THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYJustinian’s ‘Great Church’ of St Sophia still stands in Istanbul where it was
dedicated in 535 to replace the earlier building on the site destroyed by fi re in
the Nika revolt of 532 (Chapter 5). The massive dome we now see was dedi-
cated at Epiphany, 563, after the original had collapsed due to an earthquake
in 558. St Sophia was justifi ably regarded by contemporaries as a masterpiece
of engineering and design, and praised in a prose description in Procopius’s
Buildings and a hexameter panegyric by the poet Paul the Silentiary. Justinian’s
St Sophia was paralleled on a smaller scale elsewhere, for instance at Edessa
(Urfa in eastern Turkey), where the existing church was rebuilt in the sixth
century and also dedicated to the Holy Wisdom.^22 The more classical basilical
form gradually gave way to the cross-in-square pattern familiar from Byzan-
tine churches, whose architecture developed in step with the development of
orthodox liturgy. In the fi fth and sixth centuries, the public nature of these
buildings and the prestige they brought to their builders, emperors or bishops
alike is very apparent; another huge church, dedicated to St Polyeuktos and
recently excavated, was built at Constantinople very shortly before St Sophia
by Anicia Juliana, a lady from one of the very highest aristocratic families,
evidently in direct rivalry with Justinian. Gregory of Tours tells how the gold
ceiling of St Polyeuktos was the result of Anicia Juliana’s attempt to outwit the
emperor’s designs on her fortune by using it up fi rst on church decoration.^23
Her church was sumptuously decorated, with a gold ceiling and elaborately
inlaid marble columns, and adorned with a seventy-six-line verse inscription
round the nave, in which she celebrated the magnifi cence of her donation. To
judge from a later account of its construction, Justinian’s St Sophia, built so
soon afterwards, was designed to outdo this church.
However, these important urban churches were only part of the story: there
were also many hundreds of other, less well-known churches, not so spectac-
ular, but just as infl uential locally in illustrating the impact of Christianity. A
typical small sixth-century urban centre might have several, and many towns
had what now seems an extraordinary number. Their construction did not
follow need in terms of population size; rather, building or restoring a church
was often, as in the case of the Byzantine churches restored and altered dur-
ing the Vandal and Byzantine period on North African sites such as Sbeitla
in Tunisia, a measure of local prestige, and might commemorate a particular
saint and attract large numbers for associated festivals or liturgies. Expendi-
ture by local well-to-do families which had gone in classical times towards the
building or restoration of baths, stoas and other public buildings, was now
diverted into churches and their furnishings. This is evident, for example, as
late as the seventh century in parts of Syria, where even small village churches
possessed elaborate collections of silver plate for liturgical use; these would
consist of liturgical vessels, sometimes elaborately decorated with biblical
or other scenes such as the communion of the apostles, and frequently with
inscriptions giving the names of the donors, in simple formulae such as this
one from a silver lampstand in the Kaper Koraon treasure, from a village east
of Chalcis: