The manuscript Vat. gr. 1851 and an unexpected testimony for the topography of Constantinople

In this paper, given in Greek at the annual review of archaeological work at the University of Cyprus, Maria Parani re-examines a miniature on folio 3 verso of the Byzantine manuscript Vaticanus Graecus 1851. The manuscript narrates the arrival in Constantinople of a young foreign princess to marry a Byzantine emperor's son. Parani favours a twelfth-century date linking the book to the 1179 marriage of Agnes of France and Alexios Komnenos, rather than proposed Palaiologan marriages of 1272 or 1356.

The miniature under discussion shows a coastal scene with a curved marble colonnade of ten columns topped by an architrave bearing crosses and two armed statues. Since Joseph Strzygowski, scholars have identified this structure as a bridge, and most, citing the fourteenth-century protocol of Pseudo-Kodinos for receiving royal brides at Blachernai, placed it at the Kosmidion across the Golden Horn. After Demetrios Michaelides observed following her 2017 lecture that the structure lacks arches and has no water passing beneath it, Parani compared Middle and Late Byzantine depictions of bridges and confirmed that it is not a bridge.

Re-reading Pseudo-Kodinos, she notes a second disembarkation point mentioned for royal brides: near the Acropolis or the Gate of Eugenios at the mouth of the Golden Horn. Drawing on a 1133 poem by Theodore Prodromos for the triumph of John II Komnenos and passages in Niketas Choniates, together with topographical studies by Cyril Mango and Paul Magdalino, Parani proposes that the miniature depicts the freestanding monumental colonnade at the landing place between the Gate of the Acropolis and the Gate of Eugenios, and argues that its prominence supports a Komnenian date for the manuscript.