Byzantine Imperial Coronation

Making a Byzantine emperor began, in the empire's earlier centuries, as an unambiguously military and civil act rather than a religious one: the new ruler was acclaimed by the assembled army, senate and people, and in the oldest form of the ritual was physically raised aloft on a shield, a Roman military custom the Byzantines inherited and continued long after the empire had become thoroughly Christian in every other respect. Religious coronation entered gradually rather than displacing the older acclamation outright, and by the middle Byzantine period the two had fused into a single ceremony, with the shield raising, where it survived, understood as an archaic preliminary to the properly sacred act that followed.

From roughly the seventh century the patriarch of Constantinople's placing of the crown became the ceremony's defining religious moment, normally performed in the Hagia Sophia, the empire's great cathedral, and the developing rite drew Byzantine political theology, which held the emperor to be God's appointed representative on earth, isapostolos in some formulations, equal to the apostles, into direct ceremonial expression in a way that shaped Christian ideas of sacred kingship across the medieval world far beyond Byzantium's own borders.

The patriarch's central role in crowning the emperor gave the church real, if carefully bounded, leverage within a political system that otherwise subordinated ecclesiastical to imperial authority in a relationship modern historians generally describe as caesaropapist, the emperor holding real authority over church governance even as the church alone could perform the rite that made him emperor in the fullest ceremonial and theological sense. Byzantine practice developed the technique of co-coronation, crowning an heir alongside the reigning emperor during the senior ruler's own lifetime, as a mechanism for securing dynastic succession in a system that otherwise had no fixed rule of hereditary succession and where a change of ruler could as easily come through usurpation, army revolt or palace conspiracy as through orderly inheritance, making the ceremony as much a political safeguard as a religious rite.

Empresses, where they reigned in their own right rather than only as consort, could also be crowned with variations on the same essential ceremony, a recognition Byzantine practice extended more readily in certain periods than most contemporary Western monarchies. The ceremony's theological claims and its ceremonial vocabulary, the raised platform, the acclamations, the specific regalia, influenced coronation practice across the Orthodox world and, at a greater remove, fed into medieval Western ideas of sacred kingship even where Rome and Constantinople increasingly diverged on the underlying theology of church and state after their eleventh century schism.