Ceremonies in the City in the Palaiologan Period

The paper will address questions of ceremonial in the later Byzantine capital. Until now the tenth-century Book of Ceremonies has dominated discussion of ceremonial, while the 13th-15th centuries have been neglected. Although the fourteenth-century ceremony book of Pseudo-Kodinos was published in a modern edition fifty years ago, it has not been the subject of study because it belongs to a period in which Byzantium is considered to be in decline. The work itself, with its description of a limited space in which ceremonies took place, both within the palace and without, encourages the impression that ceremonial was nothing like it used to be. The paper will argue that this picture is based on a misunderstanding both of the Book of Ceremonies and of the nature of ceremonial.

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