The Late Byzantine period (1261–1453) is marked by a paradoxical discrepancy between economic weakness and cultural strength. The apparent enigma can be resolved by recognizing that later Byzantine diplomatic strategies, despite or because of diminishing political advantage, relied on an increasingly desirable cultural and artistic heritage. This book reassesses the role of the visual arts in this era by examining the imperial image and the gift as reconceived in the final two centuries of the Byzantine Empire. In particular it traces a series of luxury objects created specifically for diplomatic exchange with such courts as Genoa, Paris and Moscow alongside key examples of imperial imagery and ritual. By questioning how political decline refigured the visual culture of empire, Dr Hilsdale offers a more nuanced and dynamic account of medieval cultural exchange that considers the temporal dimensions of power and the changing fates of empires.
Inspired by what anthropologists have called the social life of things, this article traces the shifting significations of the Royal Crown of Hungary. As an object central to notions of legitimacy in a land that served as a battleground for Eastern and Western powers during the medieval and modern eras, the crown over its contested history has come to be seen as a composite symbol of political independence and Western cultural affiliation. A thorough archaeology of the crown, however, reveals its origins as an eleventh‐century diadem designed for a Byzantine princess. Subsequently this open crown was transformed into the closed crown worn by the king of a powerful and emerging Western monarchy. In the process of this re‐gendering, the object was reconceived as papal gift. Bridging both instantiations is the crown's status as a gift, replete with associations of power and subjugation that anthropologists of gift‐giving practices have long recognized.
Taking the figure of the obelisk as its organizing principle, this chapter considers the dynamic, performative, and commemorative dimensions of empire. Over time and across cultures, obelisks have come to anchor imperial ceremonial across such broad terrain as ancient Egypt, Augustan Rome, Byzantine Constantinople (New Rome), and Ottoman Kostantiniyye. In surveying these diverse contexts marked by great monoliths, this chapter traces the relationship between imperial ritual as performed in time and over time and the persistent monumental articulations that structured and memorialized those ephemeral performances. By presenting a focused analysis of the dynamic relationship between concrete and ephemeral performances of imperial ceremonial over a nearly global scale, this chapter insists on the importance of a diachronic view of the long interactions of empires from the New Kingdom Egypt to the Ottoman Empire and beyond.
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