Exploring Byzantine Cartographies: Ancient Science, Christian Cosmology, and Geopolitics in Byzantine Imperial-Era Mapping

The study of Byzantine geography and cartography, as distinct from the contemporary scholarly study of the historical geography of Byzantium, is a field of great intellectual scope that is tilled by too few geographers. In this project I attempt to make sense of the very limited world of map objects and to think across some spatial constructs that inhabit Byzantine narrative sources.

The synthesis I attempt builds on the hypothesis that the Byzantines had an understanding of spaces and of the "spatial" as material and organizational manifestations of both symbolic and tactical significance. I argue that the rationale and manner in which they constructed and manipulated spaces, made "places," privileged, adorned, or protected locations, and understood and described their world in topographical and regionalized terms expressed their complex relationships to pre-Socratic and Hellenistic scientific knowledge, Christian dogma and practices, and Roman military doctrine. I suggest that these intellectual traditions and practices of agents and state produce a politics of space that is distinct from its constituent parts. It describes a distinctly Byzantine optic on geographical space at all scales, spanning the geographies of the subject, the oikos, the palace, the polis, the castrum, the empire, and the Byzantine cosmos. I further suggest that we need to look beyond the too few map objects that have survived, to read Byzantine narrative sources with the eyes of a geographer and a cartographer, and to highlight those instances in the sources that speak, even obliquely, about the qualities of the geographic positionality of the Byzantine subject and Byzantine materiality.

The scholarly literature that explicitly addresses Byzantine geographic phenomena from an explicitly spatial-analytical perspective is very limited. In my own discipline the work of Veronica della Dora on the making of symbolic landscapes across time at Mount Athos² and on geographic representation in Byzantine and post-Byzantine icons is of foundational importance. I highlight her recent studies of the Byzantine cosmos and more generally the Hellenic cosmos, across time and at different landscape scales, for the ways in which they break down traditional barriers of geographic research in that part of the world. Her interest in mobility and specifically the mobility of objects (such as maps), which she sees as continuously (re)scripted through dislocation and varied use, provides intriguing ways of looking at portable map objects at different times.³ Furthermore, the ways in which she claims late-Byzantine and post-Byzantine icons may be mapping the Byzantine cosmos are especially relevant to my own work.⁴

Important work by geographers and historians of cartography has been done on the known map objects from Byzantium. Most notable is the literature on Maximos Planoudes's reintroduction of Claudius Ptolemy's Geographia into the late medieval world's intellectual mainstream. Among Anglo-American scholars of historical cartography, J. B. Harley is credited for the discipline's critical shift. His work changed the discourse to structural dimensions of mapmaking, pointing out to the ideological tint and the expressions of power that these objects embodied.⁵ Della Dora's work does not refute Harley's but demonstrates alternative complexities of space-politics and culture represented by map objects. Even so, very little has been written about constructions of Byzantine space, especially from a theoretical standpoint. Thus I argue for Byzantine spatial studies.⁶

My first objective in this project is to survey extant map objects and attempt to assign to them places in an original classification. Although surveys of the objects themselves exist, most importantly in Dilke's classic volume Greek and Roman Maps,⁷ a new classification has not emerged in more than a generation. My second objective is to test out my challenge to geographers and others to read narrative sources for their embedded geographies. I chose to read Constantine Porphyrogenitus's De Administrando Imperio and De Cerimoniis for evidence of a distinct Byzantine geographical optic and logics.⁸ I search for spatial patterns—especially repeating ones—in Byzantine social and kin structure, governance and military practices, and rituals and manners in court and home that may conjure for us the...