Magdalino, Paul

emeritus professor, University of St Andrews

Constantinople as seen by its inhabitants — Paul Magdalino

Andrea Cirla · Sep 28, 2025 · partial coverage

• Constantinople
• Byzantium
• Paul Magdalino
• urban memory
• *Patria*
• Theodore Metochites
• *Byzantios*
• panegyric
• Justinian
• prophecy
• historiated columns
• late antiquity

Coverage note: full (about thirty-six minutes; YouTube auto-captions, mostly accurate, with a few garbled names such as Christodorus and Metochites)

Core ideas

Two foundation narratives, and the pagan one. The accounts of Constantinople's foundation by Constantine are surprisingly few and late. Christian ones (Eusebius, Sozomen, Socrates) mention churches in passing; non-Christian ones (Malalas, Zosimus) mention temples. All four major surviving accounts are passages in larger histories. Magdalino focuses on the pagan narrative because it is harder to reconstruct, probably because of censorship under Justinian, and because it reflects a conscious rediscovery of the city's Greek and pre-Christian roots by intellectuals around 500: after the end of the Western Empire in 476, a need to make Constantinople predestined to take Rome's place, and to give it a Greek cultural heritage on a par with Antioch, Alexandria and Athens, under a friendly emperor, Anastasius. The lost Patria of Constantinople of Christodorus of Koptos (twelve books of epic verse) probably first put it together; the genre of patria disappears under Justin I and Justinian.

Memorial and aesthetic modes. Magdalino distinguishes two ways of writing about the city: "One looks for identities and meanings. The other looks at appearances and impressions", corresponding to chronicles and patria texts (7th-10th century, stories about monuments, no comment on beauty) versus rhetorical praise (10th-15th, with kallos and megethos), contrasted in the Parastaseis and the Patria with Choniates's De signis and Metochites' Byzantios. He then gives three illustrations: prophecies of the city's doom (the sea engulfing it, echoing Babylon in Revelation, in the vision recorded by Malalas and in the life of Andrew the Fool); the historiated columns of Theodosius and Arcadius read as visual predictions of barbarian conquest; and the "haunting" of ruined monuments (bomb-site-like gaps, and spirits, stoicheia, in standing ones). The guides, tourists and guidebooks of the city can only be inferred, apart from imperial tours meant to awe visitors with Hagia Sophia, the Hippodrome and the palace relics.

Why so few panegyrics, and Metochites. The city was so preeminent that no one gained by praising it, so dedicated panegyrics are rare until after the loss in 1204 and recovery in 1261, when its inhabitants "learned not to take it for granted"; the habit revived first at Nicaea. Theodore Metochites, the richest man and chief minister under Andronikos II (1305-1328), restorer of the Chora monastery, wrote the long and difficult Byzantios. It echoes Libanius's Antiochikos, makes a passing reference to the emperor and omits the palace, provinces and armies. Its "most original contribution to literature and probably its main purpose is to praise Constantinople as the perfect urban environment in which it is possible for the intellectual to enjoy an ideal existence balanced between pure contemplation and busy public activity", an ideal reflecting his own double life. The city is "the common theater of the whole world", a place where one can be a spectator of all humanity and also an actor. In this sense, Metochites "liberates" Constantinople from imperial power, from its own history and from the bleak fourteenth century. Magdalino's next project is a translation of the memoirs of an adventurous Pontic businessman, the great-uncle of Ruth Macrides.

Excerpts