The Byzantine citizen would to the very end believe that his empire was founded on a magnificent Idea—the creation of empire as an expression of Divine Will.

The Genius of Byzantium: 

Reflections on a Forgotten Empire

by Marcia Christoff-Kurapovna

“Le grand absent—c’est l’Empire”

C. Dufour,Constantinople Imaginaire

Everywhere Western man longs for Constantinople and nowhere has he any idea how to find her. To do so is to reclaim, at last, the meaning of an empire that once defined a hierarchy of imagination long ago abandoned by our civilization; of an eleven-century political, religious and cultural struggle that sought to reconcile Christianity and Antiquity, transforming the Western spirit into a brilliant battleground between Latin and Greek, Augustus and Basileus, reason and faith, ancient and modern. Yet to unearth this Byzantium, this “heaven of the human mind”, as Yeats dreamed her, is not to go searching through histories and legends, glorious ruins or immortal poems. It is, instead, to be found retracing the evolution of a new and profound conflict in Western thought that began with the mysterious conversion of the first Constantine and ended, at the gates of the marble and gold City called ‘the world’s desire’ by the sons of that city, with the unconquerable faith of the last Constantine—himself heir to the great Palaiologoi who resurrected the dormant title of Hellene to describe their own noble line of descent.

No Byzantine ever referred to himself as Byzantine—it was ‘Roman’ all the way. It was, in fact, the librarian of the wealthy 16th century Fugger family, Hieronymous Wolf, who coined the term “Byzantium”; its common usage, in turn, taking root only as of the early 20th century among the gentleman-scholars of Oxford University—so intrigued, as they were, by the empire’s fall from grace and its even harder fall from Memory. Byzantium’s aura remained singular, unique and unmistakeable down the centuries after its collapse. “Constantinople had been left naked and desolate without a prince or a people”, wrote Edward Gibbon of the fateful events of May 29, 1453 in the 68th—and may I add, absolutely spellbinding—chapter of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “But she could not be despoiled, and the incomparable genius of the place will ever triumph over the accidents of time and fortune”. Even the Ottomans referred to ‘Constantinople’ in their official documents until 1923, no doubt aware of the power and beauty that the monumental civitas dei could still evoke—though by then she was nowhere, no more, to be lived.

But when we set out to locate this forgotten world, such definitions mean little because we no longer recognize their significance. There is no literature tempting us back slowly, chapter by century, into the center of Byzantium’s mysterium magnum that once imposed itself upon the world.


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