Fashioning Sixth-Century Constantinople

The Buildings is a sixth-century text by Prokopios of Kaisareia (Caesarea Maritima) on the building works attributed to the eastern Roman emperor Justinian I (r. 527–65 CE), extolling the virtues of good rulership through praise of architecture. Book I centres on the imperial capital Constantinople: rich in its use of rhetoric and aesthetics, it portrays the emperor as a builder-patron, but also portrays the city itself as a place of beauty and delight to its inhabitants. Several of the buildings described in Book I – such as Hagia Sophia – are extant today; they and others are also documented in a range of historical sources that allow us to compare Prokopios’s account with that of his contemporaries, and to observe the legacy and changing uses of the spaces he describes into the Middle Ages.

Fashioning Sixth-Century Constantinople presents an all-new English translation of Book I paired with a revised edition of the Greek text. It is accompanied by a detailed interdisciplinary commentary, informed by the respective disciplines of philology, history, archaeology and art history, but bringing a new perspective through cross-disciplinary collaboration, especially on points of technical and topographical descriptions, aiming at the most comprehensive and up-to-date commentary of the text.

This book will appeal to scholars and students of Byzantine literature, history, art and archaeology, as well as those interested in the florescence of Byzantine Constantinople.

This volume originates in the project ‘Procopius and the Language of Buildings’ (2018–2022), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and hosted by the Universities of Mainz and Halle-Wittenberg.

Max Ritter is an assistant professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice. He received his PhD in Byzantine Studies from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, where he later continued as a postdoctoral researcher. He also held two research fellowships in Istanbul, which allowed him to engage deeply with the city’s historical landscape and integrate the perspectives of local scholars into this book. His research focuses on building culture and lived religion in Byzantium, drawing on both textual sources and material evidence. Most recently, his research shifted towards Byzantine conceptions of nature, notably focusing on marine environments.

Elodie Turquois completed a doctorate in Classical Languages and Literature from the University of Oxford on materiality and visuality in Prokopios of Kaisareia and has published widely on Prokopios and the Buildings. She is an independent researcher whose work explores Late Antique literary aesthetics, the manuscript transmission of the Buildings; she uses narratology, stylistics and reception theory to approach ancient texts. Her most recent research investigates the reception of Constantinople and its late antique tradition in the writings of sixteenth-century French travellers.

Marlena Whiting has a doctorate in Late Antique Archaeology from the University of Oxford, with a specialism in travel infrastructure and the built environment of monasticism and pilgrimage. Currently a researcher and lecturer at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, she has held visiting fellowships at CBRL Amman and ANAMED in Istanbul, and has worked on archaeological projects in Jordan, Syria and Spain. Her research applies interdisciplinary approaches from social sciences (network analysis, spatial access theory) to material and textual evidence to understand historical contexts from a phenomenological perspective, with a focus on religious life and gendered lived experience.