Orthodoxy and Moscow’s geopolitical claim of Constantinopolitan identity as the capital of the Christian empire.¹⁴⁵ By the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the church prelates such as Zosimus, Metropolitan of Moscow (d. 1494), occasionally referred to Ivan III as the New Constantine and Moscow as the New Constantinople, New Rome, and New Jerusalem.¹⁴⁶ However, even if Moscow and its associated territory of the Muscovite principality were interchangeably mentioned as the “Third Rome,” the question of its production and perception as the successor of Rome or “Second Rome” (Constantinople) remains open also because of its political and ideological connotations in modern discourse and its ambivalent meaning in sixteenth-century Russia.¹⁴⁷

The Case of Medieval Serbian Capitals: Between Possessiveness, Belongingness, and Utopian Visions

In contrast to Bulgarian and Russian territories along major rivers, the largely mountainous terrain of the Serbian territories in a way defined a fragmented and self-contained realm, generally with a weakly developed sense of continuous urbanity. Old Roman towns such as those of Naissus (modern Niš) and Sirmium (modern Sremska Mitrovica) lost their preeminence with the development of the Byzantine Empire, which focused on the culturally and agriculturally more prosperous territories of the southeastern Balkans and Asia Minor.¹⁴⁸ As in medieval Bulgaria and Rus’, the geopolitical landscape of medieval Serbian capitals was imbued with its religious values. Judging from the textual and archaeological evidence, the Serbs accepted Christianity first in the seventh century under Emperor Heraclius and again in the 870s under Serbian prince Mutimir (ca. 850–891) during the tenure of Byzantine Emperor Basil I (r. 867–886).¹⁴⁹ By accepting the Byzantine version of Christianity almost concurrently with the Bulgarians, the Serbs developed their own Christian state that can be related to developments among the neighboring Byzantines and Bulgarians. The first Serbian capitals were religious and political centers but the archaeological evidence for qualifying these sites as capital cities is problematic.

Ras (Byzantine Arsa), near modern-day Novi Pazar, may be singled out as an early “capital” of the Serbs, where their bishopric was centered in 871 (figure 3.1).¹⁵⁰ However, almost nothing conclusive can be said about this political and religious center. On the hill of Ras, the still-standing centrally planned church of the Apostles Peter and Paul (today St. Peter’s church), archaeologically dated to the ninth century and loosely comparable in concept to the contemporaneous Round Church of Preslav, may have served as the episcopal seat, while the nearby fortification Ras-Postenje may have been the political center.¹⁵¹ A fortified earth-and-wood palisade may have functioned as a princely residence and administrative and political center in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which coincides with the rise of the Serbian Kingdom in 1217 and the autocephaly of the church in 1219.¹⁵² Yet archaeological evidence about the palace of the Serbian rulers or the distinctive functional and urban stratification common in other aforementioned capital cities is insufficient.

Other Serbian capitals, as they may be referred to by extension from textual sources, were conquered old Byzantine towns, such as Prizren or Skopje, or relatively small-scale fortifications built anew without clear urban stratification, such as fourteenth-century Kruševac (figure 3.1).¹⁵³ Important Byzantine centers such as Skopje, which the Serbs officially proclaimed their capital, may have provided the Serbs with indirect knowledge about the Constantinopolitan imperial concept of the capital city with its defined social and architectural texture. However, almost nothing of the archaeological evidence of Skopje as the capital (1346–1392) under the short-lived Empire of “Serbs and Greeks” founded by Stefan Uroš Dušan (r. 1331–1355) remains. The Serbs visited Constantinople and wrote about it as the “glorious”¹⁵⁴ city after its fall in 1204.¹⁵⁵ In contrast to medieval Bulgarians and Rus’, in their texts, Serbs seldom compared Constantinople to New Rome.

There is not enough evidence about the Serbian understanding of the capital city, and in general about any difference between the capital and a town. Seemingly every well-built and fortified enclosure was called grad, be it a town, a fortification, or a monastery.¹⁵⁶ Evidence, or rather lack thereof, suggests that most likely the Serbian rulers—from the ninth century when they essentially lived in tribal organization through their formation of a kingdom in the thirteenth century and the short-lived empire of “Serbs and Greeks” in the late fourteenth century—would reside in locations outside major religious and political centers, where not a single palatial residence has been recovered. It may even be suggested that the center of authority was above all a religious one, thus refocusing Serbs on their monastic foundations imbued with notions of a Heavenly Jerusalem, rather than on the dwellings where they lived. This hypothesis raises the question whether a capital as the central locale of authority should be always understood as a capital city, a question that goes beyond the framework of this study.

As a result, it may be argued that the Serbs developed their own sense of statehood and the role of the capital city as an administrative, economic, religious, and cultural center in the fifteenth century, when Despot Stefan Lazarević (1374–1427) proclaimed Belgrade capital of the Serbian state in 1405. Belgrade is an ancient site at the confluence of two major rivers, the Sava and the Danube, on the very edge between the Balkans and central Europe. As a frontier fortification, Belgrade changed its rulers countless times. By the twelfth century, Byzantine Belgrade was an important fortified town and like Constantinople it was protected by the Mother of God.¹⁵⁷ Contemporary Greek and Latin sources designated Belgrade as polis and civitas, respectively. They described it as a fortified city with agricultural land in the immediate surroundings, and emphasized its geostrategic, administrative, religious, and cultural importance in the Balkans.¹⁵⁸ At some point before 1142, the city was under the direct jurisdiction of the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate.¹⁵⁹ In 1284 Serbian King Dragutin (d. 1316) and his Queen Catherine (Katelina) of Hungary established their court in the city.¹⁶⁰ Belgrade, however, officially became the capital of the Serbs under Serbian Despot Stefan Lazarević, who acquired the city from the King of Hungary and later Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund of Luxemburg (1368–1437).

Bulgarian scholar Constantine the Philosopher (b. ca. 1380–d. after 1431), the biographer of Despot Stefan Lazarević, speaks of Belgrade as “the city on seven hills (vrhs),”¹⁶¹ on the biblical river Pishon (making reference to the Danube) with two islands.¹⁶² Biblical references to Jerusalem and its metonym Sion are given both in general theological terms and in terms of a sacred topography of “the city in the high,” with the appropriate urban and natural landscapes that mark the seven hills of the city. Comparing himself to a new apostle and Emperor Constantine I — a tradition used by Serbian rulers since the thirteenth century — Despot Stefan Lazarević reveals unprecedented interest in capital cities and their geopolitical significance across time and various cultures. He speaks of a wide array of great capitals including Babylon, Troy, Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Vize (Bizye), Serdica (modern Sofia), and above all Jerusalem, the capital city of King David as described in the Bible and theological texts.¹⁶³ Familiar with the concept of historical capitals—Constantinople—“The City of Constantine” and Rome—“Old Rome”¹⁶⁴—as the Ottoman vassal he was, he was deeply aware of the shifting political and religious powers in the Balkans, the unavoidable fall of Constantinople, and the spread of Islam. This may account for the pervasive references to Belgrade as the “New Jerusalem.” Despot Stefan Lazarević rebuilt Belgrade as an essentially utopian Christian capital, devoid of a clearly definable political system, as the governing laws focused on Serbian hereditary tradition and oscillated between Byzantine Christian Orthodox and Hungarian Roman Catholic sources.¹⁶⁵

Belgrade was envisioned as the material and spiritual stronghold of Orthodox Christianity, following the semantic image of the Christian Constantinople. Financially supported by rich silver production in Serbia, Despot Stefan Lazarević enlarged Belgrade from a Byzantine fortification of 1.6 ha to a capital city with a fortified enclosure and dependent area of approximately 15 ha.¹⁶⁶ The city essentially consisted of three parts: the upper city, the lower city with the safe harbor guarded by chains like the Golden Horn in Constantinople, and the fortified citadel on the top of the hill with the Despot’s residence (figure 3.14). In the lower town, the Despot built the Episcopal palace and rebuilt the Belgrade cathedral with a prominently raised dome, visible from afar.¹⁶⁷ The cathedral, dedicated to the Mother of God, treasured the miraculous icon of the Mother of God, the palladium of medieval Belgrade,¹⁶⁸ the reliquary with the hand of Emperor Constantine I, and the relics of Saint Empress Theophano (d. 897) and Saint Petka—Paraskeva of the Balkans (11th c), these last relics brought from Veliko Tŭrnovo to Belgrade.¹⁶⁹ The sacred relics emphasized the imperial importance of the city and its associative spiritual geopolitics with Constantinople.¹⁷⁰ Other churches and civic buildings were built, and educated and wealthy citizens were brought to the city and exempted from taxes. The sudden death of Despot Stefan Lazarević, still childless in 1427, combined with an event in the Belgrade cathedral, where reportedly all the icons from the iconostasis were miraculously lifted into the air, were taken as omens and understood by the Serbs as the announcement of the fall of Orthodox Belgrade.¹⁷¹ Indeed, Despot Stefan Lazarević’s nephew and adopted son Djuradj (George) Branković was not recognized as a legitimate heir, and in 1427 Belgrade was returned to the Hungarians. The capital remained Christian but was now ruled by the Western and Hussite “heretics” who venerated “paper icons,” as they were discussed by Constantine the Philosopher.¹⁷² A hundred years later, in 1521, the city fell to the Ottoman Turks.

Figure 3.14. Belgrade. (Drawing by Jelena Bogdanović)

Despot Djuradj Branković (r. 1427–1456), deemed by contemporaries the richest monarch in all of Europe because of Serbia’s enormous production of silver and gold, was left without a capital. Following the example of his uncle, Djuradj Branković, who was married to a Byzantine princess Eirine Kantakouzene (ca. 1400–1457), rushed to build a new Orthodox capital within the shrinking Serbian state and, in general, the shrinking Christian territories in the Balkans. Similar to the Vladimir-Bogolyubovo urban phenomenon of a twin-city capital but now built under completely different historical circumstances, Smederevo was established near Belgrade (figure 3.1).¹⁷³ Built at the triangular confluence of the Danube and Jezava Rivers along the major ancient road, Smederevo, the last capital of medieval Serbia and one of the largest concurrent medieval towns in southeastern Europe, was only some 10 ha in size (figure 3.15). It was a miniature copy of Constantinople; actually some 140 times smaller than Constantinople (figure 3.9).¹⁷⁴ The city was built in two phases and incorporated the essential features of the semantic image of Constantinople as the capital city, reducing to a singular construction selected constitutional, administrative, civic, religious, and ceremonial aspects. In the first phase (1428–1430), the “small town” (figure 3.16) was built at the very confluence of the rivers as a triangular citadel—containing the Despot’s residence, grand hall, bath, mint, library, and granary—enclosed by a water-filled moat and thus literally and symbolically making it an island. In the second phase (1430–1439), the “big town” was enclosed by massive triangular fortifications. Here the almost perfect triangular shape of the city was achieved because of the miniature scale of the city, which was built from scratch in the leveled terrain.

Figure 3.15. Smederevo. (Drawing by Jelena Bogdanović)

Figure 3.16. Small Town, Smederevo. (Photograph by Aleksandar Brendjan from a commercial postcard)

Smederevo was built by builders contracted by Eirine’s older brother, George Kantakouzenos, a royal figure about whom little is known but who presumably also served as an architect.¹⁷⁵ This may also account for the copious references to Constantinopolitan architecture: its triangular shape; the polychrome use of stone-and-brick building techniques with decorative brick patterns comparable to the Constantinopolitan technique; monumental brick inscriptions on towers that combined Christian symbols and historical references to the foundations of the city by the faithful ruler (figure 3.17); and the inclusion of monumental marble statues and reliefs into the thickness of the palace walls (figure 3.18).¹⁷⁶ In 1453, just after the fall of Constantinople, the relics of St. Luke, originally kept in the Constantinopolitan church of the Holy Apostles, were ceremonially transferred to Smederevo,¹⁷⁷ thus completing the relational Constantinopolitan spiritual landscape in this new capital.

Figure 3.17. The dedicatory inscription from the tower of Small Town, Smederevo. Bellow the massive Cross of Jesus Christ Victorious, the inscription in Old Slavonic reads approximately “Blessed by Jesus Christ, faithful Despot Djurdje, the ruler of Serbs and Zeta, built this town in 1430.” The size of the inscription is more than 10 m (30 feet) in length. (Photograph by Jelena Bogdanović)

Figure 3.18. Building techniques of the city walls in Smederevo and Constantinople. (Photograph by Jelena Bogdanović)

Smederevo was a utopian construct from the very start. Built as an important political and religious center at the time when Constantinople was increasingly losing its position as the Christian capital, Smederevo was a very short-lived capital city. It fell to the Ottoman Turks first in 1439 (just when the city was finished), and then again in 1454, a year after the fall of Constantinople. Built in only ten years under harsh conditions coupled with forced labor, its ruler, married to a Byzantine princess, envisioned it as new Constantinople and the stronghold of Christianity in the mid-fifteenth-century Balkans. However, common people experienced Smederevo as an imposed foreign concept of both capital and statehood; as such, it was destined for failure. The Byzantine princess Eirine was singled out as the source of all misfortune and the eventual fall of the Serbian state to the Ottoman Turks. In the vernacular tradition, Greek Eirine was nicknamed “damned Eirine” (“prokleta Jerina”) and henceforth epitomized the regional lore of a Babylonian tower and misunderstanding. Here, in the Serbian context, “damned Eirine” signified the failure to build strongholds, at the subsequent cost of human lives.¹⁷⁸

Conclusions: From Geopolitical to Geo-Religious Space

This essay highlights how Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, developed from a Roman imperial construct to a unique medieval capital. Once it became the center of Orthodox Christianity, Constantinopolitan Christian associations were frequently combined with notions of the sacred topography of Jerusalem, the ancient capital of King David, and Heavenly Jerusalem, thus making potent references to a kind of dual citizenship in both earthly and heavenly realms. These rhetorical and spiritual comparisons of the capital city with Jerusalem changed the understanding of the capital city within strict power relations and precisely defined political systems. Such developed dual political and religious notions about Constantinople remained pervasive in emerging Christian capitals in eastern Europe.

The capitals of medieval Bulgaria, Rus’, and Serbia were complimentary replicas of Constantinople as they maintained strong spiritual geopolitical associations with Constantinople as a prototype of the “ideal Christian capital.” These associations were also physical, but never only physical. The comparisons with Rome as the ultimate archetype of the capital city for these new medieval capitals, however, were almost never explicit but rather metaphorical, and stemmed from texts translated from Greek into Old Church Slavonic. After all, archetypical Rome was both historically and culturally detached from the emerging medieval states of eastern Europe. More important, the parameters that would define the capital city by that time had shifted from geopolitical to geo-religious factors, with a focus on an ordained notion of the “Christian capital.”

Built near major routes along big rivers and (in Serbia and Bulgaria) along the ancient Roman road network, medieval capitals in eastern Europe in a way recreated the polycentric Roman commonwealth under the umbrella of Christian Constantinople and shared cultural values. Similar to Tetrarchic capitals, these new medieval capitals also acquired the title polis, centered on that term’s long-lived meaning of imperial and religious unity within city and state.¹⁷⁹ Yet, new capitals varied in size, level of urban stratification, and associated architecture. The city walls and the domed churches, often done in the Constantinopolitan idiom, became generic architectural features of these novel capitals, while their physical articulation was not generic. Memorable elements of new capitals also depended on the local perception of Constantinople and on the local environments within which they were built. Thus, sometimes the capital developed within military fortifications of older Byzantine administrative and religious centers, as in Pliska, Skopje, and Ohrid. Sometimes capitals started from the fortified residence of the local ruler, as in Kiev and Kruševac, and in still other cases there is no archaeological evidence of a governmental or ruler’s presence, as in Ras. However, the role of the ruler as the perceived creator of a capital remained pervasive.

Occasionally, capitals developed from older multicultural towns like Novgorod and Belgrade, while some capitals were deliberately planned from scratch, as in case of Smederevo and Constantinople itself. A particular phenomenon is the unusual spatial and authority arrangements of “twin-capitals,” as in the cases of Vladimir-Bogolyubovo and Belgrade-Smederevo. Even if the origins and displays of capitals differed so broadly, including the most obvious fact that topography and morphology of a fortified town differed from a castle, once the site developed as a capital it was called polis, thus reaffirming its status as the capital city.¹⁸⁰ Domical churches raised on the hill, containing Christian relics and miraculous icons, were a dominant and unifying theme in the definition of the spiritual and geopolitical landscapes of the capitals not only physically but also rhetorically. This shifted the perception of the capital from the actual city to the image of the city. The historical development of Byzantine literature further confirms this change in the perception of capitals from the ekphratic descriptions and beholding of the city to the beholding of a church and Heavenly Jerusalem.¹⁸¹

The reasons for the specific urban textures of the new capitals as the result of their production as actual spaces are complex. Based on Smith’s theoretical framework, it is possible that the first memorable images the visitors formed when approaching Constantinople would result in repetitive emphasis on specific details with invested meanings, such as massive fortification walls, as in the Bulgarian and Serbian capitals, or highly raised metal-tiled roofs of prominent structures, as in the Russian and some Bulgarian examples. Frequently, Bulgarian and Serbian capitals reveal recognizable Constantinopolitan building idioms, such as the use of brick domes and wall textures of alternating bands of brick and stone, occasionally with embedded inscriptions and sculptural reliefs, which in their own right became architectural rhetorical devices of capital cities. In medieval Rus’, despite the fact that Byzantine builders participated in early Kievan projects, the stylistic elements of Constantinopolitan architecture were heavily transformed through numerous building idioms. This is most obviously seen in the use of sparkling golden domes raised high above enormous churches different in size, type, and building solutions to those in contemporaneous Constantinople.

Another connecting thread in understanding the relational topography of capital cities and the perception of the image of the capital city is encountered within the texts translated from Greek into Old Church Slavonic that were common to Bulgarians, Rus’, and Serbs, who by extension often discussed their cities as physical and conceptual copies of Constantinople, the glorious city of Constantine. The image of the City as the ultimate model for these new capitals was not the city of Constantine but its historical development at least five hundred years later. The longue durée of historical structures that marked the City departed from its historical reality since its inceptions: the City of Constantine did not have any domed church, it initially had twelve and not fourteen administrative regions, and only after Theodosius’s massive fortifications and land-works did it enclose seven hills (figure 3.3).¹⁸² These empirical references were not crucial for the memorable image of the City and the cultural values it represented. Even if the creators of the topography of the emerging capitals in territories of eastern Europe could not exactly reproduce the Constantinopolitan landscape—topographically or historically—this was not their intention anyway. The sixteenth-century fresco from the Romanian monastery of Moldoviţa shows, for example, Constantinople with eight hills (figure 3.8). What mattered was the site-related combination of natural and human-made landscapes defined by city walls, closely intertwined with omnipotent Christian relics and icons that stood for the semantic image of the Capital. This semantic image could not be separated from its nonvisual, nonverbal, and performative aspects, as the ceremonies of the consecration of Tŭrnovo and Smederevo suggest. Memorable elements of the city fabric closely intertwined with rituals performed within them were crucial for the site-related understanding of the Constantinopolitan landscape. The Constantinopolitan landscape was never literally repeated nor did it provide any kind of chronological-historical developmental thread for the “universal” capital city. Rather, along with relational landscapes of other emerging Christian capitals, the Constantinopolitan landscape expanded upon the conspicuous map of the cultural landscape of the Christian commonwealth based on shared concepts and values and the idiosyncratic differences of various peoples in the Balkans and eastern Europe analyzed here.