ABSTRACT
That Byzantine emperors occasionally sent craftsmen, builders and decorators to build or embellish monumental structures for the use of other regimes is known well enough. The ambivalence of this grand gesture is consistent with the “principles and methods” of Byzantine diplomacy, an underlying assumption that other peoples were, ultimately, indebted to the emperor. Grants of money, luxury goods, court titles together with vestments or other emblems of rank, and even of dominion over portions of territory, could be passed off as acts of sovereignty, displaying imperial philanthropia for all the world to see. That the recipients were apt to see things rather differently, as tribute, payment of respects or recognition as heads of legitimately separate regimes, was, from the Constantinopolitan perspective, neither here nor there.1 “Ignorance” was, after all, characteristic of barbarians, and outsiders’ misinterpretations of the emperor’s largesse were unlikely to carry conviction within the City’s walls; besides, the resultant monuments in faraway places might betoken the emperor’s cultural centrality in the eyes of some beholders.
