On 11 May 330, Constantine I embarked upon a ceremonial procession from the walls of old Byzantion that saw him ritually mark out the expanded boundaries of his new foundation. In similar fashion, eminent late Roman historian John Matthews in this sharp and concise volume sets out to delineate and give shape to the development of Constantine’s city over its first century. Following in the footsteps of the city’s first great explorer, Pierre Gilles, Matthews does so primarily through close and detailed engagement with the early fifth-century inventory known as the Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae. This slim and unadorned catalogue, running to just fifteen pages in the Latin edition, might appear an unpromising basis for an entire monograph. Under Matthews’ keen eye however, it becomes apparent just how much information is packed into every deceptively straightforward entry. As with Matthews’ prior works on subjects such as Ammianus Marcellinus and the Theodosian Code, From Byzantium to Constantinople is likely to become an essential starting point for its topic, the foundation of the New Rome.[1]
This event, along with the city’s development during its first century, has long lacked a study befitting its importance.[2] This absence has only become more glaring amidst a notable recent flourishing of Constantinopolitan studies.[3] The fullest prior treatment, a 1974 monograph by Gilbert Dagron focusing on early Constantinopolitan institutions, remains lively and useful, but it is rooted almost exclusively in textual rather than archaeological evidence.[4] An essential 1990 study by Cyril Mango which functions as Matthews’ chief inspiration is fuller in its coverage but limited to booklet length.[5] Both are in any event some decades old and less accessible to Anglophone readers. This is the lacuna which From Byzantium to Constantinople brilliantly fills with a diachronic and geographic survey of Constantinople’s slow transition from Constantinian refoundation to Theodosian capital.
The first, introductory chapter offers a summary of Constantine’s early career. While containing little to surprise the historian looking ahead to digging into the details of ancient catalogue entries, it serves as a brief and useful contextualization of the denser material that follows.
Chapter 2 provides a brief narrative overview of the city’s traditional origin stories along with a consideration of the processes that went into its establishment. Matthews here makes excellent use of recent scholarship on the pre-Constantinian city by Thomas Russell, and is able to preview a number of themes that will be explored more fully at a later point, including the establishment of new civic institutions such as the grain dole and the surprising scarcity of the city’s early Christian churches.[6]
Chapter 3 usefully collects and sets out the available sources for the exploration of Constantinople’s urban fabric. This includes not only the traditional literary sources (such as Zosimos and the Chronicon Paschale) but also visual sources long exploited by archaeologists but less well known than they should be to many historians, like the early modern Vavassore woodcut and the Buondelmonti Map.
Chapter 4 begins the heart of the book, with what Matthews acknowledges is a reworking and expansion of his own earlier chapter in an edited volume which introduces and translates the Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae.[7] The translation differs marginally though positively from Matthews’ original, wisely erring in the direction of greater precision.
Like its predecessor, Chapter 5 is a revision of part of Matthews’ earlier chapter on the same text, but in this case the expansion is considerable. With the aid of an invaluable set of maps, the author leads the reader through each of the city’s fourteen regions in turn to fully explore their geographic setting and relationship, building heavily on predecessors from Gilles to Berger. The chapter ends with a helpful discussion of aspects of the city that the Notitia does not or cannot capture, from missing individual monuments to the absence of any broader aesthetic sensibility.
Chapters 6 to 8 utilize a chronological framework to examine the development of the city over time via the Notitia from Constantine down to the document’s creation in the 420s. Almost every page is packed with detail as Matthews sets about determining the precise location as well as the time of creation for virtually every entry in the catalogue. In doing so, he glides effortlessly between cross referencing the terse hints of the text with the early modern maps and the modern Istanbul city grid, alongside an invaluable breakdown of the urban features visible in the Freshfield drawings of the lost Column of Arcadius as well as the testimony of medieval sources such as the infamous Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai.
Chapters 9 to 10 turn to what the author openly acknowledges are still more technical matters, using the Notitia to reconstruct the number of urban amenities from palaces and churches to colonnades. Although Matthews’ effort to calculate a potential population of residents in the latter chapter may strike some readers as too speculative, he is careful to hedge it with caveats and it is commendable that he did not evade the pressing (though likely unanswerable) question to which his investigations had naturally led.
The final chapter is sketched somewhat less robustly than its predecessors, an impression that Matthews seems to acknowledge in describing it loosely as a ‘portrait’ and ‘an attempt…to present the life of the city as an expression of its physical development’. It brings the city set out in the close reading of the Notitia into dialogue with other sets of sources, from the Theodosian Code to the testimony of later chronicles. The resulting exploration is intriguing but remains predominantly a collection of tantalizing hints, followed by a slightly abrupt ending of the volume without fully synthesizing what has gone before.
Scholars will find the middle chapters dissecting the city’s urban development through the Notitia to be the book’s most indispensable section. As he has demonstrated throughout a distinguished career in late Roman studies, Matthews has a forensic ability to deconstruct seemingly bland administrative documents and transform them into tools of interpretation. The result here is a meticulously developed internal chronology and an expression of changing urban priorities over the course of a century and more, from the more modest (though still impressive) foundation of Constantine to the expansive metropolis of the Theodosian Age.
Much of the success of the volume rests on the author’s ability to weave together this careful and logical examination of the Notitia with an engagement with broader scholarly debates about early Constantinople. The book contributes, directly or indirectly, to three especially high-profile questions: first, whether there was truly a meaningful Severan refoundation of Byzantion before Constantine; and then the twin questions of whether Constantine was truly intending to found a ‘New Rome’ and whether he envisioned it as a ‘Christian capital’ from the outset. Matthews is particularly compelling on the latter, adducing the paucity of early Christian infrastructure as a telling indicator of the city’s initial civic character. His reliance on testimony attributed to Marius Maximus for the Severan question, however, may be called into question by the recent scholarship of Stover and Woudhuysen which greatly complicates the already tangled authorship question in this instance. [8]
A small number of other points invite qualification. Despite an overall fluency in both historical and archaeological literature, occasional lapses appear. A brief discussion of a ‘sixth-century handbook on military strategy’ is rooted in a 1975 analysis by Alan Cameron, but subsequent scholarship has substantially reinterpreted and redated the relevant text to much later, reducing its usefulness as a lens for sixth-century society. Similarly, a tighter editorial pass would have avoided a few instances of near-verbatim repetition between Chapter 5’s regional survey and the chronological treatment in Chapters 6–8 (for example, the almost-identical discussion of the amphitheatre’s location under the Topkapı Palace kitchens, including the same quotation from the Theodosian Code on pp. 85 and 101). These issues are relatively minor and do little to detract from the book’s achievements.
The text is greatly enhanced by its excellent visual presentation. Special mention must be made of the copious and welcome use of maps, particularly in the middle chapters on Constantinopolitan regiones, as well as images of relevant monuments and drawings. The breakdown of the Column of Arcadius in Chapter 8 is a model for integrating visuals, captions, and narrative text to present both a monument and a historical narrative.
In sum, John Matthews’ From Byzantium to Constantinople is a typically authoritative and elegantly constructed study, which wrings exceptional insight from a deceptively sparse source. His meticulously close reading of the Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae, paired with a careful cross-referencing of literary, visual, and archaeological evidence, offers the clearest English-language account yet of Constantinople’s formative century. There is little doubt that this book will stand as an invaluable resource and reference for scholars of ancient urbanism and late Roman history.
Notes
[1] See The Roman Empire of Ammianus (BMCR 1990.02.14)and Laying Down The Law (BMCR 2001.02.27)
[2] Aspects of the topic are analyzed in R.S. Falcasantos, Constantinople: Ritual, Violence, and Memory in the Making of a Christian Imperial Capital (Berkeley, 2020). Both the late Cyril Mango and the late Alan Cameron publicly expressed the desire to write a comprehensive monograph, but neither ultimately completed the project.
[3] E.g. S. Bassett (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Constantinople (Cambridge, 2022); P. Magdalino, Roman Constantinople in Byzantine perspective: the memorial and aesthetic rediscovery of Constantine’s beautiful city, from late antiquity to the Renaissance (Leiden, 2024).
[4] G. Dagron, Naissance d’une Capitale. Constantinople et ses Institutions de 330 à 45, (Paris, 1974).
[5] C. Mango, Le développement urbain de Constantinople (IVe – VIIe siècles) (Paris, 1990).
[6] T. Russell, Byzantium and the Bosporus. A Historical Study, from the Seventh Century bc until the Foundation of Constantinople (Oxford, 2017).
[7] In L. Grig & G. Kelly, Two Romes. Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2012).
[8] J. Stover and G. Woudhuysen, The Lost History of Sextus Aurelius Victor (Edinburgh, 2023).