A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
chapter nineteen
In his vivid description of the marble-clad interior of Justinian’s sixth-century church
of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, courtier and poet Paul the Silentiary casts its walls
and pavement as a landscape of marble meadows, and stresses the varied and distant
origins and visual effects of the materials (Figure 19.1).
Quarried from such diverse sites as Laconia and Lydia, the variegated slabs of mar-
ble create an expansive ecology for the author in which stone, warmed by the golden
light of the Libyan sun on the Moorish hills, is set alongside that poured forth from
deep icy Celtic crags as well as porphyry from the Nile valley (Mango, 1972: 85–86).
Such a description serves to underscore the vastness of the Byzantine emperor’s reach
and sway by suggesting his ability to command for his capital on the Bosphoros a vast
array of raw materials from throughout the known world. Imperial terrestrial author-
ity is thus evocatively constructed through an ecological landscape of materiality. The
adumbration of the varied origins and characteristics of the Great Church’s marble
further suggests something of the “Mediterraneanness” of this building project.
Though Byzantine in conception and design—Hagia Sophia is heralded as the apex of
the eastern achievement in architecture—its facture is understood to index materially
the contours of the sixth-century empire, with marble unearthed from within the real
imperial borders, and also from Byzantium’s imaginary vision of its empire that was
thought to encompass the wider Mediterranean world.
To reassess a monument such as Hagia Sophia as an example of “Mediterranean”
art would be to cast an eye to the micro-ecological level of interpretation—that is, to
attach meaning to the flows of raw materials, trade routes, labor, and technologies
across a wide and diverse terrain, as Paul the Silentiary’s text suggests. Drawing on the
understanding of Mediterranean history as the combination of fragmentation or eco-
logical diversity on the one hand and a high degree of connectivity on the other, as
outlined in Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s Corrupting Sea, the interpreta-
tion of such monuments as “Mediterranean” attends to the relationship between the
micro-ecological level and broader networks of flow or mobilization. By extension,
the Mediterranean can thus be seen as a methodology for art history, this chapter
visual Culture
cecily J. HilSdale