DOI: 10.37095/gephyra.2028817 ISSN: 1309-3924

Constantine’s Great Palace in the Patria: Textual Layers and the Early Palatial Topography of Constantinople

Hüseyin Salikoğlu
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Patria 1.59-60 preserves the most extensive list of buildings attributed to Constantine within the Great Palace, but the notice combines evidence from different textual and chronological layers. Each lemma of the transmitted Greek is therefore tested philologically against the earliest independent attestation of the institution, name, function, or structure it denotes. Where no such attestation survives, the result remains open. The fourth-century palace is largely concealed beneath later construction and the modern city, while its most detailed written accounts belong to the Middle Byzantine period. Modern reconstructions have therefore tended to combine evidence produced across several centuries and to project the named spaces of the tenth-century palace back to Constantine. Eusebius, the Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae, Malalas, the Chronicon Paschale, the Patria, and the De Ceremoniis are compared by separating the chronologies of institutions, names, functions, and architectural settings. The comparison shows that Patria 1.59-60 is not an inventory of a Constantinian building programme. The passage gathers guard units, fiscal offices, workshops, gates, churches, halls, and baths whose independent attestations range from the fifth to the ninth century. Its attributions express Constantine’s place in the historical memory of the palace rather than construction history of every named space. Once these retrospective attributions are separated into chronological layers, the original palace can no longer be recovered as a detailed architectural plan. A more secure reconstruction identifies an upper-terrace residence with a controlled entrance, a principal representative hall, and protected access to the imperial box in the Hippodrome. The Constantinian palace is therefore best understood as a system of movement and regulated visibility. This model preserves the value of later sources while limiting the claims that can be made from them.

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