16 - Shadowy Past and Menacing Future

Summary

The physical destruction of the bronze horseman did not cause it to vanish from the Ottoman imperial imagination. Key sixteenth-century Ottoman manuscripts testify to its afterlife as a curious artefact and historical marvel. Even though the bronze horseman lost its association with Justinian, it continued to be seen as an important symbol of the pre-Ottoman past. Its physical absence could even magnify its stature. In the fascinating illustrated version of the prophetic manuscript of Al-Bistami's “Translation of the key to the comprehensive prognostication,” the reader encounters the horseman among a diachronic, curated display of the city’s monumental wonders: Hagia Sophia, the obelisk of Theodosios, the serpent column, and the masonry obelisk. They shared pre-Ottoman origins, they stood in the spaces of power associated with Byzantine culture, and they exercised power over the contemporary Ottoman imagination. Justinian’s monument stood for a discursively complicated and inconvenient past. Even though its physical presence was eliminated, its memory could not be completely erased. It continued to haunt Ottoman imagination in narratives of wonders and apocalyptic scenarios, populating an unnerving landscape of a marvelous foreign past, which lurked everywhere in the great city.