Postscript: the Horseman’s Debut in Print

Summary

Though the horseman disappeared from view in Istanbul around the time that the technology of printing was beginning to spread, the monument soon made an auspicious debut in print culture. It appeared in four illustrations of a bestseller of the early print era, the World Chronicle of Hartmann Schedel. One of these images depicts a tempest that purportedly struck Constantinople in the year 1490. Schedel deliberately paired the horseman’s "destruction" with the meteorite of Ensisheim in order to point to a prophetic future known to God. The image of Constantinople was there to signal that in the coming, final, seventh stage of human history, Christianity would triumph and the Turks would be devastated. When an unauthorized version of the Schedel World Chronicle was produced in Augsburg in 1500, the horseman was absent in the cityscape on the page describing the Ottoman conquest of the city. Copies of Buondelmonti’s view of Constantinople also started to omit the rider from its pillar. One of these images was published by Charles du Fresne Du Cange, the founding father of Byzantine studies, as the frontispiece to his groundbreaking two-volume Historia Byzantina. The notion that Justinian’s column was just another column became hegemonic in Byzantine studies.