Excavating Byzantium: Russia's Archaeologists and Translatio Imperii

The Greeks of Constantinople … held in their lifeless hands the riches of their fathers, without inheriting the spirit which created and improved that sacred patrimony: they read, they praised, they compiled, but their languid souls seemed alike incapable of thought and action.

—Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1788

In his six-volume tour de force of the downfall of what he clearly perceives to have been a remarkable imperial civilization, Edward Gibbon structured a historical paradigm that effectively separated West from East, much to the detriment of the latter. The most significant reason for the collapse of "the grandeur that was Rome," in Gibbon's accounting, was the rise of Christianity, with its intolerance for cosmopolitan pluralism. This delighted anticlerical Enlightenment philosophes such as Voltaire, but for others it was simply too much to blame an undifferentiated version of their own faith. They could, however, find conviction in the Great Schism of 1054, when Christianity itself split between West and East. Once again, the East would suffer in comparison. Western Catholicism had flowered into a variety of Protestant sects, inspired by the humanistic Renaissance, and civilization was reborn in the heart of the former Roman Empire. Eastern Orthodoxy appeared changeless, therefore stagnant in comparison. As Georg Hegel, the first and most influential historian to succeed Gibbon, adduced the situation in the 1830s, one could have presumed that in the East, those "civilized peoples in possession of Greek science and a highly refined Oriental culture," and who had not been subjected to barbarian invasions would surely rise. But such was emphatically not the case: "The history of the highly civilized Eastern Empire—where as we might suppose, the Spirit of Christianity could be taken up in its truth and purity—exhibits to us a millennial series of uninterrupted crimes, weaknesses, basenesses and want of principle; a most repulsive and consequently a most uninteresting picture."¹

Russians, heirs to Byzantium's "Spirit of Christianity," found themselves reduced in stature under this Western gaze. In the first half of the 19th century, Western historians controlled the narrative and followed the lead built by Gibbon and Hegel. The Russian intelligent and enfant terrible Petr Chaadaev bought into Hegel, and in his excoriation of his society he blamed its Byzantine legacy for what he deemed its cultural sterility.² This, though, registered as more a philosophical than a historical verdict.³ The impetus to "take the Byzantine turn" came from Tsar Nicholas I (r. 1825–55), supported by Minister of Education Sergei Uvarov, who articulated the imperial ideology of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality." The Orthodox cornerstone here prompted an official architectural movement away from the neo-Classicism that had dominated from the end of the 18th century to a "Byzantine Revival." Introduced with the Church of Christ the Savior, "neo-Byzantine" came to dominate as the new imperial style of the Russian Empire.⁴ This contributed to a second ideology, never clearly articulated but often presumed, that of translatio imperii, whereby the Russian Empire viewed itself as the continuum of the fallen Byzantine Empire. Rather than a spurious wish fulfillment of the apocryphal doctrine of "Moscow, the Third Rome," this idea rested on the assumption that imperial structures of governance would hold sway over the upstart nationalists, and that Russia would supersede the weakening Ottomans in the former Byzantine Orthodox territories.⁵ At the crux of this lay the religious inheritance of Orthodoxy.⁶ Archaeologists, themselves struggling to establish the disciplinary boundaries of a profession just then coming of age, played a prominent role in how this transition could be imagined.

The two beneficiaries of Byzantium, the Russian and Ottoman Empires, were themselves separated by a sprawling, porous border, just as both were peopled with multiconfessional minorities inhaling the fresh breath of 19thcentury nationalism. The Ottomans controlled the physical geography of the former Byzantine Empire, and Russia had inherited the Orthodox culture celebrated by Slavic brethren in the Balkans, under Ottoman suzerainty. To add another layer, the Holy Lands—the territory where Christ had been born, crucified, and resurrected—were...