The Great Palace of Constantinople, a sprawling building complex begun under
Constantine, was expanded and beautified under his successors. (See Map 4.1.) Far
more than the symbolic emplacement of imperial power, it was the central command
post of the empire. Servants, slaves, and grooms; top courtiers and learned
clergymen; cousins, siblings, and hangers-on of the emperor and empress lived within
its walls. Other courtiers—civil servants, officials, scholars, military men, advisers,
and other dependents—lived as near to the palace as they could manage. They were
“on call” at every hour. The emperor had only to give short notice and all assembled
for impromptu but nevertheless highly choreographed ceremonies. These were in
themselves instruments of power; the emperors manipulated courtly formalities to
indicate new favorites or to signal displeasure.
The court was mainly a male preserve, but there were powerful women at the
Great Palace as well. Consider Zoe (d.1050), the daughter of Constantine VIII.
Contemporaries acknowledged her right to rule through her imperial blood. But they
were happier when she was married, her blood-right legitimizing the rule of her
husband. In most cases, though, the emperors themselves boasted the hereditary
bloodline, and their wives were the ones to marry into the imperial family. In that
case the empress normally could exercise power only as a widow acting on behalf of
her children.
There was also a “third gender” at the Great Palace: eunuchs—men who had
been castrated, normally as children, and raised to be teachers, doctors, or guardians
of the women at court. Their status began to rise in the tenth century. Originally
foreigners, they were increasingly recruited from the educated upper classes in the
Byzantine Empire itself. In addition to their duties in the women’s quarter of the
palace, some of them accompanied the emperor during his most sacred and
vulnerable moments—when he removed his crown; when he participated in religious
ceremonies; even when he dreamed, at night. They hovered by his throne, like the
angels flanking Mary in the diptych panel in Plate 2.1 on p. 46. No one, it was
thought, was as faithful, trustworthy, or spiritually pure as a eunuch.
One tenth-century courtier complained that the imperial palace was rife with
“suspicion, jealousy, fear, flattery, servility, ignorance, deceit, softness, languor,
insolence, senselessness, peevishness, slander, and other impurities and filth.”^1
Perhaps so; but it also assiduously cultivated the opposite image—of perfect, stable,
eternal order. The emperor wore the finest silks, decorated with gold. In artistic
representations, he was the largest figure. Sometimes he was shown seated on a high
throne with admiring officials beneath him. At other times he stood, as in Plate 4.1,
