CONSTANTINOPLE AND THE EASTERN EMPIREThe population of the city crowded together and rioted violently on the
grounds that something alien had been added to the Christian faith. There
was uproar in the palace which caused the city prefect Plato to run in,
fl ee and hide from the people’s anger. The rioters set up a chant, ‘A new
emperor for the Roman state’, and went off to the residence of the ex-
prefect Marinus the Syrian, burned his house and plundered everything
he had, since they could not fi nd him. ... They found an eastern monk in
the house whom they seized and killed, and then, carrying his head on a
pole, they chanted, ‘Here is the enemy of the Trinity’. They went to the
residence of Juliana, a patrician of the most illustrious rank, and chanted
for her husband, Areobindus, to be emperor of the Roman state.
(John Malalas, Chronicle, trans. Jeffreys, 228)Emperor and cityThe obscure army offi cer Marcian (450–57) succeeded Theodosius II in a
political settlement ratifi ed by his marriage to Pulcheria. He proved to be
a careful and competent ruler, but he left no heir, and the succession was
decided by the powerful head of the army, Aspar, in favour of Leo (457–74),
who was on his staff.
The imperial succession always remained unstable, never having been com-
pletely formalized since the early empire. When, as on this occasion, there
was no direct heir, it was left to the army (or those elements nearest to the
centre of power) and the senate to settle the matter; the religious role of the
patriarch, or bishop of Constantinople, only came to be formally recognized
from the late fi fth century on. However, popular assent, in practice that of
the people of Constantinople, was also an important factor. In such a situ-
ation too much was left to chance, especially when the possibility of rioting
was ever-present. It is probably no coincidence that we now begin to have
records of something like a formal inauguration procedure, or that the main
elements of this were taken from military custom.^38 Leo was invested with the
torque, a military collar, in the imperial box in the Hippodrome in full view of
the soldiers and people, and then raised on a shield in an improbably military
ceremony, only then putting on an imperial diadem. The patriarch was also
involved, but there was as yet no religious crowning as such, or anointing,
or any of the trappings associated with medieval coronations, though by the
seventh century the ceremony had moved to a church setting.
Imperial inaugurations and many other public occasions were accompa-
nied by the shouting of acclamations by the crowd. These might be spontane-
ous, perhaps like the acclamations at Edessa in the context of Ephesus II (a
mixture of the patriotic and the formulaic, and recorded as an offi cial record)
or very formal and even more repetitive, as with the acclamations of the sen-
ate at the reception of the Theodosian Code, which are faithfully recorded in
the documentation; this was to become a feature of later Byzantine court cer-
emonial. They often took the form of simple cries of ‘long live the emperor’