ABSTRACT
It would not be hard to draw a stark contrast between, on the one hand, the courts of rulers in the early medieval West, where a king often dealt with his magnates as, in effect, first among equals and, on the other, the court of the Eastern emperor, glorifying his autocratic rule. Few major Western rulers could afford to remain fixed to a single seat of governance; more often they perambulated between pockets of disposable resources or active allegiance. ‘Frontiers’ were seldom clear-cut or coterminous with linguistic or other such cultural boundaries and the concept of ‘natural barriers’ had little force at a time when any form of long-distance communication was hazardous and costly. At the same time, notions at grass-roots of wider regional, let alone ‘national’ or ‘ethnic’, identities beyond membership of one’s kin-group or immediate locality were indistinct and confined mainly to pious bookmen. The Byzantine basileus, in contrast, resided in a city whose monuments bespoke world-class dominion. Through the ceremonial performed at his court the message went out that his rule was God-willed and world-wide, being that of the ‘empire of the Romans’. It offered the best hope for mankind’s future, in that emperors since Constantine the Great had been charged with the task of converting individuals and peoples to Christianity.
