City of dazzling mosaics: the golden age of Ravenna

When we refer to someone as ‘Byzantine’ we usually mean guileful or too complicated and labyrinthine in manner or speech. Perhaps the term is ill-applied: Byzantium, the medieval Greek city on the Bosporus which the Roman Emperor Constantine I renamed Constantinople, was not in essence an unfathomable, over-hierarchical or manipulative sort of place. It flourished for more than 1,000 years, until the Ottoman Turkish onslaught in the 15th century, by dint of its ‘extraordinary resilience and self-confidence’, says Judith Herrin, a leading Byzantinist.

The northern Italian city of Ravenna, with its wondrous mosaicked churches and gilded mausolea that miraculously survived the aerial bombardments of the second world war, was manifestly also a Byzantine city. Herrin shows how this was so in her scrupulously researched history of the city in its imperial heyday through the period Edward Gibbon chose to call the Dark Ages. While barbarians, vandals and pestilential black boils undermined the achievements of centuries, Ravenna served as the headquarters of Byzantine rule in the west and, through a threefold combination of Roman military prowess, Greek culture and Christian belief, became the place where European Christianity was forged, Herrin argues.

Today, by contrast, Ravenna is something of a backwater, situated in Po valley marshland. The British Tuscanites who descend on the hills round Florence over the summer holidays to enact their ‘Toujours Tuscany’ dreams tend to ignore the Adriatic city 100 miles to their east. Oscar Wilde, visiting in 1877, mused on Ravenna’s fallen greatness and the gloomy looking tomb on Via Alighieri where Dante lies buried (Dantis Poetae Sepulchrum). In Ravenna, Wilde found ‘no sound of life or joy’, though inevitably he was aware of past glories. The Roman empire had collapsed in 476 but, wonderfully, a part of it had survived and flourished — the eastern half, with its great capital at Constantinople and the Italic outpost of Ravenna as its gateway into northern Adriatic coastlands and beyond into present-day Sicily.