13 - A Timeless Ideal: Constantinople in Slavonic Imagination of the Fourteenth–Fifteenth Centuries

Summary

Before and after the fall of the Byzantine capital in 1453, Orthodox Slavic rulers imagined Constantinople as an ideal imperial capital and an icon of Orthodox empire. While the physical city was dramatically declining in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it remained iconic. An imperial ideal was materialized in the ensemble of two architectural monuments – Hagia Sophia and the horseman. Hagia Sophia and the horseman were the interconnected memory sites of Constantinople. Their gigantic size and physical proximity united them as breathtaking manifestations of a sacralized Orthodox capital of a bygone age. Though this image was promoted by Palaiologan fundraising campaigns of the fourteenth century, it continued to flourish in Slavic lands long after Byzantium ceased to exist. By analyzing the illustrated history created for Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria in the mid-fourteenth century, the narratives of Russian pilgrims and church officials, and the Slavic version of the Narrative on the Construction of Hagia Sophia, I demonstrate how Slavic Orthodox rulers constructed an image of a timeless, sacred city. While for Ivan Alexander Constantinople was a political, historical place, for Russian observers Constantinople became a timeless, sacral entity.