4 - Symbolic Self-Coronations in Byzantium

Summary

The fourth chapter analyses what scholars have called ‘symbolic’ or ‘heavenly’ coronations in Byzantium. With the expansion of Christianity throughout the Mediterranean, self-coronation and the mediation of priests became a point of divergence. Emperors in Christian Byzantium are to be crowned by the patriarchs in ritual practice, but they are frequently crowned by the iconographic representation of the ‘hand of God’. This chapter engages in a comparative analysis of the reality of church intervention in the real performative ceremony of the imperial coronation and the imaginative fiction of the crowning of the emperor directly by Christ and his angels and saints, as established in some iconographic representations. In Byzantium, imperial art was given the task of translating into a visual and symbolic – but not necessarily referential – language the values and ideology that prevailed in each dynasty concerning the source of its power.