In 1979 Averil Cameron published in Past and Present a brilliant and seminal article under the title ‘Images of Authority: Elites and Icons in Late Sixth-Century Byzantium’. Cameron argued that during and, in particular, after the reign of the emperor Justinian (527-565), and in a context of growing economic and geopolitical crisis within the eastern Roman empire, the political culture of Constantinople underwent a profound, but vital, transformation. In this transformation, the traditional classical trappings of imperial power were de-emphasised, and emperors instead shrouded themselves in the veil of holiness, Christianising imperial rituals and rhetoric, and lending their active patronage to a range of religious phenomena then occurring across the eastern empire: in particular, the expansion of church building, of Marian devotion, and of the cult of icons. For Cameron, these phenomena then served as a focus for the emergence of new civic identities, to a process of ‘cultural integration’ to which emperors made a decisive contribution. Although this process was in itself unable to prevent the subsequent Islamic conquest of the Roman Near East, it nevertheless lent the subsequent state centred on Constantinople the ‘strength and will’ to weather the storm of subsequent centuries.
