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OX F O R D S T U D I E S I N M E D I E VA L
E U RO P E A N H I S TO RY

General Editors
joh n h . a rn old pat r i c k j . ge a ry
and
joh n wat ts
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Graphic Signs of
Authority in Late
Antiquity and the Early
Middle Ages, 300–900
I L D A R G A R I P Z A N OV

1
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1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

To Annika, Elvira, and Lenar

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

Acknowledgements
During my childhood, the first thing I saw waking up every day was a Central Asian
carpet hanging on the wall beside my bed. It was replete with various geometric
shapes and aniconic forms that were very distinct from the natural world and
saturated with colours absent in my immediate surroundings. Every morning, my
eyes browsed through this visual labyrinth and occasionally discovered new patterns
and discerned silhouettes of unfamiliar things. This wall carpet with its interlacing
lines and curves captivated my awakened imagination, and seemed infinite in the
number of shapes and figures it revealed to my contemplative gaze. These early
experiences of visual thinking no doubt contributed to my fascination with late
antique and early medieval aniconic graphic devices, which constitute the main
subject of this study.
The vast amount of surviving visual graphic evidence, most of which remains
unknown outside highly specialized disciplines and some of which has not been
studied at all, meant that it took much effort and external support to complete this
book. The generous funding of the Research Council of Norway (grant no. 217925
for 2012–17) financially supported my research and writing throughout, whilst
the highly supportive academic environment at the Department of Archaeology,
Conservation, and History at the University of Oslo, which I joined in 2012, made
my work on this project a highly productive process. My special thanks to my
departmental fellow historians Klaus Nathaus and Veronique Pouillard for helping
me to see my book project within a much broader perspective, and to Knut
Ødegård and Alf Storrud for their genial assistance during my research trips to
Rome and Istanbul. I also truly enjoyed the cordial atmosphere at the Norwegian
Institute in Rome, my research base during various Italian trips, and I am grateful
to Siri Sande, Anne Nicolaysen, and Manuela Michelloni for their unwavering
support on those occasions.
Visiting fellowships at Balliol College, Oxford and at Clare Hall, Cambridge as
well as a visiting membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton
have greatly contributed to the successful completion of this book, by allowing me
to write its various parts in vibrant and highly stimulating scholarly settings. I am
filled with sincere gratitude to Lesley Abrams, Jonathan Shepard, Rosamond
McKitterick, Anna Muthesius, Patrick Geary, Nicola di Cosmo, and Alan Stahl for
their generous support and hospitality during those academic stays. I am also
appreciative of companionship with other visiting historians and medievalists at
the Institute for Advanced Study in the autumn of 2016; social interactions and
conversations with most of them made my research stay there quite a unique
experience. The latter membership provided me with access to visual resources at
the Index of Christian Arts at Princeton University, and I am thankful to Catherine
Fernandez for her expert guidance through its card database, which has yet to be
fully digitized.
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viii Acknowledgements

Writing a book navigating through the worlds of late antiquity, early Byzantium,
and the early Middle Ages is a challenging task for a single author, and I have learnt
many positive lessons from scholarly collaboration and the productive exchange
of ideas within the Early Graphicacy network and during its conferences in Oslo,
Rome, and Istanbul. I would like to express special thanks to Caroline Goodson,
Henry Maguire, Patrick Geary, David Ganz, Larry Hurtado, Leslie Brubaker,
Michelle Brown, Ben Tilghman, Michael Squire, Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, Beatrice
Kitzinger, Richard Abdy, Jim Crow, and Chris Entwistle. I have also benefited
from presenting preliminary thoughts and some sections of this book at the Earlier
Middle Ages Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in London, at the
Oliver Smithies Lecture Series at Oxford University, the Materialität und Medialität
des Geschriebenen Seminar at Heidelberg University, the Late Antique and Medieval
Seminars at Cambridge University, the Making a Mark Conference at Brown
University, and the Medieval Seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton. I am further greatly indebted to John Arnold for his valuable feedback
on the book’s original design and to Henry Maguire, Michelle Brown, Celia Chazelle,
Jinty Nelson, Rosamond McKitterick, Christoph Eger, Caroline Goodson, and
anonymous readers at Oxford University Press for casting an expert eye on its
earlier drafts or selected chapters and providing me with encouraging comments
and constructive criticism.
This book relies on a substantial number of images to make its narrative accessible
to readers, which necessitated the demanding task of acquiring relevant image
permissions from different institutions in Europe and North America, and I am
appreciative of the friendly efforts that Manuela Michelloni, Romy Wyche, and Alf
Storrud invested in communicating on my behalf with relevant collections and
authorities in Italy, France, and Turkey. I am also grateful to Svein Gullbekk and
Alan Stahl for their cordial support and assistance in providing this book with the
photos of relevant coins from their numismatic collections at the University of
Oslo and Princeton University. Furthermore, I am beholden to those museums
and libraries, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New York, the Walters
Art Museum in Baltimore, and the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel—to
name just a few—that facilitate current visual and material turns in humanities by
sharing images of their artefacts and manuscripts with researchers and the general
public under unlimited Creative Commons licenses. I hope that more museums
and libraries will choose this path of public service in the future.
Last but not least, I would like to thank Alice Hicklin and Albert Fenton for
their assistance in styling my text in British English and checking its various
technical aspects, as well as the editorial staff at Oxford University Press for their
sterling work in bringing my manuscript to its final form.
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Contents
List of Figures xiii
List of Charts xxi
List of Diagrams xxiii
List of Abbreviations xxv

Introduction 1
0.1 Graphic Signs, Graphic Visualization, and Early Graphicacy 3
0.2 Graphic Signs of Authority and Political Culture 8
0.3 Graphic Signs of Authority: Historiographic Trends 13
0.4 Cultural History of Graphic Signs of Authority 19

I . G R A P H I C S I G N S O F D I V I N E AU T H O R I T Y
I N L AT E A N T I Q U I T Y
1. The Origins of Early Christian Graphic Signs 27
1.1 The nomina sacra, Staurogram, and Chi-Rho 27
1.2 Early Christian Authors on Symbolic Meanings of Letters and
Christian Graphic Signs 31
1.3 Protective Seals and the Bruce Codex 35
1.4 ‘Magical’ Characters and their Early Christian Critics 41
1.5 Apotropaic Graphic Devices as a Symptomatic Feature of
Late Antique Culture 47

2. Christograms as Signs of Authority in the Late Roman Empire 50

2.1 Lactantius and Constantine I’s Victorious Sign in 312 50
2.2 Eusebius and the Appropriation of the Chi-Rho as an Imperial
Triumphant Symbol in the 320–40s 54
2.3 The Hierarchy of Christian Signs in the Visual Communication
of Imperial Authority in the Second Half of the Fourth and
Early Fifth Centuries 65
2.4 Christograms as Paradigmatic Christian Symbols at the Turn
of the Fifth Century 77

3. The Sign of the Cross in Late Antiquity 81

3.1 The Early Symbolism of the Cross and the Origins of the Cult
of the Holy Cross 81
3.2 The Sign of the Cross as a Late Antique Symbol of Authority 89
3.3 The Apotropaic Power of the Sign of the Cross in Late Antiquity 99
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x Contents

I I . M O N O G R A M M AT I C C U LT U R E I N L AT E A N T I Q U I T Y
4. Monograms, Early Christians, and Late Antique Culture 109
4.1 Late Antique Epigraphic Culture and Monograms
as Epigraphic Devices 112
4.2 The Calendar of 354 and Fourth-Century Roman Aristocratic Culture 118
4.3 Monograms as Protective and Intercessory Devices 124
4.4 The Contemplative Process Involved in Understanding
Monograms and Late Antique Neoplatonism 127

5. Secular Monograms, Social Status, and Authority in the Late

Roman World and Early Byzantium 131
5.1 The Numismatic Monogram of Theodosius II: Monograms as
Signs of Imperial Authority in the Middle and Second Half
of the Fifth Century 133
5.2 Monograms as Signs of Authority on Silverware, Weights, Bricks,
and Consular Diptychs 138
5.3 Monograms as Visual Signs of Social Power, Noble Identity,
and Elevated Status: Rings, Dress Accessories, and Luxury Objects 147
5.4 Monograms as a Symptomatic Feature of Late Antique paideia 154

6. Public Monuments and the Monogrammatic Display of Authority

in the Post-Roman World 160
6.1 From Consular Diptychs to the Monumental Display of Authority:
Juliana Aniana and St Polyeuktos (c.506–27) 160
6.2 Justinian I, Theodora, and a Defensive Response: Sts Sergius
and Bacchus (c.527–32) 167
6.3 The Monogrammatic Display of Imperial Authority in
Hagia Sophia (532–7) 175
6.4 Monumental Monograms and Early Medieval Bishops 186

I I I . G R A P H I C S I G N S O F AU T H O R I T Y
I N E A R LY M E D I E VA L E U RO P E
7. Monogrammatic Culture in Pre-Carolingian Europe 199
7.1 Monograms as Royal Signs of Authority 199
7.2 Monograms as Signs of Social Status and Episcopal Authority
in Pre-Carolingian Europe 205
7.3 Invocational Graphic Devices in Pre-Carolingian Material and
Manuscript Culture 216
7.4 Christograms and the Sign of the Cross in Pre-Carolingian
Material and Manuscript Culture 223
7.5 Late Antique Monogrammatic Culture and the Origins of
Monogrammatic Lettering 235
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Contents xi

8. Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 242

8.1 Monogrammatic Initials in Carolingian Gospel-Books and
Sacramentaries 243
8.2 Royal, Episcopal, and Papal Monograms as Signs of Authority
in the Carolingian World 255
8.3 A Monogrammatic Revival in Carolingian Manuscript Culture
and De inventione litterarum 272

9. The Power of the Cross and Cruciform Devices in the

Carolingian World 286
9.1 The Bible of San Paolo fuori le mura and Cruciform Invocations
in Carolingian Religious Manuscripts 286
9.2 The Sign of the Cross in Manuscript and Material Culture 292
9.3 Hrabanus Maurus’ In honorem sanctae crucis: The Sign of the
Cross as the Main Organizing Principle of Carolingian Graphicacy 303

Conclusion 313

Select Bibliography 321

Index of Manuscripts 359
General Index 363
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List of Figures
1.1. Tau-rho and christograms: chi-rho, iota-eta, and iota-chi. 29
1.2. Christian graphic signs on third-century gems, based on Spier,
Late Antique and Early Christian Gems: a) the chi-rho (nos. 112–31);
b–c) the chi-tau (nos. 134–5); d) a monogram comprising
Χ, Ρ, Η, Τ, Υ (no. 133); e) a combination of a tau with an
eight-armed star (no. 137). 33
1.3. Jeu 5 diagram in the Bruce Codex. Oxford, Bodleian Library,
Bruce 96, p. 12 (above), and its graphic model (below). 37
1.4. Occult seals in the Bruce Codex, based on its edition in The Books of Jeu, ed.
Schmidt: a) for the fifty-fifth treasury (p. 39); b) for the fifty-seventh treasury
(p. 40); c) for the fifty-eighth treasury (p. 41); d) for the fifty-sixth treasury
(p. 40); e) for the sixtieth treasury (p. 43). 38
1.5. Baptismal seals in the Bruce Codex, based on its edition in The Books
of Jeu, ed. Schmidt: a) for baptism of water (p. 61); b) for baptism of fire
(p. 63); c) for the baptism of the Holy Spirit (p. 65). 38
1.6. Votive plaques from Water Newton, Cambridgeshire. London, BrM.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. 40
1.7. Magical text from Egypt, fourth century, P.Oslo I 1, c.7. Courtesy
of the University of Oslo Library Papyrus Collection. 43
1.8. Fifth- or sixth-century bronze amulet, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan,
Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, acc. no. 26119. 46
2.1. Obverse of Constantine I’s silver coin-medallion (Ticinum, 315).
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, inv. no. OH-A-ДР-15266.55
2.2. Dedication medallion in the basilica of Aquileia. 58
2.3. Optatianus, Poem 8, in Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 9 Aug. 4,
fol. 11r. © HAB Wolfenbüttel <http://diglib.hab.de/mss/9-aug-4f/start.htm> 59
2.4. Optatianus, Poem 19, in Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 9 Aug. 4, fol. 4r.
© HAB Wolfenbüttel <http://diglib.hab.de/mss/9-aug-4f/start.htm> 60
2.5. Copper coin of Constantine I (Constantinople, 327–8). London, BrM.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. 61
2.6. Silver coin of Constantine II (Siscia, 337–40). Oslo University, Museum
of Cultural History. 62
2.7. Gold glass with Sts Peter and Paul. New York, MMA, acc. no. 16.174.3. 64
2.8. Gold rings with chi-rhos, England, fourth century. London,
BrM, reg. nos. 1983,1003.1 and 1984,1001.1. © The Trustees of
the British Museum. 66
2.9. Mosaic from Hinton St Mary, England. London, BrM,
reg. no. 1965,0409.1. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 67
2.10. Copper coin of Magnentius (Lyons, 352–3). Oslo University, Museum
of Cultural History. 68
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xiv List of Figures

2.11. Semissis of Aelia Eudoxia (Constantinople, c.400). London, BrM,
reg. no. 1839,0311.1. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 73
2.12. Tremissis of Aelia Eudocia (Constantinople, c.423–43). Princeton
University Numismatic Collection, Department of Rare Books and
Special Collections, Firestone Library. 73
2.13. Chi-rho on the eastern side of the Golden Gate, Constantinople.
Photo by James Crow. 75
2.14. ‘Sarcophagus of Stilicho’, Church of Sant’Ambrogio, Milan.
Norwegian Institute in Rome, H. P. L’Orange Photo Archive. 76
2.15. Frontal side of the Encolpion of Empress Maria (398–407).
Paris, Musée du Louvre, acc. no. OA9523. Photo (C) RMN-Grand
Palais (musée du Louvre)/Droits réservés. 78
2.16. Triple chi-rho from Albenga Baptistery. Graphic drawing. 79
3.1. Floor mosaic in the Basilica of Aquileia. 84
3.2. Solidus of Theodosius II (Constantinople, 420–2). Princeton University
Numismatic Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections,
Firestone Library. 88
3.3. Nummus of Theodosius II, Ae4 (Antioch, 408–50). Oslo University,
Museum of Cultural History. 90
3.4. Upper central side of the triumphant arch in Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome. 93
3.5. Central dome of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna. 94
3.6. Tremissis of Anthemius (Milan or Rome, 467–72). Oslo University,
Museum of Cultural History. 94
3.7. Gold crossbow brooch, second half of the fifth century. New York,
MMA, acc. no. 1995.97. 95
3.8. Early Frankish ring with a cross, c.450–525. New York, MMA,
acc. no. 17.192.229. 96
3.9. Solidus of Heraclius (Constantinople, 638–41). Princeton University
Numismatic Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special
Collections, Firestone Library. 97
3.10. Tremissis of Heraclius (Byzantine Spania, 610–21). Oslo University,
Museum of Cultural History. 98
3.11. Early Byzantine gold pendant-cross. New York, MMA, acc. no. 2006.569. 100
3.12. Mould for an ankh amulet from the reign of Amenhotep III
(c.1390–53 bc). New York, MMA, acc. no. 11.215.711. 101
3.13. Funerary stela with an ankh-cross from Akhmim, Egypt. New York,
MMA, acc. no 10.176.29. 102
3.14. Late antique textual amulet from Egypt, fourth or fifth century, P.Oslo I 5.
Courtesy of the University of Oslo Library Papyrus Collection. 103
3.15. Magical text from Egypt, fourth century, P.Oslo I 1, c.8. Courtesy of
the University of Oslo Library Papyrus Collection. 104
4.1. Silver coin (four drachmas) of Alexander III with a monogram as a mintmark
(Babylon, 325–3 bc). Princeton University Numismatic Collection,
Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library. 110
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List of Figures xv
4.2. Latin and Greek monograms of the Early Imperial period: a) monogram
Vespasianus used as his countermark on the coins of Nero c.88–9; b)
monogram Aurelius on late second- or early third-century balsamaria; c)
on the second-century jasper gem from the Ashmolean Museum; d–g) Greek
monograms on third-century eastern gems, based on Spier, Late Antique and
Early Christian Gems, correspondingly nos. M12, M14, M1, M23. 110
4.3. Third- and fourth-century monograms from Roman catacombs:
a) TP (ICUR, vol. 4, no. 10579); b) Πρῖμα? (ICUR, vol. 4, no. 10579);
c) Ἀγάπη (ICUR, vol. 5, no. 15148.h); d) Avite (ICUR, vol. 5, no. 14752.c);
e) Constans or Constantius (ICUR, vol. 5, no. 13277); f ) Alethius
(ICUR, vol. 3, no. 8748); g) Gaudentia (ICUR, vol. 5, no. 14752.a);
h) Πάστωρ? (ICUR, vol. 1, no. 2058); i) Πρίσκος (ICUR, vol. 4, no. 10713.q). 112
4.4. Fourth- and fifth-century monograms from Roman catacombs:
a) Agape (ICUR, vol. 7, no. 19427.c); b) Petronia? (ICUR, vol. 7, no. 17995);
c) Rusticius and Rufilla (ICUR, vol. 9, no. 25792); d) Navira (ICUR, vol. 5,
no. 14751); e) Eufentine? (ICUR, vol. 2, no. 6060); f ) Annes (ICUR, vol. 9,
no. 24236.a); g) Petrus in pace (ICUR, vol. 2, no. 4516); h) Palma et laurus.114
4.5. Obverse of a late Roman contorniate with the Palma et laurus monogram
in the field. London, BrM, reg. no. R.4814. © The Trustees of the
British Museum. 116
4.6. Marble plaque with the Palma et laurus monogram and the symbol of
the palm leaf accompanying on the inscription of Clodius Ablabius
Reginus from the Flavian Amphitheatre in Rome, mid-fourth century. 117
4.7. Tabula of Eleuteria from Roman catacombs (a. 363). From ICUR,
vol. 1, no. 1426. 117
4.8. Dedication page in the Calendar of 354, in Vatican City, Codex
Vaticanus Barberini lat. 2154 (a. 1620). From Strzygowski,
Die Calenderbilder, fig. III. 119
4.9. Late antique monograms: a–b) from Roman catacombs, Bonifatius
(ICUR, vol. 3, no. 8332.e) and Leonis?, a. 386 (ICUR, vol. 8, no. 21609.c);
c) from silver plates in the Esquiline Treasure, Rome; d) νικᾷ ἡ τύχη τῶν
Πρασίνων monograms from Aphrodisias and Ephesos; e) monogram from
a marble tombstone in Villareggia. 121
4.10. Silver plate from the Esquiline Treasure. London, BrM,
reg. no. 1866,1229.14. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 122
4.11. Acclamatory monogram from Aphrodisias, νικᾷ ἡ τύχη τῶν Πρασίνων.
Photo by Ine Jacobs. 127
5.1. Consecratio panel, upper part. London, BrM, reg. no. 1857,1013.1.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. 132
5.2. Copper coin of Theodosius II, Ae4 (Nicomedia, c.445–50).
Oslo University, Museum of Cultural History. 134
5.3. Monogrammatic reverses of late Roman copper coins, Ae4:
a) of Marcian (450–7); b) of Leo I (457–74); c) of Zeno (474–91);
d) of Libius Severus (461–5). Oslo University, Museum of Cultural History,
and Princeton University Numismatic Collection, Department of Rare
Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library. 136
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xvi List of Figures

5.4. Pentanummis of Justin II and Sophia (Antioch, 565–78). Princeton
University Numismatic Collection, Department of Rare Books and
Special Collections, Firestone Library. 138
5.5. Late antique weights with monograms: a) copper-alloy weight,
London, BrM, reg. no. OA.821. © The Trustees of the British Museum;
b) early Byzantine glass weight, New York, MMA, acc. no. 81.10.148. 140
5.6. Monograms from early sixth-century consular diptychs: a) from the
consular diptych of Clementinus (Constantinople, 513); b) from
the consular diptych of Orestes (Rome, 530). 143
5.7. Diptych of Areobindus (Constantinople, 506). The State Hermitage
Museum, St Petersburg, inv. no. W-12. 145
5.8. Diptych of Areobindus (Constantinople, 506). Paris, Musée du Louvre,
acc. no. 85-001669 EE. Photo (C) RMN-Grand Palais (musée du
Louvre)/Daniel Arnaudet. 146
5.9. Late antique rings with monograms: a) gold ring of Khan Kubrat
from Malaja Pereshchepina, The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg,
inv. no. W-1052; b) silver ring, Baltimore, WAM, acc. no. 57.2104. 148
5.10. Early Byzantine gold bracelet (c.500). New York, MMA,
acc. no. 17.190.2054. 149
5.11. Monograms on sixth-century objects, graphic drawings: a)
from Italy (c.500); b) from the Moselle area; c) crossbow fibula from
Yenikape, Istanbul. Drawing by Arwa Darwich-Eger; d) the central
medallion of the silver plate of kandidatos Nektarios from Staatliche
Museen zu Berlin, mid-sixth century. 150
5.12. Early Byzantine belt buckle, found in Hamas, Syria. Baltimore, WAM,
acc. no. 57.545. 152
5.13. Early Byzantine silver plate (610–13). New York, MMA, acc. no. 52.25.2. 153
5.14. Late antique silver spoon. New York, MMA, acc. no. 2005.39. 155
5.15. Silver spoons from the Lampsakus Treasure, view from above. London,
BrM © The Trustees of the British Museum. 157
5.16. Silver spoon from the Kaper Koraon Treasure, Baltimore, WAM,
acc. no. 57.649. 158
6.1. Pilastri acritani outside San Marco, Venice. 164
6.2. a–b) Ἁγίου Πολυεύκτου monograms on the pilastri acritani; c)
undeciphered monogram on the pilastri acritani; d) monogram on a
capital from St Polyeuktos, reused in the Papadopoli Gardens in Venice. 165
6.3. Monumental monograms from: a) Rome; b) Ravenna; c) Aphrodisias. 165
6.4. Sts Sergius and Bacchus, Istanbul, inner view. 169
6.5. Monumental monograms on the ground level of Sts Sergius and Bacchus:
a) southern bay; b–c) north-western bay; d) north-eastern bay; e–f )
additional columns in southern bay. 171
6.6. ΒΑCΙΛΕΩC and ΙΟΥCΤΙΝΙΑΝΟΥ monograms on the gallery level
of Sts Sergius and Bacchus: a–b) south-eastern side; c–d) southern side; e–f )
south-western side; g–h) north-western side. 173
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List of Figures xvii

6.7. Monumental monograms on the gallery level of Sts Sergius and Bacchus:
a–c) ΘΕΟΔΩΡΑC monograms; d) ΑΥΓΟΥCΤΑC monogram. 174
6.8. Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, inner view. 177
6.9. Imperial monograms in Hagia Sophia: a) ΒΑCΙΛΕΩC;
b) ΙΟΥCΤΙΝΙΑΝΟΥ; c) ΑΥΓΟΥCΤΑC; d) ΘΕΟΔΩΡΑC.178
6.10. Theodora’s monumental monograms: 1. in Sts Sergius and Bacchus;
2. in the southern side of Hagia Sophia (2a–c: ground floor; 2d–g: gallery);
3. in the northern side of Hagia Sophia (3a–e: ground floor; 3f–g: gallery);
4. in Hagia Irena; 5. on a capital from the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul,
originally from Hebdoman; 6. in St John of Ephesos; 7. on bronze plaques
in Hagia Sophia. 179
6.11. Fragment of a chancel screen with Constantine’s monogram reused in
Hagia Irene, Istanbul. 181
6.12. Imperial monograms in Hagia Irene, Istanbul: a) ΒΑCΙΛΕΩC;
b) ΙΟΥCΤΙΝΙΑΝΟΥ; c) ΑΥΓΟΥCΤΑC; d) ΘΕΟΔΩΡΑC.184
6.13. Chancel screen in San Clemente, Rome. Norwegian Institute in
Rome, H. P. L’Orange Photo Archive. 187
6.14. Monumental monograms in churches: a–b) Zvart’nots; c–d)
San Vitale, Ravenna; e) Eufrasian Basilica, Poreč; f ) Solin;
g) Grado Baptistery; h) of Bishop Maximian from an impost
fragment in Ravenna; i–j) Archiepiscopal Chapel, Ravenna. 189
6.15. Monogram of Bishop Elias on floor mosaic in the ‘Mausoleum of
St Eufemia’, Grado Cathedral. 191
6.16. Monumental episcopal monograms in the mosaics of the Neonian
Baptistery, Ravenna: a) of Bishop Neon; b–c) of Bishop Maximian. 193
6.17. Archiepiscopal Chapel, Ravenna. © Vanni Archive/Art Resource, NY. 194
7.1. a) Reverse of a quarter-siliqua with Theodoric’s monogram (Ravenna,
493–526), Oslo University, Museum of Cultural History; b) reverse of
a half-siliqua with Athalaric’s monogram, Princeton University Numismatic
Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone
Library; c) reverse of a Lombard gold coin with Perctarit’s monogram,
Oslo University, Museum of Cultural History. 201
7.2. Solidus of Theoderic in the name of Emperor Anastasius with a
monogrammatic mintmark on the reverse (Rome, 491–516). London,
BrM, reg. no. 1867,0101.1014. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 202
7.3. a) Theodebald’s numismatic monogram (548–55); b) design
of the signet-ring of Bertildis (628–38); c) diplomatic monogram
of Clovis II (654). 203
7.4. Merovingian ring, seventh century. New York, MMA, acc. no. 17.191.93. 206
7.5. Horse bit from Visigothic Spain. New York, MMA, acc. no. 47.100.24. 207
7.6. a) Theodemir’s monumental monogram from Pla de Nadal;
b) monumental monograms from Santa María de Lara at Quintanilla
de las Viñas; c) monumental monograms of Justinian II from the Land
Wall of Constantinople. 209
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xviii List of Figures

7.7. Lower frontal part of Maximian’s throne, Ravenna. Norwegian Institute
in Rome, H. P. L’Orange Photo Archive. 210
7.8. Early Byzantine copper-alloy polycandelon. London, BrM,
reg. no. 1994,0610.11. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 211
7.9. Monograms on early medieval objects from Italy: a) on the ‘Pegasus’
lamp from Crypta Balbi, Rome; b) on the strap-end from Castel Trosino,
grave 126; c) on the strap-end from Castel Trosino, grave 9. 213
7.10. Copper-alloy belt buckle from Visigothic Spain, seventh century.
New York, MMA, acc. no. 66.152.2. 214
7.11. a) Ostrogothic copper coin with the monogram of Ravenna, Oslo
University, Museum of Cultural History; b) the reverse of a Merovingian
silver coin from Clermont with the urban monogram ARV[ernum],
Princeton University Numismatic Collection, Department of Rare Books
and Special Collections, Firestone Library. 215
7.12. Early graffito from late antique Aphrodisias. Photo by Angelos Chaniotis. 217
7.13. Early Byzantine gold pendant with the ΦΩΣ–ΖΩΗ monogram.
New York, MMA, acc. no. 17.190.1660. 218
7.14. a) Ora pro me device from St Petersburg, National Library of Russia,
Lat.Q.v.I.3, fol. 192r; b) Ora pro me device from Würzburg, UB,
M.p.th.f.68, fol. 170v: c) Amen device from Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod.
Guelf. 64 Weiss, fol. 67v; d) Θεοτόκε βοήθει monogram on the
strap-end from Mersin, Cilicia; e) Θεοτόκε βοήθει τῶ σῶ δούλω device
from early Byzantine seals; f ) ΜΙΧΑΗΛ monogrammatic tattoo on
a mummified body from et-Tereif, Sudan; g) Η ΑΓΙΑ ΜΑΡΙΑ
monograms on icons from Mount Sinai. 219
7.15. Bottom of the ewer of Zenobios. New York, MMA, acc. no. 17.190.1704. 222
7.16. Sarcophagus of Bishop Theodorus from Ravenna, fifth century.
Norwegian Institute in Rome, H. P. L’Orange Photo Archive. 224
7.17. Carmen figuratum of Venantius Fortunatus, late sixth century, from
Venantius Fortunatus, Opera poetica, ed. Leo, p. 116. 226
7.18. Marble decoration in Sts Sergius and Bacchus, Istanbul. 227
7.19. Apse mosaic in San Vitale, Ravenna. 228
7.20. Mosaic from the presbytery of San Vitale. 230
7.21. Monogrammatic cross in Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 10439, fol. 1v. 231
7.22. a–b) Reverse of copper and silver coins of Justinian I from Ravenna
(c.555–65), Oslo University, Museum of Cultural History; c) reverse
of a Merovingian tremissis (Veuves, c.620–40), Princeton University
Numismatic Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special
Collections, Firestone Library. 231
7.23. Monogrammatic initials and lettering from late antique manuscripts:
a–b) Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 12097, fols 89v and 97v; c–e) in the palimpsest
from León, Archivio Cathedralico, Ms. 15; f ) Paris, BnF, Ms.
lat. 17226, fol. 91r; g) Uppsala, Universitetsbibliothek, Sign. DG.1. 232
7.24. Codex Valerianus, Munich, BSB, Clm. 6224, fol. 202r. 233
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List of Figures xix

7.25. Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 1625, fol. 1v. 235
7.26. Christi initial in the Echternach Gospels, BnF, Ms. lat. 9389, fol. 19r. 238
7.27. LIBer generationis initial in the Echternach Gospels, BnF, Ms. lat. 9389,
fol. 20r. 239
8.1. LIber generationis initial in Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf.
16 Aug. 2°, fol. 5r. © HAB Wolfenbüttel <http://diglib.hab.de/mss/
16-aug-2f/start.htm>244
8.2. IN principio initial in London, BL, Egerton Ms. 768, fol. 63r. 245
8.3. Initials in St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 348: a) Vere dignum (p. 367);
b) Te igitur (p. 368). 248
8.4. Vere dignum initial in Berlin, SBB, Ms. Phill. 1667, fol. 103r. 250
8.5. Vere dignum and Te igitur initials in Autun, BM, Ms. 19 bis, fols 8v–9r.
© IRHT. 251
8.6. Te igitur initial in Le Mans, BM, Ms. 77, fol. 9v–10r. © IRHT. 254
8.7. Inhabited initials in St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 731: a) p. 113; b) p. 111. 258
8.8. Carolingian diplomatic monograms, based on DK: a) of Charlemagne;
b) of Louis the Pious in Aquitaine (808–14); c) of Louis the Pious in
Aachen (814–40); d) of Lothar I; e) of Pippin I of Aquitaine; f ) of Odo;
g) of Rudolf; h) of Louis IV; i) Lothar III. 260
8.9. Scribal colophon in Valenciennes, BM, Ms. 59, fol. 181v. © IRHT. 261
8.10. a) Monogram of Benedict of Aniane in Munich, BSB, Clm. 28118, fol. 18r;
b) East Frankish diplomatic monograms in St Gallen, SB,
Cod. Sang. 397, p. 51; c) monograms of Bishop Hanto in Munich,
BSB, Clm. 23631, fol. 245r. 263
8.11. Introductory monograms in Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum,
Ms. Ludwig II 1, fol. 3v. 266
8.12. a) Greek monogram of Charlemagne on Ravennate coins (792/3–814);
b) monogram of Duke Sico on Beneventan coins; c) ROMA monogram
on ninth-century papal coins; d) monogram of Pope Nicholas I
(858–67) on papal coinage; e) epistolary monogram of Bishop John
(a. 827/8) from ChLA, vol. 58, no. 14. 267
8.13. Fragmentary funerary epitaph of Bishop Lopicenus from Modena.
Norwegian Institute in Rome, H. P. L’Orange Photo Archive. 268
8.14. Monograms of Pope Paschal I in Santa Prassede, Rome. 269
8.15. Monograms of Pope Leo IV on epigraphic tabula ansata from
Civitavecchia (a. 854): a) left side; b) right side. Norwegian Institute
in Rome, H. P. L’Orange Photo Archive. 270
8.16. Monogram of Bishop Handegis from the Cathedral of Pola.
Norwegian Institute in Rome, H. P. L’Orange Photo Archive. 271
8.17. a) urban monogram (Dorobernia civitas) on the pennies of Canterbury
during the episcopate of Archbishop Wulfred (805–32); b) urban
monogram of London on pennies of Alfred the Great; c–d) box monograms
from London, BL, Cotton Ms. Vespasian A. I., fols 153r–v; e) monogram of
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xx List of Figures
Sendelenus from Lyons, BM, Ms. 452, fol. 276r; f ) monogram of Martinus
from Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 1603, fol. 192r; g) monogrammatic initial of
STORAX from Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 9332, fol. 246v. 272
8.18. Marginal cruciform monograms in Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 7906, fol. 80r. 274
8.19. Diagram with a central monogram in St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 237, p. 63. 276
8.20. Scribal monograms from Vatican City, BAV, Reg. lat. 438, fol. 31v. 277
8.21. Preserved monogrammatic section of the De inventione litterarum in
St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 876, p. 281. 279
8.22. Monograms of the De inventione litterarum in the 1606 edition of Goldast. 280
8.23. Monogrammatic devices in Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 14 Weiss.:
a) monogrammatic initial and lettering on fol. 221r; b) monogrammatic
initial on fol. 18r; c) monogrammatic initial on fol. 235r; d) the ΦΩΣ–ΖΩΗ
monogram on fol. 23v; e) Solomon’s monogram and sign on fol. 247r.
© HAB Wolfenbüttel <http://diglib.hab.de/mss/14-weiss/start.htm> 283
9.1. Cruciform devices from Carolingian manuscripts: a) Würzburg, UB,
M.p.th.f.19, fol. 67v; b) Munich, BSB, Clm. 6329, fol. 192r; c) Bamberg,
Staatsbibliothek, Msc. Patr. 61, fol. 103r; d) Rome, Abbazia di San Paolo
f.l.m., Biblia, fol. 1r. 287
9.2. Two paired monograms on the ‘Beautiful Doors’ in Hagia Sophia,
Istanbul: a) Χριστὲ βοήθει; b) Μιχαὴλ δεσπότῃ. Photo by Joe Glynias. 290
9.3. Te igitur in Paris, BnF, Ms. Nouv. Acq. lat. 1589, fol. 10r. 291
9.4. Cruciform liturgical monograms from Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 12272,
fol. 104v. Graphic drawing. 293
9.5. Cross page in Heidelberg, UB, Cod. Sal. X.12a, fol. 1v. 296
9.6. Graphic devices in Carolingian manuscripts: a) IHS XPS monogram
from Tours manuscripts; b) IOHANNIS monogram from Paris,
BnF, Ms. lat. 266, fol. 172r; c) cruciform device from Leiden,
Universitetsbibliotheek, VLO.41, fol. 19v; d) crosses from Munich,
BSB, Clm. 6270a, fol. 154r. 298
9.7. Technical signs in Schaffhausen, Stadtbibliothek, Ms. 78, fol. 1v. 300
9.8. T–O map in Munich, BSB, Clm. 6250, fol. 208r. 301
9.9. Denier of Louis the Pious (Dorestad, 822–40). Oslo University, Museum
of Cultural History. 302
9.10. Carmen figuratum of Joseph the Scot, from Iosephi Scotti carmina,
VI, ed. Dümmler, p. 159. 305
9.11. Acrostic poem from Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 12262, fol. 3r. Graphic drawing. 306
9.12. Poem 28 of In honorem sanctae crucis in Lyons, BM, Ms. 597, fol. 24v.
© IRHT. 309
9.13. Poem 11 of In honorem sanctae crucis in Lyons, BM, Ms. 597, fol. 7v.
© IRHT. 310
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List of Charts
2.1. Chi-rhos and tau-rhos on datable Roman Christian inscriptions
from the 320s to 430s (absolute numbers). 63
2.2. Chi-rhos and tau-rhos on datable Roman Christian inscriptions from
the 320s to 430s (percentage). 63
2.3. Percentage of datable Roman Christian inscriptions with chi-rhos
from the 320s to 400s. 64
2.4. The use of an alpha and omega with christograms on datable Roman
Christian inscriptions from the 320s to 400s (absolute numbers). 69
2.5. The use of an alpha and omega with christograms on datable
Roman Christian inscriptions from the 320s to 400s (percentage). 69
2.6. The use of crosses and tau-rhos on datable funerary inscriptions
from Zoora from the 340s to the 490s. 71
2.7. The use of tau-rhos on datable funerary inscriptions from Zoora
from the 340s to the 490s. 72
3.1. The use of crosses on datable late antique funerary inscriptions
from Zoora (absolute numbers). 85
3.2. The use of crosses on datable late antique funerary inscriptions
from Zoora (percentage). 85
6.1. The imperial ancestry of Anicius Olybrius Junior. 161
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

List of Diagrams

6.1. The plan of Sts Sergius and Bacchus. 170

6.2. The ground level of Hagia Sophia. 182
6.3. The gallery level of Hagia Sophia. 183
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

List of Abbreviations

AB Art Bulletin
acc. no. accession number
AJA American Journal of Archaeology
ANF Alexander Roberts et al., eds. Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of
the Fathers Down to a.d. 325, 10 vols (Peabody, 1994)
BAV Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
BL British Library
BM Bibliothèque municipale
BnF Bibliothèque nationale de France
BrM British Museum
BSB Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
BZ Byzantinische Zeitschrift
CBC Alfred R. Bellinger, Philip Grierson, and Michael Hendy.
The Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks
Collections and in the Whittemore Collection, 5 vols (Washington,
DC, 1966–2006)
CCSL Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina
CCSM Corpus Christianorum, Series Medievalis
ChLA Robert Marichal and Albert Bruckner, eds. Chartae Latinae
Antiquiores, 110 vols (Zurich, 1954–).
CLA Elias Avery Lowe. Codices Latini Antiquiores, A Palaeographical
Guide to Latin Manuscripts prior to the Ninth Century, 12 vols
(Oxford, 1934–72)
DK Ferdinand Lot et al., eds. Diplomata Karolinorum: Recueil de
reproductions en fac-similé des actes originaux des souverains
carolingiens conservés dans les archives et bibliothèques de France,
9 vols (Paris, 1936–49)
DOP Dumbarton Oaks Papers
Ecclesiastical Silver Ecclesiastical Silver Plate in Sixth-Century Byzantium, ed. Susan
Plate A. Boyd and Marlia Mundell Mango (Washington, DC, 1992)
EDB Epigraphic Database Bari. http://www.edb.uniba.it.
EDDB Erzbischöfliche Diözesan- und Dombibliothek
EHR English Historical Review
EME Early Medieval Europe
FS Frühmittelalterliche Studien
Graphic Signs Graphic Signs of Identity, Faith, and Power in Late Antiquity and the
Early Middle Ages, ed. Ildar Garipzanov et al. (Turnhout, 2017)
Graphische Symbole Graphische Symbole in mittelalterlichen Urkunden: Beiträge zur
diplomatischen Semiotik, ed. Peter Rück (Sigmaringen, 1996)
HAB Herzog August Bibliothek
ICUR Inscriptiones Christianae urbis Romae septimo saeculo antiquiores,
nova series, ed. Angelo Silvagni et al.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

xxvi List of Abbreviations

Intelligible Beauty ‘Intelligible Beauty’: Recent Research on Byzantine Jewellery, ed. Chris
Entwistle and Noël Adams (London, 2010)
inv. no. inventory number
ICA Index of Christian Art
JAC Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum
JLA Journal of Late Antiquity
JRA Journal of Roman Archaeology
JRS The Journal of Roman Studies
JÖB Jahrbuch der Österreichisches Byzantinistik
Katalog Bernhard Bischoff. Katalog der festländischen Handschridten des
neunten Jahrhunderts (mit Ausnahme der wisigotischen), 3 vols
(Wiesbaden, 1998–2014)
KM Wilhelm Koehler and Florentine Mütherich. Die karolingischen
Miniaturen, 8 vols (Berlin and Wiesbaden, 1930–2013).
MEC Philip Grierson and Mark Blackburn. Medieval European Coinage:
With a Catalogue of the Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge, vol. 1, The Early Middle Ages (5th–10th Centuries)
(Cambridge, 1986)
MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica
ML Morgan Library
MMA Metropolitan Museum of Art
NPNF I Philip Schaff, ed. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st Series, 14 vols
(Peabody, 2012)
NPNF II Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers,
2nd Series, 14 vols (Peabody, 2012)
ÖNB Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
PL Patrologia Latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, 221 vols (Paris,
1844–64).
reg. no. registration number
RIC Robert Mattingly et al., eds. The Roman Imperial Coinage, 10 vols
(London, 1923–94)
SB Stiftsbibliothek
SBB Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Sign and Design Sign and Design: Script as Image in Cross-Cultural Perspective
(300–1600 ce), ed. Brigitte M. Bedos-Rezak and Jeffrey Hamburger
(Washington, DC, 2016)
Signum crucis Erich Dinkler. Signum crucis: Aufsätze zum Neuen Testament und zur
christlichen Archäologie (Tübingen, 1967)
UB Universitätsbibliothek
WAM Walters Art Museum
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

Introduction

At the end of the fourth century, a Christian cleric in North Africa made a seemingly
puzzling statement: ‘By that sign of the cross every Christian act is described (describi-
tur): to do good in Christ and to hold fast resolutely to him, to hope for heaven,
to avoid profaning the sacrament.’1 This wording sounds paradoxical: how can a
graphic sign (signum), made of two crossing lines and void of words or even letters,
describe so many Christian beliefs, norms, and emotions? We could of course opt
to discard this statement, deeming it to be the clumsy oxymoron of an unsophisti-
cated Christian preacher. But the passage in question in fact came from the quill of
one of the most eloquent and incisive Christian intellectuals in the first millennium
ad, none less than Augustine of Hippo, who evidently believed strongly that the
graphic sign of the cross could encapsulate a plethora of abstract ideas.
Augustine was not alone in his belief that graphic signs had a special meaning.
Around the same time Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, a pagan Roman with a noble
pedigree stretching back to the Republican era, commented on the meaning of the
personal monogram he used on seals in a letter sent to an old friend. Symmachus
wrote that, in the case of this type of late antique signum,2 his ‘name was presented
more to be understood (intellegi) than to be read (legi)’.3 Authored by a person
with an entirely different religious and social background to Augustine, the passage
expresses a conviction somewhat similar to the above dictum: viewing a graphic
sign involves a form of communication involving mental comprehension that is
nevertheless distinct from reading. More than a century and a half after Symmachus’
letter, an early Byzantine court attendant in Constantinople, Paul the Silentiary,
appears to have been certain that graphic signs of this type were worth many words.
In his poetic panegyric to Justinian I, Paul mentions an imperial monogram carved
on the templon screen in Hagia Sophia, on which ‘the carver’s tool has incised one
character (γράμμα) that means many words (πολύμυθον), for it combines the
names of the Empress and Emperor’.4

1 Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, II. 150, ed. and trans. Green, pp. 128–9: ‘Quo signo crucis
omnis actio Christiana describitur: bene operari in Christo et ei perseveranter inhaerere, sperare cae-
lestia, sacramenta non profanare.’ My translation for the first clause in this passage. On the date of this
work, see Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. Green, pp. ix–xxiii.
2 On monograms defined as signa in this period, see Fink, ‘Neue Deutungsvorschläge’, p. 86.
3 ‘quo nomen meum magis intellegi quam legi promptum est’, Quintus Aurelius Symmachus,
Epistolae, II. 12, Symmachi opera, ed. Seeck, p. 46.
4 ‘γράμμα χαράσσει / ἡ γλυφὶς ἓν πολύμυθον ἀολλίζει γὰρ ἀνάσσης / οὔνομα καὶ βασιλῆος’, Paulus
Silentiarius, Descriptio Sanctae Sophiae, 713–15, ed. de Stefani, p. 49. The translation is slightly modi-
fied from that found in Mango, ed., The Art of the Byzantine Empire, p. 87.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

2 Graphic Signs of Authority

Writing in the early fourth-century city of Trier in the northern part of the late
Roman world, the Christian rhetorician Lactantius described another graphic
sign, a divine monogram, which appeared to Emperor Constantine in a vision
before the decisive battle of his career near Rome in 312. In his dream, the Roman
emperor was told to have this graphic sign of God (caeleste signum dei) inscribed
onto the shields of his soldiers, as a kind of divine armour. He did as advised
and won the ensuing battle.5 An anonymous religious practitioner in fourth- or
fifth-century Roman Egypt expressed a similar belief in the power of graphic signs
while exhorting his readers in a practical manual—which modern scholars have
called ‘magical’—to inscribe (γράψον) seven graphic characters (χαρακτῆρας) on a
seven-leafed sprig. According to this author, a sprig inscribed with such graphic
signs would become ‘the body’s greatest protective charm, by which all are made
subject, and seas and rocks tremble, and daimons avoid the characters’ divine
power (χαρακτήρων τὴν θείαν ἐνέργειαν)’.6
These five authors, writing in different parts of the late antique world with
diverse social and religious backgrounds, convey two aspects of their cultural uni-
verse that are essential to this book: first, that certain graphic signa were capable of
encapsulating abstract ideas, referential information, or transcendent powers in a
very efficient manner, and secondly, that despite being often described using terms
associated with the act of writing, this form of communication was perceived as
profoundly different from the latter. This visual form of social communication
constitutes the subject of this book, which examines how graphic signs of the kind
described above—such as the cross sign, christograms, monograms, and occult
graphic characters—represented and communicated secular and divine authority,
and how they were understood to relate to, and interact with, the supernatural
world in the late antique Mediterranean and early medieval Europe, from approxi-
mately the fourth to ninth centuries ad.
There is, of course, nothing new about the use of abstract graphic signs as an
aspect of social communication. As Genevieve von Petzinger points out, our early
Palaeolithic predecessors were already inscribing them onto different surfaces, and
early humans employed thirty-two specific geometrical signs at different sites in
Europe, dated to the period between approximately 40,000 and 10,000 years ago.7
Yet because of the limited evidence regarding their usage, alongside the many other
signs that were inscribed or drawn in subsequent centuries, the actual meanings of
such elusive prehistoric signs remain arduously debated. In contrast, more precise
knowledge of the specific material, historical, cultural, and religious contexts in
which the graphic signs discussed in this book occurred affords us a much better
understanding of their meanings—for the people who created and employed them
in everyday and ritual settings—and of their wider societal functions. Most of
these signs emerged in the first centuries of the first millennium ad, and their

5 Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum, 44. 5–6, ed. Städele, pp. 200–2.

6 Papyri Graecae Magicae, I. 262–75, ed. Preisendenz and Henrichs, vol. 1, pp. 14–17; the English
translation is slightly modified from that in The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, ed. Betz, p. 10.
7 von Petzinger, The First Signs.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

Introduction 3

growing popularity in late antiquity and their modified usage in the early Middle
Ages reflected changing socio-political, religious, and cultural views, perceptions,
and assumptions. Such perceptions must have been shared by much of the popu-
lace, but also specifically by members of distinct social groups, in the years that
witnessed the profound transformation of the Graeco-Roman world and the
­formation of medieval Europe. The history of such graphic signs is therefore capable
of providing both a valuable historical insight into that process of transformation,
as well as a more fundamental understanding of their operating mode across
different cultures and eras.

0.1. G R A P H I C S I G N S , G R A P H I C V I S U A L I Z AT I O N ,
A N D E A R LY G R A P H I C A C Y

The aforementioned aspects of late antique visual culture—namely the communi-

cative potential of graphic signs and their difference from writing systems in terms
of their mode of operation—fit remarkably well with the new theoretical model of
visual communication promoted by modern research in the fields of visual studies
(visual literacy), information visualization, and graphicacy, which have been gaining
in academic popularity from around the turn of the twenty-first century.
The interdisciplinary field of visual studies originated in the 1950–60s and
reached maturity in the 1990s, marked by collaboration between art historians,
specialists in visual culture, and cognitive psychologists, with particular focus on
the connection between mechanisms of visual perception and visual art, and on
the role of visual images in social communication.8 On the one hand, such studies
have emphasized that ‘visualcy’ (to employ their argot) should not be dichotom-
ized with literacy. As Tom Mitchell has stressed, ‘all the so-called visual media
are mixed or hybrid formations, combining sound and sight, text and image’.9 To
make this point clearer, he has introduced the notion of ‘imagetext’.10 Mitchell’s
observations about the hybrid nature of visual media are especially relevant to the
graphic signs discussed in this book, which operated as intermediaries between the
Word and Image, and conveyed abstract information and concepts.
On the other hand, such studies have pointed out that the process of seeing is
profoundly different from reading. In other words, ‘visualcy’ depends on a specific
set of abilities and experiences, and it may increase in significance in certain histor-
ical and social contexts—a phenomenon referred to as a ‘pictorial turn’.11 Having
started with the German School of Gestalt psychology, ever-growing academic
research into the cognitive mechanisms involved in the process of seeing has
shown the unique nature of visual perception, dubbed by the famous American art

8 See e.g. Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception; Mitchell, Picture Theory; Messaris, Visual ‘Literacy’;
Elkins, Visual Studies; Elkins, ed., Visual Literacy. This list is by no means comprehensive.
9 Mitchell, ‘Visual Literacy’, p. 15.
10 Mitchell, Picture Theory, pp. 95 and 160–1. Mitchell’s term is different to the more restrictive
term ‘iconotext’ as understood by Nerlich, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un iconotexte?’, pp. 255–302.
11 Mitchell, Picture Theory, p. 13; Mitchell, ‘Visual Literacy’, pp. 15–16.
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4 Graphic Signs of Authority

theorist Rudolf Arnheim (1904–2007) as ‘visual thinking’. In the monograph that

appeared under this title in 1969, Arnheim challenged the traditional juxtaposition
of visual perception—as connected to concrete information and thought—with
imageless rational reasoning, and asserted that ‘[i]n the perception of shape lie the
beginnings of concept formation.’12 Various studies in cognitive psychology in
the past fifty years have largely confirmed his theoretical insights. Summarizing
empirical research in the field, Liza K. Libby and Richard P. Elbach stated in 2013
that existing evidence has shown ‘that imagery can function to represent abstract
ideas, in addition to functioning to represent concrete information,’ and that
­‘perhaps “imageless thought” is not imageless after all, but rather involves noncon-
scious imagery.’13 These recent findings have thus confirmed an intuitive insight
of the great physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955), who said that ‘[t]he words of
the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my
mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in
thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily”
reproduced and combined.’14
Modern studies directed towards graphic designers have further corroborated
the validity of Arnheim’s and Einstein’s statements, with reference to signs, graphs,
and other abstract graphic forms employed in the field of information visualization—
meaning ‘a graphical representation of some data or concepts’.15 Drawing on recent
research in cognitive psychology, one of the leading authors in the field, Colin
Ware, states that the process of visual thinking involved in graphic visualization is
to a large extent determined by our visual ‘hardware’, and by the way the human
brain processes and transforms visual stimuli. Hence, the basic principles of graphic
visualization are of a sensory, and therefore universal, nature, occurring across
­different human cultures. Some of these principles are vitally important to achieve
a proper understanding of the ways in which graphic signs were employed and
organized in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and are consequently listed
here briefly.
The first relevant principle is that an important target object or data should
be represented by graphic elements that are visually distinct from less significant
surroundings. This can be achieved by a difference either in shape or in size, both
of which produce a pop-up effect that allows our vision to find an important object
easily in order to process related graphic information at a glance. The pop-up effect
is significant in information visualization, as research into visual cognition has shown
that the capacity of our visual working memory is limited to a small number of
simple visual objects and patterns: without activating that perceptual effect import-
ant graphic information can be easily overlooked.16 This sensory principle was

12 Arnheim, Visual Thinking, p. 27.

13 ‘The Role of Visual Imagery’, p. 161.
14 Einstein’s letter to Jacques Hadamard, June 17, 1944, in Hadamard, An Essay, p. 142, with a
slight correction in Calaprice, ed., The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, which can be corroborated by an
earlier draft of the text in the Einstein Archive Online, no. 1-146.
15 Ware, Visual Thinking, p. 20.
16 Ware, Information Visualization, pp. 14, 140, and 394; and Ware, Visual Thinking, pp. 24–32.
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Introduction 5

repeatedly employed by the producers of the graphic signs under discussion in this
book, and appears across various late antique and early medieval material media—
for example, when christograms and the sign of the cross were carved on early
Christian epitaphs in late Roman catacombs, when occult characters were inscribed
on ‘magical’ papyri or metal and stone amulets, or when complicated monograms
were drawn in late antique and early medieval manuscripts. Such intentional treat-
ment of these graphic signs reflected both their significance and their operational
value in the eyes of their producers and viewers. Connectedness is another funda-
mental Gestalt principle, meaning that ‘connecting different graphic objects by
lines is a very powerful way of expressing that there is some relationship between
them’.17 This principle is employed in the production of late antique and early
medieval monograms, whereby phonetic characters are connected within a single
graphic structure to indicate their joint use in a hidden word or words. A third
sensory principle is that visual perception is highly sensitive to perfectly vertical
and horizontal lines, which makes them a highly efficient tool in the graphic
organization of information.18 This factor partly explains the popularity of the sign
of the cross—composed precisely of such lines—across different cultures and
times, but in the late antique Mediterranean in particular. Even more pertinent to
our discussion is the perceptual principle according to which human eyes tend
to see a closed contour as an object. This principle is highly important for visual
communication since ‘the object metaphor is persuasive in the way we think about
information, no matter how abstract’.19 As a result, closed contours such as a circle
and square are commonly used to visualize various concepts.20 That the first late
antique monograms were of a square shape is highly significant in this regard, as is
the fact that circles in the form of wreaths or medallions often framed such mono-
grams, as well as christograms and the sign of the cross.
This use of object-like graphic forms as proxies for concepts and abstract ideas
stems from the known ability of the human brain to link certain pieces of visual
information to certain pieces of verbal information, in what neuroscientists call ‘cell
assembly’ and the ‘neuronal network’.21 Thus, seeing certain objects momentarily
activates connected parts of verbal memory.22 More importantly for my argu-
ment, modern research in cognitive psychology suggests that certain visual signs,
including religious symbols, become cognitively bound to a particular non-visual
cluster of concepts: viewing religious symbols such as the cross or a christogram
causes an automatic and rapid activation of related concepts in the human mind.23
Through their power to rapidly invoke nonvisual information from the long-term
memory, such graphic signs thus function as a form of memory extension.24 Such
symbols can also produce certain associations and emotional responses from their
viewers, an ability that is highly important for commercial usage of modern brand

17 Ware, Information Visualization, p. 182. 18 Ware, Visual Thinking, p. 57.

19 Ware, Information Visualization, p. 293.
20 Ware, Information Visualization, pp. 186–7 and 222–4.
21 Stock, Gajsar, and Güntürkün, ‘The Neuroscience of Memory’, pp. 373–5.
22 Ware, Information Visualization, pp. 311–15.
23 Ware, Visual Thinking, pp. 124–5 and 168–9. 24 Ware, Information Visualization, p. 377.
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6 Graphic Signs of Authority

logos—such as the Coca-Cola, Nike, or Adidas logos, each estimated to be worth

billions of dollars. Early Christian graphic signs prompted even stronger emotional
responses from their Christian viewers, especially when they appeared in natural
settings or visions, or were employed in ritual performance. Modern companies
invest vast amounts of money in advertisement and other forms of branding to
make their logos recognizable, encouraging positive emotional responses to them
in the minds of their potential consumers, and thus providing emotional leverage
to the brand owners. In the 1990s some brands even began to promote themselves
as a way of life, a set of values, an idea, or an attitude embodied by the products
marked with their logos.25 In a different manner, early Christians were familiarized
with their religion’s graphic signs through liturgy and material settings, while
incessant comments in early Christian texts ensured that such signs were bound in
the minds of their readers to major Christological and ethical tenets, and the cor-
responding way of life and attitudes. Thus, for example, in the passage mentioned
above in this introduction, Augustine propagated the sign of the cross to his readers
as the paradigmatic visual symbol of Christianity encouraging the faithful to believe
in Christ and salvation and to act accordingly.26 In the Christian world of late
antiquity such graphic signs began to be actively employed as quasi-logos, not only
in religious but also in socio-political interactions. Through this fusion of religious
and political meanings, Christian graphic signs became salient visual features of
the contemporary political landscape.
A more contextualized discussion of christograms and monograms takes us
from the sensory principles of graphic visualization to arbitrary visual symbols and
aspects of graphic representation that are culturally specific and historically limited.
In most cases, however, graphic signs employ both sensory and arbitrary codes of
graphic composition.27 For instance, the chi-rho sign uses the principle of connected-
ness, but the original choice of the letters chi and rho did not relate to any sensory
principle, and was defined by the cultural settings of the classical world.
Whereas in visual studies (especially in the US) visual perception and visual
communication have been discussed with reference to ‘visual thinking’, ‘visual lit-
eracy’, and ‘information visualization’, in education studies (particularly in the
UK) the unique nature of these phenomena have been described with reference to
‘graphicacy’. This concept appeared at roughly the same time as Arnheim’s concept
of visual thinking. In the mid-1960s, the British scholars W. G. V. Balchin and
Alice M. Coleman coined graphicacy as a term to describe the intellectual skill
required both to understand visual aids such as maps, photographs, charts, and
graphs, and to communicate using these tools. Graphicacy, they stated, therefore
needed to be taught in school alongside literacy and numeracy.28 In tandem with
the rise of the field of visual studies from the 1990s, graphicacy became an

25 For more details, see Klein, No Logo, especially pp. 3–124.

26 De doctrina Christiana, II. 150, ed. and trans. Green, pp. 128–9.
27 Ware, Information Visualization, pp. 9–12.
28 Balchin and Coleman, ‘Graphicacy—the Fourth “Ace” ’; Balchin and Coleman, ‘Graphicacy
Should Be the Fourth Ace’.
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Introduction 7

established concept in educational psychology,29 and consequently entered English

dictionaries. Thus, The Merriam–Webster Dictionary defines graphicacy as ‘the
­ability to understand, use, or generate graphic images (as maps and diagrams)’,
while The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as ‘knowledge of or skill in the
use of graphical information; the ability to produce or interpret diagrams, maps,
tables, etc.’ In contrast to these established definitions, Xenia Danos has recently
suggested a much broader interpretation of graphicacy as ‘the ability to commu-
nicate through still visual images such as graphs, maps, diagrams, symbols and
drawings’, and has argued for its similarity to the category of visual literacy com-
monly used in the US.30
A strong focus amongst scholars of graphicacy on maps and diagrams has also
led to an emphasis on the crucial role of this intellectual skill in the communica-
tion of spatial information, which in turn has connected graphicacy studies to
modern research on visuospatial cognition31—research that deals with both the
cognitive mechanism involved in coding spatial relations of the real world through
visual aids such as maps, diagrams, and graphs, and with the use of such forms of
spatial representations within thinking in general.32 Cross-disciplinary fertilization
has led to graphicacy being defined not only as an intellectual skill but also as a
major form of communication on a par with oracy (orality), literacy, and numeracy.
Thus, as early as 1999, a South African specialist in education studies, Pamela
Dianne Wilmot, stated: ‘Graphicacy is a form of communication in that it utilizes
some form of symbolic language to convey information about spatial relation-
ships. . . . [I]t requires that the reader/creator of graphic language possesses concep-
tual knowledge of the phenomena represented in the graphic representation, as
well as perceptual abilities and an understanding of spatial concepts.’33
Modern research has further shown that spatial concepts are highly relevant to
the process of abstract thinking. Thus, cognitive linguists have pointed to the
­paramount importance of spatial metaphors in our language,34 while the empirical
research of cognitive psychologists has demonstrated that people systematically
attribute specific spatial relations to abstract concepts such as hope, success, and
respect.35 Graphicacy, therefore, can be defined as a form of communication,
related to the graphic visualization of information and based on the capacity of

29 See, for example, Boardman, ‘Graphicacy in the Curriculum’; Boardman, Graphicacy and
Geography Teaching; Boardman, ‘Graphicacy Revisited’; Weiner, ‘A Test of Graphicacy’. For a more
detailed overview of this kind of research, see Danos, Graphicacy, pp. 18–29.
30 Danos, Graphicacy, p. 2. It is noteworthy in this regard that ‘Graphicacy’ has been chosen as a
company name by one of the American dot-coms in data visualization, information graphics, graphic
design, motion graphics, and so on.
31 de Vega et al., eds, Models of Visuospatial Cognition; Shah and Miyake, eds, The Cambridge
Handbook of Visuospatial Thinking.
32 Tversky, ‘Functional Significance’; Newcombe and Learmonth, ‘Development of Spatial
Competence’.
33 ‘Graphicacy as a Form of Communication’, pp. 91–2.
34 Lakoff, Women, Fire; Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors; Bloom, ed., Language and Space; Pinker,
The Stuff of Thought.
35 Richardson et al., ‘ “Language Is Spatial” ’; Richardson et al., ‘Spatial Representations’; Libby
and Elbach, ‘The Role of Visual Imagery’, p. 161.
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8 Graphic Signs of Authority

human perception to process object-like visual signs and symbols, and their spatial
relationships within more complex graphic representational systems, as proxies
for concepts and abstract thought. Whilst this capacity is universal, the ability to
communicate conceptual information through specific graphic devices depends
on a person’s familiarity with certain cultural systems of graphic visualization,36
which are usually historically specific.
The vast majority of graphicacy studies to date have concentrated on maps,
­diagrams, and graphs, because of their importance to modern educational prac-
tices. Even though some scholars, such as W. G. V. Balchin, list many other
­categories of graphicacy, including traffic signs, health and safety symbols, national
flags, and heraldic devices,37 such categories remain subordinate to the aforemen-
tioned graphic forms of graphicacy in scholarship. But this established hierarchy of
graphic forms is itself a by-product of modernity. Existing evidence indicates that
maps and diagrams had a very limited circulation in late antiquity and the Middle
Ages, and in these historical periods it is probable that less than 1 per cent of the
population could encode or decode information using such graphic representa-
tional systems. In further contrast to the modern age, graphic communication in
the late antique Mediterranean and in early medieval Europe was defined by its
eclectic corpus of graphic signs of diverse origin and nature, the use of which was
facilitated by the very same visuospatial ability of human cognition that generated
modern forms of graphicacy. At the same time, such graphic signs originated and
operated within a profoundly different cultural system of visual representation in a
world of different media, a cultural context that I have discussed elsewhere with
reference to the concept of early graphicacy.38
The typical forms of early graphicacy—‘pop graphicacy’, as it were—combined
basic graphic shapes and lines with decorative symbols, employed glyphic and
­glottographic characters, some of which were invested with symbolic meanings
and perceived transcendent properties, and encoded names as well as words and
phrases of symbolic importance in some instances. These graphic devices of a
hybrid nature defy the artificial dichotomy of text and image, because they employ
letters and words as para-textual elements and isolated decorative symbols as para-
iconographic phenomena—both dominated by the signs’ graphic networks of
­spatial organization.

0 . 2 . G R A P H I C S I G N S O F AU T H O R I T Y
A N D P O L I T I C A L C U LT U R E

This introduction to the graphic signs of authority in late antiquity and the early
Middle Ages has thus far neglected to provide a precise definition of its basic consti-
tuting unit. ‘Graphic sign’ is a notion that is often considered to be self-explanatory.

36 Postigo and Pozo, ‘On the Road to Graphicacy’, p. 641.

37 ‘Graphicacy and the Primary Geographer’.
38 For more details, see Garipzanov, ‘The Rise of Graphicacy’.
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Introduction 9

For this reason, dictionaries and manuals of graphic signs either fail to define the
term,39 or offer somewhat reductive definitions, as in Shepherd’s Glossary of Graphic
Signs and Symbols: ‘Any written, printed or carved mark which is used convention-
ally to convey an idea.’40 Moreover, the term has neither an established definition,
shared across various fields in the humanities, nor one which features prominently
in academic works of cultural history. When one is employed, it has traditionally
been discussed as referring to visual signs of various kinds operating in a number
of semiological systems, with post-Saussurian semiotics providing a common the-
oretical framework for its conceptualization41—as, for instance, in Walter Mignolo’s
discussion of native writing practices in Latin America: ‘Semiotically, a graphic
sign is, then, a physical sign on a solid surface made with the purpose of establishing
a semiotic interaction.’42 Any human-made mark on solid surface can thus be
defined as a graphic sign, as long as it conveys shared meaning/s (i.e. signifies
something) to its producers and audiences.
This definition of the graphic sign is akin to Charles S. Peirce’s broad notion of
sign as equivalent with any kind of meaning, and the Peircean classical division
of signs can similarly be applied to visual graphic forms.43 Based on a sign’s relation
to referent, Peirce distinguished three types of signs (signifiers), which now are
often viewed as ‘universal meaning-making principles’:44 namely icons, indices,
and symbols. Iconic signs signify by resemblance/likeness; indexical signs signify
by contiguity, i.e. existential or physical connection of some kind; and symbolic
signs signify by convention.45
Most graphic signs fall into the latter two groups. After all, ‘the more relevant
the graphic aspects of a sign’s gestalt are to its meaning, the more it is likely to be
pictorial in nature’,46 which will take it into another domain of visual communica-
tion, namely that of picture signs and figurative art. Compared to pictures, graphic
signs tend to be simpler and more abstract in their form,47 and their relationship
to the signified is less direct. Many of them function as indexical signs, such as
christograms and monograms originating in the Graeco-Roman world as indexes
for names. These monograms were connected to their referents through the use of
identical letters, rearranged in visual webs of new spatial relations. Thus, the late
antique bishop Avitus of Vienne referred to his own monogram as the indicium
(disclosure, indication, or evidence) of his name (‘Signum monogrammatis mei
per gyrum scripti nominis legatur indicio’).48 Meanwhile, the Latin term indicium
can also be translated as ‘sign’, and it is in this more narrow sense that the term
‘sign’ is often employed in academic discourse as a substitute for the indexical sign

39 See, for example, Frutiger, Signs; and Post, Saints, Signs.

40 Shepherd, Shepherd’s Glossary, p. 26.
41 For the criticism of Saussure’s privileging of spoken languages and his emphasis on the phonic
substance in the concept of a sign, see Holdscroft, Saussure, pp. 39–42.
42 Mignolo, The Darker Side, p. 78.
43 Short, Peirce’s Theory, pp. 164–72; Sonesson, ‘The Cognitive Semiotics’, pp. 39–40.
44 Stöckl, ‘In Between Modes’, p. 26.
45 Short, Peirce’s Theory, pp. 214–23; Atkin, ‘Peirce’s Theory’.
46 Stöckl, ‘Typography’, p. 207. 47 Stötzner, ‘Signography’, pp. 285–7.
48 Avitus Viennensis, Epistolae ad diversos, 87 (78), in Alcimi Aviti opera, ed. Peiper, p. 97.
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10 Graphic Signs of Authority

and juxtaposed with the term ‘symbol’.49 For the graphic signs discussed in this
book, such a distinction between indexical and symbolic signs is neither straight-
forward nor productive. It is of course true that the sign of the cross developed a
number of symbolic meanings in late antique Christian society and thus func-
tioned as a true symbol. But it cannot be said that the lexical content of christo-
grams was accessible to most Latin readers, as Lactantius’ famous yet perplexing
description of Constantine’s victorious sign makes quite obvious. Most people in
late antiquity were even less capable of comprehending the linguistic meanings
of most monograms, and a shift in ‘modes of signification’50 accompanied the
­cultural transmission of monograms on their way from producers and recipients
to external observers. For the latter category, monogrammatic signs were often
nothing more than abstract visual symbols of noble status and authority, or empower-
ing graphic devices with supernatural qualities. Monograms thus embodied shifting
cultural attitudes, social hierarchies, and political power. In doing so, they did not
differ much from graphic signs in general, which are in a state of permanent flux
while travelling ‘from person to person, from age to age, from country to country,
from one domain of use to another’.51
Although similar to other types of signs in their communicative aspects, graphic
signs differ in having specific visual properties, and they can also be classified
according to their visual shapes.52 Frank Kammerzell has emphasized the import-
ance of this aspect in his definition of the graphic sign as ‘a visible mark that is
deliberately produced by a human being on an appropriate carrier and embodies a
particular shape and a corresponding piece of information intended by its producer’.53
Some primary graphic forms have been universal for different cultures—such as a
square/box or circle pervading the world of graphic signs in late antiquity and
the early Middle Ages54—and contemporary thinkers invested such forms with a
range of symbolic meanings. Thus, for an early patristic author such as Clement
of Alexandria, the regular proportions of the square form symbolized security
and functioned as a blueprint for all other things in the world,55 while Plotinus
and Pseudo-Dionysius saw the circle as a shape that likened the human soul with
the divine intelligences.56 Another primary graphic form popular in modern
graphic design, the triangle, is notable for its rare use in the late antique or early
medieval world. In this period, the cruciform shape gradually became the most
popular form of graphic sign, and this development visualized the successful pro-
cess of Christianization, as well as the ubiquitous presence of the sign of the cross
in early medieval visual culture. The shameful sign of capital punishment was thus

49 For a different interpretation of the complex relationship between ‘sign’ and ‘symbol’ in academic
discourse, see Jung, ‘Ziechen’.
50 Gross, Lesezeichen, p. 76; and Stöckl, ‘Typography’, p. 206.
51 Stötzner, ‘Signography’, p. 300.
52 Stötzner, ‘Signography’, p. 286; Frutiger, Signs, pp. 43–51.
53 ‘Defining Non-Textual Marking Systems’, p. 278.
54 These graphic forms were also used by prehistoric Europeans in the Upper Paleolithic era: von
Petzinger, The First Signs.
55 Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, or Miscellanies, 6. 11, p. 500.
56 For more details, see Chapter 4.
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Introduction 11

transformed into a beautiful symbol of transcendent power and divine authority,57

which left a noticeable imprint on the visual world of early medieval graphic signs.
This change epitomized the cultural transformation of the late antique Mediterranean
world and early medieval Europe.
In addition to differentiating graphic signs by their visual forms and their
semiotic relation to referents, Andreas Stötzner has suggested dividing them
by the nature of their referents, into informative signs signifying things, phonemes,
words, and ideas, and emblematic signs signifying people, human collectives,
and institutions.58 Whereas this distinction might be applicable to the taxonomy
of modern signs, it is much less productive for late antique and early medieval
graphic devices. For example, signs such as christograms and monograms can be
defined as emblems, but they also encoded words, and often symbolized ideas.
Furthermore, Stötzner’s distinction is made with reference to modern Western
secularized culture. Late antique and early medieval culture was defined by a
universal belief in the reality of supernatural forces, and thus many graphic
signs were hardly perceived by their contemporaries as passive communicative
or emblematic means. Some, such as occult graphic characters or Christian
signs, were believed to function as active agents, capable of affecting the tran-
scendent world on behalf of their producers, bearers, or viewers. For such
devices, therefore, the process of their production and their use in specific ritual
settings were of utmost importance. When properly employed in late antiquity
and the early Middle Ages, performative signs of this kind were perceived to act as
independent agents of religious and social interaction, as powerful as Byzantine
icons in the post-Iconoclastic era.
The signs repeatedly mentioned in this introduction—such as the cross, christo-
grams, occult graphic characters, and monograms—represent a large group of late
antique and early medieval graphic signs that were to a varying degree involved in
the representation and communication of transcendent and secular authorities,
and for this reason they can be defined as graphic signs of authority. Due to their
symbolic function, such devices encoded graphic information of a more abstract
nature than the non-textual marks of producers that appeared on various material
artefacts in the classical world. It is true that many graphic signs created by lesser
authorities were inspired by this earlier tradition of producer marks; in some cases,
it is hard to draw a precise dividing line between the two visual phenomena—for
instance, in the case of the monogrammatic signs of officials in charge of produc-
tion that were stamped on material artefacts in early Byzantium. Yet the graphic
marks of producers primarily encoded concrete information referring to a specific
master, workshop, or mint, and as such differed from the graphic signs of authority
in the Roman sense of the latter term (auctoritas): ‘authority as guarantee; author-
ity as origin or creation; and authority as personal prestige.’59 Such auctoritas was
primarily moral authority, i.e. ‘the capacity to inspire respect’, as claimed first by

57 Viladesau, The Beauty of the Cross, pp. 3–17. 58 Stötzner, ‘Signography’, pp. 291–3.
59 Krieger, ‘The Idea of Authority’, p. 258. See also Furedi, Authority, pp. 59–69 and 95–102.
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12 Graphic Signs of Authority

the Roman senate and emperors, and later by early Christian ecclesiastical leaders;
its outward signs and symbols were ‘eminently communicable and transferrable’.60
The notion of authority remains culture-dependent. In modern, largely secular-
ized society, where authority is perceived as the ‘legitimate power to command
and to secure obedience’,61 graphic signs of political authorities and visual symbols
of a religious and occult nature are usually considered separately. Yet this distinction
appears rather anachronistic when applied to late antiquity and the Christian
Middle Ages, where authority was commonly juxtaposed with coercive power,62
where divine and supernatural entities were credited with real presence in the
human world, and where imperial or royal authority was increasingly endowed
with transcendent properties. In this world, secular and ecclesiastical agents and
divine and transcendent forces overlapped within hierarchies of powers, and their
competing claims to authority established a plurality of authorities in late antique
and early medieval society.63 In this competitive environment of human and tran-
scendent ‘claimants’, their graphic signs became invested with varying degrees of
authority in concurrent society and its political culture.
Since its introduction by Gabriel A. Almond in 1956, ‘political culture’ has become
an important category in academic research of polities and politics, offering an
alternative approach to more traditional studies of ‘institutions’ and ‘political thought’.
The category of ‘political culture’ was designed to attract more attention to the issue
of how people interact with their political system, and to how people’s behaviour,
attitudes, and beliefs affect that system, although various political scientists have
emphasized different aspects of this interaction. Consequently, they have defined
political culture in various ways—for example, as ‘a particular pattern of orienta-
tion in political action’ with reference to attitudes towards politics, political values,
ideologies, national character, and cultural ethos;64 as ‘a system of political symbols’
involved in political communication;65 or as ‘publicly common ways of relating’.66
The same variability and indeterminacy have characterized the category of
­political culture in historical studies, where it became a buzzword as early as the
1980s.67 As Ronald Formisano commented, in those years ‘[p]robably no two his-
torians defined political culture (explicitly or implicitly) in the same way’.68 This
statement remains valid to the present day, although in line with the increasing
popularity of cultural history, historians—and medievalists in particular—have

60 Hopfl, ‘Power, Authority’, pp. 219 and 221.

61 Krieger, ‘The Idea of Authority’, p. 253. For other relevant modern discussions of the concept
of authority and its historical developments, see Arendt, ‘What is Authority?’; Lincoln, Authority,
pp. 1–6; Christiano, ‘Authority’; Agamben, State of Exception, pp. 74–88; Furedi, Authority.
62 Oakeshott, Lectures, p. 293; Furedi, Authority, pp. 1–2.
63 On a secular-religious dichotomy not being useful for late antiquity in this period, see e.g. Rapp,
Holy Bishops, p. 6.
64 Almond, ‘Comparative Political Systems’, p. 396. For a slightly modified definition, see Almond
and Verba, The Civic Culture.
65 Dittmer, ‘Political Culture’, p. 566. 66 Chilton, ‘Defining Political Culture’, p. 427.
67 For detailed discussions of these developments in political science and historical studies in the
last third of the twentieth century, see Gendzel, ‘Political Culture’; and Formisano, ‘The Concept of
Political Culture’.
68 Formisano, ‘The Concept of Political Culture’, p. 414.
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Introduction 13

become much more interested in the ‘cultural’ dimension of political culture and
have commonly studied the latter in a manner inspired by Clifford Geertz’s ‘thick
descriptions’.69
Thus, for instance, for Levi Roach, later Anglo-Saxon political culture is very
much a ‘culture of signs and symbols’.70 By contrast, John Watts sees political
­culture in late medieval Europe as consisting essentially of ‘three non-governmental
kinds of structure’, namely media (education, art and architecture, preaching,
books, conversations, and so on), social networks (lordship and service, patronage
and clientage, families, dynasties, and clans), and ideology (political ideas, lan-
guage or rhetoric, attitudes, and assumptions).71 Taking a different approach to
Watts, Geoffrey Koziol describes the political culture of France from the tenth to
twelfth centuries with reference not only to the fundamental political values and
mimetic power of kingship, alongside the limited role of noble women in politics,
but also to the material foundations of secular power.72 These examples illustrate
Formisano’s point, yet they also point to the futility of offering yet another definition
of political culture.
This book does not aim to do so. It is here sufficient to point out that this
­category refers to cultural settings—both real and imagined—in which politics,
political order, and polities are embedded, and that these settings may differ con-
siderably across various historical contexts. More important for this monograph
is one specific suggestion that I would like to make, namely that graphic signs
of authority should be viewed as an immanent part of symbolic communication
pertinent to political culture and its media.73 Through their cognitive potential to
function as proxies for abstract ideas and concepts, these forms of early graphicacy
functioned as a visual medium expressing and communicating widely shared ideas,
assumptions, attitudes, beliefs, and patterns of symbolic behaviour relating to the
nature, as well as the various sources and forms, of authority in late antiquity and
the early Middle Ages. A contextualized up-to-date study of such graphic signs is
therefore capable of providing new insights into a visual aspect of contemporary
political culture, studies of which have traditionally been framed by late antique
and early medieval written discourses.

0 . 3 . G R A P H I C S I G N S O F AU T H O R I T Y:
H I S TO R I O G R A P H I C T R E N D S

The existing literature on the history of graphic signs discussed in this book is
­divided into two disconnected groups. Firstly, a substantial number of detailed
academic studies exist dedicated to specific groups or particular graphic signs,

69 For overviews of political culture studies in medieval history, see e.g. Carpenter, ‘Introduction’;
and Stofferahn, ‘Resonance and Discord’.
70 Kingship, pp. 209–10. 71 The Making of Polities, pp. 129–57.
72 ‘Political Culture’, pp. 43–76.
73 Elsewhere I have discussed this type of communication with reference to the symbolic language
of authority; see Garipzanov, The Symbolic Language.
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14 Graphic Signs of Authority

which are barely known outside specialized academic disciplines; secondly, there
are a few non-specialist overviews of varying quality, addressed to collectors and
the general public, such as Otto C. Flämig’s compendium of medieval and early
modern monograms (2003) and Robert Feind’s manual of Byzantine monograms
(2011).74 Publications in this second category have doubtlessly stimulated interest
in the topic among a wider readership, but to the best of my knowledge, no aca-
demic book since Viktor Gardthausen’s monograph on early monograms (1924)75
has attempted to present a broad analytical study of large graphic data of this kind
covering a long historical time span.
Utilizing his academic background in ancient history as well as Greek and Latin
palaeography, Viktor Gardthausen (1843–1925) was able to compile a broad
­survey of classical and early medieval monograms in the Latin West and the Greek
East. His work took into account a wide range of graphic evidence brought into
scholarly discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For this reason,
his study remains the key reference work on the subject in modern academic litera-
ture. Yet his detailed discussion of various monogrammatic types and samples
lacked the necessary cultural contextualization of particular graphic signs, and in
some cases he interpreted certain monograms in ways later shown to be erroneous.
Almost a century since its original publication, his book has also become outdated
in terms of its corpus of graphic evidence.
Gardthausen’s monograph benefited from a number of specialized reports,
­articles, and notes on the history of graphic signs in antiquity that appeared before
World War I and in the Interwar period, a body of material that demonstrated an
avid engagement in this research subject among both ancient historians and
­philologists, alongside specialists in early Christianity. With an academic background
in classical philology, the work of Franz Dornseiff (1888–1960) was representative
of the first group of scholars, and his German book (1922) on the use of letters in
ancient mystic and ‘magical’ practices is still referred to in modern studies of
ancient gematria and isopsephy.76 Writing in the same period, the German theolo-
gian and church historian, Franz Joseph Dölger (1879–1940), exemplified the
growing interest of specialists of early Christianity and Christian archaeology in
the history of Christian symbols and signs. His unfinished book on the various
uses and symbolic meanings of the sign of the cross in the first millennium ad,
which was posthumously published by his pupils as a series of essays in the late
1950s and 1960s, remains an important reference work on that topic.77
Dornseiff ’s and Dölger’s erudite studies also highlight the gradual fragmenta-
tion of the scholarly field that explores graphic signs, a result of the growing
­professionalization of academic disciplines over the course of the twentieth century.

74 Flämig, Monogramme; Feind, Byzantinische Monogramme. For a critical review of the later work
by Werner Seibt, see JÖB, 61 (2011), 252–3.
75 Das alte Monogramm.
76 Dornseiff, Das Alphabet. This book derived from his PhD on the mysticism of letters, defended
in Heidelberg in 1916: Dornseiff, Buchstabenmystik.
77 Dölger, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des Kreuzzeichens I–IX’. Klauser, Franz Joseph Dölger,
pp. 100–1.
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Introduction 15

Consequently, such research has become divided into highly specialized academic
disciplines according to various types of graphic signs and/or the media on which
they appeared, and has thus lost some of its appeal amongst scholars more focused
on political and socio-economic history.78
In this process of professionalization, such specialized disciplines have also
developed considerably different approaches to graphic evidence. Thus, specialists
in early Christianity and Christian archaeology—such as Carlo Cecchelli
(1893–1960),79 Erich Dinkler (1909–81),80 Jack Finegan (1908–2000),81 Larry
Hurtado,82 and Bruce Longenecker83—have focused on early Christian signs (the
sign of the cross and christograms), and analysed their symbolic meanings and
wider theological contexts as reflected in the writings of early Christian fathers.
Archaeologists, however, have never systematically analysed the use of such graphic
signs on mass-produced objects and public monuments, and we still lack a com-
prehensive overview of such symbolic usage in terms of media, chronology, and
regional variation.
Early Christian signs have traditionally been treated separately from another
group of graphic signs widespread in the Mediterranean world in the first millen-
nium ad and related to transcendent powers: occult charactera and mystical seals.
These esoteric graphic signs have been discussed by students of deviant religious
practices and related material artefacts such as amulets and papyri, under the cat-
egory of ancient magic—an academic field that was established around the turn
of the twentieth century.84 Consequently, for prominent specialists in ancient
amulets—such as Campbell Bonner (1876–1954) or Roy Kotansky—these were
defined as magical (or sometimes Gnostic) amulets, and graphic characters
inscribed in such media have been commonly described in this academic field as
magical signs.85 Yet this traditional ‘magic’ approach to the study of occult signs
has been questioned in recent years. Principally, many specialists in this field have
admitted the difficulties of defining magic and separating it from religion,86 with
Bernd-Christian Otto in particular questioning the general scholarly use of the
category of magic, instead historicizing it in terms of concurrent literary discourses.87
More importantly, recent research has shown that Christians in Egypt and Syria
not only used such occult characters in late antiquity but also sometimes did so
syncretically with Christian symbols,88 which means that the lines between
Christian and occult graphic signs were less sharply drawn in late antiquity than

78 This can be illustrated by a dictum on F. J. Dölger’s academic profile attributed to the renowned
Russian-American classical historian Michail Rostovtsev (1870–1952): ‘Dölger ist kein Historiker, er
ist ein Antiquar’ (‘Dölger is not a historian, he is an antiquarian’); Klauser, Franz Joseph Dölger, p. 110.
79 Il trionfo. 80 Signum crucis. 81 The Archeology.
82 The Earliest Christian Artifacts. 83 The Cross.
84 For more details, see Bremmer, ‘Preface’, p. 7.
85 Bonner, Studies; Kotansky, Greek Magical Amulets. See also Frankfurter, ‘The Magic’; and
Dickie, Magic.
86 See e.g. Remus, ‘ “Magic” ’, pp. 268–72; Bremmer, ‘Preface’, pp. 10–12.
87 Otto, Magie; Otto, ‘Towards Historicizing “Magic” ’; Otto, ‘Historicising “Western Learned
Magic” ’.
88 See Dickie, Magic, pp. 274–81; Spier, ‘An Antique Magical Book’; Gordon, ‘Charactêres’.
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16 Graphic Signs of Authority

the separated academic fields of early Christianity and ancient magic would suggest.
The same holds true for the syncretic use of such signs on medieval textual amulets,
which, as Don C. Skemer argues, was ‘a geographically widespread Western ritual
practice at the nexus of religion, magic, science and written culture’.89
Scholars of classical and medieval epigraphy, palaeography, diplomatics, sigil-
lography, and numismatics have adopted an entirely different, largely taxonomic,
approach to late antique and early medieval graphic signs—and most importantly,
to monograms. They have usually discussed such signs under the rubric of compen-
dium scripturae, that is, utilitarian devices employed in classical and medieval writing
practices, primarily deployed to abbreviate personal names. Benet Salway’s definition
of the monogram in the recently published Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy—as
a ‘shorthand method of identification that emerges in the epigraphic record in late
antiquity’—is representative of this widely shared attitude.90 From this perspec-
tive, it is hardly surprising that specialists in these auxiliary historical disciplines
have considered classification and decoding to be their main tasks in studying
monograms found on stone, parchment, seals, and coins. Consequently, some
­sigillographers and numismatists—like Vitalien Laurent (1896–1973) and Philip
Grierson (1910–2006)—have produced various formal taxonomies of monograms
as well as other graphic devices on specific late antique and early medieval media
such as lead seals and coins, but they have rarely touched upon wider cultural con-
texts facilitating the appearance and popularity of these signs in late antiquity.91
In the past half century, such a taxonomic approach has been successfully used
in Vienna to study the enormous corpus of early Byzantine monograms. In 1971,
Walter Otto Fink defended an unpublished PhD thesis entitled Das byzantinische
Monogramm (‘The Byzantine monogram’), in which sigillographic material was
complemented by known evidence from architectural monuments, silver objects,
rings, ivories, and coins. Fink attempted to establish some general principles used
in the construction of these monograms, and to decode them utilizing a database
of approximately five thousand known names and titles of early Byzantine
­officials.92 Yet despite such a systematic approach, he had to admit that a definitive
resolution was only possible for monograms in very rare cases, and that his pro-
posed variants of decoding were just one of several possible options.93 Another
Viennese sigillographer, Werner Seibt, has advanced this method further by check-
ing all the readable letters of a monogram against the database of names, titles, and
offices, in which the letters of each entry were listed in alphabetical order. This
fruitful method produced a number of plausible matches. But still in 2016, Seibt
had to acknowledge that even a limited combination of letters can be interpreted
in many ways and connected with both common and rare names, without an
absolute guarantee which particular one was encoded in a specific monogram.
Monograms combining names with titles and offices are even less predictable for

89 Binding Words, p. 5. 90 Salway, ‘Late Antiquity’, p. 376.

91 Laurent, Les sceaux byzantins; Bellinger, Grierson, and Hendy, eds, Catalogue, vol. 2,
pp. 107–11.
92 The method has been summarized in Fink, ‘Das frühbyzantinische Monogramm’.
93 Fink, ‘Neue Deutungsvorschläge’, pp. 88–94.
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Introduction 17

deciphering, and Seibt admits that in some cases he has capitulated ‘in front of
the mass of possible data’.94 These results clearly show both the benefits and
limitations of a formal taxonomic approach to the study of late antique monograms,
as well as the need for contextual analysis to properly situate them as cultural phenom-
ena—analysis that should take into account relevant written discourses, culturally
defined assumptions and practices, and specific historical contexts.95 When a spe-
cific context in which a monogram was created and used is all but lost or omitted,
any suggested decoding and/or interpretation often remains mere hypothesis.
Hence, since the 1990s scholars have begun increasingly to take into account
the historical, cultural, and material contexts in which specific monograms and
other late antique and early medieval graphic signs operated, and to look at their
usage outside the compendium scripturae straightjacket—as, for instance, in Carlo
Carletti’s treatment of the so-called Palma et laurus monogram in the epitaphs of
early Christian Rome, in Charlotte Roueché’s discussion of epigraphic monograms
in late antique Aphrodisias and Ephesos, and in Antony Eastmond’s cultural con-
textualization of early Byzantine monograms.96 In diplomatics, a similar approach
has been propagated by Peter Rück (1934–2004) and his School of diplomatic
semiotics at the Institut für Historische Hilfwissenschaften at Marburg.97 In the
­pragmatic editorial introduction to the impressive collected volume on graphic
symbols in medieval charters (1996)—including the cross, monograms, chris-
mons, and rota—Rück defined the task of diplomatic semiotics as follows: ‘to
understand the charter as a system of linguistic, graphic, and material signs (codes)
in a communicative process’,98 and called for more attention to graphic symbols
in this medium. Despite mixed responses to Rück’s approach,99 his efforts have
contributed to an increased awareness of the significant role that graphic signa
and nota played in medieval charters and, more generally, of the importance of
a material medium for the proper understanding of graphic signs. This awareness
is evident in the current major project on Material Text Cultures (Materiale
Textkulturen) at the University of Heidelberg. In spite of the project’s main focus
on the materiality of writing and quasi-writing, its adoption of a contextualized
approach to such ‘material texts’ is highly relevant for historical research on graphic
signs.100 In another drastic departure from traditional diplomatics inspired by

94 ‘The Use of Monograms’, pp. 11–12.

95 For a similar emphasis on the importance of contextual parameters with reference to Peircean
semiotics, see Bedos-Rezak, When Ego Was Imago, pp. 60–71.
96 See e.g. Carletti, ‘Un monogramma’; Roueché, ‘Looking for Late Antique Ceremonial’;
Roueché, ‘Interpreting the Signs’; and Eastmond, ‘Monograms’.
97 This approach was propagated by publications in the Marburg series Elementa diplomatica, with
Peter Rück functioning as its academic editor; see e.g. Rück, Bildberichte; and Worm, Karolingische
Rekognitionszeichen.
98 ‘Ausgabe einer diplomatischen Semiotik ist es, die Urkunde als System von – sprachlichen,
graphischen und stofflichen – Zeichen (Codes) in einem Kommunikationsprozeß zu begreifen . . . ’,
Rück, ‘Beiträge’, p. 13.
99 For a sceptical response, see Kölzer, ‘Diplomatik’, pp. 20–3.
100 http://www.materiale-textkulturen.de (accessed 19 July 2016). For the emphasis on a hermen-
eutic approach to the study of ‘material text’, see Hilger, ‘ “Text-Anthropologie” ’. See also volumes
issued in the Materiale Textkulturen series that started in de Gruyters from 2014.
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18 Graphic Signs of Authority

semiotics and semiotic anthropology, Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak has recently

argued that the medieval charter ‘was an iconic document in which several systems
of signs—the letter, the image, the heraldic emblem—entertained a symbiotic
­relationship’, and that the charter’s seal functioned ‘as a sign, conveying identity,
status, prestige, and power-covenant’—a sign combining text and image in a single
discourse.101
Until recently, late antique and early medieval graphic signs remained in the
shadows of figurative imagery in art history—more or less similar to their
­marginalization in traditional studies on literary culture. This situation reflected
a deeply entrenched academic ‘assumption that word and image commonly
stand in opposition’.102 In response to this paradigm, the British art historian
Michael Squire has even recently warned classicists and medievalists that ‘our
understanding of “texts” and “images” . . . is socially, culturally and, above all,
theologically invested’.103 More specifically, the modern tendency to separate
texts and images abruptly originated in the early modern period under the
influence of Protestantism, which imposed a residual logocentrism upon the
modern perception of images, whereby ‘responses to images must follow ver-
bally determined patterns of cultural response’.104
At the same time, art historians studying the early medieval decorated book
have dealt for quite a long time with the development of letter-based graphic
forms in this medium. Thus, in 1970, Carl Nordenfalk discussed the late antique
decorated initials that appeared in the fourth century as a new visual phenomenon,
blurring the established borders between text and image;105 and students of
­medieval illuminated manuscripts and Insular decorated books in particular have
paid close attention to the interplay between script and image, to the graphic
design of such books as a whole, and to ideographic (‘extralinguistic’) meanings of
display letters and letter-based graphic forms, including the so-called ‘monogram-
matic initials’.106
In recent years, art historical research on the interplay between word and image
has benefited greatly not only from a methodological shift in art history, brought
about by studies in visual studies and visual literacy, but also from interdisciplinary
collaboration with cultural historians, palaeographers, epigraphers, and sigillogra-
phers. This transition is illustrated by a series of workshops at the Courtauld Institute
of Art in London in 2010–11, which assembled both art historians and epigraphers.
These colloquia generated a collected volume on the visual (‘non-verbal’) qualities
of epigraphic writing and images disguised as words in the late antique and medieval
Mediterranean and Near East (2015), which also considered the performative
qualities of such epigraphic writing and pseudo-writing and their role in the con-
struction of authority and identities.107 The level of interdisciplinarity was even

101 When Ego Was Imago, pp. 27–9. 102 Eastwood, Ordering the Heavens, p. 420.
103 Squire, Image and Text, p. 17. 104 Squire, Image and Text, p. 8.
105 Die spätantiken Zierbuchstaben.
106 See e.g. Kendrick, Animating the Letter; Brown, The Book; Hamburger, ‘The Iconicity’;
Tilghman, ‘The Shape’; and Hahn, ‘Letter’.
107 Eastmond, ed., Viewing Inscriptions.
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Introduction 19

higher at the international symposium convened by Brigitte M. Bedos-Rezak

and Jeffrey F. Hamburger at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC, in 2012, which
brought together specialists in medieval art history, sigillography, diplomatics, and
epigraphy, as well as in the anthropology of writing and non-Western writing sys-
tems. This conference resulted in an impressive collected volume (2016), which
provides multidisciplinary insights into the history of ‘imagistic lettering’ or
‘script-images’ (reminiscent of Tom Mitchell’s notion of ‘imagetext’), i.e. hybrid
signs formed through the fusion of letter and image, in the ancient and medieval
Near East, Europe, Byzantium, and Latin America.108
Such promising collaborative efforts demonstrate the effectiveness of an inter-
disciplinary approach to graphic signs, an approach that has been adopted in
this book. It facilitates the coverage of graphic evidence on a wide range of media
that, until recently, has almost never been studied collectively—such as various
mass-produced objects and unique objects of arts, architectural monuments and
epigraphic inscriptions, and manuscripts and charters. This approach also allows a
synthetic study of graphic signs of authority that, as a result of compartmentalized
academic traditions, have traditionally been treated as separate, and largely unre-
lated, phenomena.

0 . 4 . C U LT U R A L H I S TO RY O F G R A P H I C
S I G N S O F AU T H O R I T Y

Whereas many academic accounts describe the cultural history of this transforma-
tive age from textual, art historical, or archaeological perspectives, with narratives
necessarily driven by textual sources, figural imagery, and/or archaeological
material, the following chapters focus on graphic signs of authority that are inscribed,
engraved, stamped, carved, written, and drawn on different types of material
­artefacts. This study navigates this type of visual evidence with ‘illustrative’ (as
it were) references to particular media, specific historical contexts, and relevant
late antique and early medieval texts. In doing so, it aims to offer an alternative
account of the cultural, religious, and socio-political transition from the late
Graeco-Roman world to that of early medieval Europe—a diachronic narrative
combining contextualized detailed discussions of representative graphic samples
on various material objects, in a manner reminiscent of art historical studies, with
overviews of general trends in the use of relevant graphic devices, akin to publica-
tions in cultural history and archaeology.
The following chapters examine the cultural history of graphic signs of authority
in the late antique Mediterranean and early medieval Europe largely in chronological
order. Part 1 presents the late antique history of graphic signs of authority relating
to a transcendent sphere. Chapter 1 investigates the cultural context that contributed
to the appearance and growing significance of the earliest Christian signs such as
the chi-rho and tau-rho, and provides an overview of the diverse corpora of graphic

108 See the editorial introduction in Sign and Design, pp. 1–16.
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20 Graphic Signs of Authority

signs that were employed in the Imperial period as part of non-orthodox and
­alternative religious practices, traditionally referred to as ‘Gnostic’ or ‘magical’.
These specific historical conditions led to the earliest Christian signs functioning
as visual symbols for nascent Christian communities, symbols referring to Christ
and his salvific mission. At the same time, in the turbulent world of competing
religious practices, where different graphic signs claimed various degrees of tran-
scendent power and spiritual authority, early Christian signs were bound to acquire
apotropaic properties. Furthermore, outside the normative world of early Christian
dogmas and prescriptions, Christ and his saints had to prove their transcendent
powers against fierce competition from more anonymous (but no less awe-inspiring)
mystical forces, and many Christian laymen and even some clerics continued to
employ occult graphic characters—often side by side with Christian symbols—in
the late antique world, especially in the Eastern Mediterranean. Chapter 2 shows
how in the fourth century the chi-rho symbol, complemented towards the end
of that century by the tau-rho symbol, developed into a paradigmatic symbol of
religious authority in the Roman empire. Parallel to that process, the Constantinian
dynasty adopted the chi-rho as their imperial ‘logo’, appealing not only to Christians
of lower status but also to imperial officials and the aristocracy, especially in the
Western Roman empire. In doing so, Constantine the Great and his heirs differed
little from their predecessors in the second half of the third century, who in add-
ition to exploiting the moral authority of the Roman title of principes began to
claim transcendent authority deriving from a special relation with divinities.109
Chapter 3 surveys the theological, historical, and cultural contexts in the Roman
world that, around the turn of the fifth century, transformed an ignominious
­symbol of capital punishment in the form of a tau-rho cross into the triumphant
symbol of Christianity, a four-armed cross. Its visual similarity to some mystical
charactera featuring four and eight arms probably contributed to its growing repu-
tation for apotropaic power, so that the cross gradually came to be seen as superior
to other graphic devices in its access to the supernatural. In the same period,
Theodosian emperors and empresses appropriated the sign of the cross as their
imperial ‘logo’, and placed it on different media of visual communication to propa-
gate the profoundly Christian nature of their emperorship. Consequently, from the
mid-fifth century onwards, this sign became an important symbol of imperial—and,
later on, royal—authority.
Part 2 explores a specific feature of late antiquity: its unique monogrammatic
culture. Chapter 4 discusses the classical origins of late antique monograms, which
can be traced back to producers’ marks in the classical world. In the Early Imperial
period, emperors occasionally used their monograms on coins and glass vessels to
guarantee their circulation and claim a monopoly on certain products. By the
fourth century, monogrammatic signs developed into more sophisticated graphic
devices, and began to encode personal names and ritualistic phrases, especially in
Christian media such as funerary plaques in Roman catacombs. By creating their

109 For the expression of that claim on third-century imperial coinage, see e.g. Manders, Coining,
pp. 95–154.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

Introduction 21

own personal monograms, early Christians imitated—and thus appealed to the

spiritual authority of—Christ, whose name was regularly expressed by the chris-
tograms. At the same time, many personal monograms placed in public spaces
must have been viewed as useful protective devices against personal names being
misused in concurrent ‘magical’ practices. Parallel to the rise of personal mono-
grammatic signs, the use of acclamatory and intercessory monograms spread in
late antiquity due to a general belief in the efficacy of graphic devices as visual keys
to the transcendent sphere. Their increasing use in symbolic communication
accompanied the increasing popularity of acclamations in oral communication:
both reflected the expanding role of ritualized forms of communication in late
antiquity, and the transition from the mimetic visual culture of the classical world
to the ‘ritual-centred’ visuality of the Middle Ages.110 In the fourth and fifth cen-
turies, artistically designed personal monograms became a noticeable feature of
Roman calligraphic culture and became visual symbols of social prestige in late
Roman political culture. In some cases, such monograms were invested with
­hidden meanings decipherable only to a narrow circle of aristocratic elites—often
with recourse to ideas deriving from late antique Neoplatonism or mystic
Christianity. They thus marked social and cultural divisions equally. Chapter 5
traces the proliferation of monogrammatic culture on different material media in
the second half of the fifth century and into the sixth, in particular in early
Byzantium. In this period, monograms began to function as graphic signs of
authority for emperors, imperial officials, ecclesiastical leaders, and kings. They
also became visual symbols of social prestige for aristocrats, who proudly displayed
them on personal luxury objects and dress accessories—people of lower status
often copied this practice, no doubt attracted by the social prestige attached to
personal monograms. In short, by the sixth century, monograms had developed
into an established visual attribute of a late antique Christian paideia. Chapter 6
demonstrates the sixth-century expansion of this blossoming monogrammatic
tradition, tracing its diffusion onto public monuments, and in particular into
churches. Originating as ennobling graphic devices providing idiosyncratic hon-
ours to donors and commissioners, monumental monograms were first adopted by
Justinian I and Theodora as graphic signs of imperial authority, carved in ecclesias-
tical settings for liturgical rituals of power—a practice followed by their imperial
successors. Very soon after, church leaders imitated this innovation in various parts
of the early Byzantine world, including Ravenna and Rome. The sixth-century
appropriation of this imperial practice by ecclesiastical hierarchs visualized and
monumentalized the concept that Christian bishops had an exclusive claim to
­spiritual authority deriving from God—a concept that Pope Gelasius I (492–6)
had formulated in his writing some decades earlier, and that later became a corner-
stone for the medieval doctrine of two powers.
Part 3 examines the adaptation and transformation of the above-mentioned late
antique graphic traditions in early medieval Europe. Chapter 7 overviews their

110 Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer, pp. 88–124; Elsner, ‘Between Mimesis and Divine Power’;
and Squire, Image and Text, pp. 231–2 and 246–7.
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22 Graphic Signs of Authority

history in the pre-Carolingian period. The use of monograms as signs of authority

and social prestige by kings and high-status people in the Ostrogothic and
Burgundian kingdoms shows an unbroken continuation of late Roman symbolic
traditions. A real break with late Roman political culture took place in this sphere
in the seventh and early eighth centuries, when in the modified political culture of
early medieval Europe personal monograms lost their appeal as graphic signs of
royal and imperial authority, and increasingly functioned as signs of authority for
bishops and lesser local figures of power. Monogrammatic signs of collectives
(important cities and monasteries) represent a new feature in these centuries,
reflecting the changing roles of various agents in concurrent political culture. The
diminishing role of monograms in this period coincided with the proliferation of
Christian graphic devices—such as the sign of the cross and the invocational and
intercessory devices of a cruciform shape—in various media. These intercessory
graphic signs became especially popular in the early Byzantine world, where such
cruciform devices became a dominant graphic mode employed in interactions
with transcendent forces, before their role was undermined by the rise of icons in
the post-Iconoclastic era. At the same time, ‘magical’ characters continued to exer-
cise influence in private spaces, and were later transferred to late Byzantine and
Muslim occult practices. In Western manuscript culture, late antique monogram-
matic traditions led to the gradual development of a new medieval phenomenon
from the seventh to eighth centuries, namely ‘monogrammatic’ initials, whereby
some initials introduced important sections of a text by combining several letters
in a monogram-like manner. Chapter 8 starts with the examination of such initials
in Carolingian sacramentaries and gospel-books, and shows that some initials of
that kind—such as Vere dignum and Te igitur, that introduced important sections
of the Canon of the Mass—encoded ideas about God and His nature, and were
influenced by the late antique tradition of acclamatory monograms. A further
overview of the personal monograms introduced into Carolingian manuscript
­culture in the late eighth and ninth centuries confirms that late antique and con-
temporary Byzantine influences contributed to a monogrammatic revival in that
period. At the same time, the Carolingian practice of monograms represented to
a large extent a ‘re-invented’ tradition. Unlike in late antiquity, when personal
monograms functioned as well-known graphic badges of aristocratic status and
social prestige, monograms in Carolingian manuscripts represented a phenom-
enon limited to a narrow circle of Christian intellectuals that visualized the spirit-
ual authority of monastic scribes, abbots, and bishops, itself derived from their
unique status as transmitters and preservers of Christian knowledge, including the
knowledge of rare scripts and cryptographic graphic devices. This invention also
visualizes the transformation of the foci of authority that took place in Western
Europe from the fourth to ninth centuries, a transition from imperial palaces and
offices and aristocratic villas to royal and episcopal headquarters and royal monaster-
ies. A predilection for cryptic graphic forms in educated monastic circles is exempli-
fied by the appearance in this period of a compilatory text bringing together
rare scripts, graphic characters, and monograms—a work known as De inventione
linguarum or De inventione litterarum (‘On the Invention of Languages/Letters’).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

Introduction 23

Such rare graphic characters and devices were credited with the ability to interact
with the transcendent world, a quality similar to that of the aforementioned
­‘magical’ signs. The Carolingian period also witnessed the re-invention of the royal
monogram as a graphic sign of authority appealing to the Roman imperial trad-
ition and emphasizing the spiritual foundations of Carolingian kingship. The first
Carolingian monogrammatic device of that kind, the monogram of Charlemagne,
communicated such political concepts to his subjects through various media and
gradually developed into a royal ‘logo’ of Carolingian authority, which was passed
on to his heirs in the ninth and tenth centuries, along with the name ‘Charles’. Yet
the authority of this Carolingian royal ‘logo’ was a moonlight reflection of the
greater transcendent power attributed at this time to the sign of cross. Chapter 9
shows the unmatched status of this graphic sign in the ninth century and its ubi-
quitous presence in manuscript culture as well as in other media of royal authority
such as coins. Hrabanus Maurus’ work in the genre of pattern poetry known as In
honorem sanctae crucis (‘In Honour of the Holy Cross’) demonstrates the status of
that sign as the paradigmatic visual symbol of authority in the Carolingian world.
Hrabanus’ ‘imagetext’ represented a unique achievement in the field of Carolingian
graphicacy. More importantly for the cultural history of graphic signs, it highlighted
the transition from the graphic universe of late antiquity, characterized by a plurality
of competing visual claims to various kinds of authority toward a more hierarchically
organized visual culture of the Carolingian world, where the sign of the cross emerged
as the unmatched principle graphic symbol of authority for kings and bishops,
nobles and clerics, and common people.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

PA RT I
GRAPHIC SIGNS OF
D I V I N E AU T H O R I T Y I N
L AT E A N T I Q U I T Y
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

1
The Origins of Early Christian
Graphic Signs

The sign of the cross has remained the most popular Christian graphic symbol from
the early Middle Ages to the present day. In Europe and North America it is still
omnipresent, not just in ecclesiastical settings but also in public spaces and in art. This
sign has become engraved, as it were, onto the cultural code of many European
countries, to the extent that it can define the designs of national flags or the logos
of international charity organizations such as the Red Cross. Yet the rise of this graphic
symbol to prominence was all but straightforward in the first Christian centuries, and
the cross sign did not gain popularity in Christian culture until as late as the second
half of the fourth and fifth centuries. Instead, the graphic signs of Greek origin known
as chi-rho and tau-rho dominated the world of early Christian graphic symbols.

1 . 1 . T H E N O M I N A S AC R A , S TAU RO G R A M ,
AND CHI-RHO

One can trace the earliest usage of these two signs in early Christian manuscript
culture, in which they were preceded by another related visual phenomenon known
as nomina sacra. Nomina sacra appeared in both orthodox and ‘heterodox’ early
Christian manuscripts, as special abbreviated forms of sacred names consisting
of the first, last, and (in some cases) medial letters. The term itself was introduced
by Ludwig Traube in the early twentieth century, who thought that this palaeo-
graphic practice expressed Christian reverence to names related to the divine
sphere, in imitation of a similar Jewish written tradition in the Septuagint.1 From
the Hellenistic period, Hebrew texts employed a range of scribal techniques to hide
the name of God, most often with the Tetragrammaton (‫יהוה‬, or YHWH in Latin),
that only certain Jews could intone. On the one hand, this device safeguarded the
sanctity of the divine name from misuse and, on the other, its secret nature could
serve as an identifying visual marker within the Jewish community.2 The Jewish
reverence for divine names and the scribal practice of the Tetragrammaton thus
probably acted as the main source of inspiration for the invention of the first
­nomina sacra among early Christians, many of whom were ethnic Jews. This early

1 Traube, Nomina sacra, pp. 4–27.

2 For more details and references, see Andrade, ‘The Jewish Tetragrammaton’.
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28 Graphic Signs of Authority

Christian scribal practice almost certainly began in the late first century ad, and in the
following centuries it developed into a consistent way of handling divine names in
manuscripts.3 The precise functions of nomina sacra in early Christian manuscripts
remain a matter of debate. Christopher Tuckett has interpreted them as nothing
more than a reading aid,4 yet Jane Heath notes that nomina sacra obstructed rather
than helped reading. Their visual distinctiveness, she argues, aligns nomina sacra
with the tradition of memory aids that facilitated the contemplative reading of
Christian texts: a practice typical of later monastic culture.5 Similarly, most scholars
investigating this phenomenon in the context of Greek religious texts agree that
nomina sacra appeared as a symbolic palaeographic feature in emerging Christian
scribal culture, where they became a visual expression of Christian piety.6 It is in
this context that Larry Hurtado has recently called such nomina ‘the earliest
Christian “graphic signs”, combining textual and visual features’.7
The earliest nomina sacra presented abbreviated names of the two divine perso-
nas in Greek: Ἰησοῦς (Jesus), Χριστός (Christ), Θεός (God), and Κύριος (Lord).
As abbreviations, these still belonged to the world of late classical literacy. Yet they
also functioned as visual phenomena, and in such contexts appeared as graffiti and
featured in early Christian mosaics from as early as the third century, in places like
the house of St Peter at Capernaum and the prayer hall at Megiddo, both in northern
Israel, and the Domus ecclesiae at Dura-Europos in Syria. In these media, nomina
sacra expressed reverence for words related to salvation and its ultimate sources,
God and Jesus Christ. Nomina sacra for Ἰησοῦς and Χριστός appear more fre-
quently in this epigraphic material, which confirms that they already had some
history of usage in texts. Moreover, this evidence shows that by the third century
nomina sacra had become meaningful not just to scribes but to a variety of literate
Christians.8 For the latter, inscribed nomina sacra seem to have functioned as a
visual expression of their religious identity.9
From these nomina sacra, there was just one step to ‘proper’ Christian graphic
signs, in which selected letters and graphic forms conflated to create single graphic
structures. These visual symbols denoted Jesus Christ or the Crucifixion, for instance
in the earliest palaeographic sign amongst them, the tau-rho (Fig. 1.1). This devel-
opment occurred easily in a culture that used abbreviations extensively in texts, and
in which joining ‘various letters to form a ligature was familiar to readers of the
time, especially in documentary texts and inscriptions’.10 The tau-rho sign was thus
soon followed by christograms, graphic signs composed of the conflated initials or
the first two letters of Christ’s names: ΧΡ (chi-rho for Christ), ΙΗ (iota-eta for
Jesus), and ΙΧ (iota-chi for Jesus Christ) (Fig. 1.1).

3 Roberts, Manuscript, pp. 26–48; Hurtado, ‘The Earliest Evidence’, pp. 271–88; Hurtado,
The Earliest Christian Artifacts, pp. 95–134; Luijendijk, Greetings, pp. 57–62.
4 Tuckett, ‘ “Nomina sacra” ’, pp. 431–58. 5 Heath, ‘Nomina sacra’.
6 For more details and references, see Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts, pp. 122–32.
7 Hurtado, ‘Earliest Christian Graphic Symbols’, p. 29.
8 Wicker, ‘Pre-Constantinian Nomina Sacra’, pp. 71–2.
9 Luijendijk, Greetings, pp. 61–2; Gamble, Books, p. 78.
10 Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts, p. 138.
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Origins of Early Christian Graphic Signs 29

Fig. 1.1. Tau-rho and christograms: chi-rho, iota-eta, and iota-chi.

Before their appropriation for Christian usage, all of these symbols except for
the iota-eta appeared in Greek inscriptions. For instance, the tau-rho sign can be
found as an abbreviation for the word τριακάς (thirty) in an inscription dated to
the period between ad 69 and 96.11 The chi-rho sign abbreviated words including
χρόνος (time) and χρυσός (gold), and in an inscription dated to ad 138 it replaced
the word χιλιάρχης (chiliarch).12 Finally, the iota-chi represented an archaic form
of the Greek letter psi.13 The chi-rho and tau-rho also appeared in a different con-
text, as auxiliary signs in classical coinage. The chi-rho was used as a mintmark on
the coins of Alexandria in Hellenistic Egypt as early as the third century bc,14
while the tau-rho appeared as an auxiliary mark on one of the coin issues struck by
King Herod the Great in the third year of his reign (38/7 bc). Its precise meaning,
however, remains a matter of debate.15 More certain is that when the tau-rho first
appeared in New Testament manuscripts at the end of the second century ad,
it functioned as an abbreviation for the Greek letters (ταυρ), forming the central
part of the words σταυρός (cross) and σταυρόω (crucify).16 Hence, when this sign
later emerged as a free-standing Christian symbol, it must already have become
the staurogram, that is, a graphic reference to the crucified Jesus and Crucifixion,
a symbolic reference to divine authority, and a visual expression of early Christian
faith.17 Yet since the tau-rho abbreviated only part of the words related to Jesus’
cross and Crucifixion, its transition to a free-standing staurogram was less than
straightforward, and somewhat delayed.

11 Avi-Yonah, Abbreviations, pp. 105 and 119.

12 Avi-Yonah, Abbreviations, pp. 112 and 119; Turner, Greek Manuscripts, pl. 58.
13 Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts, pp. 138–9.
14 Abdy and Dowler, Coins, p. 79, fig. 5. See also Abdy, ‘From Page’, pp. 168–70 and figs 4–4a.
15 Kanael, ‘The Coins’; Kanael, ‘Ancient Jewish Coins’, p. 48; Rappaport, ‘Chapter 2.
Numismatics’, p. 41.
16 Hurtado, ‘The Earliest Evidence’, pp. 279–80; Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts,
pp. 135–54.
17 For more details and references, see Dinkler, ‘Alteste christliche Denkmaler’, pp. 177–8; Aland,
‘Neue neutestamentliche Papyri II’, 10 (1963), pp. 75–9; and 11 (1965), pp. 1–3; Dinkler-von
Schubert, ‘CΤΑΥPΟC’; Hurtado, ‘The Staurogram’, pp. 207 and 224–6; Hurtado, The Earliest Christian
Artifacts, pp. 135–54.
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30 Graphic Signs of Authority

The symbol’s origins explain why, when the solitary use of Christian monograms
began to be attested across various media in the fourth century, the chi-rho over-
shadowed the staurogram and became the most frequently deployed Christian
symbol in different media. In their symbolic usage, both signs were sometimes
bolstered by the iota-chi and iota-eta, although these appear more rarely. Scholars
have remained cautious of accepting the use of staurogram and chi-rho as free-
standing Christian symbols before the age of Constantine I.18 Danilo Mazzoleni,
for instance, has questioned a pre-Constantinian date for such symbols in early
Christian catacombs in Rome.19 Equally, W. H. Buckler’s earlier claim that the
early third-century epitaph of Gaius at Eumeneia in Phrygia featured a blurred
chi-rho cannot be confirmed due to the fair amount of chipping and weathering
that the funerary stone has suffered.20 The pre-Aurelianic date (before the 270s) for
two tau-rhos on the funerary plaque of Beratius Nikatoras, which was carved in a
catacomb located in Rome within the Aurelian Wall, has also been questioned.21
The other features of this epitaph suggest its date to c.350–425.22
Whilst there may thus be good reason for this scepticism in the case of the stau-
rogram, however, it is rather misplaced in the case of the chi-rho. As Jeffrey Spier
has recently demonstrated, the chi-rho was employed as a free-standing symbol on
early Christian gems produced in Asia Minor and Syria from as early as the third
quarter of the third century (Fig. 1.2a).23 This indicates that the symbolic use of
the chi-rho might have started amongst Greek-speaking communities in the third-
century East, and took some time to reach Rome and the western provinces.
In their Christian usage, the tau-rho and chi-rho moved from the realm of lit-
eracy to that of early graphicacy. As abbreviations, such signs referred to specific
words. Christian visual culture, in contrast, appropriated these utilitarian signs
for qualitatively different purposes: as symbolic visual references to God and
Christological concepts. Consequently, the combinations of letters that formed
such graphic devices acquired ideographic meanings, a transformation made
­possible for two principle reasons. Firstly, Greek letters represented both specific
phonetic characters and numbers, distinguished by a stroke above a letter functioning
as a number. The letters’ duality gave birth to the practice of isopsephy, whereby
combinations of letters could be analysed not only phonetically but also according
to their numeric values, and could thus be deciphered as hidden numbers with
symbolic allusions.24 This practice was not alien to early Christians since, as

18 Gardthausen, Das alte Monogramm, pp. 82–3; Sulzberger, ‘Le symbole’, pp. 447–8; Bruun,
‘Symboles’, pp. 97–8 and 156–7.
19 Mazzoleni, ‘Origine’.
20 Buckler, Calder, and Cox, ‘Asia Minor’, p. 63. Cf. Sheppard, ‘Jews’, p. 179 and pl. XXIIa–b, who
states that ‘the traces now visible on the stone are not reconcilable’ with the chi-rho.
21 ICUR, vol. 5, no. 15420 (EDB, no. 316). For more details and references, see Bardill,
Constantine, p. 163, fig. 101, note 36. On the date of the Aurelian Wall, see Dey, The Aurelian Wall,
pp. 13–17.
22 Partyka, ‘L’épitaphe’; Pleket and Stroud, ‘Rome. Epitaph’. I would like to thank Angelos
Chaniotis for discussing this epitaph with me.
23 Spier, Late Antique and Early Christian Gems, pp. 30–4, where he lists about twenty such early
gems with the chi-rho.
24 See Dornseiff, Das Alphabet, pp. 96–106.
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Origins of Early Christian Graphic Signs 31

pointed out by François Bovon, they viewed names and numbers as intrinsically
related.25 Secondly, certain Hebrew, Greek, and later Latin letters had the potential
for symbolic meaning, which led to various extralinguistic interpretations of these
letters in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

1 . 2 . E A R LY C H R I S T I A N AU T H O R S O N
SYMBOLIC MEANINGS OF LETTERS
AND CHRISTIAN GRAPHIC SIGNS

The earliest Christian example of this kind of symbolic reading of specific letters
survives in a passage from the Epistle of Barnabas, an early Christian text probably
composed in Alexandria at the turn of the second century and—judged by the
evidence of fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus—included in the early New Testament
canon. The Epistle was written for a newly emerging Christian community with an
urgent need to distinguish itself from the Jews and their reading of the Old
Testament.26 One of the ways to do so was to interpret various Old Testament
stories exegetically, as symbolic references to the New Testament history. In the
above-mentioned passage, the number of Abraham’s servants (318) in Genesis 14.
14 is interpreted as a symbolic reference to Jesus (18=IH, the first two Greek letters
of Jesus’ name) and the grace of Redemption through his cross (300=T).27 Clement
of Alexandria reiterated this passage from the Epistle of Barnabas at the turn of the
third century, and the text was well known to Christian intellectuals of the third
and fourth centuries.28 Such an isopsephic interpretation must have encouraged
the later use of iota-eta as a graphic sign for Jesus, but more significantly, it echoes
an early Christian view of tau as a symbol of the cross of Jesus and, more generally,
of Crucifixion and Salvation. This view reflected the traditional shape of a stake
employed for crucifixion in Roman times, which resembled an upright post with a
crossbeam attached on the top.29 Writing three centuries later, Isidore of Seville
stated that tau had been inscribed in military rosters before the names of soldiers
who survived a particular battle, while theta appeared before the names of fallen
soldiers.30 For people familiar with such a practice, tau carried with it a direct asso-
ciation with vitality, and—interpreted allegorically—with Christian salvation.

25 Bovon, ‘Names’, p. 267. On numerical symbolism in early Christianity and its importance for
Clement of Alexandria in particular, see Kalvesmaki, The Theology.
26 Paget, The Epistle of Barnabas, pp. 9–70.
27 The Epistle of Barnabas, 9. 7–9, ed. and rev. Holmes, pp. 408–9. For discussion, see Hurtado, ‘The
Earliest Evidence’, p. 280; Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts, p. 147; and Bovon, ‘Names’, p. 281.
28 Clement of Alexandria, The Miscellanies, or Stromata, 6. 11, p. 499. For the analysis of these
textual references, see Dölger, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des Kreuzzeichens I’, pp. 14–16. On Clement
and his text, see Heine, ‘The Alexandrians’, pp. 117–19.
29 The similarity between the latter tau and a T-shaped cross (σταυρός) was also commented upon
by contemporary pagan authors such as Lucian, Lis Consonantium (= Iudicium vocalium), 12, p. 143.
See also Shi, Paul’s Message, p. 38.
30 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, 1. 24, p. 52. For more detailed discussion of this practice, see
Dölger, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des Kreuzzeichens II’, pp. 20–2.
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32 Graphic Signs of Authority

Second- and third-century Christian authors occasionally interpreted Old

Testament passages concerning tau-shaped objects and biblical figures standing
with arms stretched outward as symbolic prefigurations of Jesus on the cross.
The mid-second-century author Justin Martyr, for example, presents such an
interpretation in connection with Moses’ adoption of Christ’s symbolic posture
in Exodus 17. 8–16 (first brought up in the Epistle of Barnabas), and in some other
Old Testament passages (Numbers 17. 1–11; Psalms 1. 3; and 2 Kings 6. 1–7).31
Justin and other early Christian authors saw the symbolism of the tau-cross not
only in the Old Testament past but also in their own days, and interpreted tau-
cross shapes in various quotidian objects as the constant promise of salvation.32 In
the early third century, Tertullian explained to his Latin readers the identification
of Jesus’ cross with the Greek letter tau by applying it to the similarly shaped
Latin letter T:
. . . and He [Jesus] signed them with that very seal of which Ezekiel spake: ‘The Lord
said unto me, Go through the gate, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set the mark
Tau upon the foreheads of the men.’ Now the Greek letter Tau and our own letter T
is the very form of the cross, which He predicted would be the sign on our foreheads
in the true Catholic Jerusalem.33
Here Tertullian referred to a well-known passage in Ezekiel 9. 4, in which the
Lord ordered an angel to go through Jerusalem and place a mark on the foreheads
of the chosen people. The word ‘mark’ is given with the word taw in the Hebrew
original, which is also the name of the final letter in the Hebrew alphabet, itself
phonetically identical with the Greek letter tau. The version of the Greek transla-
tion that Tertullian used in his exegesis accommodated this dual meaning, which
early Christian authors understood to be a reference to the salvific tau-cross of
Jesus Christ.
Earlier Judaic tradition must have influenced this exegetical reading. As Stade
demonstrated long ago, the passage in Ezekiel 9. 4 should be interpreted in the
context of other Old Testament passages that bear witness to the older Judaic
­concept of believers as property of their God (e.g. Isaiah 44. 5), and the religious
practice of marking these believers with a sign on the forehead or hand (e.g.
Genesis 4. 15 and Exodus 13. 9).34 Hence, Franz Dölger, Erich Dinkler, and Jack
Finegan believed this passage to refer to the ancient Judaic practice of administer-
ing a protective sign and mark of ownership (Eigentum- und Schutzzeichen) that
denoted the divine Lord, Jahweh. The letter taw was inscribed in Palaeo-Hebrew
epigraphic texts with two characters, + (earlier) and × (later), and these might have
been placed on some Jewish ossuaries and funerary inscriptions with precisely
the above purposes in mind. Thus, when the traditional Christian cross symbol

31 Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 86 and 90, pp. 242 and 244; The Epistle of Barnabas, 12.
2–6, ed. and rev. Holmes, pp. 416–21. For more examples and references, see Sulzberger, ‘Le symbole’,
pp. 254–66; Hurtado, ‘Earliest Christian Graphic Symbols’, p. 33.
32 For more details, see Hurtado, ‘Earliest Christian Graphic Symbols’, pp. 34–5.
33 Tertullian, Five Books Against Marcion, 3. 22, pp. 340–1.
34 Stade, ‘Beiträge’, pp. 299–318.
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Origins of Early Christian Graphic Signs 33

Fig. 1.2. Christian graphic signs on third-century gems, based on Spier, Late Antique
and Early Christian Gems: a) the chi-rho (nos. 112–31); b–c) the chi-tau (nos. 134–5);
d) a monogram comprising Χ, Ρ, Η, Τ, Υ (no. 133); e) a combination of a tau with an
eight-armed star (no. 137).

developed from the older Jewish tradition of taw, for early believers it similarly
functioned as a protective mark of their Lord.35 In some cases, Jewish converts to
Christianity could have transferred this knowledge: in the early third century
Origen related that one such convert had told him that the last letter of the Hebrew
alphabet served as a symbol of the Cross.36 For people familiar with the Hebrew
epigraphic tradition, the ×-form of that letter appeared identical to the Greek
letter chi, the initial of Christ’s name. Through such identification, chi did not
only refer to Christ, but also to a protective mark bestowed by God.
The extralinguistic importance of the letters chi and tau can also be traced
through the examination of graphic signs carved into early Christian gems produced
in the Greek East in the second half of the third century. As mentioned above, the
chi-rho appears on many of them as a graphic sign of Christ (Fig. 1.2a). But some
of those gems present peculiar graphic signs composed of chi-tau, and certain
examples include extra letters or lines (Fig. 1.2b–e).37 Different combinations of
these forms indicate that apart from the chi-rho, which is used quite consistently,
other combinations of Greek letters were employed in a more improvised manner
to refer to God, Christ, and his salvific Cross. Die-engravers apparently felt at
­liberty to choose different variants; they and their Christian customers seem to
have known of no fixed form of Christian graphic symbol other than the chi-rho.
Isopsephic considerations might have played a role in certain choices. The chi-tau
combination (Fig. 1.2b–c), for instance, comprised characters that could have been
viewed as symbols of the Cross, but simultaneously represented a total numeric
value of 900 (X=600 and T=300) expressed with Sampi, which was known as an
Episemon, a distinguishing mark in Greek, and thus as a number worthy of Jesus

35 Dinkler, ‘Zur Geschichte des Kreuzsymbols’; Dinkler, ‘Kreuzzeichen und Kreuz’; Dölger,
‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des Kreuzzeichens I–II’; Finegan, The Archeology, pp. 343–81. See also Black,
‘The Chi-Rho Sign’, pp. 324–6. For the wider tradition of religious branding in antiquity, see Jones,
‘Stigma’, p. 152.
36 Origen, Selecta in Ezechielem, 9, cols 800–1; Stroumsa, Hidden Wisdom, pp. 123–4.
37 Spier, Late Antique and Early Christian Gems, pp. 31–3, nos. 132–7.
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34 Graphic Signs of Authority

Christ.38 Furthermore, these graphic signs adorned gems mounted in finger-rings.

It is unlikely that the latter were used as signet-rings, since the signs were carved
as images in relief to be viewed directly on the rings. These features suggest that
such signs might have been interpreted as both protective markers and indicators
of religious ownership that ‘sealed’ the hands of their Christian wearers. In this
sense, such graphic ‘seals’ also functioned as protective signs of identity for those
who owned them.
It is noteworthy that the staurogram does not appear to have been on the list of
options available to gem engravers. The isopsephic reading of the staurogram—
that identified its letter tau with Jesus’ cross—developed quite late, after the
­staurogram had moved from the world of scribal devices to that of free-standing
symbols by the mid-fourth century, as testified by its presence in the Codex
Sinaiticus.39 Writing around that time, Ephraim the Syrian claimed the staurogram
signified ‘the cross is our help’ or ‘salvation is in the cross’. Ephraim connected
the letter rho with the word ‘help’ (βοήθια) because, when viewed as numbers,
rho and the sum of the Greek letters composing ‘help’ had an identical numeric
value (100).40
A further feature of the tau-cross on third-century Christian gems from the
Greek East is worthy of comment. On some specimens (Fig. 1.2b–c) the vertical
post of the tau slightly continues above the vertical bar, resembling the Roman
military standards that Tertullian and Minucius Felix commented upon in the
early third century:
The camp religion of the Romans is all through a worship of the standards, a setting
the standards above all gods. Well, as those images decking out the standards are
ornaments of crosses. All those hangings of your standards and banners are robes
of crosses.41
For your very standards, as well as your banners, and flags of your camp, what else are
they but crosses gilded and adorned.42

It is also possible, however, that the extended vertical bar was intended to represent
the letter iota, and the above-mentioned chi-tau sign in fact also consists of the
iota. By the early third century, this letter could refer to the name ‘Jesus’, as evinced
by Clement of Alexandria’s commentary on Luke, 16. 17:
Perhaps by the iota and tittle His righteousness cries, ‘If ye come right unto Me, I will
also come right to you; but if you are crooked, I also will come crooked, saith the Lord
of hosts;’ intimating that the ways of sinners intricate and crooked. For the way right
and agreeable to nature which is intimated by the iota of Jesus, is his Goodness, which

38 Finegan, The Archeology, pp. 232–3.

39 A staurogram was used as a free-standing symbol after the text of the Book of Isaiah: London,
BL, Add. Ms. 43725, fol. 68r. This free-standing graphic sign also appears in the Codex Vaticanus
(Vatican City, BAV, Gr. 1209, p. 1382), produced in the second half of the fourth century. See
Nordenfalk, Die spätantiken Zierbuchstaben, vol. 1, pp. 104–5, figs 23–4.
40 Ephraim, In sanctam Parasceven, p. 477; Dölger, Sol salutis, p. 61; Hurtado, The Earliest Christian
Artifacts, p. 149; and Vinzent, Christ’s Resurrection, p. 23.
41 Tertullian, Apology, 16, p. 31. 42 Minucius Felix, Octavius, 29, p. 191.
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Origins of Early Christian Graphic Signs 35

constantly directs those who believe from hearing. ‘There shall not, therefore, pass
from the law one iota or one tittle,’ neither from the right and good the mutual prom-
ises, nor from the crooked and unjust the punishment assigned to them.43
As this passage reveals, by the early third century the iota already referred to
Jesus Christ and his righteousness. From that time on, therefore, it could be
used in combination with the chi to create another Christian sign referring to
Christ, namely the iota-chi, a christogram that became more popular in the
fifth and sixth centuries.

1.3. P ROT E C T I V E S E A L S A N D T H E B RU C E C O D E X

The well-established early Christian usage of graphic signs—as protective seals and
marks of ownership referring to God—bears resemblance to the less orthodox
­religious employment of graphic devices that has traditionally been discussed with
reference to Gnosticism—a category of dubious nature that has been incessantly
debated and questioned in recent decades.44 Furthermore, despite Irenaeus of
Lyons’ criticism of the so-called ‘Gnostic’ interpretations of numbers and letters in
the late second century, the above analysis clearly shows that some orthodox
Christian intellectuals accepted similar interpretations.45 It was suggested some
decades ago by Jean de Savignac that Christians borrowed the symbolic use of the
staurogram from ‘Gnostic’ circles in Egypt.46 This hypothesis has since been
refuted,47 but it does not negate the difficulty in distinguishing between Christian
and so-called Gnostic usage of graphic signs: both ‘orthodox’ Christians and those
who called themselves ‘gnostics’ (i.e. possessors of a special saving knowledge
(γνῶσις)) enthusiastically used them as protective seals.48
Produced in a late antique ‘Gnostic’ context, The Book of the Great Initiatory
Discourse, also known as the Books of Jeu, illustrates this use of graphic signs, since
it has been described as the only extant Gnostic document to contain graphic mar-
ginalia.49 This work was originally written in Greek in late third- or fourth-century
Egypt and later preserved in a Coptic translation in the Bruce Codex, currently
held by the Bodleian Library.50 In the Book, the resurrected Jesus Christ takes
his disciples on a mystic journey towards heavenly spheres to approach the true
invisible god Jeu (Ιέου). During this enlightening process, Jesus shares with his
disciples esoteric knowledge that enables them to travel across the mystical world,

43 Clement of Alexandria, Fragments, p. 578.

44 For the criticism of this category as a twentieth-century scholarly construct to define religious
traditions deviant from the perceived ‘orthodox’ Christianity, see Williams, Rethinking Gnosticism;
King, What is Gnosticism?.
45 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1. 14–16 and 2. 20–8, pp. 336–42 and 387–402. On this text, see
Greer, ‘The Dog and the Mushroom’. See also Bovon, ‘Names and Numbers’, p. 281.
46 Savignac, ‘Les papyrus’. 47 Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts, pp. 143–6.
48 For more details, see Norris, ‘Gnostic Literature’, p. 20.
49 Finney, ‘Did Gnostics Make Pictures?’, p. 436.
50 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms. Bruce 96. For details and references, see Pearson, Gnosticism,
p. 74; and Crégheur, Édition critique, pp. 160–70.
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36 Graphic Signs of Authority

and leads them through sixty divine treasuries hosting multiple types and emanations
of Jeu, before they reach the final Treasury of the Light where Jeu resides.
The book is filled with graphic diagrams drawn to visualize both these treasuries
and the various graphic seals the disciples encounter on their mystic journey.51 Each
treasury contains a specific type of Jeu, defined not only by a unique name but also
by a special graphic character (Fig. 1.3, Jeu 5).52 Along with arcane passwords made
of specific names and numbers, Jesus gives graphic signs to his disciples, who have
to mark themselves with a particular seal in order to gain access to a given treasury.
There, they receive the seal and the name of a corresponding Jeu-type.53 The texts
explaining how to enter each treasury differ little except for the provision of specific
names, numbers, and graphic seals (Fig. 1.4a–e); Jesus’ description of the fifty-fifth
treasury provides a representative example of these passages:
Here now the placing of this treasury. When you come to this treasury, seal yourselves
with this seal, which is here (Fig. 1.4a). This is its name, Zōksaezōz. Say it only once
while this cipher 30515 is in your hand, and say this name, Ōōieēzazamaza, three times,
and the watchers and the ranks and the veils are drawn back, until you go to the place
of their Father, (and he gives you his seal and his name), until you go (to the gate into
his treasury). Now this is the placing of this treasury and all those within it.54
In this context, the above-mentioned seals function as graphic marks of identity
for specific divine powers, as symbolic keys to a specific treasury of the supernat-
ural world, and as protective seals for believers.55
It is not clear on what part of the body such seals were supposed to be drawn,
but they were most likely intended for the hand or the forehead. The location
of seals on the body (Fig. 1.5a–c) is more precisely described in the account of
the triple baptism of Jesus’ disciples—the water baptism, the baptism of fire, and the
baptism of the Holy Spirit—which follows the mysteries of the treasuries. In the
final baptism:
Jesus sealed the disciples with this seal: (Fig. 1.5c). This is its name: Zakzōza. This is
its interpretation: Thōzōnōz. . . . and he baptised all his disciples with the baptism of
the Holy Spirit. . . . He sealed their foreheads with the seal of the seven virgins of the
light, which made them numbered within the inheritance of the Kingdom of the Light.
And the disciples rejoiced with very great joy because they had received the baptism of
the Holy Spirit, and the seal which forgave sins and which purified iniquities and
made them to be numbered among the inheritance of the Kingdom of the Light.56

51 See The Books of Jeu, ed. Schmidt. The text has been considerably rearranged by Crégheur,
Édition critique.
52 The Books of Jeu, ed. Schmidt, pp. 38–9, and Crégheur, Édition critique, pp. 312–13. For a
­discussion of this diagram, see Garipzanov, ‘The Rise of Graphicacy’, pp. 9–10.
53 Crégheur, Édition critique, pp. 134–9.
54 The Books of Jeu, ed. Schmidt, pp. 83–4. The text is slightly modified after Crégheur, Édition
critique, pp. 203–4.
55 On the similarity between the employment of these seals in this codex and the use of hieroglyphs
in ancient Egyptian ritual practices, see Frankfurter, ‘The Magic’, pp. 208–9.
56 The Books of Jeu, ed. Schmidt, pp. 112–14. The text is slightly modified after Crégheur, Édition
critique, pp. 255–7.
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Origins of Early Christian Graphic Signs 37

Fig. 1.3. Jeu 5 diagram in the Bruce Codex. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bruce 96, p. 12
(above), and its graphic model (below).
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38 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 1.4. Occult seals in the Bruce Codex, based on its edition in The Books of Jeu, ed.
Schmidt: a) for the fifty-fifth treasury (p. 39); b) for the fifty-seventh treasury (p. 40);
c) for the fifty-eighth treasury (p. 41); d) for the fifty-sixth treasury (p. 40); e) for the sixti-
eth treasury (p. 43).

Fig. 1.5. Baptismal seals in the Bruce Codex, based on its edition in The Books of Jeu,
ed. Schmidt: a) for baptism of water (p. 61); b) for baptism of fire (p. 63); c) for the baptism
of the Holy Spirit (p. 65).

This passage indicates that graphic seals placed on foreheads played the same role
among gnostics as they did among mainstream Christians and Jews: they served as
protective signs of ownership referring to a divine Lord, and thus functioned as
signs of divine authority. Moreover, as noted by Paul Finney, the practice of a reli-
gious leader initiating his ‘disciples in a rite that culminated in a magical sealing’
has close parallels in so-called magical papyri. As Finney comments, many seals in
the Bruce Codex employ linear hastae common to late Roman and Byzantine
monogrammatic ligatures, pointing to the influence of late Roman sigillography
on ‘Gnostic’ seals.57 In other words, despite their arcane nature, some graphic

57 Finney, ‘Did Gnostics Make Pictures?’, pp. 437–8.

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Origins of Early Christian Graphic Signs 39

f­eatures of these seals were affected by common late antique sphragistic conven-
tions. Furthermore, most of the functions that the ‘Gnostic’ seals fulfilled in the
Bruce Codex are echoed in the use of early Christian signs, another indicator that
contemporary Jews, mainstream Christians, various groups of gnostics, and pagans
shared a common graphic culture.58 In this culture, depending on specific religious
and cultural contexts, certain graphic seals denoted protective signs, were viewed
as an especially powerful means of communication with the transcendent sphere,
and/or functioned as signs of authority referring to divine lords. Consequently,
particular graphic symbols became suitable signs of identity for members of the
religious communities that employed them.
The seal necessary to enter the fifty-fifth treasury (Fig. 1.4a) presents a par-
ticularly important case, principally because of its use of the first and last letters
of the Greek alphabet, alpha and omega. These two letters became the Christian
symbols of God (Revelations, 1. 8 and 21. 6) and of Jesus Christ’s divine nature
in particular (Revelations, 22. 13): ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and
the last, the beginning and the end.’ In the late second century, Irenaeus of Lyons
criticized the so-called Marcosian ‘Gnostics’ for their isopsephic interpretations,
arguing they invested these two letters with excessive extralinguistic meanings.
According to him, Marcus and his followers stated that Jesus was not only called
alpha and omega, but also the dove since the numeric value of the alpha (1) and
omega (800) is 801, which is identical to the numeric values of the Greek letters
composing the word ‘dove’ (περιστερά, 80 + 5 + 100 + 10 + 200 + 300 + 5 + 100 +
1 = 801). Hence, the dove became a symbol of Christ.59 Yet Clement of Alexandria
had no problem referring to the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet as
symbols of the Lord and God the Son,60 and in the fourth century Christians
began to use the very same letters by the sides of free-standing chi-rho and
­tau-rho to symbolize the divine nature of Jesus. Moreover, images of doves
­frequently flanked such christograms with the alpha and omega on Roman
funerary tabulae carved in the second half of the fourth century, which clearly
demonstrates that Christian symbolism eventually appropriated the very con-
nection between the alpha and omega of Jesus and the dove that Irenaeus had
criticized as heretical.61
The hoard found at Water Newton in Cambridgeshire in 1975, on the same
location of the former Roman town of Durobrivae, reveals early examples of
engraved chi-rho alongside the alpha and omega on silver objects that belonged to
a practising Christian group, including silver liturgical vessels and votive plaques.

58 This shared graphic culture must have survived through the Middle Ages, as hinted by the pro-
tective seals not dissimilar from those in the Bruce Codex that can be found in late Byzantine ‘magical’
treatises. See Gordon, ‘Charactêres’, pp. 289–90.
59 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1. 14. 6 and 15. 2, pp. 338–9.
60 Clement of Alexandria, The Miscellanies, or Stromata, 4. 25, and 6. 16, pp. 438 and 513. See also
Der Traktat ‘Vom Mysterium der Buchstaben’, ed. Bandt, pp. 82–5.
61 Of course, by the early fifth century, doves were also identified with the Holy Spirit and the
apostles, as Paulinus of Nola’s description of the apse mosaic in the Basilica of St Felix in Nola (the
so-called Basilica nova), probably c.403, makes it clear: Epistolae, 32. 10, p. 286. See also Murray,
Symbols, p. 170; Dijkstra, The Apostles, p. 242.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi
Fig. 1.6. Votive plaques from Water Newton, Cambridgeshire. London, BrM. © The Trustees of the
British Museum.
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Origins of Early Christian Graphic Signs 41

The hoard has been dated to the second half of the fourth century, although some
objects found within may predate this period. Among the hoard’s objects are
nineteen votive leaves—one in gold and the rest in silver—similar in type to those
offered as ex-votos in British pagan temples.62 Yet seven of these plaques uniquely
feature the chi-rho sign, with all but one including the alpha and omega at its sides
(Fig. 1.6). It has been suggested that the Christian community who used these sil-
ver objects took over a temple where such ex-votos had been customary, and
adapted the practice to their own Christian rituals.63 Yet this process of adaptation
might equally have been triggered by the general context of competing religious
practices in which early Christian communities operated, both in Britain and fur-
ther afield. Returning to the chi-rho symbol struck on those leaves, with the
accompanying alpha and omega, on the one hand they indicated the divine Lord
to whom these specific ex-votos were offered—namely Christ—and on the other
hand they functioned as his salvific seals, protecting members of that religious
community in a world of competing apotropaic signs.

1 . 4 . ‘ M A G I C A L’ C H A R A C T E R S A N D T H E I R
E A R LY C H R I S T I A N C R I T I C S

The plaques from Water Newton are broadly similar to the so-called curse tablets,
known in Latin as defixiones and in Greek as καταδέσμοι (binding curses), which
survive as ‘inscribed pieces of lead, usually in the form of thin sheets, intended to
bring supernatural power to bear against persons and animals’.64 Such binding
curses were also written or inscribed on papyrus, wax, limestone, gemstones,
­broken shards of pottery, and even ceramic bowls.65 These curse tablets produced in
the classical era sometimes included written formulas, and at a later period incorp-
orated images. But in the late classical period, special mysterious signs known
as χαρακτῆρες (charactêres) in Greek and charactera in Latin appeared not only
on curse tablets but also on bronze, silver, and gold lamellae, gemstones, public
inscriptions, and papyri in various regions of the Roman world. These graphic signs
represented powerful tools of supernatural protection or attack in late antiquity,
when their use became especially popular, and charactera continued to appear in
medieval and early modern manuscripts.66
The function of these graphic signs remains somewhat unclear, as does the
­manner in which they came to represent the embodiment of great powers. John
Gager has suggested a possible astrological origin, arguing that they symbolized

62 Painter, ‘A Fourth-Century Christian Silver Treasure’, has first dated the hoard to the late third /
early fourth century. But the hoard’s dating was changed to 350 or 303–4 in Kent and Painter, eds,
Wealth of the Roman World, pp. 29–33, nos. 26–53, and, finally, to the second half of the fourth
­century in Painter, ‘The Water Newton Silver’. See also Brown, Through the Eye, pp. 41–2.
63 Thomas, Christianity, pp. 116–17; and Henig, Religion, pp. 111–13.
64 Jordan, ‘Defixiones’, p. 206. 65 Gager, Curse Tablets, p. 3; Collins, Magic, pp. 64–73.
66 Collins, Magic, pp. 73–4; Grévin and Véronèse, ‘Les “caractères” magiques’; Gordon,
‘Charactêres’.
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42 Graphic Signs of Authority

planetary powers that were associated with angels and archangels in the late
Roman world.67 At the same time, some ‘magical’ practitioners understood char-
actera not as graphic representations of those forces, but as independent divine
agents.68 Despite these occult signs having no phonology nor agreed semantic
value,69 some charactêres resemble letters in the Greek alphabet and behave simi-
larly, appearing in lines and clusters (Fig. 1.7). As in the case of the seals in the
Bruce Codex, certain charactera also have linear hastae, with circles and nodes at
their ends, connecting them to late Roman sigillography. Hence, David Frankfurter
has suggested that they were used as a kind of ‘sacred’ writing, ‘intelligible only to
deities, angels, or the enlightened’.70 He connects the origins of such signs to the
decline of the traditional Egyptian priesthood in Roman Egypt, a development
that markedly reduced the number of people able to write and read hieroglyphs,
consequently turning them into undecipherable signs of supernatural power.
Charactêres, he argues, emerged in this changed cultural context in imitation of
hieroglyphs, encouraged by a widespread Graeco-Roman fascination with these
symbols.71 In addition to these factors, Richard Gordon has pointed to two other
social developments conditioning the invention of charactêres in Egypt: namely
‘the assimilation of Greek culture into specifically religious contexts’ and the
appearance of Greek-speaking customers for ‘magical’ services.72 In short, modern
research indicates that charactêres originated in the multi-cultural environment of
Roman Egypt dominated by Greek literacy, and this graphic phenomenon rapidly
spread thereafter across the Graeco-Roman world.
Based on the evidence of ‘magical’ papyri, Gordon suggests that charactêres were
probably invented in the course of the second century ad. Yet other evidence indi-
cates that their use reached the western parts of the Roman empire as early as the
turn of the second century, which means that these graphic signs might have
appeared in Egypt in the course of the first century ad. Thus, writing at the begin-
ning of the second century ad, Tacitus probably thought of graphic signs visually
similar to charactêres in his description of the trial of M. Scribonius Libo Drusus,
a member of the Roman elite accused of sorcery in 16 ad. Amongst other evidence,
according to Tacitus, the prosecutor mentioned a paper listing the names of Caesars
and senators, to which Libo had wilfully added some mysterious marks of harmful
nature (atrocis vel occultas notas).73
This interpretation of Tacitus’ report is corroborated by the evidence of the earli-
est gold lamellae with transcendent charactera that were found at La Vedrenne in
France and near the Roman fort at Segontium (Caernarvon) in Wales, both dated
to the decades around the turn of the second century ad.74 In the latter case, the
find was evidently produced in a multi-cultural context, and thus represents a

67 Gager, Curse Tablets, p. 10. 68 Collins, Magic, pp. 74–8.

69 Gordon, ‘Charactêres’, pp. 255–63. Cf. Sylloge gemmarum gnosticarum, ed. Mastrocinque, vol. 1,
pp. 90–8.
70 Frankfurter, ‘The Magic’, p. 207. 71 Frankfurter, ‘The Magic’, pp. 205–11.
72 Gordon, ‘Charactêres’, pp. 257.
73 Annales, 2. 30, ed. by Fisher, p. 61. For more details, see Ogden, Magic, no. 291, pp. 282–3.
74 Kotansky, Greek Magical Amulets, nos. 2 and 10, pp. 3–12 and 44–5.
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Origins of Early Christian Graphic Signs 43

Fig. 1.7. Magical text from Egypt, fourth century, P.Oslo I 1, c.7. Courtesy of the University
of Oslo Library Papyrus Collection.
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44 Graphic Signs of Authority

particularly interesting case. The charm contains a Jewish liturgical formula written
with Greek letters, accompanied with ‘magical’ characters of various forms, reflecting
the fame that the Jewish ‘magicians’ acquired in those centuries.75 One can postu-
late an equally cosmopolitan context for a later specimen from Britain, a fragment
of a gold charm found at the site of a Romano-British temple near Woodeaton in
Oxfordshire. This fragmentary lamella, which includes the name Adonae (typical
of Judeo-Christian culture) in Latin, accompanied with letter-like charactera,
might have been a votive offering made in the fourth or fifth centuries.76 Such a
find reveals parallels with the Christian votive plaques found at Water Newton,
and the mysterious signs on the former and the chi-rhos on the latter perhaps
­functioned similarly, as graphic means of providing direct access to divine power.
Understood in this way, both resemble certain ‘Gnostic’ seals so similar to esoteric
charactera that they are sometimes even described as such in scholarship.77
This functional similarity may appear paradoxical when one considers that,
unlike Christian signs, occult charactera have traditionally been viewed as charac-
teristic of ancient magic. Yet recent studies have emphasized that the perception of
magic as a distinct phenomenon opposed to religion is a social construct.78 It has
also been shown that classical and late antique discourse used the notion of ‘magic’
as a means to secure ‘a polemical devaluation and social exclusion of the people,
rituals or beliefs in question’.79 From this perspective, it is unsurprising that early
Christian intellectuals labelled the occult charactera as magical signs.
Augustine played an important role in the creation of the Christian discourse
of ‘pagan magic’ as the work of the Devil and his forces,80 and magical characters
featured in accounts of pagan deviations in his De doctrina Christiana, as well as
in his sermons. Among a list of superstitious practices, Augustine mentioned
certain marks called charactera (notis quos caracteres vocant) that people, including
Christians in North Africa, used as magical remedies81 or apotropaic devices.82 In
spite of such criticism, echoed by prominent Christian intellectuals in the sixth
and seventh centuries, the use of charactera in various ‘deviant’ practices seems to
have blossomed in the late antique world. Thus, Caesarius preached to his Christian
audience in Merovingian Arles against the use of devilish characters (diabolicos
characteres) on apotropaic and healing devices, and in Visigothic Spain Isidore of
Seville repeated Augustine’s and Caesarius’ diatribes against the employment of
amulets with magical characters.83 Yet these condemnations do not seem to have
deterred their everyday use by Christians, and in the early sixth-century Caesarius

75 Dickie, Magic, pp. 287–93. 76 Kotansky, Greek Magical Amulets, no. 3, pp. 13–15.
77 Kotansky, ‘Amulets’, p. 70.
78 Otto, ‘Towards Historicizing “Magic” ’; Bremmer, ‘Preface’, pp. 10–11; and Sfameni, ‘Magic’,
pp. 437–40.
79 Otto, ‘Towards Historicizing “Magic” ’, p. 326.
80 Otto, ‘Towards Historicizing “Magic” ’, pp. 329–30.
81 Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, 2.74 and 2.111, ed. and trans. Green, pp. 90–3 and 108–9.
82 ‘ . . . et quando illi caput dolet, caracteres sibi ad collum ligat, et qui non vult mori, ad collum sibi
ligat’, Augustine, Sermones, 260D, ed. Morin, p. 500.
83 Isidore, Etymologies, 8.9.30, ed. Barney et al., p. 183; Caesarius of Arles, Sermons, 1.12, 13.5,
184.3, and 204.3, ed. Mueller, vol. 1, pp. 13 and 78; vol. 2, p. 481; vol. 3, p. 74. For more details and
references, see Dickie, Magic, pp. 280, 304, and 309.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

Origins of Early Christian Graphic Signs 45

of Arles complained that not only lay people but also some members of the
Christian clergy in Gaul actively involved themselves in such deviant practices.
Often enough they receive charms even from priests and the religious, who, however, are
not really religious and clerics but the Devil’s helpers. See, brethren, how I plead with
you not to consent to accept these wicked objects, even if they are offered by clerics.84
The proliferation of ‘magical’ characters was even more evident in the Roman East
and early Byzantium, where they were inscribed on amulets, and carved onto
­public buildings such as the Miletus theatre, which had an apotropaic inscription
with occult signs carved onto an external wall during late antiquity.85 A popular
occult sign of an eight-armed star with small circles at the end of its arms—the
latter feature explaining another name used by modern scholars for such charac-
tera, namely signes pommetés86—can be found in late antique floor mosaics, for
example, on pavements in a palatial building at Apamea in Syria dated to the early
fifth century and in the sixth-century church of Beit Méry in Lebanon.87 The
unique floor design of that church combined this occult character with apotropaic
signs more common for late antique church floor mosaics such as Solomon’s
knots, swastikas, rings, and crosses of different types. A similar practice can be traced
in late antique private houses, where magical signs and apotropaic inscriptions
appeared on pavement mosaics in doorways or entrance areas.88
The popularity of such charactera is also evinced by their presence in a number
of late antique Egyptian papyrus manuscripts in Greek, Coptic, and Aramaic,
some of which include practical manuals on their usage.89 A number of these papyri,
especially Coptic ones, certainly emanated from Christian circles and were the
work of monks and priests combining elaborate sets of charactêres with invocations
of Jesus, Maria, angels, and demonic entities.90 An early example of such texts is
a fourth-century papyrus sheet from a ‘magical’ handbook in Greek (P. Berol.
17202), which starts with a Christian liturgical exorcism focusing on Jesus’ miracles,
and ends with the list of charactera.91 A later Coptic example is the so-called
Magical Book of Mary and the Angels (P. Heid. Inv. Kopt. 685), a text that combines
a prayer to the Virgin Mary with charactêres framing the figure of Jesus in an
­ornamental fashion.92
Jeffrey Spier has suggested that there must have been a ‘magical’ book of a ­similar
nature in early Byzantium, which the producers of apotropaic Christian amulets of
Syrian-Palestinian origin used as a manual in the early sixth century. On one such

84 Caesarius of Arles, Sermons, 50.1, ed. Mueller, vol. 1, p. 254. For more textual examples of
Christian clerics and bishops practising ‘magic’, see Dickie, Magic, pp. 271–81.
85 Cline, ‘Archangels, Magical Amulets’.
86 Derchain, ‘Intailles magiques’, p. 193; Gordon, ‘Charactêres’, p. 257, note 13.
87 For more details and references, see Maguire, ‘Magic’.
88 Scheibelreiter-Gail, ‘Inscriptions’, pp. 148–50.
89 The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, ed. Betz; Dzwiza, Schriftverwendung; Gordon,
‘Charactêres’, p. 272.
90 Gordon, ‘Charactêres’, pp. 272–9.
91 Brashear and Kotansky, ‘A New Magical Formulary’.
92 Meyer, The Magical Book of Mary and the Angels; Gordon, ‘Charactêres’, pp. 278–80.
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46 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 1.8. Fifth- or sixth-century bronze amulet, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, Kelsey
Museum of Archaeology, acc. no. 26119.

specimen, occult charactera accompanied an image of King Solomon, who later

became a popular figure in medieval occult practices.93 This conflation of Christian
motifs with ‘magical’ characters is also evident on the reverse of a bronze amulet
medallion (Fig. 1.8b) in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology in Ann Arbor, which
is dated to the fifth or sixth century and presents the orthodox images in the upper
field of the enthroned Christ and the four beasts of the Book of Revelations with a
Greek liturgical phrase from the Sanctus (originally from Isaiah 6.3)—‘Holy, Holy,

93 Spier, ‘An Antique Magical Book’, no. 6.

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Origins of Early Christian Graphic Signs 47

Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth’—followed by six occult charactêres taking the central
position and a blend of ‘magical’ symbols in the lower field.94 Their location and
size indicates that the medallion’s creator intended these esoteric characters to
occupy equal prominence with the Christian symbols and invocation, to ensure
the efficacious nature of the amulet, which, according to a circular inscription near
the reverse’s rim, was a ‘seal of the living God’, guarding its wearer from all evil.95
Such an amulet was defined in Greek as φυλακτήριον (phylactery), rendered in
Latin as phylacterium. The same term was used to refer to textual amulets and
Greek and Coptic magical papyri on the one hand and p ­ ortable Christian reliquar-
ies and pectoral crosses on the other96—thus highlighting unclear borders between
acceptable and deviant apotropaic practices.97

1.5 . A P OT RO PA I C G R A P H I C D E V I C E S A S A
S Y M P TO M AT I C F E AT U R E O F L AT E
A N T I Q U E C U LT U R E

The overview in the preceding sections demonstrates that early Christian graphic
signs originated in the cosmopolitan Roman empire, where diverse cultural tradi-
tions shaped their early development. Firstly, their formal features derived from
Hellenistic literate culture, which had used the tau-rho and the chi-rho as abbrevi-
ations. Early Christian manuscript culture incorporated the tau-rho in this cap-
acity, whence it developed into a particular visual expression of Christian piety. In
the course of the second and third centuries, these signs became graphic symbols
referring to Jesus Christ and the Crucifixion. As such, the chi-rho began to repre-
sent free-standing Christian symbols in various media, as did other signs at a later
stage. Secondly, under the influence of the classical practice of isopsephy, as well as
earlier Judaic tradition, some letters employed in early Christian graphic devices
acquired extralinguistic conceptual meanings—in some cases related to the nature
of the divine—which second- and third-century Christian authors commented
upon. Thirdly, the earlier Judaic practice of using graphic devices of that kind
as protective seals and marks of ownership referring to the divine Lord clearly
influenced the early use of Christian graphic signs as solitary symbols. In other
words, the Lord marked out his flock for salvation with such signs, and bearing this
mark of the Lord’s ownership carried a promise of divine protection. In this sense,
these signs functioned with reference to divine authority. After all, authority is often
invested with some apotropaic qualities. In this functional usage, early Christian
graphic symbols differed little from contemporaneous religious seals traditionally

94 Bonner, Studies, no. 324, p. 307. Exactly the same phrase in Latin (‘sanctus, sanctus, sanctus,
dominus deus [sabaoth]’) can be found in the mid-thirteenth-century Canterbury Amulet: Canterbury
Cathedral Library, Add. Ms. 23, col. 8, transcribed by Skemer, Binding Words, pp. 285–304, at p. 300.
95 For a detailed discussion of this amulet and relevant references, see Dauterman Maguire,
Maguire, and Duncan-Flowers, Art and Holy Powers, pp. 214–15.
96 For more details and references, see Skemer, Binding Words, pp. 10–12.
97 For the shared magical culture of late antiquity, see Boustan and Sanzo, ‘Christian Magicians’.
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48 Graphic Signs of Authority

labelled as ‘Gnostic’. Finally, in their protective function, Christian graphic symbols

were comparable to occult graphic characters that spread across the Roman world
from around the turn of the second century ad onwards. Clandestine charactera,
esoteric seals, and more widely accepted Christian signs fulfilled a more or less
identical role for different communities: the graphic means to provide access to
supernatural or divine powers. The distinction between acceptable and deviant
practices in the use of these signs remains somewhat obscure, especially in the third
and fourth centuries, and even in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, many
Christians did not consider the use of powerful charactera in their communication
with the supernatural world to be problematic, despite repeated criticism of this
practice made by some late antique church leaders.
This situation merely reflected the fact that a predilection for graphic devices
with perceived transcendent powers had become a general phenomenon in
the Imperial period and especially in late antiquity, and that this trend affected
both non-Christian and Christian cultures. Graphic traditions from the Eastern
Mediterranean obviously influenced this development, but it also seems symptomatic
of a wider societal transformation. The changing world of late antiquity, where
traditional cultural norms and practices lost their unquestionable grasp over
local communities, and where new cosmopolitan strands of religious worship eroded
localized polytheistic cults, created a public demand for new ways to control a highly
volatile social environment, as well as unpredictable supernatural powers, and
required more direct means to interact with transcendent forces in that process. As
Peter Brown has shown, public enthusiasm for more direct access to the divine
produced the figure of a holy man as a distinctive new feature of the late antique
social landscape.98 The spread of graphic signs with perceived supernatural proper-
ties represents another societal response to the very same need.
In this social context of competing religious cultures and practices,99 Christians
also needed effective graphic signs that could provide them recourse to supernatural
powers for protection and success. Initially the staurogram and christograms
­furnished them with such powerful graphic tools, combining the graphic structure
of occult charactera with letters referring to Christ or the Crucifixion. Early hagi-
ography is filled with stories of saints competing with ‘magicians’ in the art of
wonder-making, and in the same vein, early Christian graphic signs competed
with ‘magical’ graphic devices in the late antique sociocultural landscape.
But the use or rejection of graphic symbols also represented a powerful means of
establishing and maintaining internal group boundaries and coherent identities.
This was especially important for second- and third-century Christians, for whom
the need to distinguish themselves from the Jews, and from other religious groups
worshipping Jesus, was an urgent and serious matter. The adoption of the chi-rho,
tau-rho, and other Christian signs allowed early Christian leaders to demarcate
boundaries for their nascent communities by means of early graphicacy. These

98 Brown, ‘The Rise’; with a slight modification in Brown, Authority, pp. 55–78.
99 For an emphasis on Christianity as just one of the Eastern cults spreading across the late Roman
empire, see e.g. Pettipiece, ‘From Cybele’.
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Origins of Early Christian Graphic Signs 49

symbols not only differed from contemporary religious and occult signs but also
carried cryptic messages on the nature of the Christian God. Only a well-read
­person could fully decode those messages, with their references to the Holy
Scripture and the exegetical comments of the apostolic fathers. The majority of
Christians, meanwhile, saw these signs as graphic promises of salvation and as visual
manifestations of religious identity within particular groups and, from the fourth
century, of the triumphant Christian empire propagating the Gospel of the
Heavenly King.
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2
Christograms as Signs of Authority
in the Late Roman Empire

In the course of the fourth century, Christian graphic signs became a visible feature
of late Roman society, and their functions changed dramatically. From being the
graphic signs of a small and suppressed religious minority at the beginning of
that century—signs that many contemporaries might not have seen any different
from esoteric seals or occult characters—they developed into the triumphant
symbols of the Christian empire, and new signs of authority for Roman emperors
and Christian bishops. In this new function, they began to feature at imperial
courts, in episcopal basilicas, and on various luxury objects. This transformation
did not happen overnight, but instead mirrored the gradual process of conversion
in the late Roman empire, with the reign of Constantine I (306–37) playing a
pivotal role.1

2 . 1 . L A C TA N T I U S A N D C O N S TA N T I N E I ’ S
V I C TO R I O U S S I G N I N 3 1 2

In 311, just before his death, Emperor Galerius issued an edict in Nicomedia
that ended the Great Persecutions of Christians in the Roman empire, initiated
by Diocletian in 303. Two years later, Licinius and Constantine promulgated a
law (later known as the Edict of Milan) that promised Christians even more
favourable treatment.2 The year 313 thus marked the transformation of
Christians in the empire from a persecuted minority to an officially recognized
religious community that received imperial support; churches were restored
and confiscated ecclesiastical properties returned. Shortly after Galerius’ edict,
Constantine embarked on a southbound military offensive against Maxentius’
forces in Italy, and in the autumn of 312 reached Rome for the ultimate clash
with his imperial adversary. As the Christian rhetorician Lactantius wanted his
readers to believe a few years after those dramatic events,3 Constantine had a

1 For overviews of Constantine’s reign, see Cameron, ‘Chapter 4. The Reign of Constantine’,
pp. 90–109; and Barnes, Constantine.
2 For more details and references, see Barnes, Constantine, pp. 93–7; Lenski, ‘The Significance’.
3 On the date of this work and its audience, see Barnes, ‘Lactantius’; Van Dam, Remembering
Constantine, pp. 112–24.
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Christograms in the Late Roman Empire 51

vision before this imminent battle, which entered historical records as the Battle
of the Milvian Bridge (28 October 312).
Constantine was advised in a dream to mark the celestial sign of God on the shields
[of his soldiers] and so to proceed to battle. He did as he was commanded, and by
means of a letter X crossed through, with the upper tip [of the crossing line] bent
around (transversa X littera, summo capite circumflexo), he marked Christ on their
shields. Armed with this sign, the army took up its weapons.4
This tale represents the earliest textual reference to a Roman emperor appropriating
a Christian graphic sign to use as an apotropaic device for both himself and his
army, and Lactantius intended the ensuing description of Constantine’s victory
over Maxentius to confirm the intercessory efficacy of that symbol to his readers.
This passage has been the subject of a protracted academic debate, currently
dominated by two radically different standpoints. The traditional approach has
been to treat Lactantius’ description as an eye-witness account of an actual event,
that needs either proper interpretation or correction to reveal accurately what sign
Constantine saw in his dream and then placed on the shields of his soldiers.
Consequently, many scholars have suggested that Lactantius’ problematic passage
should be interpreted as referring to the chi-rho, something like in the passage
above.5 Such a reading would then be corroborated by the presence of the chi-rho
on monuments and artefacts dated to the Constantinian period.6 Yet the precise
wording that the Christian writer selected to describe the graphic symbol in question
is rather awkward if he referred to the chi-rho, which was employed as a free-standing
symbol in the Roman East from as early as the second half of the third century;
that sign might have been familiar to Lactantius after his earlier stay in Nikomedia,
as well as to some of his Latin readers. In response to such a linguistic objection, it has
been suggested that the passage may be textually corrupt, which is not impossible
when one considers that Lactantius’ text has survived only in a single manuscript.
Consequently, the interpolation of a letter I into the passage describing Constantine’s
sign has been proposed to make the latter compatible with the chi-rho: ‘by means
of an X crossed through by a letter I’ (transversa X littera I).7
Other scholars have read Lactantius’ passage as a reference to the tau-rho/
staurogram—also known as the monogrammatic cross—a sign the use of which as
a solitary symbol in the Latin West remains dubious before Constantine’s reign.8
The graphic structure of this free-standing symbol was therefore unknown to

4 ‘Commonitus est in quiete Constantinus, ut caeleste signum dei notaret in scutis atque ita
proelium committeret. Fecit ut jussus est, et transversa X littera, summo capite circumflexo, Christum
in scutis notat. Quo signo armatus exercitus capit ferrum’, Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum, 44.
5–6, pp. 200–2.
5 Sulzberger, ‘Le symbole’, pp. 401–9; Marrou, ‘Autour’, pp. 403–14. For recent detailed linguistic
discussions of this passage and the word ‘transversa’ in particular, as well as relevant literature, see
Heck, ‘Constantin’, pp. 124–7; and Bardill, Constantine, p. 161, notes 23 and 25.
6 Odahl, ‘The Celestial Sign’.
7 Sulzberger, ‘La Symbole’, pp. 406–7. For relevant literature and a critical discussion of that
emendation originally suggested by Henri Grégoire, see Bardill, Constantine, pp. 161–2.
8 For the discussion of the staurograms on the plaque of Beratius Nikatoras, see Chapter 1.
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52 Graphic Signs of Authority

Lactantius’ Latin readers, and his description of the sign, with its reference to the
initial of Christ’s name in Greek, would have made its symbolic meaning more
apparent to his readers: ‘by means of a letter X turned sideways, with the top of its
head bent around, he marked Christ on their shields.’9 In that case, the Christian
apologist would have perceived that sign to be a christogram, and Lactantius may
have been familiar with a passage in Justin Martyr’s second-century First Apology,
which mentioned an alleged reference in Plato’s Timaeus to Christ being placed
crosswise on the world. Justin argued that the Greek philosopher had borrowed
this idea from Numbers, 21, 8–9, in which Moses made the sign of a cross using a
brass serpent. Plato, meanwhile, wrote of the soul of the universe being placed on
the latter as a χίασμα, in the form of the letter chi.10 Thus Justin Martyr thought
of the letter X turned sideways, as if it were an equal-armed cross, and Lactantius
could have imagined the main frame of Constantine’s sign in the same way.
In his recent study, Jonathan Bardill has attempted to support the latter reading
using visual evidence attributed to the Constantinian period. Most of that evidence
lacks precise dating, and its attribution to the period before or soon after the Battle
of the Milvian Bridge remains inconclusive. Among other examples, Bardill refers
to a staurogram identified on frescoes in the so-called domus Faustae, a high-status
and possibly imperial residence in the vicinity of the Lateran basilica, deeming it
to be crucial material evidence that the free-standing tau-rho might have been
employed in Constantinian Rome soon after the victorious battle of 312. According
to the reconstruction of the frescoes and related inscriptions made by Valnea Santa
Maria Scrinari, the staurogram should probably be linked to the mural inscription
‘In this sign is the victory of the Father’ (In signo hoc est patris victoria), and was located
close to another inscription that mentioned the fourth consulship of Licinius of
315. Because of this spatial proximity, Bardill dates that sign to 315.11
Yet that graphic evidence is quite problematic. Firstly, Scrinari’s reconstruction
of these inscriptions has been contested, as has her interpretation of the whole
complex as the house of Constantine’s wife, Fausta.12 Furthermore, the connection
made between the inscription mentioning the fourth consulship of Licinius and
the staurogram in a separate line is highly hypothetical. The fresco panels name all
the members of Constantine’s family, from his father, Constantius Chlorus, to his
sons—including Constans, with a simple chi-rho placed between the two words of
his title imperator Romanorum (337–50). The frescoes could therefore have been
created or modified in the second quarter of the fourth century, and the staurogram
may also have been drawn during that period. Moreover, the inscription accom-
panying the tau-rho echoes the description of Constantine’s sign in Eusebius’ Life
of Constantine, written after the emperor’s death in 337. It was therefore probably

9 For further details, see Aland, ‘Bemerkungen’, pp. 173–9, at p. 176; Black, ‘The Chi-Rho Sign’,
pp. 320–2; Bardill, Constantine, pp. 161–2.
10 Justin Martyr, The First Apology, 55, p. 183, note 2. For a detailed discussion of this passage and
its broader philosophical context, see Heid, Kreuz, pp. 19–29.
11 For more details and references, see Scrinari, Il Laterano imperiale, pp. 162–73, figs 126–70,
especially table E and fig. 133; Bardill, Constantine, pp. 164–6.
12 See especially Liverani, ‘Note’.
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Christograms in the Late Roman Empire 53

painted on the wall along with the sign sometime in the 340s or perhaps even later.
That the tau-rho was depicted with an alpha and omega below its vertical bar also
supports a later date, since the extant corpus of material evidence suggests that the
addition of an alpha and omega to chi-rho and tau-rho signs—as graphic emphasis
on the divine nature of Christ—took place after the reign of Constantine.13
Peter Weiss has instead suggested that the appropriation of Constantine’s victorious
sign might have been inspired after a possible sighting by the emperor and his
soldiers whilst on campaign in Gaul of a solar halo phenomenon in the form of
a ‘light-cross’, arguing that Constantine might have originally interpreted this
sighting as a symbolic manifestation of Sol, the divine Sun. Before the battle of the
Milvian Bridge in 312, according to Weiss and those who support his view, this
earlier vision could have been re-interpreted as pointing to the triumphant symbol
of Christ, and that ‘miraculous’ sign in the sky above the sun was later described
by Eusebius of Caesarea as ‘a cross-shaped trophy formed from light, and a text
attached to it which said, “By this conquer”’.14 Such Christian appropriation of
a pagan symbol could happen easily: the dies natalis (‘birthday’) of Sol Invictus
coincided with Christmas, and both divinities were associated with heaven and
light.15 Because of such similarities, in 312 the shape of the solar halo could have
been reinterpreted as revealing an apotropaic sign of Christ, and a slightly modified
variant of a solar symbol (a six- or eight-pointed star) was allegedly placed on the
shields of Constantine’s soldiers, and from there caught Lactantius’ attention.
The second, more recent approach to Lactantius’ description of the triumphant
sign understands it to be a literary construct; a rhetorical device intended to
highlight divine support for Constantine’s take-over of Rome. At the time of the
battle, Lactantius was not in Rome but Trier, and wrote an account based on the
various stories of people who had participated in the Battle of the Milvian Bridge;
in his triumphalist mode he was capable of providing a Christian re-interpretation
for a sign that he had either seen or heard about, which might have had an entirely
different original context and meaning.16 After all, stories of revelatory dreams or
visions experienced by historical figures before crucial battles were common in
classical historiography. Lactantius’ imagination might have been triggered, for
instance, by a distinctive emblem on the shields of a particular military unit that he
had seen in Trier.17 It is also remarkable that the description of the Battle of the
Milvian Bridge in all surviving versions of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History (9, 2–8)—
written in the East between c.313 and the mid-320s and filled with biblical similes

13 Cecchelli, Il trionfo, pp. 95 and 97. Cf. Bardill, Constantine, p. 164, note 41.
14 Eusebius, The Life of Constantine, 1. 28. 2, p. 81, with comments at pp. 204–8 pointing to biblical
parallels. On the eschatological interpretation of this vision, see Nicholson, ‘Constantine’s Vision’.
15 Weiss, ‘The Vision’; Drake, ‘Solar Power’; Long, ‘How to Read a Halo’; Girardet, Der Kaiser,
pp. 30–52; Hollard and López Sánchez, Le Chrisme, pp. 37–67; Lenski, Constantine, pp. 69–70. For
criticism of Weiss’s interpretation, see Weber, Kaiser, p. 281; Harris, ‘Constantine’s Dream’. Cf. also
Bardill, Constantine, pp. 159–60, 168–74, and 326–31, who argues that Eusebius’ description of this
vision was a later elaboration of St Paul’s vision on the way to Damascus (Acts, 26. 13).
16 For more details and references, see Bleicken, Constantin, pp. 30–3; Van Dam, Remembering
Constantine, pp. 112–19.
17 Harris, ‘Constantine’s Dream’, pp. 492–3.
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54 Graphic Signs of Authority

with the aim of emphasizing divine support for Constantine—does not include
any mention of a miraculous sign being revealed to Constantine, or its subsequent
appropriation by the emperor.18
Regardless of the original appearance of Constantine’s victorious sign, if indeed
it existed at all, the sign clearly played a less significant role for the emperor and his
entourage in the first years after the defeat of Maxentius than Lactantius wanted
his readers to believe. The chi-rho was never propagated as a triumphant symbol of
Constantine’s success on his coinage in the second decade of the fourth century,
while the earliest coin issue featuring a tau-rho took the form of solidi struck far in
the East, in Antioch in 336/7. But even at such a late date that sign was used as a
simple mintmark.19 In the 320s and 330s, when the Christian connotations of
the Battle of the Milvian Bridge acquired a more prominent symbolic role for
Constantinian emperorship, his triumphant sign became firmly linked to the chi-rho
in the public’s mythologized perception of the emperor. Lactantius’ work must have
been influential in the creation of that myth. As if echoing Lactantius’ text, a chi-rho
was chosen to be one of the symbols that appeared on the shield of Constantine’s
son Crispus on the obverse of a series of copper coins issued c.322–3 in Trier,
the location of Crispus’ imperial residence.20 It is known that, after moving to
Constantine’s headquarters in Trier, Lactantius instructed Crispus in Latin, sug-
gesting that the text of De mortibus persecutorum might have been known at that
court and by local mint masters in particular. The teacher’s story could thus have
influenced that particular numismatic image of his pupil.

2 . 2 . E U S E B I U S A N D T H E A P P RO P R I AT I O N
OF THE CHI-RHO AS AN IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT
SYMBOL IN THE 320–40s

When Eusebius described the imperial celestial sign in his Life of Constantine in
the late 330s, his perception was clearly shaped by the appearance of the imperial
labarum as well as by stories explaining its importance and meaning that Constantine
had told to Eastern bishops in the final years of his reign. As a result of these
conflated memories and Eusebius’ own agenda,21 his eye-witness account of that
trophy creates a false impression that the apotropaic standard faithfully represented
the emperor’s miraculous sign in 312:
A tall poll plated with gold had a transverse bar forming the shape of the cross. Up at
the extreme top a wreath woven of precious stones and gold had been fastened. On it
two letters, intimating by its first characters the name ‘Christ’, formed the monogram
of the Savior’s title, rho being intersected in the middle by chi. These letters the

18 Harris, ‘Constantine’s Dream’, p. 491; and Van Dam, Remembering Constantine, pp. 85–95.
19 RIC, vol. 7, pp. 61–4, 666, and 695.
20 RIC, vol. 7, p. 197, no. 372; Odahl, ‘The Celestial Sign’, p. 19; Abdy and Dowler, Coins, p. 88,
fig. 6; Abdy, ‘From Page’, p. 175.
21 This point is discussed in detail by Van Dam, Remembering Constantine, pp. 61–80.
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Christograms in the Late Roman Empire 55

Emperor also used to wear on his helmet in later times. From the transverse bar, which
was bisected by the pole, hung suspended a cloth, an imperial tapestry covered with a
pattern of precious stones fastened together. . . . But the upright staff, which extended
upwards a long way from the lower end, below the trophy of the cross and near the
top of the tapestry delineated, carried the golden head-and-shoulders portraits of the
Godbeloved Emperor, and likewise of his children. This saving sign was always used
by the Emperor for protection against every opposing and hostile force, and he com-
manded replicas of it to lead all his armies.22
As Eusebius’ description makes clear, Constantine’s labarum was a T-shaped standard
surmounted with a wreath, which had a chi-rho within.23 Yet, as emphasized by
Bardill, this labarum might originally have been limited to a simple T-shaped
standard, as presented on silver coin-medallions issued in Ticinum in 315 (Fig. 2.1),
and only received additional elements in the following years. The portrait of the
emperor and his sons, for example, could only have been added after Crispus
and Constantine Junior had become Caesars in 317. The precious wreath with the

Fig. 2.1. Obverse of Constantine I’s silver coin-medallion (Ticinum, 315). The State
Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, inv. no. OH-A-ДР-15266.

22 Eusebius, The Life of Constantine, 1. 31, pp. 81–2, with comments at pp. 210–12.
23 Black, ‘The Chi-Rho Sign’, pp. 321–3. Bardill argues that the porphyry sarcophagus in the
atrium of Hagia Irena presents the image of that standard and was originally made for Constantine I,
Constantine, pp. 187–94.
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56 Graphic Signs of Authority

chi-rho within must have been added in the second half of Constantine’s reign,
the result of the later re-interpretation of Constantine’s reputed visions in 310
and 312. Furthermore, this later re-visioning of earlier events can be accounted for
by the fact that the first numismatic depictions of the triumphant standard with
a chi-rho, as described by Eusebius, only appeared on Roman coinage from 326
onwards.24 Eusebius’ text, alongside his description of the labarum, thus reflected
a modified remembrance of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in the late 320s and
330s, when the chi-rho had become the triumphant graphic sign of Christ par
excellence. After Constantine appropriated the symbol in the second half of his
reign, this modification was a simple one to make. As Eusebius claimed, Constantine
personally placed that sign on his helmet soon after the battle, and the emperor is
indeed shown wearing a helmet with an apotropaic chi-rho on its crest on the
above-mentioned coin-medallions from Ticinum (Fig. 2.1).25 Furthermore, when
western imperial mints placed different graphic symbols on the helmet of
Constantine’s profile bust on his copper coins produced in c.318–20, one of the
issuers in Siscia chose a chi-rho for this precise purpose.26
The public perception in the 320s of the chi-rho as Constantine’s triumphant
sign was hardly accidental, and must have been influenced by the growing visibility
of the chi-rho in the Roman world after the battle of the Milvian Bridge. This sign
accompanied imperial inscriptions featuring Emperor Constantine’s name on two
Roman milestones in North Africa dated to the first four months of 313, one in
Mauretania Caesariensis and the other in Numidia (Djémila).27 The same sign
appears on another Roman milestone at Djémila carved between 319 or 324, and
the practice of marking milestones with chi-rhos can be attested in that region
in the years after 326.28 The chi-rho was familiar to contemporary Christians in
Italy too, evinced by its use in Roman catacombs, although, as mentioned in the
previous chapter, the earliest instances of such usage are difficult to date.29 The first
two secure examples of the chi-rho in such an epigraphic context date from 323
and 331. In the earliest funerary inscription, the chi-rho was employed as an
abbreviation of Christ’s name in the phrase in pace Christi,30 while the later inscription
presents a more advanced stage in the usage of that sign, which functions both
as an abbreviation in the expression in signo Christi and as a free-standing symbol
preceding the entire epigraph.31 Another example of very early usage may be
viewed on the marble Roman sarcophagus that a certain Aurelius Filtatus made for

24 Bruun, ‘The Victorious Signs’, pp. 45–6; Bardill, Constantine, pp. 160 and 174–9.
25 It has been suggested that the medallions of this type were stuck for distribution among
Constantine’s officers to celebrate his decennalia: RIC, vol. 7, p. 364, no. 36; Overbeck, ‘Das
Münchner Medallion’; and Bardill, Constantine, pp. 177–8.
26 Bardill, Constantine, pp. 172–3. On other examples of the chi-rho being used as a mintmark in
those years, see Odahl, ‘Christian Symbolism’, pp. 127–31.
27 Salama, ‘Les provinces d’Afrique’, pp. 153–7; Lenski, Constantine, pp. 8–9 and 71.
28 Salama, ‘Le plus ancien chrisme’; and Salama, ‘Anniversaires impériaux’, pp. 139–44.
29 Mazzoleni, ‘Origine e cronologia’.
30 ICUR, vol. 7, no. 17425 (EDB, no. 17717). Wuschmeyer, ‘Christogramm’, p. 539.
31 ICUR, vol. 8, no. 21597 (EDB, no. 35783); Bruun, ‘The Victorious Signs’, p. 43.
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Christograms in the Late Roman Empire 57

his deceased daughter, dated to the first third of the fourth century: in its central
clipeus a simple chi-rho preceded the funerary text.32
Further evidence for the familiarity of the chi-rho to Christians in Italy, and for
its public visibility soon after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, appears on surviving
early fourth-century pavement mosaics in the basilica of Aquileia, then the largest
city-port of the North Adriatic. These floor mosaics would have cost more than
400 gold solidi to make, and are typical of the fourth century, using traditional
classical motifs to communicate early Christian symbolic messages: a bucolic
scene/the Good Shepherd, a fish/symbol of Christ in the central medallion sur-
rounded by the portraits of anonymous donors, various ornaments and knots of
cruciform shape, and others besides. Surviving fragments of wall paintings also
show geometrical and cruciform ornaments. That a sumptuous church built soon
after the end of the Great Persecutions accommodated symbolism that catered to
the visual tastes of its wealthy early fourth-century Aquileian donors should not
surprise us.33 A single chi-rho, placed in the dedication medallion of the basilica’s
founder, Bishop Theodorus, remains the only demonstrably Christian sign on the
surviving mosaics, and is placed in the south hall of his domus ecclesiae. Theodorus
is mentioned in the materials of the Synod of Arles (314), and his pontificate is
traditionally dated c.308–19.34 So the basilica and its impressive mosaics was prob-
ably created in the years after the so-called ‘Edict of Milan’ and before the bishop’s
demise, c.313–19. Much like the design of the clipeus in the above-mentioned
sarcophagus of Filtatus, the simple chi-rho in the basilica of Aquileia is placed in
a medallion and located above an inscription, which refers to Heaven (caelitus)
entrusting the Aquileian Christian community to the bishop, and thus can be
interpreted as a celestial sign of his divine Lord (Κύριος): ‘O happy Theodorus,
with the help of Almighty God and the flock trusted to you by the heaven you have
blessedly made and gloriously dedicated everything’ (Fig. 2.2).35
By the mid-320s, when Sol Invictus disappeared from Constantinian coinage,36
the chi-rho became the principal symbol of victorious imperial authority at the
court of Constantine I, as the versus intexti of Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius show
us conclusively.37 Following the earlier tradition of Hellenistic calligraphic poetry,
these poems are framed by geometrical forms and certain letters. In addition, three
of Porfyrius’ compositions (poems 8, 14, and 19) include chi-rhos of the elongated

32 Repertorium der christlich-antiken Sarkophage, vol. 1, no. 132, p. 88.

33 Testini, Aquileia, pp. 369–98; Marini and Adrian, I mosaici; Bisconti, ‘Tra Aquileia e Spalato’;
Lehmann, ‘Die frühchristlichen Mosaiken’; Brown, Through the Eye, pp. 39–40; Cuscito, ‘Aquileia’;
Novello, ‘Aquileia’.
34 Testini, Aquileia, p. 368.
35 ‘THEODORE FELI[X / A]DIUVANTE DEO / OMNIPOTENTE ET / POEMNIO
CAELITUS TIBI / [TRA]DITUM OMNIA / [B]AEATE FECISTI ET / GLORIOSE DEDICASTI.’
On the concurrent perception of God and Christ as king and relevant literature, see Bardill, Constantine,
pp. 341–54.
36 For details and references, see Bardill, Constantine, p. 331.
37 For further details and references, see Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius, Carmina; Levitan,
‘Dancing’; Ernst, Carmen figuratum, pp. 97–142; Bruhat, Les ‘carmina figurata’; Wienand, Der Kaiser
als Sieger, pp. 355–402; Squire, ‘Patterns’; Squire, ‘How to Read’; Squire, ‘POP Art’; Squire and
Whitton, ‘Machina sacra’; Squire and Wienand, eds, Morphogrammata.
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58 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 2.2. Dedication medallion in the basilica of Aquileia.

type very similar to that in the Aquileian basilica.38 Porfyrius composed these
poems while in exile c.322–6 and sent them along with other visual poems to
Constantine I, probably on the occasion of the twentieth imperial anniversary of
the emperor and the tenth imperial anniversary of his two sons in 326.39 The gift
must have impressed its imperial recipient: Porfyrius was permitted to return from
his exile and even to hold the office of Roman urban prefect in 329 and 333.40
In one case (poem 8), a structuring chi-rho is accompanied by the monumental
letters of the name IESVS, themselves distributed in a clockwise pattern between
the chi-rho’s arms (Fig. 2.3). This graphic device thus presents a divine name, Jesus
Christ, in monogrammatic form. In another case (poem 19), a chi-rho depicts
the mast of the ship that also incorporates the Latin number XX referring to
Constantine’s imperial anniversary (Fig. 2.4), and should consequently be interpreted

38 For a detailed discussion of the chi-rho in these poems and relevant bibliography, see Squire and
Whitton, ‘Machina sacra’. I omit another poem presenting a chi-rho, poem 24, from my discussion
because its attribution to Porfyrius has been questioned in academic literature. See Publilii Optatiani
Porfyrii Carmina, vol. 1, pp. xxix–xxxi, and vol. 2, pp. 153 and 157–8; Bruhat, Les ‘carmina figurata’,
pp. 38–9. Cf. Barnes, ‘Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius’, p. 174; Ernst, Carmen figuratum, pp. 98 and
138; and Squire and Whitton, ‘Machina sacra’, pp. 86–91.
39 Cf. Squire and Whitton, ‘Machina sacra’, note 55, dating poem 8 slightly earlier, to c.320–1.
40 Barnes, ‘Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius’; Wienand, Der Kaiser, pp. 355–61 and 371–3; Squire
and Whitton, ‘Machina sacra’, p. 49.
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Christograms in the Late Roman Empire 59

Fig. 2.3. Optatianus, Poem 8, in Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 9 Aug. 4, fol. 11r. ©
HAB Wolfenbüttel <http://diglib.hab.de/mss/9-aug-4f/start.htm>

as a victorious symbol of imperial triumph. In these two cases, the chi-rho is referred
to as salutare or caeleste signum. The third instance in Poem 14 glorifies the defeat
of Licinius (324), and hence the chi-rho structuring those poetical verses also
reveals a strong triumphal connotation. That none of the chi-rhos are accompanied
by an alpha and omega suggests that the Christological implications of these two
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60 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 2.4. Optatianus, Poem 19, in Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 9 Aug. 4, fol. 4r. ©
HAB Wolfenbüttel <http://diglib.hab.de/mss/9-aug-4f/start.htm>

letters had less importance in the Constantinian age.41 All in all, Porfyrius seems
to have chosen this new graphic device for his calligraphic verses because he
perceived the chi-rho to be both the most popular contemporary Christian sign,
and a triumphant celestial symbol of Constantinian emperorship. In his precarious
situation in exile, Porfyrius must have been sensitive to the current atmosphere and
preferences of the Constantinian court in order to ensure his innovative graphic
verses would receive a benevolent response from their imperial recipients. In this
vein, the creation of at least three calligraphic poems featuring the chi-rho as a
graphic frame, and the complete absence of other christograms in Porfyrius’ visual
poetry, shows beyond any doubt which Christian sign held the place of honour at
the court of Constantine I in the mid-320s.

41 Cf. Squire and Whitton, ‘Machina sacra’, pp. 92–4.

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Christograms in the Late Roman Empire 61

The evidence of Roman coinage in the second quarter of the fourth century
further bolsters the unquestionable position of the chi-rho as the prime Christian
symbol in an imperial context in the later reign of Constantine I as well as during
the reigns of his sons. Before the mid-320s, the rare placement of chi-rhos on
Constantinian coins of the Western Roman empire seems to have been the result
of local initiatives. The situation changed, however, after three events in the mid-
320s: the defeat of Licinius in 324, Constantine’s involvement in the Council of
Nicea in 325, and the twentieth anniversary of his reign in 326. After these events,
the triumphant standard marked with the chi-rho was introduced onto gold
medallions in Siscia in 326, and onto a rare copper issue in Constantinople in
327–8 (Fig. 2.5).42 In both cases, the chi-rho functioned not as a purely apotropaic
sign (as it probably did on the coin-medallions struck in Ticinum about a decade
earlier) but also as a triumphant symbol of Constantinian emperorship. In that
capacity, military standards carrying the chi-rho became a recurrent visual motif
on Roman coins of the 330s and 340s (Fig. 2.6), as well as in the second half of the
fourth century.43
Eusebius’ ekphrastic description of the labarum in the late 330s indicates that
this change in numismatic iconography accurately represented concurrent imperial
symbolism. Its appeal to Roman elites can be deduced from the evidence that a
simplified version of this triumphant trophy, featuring a chi-rho inside a laurel wreath,
appeared as an object of adoration on the central frontal part of some figurative
sarcophagi produced in Rome between the mid-fourth century and the beginning
of the fifth century.44

Fig. 2.5. Copper coin of Constantine I (Constantinople, 327–8). London, BrM. © The
Trustees of the British Museum.

42 Bruun, ‘The Victorious Signs’, pp. 45–6; RIC, vol. 7, pp. 566–7 and 573; Bardill, Constantine,
pp. 143 and 176; and Hollard and López Sánchez, Le Chrisme, p. 62.
43 Bruun, ‘The Victorious Signs’, pp. 47–56.
44 Repertorium der christlich-antiken Sarkophage, vol. 1, nos. 49, 59, 61, 175, 208, 224, 653, and
933; Repertorium der christlich-antiken Sarkophage, vol. 3, no. 124; and Koch, Frühchristliche
Sarkophage, pp. 194, 292, 294, 315–16, and 320.
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62 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 2.6. Silver coin of Constantine II (Siscia, 337–40). Oslo University, Museum of
Cultural History.

Increasing imperial use of the chi-rho from the 330s onwards occurred side by
side with its growing popularity in Roman-Christian epigraphics. Carlo Carletti has
estimated that christograms are present on 10 per cent of early Christian funerary
inscriptions, and this seems to be a fair number for the surviving fourth-century
epigraphs from Roman catacombs.45 Yet such a figure does not take into account
diachronic changes in the usage of christograms in the course of that century. No
epigraphic record securely dated to before 323 includes a christogram, and as surviving
epigraphic material with precise dating suggests (Charts 2.1–3),46 the use of the chi-rho
noticeably increased in the 330–50s, when it appeared on approximately 10–14
per cent of inscriptions. The chi-rho remained the christogram par excellence of this
medium, until other Christian signs started to appear in that context in the 380s.
Furthermore, this christogram represents the only graphic sign that appeared
on fourth-century Christian gold glasses, originally created as vessel bases or
‘blobs’ decorating the walls of vessels.47 Such vessels might have had ceremonial
functions, and most with known provenance served as decorative elements in
Roman catacombs, fixed onto surfaces of loculi. The decoration of these Christian
gold glasses usually featured figural imagery, and chi-rhos occur extremely rarely
alongside such decoration, where the sign was typically placed between two
human figures who might represent a range of individuals including biblical per-
sonages, Roman popes and saints, or well-to-do Christians. In all these cases, the
chi-rho refers graphically to Christ, and in some cases is also treated as an object
of adoration.48 Identifiable samples of this small corpus feature Pope Damasus I
(366–84) accompanied by his noble acquaintances, as well as saints. The corpus

45 ‘Un monogramma’, p. 127.

46 The charts are based on the data derived from The Epigraphic Database Bari at http://www.edb.
uniba.it, created by a project team led by Carlo Carletti, and ICUR.
47 Cf. also the Homblières Cup with a chi-rho on its bottom, dated to the second half of the fourth
century; Coche de la Ferté, L’antiquité, no. 54, pp. 175–6.
48 Grig, ‘Portraits’; and Morey, The Gold-Glass, nos. 36, 72, 76, 106, and 112. This corpus includes
close to three hundred specimens and only about a dozen of them feature a chi-rho.
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Christograms in the Late Roman Empire 63

250

200 2 6 1
10 4
8

150 179
9 15

184
100
139 131 175
9
10 3
50
78 1
1 4 60 55
36
24 24 18
0
320s 330s 340s 350s 360s 370s 380s 390s 400s 410s 420s 430s
with tau-rhos with chi-rhos without christograms

Chart 2.1. Chi-rhos and tau-rhos on datable Roman Christian inscriptions from the 320s
to 430s (absolute numbers).

100%

95%

90%

85%

80%

75%
320s 330s 340s 350s 360s 370s 380s 390s 400s 410s 420s 430s
with tau-rhos with chi-rhos without christograms

Chart 2.2. Chi-rhos and tau-rhos on datable Roman Christian inscriptions from the 320s
to 430s (percentage).
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64 Graphic Signs of Authority

16
14.3 14.3
14

12
10.3
10 10.4

6
6.1 5.2
4.2
4
4

2 2.1

0
320s 330s 340s 350s 360s 370s 380s 390s 400s 410s

Chart 2.3. Percentage of datable Roman Christian inscriptions with chi-rhos from the
320s to 400s.

Fig. 2.7. Gold glass with Sts Peter and Paul. New York, MMA, acc. no. 16.174.3.

thus suggests that this type of decoration was somehow connected to Damasus and
produced during his pontificate. Another group of gold glasses, featuring Sts Peter
and Paul flanking a column surmounted by a chi-rho in a circle (Fig. 2.7), have
similarly been attributed to the second half of the fourth century.49
Thus, the chi-rho that began to appear in different media from the second half
of Constantine’s reign onwards fulfilled two functions. On the one hand, a simple
chi-rho became a primary graphic sign of the divine Lord, which could be occa-
sionally used by both Christian clerics like Bishop Theodorus and Pope Damasus,

49 Grig, ‘Portraits’, pp. 208–18; and Noga-Banai, ‘Between Rome and Jerusalem’, p. 57.
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Christograms in the Late Roman Empire 65

and by Christians of different status buried in Roman catacombs.50 On the other

hand, it entered the corpus of imperial symbols as a triumphant Christian sign
and in this capacity became associated with the imperial labarum. As demonstrated
by the Roman marble sarcophagi discussed above, this imperial motif evidently
pleased the visual tastes of some Christian clarissimi in the eternal City, a perhaps
unsurprising outcome when one considers that the creators of such sarcophagi
increasingly expressed Christian devotion through imagery borrowed from both
the imperial court and the emperor’s army.51

2.3. T H E H I E R A RC H Y O F C H R I S T I A N S I G N S I N
T H E V I S U A L C O M M U N I C AT I O N O F I M P E R I A L
AU T H O R I T Y I N T H E S E C O N D H A L F O F T H E
F O U RT H A N D E A R LY F I F T H C E N T U R I E S

The use of the chi-rho on various objects, and its simultaneous imperial connota-
tions, became especially noticeable in the western Roman provinces. As pointed
out by Susan Pearce, evidence from fourth-century Gaul and Britain reveals this
developing trend, and chi-rhos were regularly placed not only on artefacts related
to the Christian cult52 but also on objects associated with imperial governance
including lead seals, pewter ingots, copper grain measures, and signet-rings probably
worn by government officials (Fig. 2.8).53 Gold rings with chi-rhos might have
been dispatched as imperial gifts to high-standing officials as early as the reign of
Constans I (337–50), a practice demonstrated by a ring from the Ferrell Collection
that combines a chi-rho with an inscription swearing allegiance to Constans.54 Yet
the practice of placing chi-rhos on objects related to the imperial sphere in the
Roman West became especially noticeable in the second half of the fourth century,
as evinced by the employment of that symbol on datable finds of defensive armour
and dress accessories of imperial representatives, the majority of which emanate
from the north-western Roman provinces. In this period, the symbol might first
have been introduced—as both an imperial and apotropaic sign—onto the helmets

50 Chi-rhos appear not only on funerary tabulae but also on sarcophagi. For example, a simple
chi-rho marks out a Roman sarcophagus dated to 363, which is now in the Louvre, Paris: Repertorium
der christlich-antiken Sarkophage, vol. 3, no. 433; earlier described in Inscriptiones Christianae, ed. de
Rossi, vol. 1, no. 161.
51 For more details, see Brown, Through the Eye, p. 250.
52 As, for example, on liturgical objects from the Water Newton Treasure discussed in Chapter 1 or
on liturgical spoons from the Mildenhall Treasure dated to c.360, see Painter, ‘The Mildenhall
Treasure’; and Kent and Painter, eds, Wealth, pp. 33–9, nos. 54–79; the spoons nos. 74–6. See also the
use of chi-rhos on the Coffin of St Paulinus dated to the second half of the fourth century: Trier,
Rheinisches Landesmuseum, inv. no. 99.1373.
53 Pearce, ‘The Hinton’, pp. 200–1. The gold rings from the British Museum (reg. nos. 1983,1003.1
and 1984,1001.1) are representative of such signet-rings. As pointed out by Spier, Late Antique and
Early Christian Gems, pp. 22–4, no. 42, and pp. 183–5, nos. R4–R50, nearly all fourth-century rings
engraved with chi-rho are from western provinces.
54 Spier, Treasures, pp. 62–3, no. 43; and Spier, Byzantium, pp. 56–7, fig. 5.2.
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66 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 2.8. Gold rings with chi-rhos, England, fourth century. London, BrM, reg.
nos. 1983,1003.1 and 1984,1001.1. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

of imperial officers stationed along the European limes of the Roman empire,55 and
were very soon added to the crossbow brooches used to fasten military cloaks of
high-ranking imperial officials. Surviving examples of such brooches have been
dated to the period beginning in the second half of the fourth century and ending
with the first half of the fifth century.56 Yet the utilization of the chi-rho on such
objects in this imperial sphere was not a widespread phenomenon. As Christoph
Eger has demonstrated, this sign (in some cases accompanied by an alpha and omega)
was placed on only approximately 13 per cent of surviving crossbow fibulas of type
5 attributed to the period in question; the percentage corresponds—with striking
similarity—to the above-mentioned number of funerary epigraphs with chi-rhos
in fourth-century Roman catacombs.57
Probably because of this imperial association, in the middle and second half of
the fourth century chi-rho symbols began to adorn floor mosaics in aristocratic
villas located in northern Spain, such as the Villa Fortunatus at Fraga.58 In Britain
too, this graphic symbol was used in late antique villas at Hinton St Mary and
Frampton in Dorset, both of which were located in the vicinity of the Roman
city Durnovaria (Dorchester). The mid-fourth-century mosaics in these villas are
replete with mythological and hunting scenes, foliage and ivy-leaf scrolls, and

55 For more details and references, see Mackensen, ‘Vergoldete Bronzebeschläge’; and Miks,
‘Hoc signo’.
56 Eger, ‘Between Amuletic Ornament’, pp. 291–303.
57 Eger, ‘Between Amuletic Ornament’, pp. 293–5.
58 At that villa, a chi-rho divides the name FORTV/NATVS accompanying one of the late Roman
floor mosaics: Serra Rafols, ‘La Villa Fortunatus’, p. 29 and plate 10; and Pearce, ‘The Hinton’, p. 199.
See also Brandenburg, ‘Christussymbole’, pp. 74–188 and pp. 126–7, who emphasizes the perceived
apotropaic quality of the chi-rho as one of the reasons for their secular use in the western provinces.
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Christograms in the Late Roman Empire 67

Fig. 2.9. Mosaic from Hinton St Mary, England. London, BrM, reg. no. 1965,0409.1.
© The Trustees of the British Museum.

represent a symbiosis of Bacchic (presumably Orphic) and Christian motifs.59 In

both cases, the chi-rho might have been incorporated into these mosaics because
of its symbolic significance for contemporary Roman emperors (Fig. 2.9).60
This striking imperial connotation of christograms used in western provinces
is exemplified by the Salus series of large copper coins issued in Gaulic mints in
352–3 in the name of the imperial contender in the West, Magnentius, and in the
name of his son, Decentius. The series represented the first numismatic case of the
use of chi-rhos as a reverse type (Fig. 2.10).61 Magnentius strived to bolster his
imperial position in the Western Roman empire by presenting himself in the guise

59 Perring, ‘ “Gnosticism” ’, esp. p. 101. Perring argues that this iconography shows the explicit
adaptation of Bacchic-Orphic ideas by Christian worshippers and should be understood in the context
of Gnostic Christianity that supposedly flourished among a large proportion of the Romano-British
elite before the imperial suppression of deviant Gnostic practices in the 370–80s. Cf. Stroumsa, ‘The
Afterlife’, who points to difficulties in distinguishing Orphic, Gnostic, and Christian traditions in
this period.
60 At Hinton St Mary (Fig. 2.9), this symbol marks a bust in a central medallion that has been
interpreted as representing either Christ or an emperor. As Christ: Toynbee, ‘A New Roman
Mosaic Pavement’; Painter, ‘The Roman Site’; and Painter, ‘The Design’. As an emperor: Pearce,
‘The Hinton’, pp. 201–18. The fact that the Hinton bust is dressed in a pallium, the dress that is
associated with Christ, biblical figures, and saints in early Christian art, is in favour of the first
interpretation; Urbano, ‘ “Dressing a Christian” ’.
61 RIC, vol. 8, p. 43, Amiens, nos. 34–45; Trier, nos. 318–27; Lyons, nos. 153–76; Arles,
nos. 188–202; Brenot, ‘À propos’; and Hollard and López Sánchez, Le Chrisme, pp. 69–77.
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68 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 2.10. Copper coin of Magnentius (Lyons, 352–3). Oslo University, Museum of Cultural
History.

of Constantine’s legitimate heir, and the numismatic appropriation of Constantine’s

triumphant symbol served that goal as well as marriage to the latter’s distant relative
Justina.62 The chi-rho on these coins was flanked by an alpha and omega, and this
innovation has been usually viewed in the context of Magnentius’ challenge to the
Arian emperor Constantius II, since the addition of these two letters might have
played on their strong anti-Arian Christological connotation, with reference to
Revelations, 1. 8 and 22. 13. If this interpretation is correct, Magnentius thus
chose to present himself as the imperial defender of orthodoxy in his struggle
against Constantine I’s own son.63 In the end, this religious visual statement did
not help Magnentius’ cause, and he was defeated, dying ingloriously. After his
demise, no imperial members of the Constantinian dynasty utilized the chi-rho
as a numismatic type.
The introduction of an alpha and omega design onto Roman coinage corresponds
chronologically to a similar usage of these symbolic letters in securely dated epigraphic
evidence from Roman catacombs (Charts 2.4–5). The earliest precisely datable
funerary inscription featuring a chi-rho and an alpha and omega was inscribed in
355,64 and in the last four decades of the fourth century these apocalyptic letters
accompanied the majority of epigraphic christograms in Rome. These data suggest
that the appearance of the new numismatic form of chi-rho on Magnentius’ coin-
age might have reflected a more general trend in the western Roman provinces.
The western use of the two symbolic letters alongside christograms may have been
prompted by strife between the adherents of Nicean orthodoxy, supported by the
Western Roman emperors Constans I (337–50) and subsequently Magnentius
and Valentinian I (364–75), and the Arians, supported by the Eastern emperors
Constantius II (337–61) and later Valens I (364–78). It is noteworthy in this regard
that a silver missorium traditionally associated with Valentinian I presents the

62 Van Dam, Remembering Constantine, pp. 48–9.

63 Bruun, ‘The Victorious Signs’, pp. 52–4.
64 Inscriptiones Christianae, ed. de Rossi, vol. 1, no. 127.
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Christograms in the Late Roman Empire 69

16

14

12
8
10 8
2
8 8

5
6

9
4 8
7 3
6
2 4 4 4
2
1
0
320s 330s 340s 350s 360s 370s 380s 390s 400s
christograms with alpha and omega christograms without alpha and omega

Chart 2.4. The use of an alpha and omega with christograms on datable Roman Christian
inscriptions from the 320s to 400s (absolute numbers).

100%

90%

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%
320s 330s 340s 350s 360s 370s 380s 390s 400s
christograms with alpha and omega christograms without alpha and omega

Chart 2.5. The use of an alpha and omega with christograms on datable Roman Christian
inscriptions from the 320s to 400s (percentage).
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70 Graphic Signs of Authority

emperor with a chi-rho in his halo accompanied by an alpha and omega,65 while
a silver plate from Kerch, produced in the East in the mid-fourth century and
thought to represent the image of Constantius II, shows an imperial guard holding
a shield decorated with a simple chi-rho.66 The religious confrontation of the
340–70s might have encouraged supporters of the Nicene Creed to furnish epigraphic
christograms with an alpha and omega that undoubtedly emphasized the divine
nature of Jesus, and the previously mentioned staurogram that appears alongside
these two letters in the so-called domus Faustae may represent one of the earliest
examples of such usage within Rome.
The domus Faustae fresco perhaps also represents one of the earliest instances of
the Roman use of the tau-rho. The Catacombs of Priscilla provide the earliest
occurrence of that symbol in a funerary Christian context that can be precisely
dated—namely to the year 355. But at that early date the tau-rho remained an
iconographic element, a long monogrammatic cross held by a biblical figure.67
Later on, an identical visual motif appeared on rare solidi of the Western Roman
emperor Honorius struck in Ravenna c.413; the reverse shows the triumphant
emperor bearing a long monogrammatic cross instead of the traditional military
standard, while the hand of God crowns him with a wreath.68 The surviving evidence
indicates that the tau-rho sign was occasionally employed in Roman epigraphy
during the second half of the fourth century,69 but only with the declining usage
of the chi-rho in the 380–90s (Chart 2.3) did the former sign begin to appear fre-
quently as an alternative Christian symbol in such an epigraphic context. Similar
to the chi-rho, an alpha and omega often accompanied the tau-rho, and this new
form of christogram seems to have superseded the chi-rho in Roman funerary
epigraphy in the first decades of the fifth century (Charts 2.1–2). The evidence of
the Roman catacombs is corroborated by the presence of staurograms on funerary
mosaics, for instance those in Tabarka and Furnos Minus in North Africa dated to
the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth centuries, and those on floor
mosaics in the Lebanese church of Zahrani dated to the late fourth century.70
Furthermore, the employment of the tau-rho and the sign of the cross in the
Roman catacombs had somewhat similar chronological developments, which may
explain the growing popularity of the former sign: it combined the graphic structure
of the cross with the first letters of Christ’s name, where a chi was turned sideways,
and thus could represent to the viewer both the chi-rho and the cross.
This interpretation is further supported by visual evidence from the Roman
East. The tau-rho appears by the side of the sign of the cross in Oxyrhynchus

65 Since the object is heavily worn, they are apparently visible only in the old photograph. For
details, see Pearce, ‘The Hinton’, p. 208, note 130.
66 Cecchelli, Il trionfo, fig. 45; and Bardill, Constantine, p. 161, fig. 100.
67 ICUR, vol. 9, no. 24862 (EDB, no. 6893). On the tau-rho in this context, see Testini, Archeologia
cristiana, p. 356.
68 Grierson and Mays, Catalogue, p. 201, no. 742; and RIC, vol. 10, no. 1310.
69 See, for example, the inscription allegedly carved in 368; Inscriptiones Christianae, ed. de Rossi,
vol. 1, nos. 208, which is not included in EDB.
70 Baratte, Catalogue, nos. 9 and 11, pp. 43–8; Brandenburg, ‘Christussymbole’, pp. 102–5,
plate 11a.
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Christograms in the Late Roman Empire 71

papyri from late antique Egypt, where the earliest tau-rho was drawn in a letter
dated to the mid-fourth century.71 Further evidence is provided by funerary stelae
at Zoora in the Roman province of Palestina Tertia, modern Ghor es-Safi south of
the Dead Sea; most of these stelae are provided with precise dates in their Greek
epitaphs (Charts 2.6–7).72 The earliest tau-rho sign appeared in that epigraphic
context in the same year as in the Roman catacombs, namely in 355,73 approximately
a decade after the sign of the cross began to be carved on those tombstones. As in
the Roman catacombs, the visibility of the tau-rho in this cemetery located in the
Roman East dramatically increased in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, but
that symbol generally functioned in a supplementary manner to the sign of the
cross and was most likely perceived to be its variant, a monogrammatic cross.
Corroboration comes from the evidence that many tombstones had outlined
crosses with the letter chi inscribed at the middle, and often on the arms of the cross.
Both types of crosses thus indirectly referred to Christ. Put succinctly, the increasing
popularity of the tau-rho in the late fourth-century Roman empire most likely
mirrored the growing popularity of the sign of the cross in the second half of the
fourth century, a development that will be discussed in Chapter 3.

35

30

25

6 4 10
20
5
26 24
15
10 15
1
3 13 10 18 16
10 1
5 16 17
7 11 10
2 8
5 9 4
5 6 5 6 6 5
3 4 3
2 2 1 2 2
0
0s

0s

0s

0s

0s

0s

0s

0s

0s

0s

0s

0s

0s

0s

0s

0s 0s

s
90
41
34

35

36

37

38

39

40

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

4 9
–5
50

tau-rho only various crosses no cross

Chart 2.6. The use of crosses and tau-rhos on datable funerary inscriptions from Zoora
from the 340s to the 490s.

71 Blumell, Lettered Christians, pp. 302 and 310; Ghignoli, ‘Writing Texts’, pp. 17–18.
72 Meimaris and Kritikakou-Nikolaropoulou, Inscriptions.
73 Meimaris and Kritikakou-Nikolaropoulou, Inscriptions, vol. 1A, no. 14.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

72 Graphic Signs of Authority

30
28
26 26
25

20
20 19
18
17
16
15
13
12
10 10 9 10
10
8 8
6
4 5
5 3 3 3
2
1 1 1
0
350s 360s 370s 380s 390s 400s 410s 420s 430s 440s 450s 460s 470s 480s 490s
without tau-rho tau-rho

Chart 2.7. The use of tau-rhos on datable funerary inscriptions from Zoora from the 340s
to the 490s.

By the late fourth and early fifth centuries, the chi-rho, tau-rho, and cross
formed a new hierarchy of Christian signs observable in various media produced
in the Theodosian period, including Eastern Roman coinage struck three decades
after Magnentius’ death, when the chi-rho reappeared as a coin type. A simple
chi-rho within a laurel wreath was placed on the reverse of silver siliquae and
gold tremisses (1/3 of the solidus) produced in Constantinople in the name of
Empress Aelia Flaccilla (383–5), the Spanish wife of Theodosius I. These rare
coin issues were probably struck when she was elevated to Augusta in 383,74
since the new reverse type certainly inspired the first precisely datable appearance
of a similar ‘triumphant’ chi-rho in a Roman funerary inscription carved in the
following year (384).75
Thereafter, this ‘triumphant’ chi-rho was placed on silver coins and gold semisses
(2/3 of the solidus) of Aelia Eudoxia (Fig. 2.11), who married Flaccilla’s imperial son,
Arcadius, in 395, and was herself crowned as Augusta in 400.76 This numismatic
series continued into the reign of Eudoxia’s son, Theodosius II, when identical
semisses were struck in Constantinople in the name of his imperial sister and wife,
Aelia Pulcheria and Aelia Eudocia respectively.77 The semisses were the denom-
ination of late imperial gold coinage that was traditionally struck for special
occasions, and the coins in question were probably ceremonial issues produced to
commemorate the women’s imperial coronations as Augusta in 414 and 423. It is
salient to note that tremisses and siliquae of similar design were produced in the

74 RIC, vol. 9, p. 232, nos. 76 and 78; and Holum, Theodosian Empresses, pp. 28–9.
75 ICUR, vol. 7, no. 19963 (EDB, no. 21504).
76 Grierson and Mays, Catalogue, pp. 133–5; and RIC, vol. 10, nos. 18 and 46.
77 Grierson and Mays, Catalogue, pp. 152–6; and RIC, vol. 10, nos. 248 and 332.
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Christograms in the Late Roman Empire 73

Fig. 2.11. Semissis of Aelia Eudoxia (Constantinople, c.400). London, BrM, reg. no.
1839,0311.1. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Fig. 2.12. Tremissis of Aelia Eudocia (Constantinople, c.423–43). Princeton University

Numismatic Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone
Library.

name of the same empresses in the early fifth century. These featured a new reverse
type, that of the sign of the Latin cross within a laurel wreath (Fig. 2.12).78
Taken together, these semisses and tremisses highlight a new hierarchy of Christian
symbols, in which a chi-rho within a laurel wreath functioned as a major graphic
symbol of contemporary Christian emperorship. This impression is confirmed by
the solidi issued in the names of the same empresses, the reverse of which shows
the figural personification of Victory holding a shield with a triumphant chi-rho
inscribed on it. In early issues, the chi-rho appears in an oval shield/medallion on
a column, an image reminiscent of a similar motif produced in contemporary Rome
on the above-mentioned gold glasses, where the monumental sign is accompanied
by Sts Peter and Paul (Fig. 2.7).
The numismatic reverse type featuring a seated Victory with a chi-rho on her
shield had been introduced onto the coins of Aelia Flaccilla when she became

78 RIC, vol. 10, nos. 21, 50, 214, 252–3, 280–1, 383–4, and 387–8.
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74 Graphic Signs of Authority

Augusta in 383.79 At the same time, the solidi of Eudoxia, Pulcheria, and Eudocia
presented an important deviation to this coin type, one already in use on early sol-
idi of Arcadius: the obverse of their solidi shows a dextera Dei (a hand of God)
placing a wreath on the head of an empress, symbolizing their imperial authority
as directly descending from God.80 The primary graphic symbols of Christ placed
within a laurel wreath carried precisely the same message. The introduction of such
symbols onto monetary issues, intended to illustrate the Theodosian empresses’
newly established status, thus conveyed a preeminent aspect of their public image,
simultaneously revealing that a reputation for piety was an important attribute of
female imperial authority in the Eastern Roman empire. Pulcheria exemplified
this new image especially, and publicly devoted her virginity to God, promoted the
veneration of Mary as Theotokos, and was extolled for the patronage of holy men and
for rich donations to the Church.81 As the aforementioned gold coins clearly indicate,
Eudoxia and Eudocia did not differ from Pulcheria and propagated the same message
of female imperial authority and its transcendent sources to the users of their coins.
Early monuments of imperial Constantinople reveal that the chi-rho dominated
the staurogram in imperial visual propaganda, whilst also showing the steady rise
to prominence of the sign of the cross. As pointed out by James Crow, a damaged
chi-rho on the Aqueduct of Valens (373) provides the earliest extant monumen-
tal christogram in Constantinople.82 The Golden Gate, incorporated into the
Theodosian Walls, preserves another monumental statement of authority visible
from the inside of the imperial Capital, namely a chi-rho placed over the main arch
and framed by a triumphant wreath (Fig. 2.13), with the latter reminiscent of the
coinage of the Theodosian empresses. Simple crosses and tau-rhos were also placed
on less prominent parts of this monument,83 thus creating a hierarchy of symbols
similar to that on the above coinage. Although the precise dating of the Golden
Gate remains a matter of debate, it must have been erected either in the late fourth
century or in the first quarter of the fifth century, roughly contemporary with the
striking of the Theodosian empresses’ coinage.84 More precisely datable is the now-
destroyed column of Arcadius (c.402/3), the top of which displayed four tau-rhos
and four crosses. Three of the bas-relief sides of its base featured an image of two
angels holding laurel wreaths, using the same two signs as the coins of the Theodosian
empresses, a chi-rho on the south side and a cross on the west and east sides, and
differing only in that an alpha and omega flanked the chi-rho on the monument.85

79 Holum, Theodosian Empresses, pp. 32–4; and RIC, vol. 9, p. 225, nos. 48–9.
80 Holum, Theodosian Empresses, pp. 65–9 and 123.
81 Millar, A Greek Roman Empire, pp. 35–6; Holum, Theodosian Empresses, pp. 79–174; Harries,
‘“Men without Women”’, pp. 67–73 and 88–9.
82 Crow, ‘Blessing or Security?’, pp. 153–4.
83 For more details and references, see Crow, ‘Blessing or Security?’, pp. 148–51.
84 Kazhdan, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, p. 858; Bardill, ‘The Golden Gate’; Asutay-
Effenberger, Die Landmauer, pp. 54–61; Crow, ‘Blessing or Security?’, pp. 150–1.
85 The drawings of this base were preserved in the so-called ‘Freshfield album’ drawn in the six-
teenth century: Freshfield, ‘Notes’, pp. 101–2. A large carved chi-rho is said to have been carved on
the ceiling of the vestibule inside the base accessed through the door on the north side, Freshfield,
‘Notes’, pp. 96–7.
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Christograms in the Late Roman Empire 75

Fig. 2.13. Chi-rho on the eastern side of the Golden Gate, Constantinople. Photo by
James Crow.

Both media thus represent an identical attitude to the relative roles of the main
Christian graphic signs in the visual communication of imperial authority, with
the chi-rho assuming a more prominent position than the tau-rho, and the sign of
the cross becoming increasingly important at the turn of the fifth century.
This attitude, evinced by various imperial media in the Eastern Roman empire
and by coinage in particular, affected the visual tastes of Christians in remote
parts of the Roman East, for instance in the already-mentioned funerary inscrip-
tions in Zoora, where the chi-rho remained exceptionally rare in the late Roman
period. Yet the symbol was carved onto a small number of tombstones precisely
in the period when the ceremonial coins of the Theodosian empresses were
struck. It first appeared on a stela dated to 391 and then was carved twice again,
in 411 and 412.86 A more complicated combination of tau-rho and chi-rho, a
tau-rho-chi, were inscribed in 386 and 406.87 Furthermore, an alpha and omega
occasionally appeared in this context in the same period, with the first case dated
to 383.88
In the West, well-to-do Christians shared the imperial ‘pantheon’ of graphic
signs in a more noticeable manner. Thus, the new graphic formula of the ‘triumphant’
chi-rho was introduced into Christian visual culture in late fourth-century Italy.
A ‘triumphant’ chi-rho, similar to the one on the Golden Gate, can be viewed on
the so-called Sarcophagus of Stilicho, now located at Sant’Ambrogio in Milan

86 Meimaris and Kritikakou-Nikolaropoulou, Inscriptions, vol. 1A, nos. 63, 97, and 100.
87 Meimaris and Kritikakou-Nikolaropoulou, Inscriptions, vol. 1A, no. 87, and vol. 1B, no. 17.
88 Meimaris and Kritikakou-Nikolaropoulou, Inscriptions, vol. 1A, no. 45.
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76 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 2.14. ‘Sarcophagus of Stilicho’, Church of Sant’Ambrogio, Milan. Norwegian Institute

in Rome, H. P. L’Orange Photo Archive.

(Fig. 2.14).89 Another example of the triumphant symbol, identical to the chi-rho
with an alpha and omega on the base of the column of Arcadius, has been dis-
covered on fragments of a wall painting in a Roman villa at Lullingstone in Kent,
probably in the late fourth century.90

89 The identity of the person it was made for remains a matter of speculation; Tcherikover, ‘The
Pulpit’, pp. 48–9, note 55.
90 Painter, ‘The Lullingstone Wall-Plaster’; Frend, ‘Pagans, Christians’, p. 124, no. 24.
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Christograms in the Late Roman Empire 77

2.4. C H R I S TO G R A M S A S PA R A D I G M AT I C C H R I S T I A N
S Y M B O L S AT T H E T U R N O F T H E F I F T H C E N T U RY

The symbolic interplay between the chi-rho and tau-rho in both imperial and
Christian elite culture at the turn of the fifth century is further illustrated by the
encolpion that Empress Maria received on the occasion of her wedding to Emperor
Honorius in 398, found in her tomb in the basilica of St Peter in Rome.91 On its
frontal side (Fig. 2.15) the names of the imperial couple and Maria’s parents, Stilicho
and Serena, all in the vocative, are written in crossing lines to form a chi-rho sign;
the names of the older couple form X while those of their young daughter and her
imperial groom form P. The chi-rho here probably represents the pre-eminent
imperial sign, especially when compared to the ‘Rothschild Cameo’, which has
been interpreted as an artefact produced to honour the same wedding.92 The
cameo features two busts in a classicizing style, identified as Honorius and Maria.
The former wears a ceremonial wreath with a square jewel inscribed with a simple
chi-rho,93 a triumphant imperial sign intended to connect its wearer with the first
Christian emperor, Constantine I.
While the chi-rho connects the members of Stilicho’s family to Emperor Honorius,
another Christian sign on the encolpion of Maria, the tau-rho, reveals the second
graphic message of the encolpion: the Christian wedding acclamation Honori [et]
Maria vivatis (‘Honorius and Maria, may you live!’). The second part of this
acclamation—in Christo—is implied by the above-mentioned chi-rho, which, as
mentioned earlier in this chapter, carried this meaning in early Christian epigraphs.
Such an interpretation is corroborated by the other side of the encolpion, which
presents the same graphic devices made of the names of Maria’s parents and her
brother and sister, Eucherius and Thermantia. Yet it is not the names of the sib-
lings but those of the parents that create the letter rho on this side, while their
children’s names form the chi. As a result of this change, the tau-rho on the rear
contains the phrase Stelicho [et] Serena vivatis [in Christo], an acclamation appro-
priate for the older couple but not for their unmarried children.
At the middle of the graphic composition on the frontal side, one can see an
ankh-cross, which was appropriated by the Christian Copts as a symbol of eternal
life referring to Christ’s passion.94 This symbol divides the verb vivatis and thus
explains the deep meaning of the phrase ‘vivatis in Christo’ (may you live in Christ):
it refers, first and foremost, to eternal life, the promise of which became possible
through the Crucifixion of Christ symbolized by the staurogram. To ensure that
this wish be fulfilled, a holy relic was encapsulated in the encolpion. So the process

91 Parrot and Adhemar, eds, Vingt ans d’acquisitions, p. 76, no. 234; and Weitzmann, ed., Age of
Spirituality, p. 306, no. 279.
92 For more details and references, see Sande, ‘The Iconography and Style of the Rothschild
Cameo’. For its attribution to Constantius II and his wedding in 335, see Spier, Late Antique and Early
Christian Gems, pp. 131–2, no. 712.
93 Elsner, Imperial Rome, p. 86; and Bojcov, ‘Der Heilige Kranz’.
94 Weitzmann, ed., Age of Spirituality, p. 494. The origins of the ankh-cross will be discussed in
more detail in Chapter 3.
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78 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 2.15. Frontal side of the Encolpion of Empress Maria (398–407). Paris, Musée du
Louvre, acc. no. OA9523. Photo (C) RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/Droits réservés.

of graphic encoding on this luxurious object, which was most likely commissioned
by Stilicho and his wife as a bridal gift to their daughter, was guided by the two
Christian signs that became pre-eminently popular among Christian elites at the
turn of the fifth century. Some features of this encolpion show eastern influences:
firstly, its producer/s erroneously used a Greek eta instead of a Latin E, indicating
familiarity with both Latin and Greek. Secondly, the use of the ankh-cross points
to knowledge of the graphic conventions of the Eastern Mediterranean. In short,
we are presented here with a product of cosmopolitan imperial culture, which
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Christograms in the Late Roman Empire 79

employed a complicated graphic composition that, properly speaking, is neither

text nor image. It belongs to the realm of early Christian graphicacy, which at the
turn of the fifth century was dominated by the chi-rho and tau-rho.
By the fifth century, these two signs also became paradigmatic symbols in
Christian visual culture, especially in the West. They were deployed as focal points
on many Christian artefacts, such as the sarcophagi produced in Toulouse in the
second half of the fifth century,95 or on mosaics in some fifth-century Christian
churches, for instance within the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Fonte in Napoli.
Produced in the late fourth or early fifth century, the central medallion at the top
of the ceiling, situated right above the baptismal font, shows the hand of God placing
a triumphant wreath on a golden staurogram,96 an image reminiscent of the hand
of God on the early fifth-century solidi of the Theodosian empresses. While such
central mosaics in later baptisteries in Ravenna feature the figural representation
of Jesus Christ, the triumphant Christ in the baptistery in Napoli was revealed to
Christian neophytes through a graphic sign reminiscent of Crucifixion and Salvation:
a crowned staurogram flanked by an alpha and omega.
In the baptistery of Albenga in northern Italy, variously dated to the period
between the early fifth and early sixth centuries, the Christian divinity is identified
by a triple chi-rho accompanied by alphas and omegas within three circles,97 empha-
sizing the Trinitarian unity of Christ with the other two divine personas (Fig. 2.16).
In both mosaics, the golden christograms are set against a blue background marked

Fig. 2.16. Triple chi-rho from Albenga Baptistery. Graphic drawing.

95 Repertorium der christlich-antiken Sarkophage, vol. 3.

96 Cecchelli, Il trionfo, pp. 84–5, fig. 67; Maier, Le baptistère, pp. 26–7 and 69–77; Pariset,
‘I mosaici’; Sanmorì, ‘I mosaici’, pp. 343–5; Jensen, Living Water, pp. 191–4. For the contested dating
of the baptistery and its mosaics with relevant bibliography, see Kleinbauer, ‘The Iconography’, p. 36,
note 40. A staurogram within a wreath also appears in the fourth-century Mosaic of the Crown in the
Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth: Finegan, The Archeology, pp. 50–1.
97 Cecchelli, Il trionfo, pp. 84–5, fig. 66; Marcenaro, Il battistero, pp. 129–91. Twelve doves surround
the outer circle, thus representing Christ’s apostles; Jensen, Living Water, p. 119.
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80 Graphic Signs of Authority

with golden stars, delineating the heavenly sphere in which these graphic signs
operated. In both cases, the chi-rho and tau-rho thus functioned as symbolic
graphic representations of Christ, whose nature as Logos was described at the
beginning of the Gospel of John: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God’ (‘In principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat
apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum’, John, 1.1). If God was Word, hybrid graphic
compositions composed of letters and conveying extralinguistic meanings referring
to Christological and Trinitarian concepts reflected his divine nature just as well
as any figural imagery might. In the Baptistery of Albenga, meanwhile, the triple
chi-rho embellishes the ceiling of the niche, the upper interior wall of which shows
to visitors the image of the jewelled cross flanked by two sheep, calling to mind the
third crucial graphic symbol of divine authority that rose to prominence in the
fifth century, namely the sign of the cross.
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3
The Sign of the Cross in Late Antiquity

Cruciform signs have had a long and complex history in Europe, the Mediterranean
world, and the Near East. The ×-shaped cross was already appearing on artefacts
and cave drawings produced in Ice Age Europe, where it was displayed side by side
with other geometric signs in some form of graphic communication, the nature of
which remains subject to debate.1 The cross sign with equal arms continued to be
in use in the ancient world where it could, for example, function as a symbol of
good luck or as a symbol of the sun. Through its visual similarity with the last letter
of the Hebrew alphabet, taw—which was also the word designating ‘sign’—it had
acquired additional symbolic and apotropaic meanings among the ancient Jews
and, thereafter, was passed on to early Christians.2 Yet within Christian usage, this
symbol developed an inseparable connection to the material medium of Christ’s
passion—a historical event that made the Lord’s promise of salvation real to his flock.
It is through its prototype that the late antique sign of the cross acquired its
emblematic, salvific, and apotropaic functions.

3.1 . T H E E A R LY S Y M B O L I S M O F T H E C RO S S
A N D T H E O R I G I N S O F T H E C U LT
O F T H E H O LY C RO S S

As early as the second half of the second and early third centuries, patristic fathers
reflected on the symbolic importance of the sign of the cross among early Christians
and its perceived power. Indeed, according to St Paul, ‘the word of the cross, to
them indeed that perish, is foolishness; but to them that are saved, that is, to us,
it is the power of God’ (Corinthians, 1.18). Authors such as Justin Martyr and
Tertullian imagined this symbol as a tau cross (crux commissa) reminiscent of the
Cross of Jesus, and discerned it in various mundane objects. These and later
Christian fathers also interpreted various objects and postures described in the Old
Testament as symbolic anticipations of the Cross.3 Writing in Carthage at the
turn of the third century, Tertullian made it clear that his North African Christian

1 See von Petzinger, The First Signs, especially its introductory table of signs.
2 For more details, see Dölger, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des Kreuzzeichens II’; Dinkler, ‘Zur
Geschichte des Kreuzsymbols’; Dinkler, ‘Kreuzzeichen’; Finegan, The Archeology, pp. 339–50. For an
overview of the symbol’s early history, see Sulzberger, ‘Le symbole’, pp. 345–93.
3 Dölger, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des Kreuzzeichens V’, pp. 5–10. For a full list, see Armstrong,
‘The Cross’, pp. 34–8. For a short overview of early Christian discourse on the sign of the cross, see
Longenecker, The Cross, pp. 149–61.
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82 Graphic Signs of Authority

compatriots adored the symbol of the cross and even signed their foreheads with it
in almost every action of daily life, including liturgical activities. At the same time,
Tertullian as well as his near contemporary Minucius Felix, made sure to refute the
pagan claim that Christians worshipped the cross.4 What is certain is that for early
Christians the symbol of the cross drawn by hand or imagined in quotidian objects
functioned as an apotropaic sign of salvation and blessing, and many contemporaries
already saw it as a distinctive characteristic of early Christians.5 This symbolic
usage continued in North Africa in the mid-third century, and Bishop Cyprian of
Carthage commented on this phenomenon with a statement repeated by many
patristic authors in other Roman regions: ‘in this sign of the cross is salvation to
all those who are marked [with it] on their foreheads.’6 Furthermore, from the
times of Origen and Tertullian, catechumens signed their foreheads with the
symbol of the cross, and by the fifth century, this practice had become widespread
across the Roman empire.7 This crossing gesture functioned as an apotropaic seal
of Christ marking one’s religious identity and affiliation, a usage not very different
from the application of the baptismal seals in the Books of Jeu discussed earlier on
in this monograph.
Furthermore, as mentioned in Chapter 1, the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet,
taw, was drawn in antique and late antique periods, first in the form of a standing cross
with equal arms, known to modern scholars as the Greek cross (crux quadrata, +),
and later as a cross lying on its side (crux decussata, ×). It was the latter sign that,
according to the Hebrew text of the Old Testament (Ezekiel 9. 4), the Lord ordered
to be inscribed on the foreheads of his chosen people, and in Jewish cosmology this
graphic character encapsulated the cosmic power of God similar to the perceived
powers of ‘magical’ charactêres. This cosmic staurology was known to early Christian
apologists such as Justin Martyr as well as some gnostic groups,8 but Greek-speaking
Christians could also see the equal-armed cross as representing the first Greek letter
of Christ’s name, chi, and thus directly referring to the Messiah himself. From the
second half of the fourth century onwards, the latter referential meaning also con-
tributed to the frequent use in the Roman world of monogrammatic crosses (also
known as tau-rhos), which combined the graphic structure of the salvific sign with
the first two letters of Christ’s name.9
As a powerful seal of God, the sign of the equal-armed cross first appeared in the
Roman East, and was inscribed in and around Jerusalem, for instance, on several

4 Tertullian, Apology, 16, p. 31; Tertullian, The Chaplet, or de corona, 3, pp. 94–5. For further details
and references, see Dölger, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des Kreuzzeichens I’; Hurtado, ‘Earliest Christian
Graphix Symbols’, pp. 34–5. The usage described by Tertullian was also referred to by Christian
authors in other provinces of the Roman empire; see Dölger, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des Kreuzzeichens
VIII’, pp. 7–13 and 28–34;
5 ‘. . . et qui crucis nos religiosos putat’ Tertullian, Apologeticus adversus Gentes pro Christianis, 16,
cols 365–6. See also Viladesau, The Beauty of the Cross, p. 7.
6 ‘Quod in hoc signo crucis salus sit omnibus qui in frontibus notentur’, Cyprian, Testimoniorum
libri tres adversus Judeos, 2. 22, col. 716.
7 Dölger, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des Kreuzzeichens IV’.
8 For more detailed discussion, see Heid, Kreuz, pp. 13–60 and 67–8.
9 Dölger, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des Kreuzzeichens III’; Finegan, The Archeology, pp. 350–2; see
also Chapter 2.
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The Sign of the Cross in Late Antiquity 83

Jewish ossuaries dated to around the first century bc and first century ad and,
in the following centuries, on ossuaries associated with early Christian converts
residing in that area.10 By the third century, the use of the latter graphic sign had
already reached Rome where its different forms—including another ancient form
of the cross, the so-called crux gammata (swastika)—appeared on a few funerary
plaques in early Roman catacombs.11 Cyprian’s contemporary, Novatian, confirms
that, by the mid-third century, the sign of the equal-armed cross was perceived in
Rome as a form of the signum crucis, while interpreting the crossed hands of Jacob
as signifying Christ as well as ‘the figure and the future form of the passion’.12 The
sign of the equal-armed cross could thus function in an early Christian context
as a sacred seal identifying both the Lord and his faithful followers chosen for
ultimate salvation.
During the fourth century, the visual presence of the sign of the cross with equal
arms slightly increased in Roman catacombs. But in the century when Roman
emperors abolished shameful punishment by crucifixion,13 this sign marked less
than 1 per cent of all tabulae in this funerary context. Such a low number can be
partly explained by the recent argument that, contrary to the rarely challenged
assumption of Christian archaeology, third- and, even, fourth-century Roman sub-
terranean cemeteries were used by both Christians and pagans, whose tombs often
remain indistinguishable to scholars.14 This caveat notwithstanding, the number of
cross signs still remains too low, and points to their limited usage in fourth-century
Roman funerary contexts (Fig. 4.7).15 This data is noteworthy considering the omni-
presence of abstract cruciform ornaments on pavement mosaics in fourth-century
Italian churches—for example, in the early fourth-century basilica of Aquileia
(Fig. 3.1). The Mausoleum of Augusta Constantina (d. 354) in Rome provides
another relevant example.16 Similar to contemporary Italian churches, Santa
Constanza displays various cruciform ornaments on its ceiling mosaics, but no sign
of the cross typical of ecclesiastical decorations in fifth-century Rome.
Such limited usage of the sign of the cross in subterranean Rome stands in stark
contrast with visual material from the Roman East. The evidence of late antique
graveyards at Zoora in Roman Palestine demonstrates that the Greek cross was first
carved on their funerary stelae as early as the 340s (in 342/3 and 345), and the

10 Finegan, The Archeology, pp. 356–74; Figueras, Decorated Jewish Ossuaries, pp. 22–3; Longenecker,
The Cross, pp. 49–60. Cf. Houston Smith, ‘The Cross Marks’. For the late antique usage of this sign in
a Jewish context, see Heid, Kreuz, pp. 52–9.
11 Finegan, The Archeology, pp. 377–8. See also third-century inscriptions with various cross signs
in ICUR, vol. 4, no. 10756a (EDB, no. 38735); ICUR, vol. 7, nos. 20361, 20384, 20432 (EDB, nos.
5503, 9249, 10027); ICUR, vol. 8, no. 21349 (EDB, no. 14730); ICUR, vol. 9, no. 24912 (EDB,
no. 12574). For an overview of the appearances of Christian cross signs in the pre-Constantinian era,
see Longenecker, The Cross, pp. 73–119.
12 Novatian, Treatise Concerning Trinity, 20, p. 631. On Cyprian and Novatian, see Heine, ‘Cyprian
and Novatian’.
13 Granger Cook, ‘Crucifixion’.
14 Bodel, ‘From Columbaria to Catacombs’; Denzey Lewis, ‘Chapter 12. Reinterpreting “Pagans” ’.
15 A search in EDB shows only 154 plaques featuring crux (‘cross’) out of 20,860 fourth-century
recorded inscriptions.
16 Brandenburg, Die frühchristlichen Kirchen, pp. 76–91.
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84 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 3.1. Floor mosaic in the Basilica of Aquileia.

public visibility of this sign in this material medium rapidly increased from the
mid-350s onwards, complemented in these decades by the monogrammatic
cross (the tau-rho) (Charts 2.6–7). As a result, various cross signs marked the vast
majority of grave stones in Zoora’s cemeteries in the fifth century and all of them
in the sixth (Charts 3.1–2).17 Thus, the sign of the equal-armed cross clearly was a
much more popular visual symbol in fourth-century Palestine than in Italy, which
is unsurprising considering its earlier history in that eastern province.18 After all,
as mentioned in the preceding chapter, the centres and arms of many outlined
crosses on tombstones in Zoora also frequently featured the crux decussata (×),
identical with the Hebrew taw, a symbolic character that had been so important in
Palestine in the previous centuries.
In the fourth century, the use of this sign was not restricted to Palestine and had
spread to neighbouring provinces. For instance, the sign of the equal-armed cross
appears on rare gold and silver rings attributed to the mid-fourth century, where it is
placed above facing male and female busts.19 Most of them are inscribed with the
names of owners in Greek, which points to the Greek East as the most probable place
of origin for most of these seals. Furthermore, the sign of the Greek cross appeared
in Christian letters dated to the fourth century from late antique Oxyrhynchus, and
its use visibly increased in the following century. In this Egyptian material, the sign

17 Meimaris and Kritikakou-Nikolaropoulou, Inscriptions. For another example from Palestine of

the sign of the cross becoming the default Christian symbol on tombstones, see Alt, Die griechischen
Inschriften.
18 See also Dinkler, ‘Das Kreuz als Siegeszeichen’, p. 74.
19 Spier, Late Antique and Early Christian Gems, pp. 23–4, nos. 45, 47, 63.
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The Sign of the Cross in Late Antiquity 85

50
46
45
41
40

35 33

30
27
25
25
22
20 19
17
15 14 14
11 10
10
7 7
5 4 4
5

0
s

s
50

70

90

10

30

50

70

90

90
–4
–3

–3

–3

–4

–4

–4

–4

–5
0s
0s

0s

0s

0s

0s

0s

0s

0s
40
34

36

38

42

44

46

48

50
no cross various crosses

Chart 3.1. The use of crosses on datable late antique funerary inscriptions from Zoora
(absolute numbers).

100%
100%
90% 87%
79% 80%
80% 87%
70%
78%
70%
60%
50% 53%
40%
39%
30%
20%
10%
0%
0s

0s

s
70

90

30

50

70

90

90
41
35

–3

–3

–4

–4

–4

–4

–5
–
s–

0s
0s

0s

0s

0s

0s

0s

0s
0

40
36

38

42

44

46

48

50
34

Chart 3.2. The use of crosses on datable late antique funerary inscriptions from Zoora
(percentage).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

86 Graphic Signs of Authority

was employed at the beginning of the text as an invocation of Christ and a visual
form of blessing to the addressee.20 Finally, cross graffiti can also be traced in fourth-
century layers of Greek cities such as Aphrodisias, where they competed in public
space with visual symbols of pagan deities.21
These different trends in the usage of the sign of the cross between the western
and eastern Roman regions can also be mapped in contemporary literary sources, such
as Lactantius’ and Eusebius of Caesarea’s descriptions of Constantine’s apotropaic
sign delivered to him before the battle of the Milvian Bridge, discussed in the
previous chapter. Narrating in Trier in the 310s, Lactantius glorified the apotropaic
power of the chi-rho, whereas Eusebius, metropolitan bishop of Palestine, wrote in
the late 330s of the celestial vision of the sign of the cross, ‘a cross-shaped trophy
formed from light’.
At the same time that the sign of the Greek cross was gaining prominence on
Christian grave stones in Palestine, people in Jerusalem are said to have twice seen
the apparitions of a luminous cross. The first celestial cross was observed on 7 May
351 in the sky stretching from Golgotha to the Mount of Olives, a mount flanking
the Temple of Jerusalem.22 Soon thereafter Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem (c.349–86)—
in whose theology the Cross of Jesus was of utmost importance—dispatched a letter
to Emperor Constantius II with the description of this miraculous occurrence.
In this letter, Cyril interpreted the sign as the premonition of the Second Coming
and as the trophy of victory delivered by God to Constantine’s heir, at that time con-
fronting the usurper Maxentius. Twelve years later, in 363, another vision of a cross
of light purportedly took place in Jerusalem after Emperor Julian’s failed attempt to
restore the Jewish Temple. Written texts inform us that, during this incident, the
luminous powerful symbol allegedly symbolizing Christianity’s triumph over the
Jews not only appeared in the sky but also left marks on the clothes and bodies of
people witnessing this marvellous event.23 Such fourth-century beliefs in the power
of luminous crosses were firmly anchored in late antique cosmology where the cross
was viewed as the powerful cosmic frame defining heavenly and worldly axes, and in
Cyril’s mind, the Cross on Golgotha was situated at the middle of the world so that
Christ could trace the cross of the world with his crucified body.24
Another work by Cyril, the Catecheses, indicates that by the late 340s the mater-
ial object believed to be the Cross of Jesus was already present in the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre built by Constantine the Great at Golgotha (the Martyrium basilica)
and over the tomb of Jesus (the Anastasis rotunda), which was consecrated in 335.
The wood’s authenticity and origin has been a matter of arduous historiographic
debate.25 What is certain is that ‘wood considered to be the cross of Christ was

20 Ghignoli, ‘Writing Texts’, pp. 17–18.

21 Chaniotis, ‘Zwischen Konfrontation und Interaktion’.
22 For the scientific explanation of such celestial apparitions, see Weiss, ‘The Vision’, pp. 240–5.
23 Drijvers, ‘The Power of the Cross’, pp. 241–7.
24 For more details and references, see Heid, Kreuz, pp. 71–105.
25 For the arguments of the two opposite interpretations and relevant references, see Borgehammer,
How the Holy Cross, pp. 85–142; and Heid, ‘Der Ursprung’.
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The Sign of the Cross in Late Antiquity 87

discovered, although we do not know how and by whom’.26 The written accounts
of that church from the 330s—by Eusebius and the so-called Bordeaux pilgrim—
did not mention the wood of the Cross there, which suggests that it was either yet
to be discovered or had not acquired liturgical importance. Regardless its origins,
Bishop Cyril turned this relic into the focal point of the burgeoning cult, and
skilfully employed the growing liturgical veneration of the True Cross in order to
increase the authority of his see vis-à-vis the metropolitan bishopric of Caesarea.
The rise of this new cult clearly made his bid for ecclesiastical primacy in Palestine
successful: he was able to install his nephew Gelasius at the see of Caesarea and was
listed before other bishops of that region in the acts of the Council of Constantinople
in 382.27 All in all, there seems to have been a direct correspondence between
the growing visibility of the sign of the cross in Palestine and elsewhere from the
mid-fourth century onwards and the establishment of the cult of the Holy Cross
in Jerusalem and the subsequent dissemination of its relics across the late Roman
empire. For example, The Life of St Macrina, written by Gregory of Nyssa between
380 and 383, mentions that this female saint was in possession of a ring with a gem
inscribed with the sign of the cross and encapsulating a relic of the Holy Cross.28
The account of Egeria, a western pilgrim to the Holy Land in the 380s, testifies
to the centrality of the wood of the Holy Cross during the liturgy of Good Friday,
when this material medium of salvation was taken from a reliquary made of gold
and silver and displayed to a weeping audience gathered in the Martyrium. On
another occasion, pilgrims worshipped an object referred to as the Cross, which is
commonly taken as alluding to a wooden monumental cross installed in the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre after the mid-fourth century.29 Jerome’s description
of another pilgrim, a certain Paula, visiting that church in the 380s is interpreted
in a similar vein, since the text states that she threw herself in front of that Cross
(ante Crucem) and adored it as if she perceived the Lord hanging upon it.30 Yet
some scholars doubt the existence of such a monumental cross at this location
before the late seventh century; it is possible, they argue, that the two above accounts
refer to a portable ceremonial cross standing inside the Martyrium or the reliquary
with the wood of the True Cross kept there.31 Another liturgical event focused on
the Holy Cross and originating from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre became
known from the sixth century as the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (Exaltatio
crucis); the holy day celebrated the latter’s legendary finding on 14 September, the
second day of festivities (known as Encaenia) dedicated to the consecration of that

26 Drijvers, ‘Helena Augusta’, p. 149. 27 Drijvers, ‘Promoting Jerusalem’, pp. 79–95.

28 The Life of Saint Macrina, trans. Corrigan, p. 47. For earlier examples, see Frolow, La relique,
p. 155.
29 Egeria’s Travels, 36–7, trans. Wilkinson, pp. 154–7. For a detailed argument for the existence of
such a monumental cross, see Heid, Kreuz, pp. 221–42.
30 Jerome, Letters, pp. 198–9. ‘Prostrataque ante Crucem, quasi pendentem Dominum cerneret,
adorabat’, Epistolae S. Hieronymi in quattuor classes divisae secundum ordinem temporum, 108. 9, col. 883.
31 For a detailed argument against the cross’s existence, see Christine Milner, ‘ “Lignum Vitae” ’. See
also Wood, ‘Constantinian Crosses’, pp. 8–10, who argues that such literary descriptions are products
of imagination on the part of western pilgrims inspired by the jewelled reliquary of the cross in the
Martyrium.
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88 Graphic Signs of Authority

Church.32 By Egeria’s time, this liturgical feast had already been furnished with its
own legend, the so-called Helena legend.
The legend describing the finding of the True Cross most likely originated in the
second half of the fourth century and possibly from within social circles close
to Cyril of Jerusalem, since its shortest version was first recorded in the Church
History of his aforementioned nephew, Gelasius of Caesarea, around 390. The
legend attributed the leading role in the discovery of the True Cross to the mother of
Constantine, Helena, who was known to have visited the eastern Roman provinces,
including Palestine, in the 320s.
Within a decade or so, the legend became known among Christian authors in
Latin Italy such as Ambrose of Milan, Rufinus of Aquileia, and Paulinus of
Nola.33 The expansion of the cult of the Holy Cross to the west around the turn
of the fifth century also affected the public memory of Constantine’s miraculous
sign. When Rufinus of Aquileia wrote a modified Latin translation of Eusebius’
Ecclesiastical History c.402, he projected the changing visual symbolism of his age
onto the description of events in 312. Consequently, he augmented Eusebius’ text
with a passage on Constantine’s vision before the battle of Milvian Bridge.
According to Rufinus, Constantine saw in the fiery sky not the chi-rho but the sign
of the cross (‘in caelo signum crucis igneo’). Consequently, the emperor entered the
battle under cross-shaped military standards, whilst allegedly carrying a gold
material symbol of that cross (‘signum nihilominus crucis ex auro fabrefactum’) in
his right hand.34 The latter element is reminiscent of the image of Victoria holding
a jewelled cross in her right hand that appeared on imperial solidi in 420 (Fig. 3.2).
The sign of the cross thus began to be seen as an appropriate symbol for a triumphant
Christian emperor.

Fig. 3.2. Solidus of Theodosius II (Constantinople, 420–2). Princeton University Numismatic

Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library.

32 van Tongeren, Exaltation of the Cross, pp. 17–40.

33 de Blaauw, ‘Jerusalem in Rome’, pp. 63–4.
34 Rufinus, Historia Ecclesiastica, 9, 9, ed. Mommsen, pp. 827–9; Cecchelli, Il trionfo, pp. 81–2;
van Dam, Remembering Constantine, pp. 44–7. On the reworking of Eusebius’ narrative in Rufinus’
translation, see Humphries, ‘Rufinus’s Eusebius’.
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The Sign of the Cross in Late Antiquity 89

The burgeoning veneration of the Holy Cross resulted in several longer versions
of its legend appearing in the fifth and sixth centuries; they saturated the main
narrative plot with new details. Among these longer texts, the Judas Kyriakos legend
composed between 415 and the 440s, probably in Jerusalem, became the most
popular version during the Middle Ages. Translated into Latin, this Inventio crucis
narrative provided an impetus for a Latin feast of the Invention of the Cross on
3 May, which was celebrated in Rome as early as the sixth century.35

3 . 2 . T H E S I G N O F T H E C RO S S A S A L AT E
A N T I Q U E S Y M B O L O F AU T H O R I T Y

As the Helena legend has highlighted, from early on, the cult of the Holy Cross
claimed an intimate connection with imperial authority. Moreover, chronologically,
the textual transmission of this legend corresponded strikingly to the pious
activities of Theodosian empresses in Constantinople. Indeed, the legend provided
them with an appealing textual model of exemplary Christian queenship. It was
known that Helena became Augusta prior to her trip to the East, and the wife of
Theodosius I, Aelia Flaccilla, was elevated to the same imperial dignity as Helena,
a practice followed by other female members of the Theodosian imperial house in
the first half of the fifth century. The Helena legend must have been known at
the Theodosian court in Constantinople, and the empresses of the new imperial
dynasty strived to emulate the pious image of Constantine the Great’s renowned
mother.36 As such, Christian piety was perceived as an attribute securing divine
sanction for the Theodosian imperial house, and its empresses were expected to
perform this virtue in public space.37 The sign of the cross played an important
visual role in this process of symbolic emulation.
The gold and silver coinage issued in the name of the Theodosian empresses in
the early fifth century exemplifies this point. When Aelia Eudoxia, wife of Arcadius,
became Augusta in 400, the mint of Constantinople issued tremisses and siliquae
in her name featuring a reverse type entirely new for Roman coinage, specifically the
sign of the cross within a laurel wreath. This numismatic practice was continued in
the following decades when Aelia Pulcheria and Aelia Eudocia, respectively sister
and wife of Theodosius II, were elevated to the same imperial status in 414 and
423 (Fig. 2.12).38 The shape of this sign, the standing Latin cross with a longer
descending arm, might have imitated the cross erected in the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre. Furthermore, c.403–8 this numismatic type was transferred to the lowest
denomination of bronze coinage (Ae4) issued in the name of Emperor Arcadius,
and thereafter the sign of the Latin cross framed by a laurel wreath became a popular

35 Borgehammer, How the Holy Cross, pp. 7–81, 145–95; Drijvers, Helena Augusta, pp. 165–80,
Drijvers, ‘Helena Augusta’, pp. 151–67.
36 Drijvers, Helena Augusta, pp. 123–4. 37 For more details, see Holum, Theodosian Empresses.
38 RIC, vol. 10, nos 21, 50, 214, 252–3, 280–1, 383–4, and 387–8.
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90 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 3.3. Nummus of Theodosius II, Ae4 (Antioch, 408–50). Oslo University, Museum of
Cultural History.

reverse type on the copper-alloy coinage of Theodosius II (408–50) (Fig. 3.3),39

thus addressing the vast majority of their subjects in the Eastern Roman empire
and sometimes influencing their artistic preferences. For example, several surviving
gems carved for fifth-century rings display an identical motif of a standing Latin
cross framed by a triumphant wreath.40
Even before the sign of the Latin cross was introduced onto Theodosian imperial
coinage, it acquired a more prominent symbolic presence in the public image of
the Theodosian dynasty in Constantinople. A carved Latin cross can still be seen
on a pier of the late fourth-century Arch of Theodosius in the Forum Tauri. As
mentioned in the previous chapter, this sign also featured prominently on the
Golden Gate built around the turn of the fifth century and on the column of
Arcadius erected c.402/3.41 This visual symbolism of the Theodosian dynasty was
not vastly different from the aspirations of its Christian subjects. In a similar spirit,
Christians reclaimed public spaces by carving and scratching crosses and cross
graffiti onto various classical monuments and sculptures in the eastern Roman
cities from the late fourth century onwards.42 The sign of the cross became even
more visible inside eastern churches: for instance, the Syrian city of Antioch featured
the cruciform martyrium of St Babylas erected c.379. Its pavements created in the
period of 381–404 were representative of a contemporary trend in decorative
mosaics, whereby classical representational and symbolic imagery were replaced
with abstract designs, including cross signs. In St Babylas, this graphic symbol
appeared in its eastern arm, which was the original path toward its most holy place,
the shrine of the saint.43 This ecclesiastical building was not exceptional in its
pavement decorations, considering that the sign of the cross dominated the visual

39 Grierson and Mays, eds, Catalogue, pp. 140–2, and nos 253, 257, 261–2, 333–8, 341–5; RIC,
vol. 10, nos 106–41, 440–55.
40 Spier, Late Antique and Early Christian Gems, pp. 75 and 89, nos 448–50 and 515.
41 Crow, ‘Blessing or Security?’, pp. 152–3, fig. 5.3.
42 For further details and references, see Jacobs, ‘Cross Graffiti’, pp. 177–81 and 192–214.
43 Kitzinger, ‘The Threshold’, pp. 639–40.
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The Sign of the Cross in Late Antiquity 91

programmes of floor mosaics in Syrian and Palestinian churches from the late
fourth to seventh centuries.44
In addition to the appropriation of the cross sign on her coinage, Aelia Eudoxia
was also credited with providing silver candlesticks in the shape of portable crosses
for Orthodox liturgical processions competing with similar Arian arrangements
across the imperial capital on Saturdays, Sundays, and festal days.45 It is also
noteworthy that Augusta Eudoxia actively employed the symbol of the Cross
in her public propaganda in the context of her long-lasting dispute with John
Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople from 398 to 404, who felt uneasy about
active female involvement in ecclesiastical matters. Bolstered by the example of
Helena, Eudoxia prevailed in this conflict resulting in the exile of John Chrysostom,46
thus establishing a viable path of effective participation in ecclesiastical matters
for the subsequent Theodosian empresses.
Parallel to the sign of the cross acquiring a higher visibility in imperial media
in Constantinople from the turn of the fifth century, the veneration of the
Cross of Golgotha as the sign of the Lord’s power developed new and luxurious
forms appropriate for higher lay and ecclesiastical authorities. A ninth-century
Byzantine narrator, Theophanes, stated that, influenced by his elder sister Pulcheria,
Theodosius II sent a golden cross embellished with jewels to Jerusalem c.420–1, to
be erected on Golgotha.47 If true, this story highlights the fact that Theodosius II held
the sign of the cross in high esteem—an attitude also illustrated by another story
alleging that the emperor himself once copied a Bible where the lines of letters
on each page were arranged in a cross shape.48
The veracity of Theophanes’ story remains contested, but it may reflect the fact
that, by the early fifth century, the wooden monumental cross in the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre might have been replaced with a cross similar to the one later
ascribed to Theodosius II. Furthermore, in the fifth and sixth centuries, it had
become customary among figures of authority to furnish reliquaries of the frag-
ments of the True Cross that were disseminated across the Mediterranean world
with gold and jewels. Such precious reliquaries were often made in a cruciform
shape, like the famous Cross of Justin II that this Byzantine emperor (565–74) sent
as a gift to papal Rome.49
Reliquaries of this kind as well as the direct and indirect knowledge of the
monumental cross on Golgotha might have inspired the depictions of the jewelled
cross, crux gemmata, that appeared in fifth- and sixth-century apse mosaics in many
eastern and western churches. The apse mosaic in the Church of Santa Pudenziana,
produced during the pontificate of Innocent I (402–17), provides the earliest

44 Tchalenko and Baccache, Églises de village; Hachlili, Ancient Mosaic Pavements, pp. 224–5.
45 Socrates Scholasticus, The Ecclesiastical History, 6. 9, trans. Zenos, p. 144.
46 Harries, ‘ “Men without Women” ’, p. 88. For further details and references, see Holum,
Theodosian Empresses, pp. 54–77.
47 See Holum, Theodosian Empresses, pp. 103–9, who accepts this account.
48 It has been argued that this Bible was displayed in fourteenth-century Constantinople:
Momigliano, ‘Popular Religious Beliefs’, p. 152.
49 Milner, ‘ “Lignum Vitae” ’, pp. 83–90. On early reliquaries of the fragments of the True Cross,
see Frolow, Les reliquaires, pp. 173–7. On the Cross of Justin II, see Elbern, ‘Zum Justinuskreuz’.
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92 Graphic Signs of Authority

example in Rome.50 The mosaic displays the image of the enthroned Jesus in the
scene of the Last Supper. Above Jesus appears a monumental jewelled cross on a
mount flanked by the four beasts of the Apocalypse in the sky, visual motifs most
likely symbolizing the salvific power of the True Cross at the end of the world.51
Whereas the monumental cross in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was the most
likely source of inspiration for the crux gemmata in Santa Pudenziana, a reliquary
of the True Cross was a more probable prototype for a crux gemmata on the mosaic
of the triumphal arch in another Roman church, Santa Maria Maggiore, produced
during the pontificate of Sixtus III (432–40).52 The upper centre of this arch facing
the nave features an enthroned jewelled cross flanked by the same four beasts as on
the mosaic in Santa Pudenziana, whilst a scroll with the seven seals of Revelation
is displayed below and a chi-rho and an alpha and omega further underneath
(Fig. 3.4). As a visual promise of salvation, a golden Latin cross could also be
depicted with the visual motifs symbolizing heaven on its background, namely
blue skies and golden stars. Such composition appears on the mosaics of the central
dome in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, with the four beasts of the
apocalypse in its corners (Fig. 3.5), and in the Church of St Mary in Casaranello
in Puglia, both originating from the first half of the fifth century.53 Later on, these
various iconographic settings in the visual representations of the crux gemmata
could also be freely combined for new symbolic messages, as in the sixth-century
apse mosaic in the Church of Sant’Apollinare in Classe. The latter mosaic displays
St Apollinaris of Ravenna, imitating the cross with his posture, beneath the scene
of the Transfiguration of Jesus: the jewelled cross in a blue medallion with golden
stars, with an enface bust of Jesus at its middle, is identified as salus mundi (‘the
salvation of the world’) beneath and as ΙΧΘΥΣ (the backronym for ‘Jesus Christ,
Son of God, Saviour’) above—thus making the two meanings of the shining cross
more apparent to its viewers.
The early history of the crux gemmata in church mosaics clearly demonstrates
that, by the mid-fifth century, the sign of the Latin cross associated with the Cross
of Golgotha became an important symbol of divine authority within religious art.
At the same time, Eastern and Western Roman emperors were appropriating this
sign as the principal imperial symbol of Christian emperorship. Thus, for instance,
the description of Emperor Leo I’s coronation in 457, preserved in the later Book
of Ceremonies, makes it clear that fixed and portable crosses played an important
symbolic role in this imperial ritual.54 Furthermore, by the mid-fifth century, the
numismatic reverse type of the sign of the cross inside a laurel wreath was brought
from base-metal to gold coinage issued in the name of male rulers and, for example,
appears on the tremisses of the Western Roman emperors Valentinian III (425–55)
and Anthemius (467–72) (Fig. 3.6). This connection between the sign of the cross

50 Schlatter, ‘The Text’; Brandenburg, Die frühchristlichen Kirchen, pp. 145–51.

51 Heid, Kreuz, pp. 176–88. Cf. Milner, ‘ “Lignum Vitae” ’, pp. 91–4.
52 Brandeburg, Die frühchristlichen Kirchen, pp. 195–208.
53 Cecchelli, Il trionfo, pp. 85–6; Castelfranchi, Pittura monumentale, pp. 21–2.
54 Constantine Porphyrogenitos, The Book of Ceremonies, 1. 91, trans. Moffatt and Tall, vol. 1,
p. 414. For further details and references, see Cotsonis, Byzantine Processional Crosses, p. 9.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi
Fig. 3.4. Upper central side of the triumphant arch in Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome.
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94 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 3.5. Central dome of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna.

Fig. 3.6. Tremissis of Anthemius (Milan or Rome, 467–72). Oslo University, Museum of
Cultural History.

and imperial authority is further exemplified by gold crossbow brooches of

Type 7 produced in the second half of the fifth and the early sixth centuries.
These brooches differed from earlier types in that they featured large Latin or
monogrammatic crosses as part of their visual designs (Fig. 3.7). Such distinctive
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The Sign of the Cross in Late Antiquity 95

Fig. 3.7. Gold crossbow brooch, second half of the fifth century. New York, MMA, acc.
no. 1995.97.

cloak fasteners were crafted for high-status imperial dignitaries, and their large
size and prominent location on the bodies of their wearers turned their cruciform
symbols into visible tokens of imperial authority for anyone who saw or encountered
the officials wearing them.55
This symbolic usage of the cross sign on various material artefacts had increased
by the sixth century, when it was displayed across the Mediterranean Christian
world, on public monuments, on mass-produced objects from base metals, and on
various luxurious objects—such as silver dishes or jewellery (Fig. 3.8).56 A homily
once ascribed to John Chrysostom, but probably reflecting the early Byzantine
­visual landscape, encapsulated this triumphant march of the sign of the cross by
stating that, at that time, it could be seen celebrated everywhere, ‘in houses, in
marketplaces, in deserts, in streets, on mountains, in valleys, in hills . . . , on clothes,
on weapons, . . . on silverware, on objects in gold, in pearls, in wall painting . . . ’.57

55 Eger, ‘Between Amuletic Ornament’, pp. 308–12.

56 For the ubiquitous presence of the cross sign on early Byzantine silver dishes, see Leader-Newby,
Silver and Society, pp. 80–90. For sixth- and seventh-century examples, see nos. 5, 25, 28–9, 32, 36,
40–2, 45–6, 51–5, 67–8, 73, 76, 91–2, 98–9.
57 Cited in Maguire, Maguire, and Duncan-Flowers, Art and Holy, p. 18.
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96 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 3.8. Early Frankish ring with a cross, c.450–525. New York, MMA, acc. no. 17.192.229.

The paramount importance of the sign of the cross in sixth-century visual

c­ ulture is also exemplified by a particular iconographic modification: a scene of
St Peter and St Paul adoring the Latin cross, referring to the Cross of Golgotha,
appeared on objects of Palestinian art in the sixth and seventh centuries. This scene
was similar to an iconographic composition popular in Rome in the second half of
the fourth century. Yet on the earlier prototype, St Peter and St Paul flanked not a
cross but a chi-rho surmounted on a column.58
In the same period, the cross sign affected not only Christians’ social body,
namely their dress and dress accessories, but also transformed their visual forms
of self-identification, namely signatures on private charters. From the late fifth
century onwards, this sign became the primary form of signature in the early
Byzantine East and Latin West.59 By the sixth century, the cross sign also became
an established feature of manuscript culture. Thus, along with the dissemination
of the relics of the True Cross in fifth-century Italy, the sign of the cross began to
decorate the sumptuous front covers of Italian gospel-books, as exemplified by a
fifth-century mosaic in the Catacombs of San Gennaro in Naples showing a bishop
holding a book, the front side of which is embellished with the sign of the cross
and the four evangelist symbols between its arms.60 This depiction finds a slightly
later material parallel in the renowned cruciform gold covers that the Lombard
Queen Theodelinda provided for a gospel-book donated to a church in Monza
around the turn of the seventh century.61
In the sixth century, the symbol of the cross affected other forms of late antique
graphicacy. Thus, in the early sixth century, the cruciform design influenced the
structure of late antique monograms, resulting in the appearance of cruciform
monogrammatic devices across various material media in early Byzantium.62

58 Noga-Banai, ‘Between Rome and Jerusalem’.

59 Garipzanov, ‘Metamorphoses’, 422–3; Ghignoli, ‘Writing Texts’, pp. 20–3.
60 Nees, ‘A Fifth-Century Book Cover’, pp. 4–6. For further details on the use of the cross sign in
Latin manuscript culture from the fifth century onwards, see Chapter 7.
61 For more details and references, see Ganz, ‘The Cross’, pp. 252–8.
62 This topic is discussed in the following chapters.
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The Sign of the Cross in Late Antiquity 97

Later in that century, the Merovingian Christian poet Venantius Fortunatus

employed the sign of the cross as the main structural principle in his carmina
figurata, thus shaping the classical genre of visual poetry with the Christian
form that became most popular in early medieval Western Europe.63 Fortunatus’
choice was not accidental, considering that he also wrote cross hymns for the
liturgical procession dedicated to the arrival of a relic of the True Cross to
Poitiers in 569.64
The growing importance of the sign of the cross in early Byzantium in the
course of the sixth century was highlighted by the imperial coinage of Tiberius II
(578–82). During his reign, a form of the Latin cross, which numismatists
often call cross potent, replaced the figural image of the standing angel as the
main reverse type on the most prestigious metal, gold. A simple cross appears
on tremisses, whereas a Latin cross on a globe and a Latin cross on steps were
displayed respectively on his semisses and solidi. The latter form of the cross is
thought to have represented the monumental cross on Golgotha.65 According
to John of Ephesus, Tiberius was dictated to modify his coinage in a dream as
a public profession of his Christian persuasion. Of course, the story might be a
literary invention, but it at least suggests that in the eyes of bystanders the
emperor was seen as the protagonist of the new coin design.66 The new reverse
types were discontinued during the reigns of Maurice (582–602) and Phocas
(602–10). But from the reign of Heraclius (610–41) onwards, the standing Latin
cross became the default reverse type of Byzantine gold coinage (Figs 3.9–10).
Whilst eparch of Carthage, Heraclius revolted against the imperial usurper
Phocas, and the restoration of the cross type after his elevation to the imperial

Fig. 3.9. Solidus of Heraclius (Constantinople, 638–41). Princeton University Numismatic

Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library.

63 Ernst, Carmen figuratum, pp. 149–57. See also Pelteret, ‘A Cross’, pp. 56–7.
64 van Tongeren, Exaltation of the Cross, pp. 229–47.
65 CBC, vol. 1, pp. 266–9; vol. 2, pp. 94–9.
66 John Bishop of Ephesus, The Third Part of the Ecclesiastical History, 3. 14, trans. Smith, p. 192;
Morrisson, ‘Displaying the Emperor’s Authority’, pp. 71–3.
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98 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 3.10. Tremissis of Heraclius (Byzantine Spania, 610–21). Oslo University, Museum of
Cultural History.

throne not only highlighted the rupture with the overthrown emperor but also
visualized a symbolic claim to legitimate connection with the Justinian dynasty.67
The history of the True Cross during the reign of Heraclius made its numismatic
symbol even more meaningful to coin users. The relic of the True Cross was plun-
dered during the Persian capture of Jerusalem in 614, and Heraclius recovered and
reinstalled it in Jerusalem in 631. Because of an imminent Muslim threat to that
city later in the 630s, the relic was transferred to Constantinople, which gave a
strong impetus for the dissemination of the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross
within early Byzantium. The feast now celebrated both the finding of the Cross by
Helena and its recovery by Heraclius, and by the mid-seventh century this feast on
14 September was already celebrated in Rome and, later on, in the British Isles and
in Gaul. This rising cult of the Holy Cross and the related spread of its relics in
pre-Carolingian Europe further enhanced the symbolic significance of the sign of
the cross in the public consciousness.68
The magnificent Constantinopolitan church of Hagia Sophia that Emperor
Justinian I rebuilt in 532–7 exemplified the preeminent importance of this graphic
symbol in contemporary religious art. The sign of the cross functioned as the principal
decorative element in the visual programme of this as well as other sixth-century
churches. Its ubiquitous presence in this splendid church, built as an assertive
manifestation of Justinian’s imperial prowess, exemplifies the early medieval trend
whereby earthly rulers appropriated this Christian symbol to visualize their claim
to authority—an authority that was sanctioned and protected by the Divine Lord.
Yet as the church’s sixth-century admirer, Paul Silentiary, made clear, Justinian’s
contemporaries saw the cross sign on its dome mosaic not only as a graphic symbol
of the Lord, but also as a form of protection for Hagia Sophia itself and the imperial

67 On the calculated diversion of Heraclius’ coins from those of his predecessor, see Penna and
Morrisson, ‘Usurpers and Rebels’, pp. 25–7.
68 van Tongeren, Exaltation of the Cross, pp. 34–122. For further discussion, see Chapter 7.
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The Sign of the Cross in Late Antiquity 99

capital in general.69 The latter point brings us to the apotropaic function that this
graphic symbol fulfilled during late antiquity.

3.3 . T H E A P OT RO PA I C P OW E R O F T H E S I G N
O F T H E C RO S S I N L AT E A N T I Q U I T Y

From the second half of the fourth century, when the cross sign became a prominent
graphic symbol on tombstones in Palestine, many Christians in the eastern Roman
provinces invested it with apotropaic and healing powers. These powers derived
from the symbol’s ultimate prototype, and, according to the Helena legend, the Cross
of Jesus was identified among three crosses found near the Holy Sepulchre precisely
through its healing properties. Furthermore, in the late antique Eastern Mediterranean
world, Christian bishops, writers, and religious men and women imagined demons
as the primary spiritual adversaries looming large around pagan temples and
elsewhere,70 and as early as the mid-fourth century Cyril of Jerusalem and Athanasius
of Alexandria claimed that the sign of the cross was an efficient weapon against these
vile opponents.71 In Athanasius’ Life of St Anthony, the Egyptian hermit repeatedly
employed the cross sign to scare away such threatening spiritual combatants, and
even stated that this sign made any magic ‘powerless and sorcery ineffectual’.72
According to the hagiographic text of Gregory of Nyssa written in the 380s,
another early saint, St Macrina, wore not only a ring with a relic of the True Cross
but also an iron cross—both objects, suspended on a chain hanging around her
neck, functioned as protective talismans. The latter object exemplifies the com-
mencement of an enduring tradition of pendant-crosses (Fig. 3.11), which became
extremely popular in the early Middle Ages, not only as apotropaic devices, but
also as outward, material manifestations of Christian identity.73 Furthermore,
in her alleged prayer, St Macrina described the sign of the Holy Cross as the
Lord’s protective token against various supernatural foes,74 and John Chrysostom
addressed his liturgical audience in late fourth-century Antioch in a similar style.
In his philippic against Jewish ‘magical’ practices, he encouraged Christians to
trust, instead, in the sign of the cross and use it as a healing device as well as a
phylactery against demons.75 The statements of Cyril, Athanasius, and John were
representative of their age, and belief in the apotropaic power of the cross sign
against such hostile spiritual forces accounts for many cross graffiti appearing

69 Mango, ed., The Art of the Byzantine Empire, p. 83.

70 For additional details and references, see Wiśniewski, ‘Pagan Temples’.
71 For further details and references, see Dölger, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des Kreuzzeichens VI’,
pp. 13–14 and 25–30.
72 Athanasius, The Life of Saint Anthony, 35 and 78, trans. Meyer, pp. 49 and 84.
73 Dölger, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des Kreuzzeichens VIII’, pp. 34–7.
74 The Life of Saint Macrina, trans. Corrigan, pp. 41 and 47.
75 John Chrysostom, Homilies to the Colossians, 8.5, p. 298; Wilken, John Chrysostom, pp. 83–5.
On the healing power of the cross sign in late antiquity, see Dölger, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des
Kreuzzeichens VII’, pp. 5–12.
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100 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 3.11. Early Byzantine gold pendant-cross. New York, MMA, acc. no. 2006.569.

in the cityscape of the Eastern Mediterranean world, especially in the fifth and
sixth centuries.76
Such practices, as well as the growing veneration of the sign of the cross in the
reign of Theodosius II (408–50), probably resulted in the prescript against the
profanation of this symbol that Theodosius II addressed to the praetorian prefect
Eudoxius in 427. This imperial law prohibited the practice of inscribing or painting
the sign of the cross directly on the ground, or on stone or marble placed on the
ground.77 This ban was repeated several times thereafter, including at the Council
of Trullo (692), but the existing evidence of pavement mosaics indicates that this
regulation was not followed diligently in the late Roman and early Byzantine
worlds.78 The apotropaic use of signs of the cross over and above the ground seems
to have been a less controversial affair. In the fifth and sixth centuries, they frequently
appear in the eastern provinces on various monuments such as city gates, aqueduct
bridges, and so on, with the purpose of reinforcing such constructions against

76 Jacobs, ‘Cross Graffiti’, pp. 186–92; Dölger, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des Kreuzzeichens VII’,
pp. 23–34.
77 ‘signum salvatoris christi nemini licere vel in solo vel in silice vel in marmoribus humi positis
insculpere vel pingere’ Codex Iustininianus, 1.8.1, ed. Krueger, p. 89.
78 Tzaferis, ‘Early Christian Churches’, p. 285; Hachlili, Ancient Mosaic Pavements, pp. 224–6.
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The Sign of the Cross in Late Antiquity 101

Fig. 3.12. Mould for an ankh amulet from the reign of Amenhotep III (c.1390–53 bc).
New York, MMA, acc. no. 11.215.711.

hostile forces or earthquakes.79 Conforming again to the same apotropaic function,

the sign of the cross appeared on jewellery such as earrings, buckles, rings, and cloths,
and was stamped on various mass-produced objects.80
In this function, this graphic symbol was similar to other protective signs appro-
priated by Christians in late antiquity, such as Solomon’s knot or the ankh symbol.
The Egyptian symbol of life, the ankh, was depicted in sacred settings as a divine
sign, and it was frequently employed as an apotropaic symbol on various ancient
amulets (Fig. 3.12). Yet, because of its specific meaning and visual similarity to the
tau-cross and staurogram, this symbol was seen by Christians in Egypt as a form of
the cross. As such, the ankh-cross (crux ansata), as it has been termed since the
nineteenth century, was appropriated in Christian visual culture in Egypt and was
occasionally displayed on artefacts produced in other late antique Roman prov-
inces. According to the written accounts of Rufinus, Socrates Scholasticus, and
Sozomenus composed in the first half of the fifth century, Christians were already
interpreting this ancient symbol of eternal life as the sign of the cross by the time
of the destruction of the Temple of Serapis in Alexandria in 390. These narrators
also stated that, due to the similarity of this hieroglyph to the Christian cross sign,
many priests and servants of the temple decided to convert to Christianity.81
This narrative spin was probably added to the story for dramatic effect. Yet the
uninterrupted use of the more familiar ancient symbol might certainly have
made a transition from pre-Christian to Christian visual culture much easier for some
locals. Material evidence indicates, meanwhile, that this symbol was appropriated
by Christians in Egypt by the early fourth century, and from that time onwards,
the ankh-cross began to appear frequently on various Coptic artefacts such as

79 Ćurčić, ‘Design’, pp. 18–20; Jacobs, ‘Gates’, pp. 202–5 and 209; Crow, ‘Blessing or Security?’,
pp. 167–70.
80 For further details and examples, see Maguire, Maguire, and Duncan-Flowers, Art and Holy,
pp. 18–21.
81 For further details, see Cramer, Das altägyptische Lebenszeichen, pp. 5–7.
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102 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 3.13. Funerary stela with an ankh-cross from Akhmim, Egypt. New York, MMA, acc.
no 10.176.29.

funerary stelae (Fig. 3.13), textiles, the walls of monasteries and churches, papyri,
and manuscripts, often in combination with the chi-rho, Greek cross, or staurogram
(Fig. 3.14).82 In later Coptic manuscripts such as the fifth- or sixth-century Glazier
Codex,83 the ankh-cross is even depicted as a full-page image, flanked by peacocks
and other birds, that is, in the function reserved in contemporary Christian
manuscript culture in the Latin West for the sign of the cross or monogrammatic
cross.84 By the late fourth century, the ankh-cross had been appropriated in late
Roman imperial art and appears, for example, on the encolpion of the Western

82 Cramer, Das altägyptische Lebenszeichen, pp. 7–52; Finegan, The Archeology, pp. 382–9; Bardill,
Constantine, pp. 166–8.
83 New York, ML, Ms. G. 67, p. 215. Its binding was radiocarbon dated to 420–598; see Sharpe,
‘The Earliest Bindings’, p. 383, note 13.
84 For further details, see Chapter 7.
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The Sign of the Cross in Late Antiquity 103

Fig. 3.14. Late antique textual amulet from Egypt, fourth or fifth century, P.Oslo I 5.
Courtesy of the University of Oslo Library Papyrus Collection.

Roman empress Maria (Fig. 2.15) or on the imperial porphyry sarcophagus in

Constantinople, currently kept in the atrium of Hagia Irene.85 In both cases, this
symbol was combined with the chi-rho, which thus corroborated the ankh’s Christian
meaning for its viewer or audience.
Solomon’s knot, another graphic symbol with ancient roots, was a popular
ornamental motif on Roman pavement mosaics in the Early Imperial period.
In late antiquity, it became one of the most frequently used ornamental motifs used
on floor mosaics in Jewish synagogues and Christian churches. In the latter material
context, Solomon’s knot appeared alongside ornamental crosses (Fig. 3.1), and must
have been invested with apotropaic resonances not unlike the sign of the cross.86
The frequent usage of Solomon’s knot in the late antique East was probably also
encouraged by the growing popularity of the Solomonic magical tradition in areas
such as Syria and Palestine, where bronze amulets with the figure of Solomon
often under his Christian alias, St Sisinios, became popular in the sixth century.
On these amulets, Solomon or St Sisinios is portrayed combating a demonic figure
(Fig. 1.8a), and Solomon’s knot on floor mosaics in contemporary eastern churches
has been shown to have fulfilled a similar apotropaic function in some cases.87
As discussed in Chapter 1, the cross sign on such eastern Christian mosaics was
used side by side not only with Solomon’s knot but also, on some rare occasions, with
signs reminiscent of late antique charactêres.88 This dual appearance of cruciform
symbols with ‘magical’ signs points to a culture in which the use of ‘magical’ practices
and related characters was quite common. It also bears witness to the process of
cultural osmosis between officially approved Christian graphic culture and deviant
visual practices harshly criticized by Christian preachers and bishops such as
John Chrysostom and Augustine. Late antique Christians—especially in Egypt,
Palestine, and Syria—were not different from the rest of society in their fondness

85 For the discussions of the encolpion and sarcophagus, see respectively Chapter 2 and Bardill,
Constantine, pp. 187–94. His attribution of the sarcophagus to Constantine I remains highly
speculative.
86 Kitzinger, “The Threshold’, pp. 640–4; Dinkler, ‘Der salomonische Knoten’.
87 Spier, ‘An Antique Magical Book’; Maguire, ‘Magic and Geometry’, pp. 267–8; Erdeljan and
Vranešević, ‘Eikōn and Magic’.
88 On the latter, see Gordon, ‘Charactêres’, pp. 257–78.
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104 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 3.15. Magical text from Egypt, fourth century, P.Oslo I 1, c.8. Courtesy of the University
of Oslo Library Papyrus Collection.

for textual amulets, which empowered textual invocations of Christian as well as

more obscure transcendent forces with rows of graphic characters, which could
consist of magical charactêres (Fig. 1.8) or Christian signs. The latter can be seen
in a Greek binding spell from Egypt produced in the fourth or, more likely, fifth
century (P.Oslo 15) and invoking Iao, Adonai, Eloe, Salaman, as well as Jesus
Christ to protect a house from all evil, sorcery, and bad spirits, and empowering
this textual amulet with the signs of the cross and ankh-cross (both featuring an
alpha and omega), staurogram, and the acronym ΙΧΘΥΣ (Fig. 3.14).89
In late antiquity, these two groups of signs were not mutually exclusive. On the
one hand, the sign of the cross was routinely included by occult masters into some
chains of ‘magical’ characters—assimilated by the addition of small circles at the ends
of its arms typical of such charactêres (Fig. 3.15).90 On the other hand, by the
mid-fourth century, one of the most powerful ‘magical’ characters, an eight-armed
star, was incorporated into the list of Christian symbols as the eight-armed cross
or—with a loop at the end of the upper vertical line—as the tau-rho-chi. The latter
symbol appeared, for instance, in Roman catacombs, on tabulae dated to 347 and
348,91 and on a few funerary stelae in Zoora, Palestine, dated to 386 and 406.92

89 Eitrem and Fridrichsen, ‘Ein christliches Amulett’.

90 Gordon, ‘Charactêres’, p. 278, note 68.
91 Sulzberger, ‘Le symbole’, pp. 426–8; ICUR, vol. 7, no. 17433 (EDB, no. 21353); ICUR, vol. 1,
no. 887 (EDB, no. 29417).
92 Meimaris and Kritikakou-Nikolaropoulou, Inscriptions, vol. 1A, no. 51; vol. 1B, no. 406.
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The Sign of the Cross in Late Antiquity 105

A similarly liminal watershed between acceptable and so-called ‘magical’ graphic

signs can be observed in cruciform devices with letters placed between the arms
of the cross, which became extremely popular in early Byzantium from the sixth
century onwards. For example, in the funerary epigraphy of Zoora, the practice of
writing the letters of the name of the deceased in the four quadrants of the cross
originated in the second half of the fifth century and became more established in
the sixth.93 A similar cruciform device appears as a pseudo-seal in a sixth-century
Coptic ‘magical’ papyrus (PCairo 45060) marked with signes pommetés, and with
the name of Sabaoth written in its four quadrants.94 In the following centuries, a
comparable graphic design was employed in the cruciform invocative monogram
petitioning Theotokos for help, Θεοτόκε βοήθει (‘Mother of God, help’), whereby
the end of this formulaic address, τῷ σῷ δούλῳ (‘your servant’), was written in the
four quadrants of the cross (Fig. 7.14e).95
These examples illustrate that, outside the normative world of Christian graphic
symbology as presented in early Christian literature, the sign of the cross was
engaged in a process of cultural cross-fertilization—in terms of both visual forms
and functions—with more obscure late antique signs with perceived transcendent
powers. This process increased the appeal of this sign amongst wider and more
diverse social strata. At the same time, boosted by the flourishing cult of the Holy
Cross, this graphic symbol developed into the primary Christian sign of authority
in the fifth and sixth centuries, and began affecting other forms of late antique
graphicacy too. Consequently, the growing prominence of this Christian symbol
in those centuries left its unmistakeable imprint on late antique monogrammatic
culture, in which cruciform monograms and other cruciform graphic devices con-
ceptualizing Christian identity, authority, and spiritual power came to dominate
from the sixth century onwards.

93 Meimaris and Kritikakou-Nikolaropoulou, Inscriptions, vol. 1B, nos. 71–4, and 79.
94 Gordon, ‘Charactêres’, pp. 278–9.    95 For further details, see Chapter 7.
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

PA RT I I
M O N O G R A M M AT I C C U LT U R E
I N L AT E A N T I Q U I T Y
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

4
Monograms, Early Christians,
and Late Antique Culture

The origins of monograms can be traced to classical Greece and the Hellenistic
world in particular, where such graphic devices became a regular feature of coin design.
The coins of Alexander the Great and Philip III Arrhidaeus alone display around
1500 different monograms, added as small auxiliary marks to their reverse sides
(Fig. 4.1).1 These comprised the initial or most important letters of personal names,
making them consequently difficult to decipher. In the older academic tradition,
scholars believed that the monograms represented the names of their issuing
authorities, such as Hellenistic kings, generals, or higher magistrates.2 In contrast,
modern numismatists tend to see these small graphic devices as control marks
stamped by lower-status employees of a mint, namely mint masters or moneyers
involved in coin production, or other mint employees responsible for the weight
and alloy control of minted coins.3 Selected letters conjoined within a single
monogrammatic structure thus communicated information about the coins’ pro-
ducers within the limited field of the coin itself. Monogrammatic control marks
were especially popular in the third century bc, but in the following centuries these
individualizing numismatic signs came to be gradually replaced by the full names
of people involved in their production, or by more simplified control marks, namely
single letters and/or the year of production.4 These early monograms thus developed
as a specific form of producers’ stamps, which could occasionally be used on other
mass-produced objects such as pottery.5
This numismatic practice first affected Roman republican coinage after Rome
came into close contact with the Hellenistic world, and monogrammatic combin-
ations or ligatures combining two, three, or four letters were occasionally used by
moneyers to mark denarii produced in the second and first centuries bc.6 The
Hellenistic numismatic tradition of monogrammatic stamps continued in the
Early Imperial period, when moneyers used both Greek and Latin monograms as

1 Price, The Coinage, vol. 2, pp. 550–630.

2 Gardthausen, Das alte Monogramm, pp. 32–42.
3 For a detailed overview of the functions and usage of monograms on Hellenistic coinages as well
as relevant bibliography, see de Callataÿ, ‘Control Marks’.
4 de Callataÿ, ‘Control Marks’, pp. 56–7.
5 See e.g. a late Hellenistic mould-made pottery lamp in London (BrM, reg. no. 1908,0517.7),
which features a complicated Greek monogram on its base.
6 e.g. Crawford, Roman Republican Coinage, nos. 132–4 and 142–4. In addition, a half-ligature
and half-monogram of the mint name ROMA once appeared in this period (nos. 293–5).
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110 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 4.1. Silver coin (four drachmas) of Alexander III with a monogram as a mintmark
(Babylon, 325–3 bc). Princeton University Numismatic Collection, Department of Rare
Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library.

Fig. 4.2. Latin and Greek monograms of the Early Imperial period: a) monogram Vespasianus
used as his countermark on the coins of Nero c.88–9; b) monogram Aurelius on late second- or
early third-century balsamaria; c) on the second-century jasper gem from the Ashmolean
Museum; d–g) Greek monograms on third-century eastern gems, based on Spier, Late
Antique and Early Christian Gems, correspondingly nos. M12, M14, M1, M23.

a stamp type to countermark provincial coins in the Greek East and Latin West.
These monograms were usually composed of the initial letters of encoded words,
and have been interpreted as the names of provincial cities or regions, dependent
Hellenistic kings, and Roman emperors (e.g. Nero) and their titles (i.e. imperator,
Augustus, and Caesar).7 In exceptional cases, the coins of Roman emperors were
countermarked in the manner of provincial coinage. Thus, the monogram of
Vespasian (Fig. 4.2a), emperor from ad 69 to 79, was stamped on copper coins

7 Howgego, Greek Imperial Countermarks, nos. 604–44 (Greek monograms) and 645–59 (Latin
monograms); Burnett, Amandry, and Ripollès, Roman Provincial Coinage, vol. 1, p. 810 (for Spain).
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Late Antique Monograms and Early Christians 111

of Nero (ad 37–68) during the civil war of 68–9 following the latter’s suicide,
when Vespasian still remained a military commander in Palestine.8 Here, the
monogrammatic stamp both prolonged the use of Nero’s coins and functioned as
a graphic sign of Vespasian’s authority in areas under his own control. Numismatists
have traditionally deciphered this monogram as VESPA, but in fact all the letters of
Vespasian’s name (Vespasianus) can be read in its structure.
In its usage, Vespasian’s monogrammatic device resembles the personal monograms
that were sometimes placed on glass vessels in the Early Imperial period,9 such as a
Latin monogram within a laurel wreath that appears on the bases of candlestick-type
balsamaria found in northern Italy (Fig. 4.2b), dated to the period between the
mid-first and third century. This graphic sign was accompanied by the inscription
Vec[tigal] monop[oliu]m p. Imp. Caes. M.A. . . . onini, placing the production of
such vessels within the reign of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (161–80) or Marcus
Aurelius Severus Antoninus (198–217), better known by his nickname Caracalla.10
The monogram consists of the letters A, R, V, E, S, and probably L and I, present-
ing to its viewer the imperial nomen Aurelius. This graphic device thus probably
reveals an issuing imperial authority exercising monopoly on a certain product, in
this case balsam.11 Aurelius’ monogrammatic sign also had an additional similarity
to its Greek precursors, guaranteeing the quality of the products that bore the stamp.
Such monogrammatic stamps probably continued to be employed occasionally
on concurrent pottery, as can be deduced from an Early Imperial lamp (dated
c.80–120) from the British Museum, which was produced in Egypt and features
a ΠΟ monogrammatic stamp impressed within its base-ring.12
Unlike contemporaneous coinage, Hellenistic signet-rings rarely featured inscribed
monograms. The practice of carving personal monograms onto ring gems became
more popular, however, in the second century ad, increasing further still in the
following century. One of the early material witnesses to this practice is a red jasper
gem now held in the Ashmolean Museum. Dated on stylistic grounds to the
second century ad (Fig. 4.2c), it features a bust in profile and an undeciphered
Greek monogram, both engraved in negative onto the gem.13 This example was by
no means an isolated case, and Jeffrey Spier has recently identified a group of rings
attributable to the first half of the third century—most of which have jasper and
cornelian gems—that were similarly inscribed with intaglio box Greek monograms.
These graphic devices were constructed around the letters M, N, and Π, and
employed most or all the letters of the ring owners’ names (Fig. 4.2d–g).14
In late antiquity, the use of monograms became widespread in both the Greek
East and Latin West, and they began to be placed on a wide range of material

8 RIC, vol. 1, pp. 10–11.

9 Gardthausen, Das alte Monogramm, pp. 18–19; Kisa, Das Glass, vol. 3, p. 932, no. 48; and Spier,
Late Antique and Early Christian Gems, p. 193.
10 Frova, ‘Vetri romani’.
11 For a discussion of the vectigal monopolium inscription on such glass vessels, see Fleming, Roman
Glass, p. 65.
12 London, BrM, reg. no. 1987,0402.8.
13 Henig and MacGregor, eds, Catalogue, vol. 2, p. 69, no. 5.24; Spier, Late Antique and Early
Christian Gems, p. 193, notes 2, 4, and 5, and plate 141, fig. 28.
14 Spier, Late Antique and Early Christian Gems, pp. 193–5, nos. M1–M39.
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112 Graphic Signs of Authority

objects. By that time, the structure of monograms had changed from that of their
earlier Hellenistic prototypes: late antique monograms were expected to consist of
all the letters of encoded words. No longer limited to the function of pragmatic
control marks, they developed into more sophisticated visual devices, encoding
personal names and ritualistic phrases such as acclamations and intercessory prayers.
In short, late antique monograms departed from their classical precursors not only
in terms of their quantitative scope but also in their contextual functions and the
messages they communicated.

4.1. L AT E A N T I Q U E E P I G R A P H I C C U LT U R E A N D
MONOGRAMS AS EPIGRAPHIC DEVICES

By the third century ad, monograms had found their way not just onto such media
as glass vessels and signet-rings, but also into epigraphic culture, where they most
usually encoded personal names. The earliest Greek monograms carved in early
Roman catacombs most likely belong to this period, although such early examples
lack precise dating. Similar to classical numismatic examples, some epigraphic
monograms consisted of only a few letters, as in the case of a tau-rho monogram
(a rho grafted upon the vertical bar of a tau) below the name Ἀφροδίσις on a third-
century marble tabula from the Catacombs of San Callisto (Fig. 4.3a), or a pi-rho
monogram accompanying the titulus of Εὐστόργις in the Catacombs of Domitilla,
tentatively dated to the second half of the third century (Fig. 4.3b).15 Yet box

Fig. 4.3. Third- and fourth-century monograms from Roman catacombs: a) TP (ICUR, vol. 4,
no. 10579); b) Πρῖμα? (ICUR, vol. 4, no. 10579); c) Ἀγάπη (ICUR, vol. 5, no. 15148.h);
d) Avite (ICUR, vol. 5, no. 14752.c); e) Constans or Constantius (ICUR, vol. 5, no. 13277);
f ) Alethius (ICUR, vol. 3, no. 8748); g) Gaudentia (ICUR, vol. 5, no. 14752.a); h) Πάστωρ?
(ICUR, vol. 1, no. 2058); i) Πρίσκος (ICUR, vol. 4, no. 10713.q).

15 ICUR, vol. 4, no. 10579 (EDB, no. 884); and ICUR, vol. 3, no. 7203 (EDB, no. 23774). Such
abbreviated monograms continued to be used in the fourth century, e.g. ICUR, vol. 1, no. 2058 (EDB,
no. 11877); ICUR, vol. 9, no. 26303 (EDB, no. 13021); ICUR, vol. 9, no. 24101 (EDB, no. 13061).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

Late Antique Monograms and Early Christians 113

monograms, containing all the letters of encoded names, had no doubt become
prevalent by the turn of the fourth century.16 It is possible that some early mono-
grammatic devices communicated specific Christian wishes, such as the monogram
encoding the word Ἀγάπη (Christian love) (Fig. 4.3c),17 although this might equally
have referred to the female personal name Ἀγάπη, then quite popular in early
Christian Rome.18 These early examples also demonstrate that, from the time of
their introduction onto Christian epigraphs, monograms were used not as abbre-
viation marks but as visual devices that treated personal names and, perhaps,
particular words, in a special way. They were inscribed to place visual emphasis
on either a specific Christian wish, or the name of a deceased person.
By the fourth century, this Greek practice had influenced Latin inscriptions
in Roman catacombs, and Latin monograms equalled Greek ones in number in
such a funerary context. At the same time, the principles of graphic composition
that defined the structure of Latin monograms began to differ from their Greek
counterparts. Some were built as sequences of Latin ligatures (AV, TE, NT,
and so on) intended to be read from left to right (Fig. 4.3d);19 combinations of
this kind had a long history in Roman and early Christian epigraphics.20 Others
employed the letters N, H, and M as their starting building block, adding
­additional letters arbitrarily around that monogrammatic frame (Fig. 4.3e–f ).21
The rest conjoined letters in more complicated calligraphic ways (Fig. 4.3g).22
Some monograms combined these three modes in their graphic structures. The
resulting forms consequently look quite different to Greek monograms, which
frequently employed the letter pi in various combinations with alpha, theta, eta,
and chi, as well as with other letters, to create more geometrically balanced visual
forms (Fig. 4.3h–i).23
Whilst they may have had dissimilar graphic silhouettes, Latin monograms
were not unlike their Greek counterparts in their semantic content. They usually
encoded the names of deceased people, sometimes influenced by Greek prototypes,
such as the Latin monogram of the name Agape inscribed in the Catacombs of
Cyriaca (Fig. 4.4a).24 In some cases, these fourth-century devices hid acclamatory
messages, such as the monogram Avite (hail) (Fig. 4.3d), which finds a Greek
parallel in the acclamatory monogram Χαῖρε inscribed in the first half of the

16 ᾿Ιαναρία: ICUR, vol. 5, no. 15148.i (EDB, no. 3454); Ἀγριππῖνα: ICUR, vol. 5, no. 15148.g
(EDB, no. 3918); Πέτρος: ICUR, vol. 3, no. 8392 (EDB, no. 25606); Μακαρία: ICUR, vol. 3, no.
7230 (EDB, no. 23805).
17 ICUR, vol. 1, no. 696 (EDB, no. 16636); ICUR, vol. 5, no. 14974 (EDB, no. 1442); ICUR,
vol. 5, no. 15148.h (EDB, no. 3453). See also Testini, Archeologia, p. 354.
18 Kajanto, Onomastic Studies, pp. 91 and 113–14.
19 e.g. ICUR, vol. 5, no. 14752.c (EDB, no. 1389).
20 Testini, Archeologia, p. 352.
21 e.g. ICUR, vol. 5, no. 13277 (EDB, no. 5400); ICUR, vol. 6, no. 16785.a (EDB, no. 12341);
ICUR, vol. 3, no. 8748 (EDB, no. 19095); ICUR, vol. 8, no. 23106.a (EDB, no. 38059).
22 e.g. ICUR, vol. 5, no. 14752.b (EDB, no. 4961); ICUR, vol. 5, no. 14752.a (EDB, no. 4960).
23 e.g. ICUR, vol. 1, no. 2058 (EDB, no. 11877); ICUR, vol. 4, no. 10713.q (EDB, no. 7556).
24 ICUR, vol. 7, no. 19427.c (EDB, no. 35326).
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114 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 4.4. Fourth- and fifth-century monograms from Roman catacombs: a) Agape
(ICUR, vol. 7, no. 19427.c); b) Petronia? (ICUR, vol. 7, no. 17995); c) Rusticius and Rufilla
(ICUR, vol. 9, no. 25792); d) Navira (ICUR, vol. 5, no. 14751); e) Eufentine? (ICUR,
vol. 2, no. 6060); f ) Annes (ICUR, vol. 9, no. 24236.a); g) Petrus in pace (ICUR, vol. 2,
no. 4516); h) Palma et laurus.

fourth century.25 Occasionally, personal monograms functioned as quasi-ownership

marks as, for example, in the case of the monogram of Constans or Constantius
carved over the entrance to a private basilica in the Catacombs of Pretestato in
Rome (Fig. 4.3e).26 In other cases, personal monograms almost functioned as
producers’ marks, encoding the names of individuals who had commissioned
funerary tabulae for their deceased relatives. One such instance of this use is
evident on the funerary marble plaque of a certain Quadratinus, on which a box
monogram (possibly of Petronia) is carved between the two final words of the
inscription, soror fecit (the sister M. has made) (Fig. 4.4b).27
In the course of the fourth century, it became relatively common to carve the
personal monograms of the deceased without any accompanying text, not only on
funerary plaques but also on the central frontal part of sarcophagi.28 A well-known
example of such practice survives on a sarcophagus fragment from the Catacombs
of Priscilla, later moved to the mausoleum attached to the Basilica S. Sylvestri,

25 ICUR, vol. 7, no. 14752.c (EDB, no. 1389); ICUR, vol. 3, no. 7274 (EDB, no. 22765). On the
use of χαῖρε in Greek epigraphs, see Kajanto, The Study of Greek Epigraphs, pp. 18 and 39–40.
26 ICUR, vol. 5, no. 13277 (EDB, no. 5400). See also a tabula from the Catacomb of Cyriaca
dated to c.390–425, where a box monogram precedes the word cub(iculum) in the first line of the
inscription, ICUR, vol. 7, no. 17661 (EDB, no. 34616); ICUR, vol. 7, no. 17663e (EDB, no. 34622).
27 ICUR, vol. 7, no. 17995 (EBD, no. 27389); ICUR, vol. 7, no. 18007f (EDB, no. 27418).
28 Φιλάδελφος: ICUR, vol. 5, no. 15148.d (EDB, no. 3915); Valerius Quartus: ICUR, vol. 9,
no. 25792 (EDB, no. 16825); Κηνσωρεῖνος: ICUR, vol. 4, no. 10713.l (EDB, no. 7478); Ἀθηνόδωρος:
ICUR, vol. 4, no. 10713.n (EDB, no. 7480); Μόδεστος: ICUR, vol. 4, no. 10713.p (EDB, no. 7481);
Rusticius and Rufilla: ICUR, vol. 9, no. 25792 (EDB, no. 16824); Fortunatus or Vetranio: Arachne
Database, ID no. 1398735, serial no. 224651.
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Late Antique Monograms and Early Christians 115

which presents the box monograms of Rusticius and Rufilla (Fig. 4.4c).29 In the
box monogram of Rusticius the chain of letters should be followed from left to
right three times, while the encoded name of Rufilla presents an intermediary
form between a Latin abbreviated inscription and a proper monogram, wherein
the first four letters are written in a calligraphic manner from left to right and the
last three letters are inscribed above the capital letter U. As to marble tabulae
without accompanying epigraphs, personal monograms of the deceased were
often treated as graphic images and presented alongside Christian symbols, evident
on the funerary plaque of Navira from the Catacombs of Pretestato, where
Navira’s box monogram (Fig. 4.4d) is flanked by two early Christian symbols, a
dolphin and an anchor.30
With the increasing use of the chi-rho sign in funerary epigraphs from the
­second quarter of the fourth century onwards, and in the late fourth century in
particular, some monograms began to be treated as personal equivalents of the
primary sign of Christ. Thus, on a marble tabula from the Catacombs of Commodilla,
inscribed in 400, the box monogram of a person’s name was set within a ‘laurel’
circle identical to the one used in conjunction with chi-rhos on Roman funerary
inscriptions of the late fourth century (Fig. 4.4e).31 On another funerary plaque,
the box monogram of a certain Annes was carved beneath a triumphant chi-rho
and was ‘shielded’ on both sides, as it were, by the hanging ends of the latter’s
ribbon (Fig. 4.4f ), with the effect that the two signs created a graphic device
demonstrating that the deceased’s imperishable soul was entrusted to the Lord’s
protection.32
Latin acclamatory monograms reached a new level of popularity from the
­second half of the fourth century onwards into the fifth, when new forms of
monograms were constructed to encode established Latin phrases such as [depositus]
in pace ([laid down] in peace), sometimes appearing in combination with the name
of the deceased.33 The marble tabula of a certain Petrus from the Catacombs of
Ponziano, for instance, dated by inscription to 443, features two monograms that
have both been deciphered as Petrus in pace (Fig. 4.4g).34 It is noteworthy that
the second graphic device features a contraction over the letters I and the ligature
of PE, illustrating how Latin palaeographic norms could be employed in the
construction of such graphic devices.
In this period, the usage of one specific acclamatory bar monogram became
more consistent, present in catacombs as well as above the ground in Rome. The

29 ICUR, vol. 9, no. 25792 (EDB, no. 16824); and Fiocchi Nicolai, Bisconti, and Mazzoleni, The
Christian Catacombs, pp. 159–60.
30 ICUR, vol. 5, no. 14751 (EDB, no. 4959). See also ICUR, vol. 9, no. 25794 (EDB, no. 16827)
from the Catacombs of Priscilla, where a non-deciphered monogram is accompanied by the image
of a dove.
31 Eufentine (suggested by Marucchi): ICUR, vol. 2, no. 6060 (EDB, no. 16491).
32 ICUR, vol. 9, no. 24236.a (EDB, no. 12267).
33 ICUR, vol. 3, no. 9212 (EDB, no. 18099); ICUR, vol. 4, no. 12303 (EDB, no. 7355). As
pointed out by Danilo Mazzoleni, ‘in pace’ was by far ‘the most common expression’ in early Christian
epitaphs: ‘The Rise of Christianity’, p. 453.
34 ICUR, vol. 2, no. 4516 (EDB, no. 18947).
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116 Graphic Signs of Authority

monogram is composed of the letter P with an E added to the lower part of its
vertical bar (Fig. 4.4h); the latter letter is occasionally replaced with an L or F.
Since, in many instances, this monogram is accompanied by the image of a palm
leaf, the PE monogram has been decoded as consisting of the word palma, an inter-
pretation that allows for several possible triumphant acclamations: Palma et laurus
(The palm and laurel!), Palma Elea (The Elean palm!), or Palma feliciter (Happy
victory!).35
These readings are supported by the evidence that in the same period this
monogram appeared in circus settings. Some late antique medallions, struck in Rome
from the mid-fourth through to the fifth century and known as contorniates,
feature this graphic sign or the image of a palm leaf in their field (Fig. 4.5).36 The
precise function of contorniates remains unclear, although their reverse imagery
featuring circus events and chariots and naming charioteers indicates a possible
connection with circus games—they were perhaps used as admission tickets or
souvenirs, as gaming pieces, or as gifts distributed during New Year celebrations, in
which a pompa circensis (circus procession) continued to play a crucial role in the
Late Imperial period.37 Indeed, such a triumphant acclamation would have been
most appropriate in a circus context, and the mid-fourth-century inscription of
the Roman senator Clodius Ablabius Reginus from the Flavian Amphitheatre in
Rome features the PE monogram accompanied by the image of a palm leaf (Fig. 4.6).
After the mid-fourth century, this monogram could also be used as a Christian
marker. In that function, it was for example carved alongside a palm leaf in
Rome on the classical statuette of a ploughing farmer and ox, currently on dis-
play in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin.38 The monogram was added on the ox’s

Fig. 4.5. Obverse of a late Roman contorniate with the Palma et laurus monogram in the
field. London, BrM, reg. no. R.4814. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

35 Marucchi, Christian Epigraphy, pp. 67–8; Marrou, ‘Palma et Laurus’; Testini, Archeologia,
p. 361; Carletti, ‘Un monogramma’, pp. 127–42.
36 Mittag, Alte Köpfe, table 8, Traianus XV, XVIII; and table 14, Kutscher IX.
37 Etkins, ‘Medallions’, pp. 17–18; Latham, Performance, pp. 183–232.
38 Antikensammlung, inv. no. SK490, Arachne Database, no. 409903. I am grateful to Lea Stirling
for pointing me to this artefact.
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Late Antique Monograms and Early Christians 117

Fig. 4.6. Marble plaque with the Palma et laurus monogram and the symbol of the
palm leaf accompanying on the inscription of Clodius Ablabius Reginus from the Flavian
Amphitheatre in Rome, mid-fourth century.

Fig. 4.7. Tabula of Eleuteria from Roman catacombs (a. 363). From ICUR, vol. 1, no. 1426.

thigh, and is visually reminiscent of cross signs added to classical statues in that
period—especially in the Greek East—with the aim of adjusting pagan artworks
to new Christian settings.39
The earliest precisely datable appearance of this graphic device in Roman Christian
catacombs occurs on an impressive funerary tabula commissioned in 363 by a certain
Pacatianus for his deceased mother Eleuteria (Fig. 4.7). The tabula is inscribed with
a short funerary poem, the nine lines of which each ­finish with a symbolic sign,
monogram or letter: a palm leaf, wreath, chi-rho, PE monogram, palm leaf, swastika
(crux gammata), bucranium/vase, omega, and upsilon respectively.40 This sequence
of devices is noteworthy, firstly because they are all treated as visual symbols by their

39 Jacobs, ‘Cross Graffiti’.

40 ICUR, vol. 1, no. 1426 (EDB, no. 31189); Carletti, ‘Un monogramma’, p. 140.
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118 Graphic Signs of Authority

maker, and secondly because the Palma et laurus monogram is located next to such
established symbols as the palm leaf and the chi-rho christogram. This inscription
thus illustrates that by the mid-fourth century acclamatory monograms, and the PE
monogram in particular, had become a well-established phenomenon in late Roman
epigraphic practice. This practice affected contemporary manuscript culture, as the
Calendar of 354 aptly demonstrates.

4.2. T H E C A L E N D A R O F 3 5 4 A N D F O U RT H - C E N T U RY
RO M A N A R I S TO C R AT I C C U LT U R E

The Calendar of 354, a fourth-century compilation that is known to us only through

its later copies, was a unique manuscript in many respects; among other things, it
greeted its late antique and early medieval viewers with an impressive calligraphic
monogram on its first dedication page (Fig. 4.8).41 As the Latin text on this opening
page informs us, Furius Dionysius Filocalus produced the late antique original for
a certain Roman noble named Valentinus. Little is known about the latter, other
than that he may have belonged to an established aristocratic Roman family, the
Symmachi.42 Judging by the content of the codex, its noble recipient was either a
Christian or an individual positively inclined towards Christianity. The manuscript’s
producer, on the other hand, was better known: a famed Roman calligrapher
involved in the production of the carved epigrams of Pope Damasus I (366–84)
that were destined for renovated papal tombs and subterranean martyria in Roman
catacombs.43 Damasus’ papal undertaking has been viewed as one of the public
acts of his successful policy to make Christianity culturally and aesthetically
appealing to the Roman senatorial aristocracy, and Filocalus’ involvement in that
epigraphic project, as well as his ‘authorship’ of the Calendar of 354, indicates that
he was both a member of Roman Christian aristocratic circles and a highly skilled
artisan capable of working on both stone and parchment.
Considering Filocalus’ background, it should be no surprise that his monogram-
matic device was created in accordance with Latin epigraphic norms, traceable in
contemporary inscriptions in Roman catacombs. This device incorporates ligatures
of the letters N, T, E in the lower field, and of the letters A and V in the upper right
field. Filocalus’ epigraphic experience, and his familiarity with funerary art in
general, can be further established in the layout of the dedication page when
viewed as a whole. It features a tabula ansata, found elsewhere in diverse types of
late antique epigraphic inscriptions, and the entire composition, formed of two

41 The layout of this page is known to us through early modern copies of the lost ninth-century
copy of that late antique codex. Stern, Le Calendrier, pp. 118–23, fig. 1. For the contextual study of
this work, see Salzman, On Roman Time. For the most recent study of the manuscript tradition with
relevant references, see Diviak and Wischmeyer, eds, Kalenderhandbuch. For a discussion of variations
among the surviving copies of the dedication page, see Diviak and Wischmeyer, eds, Kalenderhandbuch,
vol. 1, pp. 75–80, figs 6–9.
42 Salzman, On Roman Time, pp. 201–2.
43 Marucchi, Christian Epigraphy, pp. 340–61, esp. at p. 351; Stern, Le Calendrier, p. 123; Salzman,
On Roman Time, pp. 199–205; and Cameron, ‘Filocalus’; ICUR, vol. 4, no. 9515 (EDB, no. 19478).
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Late Antique Monograms and Early Christians 119

Fig. 4.8. Dedication page in the Calendar of 354, in Vatican City, Codex Vaticanus
Barberini lat. 2154 (a. 1620). From Strzygowski, Die Calenderbilder, fig. III.

winged Cupids or angels holding such a tabula, is visible on the frontal side of
certain late antique sarcophagi. The employment of a medallion in the central
position is also typical of that medium, where a clipeus traditionally contained the
portrait image of a deceased person. But in the fourth century, it might also be
filled by a funerary epigraph.44

44 For an example, see Repertorium der christlich-antiken Sarkophage, vol. 1, no. 132, p. 88.
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120 Graphic Signs of Authority

The medallion on the dedication page, meanwhile, features a monogram that

duplicates the phrase written on both its sides, namely ‘Valentine, floreas in Deo’
(Valentinus, may you flourish in God!), suggesting that this graphic device had
a different function to the personal monograms carved in Roman subterranean
cemeteries. On the one hand, it draws to mind contemporaneous acclamations,
which developed into a highly popular late antique form of ritualized collective speech
designed to address divinities, to express public opinion, demand or approval, or
to honour an individual,45 and which consequently influenced early Christian
liturgy.46 A monogrammatic device might therefore have been seen as a visual
means of emphasizing the special nature of that particular phrase. On the other
hand, the medallion invites its viewers to interpret the phrase as a graphic image,
thus leading them from the realm of literacy to that of graphicacy, in which the
linguistic substrate held a subservient position to the norms of graphic visualization.
Indeed, the monogrammatic device occupied the central position on the upper
page of the codex, and stood twice as high as the two lines of the corresponding
text, which is to say that the size and the location of the monogram followed the
main principles of the modern visual pop-up effect well known amongst graphic
designers.47 This effect serves both to catch the viewer’s attention and to accentuate
the significance of the graphic composition. Two other subjunctive phrases on this
page are addressed to Valentinus: ‘Valentine, vivas floreas’ (Valentinus, may you live
and flourish!) and ‘Valentine vivas gaudeas’ (Valentinus, may you live and rejoice!).
Yet these were written by Filocalus in smaller letters and thus attract less attention
than the first subjunctive phrase, which received a special eye-catching graphic
device designed to dominate the page. The different treatment of this phrase is
no doubt intentional, since the unique formula ‘floreas in Deo’ was constructed in
imitation of contemporary Christian acclamations such as ‘vivas in Deo’ or ‘vivatis
in Deo’, and hence can also be interpreted as Christian.48 Diviak and Wischmeyer
suggest that the Latin phrase was constructed in imitation of the Christian Greek
phrases ζῆν ἐν θεῷ (to live in God) or χαίρειν ἐν θεῷ (to rejoice in God), attested
in Asia Minor.49 The monogram thus makes absolutely clear to its viewer the hier-
archy of optative messages on the page, with the Christian message occupying
(both semantically and visually) top billing.
The significance of the Christian message is further emphasized by the use of
the letter O as the monogram’s external frame, the shape of which brings to
mind honorific medallion portraits. In employing that letter for this purpose,
Filocalus stands as a forerunner to those early medieval scribes who frequently
used O as both letter and frame.50 This usage makes his graphic device quite
different from the concurrent box monograms carved in Roman catacombs,

45 Roueché, ‘Acclamations in the Later Roman Empire’; Roueché, ‘Acclamations at the Council of
Chalcedon’.
46 Williams, ‘Hymns as Acclamations’.
47 Ware, Information Visualization, pp. 14 and 140; and Ware, Visual Thinking, pp. 24–32.
48 Salzman, On Roman Time, p. 199, and note 11.
49 Diviak and Wischmeyer, eds, Kalenderhandbuch, vol. 1, p. 80.
50 For a discussion of early medieval parallels, see Kessler, ‘Dynamic Signs’, pp. 120–1.
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Late Antique Monograms and Early Christians 121

Fig. 4.9. Late antique monograms: a–b) from Roman catacombs, Bonifatius (ICUR,
vol. 3, no. 8332.e) and Leonis?, a. 386 (ICUR, vol. 8, no. 21609.c); c) from silver plates in
the Esquiline Treasure, Rome; d) νικᾷ ἡ τύχη τῶν Πρασίνων monograms from Aphrodisias
and Ephesos; e) monogram from a marble tombstone in Villareggia.

which usually had the letter O attached to an end of one of their constituent
­vertical bars, for instance that on the fourth-century monogram of Constans or
Constantius in the Catacombs of Pretestato (Fig. 4.3e).51 Another means to
incorporate the letter O in such funerary graphic devices was to include it within
their inner structure, as for example in the monogram of Bonifatius from the
Catacombs of Domitilla (Fig. 4.9a) or in that carved in 386 for, presumably, Leo
in the Catacombs of St Agnes (Fig. 4.9b).52
The only explanation for Filocalus’ deviation from established calligraphic
practices is that he designed his dedication monogram to be a visual message that
emphasized the meaning of the text written by its sides. By creating an object-like
word-image, he utilized a perceptual principle later identified by modern Gestalt
psychology, namely that human vision tends to perceive closed contours like a
circle and squares as objects. For this reason, modern graphic designers commonly
use such contours to visualize concepts.53 By placing the letters of the monogram
within the circular frame of the letter O, Filocalus did precisely the same thing,
creating a visually coherent conceptual message that invited its beholder to engage
in visual contemplation.
All in all, the location, function, and form of the monogrammatic device in the
Calendar of 354 indicates that, by the mid-fourth century, Roman Christian com-
munities were beginning to understand monograms as calligraphic devices with

51 ICUR, vol. 5, no. 13277, table xiv, 6a. On this particular catacomb, see Fiocchi Nicolai,
Bisconti, and Mazzoleni, The Christian Catacombs, p. 19.
52 ICUR, vol. 3, no. 8332.e (EDB, no. 25311); and ICUR, vol. 8, no. 21609.c (EDB, no. 35801).
53 Ware, Information Visualization, pp. 186–7 and 222–4.
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122 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 4.10. Silver plate from the Esquiline Treasure. London, BrM, reg. no. 1866,1229.14.
© The Trustees of the British Museum.

aesthetic value and extralinguistic properties, which could express idiosyncratic

honours to individuals of elite status. As such, personal monograms appeared on
artefacts belonging to contemporary aristocratic culture, such as the set of silver
plates from the Esquiline Treasure—four circular and four rectangular shaped
(Fig. 4.10). These eight gilded plates with niello inlay were produced in Rome in
the second half of the fourth century, and were probably hidden on the Esquiline
Hill in 410.54 Two box monograms were engraved in the middle of their front
sides (Fig. 4.9c), the place that in the Imperial and Early Byzantine periods often
featured a figural image.55 The monograms are framed by a laurel wreath, drawing
parallels with chi-rhos that appeared within the same frame on coins and monuments
connected to the Theodosian dynasty.56

54 London, BrM, reg. nos. 1866.1229.11–18; Christie, From Constantine, p. 101.

55 See Toynbee and Painter, ‘Silver Picture Plates’.
56 For more details, see Chapter 2.
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Late Antique Monograms and Early Christians 123

The monograms on these plates have been read as Pelegrinae Turcii, with the
two names transcribed from the left to the right following Roman epigraphic
conventions.57 The luxury silverware was therefore marked as being produced for
and owned by Pelegrina, a member of the well-known aristocratic Turcii family of
fourth-century Rome, some members of which remained openly pagan until the
end of the fourth century.58 The name Pelegrina is spelled out on a silver ewer
found in the same hoard, and some have even speculated that Pelegrina could have
been a daughter of Turcius Secundus and Proiecta, both named on another silver
object in this treasure, the so-called ‘Proiecta Casket’,59 but there is no way to
prove this assumption. This treasure most likely contains silver objects accumu-
lated by a branch of the Turcii family resident on the Esquiline Hill for several
generations, and another female name, Marciana, was inscribed on several objects
at a later point, including a plate that already featured Pelegrina’s monogram.
Pelegrina may thus have been either an older relative of Turcius Secundus, or a
younger relative of Secundus and Proiecta. Some scholars hypothesize that Proiecta
was the same girl commemorated in an epigraph of Pope Damasus, who died in 385
at the age of sixteen. Furthermore, they identify that girl as a daughter of Florus,
an important figure at the eastern Christian court of Theodosius I.60 Even if this
identification of Proiecta is far from certain, the evidence of the casket alone dem-
onstrates that she was Christian: it is not only embellished with traditional classical
motifs such as Venus bathing, but also with a Christian wedding benediction on its
rim made of lead, ‘Secunde et Proiecta, vivatis in Christo’ (Secundus and Proiecta,
may you live in Christ!).61 Consequently, the casket has been viewed as a bridal gift
given to a Christian Proiecta by a husband who might also have belonged to Christian
circles in Rome. On the whole, the existing evidence is sufficiently compelling to
allow the suggestion that Pelegrina’s monograms originate from within the aristocratic
Christian milieu of the Eternal City in the age of Filocalus and Pope Damasus.
In the late fourth-century city of Rome, masterfully crafted box monograms thus
satisfied the tastes of both late Roman aristocrats and early Christians. Moreover,
existing evidence indicates that this monogrammatic tradition also appealed to Italian
landowners outside the eternal city. Two forms of a personal monogram in the geni-
tive, Philippiani, appear on tiles produced for a Roman villa at Gerace in Sicily c.375
or slightly later. Philippianus was probably the landowner of the estate where the tiles
were produced, and textual stamps spelling out his name in full mark the vast major-
ity of the ninety-nine tiles discovered during recent excavations. Five tiles, however,
feature stamps deviating from that traditional Roman type used throughout the
Imperial period. One tile presents an oval stamp with a simple box monogram of that

57 Shelton, The Esquiline Treasure, p. 33.

58 Buckton, ed., Byzantium, pp. 34–5, nos. 11–12. On the Esquiline Treasure, see Kent and
Painter, eds, Wealth of the Roman World, pp. 44–9, nos. 88–98.
59 Lanciani, The Destruction, pp. 63–4.
60 Cameron, ‘The Date’; and Salzman, The Making, pp. 80–1. Cf. a strong argument against such
an identification by Shelton, ‘The Esquiline Treasure’, who dates the treasure’s objects between the
330s and 370s.
61 For further details on this casket and its ‘iconographic program’ addressed to a female gaze, see
Elsner, ‘Genders of Viewing’.
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124 Graphic Signs of Authority

landowner similar to monogrammatic signs carved in concurrent Roman catacombs.

The four other tiles present a rectangular stamp with a more artistic combination
of two box monograms, reminiscent of Pelegrina’s graphic sign from the Esquiline
Treasure: the first encodes the beginning of Phillipianus’ cognomen (PHILIPPI)
and the second provides a graphic form for its end (ANI)—with the depiction of
a horsehead in between. The images of horses appear on other tile stamps in this
villa, and it is possible that they visualized the landowner’s or his father’s nickname,
Philippos meaning in Greek ‘fond of horses’.62 Splitting the name into two monograms
must have made this pun even more obvious for their viewers.

4 . 3 . M O N O G R A M S A S P ROT E C T I V E A N D
I N T E RC E S S O RY D E V I C E S

Several factors contributed to the late antique expansion of monograms outside their
original sphere of usage as control marks. Firstly, changes in Roman onomastic
practices facilitated the growing usage of Latin personal monograms in the third
and especially fourth centuries. In the late Republican period, the traditional Roman
full name comprised three or four elements—praenomen, nomen, cognomen, and
occasionally agnomen—which were hardly possible to express in one monogram.
But Roman onomastic practices drastically altered during the Early Imperial period.
First, the praenomen lost its individualizing function, and its use rapidly declined
from the mid-second century ad. The praenomen survived for longer among the
senatorial aristocracy, but by the fourth century even they rarely mentioned it in
their epigraphs. Secondly, after Caracalla’s grant of Roman citizenship to all free
people in the Roman empire in 212, all new citizens received the praenomen and
nomen of their imperial benefactor, Marcus Aurelius. As a vast number of people
in the empire and especially in Rome now had Aurelius as their nomen, it lost its
identifying purpose during the third century. As a result of these developments,
by the fourth century the praenomen and nomen became all but markers of
status, while various cognomina of Latin and Greek origins, as well as Christian
names which were treated as cognomina, developed into the main individualizing
element in naming practices, especially among Christians.63 Cognomina of this
kind formed the basis for a single-name system that became typical of the early
Middle Ages. It is these new single names that late antique personal monograms
predominantly represent.
Secondly, belief in the Evil Eye and a fear of the misuse of personal names
in ‘magical’ practices probably contributed in late antiquity to the spread of inscrip-
tions where personal names were replaced by anonymous formulations such as
‘whose name God/the Lord knows’.64 Personal names needed to be protected, so

62 Wilson, ‘Tile-stamps’.
63 For further detailed discussion of this transformation, see Kajanto, Onomastic Studies; and
Salway, ‘What’s in a Name?’.
64 Roueché, ‘Interpreting the Signs’, pp. 229–30.
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Late Antique Monograms and Early Christians 125

to speak, against adversaries. Since some late antique cursing spells targeted the
performers of one of several competing circus factions, Charlotte Roueché invokes
the same reasoning for the appearance of epigraphic monograms hiding the names
of two circus factions, namely the Greens and the Blues, inscribed in the public
spaces of late antique Ephesos and Aphrodisias.65 Monograms could thus be
deployed as visual devices either offering honours to, or preserving the memory of,
factions or persons, whilst simultaneously protecting them from hostile agents.
The same logic explains why some theatre seats in Aphrodisias were marked not
with the full names of their owners but with their box monograms.66
Monogrammatic devices were, of course, capable of guarding names not only
from supernatural forces but also from threats presented by secular powers. For
example, Fabio Troncarelli has suggested that the box monogram (Fig. 4.9e)
carved on a luxurious marble tombstone found in Villareggia, currently in the
Musei Civici in Pavia, hides the name of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius,
a powerful Roman aristocrat executed on the order of King Theoderic in 524.
The Ostrogothic king is known to have issued a damnatio memoriae against
Boethius: any reference to the latter was forbidden in public spaces. If Troncarelli’s
attribution of that funerary slab is correct, the substitution of Boethius’ name in
his funerary epigraph B[ene] M[erenti] with the protective monogram Severino may
have allowed its anonymous commissioner and creator to circumvent Theoderic’s
royal ban.67
Thirdly, the fact that many personal monograms appeared on funeral tabulae in
early Christian catacombs suggests that those who commissioned them believed
their main audiences to be the deceased’s closest relatives and, most importantly,
the divine Lord. God already knew their names, since they were written in his
Book of Life and in Heaven (Philippians, 4.3; and Luke, 10.20),68 and He could
therefore easily decipher monograms incomprehensible to passers-by. It is also
noteworthy that personal monograms and christograms, the monogrammatic
signs of the Lord, had similar functions in this funerary context. Similar usage of
monograms can be traced in the early Byzantine context. For example, a silver
paten from Benaki Museum produced between c.550 and 620 features a cruciform
monogram of its donor, probably ΜΑΡΙΑΣ (‘of Mary’), on its rim followed by
a phrase common in early Byzantine epigraphics: ‘In fulfilment of a vow of
those whose names God knows’ (ΥΠΕΡ ΕΥΧΗС ΟΝ ΟΙΔΕΝ Ο Θ[ΕΟ]С
ΤΑ ΟΝΟΜΑΤΑ).69 Mary’s name was already known to God and thus could be
encoded in a monogrammatic device approaching the divine at every Eucharistic
ceremony the paten was used in.

65 Roueché, ‘Interpreting the Signs’, pp. 223–5 and 231–3. For a detailed discussion of the four
circus factions in imperial Rome and early Byzantium, and the special role of the Blues and Greens
among them, see Cameron, Circus Factions.
66 For examples, see Roueché, Performers, pp. 109–10, nos. 46.H.8iii and 46.H.9iii, plate XV.
67 Troncarelli, ‘Forbidden Memory’, pp. 194–205.
68 For more details, see Carratelli, ‘Cuius nomen’; Roueché, ‘Interpreting the Signs’, pp. 228–9, and
note 33.
69 Athens, Benaki Museum, inv. no. GE 31524; ICA, no. 200886. For more on this formula, see
Ševčenko, ‘Sion Treasure’, pp. 41–2.
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126 Graphic Signs of Authority

Finally, the growing popularity of monograms must have resulted from

the widely shared late antique belief in the intercessory and protective powers
of graphic signs, exemplified by the popularity of charactêres and esoteric seals
such as those drawn in the Bruce Codex.70 A personal monogram on one
­third-century ring gem (Fig. 4.2e), for example, was framed by an ouroborus
(a tail-devouring snake), an ancient symbol that also appeared on ‘magical’/‘Gnostic’
gems often inscribed with ‘magical’ charactêres.71 Any wish or request that
addressed transcendent forces using a graphic sign was thus perceived to have a
better chance of reaching its goals. Christians of the late antique world shared
in this perception, and Carlo Carletti has argued that early Christians employed
the PE acclamatory monogram, discussed above, as an evocative ‘ideogram’
with ‘magical’ (amuletic) properties.72 The same belief in the intercessory and
empowering qualities of monogrammatic devices might have encouraged
Filocalus to design his acclamatory monogram and place it on the opening page
of the Calendar of 354.
The latter can also be interpreted as a precursor of monogrammatic devices
found across the Eastern Mediterranean in the fifth and sixth centuries, namely,
intercessory monograms asking God to protect certain individuals and the
acclamatory monograms carved by supporters of circus factions. Samples of the
latter monograms have been discovered in Aphrodisias and Ephesos. Some of
these monograms only hide the name of a faction in the genitive—the Greens
(Πρασίνων) or the Blues (Βενέτων)—with the rest of the phrase spelled out in an
epigraph. Others encode the entire or abbreviated acclamation: ‘The fortune of
the Greens triumphs!’ (νικᾷ ἡ τύχη τῶν Πρασίνων) (Figs 4.9d and 4.11). All
appeared in public settings in the period from the mid-fifth century to the early
seventh, on seats in the amphitheatre of Aphrodisias,73 and on marble columns
and blocks in the central streets of both Aphrodisias and Ephesos. Charlotte
Roueché argues that monograms were carved onto stone as visual records of the
acclamations recited during ceremonies performed by these competing factions.74
The act of encoding in stone either the whole acclamatory phrase or just the name
of the faction on whose behalf the acclamation had been carved were probably
perceived as a means of expanding its repetitive power into the future and, hence,
increasing its intercessory qualities.
Similar perceptions, as well as an increasing belief in the miraculous powers
of the sign of the cross, gave birth to invocational cruciform monograms
that requested divine assistance and protection, and from the sixth century
onwards these became a common occurrence on early Byzantine seals and other
material media.

70 For more details, see Chapter 1.

71 Spier, Late Antique and Early Christian Gems, p. 193 and no. M14.
72 Carletti, ‘Un monogramma’, p. 142.
73 Roueché, Performers, p. 105, nos. 46.E.9 and 46.E.11, plate XIV.
74 Roueché, ‘Looking for Late Antique Ceremonial’, nos. 12–13; Roueché, ‘Interpreting the
Signs’, pp. 223–5 and 231–2, figs 1–2; and Roueché, Aphrodisias, nos. 185–6.
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Late Antique Monograms and Early Christians 127

Fig. 4.11. Acclamatory monogram from Aphrodisias, νικᾷ ἡ τύχη τῶν Πρασίνων. Photo by
Ine Jacobs.

4.4. T H E C O N T E M P L AT I V E P RO C E S S I N VO LV E D
I N U N D E R S TA N D I N G M O N O G R A M S A N D
L AT E A N T I Q U E N E O P L ATO N I S M

In one of his letters written in the years before 395, the Roman noble Quintus
Aurelius Symmachus asked his friend, Nicomachus Flavianus Senior, whether or
not he had received all of Symmachus’ letters, which were sealed with a signet-ring
on which the latter’s name ‘was presented more to be understood (grasped men-
tally) than to be read’ (magis intellegi quam legi promptum est).75 Symmachus thus
conceived of his seal as both a practical means of authentication and as a form of
protection against epistolary espionage, and his monogram therefore functioned in
his eyes as a quasi-control mark confirming the integrity of the letter within. Yet
Symmachus’ description of that graphic device also seems to reflect a much wider
late antique perception of monograms. The verb ‘intellegere’—usually translated as
‘to perceive, grasp mentally, understand, and comprehend’—is juxtaposed in that
phrase by Symmachus with ‘legere’ (to read), demonstrating that for a late antique

75 ‘Non minore sane cura cupio cognoscere, an omnes obsignatas epistolas meas sumpseris eo
anulo, quo nomen meum magis intellegi quam legi promptum est’, Quintus Aurelius Symmachus,
Epistolae, 2. 12, ed. Seeck, p. 46. On the nature of the second book of his letters and that letter in
particular, see Sogno, Q. Aurelius Symmachus, pp. 61–3.
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128 Graphic Signs of Authority

viewer the process of decoding a monogram was quite different from that of
reading. In other words, the creators of late antique monograms expected their viewer
to understand or mentally grasp the monogram through a contemplative process
in which the visual extralinguistic properties of monograms and their linguistic
content were held to be equally meaningful.
Such a contemplative approach to late antique monograms was also encouraged
by the contemporary belief in the intimate relationship between letters and the
atomic elements of the world.76 It is noteworthy that the Greek word στοιχείον
described both alphabetical letters and physical elements. This belief contributed
to the active usage in late antiquity of ‘magical’ characters, pseudo-letters linked to
primordial cosmic elements. The same belief also explains the appearance of the
myth describing the creation of the world from alphabetical letters, which can be
traced in Jewish, Christian, and ‘Gnostic’ texts.77 One of them, The Mystery of the
Greek Letters, written by a sixth-century Melkite monk in Palestine and ascribed to
St Saba, even contended that these letters incorporated the archetypes and figures
(‘τοὺς τύπους καὶ τὰ σχήματα’) of the elements in the created world.78 This perceived
connection of letters to the inner structure of world must have been all the more
apparent when letters were taken out of their common linguistic context and
assembled in monograms defying the process of reading. As pointed out by
Tzahi Weiss with reference to Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, ‘reading
individual letters, or combinations of letters that do not form words, causes a
cognitive break stemming from the amputation of the normative process of
interpretation’.79 In the context of a contemplative process resulting from such
a cognitive break, the viewer of a monogram was left with its visual structure in
search for deeper meanings.
The shape late antique monograms took and the manner in which letters were
combined were therefore of considerable importance. Many monograms deployed
the Latin and Greek letters N, M, H, and Π to create a square-like main frame, to
which other letters were then attached. The choice of these letters for monograms’
bases was likely connected to their resemblance to certain ‘magical’ characters:
monograms could thus function as a kind of protective seal against evil forces. But
the shape of box monograms was also compatible with early Christian exegetical
symbolism, and Clement of Alexandria appropriated some Platonic ideas in his
Stromata at the turn of the third century, particularly in his comments regarding
the geometric symbolism of the tabernacle, which he states was ‘constructed in
most regular proportions, and through divine ideas, by the gift of understanding,
which leads us from things of sense to intellectual objects, or rather from these to
holy things, and to the holy of holies. For the squares of wood indicate that the
square form, producing right angles, pervades all, and points out security.’80

76 Dornseiff, Das Alphabet. 77 For further details, see Weiss, ‘On the Matter of Language’.
78 Der Traktat ‘Vom Mysterium der Buchstaben’, ed. Bandt, pp. 106–7. See also Stroumsa, ‘The Mystery’.
79 Weiss, ‘On the Matter of Language’, p. 114.
80 Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, 6. 11, p. 500. For the influence of Platonism on Clement’s
views, see Attridge, ‘What Gnostics Knew’, p. 12.
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Late Antique Monograms and Early Christians 129

Just as a monogram’s shape might have carried a hidden meaning, the late
antique intellectual could also discern an arcane meaning in its structure, revealed
through contemplation of the monogrammatic device in the Calendar of 354.
Letter by letter, its decoding can only be achieved if an observer enacts a circular
counter-clockwise eye movement around the inside of the monogram’s O-shaped
medallion. It is possible that, by such an arrangement of letters, Filocalus hinted
at the kinetic properties of the human soul that were repeatedly mentioned in
works of late antique Neoplatonism and their Christian adaptors as something
that brought the soul closer to the divine. It was well known to the third-century
Neoplatonist Plotinus that the soul’s motion was circular,81 and the early sixth-
century Christian theologian known as Pseudo-Dionysius described the very same
movement as an attribute that united the human soul and divine properties.
According to Pseudo-Dionysius, the soul rotated in a manner similar to the divine
intelligences, which were derived from the Good and the Beautiful and moved in
an endless circle.
First it [the soul] moves in a circle, that is, it turns within itself and away from what is
outside and there is an inner concentration of its intellectual powers. A sort of fixed
revolution causes it to return from the multiplicity of externals, to gather in upon itself
and then, in this undispersed condition, to join those who are themselves in a powerful
union. From there the revolution brings the soul to the Beautiful and the Good, which
is beyond all things, is one and the same, and has neither beginning nor end.82
Ideas of this nature were most likely known to fourth-century intellectuals including
the calligrapher Filocalus and the Roman noble Valentinus, and the revolving,
performative nature of the dedication monogram in the Calendar of 354 might
have presented Filocalus’ interpretation of the expression floreas in Deo, whereby
the human soul ascended to the divine, which ‘has neither beginning nor end’.
The introductory monogrammatic medallion, which honoured Valentinus with
his name-image instead of a figural image, should also be interpreted as representative
of a new late antique mode of showing the true human nature. This practice can
be traced in both Christian and Neoplatonic writings. Thus, Clement of Alexandria
wrote in his Exhortation to the Heathen:
For the image of God is His Word, the genuine Son of Mind, the Divine Word,
the archetypal light of light; and the image of the Word is the true man, the mind of
which is in man, who is therefore said to have been made ‘in the image and likeness
of God’, assimilated to the Divine Word in the affection of the soul, and therefore
rational; but effigies sculptured in human form, the earthly image of that part of man
which is visible and earth-born, are but a perishable impress of humanity, manifestly
wide of the truth.83
Around the turn of the fifth century, Paulinus of Nola outlined a similar cognitive
path while asserting that heavenly secrets and divine truth could only be seen through

81 Smith, ‘Physics’, p. 533, with reference to Plotinus, Enneads, 4.2.

82 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, 4. 8–9, p. 78.
83 Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Heathen, 10, p. 199.
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130 Graphic Signs of Authority

the mind’s eye and spurning various forms and appearances of the real world.84
Later in that century, the renowned Neoplatonist Proclus made a statement on the
true human nature somewhat similar to that of Clement:
Consequently, if names are images in words of the objects to which they apply, they
refer primarily to immaterial Forms, and derivatively to sensible things, so that things
in this world derive both their being and designation from that world. . . . For example,
when we speak of man, i.e. use the term ‘man’, we use it in one sense as an image of
the divine Form and in another sense when we refer to a visible man. . . . For ‘man’ is not
an ambiguous term in the sense of a bare name applied to two different things, but as
being primarily a likeness of the intelligible reality, and secondarily of the sensible thing;
for this reason man is not the same thing when we are speaking of the intelligible as
when we refer to the sensible man. In the one case it is the likeness of the divine object,
in the other the likeness of the sensible individual.85
When set in the context of this late antique intellectual worldview, so dominated
by the dichotomy of the sensible/earthly mundus and the intelligible/divine world,
the dedication monogram reveals itself as Filocalus’ attempt to present the true
image of Valentinus in ‘a likeness of the intelligible reality’ and ‘assimilated to the
Divine Word’. In this attempt, the late Roman calligrapher behaved in a similar
manner to those early Christians who employed graphic name-images to identify
themselves on funerary tabulae. On the threshold to the other world, where the soul
would leave the trappings of the human body, Christians identified themselves
using monogrammatic devices similar to graphic representations of their divine
Lord as Logos: christograms. In this context, it is hardly accidental that in the
fourth and fifth centuries these graphic signs of Christ and personal monograms
often appeared in similar contexts, and began to share some formal attributes
including medallion settings or laurel wreath frames.
The new monogrammatic trend in late antique visual communication, exemplified
by the Calendar of 354 and extant funerary epigraphy in the Roman catacombs, fully
manifested itself in the fifth and sixth centuries, when various monograms appeared
in a much wider range of media to represent aristocrats as well as figures of authority,
namely emperors, kings, and bishops.

84 ‘. . . et nunc spe sequimur quod mente videmus, spernentes varias, rerum spectacula, formas . . .’,
Paulinus of Nola, Carmina, ed. Dolveck, p. 537. For further discussion of this late antique cognitive
mode exemplified by Paulinus of Nola, see de Nie, ‘ “Divinos Concipe Sensus” ’, pp. 77–92. For a broader
discussion of the early medieval tradition of seeing with the mind’s eye from Augustine to Alcuin, see
Noble, ‘The Vocabulary of Vision’.
85 Proclus’s Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, 4. 851, pp. 220–1.
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5
Secular Monograms, Social Status,
and Authority in the Late Roman World
and Early Byzantium

The dedication text in the Calendar of 354 and the archaeological context of the
plates from the Esquiline Treasure allow scholars to decipher the monograms of
two Roman nobles, Valentinus and Pelegrina Turcia. The task of decoding such
signs becomes more challenging when any accompanying text or broader context
are all but absent, as in the case of the so-called Consecratio panel produced
in Rome or northern Italy at the beginning or in the first half of the fifth century.
Art historians have interpreted the iconography of this carved ivory panel, which
origin­ally constituted a leaf of a diptych, as representing either the consecration of
a deceased emperor or the apotheosis of a pagan philosopher.1 A medallion at the
top of the panel features a box monogram (Fig. 5.1), the meaning of which is still
debated. In the 1930s, Edmund Weigand interpreted it as SYMMACHORUM,
and in doing so connected the panel to the prominent homonymous Roman noble
family, the Symmachi.2 Most specialists of late antiquity have accepted his inter-
pretation, and have consequently associated the production of the ivory with the
commemoration of Quintus Aurelius Symmachus’ death in 402. The latter was
known to be a staunch pagan, and used a monogram to seal his letters.3 Weigand’s
interpretation is nevertheless open to questioning on two points. Firstly, it would
have been highly unusual in the fourth and fifth centuries to employ a monogram
to express a family cognomen using a plural genitive. When personal names were
encoded in this period, they normally took a singular form. Secondly, David Wright
has disputed the notion that the monogrammatic sign on the ivory includes a letter S,
and hence has questioned the latter’s connection to the Symmachi.4 Contrary to
Weigand, he has stated that the letter C and the upper curve of the letter R do not
intersect entirely, and thus cannot be interpreted as creating a composite letter S.

1 St. Clair, ‘The Apotheosis Diptych’; Volbach, Elfenbeinarbeiten, p. 52, no. 56; Wetzmann, ed., Age
of Spirituality, pp. 70–1, no. 60; MacCormack, Art and Ceremony, pp. 141–3; Cameron, The Later
Roman Empire, pp. 160–1; Buckton, ed., Byzantium, pp. 57–8, no. 44.
2 Weigand, ‘Ein bisher verkanntes Diptychon’. 3 See Chapter 4.
4 Wright, ‘The Persistence’, pp. 359–60. He sets the panel instead within a mid-fifth-century
imperial context.
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132 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 5.1. Consecratio panel, upper part. London, BrM, reg. no. 1857,1013.1. © The Trustees
of the British Museum.

A close-up inspection of the upper left corner of that graphic device cannot exclude
conclusively either of these two interpretations.5
Despite its arcane nature, the monogrammatic sign on the Consecratio panel
reveals an important social function that many late antique aristocratic mono-
grams fulfilled. Julius Victor stated in his Ars rhetorica that cryptic language is
permissible among close acquaintances who are able to understand it, using an
obscure code which they agree upon.6 The above monograms operated as just such

5 See, for example, Cameron, The Last Pagans, pp. 719–28, especially at pp. 721–2, who admits
Wright’s point, but insists on Weigand’s reading of a superscript C and the curved element of R in that
monogram as intended to convey the missing letter S—an attempt that failed due to the difficulties
associated with carving on a hard material like ivory.
6 Malherbe, ed., Ancient Epistolary Theorists, pp. 62–3.
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Monograms and Social Status in Early Byzantium 133

a cryptic quasi-language: they encoded meanings decipherable only within narrow

circles of noble donors, recipients, owners, and wearers of prestige objects, and
were obscure to people on the outside. Such graphic devices concealed personal
names from uninvited gazes, but were easily understood within the social and
family environments inhabited by those whose names such monograms encrypted.
Late antique monograms thus increased social cohesion by establishing visual
borders to outsiders. Only people within restricted social networks of power and
affluence, familiar with each other’s names and proficient in a shared code of
monogrammatic calligraphy, were able to decipher such monogrammatic signs,
and this sociocultural ability set them apart from everybody else.
Whilst the precise meaning of the graphic sign on the Consecratio panel remains
a mystery, its form exhibits the same principles of graphic composition as the
contemporary monograms discussed in the previous chapter. Like the Rusticius
monogram from the Catacombs of Priscilla (Fig. 4.4c), this graphic sign has a
superscript C attached to the monogram’s left base; like Valentinus’ monogram,
it features a superscript V above the monogram’s right base. Such similarities corrob-
orate the existence of a shared calligraphic culture, which gradually influenced the
manner in which late Roman aristocrats could express their social status and group
identity on portable luxury objects such as silverware and ivory diptychs, a practice
attested from the late fourth century onwards.7 At the turn of the fifth century this
practice was still new, and Quintus Aurelius Symmachus had to explain to a close
friend the purpose of the personal monogram he employed to seal letters. Over
the course of the fifth and sixth centuries, this practice became more widespread
in both the Latin West and Greek East, and its use expanded to include mass-
produced objects associated with emperorship and, later, kingship, namely coinage.
In this medium, imperial and royal monograms became graphic signs of authority
addressed to people from various walks of life who handled copper and, later,
­silver coins.

5 . 1 . T H E N U M I S M AT I C M O N O G R A M O F
THEODOSIUS II: MONOGRAMS AS SIGNS OF
I M P E R I A L AU T H O R I T Y I N T H E M I D D L E A N D
S E C O N D H A L F O F T H E F I F T H C E N T U RY

The personal monograms that emperors began to place on imperial copper coins
in the middle and second half of the fifth century differed from the monogrammatic
stamps on Hellenistic coins. The latter functioned as auxiliary signs of producers,
devoid of any symbolic value. The practice of using such monogrammatic control
marks, made of several letters, continued in the Greek East throughout late antiquity,
and is found, for example, on marble elements carved in Proconnesus near

7 On portable luxury goods as a material expression of shared aristocratic culture in this period, see
Stirling, ‘Prolegomena to the Study’.
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134 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 5.2. Copper coin of Theodosius II, Ae4 (Nicomedia, c.445–50). Oslo University,
Museum of Cultural History.

Constantinople.8 In contrast, the monograms on fifth-century copper coins employed

all the letters of imperial names, and became a popular reverse type alongside vota
legends and the sign of the cross. To underscore their symbolic nature, a laurel
wreath framed each of these numismatic types (Fig. 5.2). The obverse of copper
coins that displayed a monogrammatic reverse featured the imperial title legend
and imperial profile bust. In other words, imperial monograms did not replace
the legends naming emperors through literacy. Nor did they replace the imperial
profile bust, a traditional figural symbol of imperial authority. They provided,
instead, an alternative symbolic reference through graphicacy, and this symbolic
aspect connects the numismatic imperial monograms to fourth- and fifth-century
calligraphic culture. Furthermore, like earlier monograms on luxury objects and in
early Christian catacombs, numismatic monograms were constructed around a
box frame provided by the letters H, M, or N, and spelled personal names in the
genitive case.
It is more than mere coincidence that the imperial monogram was introduced
onto late Roman coinage in the reign of Theodosius II (408–50); the emperor was
no stranger to late antique calligraphic culture. He underwent a rigorous course of
study in the liberal arts during his childhood, and his commissions of works
from such a calligrapher as Aemilius Probus clearly reveal his personal fondness for
calligraphic art.9 Significantly, the emperor himself regularly honed his calligraphic
skills, and for that reason was nicknamed ‘Calligrapher’ (καλλιγράφος) by later
Byzantine authors.10 Theodosius is known, for instance, for copying manuscripts
of Solinus.11 This predilection for calligraphic culture at the Constantinopolitan

8 For more details and references, see Chapter 6, especially note 25.
9 Cameron, ‘Petronius Probus’; Cameron, The Last Pagans, p. 434; Salway, ‘The Nature and
Genesis’, p. 128.
10 George the Monk, Chronicon, ed. de Boor and Wirth, vol. 2, p. 604; Glykas, Annales, 4.260,
ed. Migne, col. 488C.
11 Cameron, ‘Petronius Probus’, p. 126 and note 35.
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Monograms and Social Status in Early Byzantium 135

court of Theodosius provides a historical backdrop for the introduction of the first
imperial monogram on copper coins in the last years of his reign (c.445–50).
The monogrammatic sign of Theodosius was introduced on the smallest denom-
ination of copper coinage (Fig. 5.2), commonly referred to as Ae4.12 They were
issued at the two mints closest to the imperial court, namely Constantinople and
Nicomedia;13 the latter mint lay approximately 116 km away from the imperial
capital. The monogram placed on copper coins at these two mints exhibits a uni-
form design, which suggests that this monogrammatic sign must have been created
at the imperial court, perhaps by the emperor himself.
Theodosius’ graphic device combines the Latin letters T and H with Greek delta
and sigma. Two remaining letters can be deciphered as either Latin E and O or
Greek epsilon and omicron. These letters probably present the imperial name in
the Latin genitive, THEOΔOCII,14 a practice that became customary for personal
monograms at that time. The peculiar mixture of Latin and Greek letters in the
imperial monogrammatic sign might have been intentional. After all, Latin repre-
sented the language of administration in the Eastern Roman empire, whilst Greek
remained the default language of communication for the vast majority of the
popu­lation. Nevertheless, the obverse of these coins only employed Latin letters to
spell the imperial name (Fig. 5.2), THEODOSIUS. Calligraphic considerations
must therefore have been of some importance.
The letter S always caused a problem for late antique designers of monograms.
Due to its curved outline, it could not be incorporated into the straight lines of a
box frame like other letters. Consequently, it was usually placed in an upper or
lower monogrammatic field (Figs 4.4e, 4.4f, 4.8, and 4.9a). In contrast, a sigma
could be incorporated into one of the vertical bars constituting a monogrammatic
box. In the case of Theodosius’ monogram, a sigma is combined with an E. Turning
to the Latin letter D, its default location in contemporary monograms was on one
of their vertical bars. In Theodosius’ graphic device, in contrast, a capital delta could
only be placed underneath the former’s horizontal bar. Was it the letter’s location
that prompted the choice of the Greek letter? The act of decoding the monogram
starts with an eye movement from left to right, following the first three letters THE.
The next two letters, OΔ, require an eye movement to be made from the top to the
bottom of the graphic device. The eye movements thus follow two lines to create a
sign of the cross, the veneration of which flourished precisely ­during the reign of
Theodosius II, to the extent that it had become the primary Christian symbol in the
late Roman world by the end of his reign, and appeared across various media includ-
ing coinage.15 It is also hardly accidental that the copper coins using the sign of the
cross as a blueprint to create Theodosius’ monogram replaced a similar issue with
the sign of the cross as its reverse type; the visible cross was thus substituted for a
cross hidden within the structure of the imperial monogram.

12 Grierson and Mays, Catalogue, pp. 88 and 148; CBC, vol. 2, p. 107; Hahn, Die Ostprägung,
p. 35; RIC, vol. 10, p. 93.
13 Grierson and Mays, Catalogue, p. 148.
14 Cf. Woods, ‘A Misunderstood Monogram’, pp. 10–12.
15 For more details, see Chapter 3.
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136 Graphic Signs of Authority

Theodosius’ calligraphic device was crafted in the last years of his reign, when his
wife Eudocia left Constantinople for a pious life in the Holy Land, and when his
equally pious sister Pulcheria withdrew from the Great Palace in the city centre to
the suburban Hebdoman Palace. Abandoned by the two most influential women
in his adult life, Theodosius consequently lived a life of chastity and Christian
observance in the 440s,16 and his monogram that appeared on the lowest denom-
ination of copper coinage, issued for circulation in Constantinople and its hinter-
land, propagated the graphic message of a Christian emperor equal in piety to
his imperial sister and spouse. Speaking more broadly, the Theodosian numismatic
innovation bears witness to the growing popularity of personal monograms as signs
of aristocratic identity and social power in the fifth century, and signalled a new trend
towards the incorporation of monogrammatic signs into the visual pageantry of
imperial authority, a historical trend that would reach maturity in the sixth century.
In the second half of the fifth century, a number of Eastern Roman emperors—
Marcian (450–7), Leo I (457–74), Zeno (474–5 and 476–91), Basiliscus (475–6),
and Anastasius I (491–518)—continued the practice of placing their monograms
on the lowest denomination of coins in circulation (Fig. 5.3a–c), which in the
years before the monetary reform of Anastasius in 498 were the only copper coins
issued at the imperial mints.17 None of the above emperors had been a legitimate
male heir of the preceding emperor, and none had risen from the ranks of the trad­
itional aristocracy of Constantinople. Their ascendance to imperial power was
instead validated in each case by marriage to an imperial widow or female relative
of a preceding emperor. In this context of dubious legitimacy, the continuation of
the main types of Theodosian coinage, including his monogrammatic type, aimed
to propagate the same message as that communicated by the matrimonial unions:
an unbroken line of legitimate imperial rulers following the Theodosian dynasty
in Constantinople. These box monograms, spelling the name of the emperor in
Latin, lacked the calligraphic excellence of Theodosius’ monogrammatic device.

Fig. 5.3. Monogrammatic reverses of late Roman copper coins, Ae4: a) of Marcian (450–7);
b) of Leo I (457–74); c) of Zeno (474–91); d) of Libius Severus (461–5). Oslo University,
Museum of Cultural History, and Princeton University Numismatic Collection, Department
of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library.

16 Holum, Theodosian Empresses, pp. 81 and 176–94.

17 Grierson and Mays, Catalogue, pp. 158 (for Marcian), 164–6 (for Leo), 178–9 (for Basiliscus
and Marcus), and 183 (for Zeno); CBC, vol. 1, pp. 11–12 (for the pre-reform bronze coinage of
Anastasius); Schindel, ‘Ein Minimus’ (for Basiliscus).
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Monograms and Social Status in Early Byzantium 137

Yet calligraphy was the least of their creators’ concerns; such imperial signs were
designed to highlight graphically the smooth continuity of emperorship after
Theodosius II and, at the same time, to allow their viewers to differentiate between
the monogrammatic coins of different emperors, even when such coins were in bad
condition (Fig. 5.3b–c). Although many coin users might not have been able to
decipher such monograms, the silhouette of each monogram must have been
memorized as the graphic sign of a specific emperor soon after its introduction,
and would be easily recognized thereafter.
The Theodosian innovation also appealed to Western Roman rulers, and the last
western emperors Libius Severus (461–5),18 Anthemius (467–72),19 and probably
Julius Nepos (474–5, 476–80),20 placed their box monograms on the lowest
denominations (Ae3 and Ae4) of their copper coins cast in Italian mints (Fig. 5.3d).
With the demise of Western Roman emperorship, the practice of placing the
monogrammatic signs of authority on coins was adopted by the first barbarian
king in Italy, Odovacar (476–93). His box monogram appears on copper nummi
and silver half-siliquae.21 Both are extremely rare and were struck in the Western
Roman imperial capital of Ravenna. They were most likely issued in the last years
of his rule, c.489–93, when the Ostrogothic troops of Theoderic invaded northern
Italy with the consent of Emperor Zeno and besieged Odovacar in Ravenna. In his
precarious situation, Odovacar was forced to claim authority independent from
the Byzantine emperors. As a result, he not only appropriated the imperial box
monogram on his coins, but also added to his title legend the appellation Flavius,
used by contemporary emperors such as Zeno and Anastasius I.
Odovacar’s appropriation of imperial visual symbols of authority was followed
by the adoption of a monogrammatic reverse type on Ostrogothic royal coinage
and by Anastasius’ reform of Byzantine copper coinage in 498,22 which confined
the earlier monogrammatic reverse type to the lowest denomination of bronze
coins—known among numismatists as minimi—and introduced heavier copper
folles (forty nummi) and its fractions.23 On these new Byzantine coins, a Greek
letter-number denoting the numeric value of a specific fraction (M = 40, K = 20,
I = 10, and E = 5) became the default reverse type. Imperial monograms also
appeared occasionally on rare pentanummia (five nummi) issued at Antioch in
the reigns of Justin I (518–27), Justinian I (527–65), and Justin II (565–78),24 and
pentanummia with the monogram of this last emperor were cast in Carthage.25

18 For a hypothetical monogram of Recimer, see Grierson and Mays, Catalogue, p. 254; RIC,
vol. 10, pp. 190–1; MacGeorge, Late Roman Warlords, pp. 218–22. For its attribution to Libius
Severus, see Woods, ‘A Misunderstood Monogram’, pp. 6–10 and 18–19.
19 Grierson and Mays, Catalogue, pp. 259; RIC, vol. 10, p. 198.
20 RIC, vol. 10, pp. 206 and 430. 21 RIC, vol. 10, pp. 213–14, MEC, nos. 1.63–64.
22 Bellinger, ‘The Copper of Anastasius I’; Nicks, The Reign of Anastasius I, pp. 233–8; and Hahn
and Metlich, Money, pp. 13–15. On the continuation of monogrammatic minimi after Anastasius’
reform, see Schindel, ‘Zur Minimusprägung’.
23 For more details, see Chapter 7.
24 Hahn and Metlich, Money, p. 37; Justin I (522–7), nos. N67 and NN67; Justinian I, no. 163;
CBC, vol. 1, p. 154 (Justinian I in 560–5), pp. 218, 226, 234, 240, and 250 (Justin II).
25 CBC, vol. 1, pp. 242 and 254.
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138 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 5.4. Pentanummis of Justin II and Sophia (Antioch, 565–78). Princeton University
Numismatic Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library.

Yet on the pentanummia of Justin II produced at Antioch, the imperial mono-

grammatic sign of the emperor and his wife Sophia was employed in an entirely
different manner when compared to the fifth- and sixth-century copper coins of
lower denominations: it replaced the imperial bust and title legend on the obverse
(Fig. 5.4), and became the only imperial attribute or identifier on such coins. This
modification reflected a sixth-century change in the use of imperial monograms on
coinage, whereby they could function as graphic symbols of emperorship as well as of
high-ranking imperial offices, as they did on late Roman and Byzantine weights,
silverware, and bricks from the second half of the fifth to the mid-seventh centuries.

5.2 . M O N O G R A M S A S S I G N S O F AU T H O R I T Y
O N S I LV E RWA R E , W E I G H T S , B R I C K S , A N D
C O N S U L A R D I P T YC H S

While imperial monograms were limited only to the lowest denominations of

Byzantine copper coinage after Anastasius’ monetary reform of 498, they began to
be employed as control stamps on some early Byzantine silverware, and this usage
continued until c.651. Such stamps were applied at imperial workshops—definitely
in Constantinople and probably in some provincial capitals—although scholars
disagree on the purpose of these stamps and the stage of production at which they
were applied.26 As issues of silver coinage in the sixth and early seventh centuries
were rare,27 silverware functioned as a form of state-produced symbolic silver bullion.

26 Dodd, Byzantine Silver Stamps, pp. 35–45; Dodd, ‘Byzantine Silver Stamps: Supplement I’,
p. 244; Dodd, ‘Byzantine Silver Stamps: Supplement II’, p. 148; Dodd, ‘Evidence of the Stamps’,
especially note 17; Feissel, ‘Le Préfet’; Nesbitt, ‘Some Observations’; cf. Mundell Mango, ‘The
Purpose and Places’, pp. 214–15; Mundell Mango, ‘Continuity’, p. 85; Mundell Mango, ‘Metalwork’,
pp. 446–7.
27 Hahn and Metlich, Money, pp. 95–6 (Justin I, Constantinople) and pp. 120–6 (Justinian I,
Constantinople, Thessalonica, Carthage, Rome, and Ravenna). This evidence contradicts Mundell
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Monograms and Social Status in Early Byzantium 139

Hence, similar to contemporary numismatic designs, its more or less regular

c­ ontrol system of five stamps included imperial portraits, a type of imperial stamp
that appeared on gold and silver objects from as early as the fourth century ad.28
Furthermore, sixth-century stamps featured not only imperial monograms but also
personal monograms of the highest level of Byzantine officials, such as the comites
sacrarum largitionum, who supervised the minting of gold and silver coins, and the
urban prefects of Constantinople, who controlled weights. In contrast, the names
of lower officials were expressed by inscription stamps, which underscores the
­concept that monograms on this medium were reserved for the use of emperors
and top imperial dignitaries in charge of the production of silver objects. Such
monogrammatic stamps therefore served as graphic symbols of imperial authority
guaranteeing the purity of the material they were stamped on. In a similar capacity,
imperial monograms reappear on seventh-century imperial coins, either as auxil-
iary signs in the field of a coin (Fig. 3.9) or as countermarks validating the use of
older copper coins. Such usage was discontinued in the Byzantine East after 685,
while in the West imperial monogrammatic stamps were employed in Carthage
and Syracuse until 698 and 720 respectively.29
The monograms of emperors and imperial officials appeared on commodity
and coin weights that were produced under their authority from the second half
of the fifth century, and their graphic signs conveyed the same validating power as
monogrammatic stamps on silverware. The earliest monograms introduced onto
metal coin weights appeared approximately at the same time as those introduced
onto coinage. Several surviving solidi weights of the emperors Marcian and Leo
I feature on their reverses imperial monograms identical to those used in copper
coinage, with an imperial bust similarly adorning their front sides.30 On weights,
monogrammatic signs of imperial officials most likely replaced imperial mono-
grams in the late fifth century, probably during the monetary and weight reforms
of Anastasius I. From that time onwards, monograms that were placed on weights
(primarily made of copper-alloy and glass) encoded the names of comites sacrarum
largitionum, praetorian and urban prefects/eparchs, and various comites.31 Yet these
imperial officials might not account for the vast variety of monograms employed
on sixth- and seventh-century weights, and Chris Entwistle has argued that many
monogrammatic signs on copper-alloy weights identified their owners: merchants
and other people who needed them for private use.32 Most monograms of this sort

Mango’s assertion that ‘[s]ilver was not coined in the eastern empire between about 400 and 615’:
‘Metalwork’, p. 446.
28 Dodd, Byzantine Silver Stamps, pp. 3–4.    29 CBC, vol. 3, p. 267.
30 Bendall, Byzantine Weights, nos. 15–16. Also, a unique semissis/weight of gold was sold at an
auction in 1988, with a monogram of Marcian on the obverse and the figure of Moneta on the reverse
(Bendall, Byzantine Weights, no. 14). The image on the reverse and the object’s round shape make it
similar to the imperial weights of the late fourth and early fifth centuries. But it has the inscription
CONOB under Moneta, which is typical of gold coins, since it confirms the purity of gold—a matter
less important for a weight. Furthermore, the known solidi weights of Marcian have a different design.
31 Entwistle, ‘Late Roman and Byzantine Weights’, Buckton, ed., Byzantium, pp. 14–15 and
86–90.
32 Entwistle, A Catalogue, and pers. comm.
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140 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 5.5. Late antique weights with monograms: a) copper-alloy weight, London, BrM,
reg. no. OA.821. © The Trustees of the British Museum; b) early Byzantine glass weight,
New York, MMA, acc. no. 81.10.148.

are in Greek, which highlights the fact that their usage on weights was mostly
­confined to early Byzantium. Some of them are in Latin, which may indicate
(although not definitively) their Italian origins, for example that on a square
­copper-alloy weight from the British Museum,33 which presents the personal box
monogram of an unknown official on its front (Fig. 5.5a), and his title v(ir)
c(larissimus) on the back. Such a usage must have been short-lived in Italy where
the latest dated square-shaped weight of the prefect Catulinus of Rome was cast
during the reign of the Ostrogothic king Theoderic (493–526).34 The use of box
and cruciform monograms was especially common on glass weights (Fig. 5.5b),
a feature resulting from the setting of their production in Egypt and Syria from the
late fifth century until the 640s, when Muslim invasion disrupted the Byzantine
system of the creation and distribution of these weights in those regions.35
Glass weights can be compared to early Byzantine lead seals, where monogrammatic
devices encoded the names of a much wider circle of imperial officials, dignitaries
of state, and ecclesiastical hierarchs. Lead seals (in the form of the so-called conical
seals) were already in use in the late Roman period, marked with figurative images
and abbreviated title legends. But by the sixth century such seals began to feature
monograms, initially of the box type (some of them can be seen on earlier conical
seals) and from the seventh century onwards predominantly of the cruciform
form—with the whole tradition of monogrammatic names on lead seals seemingly

33 Reg. no. AO.821; Entwistle, A Catalogue, no. 149.

34 BrM, reg. no. 1982,0105.1; Buckton, ed., Byzantium, nos. 78; Entwistle, A Catalogue, no. 182.
Copper-alloy objects of the same shape were issued by prefects of Rome and praetorian prefects
of Italy as early as the 420s, although scholars disagree on their function. RIC, vol. 10, pp. 9–10,
has interpreted them as solidi weights, while others explain them as tesserae monumentorum placed
on renovated buildings: Elvers, ‘Zwei neue sog. tesserae monumentorum’, pp. 204–5. None of
them feature a monogram.
35 Buckton, ed., Byzantium, p. 15; Bendall, Byzantine Weights, pp. 60–5; and Entwistle, ‘Late
Roman and Byzantine Weights’, pp. 44–5; Tobias, ‘Glass Weights’, pp. 192–200.
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Monograms and Social Status in Early Byzantium 141

falling out of fashion around the turn of the ninth century.36 Although most of
these seals, especially later ones, employed Greek monograms, rare specimens
of Italian provenance featuring Latin box monograms are also known, for instance
the sixth-century lead seal from Crypta Balbi in Rome with a personification of
this imperial capital on one side and the box monogram of Anthemius on the
other.37 Unfortunately, many Byzantine lead seals belonging to lower imperial
officials are hard to date precisely, and it is consequently difficult to ascertain how
early their monogrammatic signs began to be employed in Byzantine sigillography.
For example, the earliest specimen in the Dumbarton Oaks Database of Byzantine
seals is dated to the fourth or fifth century. It has a Latin box monogram decoded
as Marianu, with a chi-rho above, on one side and the person’s title ‘a secretis’ on
the other.38 The existing textual evidence meanwhile shows that this title referring
to confidential secretaries began to be applied to imperial officials in the East from
the last quarter of the fifth century onwards, which casts doubt on the seal’s attri-
bution to before the late fifth century.39
Monograms are also attested on brickstamps employed in Constantinople from
the early sixth century to the early seventh, a graphic feature that rendered them
distinct from late Roman brickstamps.40 Like the monogrammatic stamps placed
on silverware and weights, some of these monograms expressed the names of
emperors—principally Justinian I, Maurice (582–602), and Heraclius (610–41)—
and some represented unknown individuals. Little is known about the organiza-
tion of brick production in Constantinople, for instance whether or not some
landowners had a public duty to provide authorities with a certain amount of
bricks per annum, as seems to have been the case in Rome in the same period.41 In
the Byzantine capital, bricks were probably produced in both imperial and ‘private’
workshops (fuglinae). The former must have stamped their output with imperial
monograms, while the latter might have employed monogrammatic stamps to
express the names of the people who owned these workshops, or were somehow in
charge of their production.42 Two workshops that produced bricks in southern
Italy probably in the second third of the sixth century—for the episcopal church
of St Peter and adjacent episcopal palace in Canosa and for a rural church of
St Justus in the Celone valley—provide comparable cases to Constantinopolitan
‘private’ fuglinae. The bricks in Canosa were stamped with the box monogram of
the contemporary bishop Sabinus, the city’s most powerful man, and they were
most likely produced in his workshop.43 The bricks for St Justus feature the box
monogram IOHANNIS, which Giuliano Volpe has interpreted as referring to the
magister militum John, a nephew of the general Vitalian (consul in the East in 520),

36 Seibt, ‘The Use of Monograms’; Metcalf, Byzantine Seals, pp. 185–301, 342–63, and 492–9;
Nesbitt and Oikonomides, eds, Catalogue, vol. 5, nos. 22.5 and 47.1.
37 Arena et al., eds, Roma dall’antichità, pp. 260–1, no. II. 2. 4.
38 http://www.doaks.org/resources/seals/byzantine-seals/BZS.1958.106.751, accessed on 3 November
2016.
39 Jones, Martindale, and Morris, The Prosopography, vol. 2, pp. 1267–8.
40 On brick production and brickstamps in the late Roman empire, see Steinby, ‘L’industria’.
41 Bardill, Brickstamps, vol. 1, pp. 13–14. 42 Bardill, Brickstamps, vol. 1, pp. 16–49.
43 Volpe, ‘Architecture’, pp. 134–52.
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142 Graphic Signs of Authority

who was dispatched to Italy during the Byzantine-Gothic wars. If this identification
is correct, John could have functioned as a leading representative for Byzantine
authorities in this region.44
The evidence of coins, silverware, weights, and brickstamps thus shows that
from the second half of the fifth century onwards monograms became a popular
visual attribute of authority, first for emperors, slightly later for high-status imper­
ial officials such as praetorian and urban prefects and comites sacrarum largitionum,
and probably thereafter for lower imperial and ecclesiastical dignitaries. The evi-
dence of consular diptychs, which were representative of another high-ranking
imperial office, namely consulship, can illustrate this new graphic trend further.
The iconography of such ivory diptychs is replete with symbols of authority and
wealth, and when incised in this medium, consuls’ monograms fulfilled the same
symbolic function.
The tradition of carving ivory diptychs for consular inaugurations, and distrib-
uting them as commemorative gifts among noble peers, can be traced in written
sources from as early as the late fourth century, while the surviving specimens
(approximately four dozen have been identified so far) were produced in Rome
and Constantinople from the beginning of the fifth century until 541,45 a year
after consulship had ceased to exist as a high-ranking imperial office separate from
the figure of the emperor. Figural imagery dominates the visual appearance of these
artefacts, destined for public display in the fifth century, and the earliest surviving
monogram in that medium—of a rather simplistic form—only appears on the
consular diptych of Boethius (Rome, 487).46 On this diptych, a laurel wreath with
garlands positioned at the centre of a triangular pediment above the consul’s figure
frames two letters of his name, BE, sharing one vertical bar.
The earliest Constantinopolitan ivory panels featuring consular monograms
were produced for Areobindus in 506 and for Clementinus in 513. As in the case
of the ivory panels of Boethius, a monogram on the diptych of Clementinus adorns
a clipeus above the consul’s figure, but it includes all the letters of his name in the
Greek genitive, ΚΛΗΜΕΝΤΙΝΟΥ (Fig. 5.6a).47 Furthermore, its graphic struc-
ture is quite different from its Roman counterpart: the letters are attached to the end
of an eight-armed cruciform device with an omicron at its middle. This monogram
is interesting for three reasons. Firstly, the eight-armed graphic device became a
powerful apotropaic sign in late antiquity: its graphic structure was employed in one
of the most popular ‘magical’ charactera as well as the eight-armed Christian cross.

44 Volpe, ‘Linee di storia’, pp. 341–3. Less clear is the person whose name is encoded by a box
monogram stamp on Roman bricks probably in the sixth or early seventh century. It was deciphered
as presenting the name of one of the popes called Boniface, whose pontificates belong to this period,
or of a certain Beronicianus. Arena et al., eds, Roma dall’antichità, p. 226, no. I.10.6; Steinby,
‘L’industria’, p. 134; Bardill, Brickstamps, vol. 1, p. 16.
45 Delbrueck, Die Consulardiptychen, nos. 1–22 and 26–34; Kinney, ‘First-Generation Diptychs’,
p. 49; Olovsdotter, ‘Representing Consulship’, pp. 99–101; Cameron, ‘City Personifications’.
Cameron, ‘The Origin, Context’, emphasizes the original connection of such ivory diptychs with any
official who provided inaugural games, such as praetors earlier and, later, consuls.
46 Volbach, Elfenbeinarbeiten, p. 32, no. 6; Olovsdotter, The Consular Image, pp. 28–30, no. 6.
47 Volbach, Elfenbeinarbeiten, p. 35, no. 15; Weitzmann, ed., Age of Spirituality, pp. 48–50, no. 48;
Olovsdotter, The Consular Image, pp. 44–7, no. 10.
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Monograms and Social Status in Early Byzantium 143

Fig. 5.6. Monograms from early sixth-century consular diptychs: a) from the consular
­diptych of Clementinus (Constantinople, 513); b) from the consular diptych of Orestes
(Rome, 530).

Secondly, its quasi-cruciform shape predates the cruciform monograms of Justin

I on his nummi cast in Antioch c.522–7,48 those of Justinian I on bricks stamped
in 531/2, and those of Empress Theodora carved in Hagia Sophia c.533 by approxi-
mately ten to twenty years;49 Theodora’s monogram has traditionally been referred
to as one of the earliest cases of cruciform monograms, marking a new trend in
early Byzantium probably starting in the 520–30s. Clementinus’ quasi-cruciform
monogram, meanwhile, mirrors the sign of the cross in the upper field of his
diptych in a visual parallel that was most likely intentional, which suggests that the
sign of the cross already started to influence the shapes of personal monograms in
the Byzantine East in the early sixth century. Finally, the Greek monogram con-
trasts with a Latin inscription carved in a tabula ansata above. While the latter
employs the contemporary official language of the Eastern Roman empire, the
consul’s monogram is similar to monogrammatic stamps on early Byzantine silver-
ware, weights, and bricks in that it employs Greek, a language commonly used
among Clementinus’ noble acquaintances.
Clementinus’ diptych is also noteworthy for the skilful combination of visualcy,
literacy, and graphicacy in its public representation of the consul to noble recipients—­
through his figural image, the Latin inscription mentioning his name and titles,
and finally, his Greek monogram. These were individualizing elements of consu-
lar portrayal that otherwise remained largely unchanged in this period. It is not
surprising that when one of Clementinus’ diptychs was re-used in 530 for a
Roman noble named Orestes, consul in the West, Italian masters felt compelled
to change only these three modes of representation. They re-carved the inscrip-
tion as well as facial features in the figural image,50 and replaced the original eight-
armed monogram with a traditional Roman box monogram of Orestes in Latin

48 These nummi were traditionally attributed to Justin II. But hoard evidence indicates that they
were issued in the reign of Justin I; Phillips and Tyler-Smith, ‘A Sixth-Century Hoard’, pp. 318 and
322. Hahn and Metlich, Money, p. 37, suggest that the cruciform monogram might have been intro-
duced at the beginning of a new indiction in 522.
49 Bardill, Brickstamps, vol. 1, pp. 46–9. For more details on Theodora’s cruciform monogram, see
Chapter 6.
50 Netzer, ‘Redating’; Eastmond, ‘Consular Diptychs’, pp. 748 and 751. Cf. Olovsdotter, The
Consular Image, pp. 30–4, no. 7. The frontal portraits of an imperial couple, Anastasius I and Ariadne,
were also modified to represent an Ostrogothic royal couple, Athalaric and Amalasuentha.
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144 Graphic Signs of Authority

(Fig. 5.6b),51 thus adapting the graphic mode of representation on these panels to
the tastes of their sixth-century aristocratic audience in Ostrogothic Italy.
The importance of these three modes of consular representation most likely
differed depending on the recipients of such ivories, as one can deduce from the
visual appearance of diptychs that were produced to commemorate the consulship
of the general Flavius Areobindus Dagalaifus in 506.52 Seven consular diptychs of
Areobindus have survived to the present day, which mirrored the affluence of this
consul and his noble wife, Anicia Juliana, and their privileged position in the east-
ern capital.53 The designs of these panels divide them into three different groups
that can also be detected across the surviving corpus of consular diptychs: firstly, a
design defined by figural imagery (visualcy) (Fig. 5.7); secondly, a combination of
the consular portrait of Areobindus in the central clipeus with two box monograms
of his Greek name in the genitive, Αρεοβίνδου, surrounded by foliate ornament
(Fig. 5.8); and finally, a design dominated by graphicacy, with the box Latin mono­
gram AREOBINDUS at the middle with a small cross above it, both surrounded
by the symbols of wealth and generosity (such as cornucopia and potent vines),
and a Latin inscription framed by a tabula ansata on the top.54 Antony Eastmond
has demonstrated conclusively that these ivory panels employed different symbolic
languages to display Areobindus’ consular authority to different groups of noble
recipients, with more abstract diptychs dispatched to the closest acquaintances.55
People who belonged to that social circle were expected to decode the consul’s
Greek or Latin monograms easily and appreciate their calligraphic qualities. The
family of Areobindus must have consciously chosen such graphic designs project-
ing his cultural sophistication, as evinced by the appearance of the marble piers
(Fig. 6.1) produced for the church of St Polyeuktos that Areobindus’ noble wife,
Juliana Anicia, rebuilt in Constantinople in the following years. Like Areobindus’
more abstract diptychs, these piers feature box monograms framed by foliate orna-
ment.56 Contemporary calligraphic graphicacy thus affected the visual aesthetics
of this family and its cultural affiliations.
As pointed out by Eastmond, consular diptychs accompanied and authenticated
the gifts of silver that newly appointed consuls bestowed on their peers.57 In this
role, these ivory panels are reminiscent of the stamps used to validate silver objects
in that period, often by means of monograms. Late antique signet-rings fulfilled
the same authenticating function, and by the sixth century personal monograms
became their important visual attribute.

51 Volbach, Elfenbeinarbeiten, pp. 40–1, no. 31. Netzer, ‘Redating’, p. 266, suggests that the mono-
gram shall be decoded as ORESTES V[ir clarissimus]. Yet it would be very unusual to encode that title
in a monogram. Instead, the presence of a V in the monogram corresponds to a genitive form of that
Greek name (Ὀρέστου), namely ORESTU. After all, Clementinus’ name in the original was also given
in a genitive case.
52 Volbach, Elfenbeinarbeiten, pp. 32–4, nos. 8–14; Olovsdotter, The Consular Image, pp. 38–44,
no. 9.
53 Cutler, ‘The Making’, p. 102. For more details on the imperial ambitions of Juliana and her
husband and son, see Chapter 6.
54 Eastmond, ‘Consular Diptychs’, pp. 743–6, figs 1, 3, and 4.
55 Eastmond, ‘Consular Diptychs’, pp. 754–8.   56 For further details, see Chapter 6.
57 Eastmond, ‘Consular Diptychs’, p. 751.
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Monograms and Social Status in Early Byzantium 145

Fig. 5.7. Diptych of Areobindus (Constantinople, 506). The State Hermitage Museum,
St Petersburg, inv. no. W-12.
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146 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 5.8. Diptych of Areobindus (Constantinople, 506). Paris, Musée du Louvre, acc.
no. 85–001669 EE. Photo (C) RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/Daniel Arnaudet.
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Monograms and Social Status in Early Byzantium 147

5.3. MONOGRAMS AS VISUAL SIGNS OF

S O C I A L P OW E R , N O B L E I D E N T I T Y, A N D
E L E VAT E D S TAT U S : R I N G S , D R E S S A C C E S S O R I E S ,
A N D LU X U RY O B J E C T S

The use of personal monograms on rings, the same practice that Quintus Aurelius
Symmachus adapted for his signet-ring at the end of the fourth century, became
quite popular among people of elevated status in the course of the fifth century.
Although, as pointed out by Jeffrey Spier, relevant material is limited and poorly
classified for the period spanning the late fourth to fifth centuries,58 the usage of
monograms on rings must have become widespread by the late fifth century since
rings with personal monogrammatic signs have been found in hoards and graves
dated to that period or slightly later, such as one of the princely graves in Apahida,
Romania, or the Desana and Reggio Emilia hoards in northern Italy.
A richly furnished grave in Apahida (Apahida 1) preserves the remains of
Omaharus, a local petty king with ostensible imperial contacts, as evidenced by
his gold crossbow fibula and rings, thought to have been produced in imperial
workshops and distributed as imperial gifts.59 One of these rings, sent from
Constantinople, is embellished with a box monogram of the king’s name,60 or
perhaps of his wife ΜΑΡΙΑΣ.61 The tradition of such imperial gifts continued in
the sixth and seventh centuries, and is revealed by the hoard at Malaja Pereshchepina
in modern Ukraine, linked to the Bulgarian khan Kuvrat, who ruled in Magna
Bulgaria in the 630–40s. The hoard includes gold rings produced at an imperial
workshop in Constantinople, engraved with Greek monograms that have been
deciphered as ΧΟΒΡΑΤΟΥ (Fig. 5.9a) and ΧΟΒΡΑΤΟΥ ΠΑΤΡΙΚΙΟΥ (‘of
Patrician Chobrat’).62 These imperial gifts to the Turkic ruler were identical to the
rings worn by contemporary high-ranking Byzantine officials, such as a gold ring
from the Benaki Museum embellished with a cruciform monogram and the image
of an imperial eagle beneath.63
As in the aforementioned grave at Apahida, the Desana and Reggio Emilia
hoards contain gold crossbow fibulas, indicating that they belonged to high-ranking
people who were probably connected to the Ostrogothic court in Ravenna. The
Reggio Emilia hoard was probably deposited early in the reign of King Theoderic

58 Spier, ‘Some Unconventional Early Byzantine Rings’, pp. 13–15. See also Spier, Late Antique and
Early Christian Gems, pp. 89–93.
59 For more details on imperial control over gold dress accessories and jewellery reserved for the
imperial family and high-ranking imperial dignitaries as well as the production of such luxury objects
at imperial workshops in early Byzantine Constantinople, see Stolz, ‘The Evidence’.
60 Schmauder, Oberschichtgräber, vol. 1, pp. 52, 131–3, and vol. 2, fig. 2.4a, who dates the grave
to the second half of the fifth century; Opreanu, ‘The Beginnings’, vol. 1, pp. 923–8; Opreanu, ‘Latin
or Greek?’, pp. 279–82, who first dated that grave to the 460s and later re-dated it to the beginning
of the sixth century.
61 Spier, ‘Some Unconventional Early Byzantine Rings’, p. 15, with an example of a late fifth-
century Byzantine ring with a similar monogram (Plate 7).
62 Werner, Der Grabfund, p. 44; Spier, Treasures, p. 11.
63 Athens, Benaki Museum, acc. no ΓΕ 1829. On the so-called ‘eagle’ seals of early Byzantine offi-
cials with similar designs, see Metcalf, Byzantine Seals, pp. 101–11 and 302–37.
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148 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 5.9. Late antique rings with monograms: a) gold ring of Khan Kubrat from Malaja
Pereshchepina, The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, inv. no. W-1052; b) silver
ring, Baltimore, WAM, acc. no. 57.2104.

and presents the riches of an Ostrogothic family, including two rings with box
monograms, one of which has been decoded as Marcus or Marcomirus and the
other as a name starting with AND[. . .].64 The Desana hoard was deposited in
Ostrogothic Italy slightly later, some time in the first half of the sixth century, and
it preserves a ring with a box monogram that has been tentatively deciphered as
Macrobius.65 These examples demonstrate that, parallel to the use of monogram-
matic stamps by high-ranking imperial officials from the late fifth century, the
practice of engraving personal monograms on signet-rings became widespread
among noble Romans and Germanic ‘newcomers’ with elevated status who were
connected to the imperial court in Constantinople and the Ostrogothic court in
Ravenna.66 For this Germanic elite, the emulation of monogrammatic imperial
culture began to play an important role in the visual projection of social power and
status. This practice trickled down the social ladder, as testified by the great num-
ber of silver and copper-alloy rings present in many museum collections, with box
and cruciform monograms in both Greek and Latin, generally dated to the fifth
through to the seventh century (Fig. 5.9b).67
Noble women must have worn some of these rings, and around the turn of the
sixth century they and their noble spouses also began engraving personal mono-
grams onto other forms of jewellery to project their elevated status. A pair of

64 Bierbrauer, Die ostgotischen Grab- und Schatzfunde, pp. 198–204, figs xxxv.6–6a and 8–8a;
Baldini Lipolis and Pinar Gil, ‘Osservazioni’, especially at p. 120. Cf. Opreanu, ‘Latin or Greek?’,
pp. 279–80.
65 Bierbrauer, Die ostgotischen Grab- und Schatzfunde, pp. 204–7, figs XII.1–1a; Aimone, Il tesoro,
no. 29, pp. 100–1, 179–80, and 194–5.
66 It goes without saying that many such ‘newcomers’ were well integrated into late Roman society
through many years of military service and residence within the Roman limites. For more details and
references on the Romanness of Ostrogothic Italy and the court of Theoderic the Great in Ravenna,
see Chapter 7.
67 See e.g. two early twentieth-century catalogues: Dalton, Catalogue; and Deloche, Étude histo-
rique. Unlike male jewellery and dress accessories, finger-rings and women’s jewellery were exempt
from imperial control in early Byzantium; see Stolz, ‘The Evidence’, p. 34, note 38.
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Monograms and Social Status in Early Byzantium 149

identical gold bracelets produced in early Byzantium around 500 or in the early
sixth century and currently held in museum collections in New York and Berlin
highlights this new trend; a box monogram (probably ΜΑΡΙΑΣ, ‘of Maria’)
placed within a scroll medallion (Fig. 5.10) marks each bracelet’s round box
intended for a relic.68 The same trend is exemplified in the form of a sixth- or
seventh-century gold earring, a seventh-century gold bracelet, a bracelet clasp, and
a quatrefoil ornament—all with cruciform Greek monograms—from museum
holdings in Athens.69
In the same period, personal monograms were introduced onto belt buckles,
a dress accessory that traditionally functioned as a late Roman and Byzantine symbol
of power and authority and a material badge of imperial service for soldiers as well
as civil servants.70 This innovation was reminiscent of the usage of tamga-shaped
signs on the second-century gold and bronze belt buckles and strap-ends from the
Bosporian kingdom in the northern Black Sea area. These tamgas have been
interpreted as graphic signs of Bosporian kings and their relatives, and the belts
with such tamgas might have been distributed among royal warriors.71 Despite
the apparent similarity between the two practices, the exact nature of cultural

Fig. 5.10. Early Byzantine gold bracelet (c.500). New York, MMA, acc. no. 17.190.2054.

68 Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, ID no. 4926; Elbern, ‘Das frühbyzantinische Monogramm-Armband’.

69 On the first two, see Yeroulanou, Diatrita, nos. 235 and 554, pp. 65, 169, 194, and 290, figs 95
and 322. The bracelet has come from Kratigos/Mytilene Treasure on Lesbos, and has recently been
transferred from the Benaki Museum to the Byzantine and Christiane Museum in Athens (exhibit no.
ΒΧΜ 00888). The other three objects remain in the Benaki Museum (the earring—no. ΓΕ 1809, the
bracelet clasp—no. ΓΕ 1837, and the quatrefoil ornament—no. ΓΕ 1839). There is a similar early
Byzantine quatrefoil silver ornament with cruciform Greek monograms on both sides in another
museum collection (BrM, reg. no. 1982,0102.1).
70 Schulze-Dörrlamm, Byzantinische Gürtelschallen, vol. 2, p. 286; Albrecht, ‘Warum tragen wir
einen Gürtel?’.
71 Treister, ‘Bronzovye i zolotye priazhki’.
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150 Graphic Signs of Authority

transmission is rather hard to establish, especially since the rare usage of mono-
grams in this medium was established much later, from the late fifth century
through to the seventh. One of the earliest examples of such a belt buckle, dated to
around 500 and probably originating from Italy, features a central medallion with
a personal box monogram incised in niello (Fig. 5.11a), which encoded the name
of the belt’s wearer, a high-ranking military officer.72 This warrior could have been

Fig. 5.11. Monograms on sixth-century objects, graphic drawings: a) from Italy (c.500);
b) from the Moselle area; c) crossbow fibula from Yenikape, Istanbul. Drawing by Arwa
Darwich-Eger; d) the central medallion of the silver plate of kandidatos Nektarios from
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, mid-sixth century.

72 Schulze-Dörrlamm, Byzantinische Gürtelschallen, vol. 1, pp. 65–7 (type B13), plate 4.3; and vol. 2,
p. 323. The monogram has been decoded as presenting the name Marius, but its constituting letters
M, H, R, S, and L or C do not support that interpretation.
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Monograms and Social Status in Early Byzantium 151

connected to Odovacar’s followers or the Ostrogothic military,73 who were no

different from late Roman and early Byzantine armies in their use of monogram-
matic belt buckles or rings. As the finds of belt buckles with box monograms
show,74 after the demise of Western Roman emperorship, this material tradition
survived in sixth-century Italy as well as to the north of the Alps in the ­Rhine-Moselle
region. For example, bronze and gilded silver belt buckles have been discovered
in the Rhine-Moselle area, in two separate sixth-century warrior graves—one
with the monogram AGNUS (Fig. 5.11b) and the other with the monogrammatic
name that has been deciphered as GUNDEBALDUS or DN HELEBADUS/
HILDEBADUS.75 In the first half of the sixth century, these territories were con-
trolled by the kings of the Ostrogoths and Burgundians, and by the Merovingian
king Theodebert I (533–48), all of whom proudly displayed their Latin box mono-
grams on their royal coins.76
From the mid-sixth to seventh centuries, this practice reached its zenith in the
core Byzantine areas in the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as in reconquered terri-
tories in Sicily, North Africa, and southern Spain, as evinced by finds of belt buck-
les with cruciform monograms in these regions.77 A mould for a belt plate with a
Greek cruciform monogram has even been found at Classe, the port of Ravenna.78
Furthermore, gold belt buckles bearing the cruciform personal monograms of their
wearers began to be produced at imperial workshops in this period, most likely for
distribution among higher imperial officials (Fig. 5.12).79 As with late antique
rings, these precious symbols of status and social power were supplemented by
cheaper copper-alloy buckles embellished with monograms, which were distrib-
uted among lower social strata.80 One particular group of such belt buckles
features the cruciform monograms of Emperor Heraclius (610–41), and could
have been produced as donatives given to his soldiers.81 This monogrammatic
practice was also adaptive to changes in fashion, as shown by the appearance of
monograms on the strap ends of belts from the late sixth century until the end
of the seventh.82
Along with gold belt buckles displaying personal monograms, imperial work-
shops at Constantinople began issuing gold crossbow fibulas (another male dress
accessory expressing a social rank) with cruciform personal monograms of their
recipients. One of them has been unearthed during recent excavations in Yenikapi

73 On the interplay of a military status and ‘ethnic’ identity among Ostrogoths in Italy, see Halsall,
‘The Ostrogothic Military’.
74 Schulze-Dörrlamm, Byzantinische Gürtelschallen, vol. 2, fig. 128.
75 Deloche, Étude historique, pp. 366–8, no. VI; Schulze-Dörrlamm, Byzantinische Gürtelschallen,
vol. 2, p. 323; Seibt and Koch, ‘Eine Schilddornschnalle’, pp. 341–3.
76 For more details, see Chapter 7.
77 Schulze-Dörrlamm, Byzantinische Gürtelschallen, vol. 2, fig. 128.
78 Christie, ‘Byzantines’, p. 116, plate 4.
79 For examples of such belt buckles and relevant references, see Ross, Catalogue, vol. 2, pp. 4 and
8–9, nos. 2 and 5; Entwistle, ‘Notes’, p. 20, no. 1.
80 See, for examples, Schulze-Dörrlamm, Byzantinische Gürtelschallen, vol. 1, pp. 184–6 (type
D15, dated to the seventh century); Entwistle, ‘Notes’, no. 11 (dated to c.600–50).
81 Schulze-Dörrlamm, Byzantinische Gürtelschallen, vol. 1, p. 186, nos. 163–4.
82 Tobias, ‘Riemenzungen’.
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152 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 5.12. Early Byzantine belt buckle, found in Hamas, Syria. Baltimore, WAM,
acc. no. 57.545.

(Istanbul), and has been dated to the second quarter or the middle of the sixth
century (Fig. 5.11c).83 Imperial workshops placed monograms not only on such
luxury objects as rings, belt buckles, strap ends, and crossbow brooches, but also
on another media intimately connected to the imperial sphere: silks. Anna
Muthesius has recently pointed to seventh- and eighth-century silks with cruci-
form monograms, including those bearing the monogrammatic device of Emperor
Heraclius, and she has argued that such ‘administrative silks’ were distributed
among various imperial officials, and that the imperial monograms woven onto
them functioned as graphic confirmations of imperial power and authority dele-
gated to their recipients.84
The personal monograms of late Roman and early Byzantine nobles appeared
not only on dress accessories, jewellery, and other material objects that tradition-
ally functioned as social extensions of the human body, but also on luxury objects
such as domestic silver tableware, which articulated the noble identity of their
owners in the context of dining as a social display of status. As early as the mid-
sixth century, Byzantine silver plates began to feature the cruciform monograms of
their owners as one of their principal decorative elements. This practice was prob-
ably inspired not only by the popularity of monograms on other media but also by
earlier Roman tradition. In this regard, it is hardly accidental that on the earliest
Byzantine sample the central monogrammatic device—decoded as ΝΕΚΤΑΡΙΟΣ
ΚΑΝΔΙΔΑΤΟΣ and thus identifying the owner as a palace guard—is framed by
a laurel wreath similar to that encircling the monograms of Pelegrina Turcia on the
late fourth-century silver plates from the Esquiline Treasure (Fig. 5.11d).85
Nectarios’ graphic sign is different from Pellegrina’s in employing a court title
instead of a late Roman aristocratic nomen, which is symptomatic of both the
changed sources of social power in early Byzantium and of its connection not so

83 Eger, ‘Between Amuletic Ornament’, p. 313; Kızıltan and Baran Çelik, eds, Stories, p. 127, no. 72.
84 Muthesius, ‘Memory and Meaning’, pp. 354–61.
85 Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, ID no. 4925. For a general overview of such early Byzantine plates,
see Leader-Newby, Silver and Society, pp. 177–80. See also ICA, no. 179539.
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Monograms and Social Status in Early Byzantium 153

much to an aristocratic pedigree as to imperial service. The practice of embellishing

the middle part of silver dishes with their owners’ monogrammatic signs continued
in the first half of the seventh century, as evinced by a plate from Nicosia with the
cruciform niello monogram ΙΩΑΝΝΟΥ (‘of John’), and by three plates from one
dining set—with the monogram ΘΕΟΔΩΡΟΥ Α (‘of Theodore Α[ual] . . .’)
framed by an ivy wreath—that have been found on Cypros and divided between
museums in New York, Baltimore, and Washington, DC (Fig. 5.13).86
Surviving late antique silver cochlearia provide more data for the new mono-
grammatic trend in domestic tableware, since spoons of that type began to be

Fig. 5.13. Early Byzantine silver plate (610–13). New York, MMA, acc. no. 52.25.2.

86 Dodd, Byzantine Silver Stamps, no. 33 (Nicosia, the Museum of Antiquities: 602–10), and nos.
37–9 (MMA, The Walters Art Gallery, and the Dumbarton Oaks Collection: 610–13); Ross,
Catalogue, vol. 1, no. 17, pp. 21–3; Mundell Mango, Silver, nos. 103–5.
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154 Graphic Signs of Authority

employed for general-purpose eating in the late Roman empire.87 The cochlearia
of the sixth and seventh centuries frequently featured the personal monograms of
their owners on the discs connecting the spoons’ bowls with their handles.
Connecting discs were a fifth-century invention, and created an ideal medallion-
shaped surface on which graphic signs such as monograms, christograms, and the
sign of the cross could be inscribed. One may wonder to what extent the growing
popularity of such graphic signs in late antiquity contributed to this distinctive
material development.
As shown by Stefan Hauser in his study of cochlearia discovered before 1992,
49 per cent of specimens (forty-one spoons) found in the Latin West (totalling
eighty-four spoons) bear Christian symbols on their discs, while 21 per cent
(eighteen spoons) are embellished with Latin box monograms (Fig. 5.14). The
percentage of monogrammed silver spoons grew even higher in early Byzantium.
Out of 113 surviving cochlearia, 37 per cent (forty-one spoons) feature discs
engraved with Greek box or cruciform monograms. The vast majority of mono-
grams (fifty out of fifty-nine) appear on the spoons’ left sides, with the intended
effect that the monogram would face an average right-handed person holding the
utensil.88 On the remaining nine spoons from the Desana hoard, produced in the
early decades of the sixth century, the left side was originally engraved with a
monogrammatic cross, and a somewhat crudely designed owner’s monogram,
possibly of the Ostrogoth Gundila, was added on the right side, probably at a later
stage.89 The left side of a spoon’s disc was thus chosen as the place of an owner’s
monogram in order to project their elevated status and cultural capital to guests
during social dining.

5.4. M O N O G R A M S A S A S Y M P TO M AT I C F E AT U R E
O F L AT E A N T I Q U E PA I D E I A

Personal monograms placed within a laurel or ivy wreath, or another circular

frame, were thus inscribed on silverware, jewellery, dress accessories, and other
­luxury objects to function as graphic signs of the owners’ social identity. In that
sense, they functioned in a similar manner to the later aristocratic coats of arms, and
Hans Belting’s comments on the status of late medieval coats of arms and portraits
as media of the body are highly relevant. In his words, the coat of arms was a sign
defining the body of a social estate; it was ‘an abstraction of a body’.90 In a similar
vein, late antique personal monograms on objects of social prestige functioned as

87 Swift, ‘Design’, p. 232.

88 Hauser, Spätantike und frühbyzantinische Silberlöffel, pp. 63–8. On the matter of right- and left-
handed usage of late Roman spoons, see Swift, ‘Design’, pp. 233–4. New silver spoons with mono-
grams have appeared in museum collections since 1992, such as the spoon with a Greek box monogram
that the Hermitage acquired in 2002 (inv. no. W-1497), which can be deciphered as ΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΙΟΥ
or ΙΟΥΣΤΙΝΙΑΝΟΥ.
89 Hauser, Spätantike und frühbyzantinische Silberlöffel, nos. 28–37, plate 5; Aimone, Il tesoro, nos.
34–42, pp. 106–8, and figs XVI.2, 4, 6, and XVII.5.
90 Belting, ‘The Coat of Arms’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi
Fig. 5.14. Late antique silver spoon. New York, MMA, acc. no. 2005.39.
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156 Graphic Signs of Authority

‘body signs’ referring to a specific social estate; in this case the late Roman and early
Byzantine aristocracy. For this reason, early monograms could include an aristo-
cratic nomen, and later ones a title referring to a noble status or imperial service.
During the reign of Justinian I, known for the anti-pagan purges of 529 and
545–6,91 early Byzantine graphic abstractions of a body began imitating the
salvific graphic image of God as Logos, namely the sign of the cross, and thus
manifested to the viewers the Christian credentials of people represented by such
monograms. By the seventh century, this graphic sign became the default mono-
grammatic structure for Byzantine Christian well-to-doers. The silver spoons from
the Lampsakos Treasure demonstrate that transition in an unambiguous way.
These spoons are marked with two different personal monograms: a cruciform
monogram ΤΙΜΟΘΕΟΥ (‘of Timothy’) and a complicated box monogram, fea-
turing a cross in the upper field and set within a traditional late Roman wreath.92
The spoons thus comprise examples from two different sets, each probably originally
consisting of twelve spoons. The two sets differ not only in the distinct owner’s
monograms on their discs, but also in the nature of their inscriptions. Eight
spoons from the set marked with the box monogram have been studied in museum
collections in London, Paris, and Smyrna and attributed to the sixth century. All
are inscribed on their bowls and on the top of their handles, with five including a
line from the anonymous Greek Epigram on the Seven Sages, well known in late
antiquity and Byzantium and preserved in the Palatine Anthology (Fig. 5.15).93 In
this epigram, popular Greek maxims were attributed to each sage (Cleobulos,
Chilon, Periander, Pittacus, Solon, Bias, and Thales), who are identified with
­reference to their hometowns. The remaining three spoons present to their viewer
Latin poetic lines. The spoon set thus operates as a material medium of late
antique paideia.
Yet the spoons’ quantity and employment in dining settings implies their use by
a small circle of their owner’s acquaintances in an environment where a jocular
tone was most welcome. Accordingly, on the left side of each handle facing a
spoon’s holder, and to the right of the owner’s monogram on its disc, short Greek
phrases (unknown from other sources and containing occasional misspellings) pro-
vide an elaboration or entertaining twist to a spoon’s main literary message. These
phrases were most likely created just for these spoons, and, following the owner’s
monogram, they serve as his personal comments or jokes, demonstrating his wit to
friends and relatives. On the spoons with the lines of the seven sages, for example,
Bias of Priene’s maxim ‘Most men are evil’ receives the jocular elaboration ‘Those

91 Kaldellis, ‘The Making of Hagia Sophia’, pp. 350–2.

92 Hauser, Spätantike und frühbyzantinische Silberlöffel, nos. 103–10 (box monogram) and 160–1
and 196–201 (cruciform monogram). He follows Fink in deciphering the first monogrammatic sign
as ΑΝΔΡΕΟΥ ΕΠΙΣΚΟΠΟΥ, but this interpretation remains dubious since the monogram lacks a
letter pi.
93 Greek Anthology, vol. 3, pp. 198–201. The lines referring to Cleobulus of Lindus and Thales of
Miletus are absent on surviving spoons. For further details on this set of spoons and its inscriptions,
see Hauser, Spätantike und frühbyzantinische Silberlöffel, pp. 69–74; Baratte, ‘Vaisselle’; Buckton, ed.,
Byzantium, no. 133, pp. 118–20.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi
Fig. 5.15. Silver spoons from the Lampsakus Treasure, view from above. London, BrM © The Trustees of
the British Museum.
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158 Graphic Signs of Authority

who detest pleasure’,94 whereas Periander of Corinth’s maxim ‘Restrain anger’ is

trivialized with the humorous comment ‘When your mistress hates you’.95 The
same playful epigrammatic exchange continues on the spoons with Latin verses
(Fig. 5.15), with the owner’s humorous responses given in Greek: Vergil’s ‘O hand-
some youth, do not believe too much in beauty’ (Eclogues, 2. 7) is countered with
‘You cannot be beautiful without money’,96 while ‘Love conquers all, and we yield
to love’ (Vergil, Eclogues, 10.69) meets the response ‘Eat, you who are lovesick’.97
An anonymous Roman epigraph, ‘Baths, wine and love make death come faster’,
receives the owner’s witty warning ‘Amidst incenses, watch your hernia’.98
Whereas the spoon set featuring the box monogram is representative of the
classical tradition of late antique paideia, the set marked with the cruciform mono-
gram and produced slightly later—between the mid-sixth and mid-seventh
centuries—leans towards new Christian erudition. The latter set is stripped of any
classical reference, and six out of the eight surviving spoons are inscribed with the
names of evangelists and apostles on the top of their handles: Matthew, Mark,
Luke, Jacob, Peter, and Simon. François Baratte has suggested a possible liturgical
function for these spoons, but this need not be the case.99 Any educated Christian
was expected to know the names of the evangelists and apostles, and such inscrip-
tions were probably deemed more appropriate for pious Christian owners or for
donors to ecclesiastical foundations, as were cruciform shapes. An early seventh-
century silver spoon from the Kaper Koraon Treasure in Syria, currently in The
Walters Art Gallery (Fig. 5.16), ­illustrates the latter point by showing the image of

Fig. 5.16. Silver spoon from the Kaper Koraon Treasure, Baltimore, WAM, acc. no. 57.649.

94 London, BrM, reg. no. 1848,0601.12: top—‘ΤΟΥC ΠΛΕΟΝΑC ΚΑΚΙΟΥC ΔΕ ΒΙΑC

ΑΠΕΦΗΝΕ ΠΡΙΗΝΕΥC ’; left side—‘ΤΟΥC ΜΙCΗΛΟΝΟΥC ’. English translations on the
spoon from the British Museum and Louvre are from Byzantium, ed. by Buckton, pp. 118 and 120.
95 Paris, Musée du Louvre, Bj 2049: top—‘ΟΣ ΔΕ ΚΌΡΙΝΘΟΝ ΕVΑΙΕ ΘΥΜΟΥ ΚΡΑΤΈ
ΕΙΝ ΠΕΡΊΑΝΔΡΟΣ ’, left side—‘ΟΤΑΝ ΜΙΣΙ ΣΕ Η ΦΙΛΗ ΣΟΥ ’.
96 London, BrM, reg. nos. 1848,0601.11: top—‘O FORMOSE PUER NIMIUM NE CREDE
COLORI’, left side—‘ΑΚΕΡΜΙC ΟΥΚ ΕΙ ΕΥΜΟΡΦΟC ’.
97 London, BrM, reg. nos. 1886,0709.1: top—‘OMNIA VINCIT AMOR ET NOS CEDAMUS
AMORI’, left side—‘ΤΡ ѠΓΕ ΕΡΟΤΟΚΡΟΥCΤΕ ’.
98 Originally in Smyrna, now lost, Hauser, Spätantike und frühbyzantinische Silberlöffel, p. 73:
top—‘BALNEA VINA VENUS FACIUNT PROPERANTIA FATA’; left side—‘ΘΥΩΝ ΤΗΡ[Η]Ι
ΤΗΝ ΚΗΛΗΝ ΣΟΥ ’.
99 Baratte, ‘Vaisselle’, p. 5; Hauser, Spätantike und frühbyzantinische Silberlöffel, pp. 78–87, argues
against a liturgical function for the late antique cochlearia.
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Monograms and Social Status in Early Byzantium 159

the cross on its bowl and the cruciform monograms of donors (‘of John’ and ‘of
Thomas’) on the two sides of the disc, with the name of their father spelled out on
the handle (‘[sons] of Theophilos’).100
Yet personal monograms were viewed as appropriate regardless of the classical or
Christian leanings of the spoons’ owners, because such graphic devices projected,
first and foremost, their noble status and familiarity with elevated late antique and
early Christian culture. This monogrammatic trend was also a part of a more
general awareness in the visuality of letters that gradually permeated late antique
culture and was mirrored in concurrent written discourses, for instance, in the
grammatical treatises. In the mid-fourth century, the famous grammarian Aelius
Donatus encapsulated a classical Roman attitude in his definition of a letter as ‘the
smallest part of articulated speech’.101 In an early sixth-century Institutiones
grammaticae, another author highly popular in the early Middle Ages, Priscian,
accentuated instead the difference between letters (litterae) as visual characters
(nota) and ‘elements’ (elementi) as their oral pronunciations (pronuntiationes).102
Priscian did so with reference to the fourth-century grammatical work of Diomedes,
but his choice must also have been influenced by the ubiquitous presence of visual
letterforms on material objects and monuments in his immediate social surround-
ings in Constantinople, where he taught Latin grammar between 512 and 526.103
The concurrent proliferation of monograms contributed to such awareness of the
profound distinction between the various visual forms that letters took across a
diverse range of media, and their related oral utterances.
To conclude, having originated as an ennobling feature of fourth- and fifth-
century calligraphic culture, by the sixth and seventh centuries monograms had
developed into an immanent part of a new visual Christian paideia, affecting
private headquarters as well as public spaces. Taking a broader perspective, the
spoons with monograms—alongside the monogrammatic coins of Theodosius
II and his imperial successors, the other luxury objects of gold and silver bearing
owners’ monograms and/or monogrammatic stamps of emperors and high-ranking
imperial officials, and the ivory diptychs with consular monograms—exemplified
a fifth- and sixth-century trend, one which employed monogrammatic devices as
the third mode of visual representation distinct from literary inscriptions/
legends and figural imagery. In the sixth century this representative mode, which
had originated in late antique calligraphic culture and rapidly spread across various
media, not only affected luxury and mass-produced objects but also influenced
ecclesiastical spaces.

100 Mundell Mango, Silver, no. 19, pp. 121–2; Hauser, Spätantike und frühbyzantinische Silberlöffel,
no. 149.
101 Donatus, Ars maior, ed. Holtz, p. 603: ‘Littera est pars minima vocis articulatae’.
102 Priscianus, Institutionum grammaticarum libri XVIII, ed. Hertz, vol. 1, pp. 6–7: ‘Hoc ergo
interest inter elementa et literas, quod elementa proprie dicuntur ipsae pronuntiationes, notae autem
earum literae.’
103 On Priscian’s text and the relevant passage, see Irvine, The Making, pp. 61–2, 93–4, and
97–101.
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6
Public Monuments and the
Monogrammatic Display of Authority
in the Post-Roman World

6 . 1 . F RO M C O N S U L A R D I P T YC H S TO T H E
M O N U M E N TA L D I S P L AY O F AU T H O R I T Y: J U L I A N A
A N I A N A A N D S T P O LY E U K TO S ( c . 5 0 6 – 2 7 )

The first notable example of monograms incorporated into a monumental display

of authority relates to the construction of the new church of St Polyeuktos in
Constantinople (completed by c.527–8).1 St Polyeuktos was built by a mighty
woman of imperial descent, Anicia Juliana (c.463–527/8) (Chart 6.1). Her father,
Flavius Anicius Olybrius, was western emperor in 472, while her mother Placidia
was a daughter of Emperor Valentinian III. Juliana married Areobindus, whose
consulship in 506 was commemorated by the set of diptychs discussed in the
previous chapter, and bore a son, Flavius Anicius Olybrius Junior, who became
consul in the East at a very young age in 491.2 Her family could thus claim imper-
ial pedigree; its male members were elevated to consulship, the highest Roman civil
office that late Roman and early Byzantine emperors regularly held; and her son
was named after his imperial grandfather. The imperial aspirations in Juliana’s
­family must therefore have been profound in the late fifth and early sixth centuries.
Juliana and her family were known to be firm supporters of Chalcedonian
Orthodoxy, and during a popular revolt in 512 against the monophysite policies of
Anastasius I, a rioting crowd approached Juliana’s palace shouting ‘Areobindus for
emperor’. Areobindus himself had already fled Constantinople to avoid any
involvement in that riot, and died not long thereafter. After the demise of her
husband, Anicia Juliana seems to have decided to promote her son Anicius Olybrius
Junior’s cause in the race for emperorship, who could boast of kinship with the
fifth-century emperors through his maternal lineage and could also claim proxim-
ity to the ruling emperor through his marriage to Anastasius I’s niece, Irene. After
all, in the early sixth century an oracle had predicted the rule of a certain ‘Olybrius’.3

1 Based on textual evidence, Mango and Ševčenko, ‘Remains’, date the construction of the church
to c.524–7. But the brickstamp evidence suggests that the construction of the church took place in
two stages starting after c.508/9 and ending before 528: Bardill, Brickstamps, vol. 1, pp. 62–4 and
111–16.
2 Jones, Martindale, and Morris, The Prosopography, vol. 2, pp. 143–4, 635–6, and 795–8.
3 The Oracle of Baalbek, ed. Alexander, p. 126, note 15.
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Monumental Monograms in the Post-Roman World 161

Anicius Olybrius Junior

(cos. 491)

Flavius Areobindus
Anicia Juliana
Dagalaifus (cos. 506)

Fl. Anicius Olybrius

Placidia
(western emperor, 472)

Emperor Valentinian III Empress Licinia Eudoxia

(West, 425–455) (West, 437–455)

Emperor Theodosius II Empress Eudocia

(East, 406–450) (East, 421–443)

Chart 6.1. The imperial ancestry of Anicius Olybrius Junior.

Yet this matrimonial move did not help Anicius Olybrius after Anastasius’ demise,
and he was sidelined by a shrewd Thracian commander of the palace guards, Justin I,
who beat the scramble and rose to imperial power in 518.4 In the 520s, Justin’s
younger nephew Justinian rose to prominence in Constantinople. His ascendancy
further jeopardized the chances that Anicius Olybrius Junior would receive imper-
ial nomination. These chances faded further still when Justinian I was proclaimed
caesar, probably in 525, and then became sole emperor after the death of Justin
I in 527. Five years later, Anicius somehow became involved in the Nika revolt
against Justinian and was exiled after its bloody suppression. Although at a later
stage he was permitted to return and even had his confiscated property restored to
him, this reconciliation did not halt his political downfall, and Juliana’s family van-
ished from the written record after these events.5
In this historical context, the gradual construction of the church in two stages
can hardly have been accidental. The first phase of the building process started a
few years after the consulship of Areobindus and was halted by the events of 512.
Around that time, the people of the city of Honoratae presented Juliana with a
luxurious manuscript, the so-called Vienna Dioscorides, as a reciprocal gift for the

4 Croke, ‘Justinian under Justin’, pp. 16–19; Bjornlie, Politics, pp. 60–2.
5 Harrison, Excavations, vol. 1, pp. 4–5 and 419; Harrison, A Temple, p. 36.
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162 Graphic Signs of Authority

church she had built in their town. The manuscript is notable for its ambiguous
dedication miniature that shows Juliana as a figure with various imperial attributes,6
suggesting that in the 510s and 520s many in Constantinople and its surrounding
areas perceived Juliana and her male family members to be worthy of the imperial
throne. The second major phase in the construction of the church, when its
superstructures were erected, was carried out between c.517 and 521 when the
elderly Justin I became emperor rather unexpectedly, and the matter of the following
imperial succession remained undecided and contested.7 Public display played an
important role in that contest, and the future emperor Justinian is said to have
surpassed the spending of all other consuls for his first consular games in 521.8 The
new church of St Polyeuktos was completed soon after Justinian’s consulship,
and presented another monumental form of public display. Built near Anicia
Juliana’s palace, the church communicated to the people of Constantinople the
hereditary authority and exceptional position of her family in the imperial capital,
the attributes that Justinian clearly lacked. The splendid building replaced an
earlier and smaller church dedicated to the same saint, which had been founded by
Juliana’s great grandmother, Eudocia. It is important to remember that in early
Byzantium the foundation or refoundation of a church was a public act that
enhanced one’s reputation and authority, and for noble women, such activity rep-
resented the principal legitimate means to demonstrate status and social power.
Furthermore, refounding a church allowed the person responsible to be compared
to its original founder, usually favourably—in the case of St Polyeuktos and Anicia
Juliana, the latter surpassed the deeds of none other than Empress Eudocia, the
pious wife of Theodosius II.9
In its contemporary context, the refounding of St Polyeuktos could have been
seen as a public act designed to express the imperial claims of Juliana’s family, and,
once completed, the church might have appeared to its contemporaries ‘as a
challenge to the authority of Justin and his nephew Justinian’.10 The text of a
Greek epigram placed inside the church to praise its founder made these imperial
allusions clear, emphasizing that Anicia Juliana had built a church finer and larger
than her imperial ancestress and was thus worthy of her imperial descent. Such
allusions might have been interpreted by her contemporaries as a stark contrast to
the markedly humble origins of both Justin I and the up-and-coming Justinian I.
Furthermore, the epigram expresses the hope that, by the construction of this and
other churches, Juliana and her ‘immortal family’—including her only son and his
daughters—would receive protection from her holy intercessors. Finally, the text
likens her ostentatious building to the Temple of Solomon,11 built by a traditional

6 Kiilerich, ‘The Image’, with important corrections in Croke, ‘Justinian, Theodora’, p. 56, note
158; and Nathan, ‘The Vienna Dioscorides’ dedicatio’, pp. 95–102.
7 Bardill, Brickstamps, vol. 1, pp. 62–4 and 111–16.
8 The Chronicle of Marcellinus, ed. Croke, p. 41; Croke, ‘Justinian under Justin’, p. 37; Antony
Eastmond, ‘Consular Diptychs’, p. 762.
9 James, ‘Making the Name’, esp. pp. 63–5.    10 Harrison, Excavations, vol. 1, p. 420.
11 Harrison, A Temple, p. 139; Harrison, Excavations, vol. 1, pp. 5–7. On the architectural similar-
ities with the Solomonic Temple, see Bardill, ‘A New Temple’.
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Monumental Monograms in the Post-Roman World 163

figure of reference for the early Byzantine emperors. The new church was certainly
worthy of such a comparison: at the time of its construction it was the largest
church in Constantinople, embellished with gilded ceilings and piers and columns
made of local Proconnesian marble. Its inner parts were decorated with carvings
made by the best sculptors available in Constantinople, and were consequently
superior to those of any earlier church built in Constantinople. Its inner decorations
were further distinguished by their departure from traditional Graeco-Roman
forms, and were instead influenced by Sasanian architectural ornament.12 This
artistic choice may have been intentional, conveying both Juliana’s familiarity with
the Sasanian visual culture of royalty and her claim to sovereignty in a truly cosmo-
politan sense.13
Box monograms of Greek letters were carved on some piers and capitals, and on
the cornices placed above the doorways leading from the narthex to the nave. The
monograms on the fragments of cornices found during excavations are all of differ-
ent kinds and cannot be interpreted as hiding the name of the church’s founder or
that of her son;14 they could instead have encoded an invocative textual message
addressed to the building’s visitors. The piers of the church, two of which were
reused as spolia in thirteenth-century Venice (the so-called pilastri acritani outside
San Marco), were unique for their carved ornaments (Fig. 6.1). Box monograms
framed by medallions occupied central locations within the piers’ ornamental
designs, with two monograms on two opposite sides. Unfortunately, these graphic
devices survive only on one side of each pier in Venice, but it is clear that the upper
monograms encoded the name of St Polyeuktos in the genitive, Ἁγίου Πολυεύκτου
(Fig. 6.2a–b).15 The meaning of a monogram preserved on the lower part of one
of the piers remains unclear (Fig. 6.2c). Thus, no surviving monogram from
St Polyeuktos can confidently be deciphered as the name of either Anicia Juliana or
her son (Fig. 6.2d).16 Yet the meaning of these graphic devices is not just unclear
to modern audiences but was also obscure to Justin I and Justinian I, who lacked
formal literary education and were viewed as cultural outsiders by the imperial
aristocracy of Constantinople.17 As mentioned in the preceding chapter, creating
and reading monograms became an immanent part of late antique paideia, and
the great grandfather of Anicia Juliana, Theodosius II, even received an epithet
celebrating his calligraphic skills. The use of various monograms as decorative
messages in the inner parts of the church thus aimed to show through the medium

12 Harrison, Excavations, vol. 1, p. 414; Harrison, A Temple, p. 80; and Strube, Polyeuktoskirche,
pp. 61–80.
13 Canepa, The Two Eyes, pp. 210–16.
14 Mango and Ševčenko, ‘Remains’, p. 240; Harrison, A Temple, pp. 90, 121, nos. 2a–b, figs 111–20;
Deichmann, ed., Corpus, pp. 138–41, nos. 639–40; Eastmond, ‘Monograms’, pp. 219–20 and 226–7.
15 Harrison, Excavations, vol. 1, p. 130, nos. 6a i–ii, figs 143, 144, and 154. See also a fragment of
a pier with the monogram of St Polyeuktos within a box frame, Harrison, Excavations, vol. 1, p. 162,
nο. 21, fig. 236.
16 A reused capital in the Papadopoli Gardens in Venice, identified as originally belonging to this church,
has a badly preserved box monogram, which is also difficult to decipher: Vickers, ‘A “New” Capital’.
17 Bell, Social Conflict, p. 276.
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164 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 6.1. Pilastri acritani outside San Marco, Venice.

of ennobling calligraphic art that, unlike the Thracian newcomers,18 Juliana

and her family were equal to Theodosius. As such, the monumental monograms in
St Polyeuktos functioned as signs of authority that evoked the lineage and impec-
cable cultural background of Juliana and her family.
The church of St Polyeuktos preserves the earliest known use of monumental
monograms in such numbers, and they appeared on various types of carved decor-
ations within the building. Yet it is probable that such a practice started on a more
modest scale around the turn of the sixth century.19 A single capital of unknown
provenance found in Rome features a box monogram placed within a laurel wreath.
The monogram has been deciphered as the name of the Roman urban prefect in
509–10, Artemidorus (Fig. 6.3a); however, this attribution remains highly hypo-
thetical.20 Capitals in Ravenna with monograms of the Ostrogothic king Theoderic
the Great (493–526) provide a more secure early case of monumental monograms
(Fig. 6.3b), contemporary with the construction of St Polyeuktos and perhaps
even slightly earlier.21 These capitals currently surmount columns in the portico

18 On the rather deficient educational backgrounds of Justin I and Justinian I, see Croke, ‘Justinian
under Justin’, pp. 19–22.
19 Joachim Kramer suggests that the use of monumental monograms as signs of ruling sovereigns
started at the end of the fifth century: ‘Kämpferkapitelle’, p. 189.
20 Dresken-Weiland, ‘Ein Kämpfer-Kapitell’.
21 For stylistic reasons, these capitals have been dated to the first half of the sixth century, Sodini,
Barsanti, and Guidobaldi, ‘La sculpture’, p. 323.
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Monumental Monograms in the Post-Roman World 165

Fig. 6.2. a–b) Ἁγίου Πολυεύκτου monograms on the pilastri acritani; c) undeciphered
monogram on the pilastri acritani; d) monogram on a capital from St Polyeuktos, reused in
the Papadopoli Gardens in Venice.

Fig. 6.3. Monumental monograms from: a) Rome; b) Ravenna; c) Aphrodisias.

of the Venetian Palace, at the Piazza del Popolo. Originally, they were carved
either for the public building known as basilica Herculis or, more likely, for the
so-called ecclesia Gothorum built by Theoderic during his rule over Italy.22
Theoderic’s monumental monograms are identical to those used on his silver

22 Cirelli, Ravenna, pp. 98, 236, and 248.

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166 Graphic Signs of Authority

coins, and were no doubt deployed to display his authority in the public spaces of
the Ostrogothic capital.
Such usage of monumental monograms represented a natural development
from the earlier Roman tradition of naming a sponsor on public monuments, and
on columns in particular. For example, Ammianus mocked C. Ceionius Rufius
Volusianus (also called Lampadius), the urban prefect of Rome in 364, for his
habit of inscribing his own name onto ancient monuments as their founder
when he had simply restored them (Res gestae, xxvii. 3.7). Indeed, columns with
Volusanius’ name carved on them (as VOLVSIANIVC) have been found in Ostia,
near Rome, in the portico around the temple of the Fabri Navales. At the time of
the portico’s construction, a patron’s name might typically be placed on the lower
part of a column.23 But by the early sixth century, the upper part of a column, and
more precisely its capital, became an honoured place for such an inscription. The
Church of San Clemente in Rome preserves an example of this practice on one of
the pillars that the presbyter Mercurius, later Pope John II (533–5), donated to his
church, where they probably supported a baldachin over the altar.24
The appearance of monumental monograms may also have been influenced by
an earlier tradition in which stonemasons carved marks onto various marble pillars,
piers, bases, and capitals produced in Proconnesus near Constantinople from the
late fourth century onwards. These resembled control marks used in Hellenistic
coinage and displayed just a few letters, sometimes conjoined in simple box
monograms, which are thought to have represented the abbreviated names of their
producers.25 In contrast, monumental monograms might have developed as a
means to honour donors or commissioners within specific ritual settings.
The city of Aphrodisias in Asia Minor reveals the use of personal monograms in
public buildings in a manner reminiscent of the above-mentioned Italian cases.
Charlotte Roueché has assigned the production of these monograms to a wide
period spanning the fifth and sixth centuries and perhaps stretching even later;
however the box monograms on column capitals there were probably carved in the
late fifth century or the first half of the sixth.26 Thus, for example, the monogram
of Symbaticius placed within a medallion found in the Triconch Church (Fig. 6.3c)
is similar to the monumental monogram of King Theoderic (Fig. 6.3b): both
have a cross in their upper field.27 As in the Italian cases, the monograms on
capitals also almost certainly originated in churches, where they encoded the
names of donors. Charlotte Roueché sees this new practice as symptomatic of a
novel, late antique epigraphic trend, wherein epigrams ceased to be interpreted as
‘a formal civic document of public record’ and instead became a means to offer
‘idiosyncratic honours to individuals’. From the sixth century onwards, she states,

23 Bloch, ‘The Pagan Revival’, pp. 204–5.

24 Guidobaldi, ‘I capitelli’; and Brandenburg, Die frühchristlichen Kirchen, p. 155, fig. 90.
25 Deichmann, Ravenna, vol. 2.2, pp. 206–30; Sodini, ‘Marques’, pp. 503–10; Sodini, ‘Marble
and Stoneworking’, p. 134.
26 Roueché, Aphrodisias, VII.15–17, nos. 101–3 and plate xxvii.
27 Roueché, Aphrodisias, no. 101 and plate xxvii. The capitals with the monogram of Symbaticius
belong to a type dated to the sixth century; see Sodini, ‘Marble Capitals’, p. 189.
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Monumental Monograms in the Post-Roman World 167

epigraphic inscriptions began to fulfil an important decorative function, and

­ onumental monograms combined well with other carved decorations in
m
churches.28 The evidence from Aphrodisias also suggests that, although the earliest
datable examples of monumental monograms seem to derive from Italy, it is highly
probable that the practice began first in the Greek East in the decades before
St Polyeuktos was rebuilt in Constantinople.

6.2. J U S T I N I A N I , T H E O D O R A , A N D A D E F E N S I V E
R E S P O N S E : S T S S E RG I U S A N D B A C C H U S ( c . 5 2 7 – 3 2 )

Justinian I did not take lightly the monumental challenge of Anicia Juliana’s
refoundation of St Polyeuktos, and at some stage before his imperial elevation to
augustus he founded a church of Sts Sergius and Bacchus. Attached to the
Hormisdas Palace, the church abutted the home of Justinian and his spouse
Theodora during the reign of his uncle, Emperor Justin I (518–27). The dates and
circumstances of the church’s construction have been a controversial matter since
the 1970s. Cyril Mango thought it was built to provide a place of worship to a
community of Monophysite refugee monks between 527 (or 531) and 536, arguing
that Theodora played a crucial role in its foundation.29 Richard Krautheimer and
Thomas Mathews have separately challenged both the alleged impetus for the
church’s construction and Mango’s proposed date-range, but these claims have
been reiterated in a somewhat modified form by Jonathan Bardill.30 Yet Brian
Croke’s recent re-evaluation of the existing evidence puts forward a strong argument
against the Mango-Bardill thesis. Croke has questioned the connection between
the church’s construction and the alleged community of Monophysite monks in
Hormisdas. More importantly for our discussion, Croke has also advanced a strong
case for placing the start of construction before 1 April 527, when Justinian’s
imperial elevation to the status of Justin’s co-ruler occurred. The building is thus
interpreted by Croke and certain other scholars as Justinian’s programmatic
response to the construction of St Polyeuktos.31
Croke also refers to Justinian’s inauguration as caesar—probably in the second
half of 525—as a possible impetus for the foundation of Sts Sergius and Bacchus:
from that time on, Justinian’s status as ‘second emperor’ would have meant he
needed his own court and ceremonial space.32 Since the nave entablature describes
both Justinian and Theodora as emperor/empress and augusti, the church was most
likely conceived of in the mid-520s and completed between April 527 and c.532.

28 Roueché, Aphrodisias, Introduction.10–12.

29 Mango, ‘The Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus at Constantinople’; Mango, ‘The Church of
Sts. Sergius and Bacchus Once Again’.
30 Krautheimer, ‘Again Saints Sergius and Bacchus’; Mathews, ‘Architecture’; Bardill, ‘The Church’.
For a new argument in favour of a later date, namely between 532 and 536, see Bardill, ‘The Date,
Dedication’. The latter article has appeared too late to be taken fully into account in my text.
31 Croke, ‘Justinian, Theodora’, pp. 26–63.
32 Croke, ‘Justinian, Theodora’, p. 29; Croke, ‘Justinian under Justin’, pp. 44–6.
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168 Graphic Signs of Authority

The military saint to whom the church was originally dedicated, St Sergius, was
a pertinent choice for Justinian given his earlier military career, while the nave
entablature has recently been read as an indirect response to Juliana’s epigram in
St Polyeuktos.33 In 524, Justinian had finally overcome the legal and personal
objections that had marred his official marriage to Theodora. Both became patri-
cians, and Justinian received the title of nobilissimus shortly after, making him in
formal terms the equal of Anicia Juliana.34 Yet Justinian’s pedestrian military back-
ground and Theodora’s earlier career as a circus dancer hardly made them equal in
the eyes of the public to the noble woman of imperial descent.
In this historical context, the construction of the Church of Sts Sergius and
Bacchus would have allowed the imperial couple to respond to Juliana’s symbolic
challenge to their nascent status. The new church was decorated with gilded mosa-
ics and carvings, and it is possible that the carvers who had previously worked on
St Polyeuktos were employed in the construction of Justinian’s church. Sts Sergius
and Bacchus could not match Juliana’s church in size, but surpassed it in other
respects. While the interior of St Polyeuktos featured columns and piers made of
local white Proconnesian marble, Justinian and Theodora’s church was embellished
with expensive columns made of green verd-antique (breccia) marble from Thessaly
and red Synnada marble from Phrygia. At that time, these coloured marbles were
well-known symbols of power and status,35 and Justinian I did not miss the oppor-
tunity to demonstrate his newly acquired imperial status through such symbolic
means. His new church also had several innovative features, including an octagonal
central part covered with a dome.36 While the column capitals feature monograms,
unlike those of St Polyeuktos they neither present the name of a saint nor optative
messages. Instead, they communicate the names and titles of the founders, Justinian
and Theodora. All the monograms face the inner octagon; none appear on the
sides that face the inner passageways and galleries. As such, they were designed as
graphic signs of authority for the ruling couple, addressing any visitor who stood
in the church’s central area. They undoubtedly showed that this building was, first
and foremost, the church of Justinian and Theodora, and only then of St Sergius,
who occupied a secondary and subordinate position of importance.
In their arguments regarding the origins of the church, both Bardill (in 2000)
and Croke refer to the description of the monumental monograms of Justinian
and Theodora furnished by H. Swainson more than a century ago.37 These scholars
postulate that because the Church of Sts Sergius and Bacchus does not feature the
ΑΥΓΟΥCΤΑC monogram that one can see in Hagia Sophia, the former church
must have been completed before c.532–3 when construction of Justinian’s Hagia
Sophia began.38 Yet Swainson’s account of the surviving monograms is seriously

33 Croke, ‘Justinian, Theodora’, pp. 49–54.

34 Croke, ‘Justinian under Justin’, pp. 40–3.
35 Sodini, ‘Marble and Stoneworking’, pp. 131–2; Melfos, ‘Green Thessalian Stone’, p. 395.
36 Van Millingen, Byzantine Churches, pp. 72–5. Cf. Bardill, ‘The Date, Dedication’, pp. 105–18.
37 Swainson, ‘Monograms’. Cf. Bardill, ‘The Date, Dedication’, pp. 76–81.
38 Bardill, ‘The Church of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus’, p. 3; and Croke, ‘Justinian, Theodora’, p. 49.
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Monumental Monograms in the Post-Roman World 169

flawed. Firstly, as Joachim Kramer has noted,39 there is in fact one ΑΥΓΟΥCΤΑC
monogram preserved in the Church of Sts Sergius and Bacchus. Secondly, a
peculiar pattern in the spatial distribution of monograms survives in that church
that Swainson omits entirely. This latter observation sheds light on both the
process of building the church and consequently on its dating, and therefore needs
to be brought into this discussion.
Fourteen columns directly face the central opening on each level of the church
(Fig. 6.4 and Diagram 6.1). The columns on the ground floor are surmounted
with melon capitals featuring monogram medallions on the sides facing the centre.
On most capitals the monograms have been erased, although in two cases these
seem to have been restored at a later stage, both times erroneously: firstly, as a com-
bination of the letters F, M, and B on a capital in the south-western bay,40 and
secondly, as a cruciform monogram consisting of the letters O, Y, C, and A on a
capital in the southern bay (Fig. 6.5a). Van Millingen deciphered the latter mono-
gram as giving the name of Theodora,41 probably because of its cruciform shape;
the presence of Theodora’s cruciform monograms in both Hagia Sophia and Hagia
Irene was known to him in the early twentieth century. But the surviving example

Fig. 6.4. Sts Sergius and Bacchus, Istanbul, inner view.

39 Kramer, ‘Kämpferkapitelle’, p. 185. This observation is duly noted by Unterweger, ‘The Image’,
p. 106, note 62.
40 A similar monogram with an additional letter R at the bottom can be seen in Hagia Sophia.
Both must have made in either the early modern or modern period.
41 Van Millingen, Byzantine Churches, p. 73. Cf. Bardill, ‘The Date, Dedication’, pp. 78–80 and
note 49.
 E

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

S
Ground level Gallery level
N
W

D B
D D D
B I
T

D I
D B
D B A
D I
T

D
B D I
I B B
D D I
D T

D - damaged monogram
I - IOYCTINIANOY monogram
B - BACIΛEΩC monogram
T - ΘEOΔΩPAC monogram The walls tinted grey
A - AYΓOYCTAC monogram are Turkish work

Diagram 6.1. The plan of Sts Sergius and Bacchus.

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Monumental Monograms in the Post-Roman World 171

Fig. 6.5. Monumental monograms on the ground level of Sts Sergius and Bacchus:
a) southern bay; b–c) north-western bay; d) north-eastern bay; e–f ) additional columns
in southern bay.

in Sts Sergius and Bacchus includes only some letters of her name and introduces
extraneous elements: the upsilon is not present in Theodora’s name, while the
central cruciform structure can also be read as a letter tau, which is only found
in Justinian’s name. Additionally, its appearance and much brighter colouring
differs from the surrounding surface to the extent that this graphic device might be
the result of later restoration using plaster or similar material. One should there-
fore proceed with especial caution when deploying this peculiar monogram as early
Byzantine evidence without closer inspection. Fortunately, two original mono-
grams survive intact on the capitals of the north-western bay, protected by the
müezzin mahfili built in the Ottoman period when this church was turned into a
mosque. The monograms present the name and title of Justinian in the genitive:
ΙΟΥCΤΙΝΙΑΝΟΥ to the left and ΒΑCΙΛΕΩC to the right (Fig. 6.5b–c). Another
type of the ΒΑCΙΛΕΩC monogram has also been preserved on a western capital
in the north-eastern bay (Fig. 6.5d). These three monograms seem not to have
been cut as deep as the surrounding ornament, which may indicate that they were
carved after the capitals were installed at their present locations. Behind the
southern bay, two additional columns with capitals of a cushion type stand
beneath the gallery and display Justinian’s monograms towards the central part:
ΙΟΥCΤΙΝΙΑΝΟΥ to the left and ΒΑCΙΛΕΩC to the right (Fig. 6.5e–f ).
That no trace of the ΑΥΓΟΥCΤΑC box monogram survives on ground-floor
capitals suggests that this level might have been completed after Justinian became
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172 Graphic Signs of Authority

caesar but before he and Theodora were proclaimed augusti.42 The unusual forms
of monograms used on the ground floor support this interpretation, since they
either present unique or early monogrammatic forms. The main form of the
ΙΟΥCΤΙΝΙΑΝΟΥ monogram (Fig. 6.5b) in the north-western bay, for instance,
copies the main form of Emperor Anastastius’ monogram known from his pre-
reform bronze coinage and silver stamps.43 But the placement of the letters omi-
cron and upsilon at the top middle field is unique, and was never repeated here or
in either Hagia Sophia or Hagia Irene, suggesting that this medallion represents
one of the earliest attempts to carve Justinian’s monogram when no established
form yet existed. The same holds true for the ΒΑCΙΛΕΩC monogram in the same
bay (Fig. 6.5c), the style of which differs greatly when compared to other mono-
grams in the church, especially the shape of the letter beta. Furthermore, it places
an omega at the bottom, whereas a brief overview of monograms in the gallery of
this church as well as on the capitals in Hagia Sophia shows that placing an omega
on the top became standard later on. The monograms on the cushion capitals
inside the southern bay are also unique, and look as if they were carved somewhere
else before they were installed in the church. The circumstances of their production
may explain why they look so different to other monograms in the church that
were placed on capitals of different types. Justinian’s monogram presents a trad-
itional early form (Fig. 6.5e), but it adds a horizontal line attached to its right
vertical bar, which does not exist on other ΙΟΥCΤΙΝΙΑΝΟΥ monograms in this
church. This can be read either as the letter E, not present in Justinian’s name, or
more likely as an attempt to differentiate between the letter C and T. The
ΒΑCΙΛΕΩC monogram (Fig. 6.5f ) also has an early form, with an omega below.
Furthermore, it adds a unique elongated vertical bar in its alpha to indicate a
separate lambda. The only surviving monogram on the ground floor with a form
that would prove to become more common later on is the ΒΑCΙΛΕΩC mono-
gram in the north-eastern bay (Fig. 6.5d).
As mentioned above, the number of columns facing the centre of the church on
the gallery level matches that on the ground level. While they are smaller than
those below and surmounted with Pseudo-Ionic capitals, the gallery-level capitals
also feature imperial monograms that face the middle part of the church
(Diagram 6.1). Furthermore, all the monograms on the gallery level were carved
during the production of the capitals. The combination of the ΙΟΥCΤΙΝΙΑΝΟΥ
and ΒΑCΙΛΕΩC monograms is visible on four pairs of capitals: on the gallery’s
south-eastern (Fig. 6.6a–b), southern (Fig. 6.6c–d), south-western (Fig. 6.6e–f ),
and north-western sides (Fig. 6.6g–h). These monograms present both early
forms and those common to Hagia Sophia. The western (Fig. 6.7a), northern
(Fig. 6.7b), and north-eastern sides (Fig. 6.7c) of the gallery present the box monogram
of Theodora’s name in the genitive, a form known to be earlier than her cruciform

42 Restoration work in 2003–6 exposed monograms on two capitals in the ground-floor northern
triple arch. It is noteworthy that, on these capitals, Theodora’s personal monogram was paired not
with the ΑΥΓΟΥCΤΑC monogram, but with Justinian’s personal monogram. On these monograms,
see Bardill, ‘The Date, Dedication’, pp. 78–9.
43 Dodd, Byzantine Silver Stamps, table II, no. 2; Eastmond, ‘Monograms’, pp. 229–30.
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Monumental Monograms in the Post-Roman World 173

Fig. 6.6. ΒΑCΙΛΕΩC and ΙΟΥCΤΙΝΙΑΝΟΥ monograms on the gallery level of Sts
Sergius and Bacchus: a–b) south-eastern side; c–d) southern side; e–f ) south-western side;
g–h) north-western side.

monograms in Hagia Sophia. The title monogram, which must have accompanied
the ΘΕΟΔΩΡΑC monogram on the above sides of the gallery, has been effaced
in two instances and has only survived on the northern side, where it presents
the ΑΥΓΟΥCΤΑC monogram well known from Hagia Sophia (Fig. 6.7d). It is
noteworthy that the surviving monograms in the north-western bay and in the
gallery above it feature the same name, basileus Justinian, while in contrast
the ΒΑCΙΛΕΟC monogram in the north-eastern bay does not correspond to
Theodora’s monogram above it.
The spatial distribution of the monograms in the Church of Sts Sergius and
Bacchus, along with their differing modes of production, suggests that the ground
floor of the church was probably constructed before Justinian and Theodora were
proclaimed augusti on 1 April 527. At that time, some uncertainty evidently sur-
rounded the issue of which particular monograms should be used in the church,
and the capitals were consequently ordered with blank medallions. As suggested by
Croke, the construction of the church might have started in c.525 when Justinian
was elevated to the position of caesar. At the time when his monograms were some-
what haphazardly carved on the capitals, no established form of his name and title
yet existed, which explains the peculiar monogrammatic forms on the ground
floor. The adoption of Anastasius’ monogram that included all the letters of
Justinian’s name, and the appropriation of the ΒΑCΙΛΕΟC monogram, both
graphically expressed Justinian’s newly acquired imperial status. The gallery level
was constructed after the imperial couple had become augusti, a development that
allowed them to add the monograms of Theodora’s name and title on that level.
The gallery level was probably completed before construction began on Justinian’s
Hagia Sophia and Hagia Irene in 532, since Sts Sergius and Bacchus lacks a cruci-
form monogram of Theodora, which appeared in those two later churches. The
specific combination of name and title monograms on capitals seems to have been
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174 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 6.7. Monumental monograms on the gallery level of Sts Sergius and Bacchus: a–c)
ΘΕΟΔΩΡΑC monograms; d) ΑΥΓΟΥCΤΑC monogram.

invented specifically for Sts Sergius and Bacchus, where each bay and side have
two columns. These monograms were carved side by side so that they could be
decoded together: ‘of Emperor Justinian’ and ‘of Augusta Theodora’. Unlike the
monograms in St Polyeuktos, they were intended both to represent accessible and
unambiguous signs of authority for the new imperial couple, and to communicate
to the viewer the couple’s familiarity with the late antique aristocratic culture of
calligraphic display.
The distribution of monograms in Sts Sergius and Bacchus also suggests that it
was not originally built as a monastic church, but for the use of both men and
women, with a division made between male (southern) and female (northern)
sides that was common to large Byzantine churches.44 It is also possible that
Theodora’s monograms marked not only the female side of the church but the
place she and her female attendants occupied in the northern and north-eastern
sides of the gallery during services, while the entire southern side was reserved for
the emperor and his male followers. The imperial metatorion must have also been
situated on the southern side, as it was in the later church of Hagia Sophia. The

44 Mathews, The Early Churches, pp. 130–4; Karras, ‘Female Deacons’, p. 286 and note 62; Britt,
‘Fama’, p. 128.
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Monumental Monograms in the Post-Roman World 175

description of traditional annual imperial visits to Sts Sergius and Bacchus included
in the tenth-century De ceremoniis does not contradict this interpretation.45
To summarize, the imperial monograms in the Church of Sts Sergius and
Bacchus were conceived of as monumental signs of imperial authority intended for
public display. Unlike the monumental monograms in St Polyeuktos, they were
limited to two pairs, to ensure viewers would easily comprehend them as present-
ing the names and titles of the imperial couple. To distinguish visually between the
title monograms of Justinian and Theodora, the latter employed the title Augusta,
the highest title available for a Byzantine empress. This newly invented pattern of
monogrammatic usage was then applied in Hagia Sophia and other imperial foun-
dations inside and outside Constantinople.

6.3. T H E M O N O G R A M M AT I C D I S P L AY O F I M P E R I A L
AU T H O R I T Y I N H A G I A S O P H I A ( 5 3 2 – 7 )

Justinian’s Hagia Sophia was built in the years 532–7, following the Nika riots
(532) when his lack of legitimacy had become most apparent, and the need for a
grandiose public display of imperial authority thus became most urgent. The
emperor responded to this challenge by making an unparalleled investment in the
construction of a new magnificent church, which provided him with unprecedented
symbolic settings for the remaining part of his reign. In addition, he prohibited the
building of churches in Constantinople without imperial approval, so that no
noble would have a chance to challenge the emperor in this sphere again.46 The
destruction of the original church on the site of Hagia Sophia during the riots
allowed the emperor to rebuild it on a scale unmatched by his imperial predeces-
sors. It equalled St Polyeuktos in size and decoration,47 and surpassed it in other
respects. Its architectural elements were constructed not only of local Proconnesian
and Thessalian verd-antique marbles, as were some in the church of Sts Sergius and
Bacchus, but also of more precious ‘imperial’ marbles, namely green porphyry
from Peloponnese and red porphyry from Egypt. The building’s eight longest
columns in the exedras, for instance, were made of the latter Egyptian marble.48
The new Hagia Sophia was built by two renowned architects, Anthemios of
Tralles and Isidoros of Miletus, who diligently utilized their knowledge of Graeco-
Roman mathematics and astronomy to position and construct the building so that
its inner spaces were illuminated with daylight in the best possible way, thus

45 Nor can this general description corroborate this interpretation beyond doubt: Constantine
Porphyrogenitos, The Book of Ceremonies, 1. 11, trans. Moffatt and Tall, vol. 1, pp. 86–9; van
Millingen, Byzantine Churches, pp. 69–70.
46 Bell, Social Conflict, pp. 306–8 and 319–36.
47 Mainstone, Hagia Sophia, pp. 147–8.
48 Mango, Hagia Sophia, p. xxxix; Sodini, ‘Marble and Stoneworking’, pp. 132–3; and Mainstone,
Hagia Sophia, pp. 187–98. Red porphyry from Egypt was not accessible at that time and the column
shafts made of this marble, which differ slightly in length, were probably taken as spolia from classical
sites.
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176 Graphic Signs of Authority

creating—in Procopius’ words—a true ‘temple of light’.49 This light was in turn
perceived as the visual manifestation of divine immanence within this church
dedicated to Holy Wisdom.50 Being inside this building was and remains an
impressive visual experience (Fig. 6.8), and the designers of the church utilized
various optical effects in order to unlock the religious imagination of its visitors. In
short, the visual programme of Hagia Sophia was thoroughly planned, and a sys-
tematic use of imperial monograms on its capitals doubtlessly formed an intended
element of that original design. As emphasized by Paul the Silentiary, both God
and Emperor were honoured in this church,51 and their graphic signs were ubiqui-
tous inside. The symbol of the divine Lord, the cross, adorned the dome mosaic
and was visible from any spot in the nave,52 while various forms of the cross were
woven into aniconic mosaics in other parts of the original sixth-century church.53
This graphic sign of God was accompanied by the monograms of Justinian I and
Theodora on capitals (Fig. 6.9), as if their monogrammatic symbols functioned as
graphic mediators between the primary symbol of the divine and the building’s
visitors who stood beneath. Such a visual arrangement echoes Deacon Agapetos’
statement addressed to Justinian in the second quarter of the sixth century: ‘In his
bodily essence, the emperor is equal of every man, but in the power of his rank he
is like God over all men. He has no one on earth who is higher than he.’54 The
imperial couple’s monograms faithfully visualize this perception of their exalted
status to any church attendant standing below one of these columns on either level
and being able to view the imperial monograms and their constituent letters at a
distance of approximately five to eight metres. Through their graphic devices,
Justinian and Theodora’s imperial power was omnipresent in the church, and most
visitors were probably able to grasp this visual message of imperial authority.
The capitals in the church’s numerous colonnades are carved with monograms
on the sides facing the nave and the aisles or galleries, while some capitals sur-
mounting columns set against walls in the aisles feature a monogram only on
the side directly facing their viewers. In total, forty monograms were carved on the
ground floor, and fifty-nine were probably originally carved on the gallery level,
adding up to a grand total of ninety-nine, a figure perhaps chosen intentionally.
Ninety-nine is the age at which Abraham was circumcised (Genesis, 17. 24), an act
symbolizing his covenant with God. Ninety-nine is also the numerical value of the
letters in the Greek word ΑΜΗΝ (1 + 40 + 8 + 50 = 99)—an affirmative interjec-
tion paramount within Christian liturgy. At the same time, ninety-nine represented

49 Schibille, ‘Astronomical and Optical Principles’. For a more detailed discussion of the idea that
the design of Hagia Sophia accommodated the Neoplatonic ideas of beauty and light, and their
Pseudo-Dionysian adaptations, see Schibille, Hagia Sophia. For the probable Neoplatonic cultural
background of the two architects, see Kaldellis, ‘The Making of Hagia Sophia’.
50 Schibille, Hagia Sophia, pp. 27–31.
51 Paul the Silentiary, Description of Hagia Sophia, Prologue, 1–2, trans. Bell, p. 189; Bell, Social
Conflict, p. 333.
52 Mango, ed., The Art of the Byzantine Empire, p. 83.
53 For the detailed discussion of original mosaics and relevant bibliography, see Schibille, Hagia
Sophia, pp. 109–39.
54 Agapetos, Advice to the Emperor Justinian, 21, trans. Bell, p. 107.
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Monumental Monograms in the Post-Roman World 177

Fig. 6.8. Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, inner view.

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178 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 6.9. Imperial monograms in Hagia Sophia: a) ΒΑCΙΛΕΩC; b) ΙΟΥCΤΙΝΙΑΝΟΥ;

c) ΑΥΓΟΥCΤΑC; d) ΘΕΟΔΩΡΑC.

an important aspect of the architects’ calculations for the building’s central piers
and the related size of its original dome. Modern research suggests that the side
length of the square space created by the nave’s four huge piers was calculated as
ninety-nine Byzantine feet.55
The monograms encode in the genitive the same imperial names and titles as
those in the Church of Sts Sergius and Bacchus. While monograms that visualize
the name and title of Justinian (βασιλέως Ιυοστινιανού) and Theodora’s title
(Αυγούστας) generally employ consistent forms in various parts of the building,
monogrammatic forms of the empress’s name (Θεοδώρας) demonstrate greater
variety (Fig. 6.10.2–3). This difference probably stemmed from the fact that by
532 Justinian’s monograms were already used in other media, and had acquired a

55 Svenshon and Stichel, ‘ “Systems of Nomads” ’; and Schibille, Hagia Sophia, p. 53.
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Monumental Monograms in the Post-Roman World 179

Fig. 6.10. Theodora’s monumental monograms: 1. in Sts Sergius and Bacchus; 2. in the
southern side of Hagia Sophia (2a–c: ground floor; 2d–g: gallery); 3. in the northern side
of Hagia Sophia (3a–e: ground floor; 3f–g: gallery); 4. in Hagia Irena; 5. on a capital from
the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul, originally from Hebdoman; 6. in St John of
Ephesos; 7. on bronze plaques in Hagia Sophia.

semi-official status. In contrast, Theodora’s personal monogram might have been

developed in connection with its use on capitals placed in churches built by
Justinian and his imperial spouse. As a result, master carvers must have had a
strong influence on the appearance of variants of Theodora’s monogram in different
places. Comparison of her personal monograms in Hagia Sophia (Fig. 6.10.2–3)
with those in other ecclesiastical foundations sponsored by the imperial couple—such
as Sts Sergius and Bacchus (Fig. 6.7a–c and Fig. 6.10.1), Hagia Irene (Fig. 6.10.4),
and St John of Ephesos (Fig. 6.10.6)—shows considerable difference in the form
of her monogram as it appeared in different churches.
Moreover, a noticeable discrepancy exists between Theodora’s personal mono-
grams on the northern side of Hagia Sophia, and those on the southern side. A
ninth-century anonymous tale recounting the church’s construction states that
Hagia Sophia was built by two competing teams of masters and workmen, each of
whom erected one of these sides until they eventually coalesced at the western and
eastern ends as well as at the building’s dome.56 The appearance of Theodora’s
monogram supports this version of events, since its various forms show independ-
ent development of this visual sign on each side. In other words, masters carving
on one side seem to have designed her personal monograms separately from those
working on the other side. The ‘southern team’ consistently used the same mono-
grammatic type on both levels of the church, which is closely related to one example
of Theodora’s monogram carved in Sts Sergius and Bacchus (Fig. 6.10.1–2). The

56 A relevant excerpt from this Narratio de S. Sophia appears in Mango, ed., The Art of the Byzantine
Empire, p. 96.
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180 Graphic Signs of Authority

‘northern team’ started with the same graphic form at the central colonnade on the
ground floor, but whilst still working on that level they began to develop a new
cruciform form of Theodora’s monogrammatic name (Fig. 6.10.3a–e) that was
subsequently applied more consistently on the gallery level (Fig. 6.10.3f–g). These
cruciform forms were then imitated in Hagia Irene (Fig. 6.10.4) and in a building
in Hebdomon (Fig. 6.10.5). This epigraphic innovation exemplified the invention
and rising popularity of the cruciform monogrammatic type in early Byzantium in
the second quarter of the sixth century.
Each of the sixteen ground-level columns facing the nave originally featured
both imperial personal monograms on two corroded plaques, mounted on the
bronze hoops that fastened column shafts to their capitals; traces of these mono-
grams are still in evidence on some plaques. Both monograms have identical forms
and alternately face the nave and aisles.57 Theodora’s cruciform monogram
(Fig. 6.10.7) differs here from those on the capitals, and the hoops and plaques
were most likely cast in a separate workshop in the final years of the church’s
construction.
After the completion of Hagia Sophia, a joint cruciform monogram of the
imperial couple was also carved on the marble panels of its templon screen. Paul
the Silentiary makes special mention of that particular monogrammatic device, in
a revealing account of the viewers’ perception of such graphic signs: ‘on the middle
panels of the sacred screen which form a barrier round the sanctified priests, the
carver’s tool has incised one character that means many words, for it combines
the names of the Empress and Emperor. It is like a shield with a boss in whose middle
part has been carved the sign of the cross.’58 The panels featuring this monogram
have not survived, but the existence of such a joint imperial monogram is corrob-
orated by a later joint monogram of Justin II and Empress Sophia that survives on
their coinage (Fig. 5.4). A comparable example of an imperial cruciform mono-
gram carved on a marble templon screen has survived in Hagia Irene, where it was
repurposed as part of the floor under one of the columns on the northern side of
the church (Fig. 6.11). That screen shows the cruciform monogram of Emperor
Constantine, traditionally associated with Constantine V (741–75), who rebuilt
that church after an earthquake in 740.59
While masters on each team evidently had some freedom in the forms of the mono-
grams they carved, the spatial distribution of these graphic devices in the church
might have been decided by their superiors. It is of course possible that the masters
could not always follow such instructions correctly, especially because the mono-
grams ΙΟΥCΤΙΝΙΑΝΟΥ and ΑΥΓΟΥCΤΑC have very similar silhouettes. It is

57 Antoniades, Ekphrasis tes Hagias Sophias, vol. 2, p. 32; and Unterweger, ‘The Image’, p. 106 and
note 62.
58 Paulus Silentiarius, Descriptio Sanctae Sophiae, 713–15, ed. de Stefani, p. 49. The English trans-
lation is from Mango, ed., The Art of the Byzantine Empire, pp. 87–8, with a slight modification.
Fobelli, Un tempio, pp. 183–4, fig. 40, suggests that Silentiarius referred in this passage to two separate
monograms of the imperial couple and uses a separate box monogram for each of them in her graphic
reconstruction of the templon screens.
59 Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium, p. 214.
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Monumental Monograms in the Post-Roman World 181

Fig. 6.11. Fragment of a chancel screen with Constantine’s monogram reused in Hagia
Irene, Istanbul.

also possible that some capitals might have been set by workmen so that their
monograms faced the wrong sides. Moreover, the later restoration of some dam-
aged monograms has partially obscured their original spatial distribution, since it
was always Justinian’s monograms that were reconstructed on those occasions.
Despite such reservations, the distribution of the monograms reveals certain
­patterns. Thus, for example, the north-eastern and south-eastern aisles, closest to
the clergy in the solea, preserve only Justinian’s monograms on their capitals
(Diagram 6.2). The north-eastern and south-eastern exedras are believed to have
been reserved for male singers,60 so the omission of Theodora’s monograms in this
part of the church may have been intentional. Her monograms, meanwhile, are
abundant on the capitals in the south-western and north-western bays of the
gallery level, reserved for the exclusive use of women (Diagram 6.3). The western
gallery was later known as the place where an empress and her followers positioned
themselves during worship, and Theodora’s graphic signs symbolically frame pre-
cisely that location. Most of them adorned the inner sides of colonnades and thus
directly faced female visitors. In short, the spatial distribution of Justinian’s and
Theodora’s monograms in Hagia Sophia probably reflected the builders’ under-
standing of how laity and clergy, as well as men and women, would be separated
inside the church during services. Justinian’s monograms were evidently seen as
more appropriate for clergy, while Theodora’s monograms were destined for a
female audience.
The application of monumental monograms in Sts Sergius and Bacchus and
Hagia Sophia established a practice later imitated in other imperial foundations

60 Mango, ed., The Art of the Byzantine Empire, p. 81; Mainstone, Hagia Sophia, p. 229.
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182 Graphic Signs of Authority

E
S

N
W

I B
B I
B I B I
I I I D

I T I B

I T ?T T D II B B

B B ?I I I ?B T T

B I D I

B I I T
? D
T A
? D
A B

0 5 10 20 m D - damaged monogram
I - IOYCTINIANOY monogram
B - BACIΛEΩC monogram
T - ΘEOΔΩPAC monogram
A - AYΓOYCTAC monogram

Diagram 6.2. The ground level of Hagia Sophia.

during Justinian’s reign. Hagia Irene, rebuilt along with Hagia Sophia after the Nika
revolt, featured the same four imperial monograms on its capitals (Fig. 6.12a–d).61
The personal graphic signs of Justinian and Theodora were carved onto four sides
of a capital found in Hebdomon,62 an imperial residence in the suburbs of

61 Van Millingen, Byzantine Churches, pp. 84–105. They are accompanied by the sign of the cross
on the columns’ opposite sides.
62 Currently in the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul, inv. no. 1239 T; see Sodini, Barsanti, and
Guidobaldi, ‘La sculpture’, p. 332, note 150; Kramer, ‘Kämpferkapitelle’, pp. 183–4; and Taddei,
‘Notes’, p. 79.
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Monumental Monograms in the Post-Roman World 183

B
I I
D I A
B I B
I T
D A D
B
I I
B B
B B

I B I D

B I I I
I B I B

T A B D

A T I B

I I B I

? D
A I T
B
I I
I B D
A
I B B I
B T
T A
A T

D - damaged monogram
I - IOYCTINIANOY monogram
B - BACIΛEΩC monogram
T - ΘEOΔΩPAC monogram
A - AYΓOYCTAC monogram

Diagram 6.3. The gallery level of Hagia Sophia.

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184 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 6.12. Imperial monograms in Hagia Irene, Istanbul: a) ΒΑCΙΛΕΩC;

b) ΙΟΥCΤΙΝΙΑΝΟΥ; c) ΑΥΓΟΥCΤΑC; d) ΘΕΟΔΩΡΑC.

Constantinople, and on another capital discovered in Germia. The latter find

probably reflects an imperial donation made to the Church of St Michael in that
town.63 Imperial involvement in the reconstruction of another church in Asia
Minor, namely the Church of St John in Ephesos (c.535/6–41), is better
documented,64 and the church featured capitals with the same two monograms.65

63 Niewöhner and Rheidt, ‘Die Michaelskirche’, p. 138, fig. 2, and p. 143; Unterweger, ‘The
Image’, p. 101. A capital with the cruciform monogram similar to those of Theodora has also been
found in Libyssa, modern Gebze, on the north-eastern coast of the Sea of Marmara; see Arachne
Database, no. 150892.
64 Alchermes, ‘Art’, p. 359; Thiel, Die Johanneskirche, p. 102; and Unterweger, ‘The Image’, p. 101.
65 Die Inschriften von Ephesos, ed. Vetters, vol. 8.2, no. 4363; Hueber, Ephesos, figs 131a–b; Kramer,
‘Kämpferkapitelle’, p. 185; and Artamonov’s Collection at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and
Collection, reaccession no. ICFA.NA.0452.
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Monumental Monograms in the Post-Roman World 185

Significantly, Justinian and Theodora’s title monograms, ΒΑCΙΛΕΩC and

ΑΥΓΟΥCΤΑC, have almost never been found outside the three Constantinopolitan
churches discussed above.66
The prevalence of Justinian’s monogram in the imperial capital and its closest
surroundings was likely to have been even higher than the cases discussed above
suggest. Two capitals with his monogram, for instance, have been discovered in the
area of the church of Pegé, while another capital featuring his monogrammatic
sign was brought from Constantinople and re-used in San Marco Cathedral in
Venice during the high Middle Ages.67 His monogram also adorns a marble plaque
attached to the ambo discovered in the remains of an early Christian church in
Yalova Caplicari, an Asian coastal city facing the Sea of Marmara.68 Yet the most
vivid example of Justinian’s personal graphic sign carved for public display was
preserved in medieval Constantinople on the Maritime Gate of the Great Palace,
where an impressive frieze with a large monogram of Justinian was reused as an
imposing symbol of imperial authority.69 The evidence of this monumental device
is complemented by that of a marble statuette of an imperial eagle, currently held
in Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum, measuring 64 cm in height and featuring a
medallion with Justinian’s monogram carved on its upper chest. Similar to the
marble eagles on the base of the column of Arcadius (c.402/3), this traditional
imperial symbol must have originally decorated a public monument erected in the
sixth-century Byzantine capital.70
Justinian’s imperial successors continued the practice of inscribing monumental
monograms onto their foundations, albeit on a smaller scale. Thus, a capital with
carved cruciform monograms of Justin II (565–78) and his wife Sophia has been
found at the hot baths of Yalova Caplicari,71 while a cruciform monogram of
Emperor Phocas (602–10) survives on a capital now located in the Afyonkarahisar
Museum in Afyon, western Turkey.72 Excavations in the remains of the Hippodrome
in Istanbul have revealed another capital featuring a monogrammatic sign of
Phocas.73 The above-mentioned marble screen decorated with the monogram of
Constantine V at Hagia Irene testifies to the imperial use of monumental mono-
grams in the eighth century, while a capital with a cruciform monogram dated to
the eleventh or twelfth century found at the Tekfur Saray Byzantine palace in

66 One capital with the ΒΑCΙΛΕΩC monogram that had probably been brought from Constantinople
was reused in the courtyard of the Venetian monastery of Sant’Apollonia. See Deichmann, ed., Corpus,
p. 137, no. 638.
67 Deichmann, ed., Corpus, pp. 109–10, no. 473.
68 Kramer, ‘Kämpferkapitelle’, pp. 177–8.
69 Washington, DC, Dumbarton Oaks, Nicholas V. Artamonoff Collection, reassesion no. ICFA.
NA.0123; Mango, ‘Ancient Spolia’, p. 647, fig. 8; Asutay-Effenberger, Die Landmauer, pp. 194–5.
70 Arachne Database, no. 7809. Cf. Mendel, Catalogue, vol. 2, pp. 434–5, no. 657, who errone-
ously attributed the monogram to Emperor Julian.
71 Cameron, ‘The Artistic Patronage’, p. 73; and Kramer, ‘Kämpferkapitelle’, pp. 175–90.
72 Sodini, Barsanti, and Guidobaldi, ‘La sculpture’, p. 314, fig. 13.
73 It was found during excavations in 1927, but has since been destroyed. For more details and
references, see Brüx, Faltkapitelle, p. 66, note 516.
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186 Graphic Signs of Authority

Istanbul bears witness to the continuation of the early Byzantine tradition of

monogrammatic display in the middle Byzantine period.74

6 . 4 . M O N U M E N TA L M O N O G R A M S A N D
E A R LY M E D I E VA L B I S H O P S

The impressive churches of Justinian I and Theodora highlight a practice that

became popular in sixth-century Byzantium, namely placing monumental mono-
grams of noble donors in churches that were built with their sponsorship. The
cruciform graphic sign of Theodora on such monuments also popularized a new
type of monogram, which enjoyed increasing popularity from the mid-sixth century
onwards. This new monogrammatic type exemplified the paramount importance
of the sign of the cross in early Byzantium, and many forms of the cruciform
monogram featured letters that were attached to the arms of the cross without any
letter in the middle. This new trend is evinced, for example, by two marble capitals
found in Aphrodisias, inscribed with the cruciform monograms of Mamas and
Pakos; the pair were probably donors to an unidentified church in that city.75
The imperial tradition of marking imperial foundations with monumental
monograms was soon imitated by church leaders in various early Byzantine cities.
Thus, a capital with a cruciform monogram consisting of the letters Α, Ν, Υ, and
Ω at the ends of its cross-arms, and O at its middle, has been found at the site of
the remains of an early Christian basilica in Tomis (modern Constanza in Romania),
an important metropolitan see in the sixth century. The monogram seems likely to
have encoded the name of a local metropolitan bishop John in the genitive
(Ιωάννου).76 A comparable example from Greek Epirus has been provided by the
find of a capital with a cruciform monogram of Bishop Dumetios, ΔΟΥΜΕΤΙΟΥ,
during excavations of a church in Nicopolis, the so-called basilica A dated approxi-
mately to the mid-sixth century.77
More examples survive in Asia Minor. The cruciform monogram Ιωαννου has
been preserved in the medallion of an architrave fragment in the episcopal chapel
in Side, a metropolitan see on the south-eastern coast of Asia Minor.78 Furthermore,
in the Koimesis church in Nicea, a cruciform monogram of Abbot Hyakinthos was
carved on the entablature inscription and capitals at some stage between the sixth
century and the early eighth. The founder’s monogram was also used in the middle
of an altar panel surrounded by six other cruciform monograms—the latter
encoding an invocation to Theotokos to help his servant Hyakinthos. This church

74 Feld, ‘Zu den Kapitellen’.

75 Roueché, Aphrodisias, no. 103.
76 Barnea, Les monuments, pp. 195–6, fig. 69.2a, who attributes that monogram to a known mid-
fifth-century bishop John. But its cruciform type supports its dating to the middle or second half of
the sixth century.
77 Chalkia, ‘La scultura’, fig. 10.
78 Arachne Database, no. 151048. Another example is the cruciform monogram in a medallion
composed of letters Η, Ν, Ε, Ω, and the genitive ending –ου (perhaps, Νεωνου) carved on a marble
capital that has been found in the episcopal city Pergamon; see Arachne Database, no. 198383.
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Monumental Monograms in the Post-Roman World 187

was a part of a larger monastic complex, and the monogram of the monastic
founder thus visually communicated his authority to the monastic community.79
The imperial tradition of monogrammatic display influenced not only Byzantine
bishops and abbots but also ecclesiastical hierarchs who maintained active contact
with the imperial capital. Cruciform monogrammatic signs of the Armenian
katholikos Nerses III (641–61), carved in the Church of St Gregory the Illuminator
in Zvart’nots, bear witness to the reception of this imperial tradition on the
­eastern borders of Byzantium. The monograms ΝΑΡCΟΥ and ΚΑΘΟΛΙΚΟΥ
(Fig. 6.14a–b) adorned capitals in the church built as the katholikos’ place of resi-
dence and principal administrative centre.80 The church thus functioned as his seat
of authority, and Nerses’ monograms inside the building displayed that message
quite clearly. Nerses’ monogrammatic signs present both his name and ecclesiastical
title in the genitive, and the Church of Hagia Sophia must have been the main
source of inspiration for such usage.
The Roman church of San Clemente provides an appropriate western parallel to
the opulent churches of Justinian I and Theodora. Some of its chancel screens
feature a box monogram of Pope John II, using the genitive form of his name in
Latin, IOHANNIS, which visually resembles Justinian’s box monogram (Fig. 6.13).
John’s graphic sign on the marble screens is framed by a triumphant wreath and

Fig. 6.13. Chancel screen in San Clemente, Rome. Norwegian Institute in Rome, H. P.
L’Orange Photo Archive.

79 Wulff, Die Koimesiskirche, pp. 186–93; Weigand, ‘Zur Monogramminschrift’; Mango, ‘Notes’,
pp. 350–7, figs 3–5; Peschlow, ‘Neue Beobachtungen’; Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium, p. 203.
80 Kleinbauer, ‘Zvart’nots’, pp. 245–50; The Armenian History Attributed to Sebeos, chs 45 and 52,
trans. Thomson, pp. 112 and 151. For more details on the church, cf. Marutian, Arkhitekturnyie
pamiatniki, pp. 8–48.
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188 Graphic Signs of Authority

flanked by two Latin crosses, the latter highlighting the Christian essence of his
papal authority. Before becoming pope, John (then called Mercurius) is known
to have visited Constantinople in 523–6, when he was able to see the Church of
St Polyeuktos for himself.81 Furthermore, the chancel screens at San Clemente
were made of Proconnesian marble at a time when the Church of Sts Sergius and
Bacchus had probably already been erected and when Hagia Sophia was under
construction. The interiors of these three churches must therefore have provided
inspiration for the marble screens that embellished the church in which Mercurius/
John II served as presbyter prior to his pontificate.
Four columns with capitals showing the personal monogram of John II furnish
additional evidence for this interpretation; the columns were brought from Rome
to Lyons in the modern era and are now kept in the treasury of Lyons Cathedral.
These, too, are made of Proconnesian marble, and were most likely produced
alongside the chancel screens in a Constantinopolitan workshop. Such impressive
carved marble objects may have been commissioned by the pope himself, or were
perhaps even a gift from Emperor Justinian to Pope John II. Federico Guidobaldi
suggests that the marble screens and columns travelled together, and the latter
might have been used in San Clemente or another Roman church before they were
relocated to the Church of Sts Cosmas and Damian, their known location in the
sixteenth century.82
The influence of Constantinopolitan carvers was even more noticeable in the
North Adriatic, a region that remained in close contact with the Byzantine capital
during the sixth century. Proconnesian capitals of the types previously carved for
the churches of St Polyeuktos, Sts Sergius and Bacchus, and Hagia Sophia were
used in San Vitale at Ravenna and in the Eufrasian Basilica at Poreč (Parentium),
suggesting either that Constantinopolitan carvers accompanied the raw marble
to the region, or that the capitals were carved in the Byzantine East, and mono-
grams were later added to their imposts in post-workshop production in Ravenna
and Poreč.83
Bishop Ecclesius (522–32) was responsible for the initial phase in the construc-
tion of San Vitale, and his efforts may have been inspired by the magnificent
decorations of St Polyeuktos, which he possibly saw during his visit to
Constantinople in 526. Although the church was consecrated by Bishop Maximian
(546–57), major building activity most likely took place soon after the completion
of Hagia Sophia during the pontificate of Bishop Victor (538–45).84 Accordingly,
the box monogram that encoded both his name and ecclesiastical title (episcopus
Victor) and incorporated the sign of the cross in its upper field (Fig. 6.14c) was

81 Barsanti and Guidobaldi, ‘Gli elementi’.

82 Guidobaldi, ‘Origine’; Sodini, Barsanti, and Guidobaldi, ‘La sculpture’, p. 326.
83 Harrison, Excavations, vol. 1, p. 415; Terry, ‘The Sculpture’, pp. 55–7; Russo, Sculpture,
pp. 31–8; and Mauskopf Deliyannis, Ravenna, pp. 231–4. Moreover, similar mason’s marks appear
in the Eufrasian Basilica, San Vitale, and Hagia Sophia: Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendour,
pp. 59–60 and note 4.
84 Andreescu-Treadgold and Treadgold, ‘Procopius’, p. 714; and Mauskopf Deliyannis, Ravenna,
pp. 199–200 and 223–6.
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Monumental Monograms in the Post-Roman World 189

Fig. 6.14. Monumental monograms in churches: a–b) Zvart’nots; c–d) San Vitale,
Ravenna; e) Eufrasian Basilica, Poreč; f ) Solin; g) Grado Baptistery; h) of Bishop Maximian
from an impost fragment in Ravenna; i–j) Archiepiscopal Chapel, Ravenna.

carved on capital imposts in both the ground floor ambulatory and the gallery,
approximately five to six metres above the floor level. Clearly, they were intended
to visualize the episcopal authority of the local bishop to the church’s attendants.
The ninth-century historian Agnellus of Ravenna reported that a certain Julian the
Banker (argentarius), probably of Greek origin, had donated an enormous sum of
money (26,000 solidi) to the construction of San Vitale, and corroborated that
statement by providing the dedicatory inscription that identified Julian as the
church’s main builder.85 The lay donor’s name in the Greek genitive, ΙΟΥΛΙΑΝΟΥ,
was also encoded in the box monogram carved on two capital imposts on the gallery
level of the southern side of the presbytery (Fig. 6.14d).86 Julian’s graphic sign,
commemorating his status as principal sponsor of the church, is noteworthy for its
obvious modelling after Justinian’s monogram, and its position directly facing not
the gallery but the main altar. Its location thus renders it invisible to lay attendants
since, unlike the monogrammatic sign of Bishop Victor, it was primarily addressed
to the divine Lord.
Constantinopolitan influence is also in evidence in the diverse column capitals
erected in the Eufrasian Basilica in the coastal Istrian town of Poreč, which served
as a cathedral to local bishops in the mid-sixth century. The capitals surmount the
columns separating the nave from the aisles, and the capital imposts face the nave,
displaying the box monogram of Bishop Eufrasius (Fig. 6.14e) and present the
aisles with the sign of the cross. A medallion with the same episcopal monogram

85 Agnelli liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis, 57–9, ed. Holder-Egger, pp. 318–19; Agnellus of
Ravenna, The Books of Pontiffs of the Church of Ravenna, 57–9, trans. Mauskopf Deliyannis, pp. 171–2.
For more detailed discussion of that banker, see Barnish, ‘The Wealth’, pp. 5–7; Cosentino, ‘Banking’,
pp. 249–50.
86 Deichmann, Ravenna, vol. 2.2, pp. 4 and 99, fig. 24; and Deichmann, Frühchristliche Bauten,
fig. 307.
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190 Graphic Signs of Authority

was carved above the central door at its west façade.87 The graphic sign of the local
bishop thus marks the path from the entrance to the nave, and signalled to its
visitors who held authority in this sacred space from the moment of their arrival.
It is very likely that Constantinopolitan innovations were brought to Poreč via
Ravenna. Thus, as Yuri A. Marano has emphasized, liturgical spaces in the Eufrasian
Basilica were rearranged according to the Ravennate architectural model, and the
apse and the synthronon of the presbytery became focal points. This architectural
rearrangement rendered the episcopal church of Eufrasius different from the trad-
itional basilicas of the Adriatic type, instead highlighting the liturgical spaces that
focused on the bishop.88
Such architectural changes have been interpreted as indicative of growing epis-
copal power in both religious and civil matters.89 Ultimately, as Gisela Cantino
Wataghin puts it, ‘the church as a building had an undoubtedly major role for the
bishop in the process of asserting his authority’.90 The public display of monumen-
tal monograms by early medieval bishops, exemplified in the churches of San
Clemente and San Vitale as well as the Eufrasian Basilica, thus became a new dec-
orative tool that visualized their rising authority in Italian and Adriatic cities in the
sixth century, at a time when the civil powers of ecclesiastic leaders were steadily
increasing. For example, Bishop Victor’s graphic sign of authority was carved in
San Vitale around 540, contemporary with the expulsion of the Ostrogoths from
Ravenna by Byzantine forces, an event that created a relative vacuum of civil power
that the bishops could move in to occupy.
This newly developed mode of monumental expression of public authority
appealed to other bishops in the North Adriatic after Justinian issued the Pragmatic
Sanction for the former Ostrogothic territories in 554, confirming the bishops’ sta-
tus as administrative leaders in their communities.91 For instance, archaeological
excavations in Salona (modern Solin), formerly the provincial capital in Roman
Dalmatia, have shown that the local bishop Peter (554–62) had his box monogram
PETRUS (Fig. 6.14f ) carved onto capitals and on the architrave of a Christian
basilica built during his pontificate.92 Episcopal monograms have been better pre-
served in the small northern Italian insular town of Grado, where the archbishops
of Aquileia fled after a Lombard invasion in the 560s. The new seat required an
immediate means to express visual symbols of archiepiscopal authority. Accordingly,
the box monogram of Archbishop Probinus (569–71) was carved on the altar
panel of Grado Baptistery (Fig. 6.14g), while the monogram of his successor, Elias
(571–86), appeared in the adjacent Grado Cathedral that he consecrated in 579,
also known as the Basilica of St Eufemia.93 The presbytery in that church was

87 Terry, ‘The Sculpture’, pp. 13–26 and 29–30; Russo, Sculpture, pp. 19–38.
88 Marano, ‘Domus’, pp. 112–17 and 123.
89 Cantino Wataghin, ‘Fra tarda antichità’, p. 351; Cantino Wataghin, ‘Architecture’.
90 Cantino Wataghin, ‘Architecture’, p. 302.
91 ‘Provinciarum etiam iudices ab episcopis et primatibus uniuscuiusque regionis idoneos eligen-
dos et sufficientes ad locorum administrationem ex ipsis videlicet iubemus fieri provinciis’, Constitutio
pragmatica, 12, ed. Schoell and Kroll, p. 800.
92 Gerber et al., Die Bauten, pp. 104–5 and figs 189–91.
93 Forlati Tamaro et al., eds, Da Aquileia, pp. 277–89; Christie, From Constantine, pp. 175–6.
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Monumental Monograms in the Post-Roman World 191

Fig. 6.15. Monogram of Bishop Elias on floor mosaic in the ‘Mausoleum of St Eufemia’,
Grado Cathedral.

arranged in a similar manner to the Eufrasian Basilica, and the importance of the
bishop was further highlighted through its floor mosaics.94 The box monogram
HELIAS EPISCOPUS is currently visible on floor mosaics at the end of the nave
closest to its presbytery, in the so-called Mausoleum of St Eufemia (Fig. 6.15), a
small chapel located at the eastern end of its southern aisle, and in the salutarium,
a small hall adjacent to the southern aisle of the church. In all these places, the
episcopal monogram was placed at the centre of mosaic designs, and in some cases
it was surrounded by the dedicatory medallions of well-to-do donors—a graphic
arrangement that highlighted the elevated status of Aquileian archbishops in their
new urban setting.
Grado Cathedral also demonstrates that the Constantinopolitan tradition of
monumental monograms was not blindly copied in Italy, but was adjusted to local
practices and conditions, especially when executed by local masters. Thus, a single
box monogram consisting of the name and title of Bishop Maximian, Episcopus
Maximianus, was carved locally on the impost fragment now located in the
Archiepiscopal Museum in Ravenna (Fig. 6.14h). It derives originally either from
a church of St Andrew, which Maximian is known to have restored and provided
with columns of Proconnesian marble,95 or from the church of St Stephen dedi-
cated in 550 where, according to Agnellus, the capitals of all the columns featured

94 Cantino Wataghin, ‘Architecture’, p. 293; and Marano, ‘Domus’, p. 123.

95 Deichmann, Ravenna, vol. 2.2, p. 305 and fig. 173; Mauskopf Deliyannis, Ravenna, pp. 256–7.
For the discussion of a similar monogram on the cathedra of Maximian, see Chapter 7.
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192 Graphic Signs of Authority

the name of Maximian.96 The monogram’s design followed King Theoderic’s and
Bishop Victor’s graphic devices in placing the sign of the cross at the top, but
unlike these examples Maximian’s monogram is incised on the plain surface of the
impost block, which means that that marble impost arrived in Ravenna without a
blank monogrammatic medallion.
As the example of the Basilica of St Eufemia demonstrates, when capitals with
monogrammatic medallions were unavailable, mosaics could become an alterna-
tive medium for the public display of episcopal monograms in the North Adriatic.
Two Ravennate monuments demonstrate that this medium could also be employed
during the restoration of older ecclesiastical buildings. The first is the Neonian
Baptistery, a late fourth-century octagonal building that Bishop Neon (c.450–73)
rebuilt in the third quarter of the fifth century, and that Bishop Maximian redec-
orated before he assumed the title of archbishop some time before 553.97 Mosaic
tituli above its three absidioles were made during the latter renovation. Each quotes
or paraphrases biblical verses, and all feature box monograms at their middle.
One monogrammatic sign refers to the above fifth-century bishop—NEONE
EPISCOPUS DEI famulus (Bishop Neon, servant of God) (Fig. 6.16a)—the other
two present the name and title of the sixth-century restorer, EPISCOPUS
(Fig. 6.16b) MAXIMIANUS (Fig. 6.16c).98 Episcopal monograms are in this case
thus inseparably intertwined with the words of the Holy Scripture.
Mosaics in the sixth-century Ravennate Archiepiscopal Chapel are even more
symptomatic of the symbolic use of episcopal monograms in that northern Italian
city (Fig. 6.17). The chapel was built in the episcopal palace complex, and Agnellus
of Ravenna claimed that its construction started during the pontificate of Peter II
(494–520). Most scholars have consequently interpreted a PETRUS monogram
(Fig. 6.14i), visible above its apse, at the middle of the outer lunette, as a reference
to that bishop.99 The central part of the apse’s inner lunette features another box
monogram (Fig. 6.14j),100 the meaning of which is less certain. Since it consists of
letters A, R, C, H, I, P, and S, it probably conceals the title archiepiscopus. If this is
the case, both monograms—located approximately five to six metres above the
floor level—must refer to Archbishop Peter III (570–8), and indeed some scholars
have attributed the construction of this chapel to the time of that Ravennate
pontiff.101 Writing in the ninth century, it is not impossible that Agnellus might
have confused the two late antique bishops. Alternatively, these monograms might
have been added in the mid-sixth century, and it is salient to note that these two
monograms are stylistically similar to the episcopal graphic signs on display in
the Neonian Baptistery. Furthermore, Agnellus mentions that the chapel was

96 Agnelli liber pontificalis, 72, ed. Holder-Egger, pp. 327–8; Agnellus of Ravenna, The Books of
Pontiffs, 72, trans. Mauskopf Deliyannis, pp. 187–8.
97 Mauskopf Deliyannis, Ravenna, pp. 88–95. On this baptistery as a representation of episcopal
authority, see Wharton, ‘Ritual’.
98 Deichmann, Ravenna, vol. 1, pp. 130–1; and vol. 2.1, pp. 18–19; Deichmann, Frühchristliche
Bauten, figs 177–9; Bovini, ‘Note’, pp. 116–29.
99 For further details and references, see Mauskopf Deliyannis, Ravenna, pp. 188–96.
100 Deichmann, Frühchristliche Bauten, fig. 219.
101 For more details and references, see Pasquini, La decorazione, pp. 38–9 and note 148.
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Monumental Monograms in the Post-Roman World 193

Fig. 6.16. Monumental episcopal monograms in the mosaics of the Neonian Baptistery,
Ravenna: a) of Bishop Neon; b–c) of Bishop Maximian.

completed by Maximian,102 and it is therefore also possible that the two graphic
signs were added during his pontificate, intended to provide historical legitimacy
to his appropriation of archiepiscopal status.
The poetic inscription over the entrance to the chapel emphasizes the intimate
link between the founder (fundator) of the chapel, Peter, and its true owner
(possessor), Christ.103 The incorporation of monogrammatic signs into the visual
programme of that hall communicated the very same message. The medallion
image of Christ appears between the monograms, while the title monogram is
located between the Lord’s figural image and his graphic representation in the form
of a golden cross in a blue starry sky. In short, the monograms are embedded into
the sacred visual and liturgical spaces of the chapel and directly face its entrance, so

102 Agnelli liber pontificalis, 72, ed. Holder-Egger, p. 328; Agnellus of Ravenna, The Books of
Pontiffs, 75, trans. Mauskopf Deliyannis, p. 189.
103 Agnelli liber pontificalis, 50, ed. Holder-Egger, p. 313; Agnellus of Ravenna, The Books of
Pontiffs, 50, trans. Mauskopf Deliyannis, p. 162.
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194 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 6.17. Archiepiscopal Chapel, Ravenna. © Vanni Archive/Art Resource, NY.

that every visitor could easily recognize them and thus visualize episcopal authority
in a state of inseparable unity with its transcendent sources.
The graphic signs in the Archiepiscopal Chapel thus illustrate the transform-
ation that monumental monograms underwent in the course of the sixth century.
Such epigraphic monograms originated as ennobling graphic devices that gave
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Monumental Monograms in the Post-Roman World 195

monumental form to idiosyncratic honours, praising the donors and commissioners

of late antique buildings, mainly churches. Yet very soon after, Byzantine rulers
appropriated these carved graphic signs for the public display of their own imperial
authority in churches built as sacred settings for symbolic rituals of power, namely
in Sts Sergius and Bacchus and Hagia Sophia. In these churches, imperial mono-
grammatic devices appeared side by side with the sign of the cross, visualizing the
elevated status of emperors above all men in their proximity to the Lord.
Ecclesiastical hierarchs in various parts of the early Byzantine world adopted this
application of monumental monograms, and used them to demarcate their holy
headquarters. This practice of monumental display continued in the Byzantine
East in the following centuries, albeit on a less ambitious scale. In the early medi-
eval West, ecclesiastical centres that maintained close contacts with mid-sixth-­
century Constantinople appropriated the practice, such as at Rome and Ravenna.
But as the Ravennate case studies demonstrate, in an Italian context the practice of
monumental monograms could be applied to other media such as mosaics, and
these signs were further developed to visualize the transcendent sources of episco-
pal authority. It is therefore not surprising that when monumental monograms
were once again employed during an imperial renovatio in ninth-century Rome,
those using them did so in a manner very similar to the Ravennate examples above.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

PA RT I I I
G R A P H I C S I G N S O F AU T H O R I T Y
I N E A R LY M E D I E VA L E U RO P E
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

7
Monogrammatic Culture in
Pre-Carolingian Europe

The early medieval kingdoms emerging in the former western provinces of the
Roman empire inherited many late Roman sociocultural traits. Late antique
monogrammatic culture was one of them. The tradition of demarcating lay and
divine authority, as well as elevated status, using monograms persisted in sixth- and
seventh-century Italy, Spain, and Gaul, and sustained contacts with early Byzantium
greatly contributed to the longevity of the practice. Yet the sociocultural signifi-
cance of this monogrammatic tradition and its application in various media had
steadily changed with the gradual demise of late Roman institutions, the trans-
formation of social elites and related high-status culture, and the development of a
new visual language of authority in early medieval Europe. In this prolonged process
of sociocultural metamorphosis, the sixth-century secular and spiritual governors
of Western Europe had much more in common with their late Roman predecessors
and early Byzantine contemporaries than with their successors: the early medieval
kings and bishops of the eighth century.

7.1. M O N O G R A M S A S ROY A L S I G N S O F AU T H O R I T Y

The use of royal monograms on Ostrogothic, Vandalic, Burgundian, and

Merovingian coinage in the first half of the sixth century highlighted the unbroken
continuity of the late imperial graphic tradition in the rapidly changing political
landscape of the Western Mediterranean, and thus legitimized the nascent office of
early medieval kingship with the visual vocabulary of late antique political culture.1
As stressed in previous chapters, personal monograms began to be seen in this
period as symbolic graphic attributes of late Roman and early Byzantine dignitar-
ies, such as consuls and praetorian prefects; reges ruling in Italy, North Africa, and
Gaul no doubt perceived their status in the Mediterranean political hierarchy to be
at least commensurate with those high-ranking imperial officials or even above
them, right next to the Byzantine emperor.
This latter perspective was especially representative of the type of rulership that
the Ostrogothic King Theoderic the Great (493–526) had established in Italy

1 On the late Roman features of early medieval kingship in the West in this period, see Barnwell,
Emperor.
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200 Graphic Signs of Authority

in 493. As Jonathan Arnold has persuasively argued, the Italian realm under
Theoderic’s rule retained an emphatically Roman identity and, not unlike early
Roman emperors, he was commonly called princeps and dominus noster. These
titles were utilized in his official media,2 for example on the so-called Senigallia
gold medallion produced after the capture of Ravenna in 493, or as a commemora-
tive issue later in his reign.3 As hinted at by the return of western imperial regalia
from Constantinople to Ravenna in 497, the Byzantine court silently accepted
Theoderic’s quasi-imperial status as princeps Romanus.4 Hardly an outsider to the
political culture of the late Roman empire and its elite, Theoderic spent the forma-
tive decade of his youth as a high-status hostage at the imperial court in
Constantinople and later received the title of patrician. Made Eastern Roman
­magister militum at a young age, Theoderic was elevated to consulship in the East
in 484.5 His political worldview did not change much after he moved to Italy. As
a would-be western princeps, he appointed consuls in the West, and sought con­
firmation of his choice from the Byzantine emperors.6
In the political climate of Romanness cultivated in Theoderic’s Italy, it is hardly
surprising that his coinage continued the late Roman practice of employing the
ruler’s monogrammatic sign as the main reverse type on lower denominations
of Ostrogothic coinage. Furthermore, Theoderic’s personal box monogram—­
modelled after the late Roman calligraphic tradition—was frequently employed as
a reverse type not only on copper-alloy coinage but also on silver coins issued in his
name in Italian mints (Fig. 7.1a).7 The numismatic reform of Anastasius that
introduced the non-monogrammatic follis and its fractions did not affect the
design of Ostrogothic copper-alloy coins. In a similarly late Roman fashion,
Theoderic had his monogrammatic sign placed on other material media that
propagated his rulership and authority to Italian subjects (Fig. 6.3b).8
The monogrammatic reverse type was continued on the silver and bronze
coinage of Theoderic’s royal successors, first by his young grandson Athalaric
(526–34) (Fig. 7.1b) under the regency of the latter’s mother and Theoderic’s
daughter, Amalasuentha, thereafter by Theoderic’s nephew Theodahad (534–6),
and finally by the warring king Totila/Baduila (541–52).9 The first two rulers were
brought up in the decisively late Roman culture of the Ravennate court, and
recently one scholar has even dubbed Theodahad a ‘Platonic king’ for his passion
for late antique philosophy and erudition in Latin literature.10 The late Roman use

2 Arnold, Theoderic, pp. 61–91 and 203. See also Moorhead, Theoderic, pp. 39–51.
3 Metlich, The Coinage, pp. 15–16; MEC, pp. 19–26; Arnold, Theoderic, pp. 111–15.
4 For more details, see Arnold, Theoderic, pp. 46 and 70.
5 Jones, Martindale, and Morris, The Prosopography, vol. 2, pp. 1080–1; Arnold, Theoderic,
pp. 144–55.
6 Arnold, Theoderic, pp. 86–7.
7 Hahn, Moneta, vol. 1, pp. 85–91, Tables 11–12; MEC, pp. 36–8; Metlich, The Coinage, nos.
44–8, 51–5, 64–5, and 79–80; Arslan, ‘Dalla classicità’, pp. 434–7.
8 On the use of Theoderic’s monogram on marble capitals in Ravenna, see Chapter 6. On a
royal monogrammatic seal attributed to this king, see Schramm, ‘Brustbilder’. Cf. Berges, ‘Das
Monogramm’.
9 Metlich, The Coinage, nos. 56, 58, 60–1, 67, 88, 91, and 94; Arslan, ‘Dalla classicità’, pp. 440–9.
10 Vitiello, Theodahad.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 201

Fig. 7.1. a) Reverse of a quarter-siliqua with Theodoric’s monogram (Ravenna, 493–526),

Oslo University, Museum of Cultural History; b) reverse of a half-siliqua with Athalaric’s
monogram, Princeton University Numismatic Collection, Department of Rare Books and
Special Collections, Firestone Library; c) reverse of a Lombard gold coin with Perctarit’s
monogram, Oslo University, Museum of Cultural History.

of personal monograms on Ostrogothic coins was therefore as natural for them as

it had been for their triumphant predecessor.
With the Ostrogothic realm turning into the supreme polity of the Western
Mediterranean in the first third of the sixth century, Ostrogothic appropriation of
the late Roman numismatic use of rulers’ monograms appealed to neighbouring
kings and their entourages in North Africa, Burgundy, south-eastern Gaul, and
beyond. Thus, Theoderic’s monogram was copied on the reverse of silver coins
issued in the name of Emperor Anastasius at Sirmium in Pannonia. Since these
coins are usually associated with the Gepids, rather than with the Ostrogoths,11
the choice of graphic attributes on this coinage is the best evidence of the
Ostrogothic king’s perceived political power outside Italy. In the south, the ruler’s
monogram was noticeably absent on Vandalic coinage until the last Vandalic king
Gelimer (530–4) had his royal box monogram placed as the main reverse type
on copper coins issued in Carthage.12 This numismatic change, appealing to the
concurrent graphic symbology of rulership, should be seen in the context of the
king’s efforts to legitimize himself following the usurpation of the Vandalic throne
against the established rules of royal succession.13 In the north, the Burgundian
king Gundobad (473–516) had his box monogram made the main reverse type on
silver and base-metal coins struck in Lyons, possibly from the 490s onwards.14
Furthermore, this Burgundian king, and later his successors Sigismund (516–24)
and Gundomar II (524–32), sometimes had their personal monograms placed on
the reverse of gold coins issued in the name of Anastasius and subsequent Byzantine
emperors. But in these instances, the royal monogrammatic signs were used as

11 Metlich, The Coinage, pp. 43–4.

12 Hahn, Moneta, vol. 1, p. 95; MEC, pp. 22–3, nos. 28–30; Berndt and Steinacher, ‘Minting’,
p. 262, no. 20.
13 Conant, Staying Roman, pp. 311–26.
14 MEC, pp. 75–7. The starting date for this monogrammatic coinage remains uncertain, and one
cannot exclude the possibility that the earliest Burgundian coins with Gundobad’s monogram were
struck before Theoderic’s monogrammed coinage.
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202 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 7.2. Solidus of Theoderic in the name of Emperor Anastasius with a monogrammatic
mintmark on the reverse (Rome, 491–516). London, BrM, reg. no. 1867,0101.1014.
© The Trustees of the British Museum.

mintmarks in the field of the coin, and such usage was strikingly similar to the
occasional employment of Theoderic’s monogram at the end of the reverse legend
in his gold coinage (Fig. 7.2). The legality of this practice was slightly dubious,
since some might have perceived it as indirect infringement on the exclusive
imperial right to issue gold coins. At the same time, many would not see much
difference between such royal graphic signs and the monogrammatic mintmarks
composed of a few letters that encoded the name of the mint where the coins were
struck. Mintmarks of this type also appeared on some contemporary gold coins
issued in Theoderican Italy (Fig. 7.2), and similar mintmarks were struck on
bronze coins issued in south-eastern Gaulic mints such as Arles and Lyons from the
340s to 370s.15
The Merovingian victorious king Theodebert I (534–48) of Metz is better
known for using his full name in the title legend of his gold coins—an action that
was in direct violation of the practice established in the first decades after the dis-
continuation of Western Roman emperorship, according to which gold coinage
issued in the West featured the visual attributes and titulature of contemporary
Byzantine emperors.16 After all, the Byzantine emperor was still perceived to be a
supreme ruler in the political culture of the mid-sixth-century Mediterranean. In
contrast to his gold coinage, Theodebert’s coins of lower denominations were
much more traditional. After conquering Burgundy and Provence in the 530s, he
simply sustained the previous royal practice of placing numismatic monograms on
copper-alloy coins issued in his name in these territories, most likely in
Marseilles.17 His monogrammatic signs on these coins closely imitated the form of

15 Metlich, The Coinage, pp. 17 and 27, nos. 6–7, 16, 19–23, and 28; Bruck, Die spätromische
Kupfer Prägung, p. 81.
16 Collins, ‘Theodebert I’, pp. 27–30; MEC, pp. 116–17; Jenks, ‘Romanitas’.
17 Brenot, ‘Monnaies’, 185–6; MEC, pp. 115–16.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 203

Ostrogothic royal box monograms and were similarly framed by a wreath. One
may wonder whether this noticeable difference between Theodebert’s gold and
base-metal coinage was intentional and whether it was conditioned not only by
the symbolic importance attributed to gold, but also by the different target audi-
ences addressed by each type of currency: innovative gold coins were expected to
circulate among elites in Gaul and beyond, including Constantinople, while more
traditionalist copper-alloy coins were issued to satisfy the needs of more down-
to-earth local consumers.
A real departure from Ostrogothic prototypes at this Provençal mint only took
place on base-metal coins of King Theodebald (548–55), whose personal mono-
grammatic signs no longer imitated late Roman and Ostrogothic prototypes, but
exhibited a particular graphic form (Fig. 7.3a) typical of monograms engraved on
sixth- and seventh-century Merovingian signet-rings. The striking feature of this
new Merovingian graphic type was a semicircular line, or a superscript/subscript
letter, connecting the upper or lower ends of the two vertical bars forming a mono-
grammatic box. The resulting semi-closed shapes that often resemble houses with
pointed or round roofs (sometimes upside down) arranged letters in a nearly circu-
lar manner, reminiscent of the description of a personal monogram that the
Merovingian bishop Avitus of Vienne commissioned for himself on a signet-ring
around the year 509: ‘Let the sign of my monogram written in a circle be read as
index of [my] name.’18 Another important graphic feature of Merovingian mono-
grams saw the letter S cross its central diagonal line, which differentiated them
from late Roman samples. In this latter type, S was commonly featured in the
upper or lower field of the monogrammatic sign (Fig. 7.4).
The Lombard conquest of northern and central Italy is traditionally viewed as
the cause of a drastic rupture with late Roman socio-political traditions and
institutions in the various affected regions. Yet Lombard kings such as Agilulf
(590–616), Adaloald (616–26), and Aripert I (653–61) occasionally imitated the
Ostrogothic usage of royal box monograms as reverse types on their silver coins.19
This practice changed noticeably only in the second half of the seventh century, on

Fig. 7.3. a) Theodebald’s numismatic monogram (548–55); b) design of the signet-ring of

Bertildis (628–38); c) diplomatic monogram of Clovis II (654).

18 ‘Signum monogrammatis mei per gyrum scripti nominis legatur indicio’, Avitus Viennensis,
Epistolae, 87 (78), ed. Peiper, p. 97.
19 Hahn, ‘Anmerkungen’; Arslan, ‘Moneta e forme’, figs 43–5.
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204 Graphic Signs of Authority

coins attributed to Godepert (661–2), Grimoald (662–71), and Perctarit (671–88)

(Fig. 7.1c), when such reverse monograms incorporated both a personal name and
title, rex (‘king’)—a practice also attested in the contemporary Byzantine world.20
More importantly, the box monograms of these latter three kings appeared as a
reverse type not only on silver coins but also on gold tremisses issued in their
names. However, by the mid-seventh century, such an act would have hardly
surprised contemporaries. After the failure of the Italian reconquista in the last
third of the sixth century, Byzantine rulers were no longer able to claim gold coin-
age as their exclusive prerogative in the Western Mediterranean. Hence, royal and
‘local’ gold tremisses, void of any reference to the Byzantine emperors, began to be
struck at Visigothic and Merovingian mints from the last quarter of the sixth century
onwards. The Lombard kings’ placement of personal box monograms on the
reverse of their gold coins, a practice that differed little from the occasional usage
of urban monograms on Visigothic and Merovingian tremisses, simply confirmed
this geopolitical transformation by graphic means: in the political culture of the
late sixth- and seventh-century Western Mediterranean, the legitimacy of the
Byzantine emperor as the supreme ruler of the post-Roman world, and the symbolic
claims associated with it, were no longer taken for granted.
Compared to sixth- and seventh-century Italy, the public visibility of royal
monograms was rather limited in Merovingian Gaul outside Provence and, judging
by surviving material evidence, was restricted to a few specific material symbols of
royal authority, namely signet-rings and charters. Thus, as in other regions of the
post-Roman world, local figures of authority—Merovingian kings and queens—
had monograms engraved onto their gold signet-rings. One such example is found
on a signet-ring discovered in Laon, on which the personal name of Queen Bertildis
(628–38), a wife of King Dagobert I (623–34), is inscribed around the box mono-
gram of her title regina (Fig. 7.3b).21 A similar example has been discovered in
the sarcophagus of Queen Arnegunde, a wife of Chlothar I (511–61), buried at
St Denis between 580 and 590. Like Bertildis’ ring, the latter’s signet-ring features
the title monogram regina encircled with the queen’s name in the genitive,
ARNEGUNDIS.22 A final example is the ring attributed to King Clovis II
(639–57), which might have originated in the sarcophagus of the deceased king at
St Denis. The ring’s two bezels feature box monograms, one of which has been
decoded as S(ignum) REGIS and the other as presenting the royal name Chlodoveus
in a distinctively Merovingian monogrammatic form.23
The same king is known for the use of a different box monogram in his dip-
lomas, which is demonstrated by the charter issued at Clichy on 22 June 654
where the royal monogram incorporating the royal title rex is employed in Clovis’

20 MEC, pp. 63, 328–30; Arslan, ‘Ritrovamenti’; Arslan, ‘Il tremisse’; Arslan, ‘Moneta e forme’, figs
46–8. A similar box monogram incorporating the royal title rex appears on the gold-leaf cross found in
a rich seventh-century Lombard grave in Monza. See Fuchs, Die langobardischen Goldblattkreuze, p. 47,
no. 62, pl. 16.
21 Deloche, Étude historique, no. 186, pp. 203–5.
22 Paris, Musée du Louvre, M.A.N. 87432; Wilson, ‘A Ring’; Fleury, ‘Le monogramme’.
23 Roosens and Geubel, ‘Un anneau’.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 205

subscription line (Fig. 7.3c).24 As indicated by the box monogram of Chlothar II

(584–629), similarly used to authenticate a royal charter produced at Étrépagny in
June 625,25 monogrammatic signing might have been an established royal prac-
tice, visible on Merovingian diplomas produced in the first half and the middle of
the seventh century.26 Although a capital H frames both Clovis’ and Chlothar’s
diplomatic monograms, cursive is employed for other letters, which suggests that
each monogrammatic graphic device was designed by scribes in a Merovingian
royal chancery, in a practice that might have begun as early as the sixth century.
This usage of royal monograms for signing simultaneously reflects the much
broader employment of monograms on Merovingian signet-rings.

7.2. MONOGRAMS AS SIGNS OF SOCIAL

S TAT U S A N D E P I S C O PA L AU T H O R I T Y
I N P R E - C A RO L I N G I A N E U RO P E

The vast majority of personal monograms found on gold signet-rings represented

Gallo-Roman aristocrats (Fig. 7.4), including Merovingian bishops such as the
aforementioned Avitus, who, in the early sixth century, had his box monogram
engraved on the bezel of his signet-ring. Avitus’ ring was not exceptional in its
design, and some monogrammed gold rings from sixth- and seventh-century
Gaul probably encoded the names of other local ecclesiastical hierarchs.27 By the
early seventh century, rings had become luxurious material symbols of episcopal
­authority not just in Gaul, but in Visigothic Spain too.28 Thus, Isidore of Seville,
in his Ecclesiastical Offices written between 598 and 615, mentioned that a bishop
expected to receive a ring during consecration ‘as a sign (signum) of episcopal
­honour and the seal (signaculum) of mysteries’,29 while the Fourth Council of
Toledo (633) affirmed that a reinstated bishop had to receive pontifical insignia
including a ring before the altar.30 So one can speculate that some gold Visigothic
rings with box monograms might have belonged to bishops. In using personal
monograms for sealing, Visigothic and Merovingian bishops were comparable to
Byzantine ecclesiastical hierarchs who used personal cruciform monograms from
as early as the sixth century.31

24 ChLA, vol. 13, no. 558.

25 ChLA, vol. 13, no. 552. See also the monogram of Chlothar II in his charter to St. Denis,
ChLA, vol. 13, no. 550.
26 Erben, Die Kaiser- und Königsurkunden, pp. 146–7; Atsma and Vezin, ‘Graphische Elemente’,
pp. 323–4. On surviving Merovingian diplomas from the final third of the seventh century until the
early eighth century, royal subscripsi signs had already replaced royal monograms. See ChLA, vol. 13,
nos. 565–68 and 570; vol. 14, nos. 577, 579, 588, 591, and 593.
27 Deloche, Étude historique.
28 Dalton, Catalogue, pp. xxxiv–xxxv; and Moore, A Sacred Kingdom, pp. 152–3.
29 ‘Datur et anulus propter signum pontificalis honoris vel signaculum secretorum’, Sancti Isidori
episcopi hispalensis de ecclesiasticis officiis, 2. 5. 12, ed. Lawson, p. 60. On dating, see Isidore of Seville,
De ecclesiasticis officiis, 2. 5. 12, trans. Knoebel, p. 12.
30 Concilios visigóticos e hispano-romanos, ed. Vive, p. 203.
31 For an episcopal lead seal attributed to the sixth century, see Metcalf, Byzantine Seals, p. 341,
no. 413.
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206 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 7.4. Merovingian ring, seventh century. New York, MMA, acc. no. 17.191.93.

More certainly, monograms engraved on silver and gold sixth- and seventh-
century signet-rings, as well as on other material objects emanating from Visigothic
Spain, functioned as markers of status in local society.32 Such usage was most likely
inspired by Byzantine influence that was stronger in Visigothic Spain than in
Merovingian Gaul. This was due, in part, to the presence of the Byzantine province
of Spania on the south-eastern Spanish littoral from the mid-sixth to the early
­seventh century,33 as well as to the enduring contacts of Spain with the Byzantine
world thereafter. Under the same impulse, cruciform monograms began to appear
in seventh-century Spain, whereas this monogrammatic form had become popular
in Byzantine North Africa even earlier. This is indicated not only by the appear-
ance of cruciform imperial monograms on copper-alloy coins of Carthage after
Justinian’s reconquest of the mid-sixth century and the discovery of moulds for the
production of small medallions with cruciform monograms in the city in the same
decades,34 but also by the finds of gold and base-metal signet-rings inscribed with
cruciform monograms of the Byzantine type, which encoded their owners’ names
with Latin letters.35 Signet-rings featuring such monograms were produced in
other Latin-speaking areas in the Western Mediterranean. For instance, almost a
thousand miles northwest of Carthage, a ring with a similarly shaped cruciform
Latin monogram has been discovered in a seventh-century grave at Santa María de
Hito, in Spanish Cantabria.36

32 The Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid owns at least two Visigothic signet-rings with box
monograms: an earlier silver ring found at Brácana (Montefrío, inv. no. 62194) features a box mono-
gram of the late Roman type, while a later gold ring discovered at Montejo de Tiermes (Soria, inv. no.
52507) is inscribed with a monogram of the Merovingian type. See also Balmaseda Muncharaz,
‘Orfebrería epigrafiada’, pp. 16 and 23.
33 On these Byzantine areas and their gradual conquest by Visigothic kings ending in 621, see
Wood, ‘Defending Byzantine Spain’; and Martínez Jiménez and Moreno Narganes, ‘Nunc autem’.
34 Eger, ‘Byzantine Dress Accessories’, pp. 137–8, note 48.
35 Deloche, Étude historique, nos. 301–2. A cruciform monogram can also be seen on a gilded
bronze belt strap-end unearthed in Hippo Regius and dated to the second quarter of the seventh cen-
tury; see Tobias, ‘Riemenzungen’, pp. 159–60, fig. 9.
36 Gutiérrez Cuenca and Hierro Gárate, ‘Dos anillos’, pp. 153–9. Another signet-ring with a cru-
ciform monogram has been described by Reinhart, ‘Los anillos’, p. 174, no. 18.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 207

A unique horse bit now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, pro-
duced in seventh- or eighth-century Spain provides another example of Eastern
influence. Its rich inlaid decoration includes identical cruciform monograms of the
Byzantine style, which probably encoded the name of a noble rider (Fig. 7.5).37
This artefact is a near parallel with a currently missing horse bit from Real Armería
in Madrid, which displayed a similar monogram tentatively deciphered as the
name of King Wittiza (694–710). Yet, in contrast to the latter artefact, the tech-
nical features of the New York horse bit suggest that its usage was limited to cere-
monial purposes,38 and its cruciform monograms probably played a special role in
the pageantry of authority on such occasions. The addition of cruciform mono-
grams on Visigothic ceremonial horse bits must have been inspired by the Helena
legend on the finding of the True Cross. According to this story, which enjoyed
popularity in the early medieval West, Helena discovered not only the Cross but
also the nails by which Christ was crucified, and she re-fashioned them into a helmet
and a horse bit for her victorious Christian son, Constantine the Great.39

Fig. 7.5. Horse bit from Visigothic Spain. New York, MMA, acc. no. 47.100.24.

37 Acc. no. 47.100.24. 38 Art of Medieval Spain, pp. 68–9, no. 28.
39 Drijvers, Helena Augusta, p. 105.
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208 Graphic Signs of Authority

Visigothic Spain was also affected by the late Roman and early Byzantine practice
of engraving monograms on dress accessories. Thus, two Hispano-Visigothic belt
buckles display similarities with early Byzantine examples in that one features a
Latin box monogram on its tongue,40 and the other displays on its plate a bar Latin
monogram of the type that had been gaining popularity in the seventh-century
Mediterranean.41
Eastern influence in Visigothic Spain was exemplified not only by the use of
cruciform monograms on accessories that functioned as social extensions of the
human body, but also by the appearance of such graphic devices on public
­monuments—a widespread practice in the sixth- and seventh-century Byzantine
world. Thus, a cruciform personal monogram of the powerful Visigothic magnate
Teodemir was carved on a roundel unearthed in the remains of his richly decorated
residential complex at Pla de Nadal, near Valencia (Fig. 7.6a).42 Additionally, an
external wall of the church of Santa María de Lara at Quintanilla de las Viñas, near
the northern Spanish town of Burgos, features a frieze with three discs framing
Latin cruciform monograms. The monograms were carved in the late Visigothic
period, and probably encoded the name of a local noble donor or an invocation
(Fig. 7.6b).43 The closest surviving graphic parallels can be found in the Byzantine
East. In 558, a local governor Thomas placed his cruciform monograms on
doorways and capitals of the fortress at Androna (al-Anderin) in Syria, paired with
chi-rhos, the sign of the cross, and a cruciform monogram with the Christian
acclamation ΦΩΣ–ΖΩΗ (‘Light–Life’).44 An even closer parallel can be found at
Tower 40 of the Land Wall of Constantinople, where three similar discs with
Greek cruciform monograms were carved onto the marble surface (Fig. 7.6c). The
accompanying inscription dates these monograms to 685; they conceal a popular
invocation pleading for the divine protection of Emperor Justinian II: ‘O, Mother
of God, help Lord Justinian’ (Θεοτόκε βοήθει Ἰουστινιανοῦ δεσπότου).45
More evidence for the use of monograms to articulate social status emanates
from sixth- and seventh-century Italy, especially from Ravenna and other areas that
maintained intimate contacts with the Byzantine world. As shown in the previous
chapter, this tendency, amongst other things, resulted in the employment of
monumental monograms in ecclesiastical settings as visual symbols of episcopal
authority. One can envision a similar symbolic context for the monogram that
appears on ivory plaques embellishing the cathedrae of Maximian of Ravenna
(546–57), who, despite his humble origins in the Istrian city of Pola, was elevated

40 Ripoll, ‘Problemas cronológicos’, p. 70; Tejado Sebastián, ‘Castros militares’, pp. 155–6.
41 London, BrM, reg. no. 1992,0605.2; Ager, ‘Byzantine Influences’, p. 75, fig. 15.
42 Juan Navarro and Pastor Cubillo, ‘Los visigodos’; Chavarría Arnau, ‘Churches’, p. 172.
43 Barroso Cabrera and Morín de Pablos, ‘Fórmulas y temas’, pp. 298–9; Domingo, Capiteles,
vol. 1, pp. 298–9.
44 Eastmond, ‘Monograms’, pp. 228–9 and fig. 11.4. On the ΖΩΗ–ΦΩΣ monogram, see
­section 7.3.
45 Arachne Database, no. 144795; Meyer-Plath and Schneider, Die Landmauer, p. 130, no. 26;
Asutay-Effenberger, Die Landmauer, p. 174, fig. 199. Six similarly carved medallions with cruciform
monograms were also recorded for Tower 46, and dated to the same period. See van Millingen,
Byzantine Constantinople, p. 100; Asutay-Effenberger, Die Landmauer, p. 174.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 209

Fig. 7.6. a) Theodemir’s monumental monogram from Pla de Nadal; b) monumental

monograms from Santa María de Lara at Quintanilla de las Viñas; c) monumental
monograms of Justinian II from the Land Wall of Constantinople.

to the Ravennate see after the Justinianic reconquest of this imperial city. The
exquisite throne, designed for use in a cathedral setting, was most likely produced
in the Byzantine East.46 Under the influence of the contemporary monogram-
matic fashion, an elaborate Latin box monogram of a local Ravennate type,
MAXIMIANI EPISCOPI (‘of Bishop Maximian’), was carved on its frontal side to
face its public audiences (Fig. 7.7). The monogram is placed above the figures of
the four evangelists and John the Baptist, and is adorned by two peacocks (symbols
of immortality) on its sides, reminiscent of decorations in contemporary Christian
plastic arts and manuscript culture where two birds flank a symbol of Christ such
as a chi-rho, ankh-cross, or Latin cross. In a similar vein, the monogram incorpor-
ating Maximian’s title functioned as a graphic symbol of his episcopal authority
and ensured the bishop’s perpetual symbolic presence in his church.
This habit of marking episcopal headquarters with episcopal monograms
affected not only plastic arts but also the appearance of some contemporary mater-
ial objects produced in the Byzantine world for public use within ecclesiastical
spaces, such as the polycandela (oil lamp chandeliers) preserved in the Kumluka or
Sion Treasure. The treasure contains ecclesiastical silver objects that a Lycian bishop
named Eutychios probably donated to the monastery of Holy Sion near Myra
in the mid-sixth century, including polycandela that feature two forms of his
­personal monogram in the genitive: ΕΥΤΥΧΙΑΝΟΥ ΕΠΙΣΚΟΠΟΥ (‘of Bishop
Eutychianos’). Some of these silver chandeliers employ his cruciform monogram as
an independent visual symbol, while others frame the box monogram of the donor
with a circular inscription—intended to be read together as intercessory messages

46 For more details and references, see Volbach, Avori, pp. 38–40; Rizzardi, ‘La cattedra’; Mauskopf
Deliyannis, Ravenna, pp. 213–18.
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210 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 7.7. Lower frontal part of Maximian’s throne, Ravenna. Norwegian Institute in Rome,
H. P. L’Orange Photo Archive.

on behalf of the bishop: ΑΓΙΑ ΣΙΩΝ ΒΟΗΘΙ monogram (‘O, Holy Sion, help
Bishop Eutychianos’) and ΤΡΙΣΑΓΙΕ Κ(ΥΡΙ)Ε ΒΟΗΘΙ monogram (‘O, Thrice-
holy Lord, help Bishop Eutychianos’).47 The use of both box and cruciform
monograms corresponds well with the polycandela’s time of production revealed
by its silver stamps, c.550–60,48 making it a close contemporary of Maximian’s
cathedra. The church settings for which such polycandela were intended probably
helped to increase the perceived intercessory power of these invocations, as the
episcopal graphic signs of authority were revealed to viewers standing below by the
shimmering light of candles, creating a special visual effect for onlookers.
Such usage of monograms was not restricted to luxury silver objects, and they
were applied to more quotidian copper-alloy polycandela. For instance, a Syrian
polycandelon from the British Museum, dated to the second half of the sixth or first
half of the seventh century, features a central disc with a cruciform monogram that
can be deciphered as either ΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΙΟΥ (‘of Anastasios’) or ΙΟΥΣΤΙΝΙΑΝΟΥ
(‘of Justinian’) (Fig. 7.8).49 The location and size of the monogram clearly indicate

47 On these objects, inscriptions, and monograms, see Boyd, ‘A “Metropolitan” Treasure’, p. 10

and nos. 25–36; Ševčenko, ‘The Sion Treasure’, pp. 44–7. See also ICA, nos. 179193, 179196, and
179197.
48 Dodd, ‘The Question of Workshop’.
49 Buckton, ed., Byzantium, pp. 106–7, no. 116.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 211

Fig. 7.8. Early Byzantine copper-alloy polycandelon. London, BrM, reg. no. 1994,0610.11.
© The Trustees of the British Museum.

that it was incorporated into the chandelier for the purpose of its public display. As
this copper-alloy polycandelon illustrates, the practice of inscribing luxury interior
objects with the monograms of high dignitaries was adapted for cheaper base-
metal objects, in the same manner as these changes occurred on contemporary
dress accessories and jewellery.
Monogrammed objects in the sixth-century post-Roman world most likely had
a much greater public visibility than that implied by the small handful of surviving
samples. A passage in Agnellus of Ravenna’s Liber pontificalis, describing his city at
the end of the Gothic war in 561, allows a glimpse of that lost visual world, satur-
ated with graphic signs and monogrammatic devices: ‘And in that time there were
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212 Graphic Signs of Authority

many signs and prodigies around Ravenna, so that many “signed” (signarent) their
things (res suas) and homes and vessels, so that they might be recognized.’50 This is
a puzzling statement. Did he mean that numerous omens were interpreted in
Ravenna as signs of its imminent destruction by an invading force or natural
disaster? If he did, where did he receive this information from, and why would the
Ravennate people engage in such a ‘signing’ frenzy during the turbulent sixth
century, unheard of in other Mediterranean cities? The more likely explanation is,
however, that, writing in the ninth century, Agnellus simply attempted to ration-
alize the sixth-century monogrammatic culture of Ravenna, the remnants of which
he could still observe on monuments and ‘antique’ objects, without a real under-
standing of their sixth-century context. The ‘signing’ that Agnellus describes in his
text must have referred to monumental monograms carved in mid-sixth-century
Ravenna, as well as to monogrammatic devices of the kind seen on the polycandela
from the Sion Treasure.51
The sixth- and seventh-century finds in the Crypta Balbi in Rome provide other
examples of such ‘signed’ objects. The most spectacular is a bronze suspended lamp
in the form of Pegasus, dated to the late sixth century or first half of the seventh.
Three box monograms are engraved on the body of Pegasus along with an abbrevi-
ation SCI (Fig. 7.9a), plausibly deciphered as Monasteri Sancti Martini Turensis (‘of
the Monastery of St Martin of Tours’), and thus connecting the lamp with the
Roman church of Santi Silvestro e Martino ai Monti.52 Another monogrammed
object from Crypta Balbi is a small lead square plaque featuring a box monogram,
which identified an object it was attached to as either ‘of St Lawrence’ or ‘of
St Peter’.53 The final example is a monogrammed circular glass ‘blob’ that used to
be attached to the wall of a vessel, with a box monogram possibly identifying it as
property of the nearby monastery of San Lorenzo in Pallacinis. This practice was
hardly unique, as evinced by the existence of similar glass ‘blobs’ with monograms in
the Vatican Museum,54 and artefacts of this kind most likely left quite an impression
on Agnellus, prompting him to mention ‘signed’ vessels in the ninth century.
Monogrammatic culture was not limited to the Ravennate exarchate and Rome,
but also impacted upon Lombard territories, as shown by the finds of gold-leaf
crosses in seventh-century Lombard graves at Monza, Trezzo sull’Adda, Piacenza,
and Toscana—with monograms engraved at their central medallions.55 The same

50 ‘Et in ipso tempore multa signa et prodigia facta sunt circa Ravennam, ita ut multi signarent res
suas et domos et vasa, ut agnoscerentur’, Agnelli Liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis, 79, ed. Holder-
Egger, pp. 265–391, at p. 331. The Book of Pontiffs of the Church of Ravenna, 79, trans. Mauskopf
Deliyannis, p. 193.
51 One can add here a sixth-century Byzantine marble font from the Museum of Torcello in Venice
with a complex cruciform monogram, which also features an alpha and omega beneath its horizontal
arms. This museum item came from the perished church of Santi Marco e Andrea on Murano. All
attempts to decode this graphic device remain inconclusive. See Polacco, Sculture, pp. 32–3.
52 Arena et al., eds, Roma dall’antichità, pp. 430–2, no. II.5.8.
53 Arena et al., eds, Roma dall’antichità, p. 369, no. II.4.553.
54 Arena et al., eds, Roma dall’antichità, p. 318, no. II.3.393; Fremersdorf, Antikes, islamisches und
mittelalterliches Glas, p. 72, nos. 703–5.
55 Fuchs, Die langobardischen Goldblattkreuze, nos. 62–4, 107, and 109, pls. 15, 16, and 31; Roffia
and Sesino. ‘La necropoli’, pp. 37–8, no. 8.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 213

Fig. 7.9. Monograms on early medieval objects from Italy: a) on the ‘Pegasus’ lamp from
Crypta Balbi, Rome; b) on the strap-end from Castel Trosino, grave 126; c) on the strap-
end from Castel Trosino, grave 9.

conclusion can be drawn from the dissemination pattern of monogrammed strap-

ends in the Mediterranean world from the late sixth century until the end of the
seventh century (more than two dozen specimens are known).56 This peculiar
material tradition seems to have originated in Italy and Dalmatia, probably evolv-
ing from the earlier usage of box monograms on belt buckles, and then spread to
the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. While silver was the default metal
for strap-ends in Italy, those embellished with cruciform personal Greek mono-
grams and produced in the seventh-century Byzantine territories were similar to
contemporary Byzantine belt buckles, in that they were made of gold and gilded
copper-alloy.57
As with the early development of monogrammed belt buckles, the practice of
adding monograms to strap-ends was probably connected to high-ranking mem-
bers of the military. Such a connection is bolstered by the evidence of silver
strap-ends carved with box and cruciform monograms—some of which probably
encode Latin names—that have been found in Italy in rich warrior graves, such as
Grave 126 in the ‘Lombard’ cemetery at Castel Trosino in Emilia Romana, dated
to the first quarter of the seventh century and featuring a strap-end with a box
monogram of a standard late Roman type (Fig. 7.9b).58 In contrast, strap-ends
deposited at later burials in this cemetery—such as those in Graves 9, 90, and
T—demonstrate the transition to a cruciform monogrammatic type popular in

56 These strap-ends were part of the multipartite belts, which appeared during the reign of Justinian I.
For further details, see Schulze-Dörrlamm, Byzantinische Gürtelschallen, vol. 2, pp. 286–93; and Eger,
‘Between Amuletic Ornament’, p. 286.
57 Tobias, ‘Riemenzungen’, pp. 159–70.
58 Tobias, ‘Riemenzungen’, pp. 152–9; Paroli, ed., La necropoli, p. 170.
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214 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 7.10. Copper-alloy belt buckle from Visigothic Spain, seventh century. New York,
MMA, acc. no. 66.152.2.

contemporary Byzantium. Grave 90 has been tentatively described as the burial of

a local leader, who has even been identified as a certain Anso (a typical Lombard
name) based on three buttons discovered there. But the cruciform monogram on
the strap-end from this burial consists of the letters of a different name (G, U, I, L,
M)—perhaps the genitive form of Guilimus—which in turn begs the question
whether the monogram identified the deceased leader or another individual.59 It is
possible, for instance, that the belt was handed over from its original owner to its
final wearer, and that the latter simply perceived the cruciform monogram on its
strap-end to be an appropriate graphic symbol of social prestige. A similar trans-
formation from a personal monogram to an undecipherable visual status symbol
can be observed on the strap-end from Grave 9, on which a cruciform graphic
device accompanies a figural image of a warrior holding a shield (Fig. 7.9c). Werner
Seibt has tentatively decoded this monogrammatic sign as DULIS,60 but most of
the characters at the ends of its cruciform arms deviate from the traditional forms
of the letters D, U and L, to the extent that one may wonder whether or not the
linguistic content of that sign bore any meaning for the producer and wearer of the
strap-end. For many users of lower status, such monograms remained undecipher-
able visual signs of social prestige, as can be corroborated by a contemporaneous
copper-alloy belt buckle from Visigothic Spain, on which gilding and an ornamen-
tal sign imitating a cruciform monogram were of equal importance in visualizing
the social pretensions of its wearer (Fig. 7.10).61
The persistent use of personal monograms as graphic signs of social status in
the sixth- and seventh-century Latin West also contributed to the appearance of
monogrammatic signs referring to larger communities, such as numismatic urban
monograms. The first such graphic sign appeared on the so-called ‘municipal’ cop-
per coinage of the Ostrogothic kingdom, although Ostrogothic kings might have
been the only authority behind such issues. While most of these coins featured the

59 Tobias, ‘Riemenzungen’, p. 156, Fig. 2.7; Paroli, ed., La necropoli, p. 216.

60 Tobias, ‘Riemenzungen’, pp. 154–5.
61 The place of the belt buckle’s production remains a matter of debate. For an argument in favour
of its Eastern Mediterranean origin, see Ripoll López, ‘A Belt Fitting’.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 215

Fig. 7.11. a) Ostrogothic copper coin with the monogram of Ravenna, Oslo University,
Museum of Cultural History; b) the reverse of a Merovingian silver coin from Clermont with
the urban monogram ARV[ernum], Princeton University Numismatic Collection, Department
of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library.

personification of Rome and traditional Roman imagery such as an eagle or she-

wolf, the largest group of decanummia (10 nummi) displayed the personification
of Ravenna and the title legend FELIX RAVENNA (‘happy Ravenna’) on their
obverse, and the city’s box monogram on their reverse (Fig. 7.11a). The exact
details of their production remain a matter of debate amongst numismatists. They
were produced either in Ravenna or Rome, or perhaps in both, in the period
­ranging from the 500s to 530s.62 Like the placement of numismatic royal mono-
grams, the urban monogram of Ravenna was situated inside a wreath on the
reverse. Due to its short history, Ravenna lacked a developed repertoire of repre-
sentative symbols, and the urban monogram was thus invented as a new visual
symbol of authority appropriate to its status in the fifth and sixth centuries as a
node of imperial and royal power.
This Ravennate innovation complemented the earlier tradition of figural per-
sonifications of imperial capitals, which were actively used from the Constantinian
period onwards as religiously correct substitutes for the images of pagan deities.63
In the post-Roman world, it apparently became unproblematic to provide such
cities outside the grip of direct imperial control not only with figural personifica-
tions but also with their own graphic devices.64 Hence, the cruciform monogram
of Rome was later displayed on papal-Byzantine silver coins struck in the eternal
city at the turn of the eighth century.65 From the late sixth century onwards, some
less prominent Italian cities such as Lucca and perhaps Luni appropriated the
newly invented tradition of urban monograms for their coins,66 and this numis-
matic practice also affected mints in Visigothic Spain and Merovingian Gaul.

62 MEC, pp. 32–3; Metlich, The Coinage, pp. 48–50, nos. 78a–b.
63 Bruhn, Coins and Costume, p. 21.
64 It is hardly surprising in this regard that the only other mint in the post-Roman world which
placed an urban monogram on its bronze coins (pentanummia) during the reign of Justinian I was a
city on the north-eastern fringes of the Byzantine Empire, Cherson. See CBC, vol. 1, no. 108.
65 O’Hara, ‘A Find’, nos. 1–7 and 21.
66 MEC, no. 318; Arslan, ‘La “prima generazione” ’, p. 257, fig. 42; Arslan, ‘Monete longobarde’,
p. 326.
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216 Graphic Signs of Authority

Thus, during the joint reigns of Chindasvinth and Reccesvinth (649–53) and of
Egica and Wittiza (694/5–702), cruciform Latin monograms of Spanish cities
became the default reverse type for gold tremisses.67 This Visigothic practice was
purely pragmatic: the need to place the titles and names of two rulers on both sides
of such coins left no option but to express the mint name with a reverse mono-
grammatic type. At the same time, the fact that die-engravers consistently employed
monograms to encode the names of cities where the mints were located, rather
than the names of Visigothic kings themselves, suggests that, by the second half of
the seventh century, such graphic devices were already perceived to be less appro-
priate as symbols of royal authority, a trend that corresponded to the decreasing
popularity of imperial monograms in seventh-century Byzantium. Rather, they
were seen to function more appropriately as graphic signs representing people of
an elevated status, or distinct communities such as episcopal cities. This trend
became more apparent on Merovingian coinage from the late sixth to the first half
of the eighth century, due to the absence of effective royal control over local mints.
As a result, some gold and (later) silver Merovingian coins featured the monogram-
matic signs of local figures of authority, cities, or monasteries controlling the mints
(Fig. 7.11b).68 As in the case of the Roman evidence from the Crypta Balbi
­discussed above, monastic monograms usually encoded the names of the holy
patrons with which such communities identified themselves.
The appearance of urban and monastic monograms in the Latin West became a
noticeable deviation from the late Roman calligraphic tradition of personal and
acclamatory monogrammatic signs. These new graphic signs instead represented
discrete collective entities, namely episcopal cities and monasteries, that had grad-
ually acquired a special role in the political landscape of Western Europe after the
disintegration of the Western Roman empire.

7 . 3 . I N VO C AT I O N A L G R A P H I C D E V I C E S
I N P R E - C A RO L I N G I A N M AT E R I A L
A N D M A N U S C R I P T C U LT U R E

Invocational cruciform monograms, wishing well and begging for divine help and
support, represent another new graphic development, especially typical of the early
Byzantine East. Along with the introduction of the cruciform personal mono-
grams in the second quarter of the sixth century, the appearance of such graphic
devices reflected the ubiquitous presence of the sign of the cross in the post-Roman
world, as well as to the general belief in the sign’s apotropaic power.
Textual well-wishing and intercessory invocations—such as Ζωή (life), Ὑγεία
(health), Vivas (may you live)—became extremely popular in the late antique

67 Miles, The Coinage, pp. 348–50 and 406–30; Vico Monteoliva, Cores Gomendio, and Cores
Uria, Corpus, pp. 465–8, 473, and 525–51; MEC, p. 51.
68 For further details and references, see Garipzanov, ‘Metamorphoses’, pp. 429 and 432, nos. 4–8
and 19–35.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 217

world among a range of religious communities. Invocations of this kind were

engraved on various stamps and functioned somewhat similarly to amulets and
charms when applied to different quotidian objects, most notably bread.69 In
Christian usage, such invocations were often placed on cross-shaped stamps; the
most powerful Christian sign was thus perceived to augment the intercessory
­properties of the words themselves. For the very same reason, in the period from
the fifth to seventh centuries, some invocations began to be expressed first with
cruciform acrostics and later with proper cruciform monograms.
Angelos Chaniotis describes an earlier graphic example of such Christian appro-
priation, scratched onto a wall in late antique Aphrodisias at the time of on-going
religious competition. On that graffito, the first seven letters of the Greek alphabet
are arranged in the form of the cross; a zeta and eta provide the latter with horizon-
tal arms (Fig. 7.12). The cursive beta lying on its side in between these two letters
resembles an omega, thus producing the aforementioned word ΖΩΗ (life) encoded
in this cruciform abecedary, and thereby deciphering the symbolic meaning of the
cross to the Christian believers.70

Fig. 7.12. Early graffito from late antique Aphrodisias. Photo by Angelos Chaniotis.

69 For more details on such stamps, see Galavaris, Bread; Weitzmann, ed., The Age of Spirituality,
pp. 627–8, no. 565; and Caseau, ‘Magical Protection’.
70 Chaniotis, ‘Studying Graffiti’.
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218 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 7.13. Early Byzantine gold pendant with the ΦΩΣ–ΖΩΗ monogram. New York,
MMA, acc. no. 17.190.1660.

A more developed form of cruciform graphic device in the Greek East consisted
of the word ΖΩΗ in combination with ΦΩΣ (light), which jointly refer to divine
attributes mentioned in John 1.4 (‘In him was life; and the life was the light of
men’) and the promise of salvation made by Jesus to his followers in John 8.12
(‘I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but
shall have the light of life’). In the ‘Light–Life’ graphic device, the two words inter-
cross and share the omega as their middle letter (Fig. 7.13). In some cases, the
remaining four letters were attached to the four arms of the cross with an omega at
its centre. This popular device can also be seen as a Christian visual alternative to
the Jewish symbol of light and life, menorah or seven-branched candelabrium,
which was earlier etched in catacombs and other settings.71 The ΦΩΣ–ΖΩΗ device
appeared on various early Byzantine material artefacts such as lamps,72 rings,73

71 Longenecker, ‘ “Good Luck” ’, pp. 260–1. 72 Bouras and Parani, Lighting, pp. 26–7.
73 e.g. on a sixth-century silver ring from Royal Ontario Museum, no. 986.181.12, described by
Dauterman Maguire, Maguire, and Duncan-Flowers, Art and Holy Powers, no. 86. See also ICA,
no. 128807.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 219

Fig. 7.14. a) Ora pro me device from St Petersburg, National Library of Russia, Lat.Q.v.I.3,
fol. 192r; b) Ora pro me device from Würzburg, UB, M.p.th.f.68, fol. 170v: c) Amen device
from Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 64 Weiss, fol. 67v; d) Θεοτόκε βοήθει monogram
on the strap-end from Mersin, Cilicia; e) Θεοτόκε βοήθει τῶ σῶ δούλω device from early
Byzantine seals; f ) ΜΙΧΑΗΛ monogrammatic tattoo on a mummified body from et-Tereif,
Sudan; g) Η ΑΓΙΑ ΜΑΡΙΑ monograms on icons from Mount Sinai.

cross-pendants,74 processional crosses,75 textiles,76 belt buckles,77 and sepulchral

crosses78 found in different parts of the Mediterranean world. The popularity of
this graphic sign of Christian authority stretched beyond the core Byzantine areas
and reached as far as southern Spain in the west and Nubia in the south.
In the same period, a cruciform graphic device addressing Christian readers,
ora pro me (‘pray for me’), entered late antique Latin manuscript culture—the first
word creating a horizontal line with the next two words crossing it downward
­vertically and sharing the letter R. Clerical scribes employed such cruciform
exhortation at the end of their work, often followed by their personal name. The
cruciform shape thus empowered a scribe’s request for a prayer on his behalf.
The earliest occurrence of this graphic device can be found in the early fifth-century
manuscript with Augustine of Hippo’s works written in North Africa (Fig. 7.14a),
a manuscript that some scholars have even attributed to the quill of the author
himself. Its concluding line encourages its reader to lege et ora pro me peccatore

74 e.g. on a seventh-century gold pectoral cross found in Kerch, currently in BrM, reg. no.
1923,0716.66, and described by Dalton, ‘A Gold Pectoral Cross’.
75 ICA, no. 162518, from Paris, BnF, Cabinet des Médailles. It accompanies an invocation to
St George; see Walter, The Warrior Saints, pp. 124 and 271, fig. 21.
76 e.g. on a fifth- or sixth-century Coptic textile from Antinoë, currently in the Brooklyn Museum,
acc. no. 15.440, described in Cooney, Late Egyptian and Coptic Art, pl. 46; and at the middle of
a sixth- or seventh-century liturgical cloth from the Treasury of Monza with the cruciform Greek
monograms of the evangelists in the four corners, described by Merati, Il tresoro, pp. 8–9. All
the monograms are embroidered in red silk on linen cloth. For more details, see ICA, no. 70866.
77 e.g. a belt buckle from the Schmidt collection with a provenance from southern Spain, described
in Wamser, ed., Die Welt von Byzanz, p. 281, no. 449.
78 Tsakos, ‘Sepulchral Crosses’, pp. 165–8.
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220 Graphic Signs of Authority

Augustinus (‘Read and pray for the sinner that I am, Augustine’).79 Although the
name of Augustine could have been added to this phrase at a later stage, Augustine’s
praise of the sign of the cross mentioned earlier in this book makes the idea that he
was directly involved in the creation of this graphic device all the more plausible.
The ora pro me cruciform formula was occasionally used in early medieval Latin
manuscripts and can, for example, be seen in a gospel-book produced in southern
Italy in the second half of the sixth century (Fig. 7.14b).80
In the same centuries, the most popular liturgical word Amen also attracted the
attention of Christian calligraphers. This Greek word (ΑΜΗΝ) is possibly encoded
by the cruciform monogram on two silver shallow dishes from the Lampsakos
Treasure, produced in the early seventh century.81 The monogram appears at a med-
allion at the centre of a gilt cross, the only decoration on this tableware. In an entirely
different manner, this liturgical word was endowed with a cruciform structure in
pre-Carolingian Latin manuscript culture: for example, the word AMEN was writ-
ten twice to produce a cruciform graphic device between Books 7 and 8 of Isidore’s
Etymologies originating from the northern Italian monastery of Bobbio in the first
half of the eighth century—the two words sharing the letter M (Fig. 7.14c).82
Another substantial group of late antique graphic invocations was addressed to
divine agents. As shown by polycandela from the Sion Treasure, in the mid-sixth
century such textual requests could be addressed to Holy Sion or the Thrice-holy
Lord. In the same century, such intercessory formulas could also be directed to the
Lord and Theotokos (the Mother of God)—the Council of Ephesus in 431
invested the latter title of Mary with orthodox legitimacy against the objections of
Nestorius of Constantinople.83 Thus, for example, the abbreviated expression
Κύριε βοήθει (‘The Lord, help!’) was incorporated into scribal subscriptions on
Byzantine private charters from Hermopolis in Egypt from the late fifth to the
­seventh centuries.84 As to the invocation of Theotokos, it appears, for instance, on
a silver spoon from Toronto produced probably in the sixth century: its handle
displays the inscription ΘΕΟΤΟΚΕ ΒΟΗΘΙ (‘Mother of God, help!’) whereas the
spoon’s disk features the personal box monogram ΚΟΣΜΑ.85 By the seventh
­century, a graphic device addressing Theotokos became the most popular interces-
sory cruciform monogram in the early Byzantine world, in some cases substituted
by a similar cruciform monogram addressing the Lord. This new trend is aptly
­illustrated not only by the aforementioned monumental monograms of Justinian
II carved on the Land Wall of Constantinople in 685 (Fig. 7.6c) and of Abbot
Hyakinthos on the marble screen in the Koimesis church in Nicea,86 but also by the

79 St Petersburg, National Library of Russia, Lat.Q.v.I.3, fol. 192r. Vessey, ed., A Companion,
p. 434; CLA, 1.1613.
80 Würzburg, UB, M.p.th.f.68, fol. 170v; CLA, 9.1423a.
81 Dodd, Byzantine Silver Stamps, nos. 52–3 (BrM, reg. nos 1848.0601.13 and 1886.0318.2:
613–29/30).
82 Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 64 Weiss, fol. 67v; CLA, 9.1386.
83 Price and Gaddis, ‘General Introduction’, pp. 17–23. 84 Diethart, ‘Κύριε βοήθει’.
85 University of Toronto Art Centre, no. M82.425; Hauser, Spätantike und frühbyzantinische
Silberlöffel, no. 162; ICA, no. 129061.
86 For Hyakinthos’ monograms, see Chapter 6.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 221

placement of this type of monogrammatic sign on various dress accessories. For

instance, it ­features on a luxurious gold strap-end found in Mersin, Cilicia, dated to
the third quarter of the seventh century (Fig. 7.14d), and on a copper-alloy reliquary
belt buckle from a Munich collection, produced in late seventh- or eighth-century
Byzantium: both are inscribed with the monogram Θεοτόκε βοήθει (‘Mother of
God, help!’).87 The same monogram can be found on a gold bracelet from Kiev,
dated to the second half of the seventh century. In this case, the graphic invocation
is accompanied by another cruciform monogram encoding the name of the invo-
cation’s beneficiary, Constantine.88 Similar apotropaic monograms can be found
on a seventh-century Byzantine gold earring at the Rhode Island School of Design
Museum,89 and on a couple of early Byzantine rings held in the Dumbarton Oaks
Collection, which all invoke either Theotokos or the Lord.90
Yet it was early Byzantine lead seals that became the default media for such
invocational monograms from the seventh to ninth centuries, and this practice
persisted in Byzantium until the eleventh century.91 By the eighth century, the
most popular among them expanded the formula Θεοτόκε βοήθει by adding τῶ
σῶ δούλω between the arms of the cross (‘Mother of God, help your servant’) on
one side (Fig. 7.14e), accompanied by the name of a sealing office-holder on the
other. On some lead seals, the name of Theotokos in the cruciform monogram
seems to have been replaced with the name of the Lord (Κύριε), who became a
common addressee of such graphic invocations in the middle Byzantine period.92
During Iconoclasm, and in the eighth century in particular, the names of Theotokos
and the Lord in such cruciform invocations were also replaced by addresses to
Christ (Χριστἐ) and the Holy Trinity (Ἁγία Τριάς). The latter invocation Ἁγία
Τριὰς βοήθει (‘The Holy Trinity, help!’) was apparently placed on the seals of
­officials who opposed iconomachy.93
Cruciform monograms with similar invocational formulas also appeared occa-
sionally on other media such as silverware. Thus, the silver ewer of Zenobios from
the so-called Albanian Treasure, produced in the seventh or eighth century and
currently kept in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, features such graphic devices
incised on its bottom—the place that was previously reserved for imperial stamps
(Fig. 7.15).94 The monograms on the ewer differ from earlier monogrammatic
signs on imperial silverware not only in terms of their production—engraving
­versus stamping—but also in regard to their function: they encode the apotropaic

87 Tobias, ‘Riemenzungen’, pp. 170–2; Schulze-Dörrlamm, Byzantinische Gürtelschallen, vol. 2,

p. 302, fig. 120.
88 Kiev, Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine, inv. no. DM–1631; Byzanz: Pracht und Alltag,
no. 87, pp. 185–6.
89 Yeroulanou, Diatrita, no. 555. See also similar monograms on the clasp of a necklace and on a
ring (Yeroulanou, Diatrita, nos. 67 and 301).
90 Ross, Catalogue, vol. 2, nos. 71 and 110, pp. 61 and 81–2. See also ICA, nos. 62929 and 172120.
91 Seibt, ‘The Use’, pp. 8–10.
92 Laurent, Les sceaux byzantins, pl. XLIII; Metcalf, Byzantine Seals, pp. 458–74.
93 For more details and references, see Glynias, ‘Prayerful Iconoclasts’.
94 New York, MMA, acc. no. 17.190.1704; Dodd, Byzantine Silver Stamps, no. 103, pp. 276–7. It
was found near the village of Vrap in Albania and subsequently named after the country of its find.
Seibt, ‘Überlegungen’, p. 857, dates its production to around the 670s and 680s.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

222 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 7.15. Bottom of the ewer of Zenobios. New York, MMA, acc. no. 17.190.1704.

invocation ‘Lord, help your servant Zenobios. Amen’ (ΚΥΡΙΕ/ΒΩΗΘΙ/ΤΟΥ

ΔΟΥΛΟΥ ΣΟΥ/ΖΙΝΟΒΙΟΥ/ΑΜΗΝ).95 Five medallions with these cruciform
monograms are arranged to create the sign of the cross, to be deciphered clockwise
one after another, with the final word placed at the middle.
In some eastern Christian regions, such as Coptic Egypt and Nubia, people
relied on the miraculous protection not only of the Mother of God, the Lord,
Christ, and the Holy Trinity, but also of Archangel Michael. Consequently, the
monogram of his name must also have been invested with some sort of apotropaic

95 Cf. Seibt, ‘Überlegungen’, pp. 857–8, who questions the reading of the personal monogram as
referring to Zenobios due to the absence of an eta and suggests its decoding as presenting the genitive
form of the Avar name ‘Tζυβίνης’ (Tzobon). Yet the koine and Byzantine Greek tended to substitute
ει and η with ι, a feature that can be seen on this ewer in the monogrammatic form of the verb βοήθι
instead of βοήθει.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 223

power.96 This can be inferred from the recent detailed study of the mummified
corpse of a young Christian woman buried in Nubia, near the village et-Tereif in
modern Sudan, in c.655–775. She had a box monogram ΜΙΧΑΗΛ (Michael)
with the sign of the cross on its top tattooed on the inner thigh of her right leg
(Fig. 7.14f ). On the one hand, this monogrammatic sign looks similar to the two
box monograms (Η ΑΓΙΑ/ΜΑΡΙΑ) that identify the Virgin Mary on a sixth- or
seventh-century fresco in the Monastery of Apa Apollo in Coptic Egypt (Bawit,
Chapel XVII)97 and some pre-Iconoclastic icons from Mount Sinai dated to
the seventh and early eighth centuries (Fig. 7.14g).98 On the other hand, there
had been a tradition of placing tattoos on female bodies in this area in the pre-
Christian period, and scholars have connected this earlier tradition to ideas about
fecundity and healing practices.99 The box monogram of Michael might have been
used in a similar healing procedure, or it was tattooed as a graphic protective seal
of the kind that was described in the Bruce Codex, discussed in Chapter 1.100
This graphic sign was different from tattoos (known as stigmata) employed in
the classical world as well as in late antiquity.101 Late Roman legionaries had
imperial marks tattooed on their arms or hands, as outward marks of their military
service, and Augustine frequently likened baptismal branding with this kind of
marking in the early fifth century.102 Furthermore, criminals were subjected to
penal tattooing, while slaves could receive tattoos on their faces or foreheads as a
form of punishment. The monogrammatic tattoo from et-Tereif is, meanwhile,
closer to religious tattoos that were known in eastern lands such as Syria and Egypt
from the Hellenistic period onwards. Tattoos like these, placed on wrists or necks,
marked devotees of certain gods or goddesses, and Christians Copts continued this
tradition by tattooing the sign of the cross onto their right wrists, a practice that
survives today.103

7.4 . C H R I S TO G R A M S A N D T H E S I G N O F T H E
C RO S S I N P R E - C A RO L I N G I A N M AT E R I A L
A N D M A N U S C R I P T C U LT U R E

As shown in Chapter 2, christograms such as the chi-rho and tau-rho regularly

appeared on various material artefacts and monuments in the fifth-century
Mediterranean: for example, on luxurious marble sarcophagi produced in various
late antique cities such as Constantinople, Toulouse, and Ravenna (Fig. 7.16). In

96 His box monogram has been found carved on a limestone block in early Byzantine Miletus.
I am thankful to Joe Glynias for pointing out this find to me.
97 Weitzmann, The Monastery, p. 70, fig. 24; Bolman, ‘Figural Styles’, pp. 151–64, at p. 158.
98 Weitzmann, The Monastery, pp. 44–5, 50–1, 57–8, 61–4, pls. XXI, XXIII, XXV, LXVIII.
99 Taylor and Antoine, Ancient Lives, pp. 171–85.
100 On Michael’s perceived healing power in the late antique East, see Arnold, The Footprints,
pp. 39–49. In early Christian Nubia, St Michael’s monogram was also inscribed on church walls and
sherds, probably as an apotropaic device.
101 Jones, ‘Stigma’.
102 Vegetius, Epitoma rei militaris, 1.8 and 2.5, trans. Milner, pp. 9 and 34; and Ganz, ‘ “Character” ’.
103 Jones, ‘Stigma’, pp. 144–5. For a general discussion of tattoo-making in the Middle Ages, see
Oschema and Ott, ‘Menschenhaut’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi
Fig. 7.16. Sarcophagus of Bishop Theodorus from Ravenna, fifth century. Norwegian Institute in Rome, H. P. L’Orange Photo
Archive.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 225

the following centuries, these graphic devices continued to complement the sign of
the cross ubiquitous in early medieval material culture.104 In addition, the iota-chi—­
with the iota taking place of the rho in the chi-rho christogram—also became a
relatively popular graphic reference to Jesus Christ in the course of the fifth and
sixth centuries. For instance, it takes the central position on the imperial sarcopha-
gus from the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul—framed by a wreath held by
two angels—which was carved around the turn of the fifth century.105 It also func-
tions as the central graphic symbol on the base of the mid-fifth-century column of
Marcian in Constantinople.106 Other examples include an early sixth-century
base-metal cross from a collection in Munich on which an iota-chi is employed as
Christ’s nimbus at the central medallion,107 and a silver book reliquary with an
iota-chi on its front in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, from the Treasure of Abraham,
bishop of Hermonthis, c.600.108 Quite uniquely in the context of late antique and
early medieval visual poetry, Venantius Fortunatus also chose the iota-chi as the
main structuring form for the carmen figuratum that he wrote in Poitiers in the late
sixth century as a poetic gift to Bishop Syagrius of Autun (Fig. 7.17)—Venantius’
other visual poems being shaped by the sign of the cross.109
One can discern an awareness of the growing symbolic importance of the iota
in the iota-chi christogram in sixth-century written discourse, for example, in
Corippus’ laudatory poem to Emperor Justin II written c.566. In this panegyric,
Corippus emphasizes the symbolic significance of the initial iota that starts
the names of Justinian I and Justin II as well as that of Jesus: ‘so the glory of the
empire, so the holy letter I rises up again from its own end, and Justinian, the great
emperor, laying aside old age, lives again in Justin, an emperor with an upright
name.’110 From this perspective, it is hardly surprising that a triumphant iota-chi
symbolically referring to both Jesus and Justinian I was chosen as the main reverse
type of small bronze coins issued in the reconquered Ravenna at the end of
Justinian I’s reign, c.555–65 (Fig. 7.22a). At the same time, the iota-chi had the
same visual silhouette as a six-armed ‘magical’ character frequently employed on
contemporary textual amulets (Fig. 3.15).
The iota-chi thus possessed salvific and apotropaic qualities deriving from offi-
cial Christian interpretations and deviant ritualistic practices. Such perceived qual-
ities most likely contributed to use of the six-armed iota-chi in sixth-century
monumental architecture, where it appeared alongside the mighty sign of the cross
or another Christian symbol reminiscent of a ‘magical’ charactêr, namely the eight-
armed cross/star. For example, in the early sixth-century Constantinopolitan
church of Sts Sergius and Bacchus, this sign, slightly disguised as a flower with six
petals, was carved four times on marble plaques between the ground-floor capitals

104 For more details, see Chapter 3. 105 Inv. no. 4508 T.
106 Crow, ‘Blessing or Security?’, p. 166. 107 ICA, no. 154039.
108 Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, pp. 211–12, fig. 80.
109 Ernst, Carmen figuratum, pp. 149–57.
110 ‘sic decus imperii, sanctum sic iota resurgens // exortum est de fine suo, seniumque reponens //
nominis erecti Iustino in principe vivit // Iustinianus apex . . .’, Flavius Cresconius Corippus, In laudem
Iustini Augusti minoris libri IV, 353–6, ed. Cameron, pp. 47 and 90.
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226 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 7.17. Carmen figuratum of Venantius Fortunatus, late sixth century, from Venantius
Fortunatus, Opera poetica, ed. Leo, p. 116.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 227

Fig. 7.18. Marble decoration in Sts Sergius and Bacchus, Istanbul.

embellished with imperial monograms (Fig. 7.18), while the similarly shaped
eight-armed cross appears twice.111 The use of the iota-chi was not limited to that
church, and the sign featured in other sixth-century monuments of Constantinople,
such as the maritime wall in the Mangana area and the Church of St Polyeuktos.112
In combination with the two aforementioned Christian symbols, the very same
christogram played an important role in the iconographic programme of the pres-
bytery in the mid-sixth-century church of San Vitale in Ravenna, a visual pro-
gramme emphasizing Eucharistic ecclesiology as well as Christ’s and the emperor’s
triumph over the created world.113 The iota-chi appears in the apse mosaic, in a
medallion above the sitting Christ with a cruciform halo behind his head and
holding the scroll with seven seals from the Apocalypse (Revelations 5. 1) (Fig. 7.19).
A similar interplay between the portrait of Christ and a medallion with the iota-chi
was made in another contemporary Ravennate mosaic, namely on the ceilings of
the Archiepiscopal Chapel where the golden iota-chi is adorned by angels and the
four beasts of the Apocalypse (Fig. 6.17), with two similar iota-chis with alphas and
omegas placed on the top of the two adjacent arches. Unlike in the Archiepiscopal
Chapel, on the upper eastern wall of the presbytery in San Vitale right above the
iota-chi, two angels hold an eight-armed cross—which can also be described as a
star with eight rays—with an alpha at the middle, each arm changing its colour
outwards from red to orange and thereafter to white. This eight-armed graphic
device can be seen as the combination of the sign of the cross and an iota-chi, with

111 Guidobaldi and Barsanti, eds, Santa Sofia, pp. 266–73, figs 122, 125, 131, and 140.
112 Guidobaldi and Barsanti, eds, Santa Sofia, pp. 288 and 451, figs 163 and 277.
113 For further details and references, see Maguire, Earth, pp. 76–80; Wright, ‘Iconography’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

Fig. 7.19. Apse mosaic in San Vitale, Ravenna.

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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 229

the three colours and the alpha underscoring the eternal existence of God in three
persons, in opposition to Arian views on the nature of Christ.114 On the southern
and northern upper walls of the presbytery above the scenes of sacrifice in the Old
Testament referred to in the early medieval Canon of the Mass, similar angelic
pairs held jewelled crosses with two omegas suspended from each of them
(Fig. 7.20)—thus pointing out the sacrificial nature of Crucifixion and ­displaying
the triumphant cross as the tool of salvation at the end of the world. The former
point is further emphasized by the mosaic on the ceiling right above the altar, dis-
playing the sacrificial Lamb of God held by four angels.
In the same period that the sign of the cross and christograms proliferated in
material culture, they also began to be deployed within manuscripts, fulfilling a
range of functions. Indeed, a full-page size monogrammatic cross (staurogram)
with a pendant alpha and omega became a popular opening decoration in gospel-
books. This graphic device occupies such a position in the Gospel of John, written
by the priest Maurinus in Italy around the turn of the sixth century (Fig. 7.21).115
Similar monogrammatic crosses were cast in bronze in the same period in Italy,
featuring also as a reverse type on some silver coins of Ravenna issued in the name
of Justinian I in the mid-sixth century (Fig. 7.22b), and later on they often
appeared as a reverse type on Merovingian coinage (Fig. 7.22c).
The above manuscript of Maurinus as well as another early gospel-book—the
so-called Codex Corbeiensis produced in Italy in the fifth century—also displays a
more prosaic occasional usage of monogrammatic crosses in its margins, with or
without an alpha and omega, intended to mark folio gatherings.116 In the majority
of cases, the deployment of the sign of the cross and occasionally christograms such
as the chi-rho, tau-rho, and iota-chi—regularly accompanied by the two symbolic
Greek letters—lay in between luxurious decoration and pragmatic mark. Such
Christian signs could be used in colophons,117 precede incipits as well as frame
titles,118 and mark sections.119 As late as the early sixth century, crosses began to be
incorporated into initials. Thus, in the Parisian manuscript with the canons of
church councils and the letters of popes produced in Arles or Lyons in c.523, the

114 On John of Gaza’s sixth-century discussion of similar concentric circles in the apse mosaic of
the Justinianic basilica at Mount Sinai as a visual reference to both the Trinity and the heavenly sphere,
see Maguire, Earth, pp. 12–13.
115 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 10439, fol. 1v (CLA, 5.600).
116 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 10439, fols 174r and 182r; Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 17225, fols 48v and 153v
(CLA, 5.666).
117 See, for example, christograms, both accompanied with a suspended alpha and omega, in
Verona, Biblioteca capitolare, Ms. XIII (11), fol. 376r (Italy, s. V, CLA, 4.484), and in the Ussher
Gospels (Codex Usserianus Primus) produced at the beginning of the seventh century: Dublin, Trinity
College Library, Ms. 55, fol. 149v (CLA, 2.271). For a detailed discussion of the symbolic importance
of the latter sign, see Kitzinger, Cross and Book, pp. 61–3 and 100–1.
118 e.g. crosses and monogrammatic crosses, in some cases with pendant alpha and omega, in
Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, Ms. 701, fol. 122v (Italy, s. V2); Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 12097, fols 1r,
9r, 87v, 137v, (Arles or Lyons?, c.523, CLA, 5.619); Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 8913, fols 12r, 25r, and 39r
(probably Burgundy, s. VI, CLA, 5.573); Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 11326, fol. 3r (Italy, c.600, CLA, 5.609).
See also an iota-chi preceding the title in Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 12097, fol. 1r.
119 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 17226 (Italy, s. VII, CLA, 5.667).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi
Fig. 7.20. Mosaic from the presbytery of San Vitale.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 231

Fig. 7.21. Monogrammatic cross in Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 10439, fol. 1v.

Fig. 7.22. a–b) Reverse of copper and silver coins of Justinian I from Ravenna (c.555–65),
Oslo University, Museum of Cultural History; c) reverse of a Merovingian tremissis (Veuves,
c.620–40), Princeton University Numismatic Collection, Department of Rare Books and
Special Collections, Firestone Library.

sign of the cross is occasionally drawn inside an uncial D (Fig. 7.23a).120 The same
sign can be seen inside an initial omega in the sixth-century Greek text of John
Chrysostom’s homilies,121 or in a manuscript containing St Paul’s epistles created

120 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 12097, fols 44v, 82r, 89v, 97v, 98v, 118v, and 120v. The same initial can also
be seen in the mid-sixth-century manuscript containing Orosius’ histories produced in Italy: Florence,
Biblioteca Laurenziana, Ms. Plut. LXV, 1, fol. 62v (CLA, 3.298).
121 Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 75a Helmstedt, fol. 147r.
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232 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 7.23. Monogrammatic initials and lettering from late antique manuscripts: a–b) Paris,
BnF, Ms. lat. 12097, fols 89v and 97v; c–e) in the palimpsest from León, Archivio
Cathedralico, Ms. 15; f ) Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 17226, fol. 91r; g) Uppsala, Universitetsbibliothek,
Sign. DG.1.

in North Africa or Spain at the beginning of the sixth century,122 and an initial P in
the codex from Troyes with Gregory’s Regula pastoralis produced in Italy, ­perhaps
in Rome, around the turn of the seventh century.123 In the aforementioned manu-
script from the Rhone valley, the sign of the cross can also be seen grafted upon the
vertical bar of a half-uncial initial d (Fig. 7.23b); similar additions of crosses to the
body of initials—such as I, Q, and M—can be observed in the sixth-century text
of the Breviary of Alaric from Munich originating from southern Gaul,124 the
Cathach of Colum Cille from Ireland or Iona (c.600),125 and the seventh-century
Spanish palimpsest text of the Lex Romana Visigothorum (Fig. 7.23c).126
By the seventh century, the use of the sign of the cross and monogrammatic
crosses for various purposes had become a well-established practice in Latin
manuscript culture. The gospel-book known as Codex Valerianus produced in
northern Italy or Illiricum at the turn of the seventh century illustrates this
point.127 In this book, for example, a jewelled cross adorned by two birds embel-
lishes a colophon dividing the Gospels of Matthew and John (fol. 81v); a stauro-
gram with a Latin R instead of a Greek rho is drawn in the margins to demarcate
Luke 12. 32 (fol. 123v); and a cross surmounts an initial uncial h as a form of
decoration (fol. 242r). Yet the most impressive is the jewelled cross with a sus-
pended alpha and omega at the end of the Gospels (fol. 202v; Fig. 7.24). Two
birds sit on the horizontal arms of the cross with the bust enface of Christ on its
top—thus presenting the cross and the Incarnate Word—and the middle of the

122 Munich, BSB, Clm. 6436, fol. 23r. See also the use of decorative crosses inside O, P, d, and q
in a mid-sixth-century codex from Ravenna: Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Ms. Plut. LXV, 1, fols
44r, 62v, 133r, 145r.
123 Troyes, BM, Ms. 504, fol. 4r (CLA, 6.838). 124 Munich, BSB, Clm. 22501, fol. 11r.
125 Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, Ms. 12, fol. 48r (CLA, 2.226).
126 León, Archivio Cathedralico, Ms. 15; Legis Romanae Wisigothorum fragmenta, p. 298 (CLA,
11.1637).
127 Munich, BSB, Clm. 6224; CLA, 9.1249.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 233

Fig. 7.24. Codex Valerianus, Munich, BSB, Clm. 6224, fol. 202r.

cross is inscribed in small letters with the scribal subscription: Ego Valerianus
scripsi (‘I, Valerianus, have written [this book]’).
The multifaceted use of crosses and monogrammatic crosses in Western European
manuscript culture continued in the decades around the turn of the eighth century.
Thus, for example, a monogrammatic cross is drawn inside a decorated initial C
starting a new section in a text by Gregory the Great written in north-eastern Gaul,
possibly in Corbie,128 whereas a red Latin cross is drawn inside an uncial initial Q
in the fragments the Edict of Rothar from Karlsruhe originating from Lombard

128 Paris, BnF, Ms. Nouv. Acq. lat. 2061, fol. 74r (s. VII –VIII, CLA, 5.692).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

234 Graphic Signs of Authority

Italy.129 Around the same time, richly decorated crosses with or without an alpha
and omega also appeared as the central element of frontispiece decoration, as
­displayed in religious manuscripts produced at the abbey of Luxueil, an Irish foun-
dation in Burgundy.130
From around the turn of the eighth century onwards, this decorative use of
crosses was brought to a new level in Insular manuscript culture, where the sign of
the cross became the structural principle for diligently executed decorated carpet
pages—as one can see for instance in the Book of Durrow, the Lindisfarne Gospels,
and the St Chad Gospels.131 The carpet pages functioned as frontispieces in reli-
gious manuscripts (predominantly gospel-books) and as graphic devices introdu-
cing a Gospel or marking specific texts. On the one hand, the development of
these cross-shaped carpet pages might have reflected an Insular artistic response to
seventh-century Christology and the rising cult of the True Cross in the British
Isles.132 On the other hand, the development of the cruciform carpet pages in
Insular art would have been unthinkable without the prolonged use of jewelled
crosses as a form of decoration in Latin—as well as Coptic—religious manuscripts
in the sixth and seventh centuries.133
Such uninterrupted usage of the sign of the cross in early medieval manuscript
culture in the period from the sixth to the early eighth centuries might have been
motivated not only by aesthetic imperatives but also by the sign’s perceived apotro-
paic power. Lawrence Nees has suggested that such crosses, especially those placed
at the beginning of a book, might have been designed to protect sacred books
against demonic penetration.134 Yet such apotropaic usage was not limited in the
concurrent material culture to unequivocally Christian signs. Henry Maguire has
pointed to the employment in early Byzantine ecclesiastical settings, along with
more traditional crosses and floral ornaments, of more ambiguous apotropaic
graphic signs and devices traditionally associated with late antique ‘magical’ prac-
tices.135 A similar usage might not have been unthinkable in early Latin manu-
script culture. Indeed, a relevant case can be found in a seventh-century manuscript
containing Origen’s homilies produced in Gaul or Italy. Explicit and incipit lines
between some homilies are preceded by an ornament made of a sequence of one
of the most frequently used ‘magical’ characters, reminiscent of a large letter X
(Fig. 7.25), with small circles at the end of each arm typical of such occult charactera
in their Coptic usage (Fig. 1.7).136 Thus, with all the dominance of the sign of the

129 Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Aug. Fr. 144 (CLA, 8.**949, s. VII2).
130 St Petersburg, National Library of Russia, Lat.Q.v.I.14, fols 1r and 2v (CLA, 11.1617, s. VII,
¾); Valenciennes, BM, Ms. 495 (455), fol. 1v (CLA, 6.841, s. VII, ¾, or s. VIII, ¼); and St Gallen,
SB, Cod. Sang. 188, fol. 1r (possibly Luxeuil, c.700 or s. VIII1, CLA, 7.913).
131 The Book of Durrow: Dublin, Trinity College, Ms. A. 4. 5. (57), fols 1v, 3v, 85v, 125v; the
Lindisfarne Gospels: London, BL, Cotton Ms. Nero D IV, fols 2v, 26v, 94v, 138v, 210v (CLA, 2.187,
s. VII–VIII); St Chad Gospels: Lichfield, Lichfield Cathedral, Ms. 1, p. 220.
132 For more details and references, see Werner, ‘The Cross-Carpet Page’; Bonne, ‘De l’ornemental’;
Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, pp. 312–31; Brown, ‘The Cross and the Book’.
133 On Coptic sources of inspiration, see Brown, ‘The Cross and the Book’, pp. 31–2.
134 Nees, ‘A Fifth-Century Book Cover’, pp. 5–6. 135 Maguire, ‘Magic and Geometry’.
136 In some ornamental chains, ivy leaves—earlier linked to Dionysius’ cult—are placed inside as
symbols of life and resurrection: Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 1625, fols 2r, 19v, 40r (CLA, 5.532).
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 235

Fig. 7.25. Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 1625, fol. 1v.

cross and various cruciform devices in pre-Carolingian Europe and a general belief
in their salvific and apotropaic powers, less orthodox graphic devices could still
appear occasionally within Christian visual settings.

7.5. L AT E A N T I Q U E M O N O G R A M M AT I C C U LT U R E
A N D T H E O R I G I N S O F M O N O G R A M M AT I C
LETTERING

Late antique monogrammatic culture that left noticeable visual imprints on vari-
ous material artefacts in the sixth- and seventh-century Mediterranean also affected
concurrent manuscript culture in producing what is termed in this book ‘mono-
grammatic initials’, whereby two or more initial letters were combined into a single
graphic structure in a manner reminiscent of monograms and distinct from trad-
itional ligatures. An early example of such a graphic device is the ET-initial in
which the middle horizontal bar of E serves as the upper bar of T. This initial
appears in Latin manuscripts from northern Italy, such as an early sixth-century
gospel-book produced somewhere in the province of Aquileia,137 a mid-sixth-
century copy of Orosius’ history attributed to Ravenna,138 and the aforementioned
Codex Valerianus.139 In the seventh century, this monogrammatic form became
known in other western lands, and can be seen, for example, in the above-mentioned
palimpsest text of Lex Romana Visigothorum (Fig. 7.23d).140 The early ­palaeographic
history of the ET-initial corresponds strikingly to the dissemination pattern of

137 This manuscript is shared by libraries in Cividale, Prague, and Venice. See the illustration of fol.
75 in CLA, 3.285.
138 Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Ms. Plut. LXV, 1, fols 8r, 28r, 31v, 163v.
139 Munich, BSB, Clm. 6224, fols 21v, 44r, 49r, 179v, 187v.
140 León, Archivio Cathedralico, Ms. 15; Legis Romanae Wisigothorum fragmenta, p. 36.
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236 Graphic Signs of Authority

decorated initials as outlined by Carl Nordenfalk.141 The two types of initials can
also be often found in the same sixth- and seventh-century manuscripts, once
again indicating that the early development of decorated and monogrammatic ini-
tials were closely related phenomena, originating in the Western Mediterranean,
and Italy in particular.
The earliest forms of monogrammatic initials seem to have used the same Gestalt
principle as the one used in the monogram of Filocalus in the Calendar of 354,
namely a smaller letter or several letters were placed inside the closed or semi-
closed body of the first initial. Thus, in the aforementioned manuscript from
south-eastern Gaul produced c.523, one or several letters occasionally appears
inside uncial D;142 and in the so-called Codex Arcerianus, written in Italy around
the same time, small letters are similarly placed inside the inner spaces created by
semicircular lines of h and C.143 More examples of such monogrammatic initials
created inside uncial letters M, O, U, h, and q can be found in the sixth-century
Breviary of Alaric from southern Gaul, with some initials comprising the letters of
an entire word.144 By the seventh century, this form of monogrammatic lettering
was used not only for initials but also in the Incipit and Explicit lines of various
manuscripts produced in Western Europe (Fig. 7.23e–f ),145 and this form of dec-
orative lettering became quite popular in the eighth and ninth centuries.
Another early form of monogrammatic device in Western manuscript culture
was inspired very directly by late antique monogrammatic culture. Much like late
antique monograms, such devices consisted of several letters combined within a
single graphic structure. Early examples of such visual forms can be observed in the
Codex Argenteus produced in Ostrogothic Italy in the early sixth century and pre-
serving the text of the Gothic Bible. The lower margins of this Bible contain four
arches, framing the abbreviated names of the four evangelists written in gold. The
names of Mark and Matthew are abbreviated with two bar monograms composed
of the first two consonant letters: the former with a manna and redda (mr) and the
latter with a manna and thyth (mth) (Fig. 7.23g).146 On the one hand, these
graphic devices reflect a more general trend towards the use of monograms to
encode sacred names, a trend particularly strong in early Byzantium. For example,
the letter manna makes these Gothic signs similar to the aforementioned early
Byzantine monograms of the Virgin Mary and St Michael, which have a mu (M)
as their main graphic frame. On the other hand, the Gothic Bible is written on
purple coloured folios in silver and gold ink, which indicates that the codex must

141 Die spätantiken Zierbuchstaben, vol. 1, pp. 19–20.

142 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 12097, fols 82r, 87v, 89r,
143 Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 36.23 Aug. 2°, fols 6v, 22v, 40v.
144 Munich, BSB, Clm. 22501, fols 43v, 50r, 68v, 75v, 88v, 112v, 145, 149v, 162v, 163v, 164v,
165r, 171v, 174r, 205r.
145 See e.g. Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 17226, fols 9r, 87r, 88v, 91r–v; the palimpsest text in León, Archivio
Cathedralico, Ms. 15 (Legis Romanae Wisigothorum fragmenta, pp. 6 and 336); Würzburg, UB, M.p.th.q.1a,
p. 251 (northern France, s. VI–VII, CLA, 9.1429); Geneva, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire,
Ms. lat. 16, fols 8r–v, 31v, 32r and Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 11641, fol. 62v (this manuscript, currently divided
between the two libraries, was probably written in Luxeuil, CLA 7.**614).
146 Uppsala, Universitetsbibliothek, Ms. DG.1.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 237

have been produced for an owner of considerable status. Theoderic the Great has
been named as its probable commissioner,147 and the abbreviation of evangelists’
names with such graphic forms would fit well with the prolific monogrammatic
culture of his court in Ravenna, as well as the broader culture of Ostrogothic Italy.
In the decades around the turn of the eighth century, both forms of monogram-
matic lettering traceable in sixth-century Western manuscripts were brought to a
new artistic as well as cognitive level within early Insular gospel-books such as the
Book of Durrow, Lindisfarne Gospels, Durham Gospels, and Echternach Gospels,
where such graphic devices were used to adorn and enhance the beginning of
important sections of the text—such as the monogrammatic initials of the nomen
sacrum XPI (Christi) that begins the genealogy of Christ at Matthew 1.18 (Christi
autem generatio sic erat), which was treated as a separate book in the Insular manu-
script tradition (Fig. 7.26).148 Most importantly, such forms of monogrammatic
lettering were employed in early Insular decorated manuscripts to mark the first
word or words in individual Gospels—such as LIBer generationis for Matthew
(Fig. 7.27), IN Principio for John, QUOniam for Luke, and INitium evangelii for
Mark.149 Such monogrammatic initials were not purely decorative vignettes of
the gospel-books visibly dividing its major sections. These graphic devices
were ‘physical traces or relics of divinity’ emphasizing the perception of the Gospels
as the living body of the Incarnate Word,150 and functioned as mystical visual
­performances to the eyes of their viewers.151 They were also, as Ben Tilghman
has asserted, ‘aniconic, conceptual models’ that communicated extralinguistic
­messages, relying on the iconographic potential of letterforms.152 In the eighth and
ninth centuries, these artistic forms of monogrammatic lettering spread to the
Continent and underwent a further development in Carolingian manuscript culture.
It is important to emphasize here that the increasing employment of mono-
grammatic lettering and initials in Latin manuscript culture from the sixth to the
early eighth century was not just a side effect of late antique monogrammatic
­culture, nor did it simply result from the growing appreciation of beautiful writing
as a form of ornamentation suitable for sacred texts. This development also reflected
the growing belief among clerical intellectuals in, and wider appreciation of, the

147 Munkhammar, The Silver Bible; Hen, Roman Barbarians, pp. 56–7.
148 For more details on the initial’s symbolic meaning as ‘an iconic sign in the shape of the
Incarnation’, see Farr, ‘The Sign’. For a more detailed discussion of this symbolism with reference to
the later Book of Kells, see Tilghman, ‘Ornament’.
149 Dublin, Trinity College Library, Ms. A. 4. 5. (57), fols 14r, 193r; London, BL, Cotton Ms. Nero
D IV, fols 3r, 27r, 29r, 95r, 139r, 203v, 211r; Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 9389, fols 19r, 20r, 177r (c.690–710,
CLA, 5. 578). On the recent revision of dating for most of these Insular manuscripts, which are cur-
rently dated by a decade or two later than was originally suggested, see Nees, ‘Recent Trends’; and
Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, pp. 396–400. See also the monogrammatic initial to Mark in
an early fragmentary gospel-book from Durham, Cathedral Library, Ms. A. II. 10, fol. 2r. For a detailed
discussion of this transition and the relative importance of foreign and indigenous impulses for this
development, see Nordenfalk, ‘Before the Book of Durrow’; Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society,
pp. 227–44 and 331–44; Netzer, ‘New Finds’. For the discussion of the rich symbolic meanings
encoded by such initials, see also Tilghman, ‘The Shape’, pp. 292–3 and 296–9.
150 Kendrick, Animating the Letter, p. 174. 151 Pirotte, ‘Ornament’.
152 Tilghman, ‘The Shape’, pp. 293 and 296.
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238 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 7.26. Christi initial in the Echternach Gospels, BnF, Ms. lat. 9389, fol. 19r.

capabilities of monogrammatic and ‘imagistic’ lettering to capture the essence of

divinity and cosmic order, and to communicate deeper symbolic meanings with
visual forms.153 In early medieval Christian manuscript culture, some letterforms
and their dynamic combinations were thus seen as capable of unveiling hidden
true meanings and messages of the Holy Scripture to an inquisitive mind. In short,
Christian intellectuals adapted graphicacy for the visual exegesis of sacred texts.

153 For further detailed discussion of these aspects of early medieval lettering, see Hahn, ‘Letter’,
pp. 56–66; Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, pp. 233–8.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 239

Fig. 7.27. LIBer generationis initial in the Echternach Gospels, BnF, Ms. lat. 9389, fol. 20r.

The early medieval discourse on the extralinguistic meanings of letters, the roots
of which went back to the patristic era, provides textual evidence to this new visual
culture in which the semiology of letterforms became important. Isidore of Seville
(c.560–636) provides an early snapshot of this discourse in his treatise Etymologies,
written in the last decades of his life. In this encyclopaedic work, the Visigothic
archbishop described the symbolic meanings of one Latin and five Greek letters,
meanings that originated in the classical and early Christian eras.154 Out of five

154 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, 1. 3–4, ed. Barney et al., pp. 40–1.
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240 Graphic Signs of Authority

Greek mystical letters, two derived from Greek antiquity—the gamma and theta
signifying human life and death respectively. The explanation for the origins of the
theta’s symbolic meaning is noteworthy, since it shows that Isidore saw this letter
as both a phonetic character at the beginning of the Greek word θάνατος (‘death’),
as well as a graphic sign with a spear penetrating it through the middle, thus encap-
sulating the very same meaning in a visual form. The remaining mystical letters of
the Greek alphabet—the thau, alpha, and omega—and the Latin X are explained
traditionally with reference to patristic exegesis.155 But once again, Isidore’s text
makes it clear that he saw the letters’ symbolic potential embedded in their graphic
shapes and curves.156 So, in his opinion, the tau’s and X’s resemblance to the figure
of the Lord’s cross reveals their deep meaning to human eyes. Moreover, his descrip-
tion of the alpha and omega invests them with kinetic properties, not dissimilar
from those observable in the late antique monograms of Filocalus and Theodosius II,
discussed in Chapters 4 and 5: Christ said ‘I am Alpha and Omega’ for ‘by moving
towards each other in turn, α rolls on all the way to ω, and ω bends back to α, so
that the Lord might show in himself both the movement of the beginning to the
end, and the movement of the end to the beginning’.157
Such a symbolic viewing of letterforms implicit in Isidore’s narrative became
more apparent in the eighth and ninth centuries, not only in the aforementioned
development of monogrammatic initials, but also in later texts copying the above
passages of Isidore—such as a grammatical compilation by an Irishman, the so-called
Donatus Orthigraphus, surviving in a number of ninth-century manuscripts158—
or investing other Latin letterforms and the ways they are drawn with arcane
­religious references—such as the anonymous text on the Latin letters (De litteris
latinis quidam sapiens interpraetatus est) preserved in a manuscript from the Carolingian
abbey of Fleury.159 In the latter work, the number of strokes needed to draw d ­ ifferent
Latin letters were interpreted as referring to the Trinity, the Old and New Testaments,
the Jews, and so on. Although this anonymous work has only survived in one
Carolingian manuscript and seems not to have influenced contemporary literary
culture, its arbitrary interpretations of Latin characters was indicative of wider
Carolingian manuscript culture where clerical writers and readers were as attentive
to letterforms and their ideographic potentials as they were to their phonetic
­content. Of course, authors that wrote on grammatica in that period frequently
quoted Donatus’ fourth-century definition of the letter as an elementary particle
of articulated speech (littera est pars minima vocis articulatae).160 This definition

155 For more details, see Chapter 1.

156 On Isidore’s perception of letters as primarily visual characters, see Parkes, ‘Reading’.
157 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, 1. 3. 9, ed. Barney et al., p. 40.
158 Donatus Ortigraphus, Ars grammatica, ed. Chittenden, p. 12. The work has been dated to the
early ninth century, although a dating as early as the second half of the seventh century cannot be
excluded (pp. xxxiii–xxxiv).
159 Bern, Stadtbibliothek, Ms. 417; Grammatici Latini, vol. 8, Anecdota Helvetica quae ad gram-
maticam Latinam spectant, ed. Keil and Hagen, pp. 302–8. The manuscript has been dated to the first
half of the ninth century. For more detailed discussion, see Tilghman, ‘The Shape’, p. 295.
160 Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture, pp. 97–104. See e.g. Alcuin, De grammatica, 269, col. 855A;
Murethach, In Donati artem maiorem, ed. Holtz, pp. 7–8.
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Monogrammatic Culture in the Pre-Carolingian Europe 241

was natural for the late Roman world where the written alphabet was perceived as
‘the graphic version of the oral’,161 and this perception underpins St Augustine’s
semiotic theory. Yet for many early medieval grammarians, Latin was all but a
­natural spoken tongue. It was the language of liturgy as well as the textual culture
of silent reading. The Latin letters were more often viewed than heard. Consequently,
many early medieval clerics could hardly embrace whole-heartedly the definition’s
spirit and its implications, and some of them reflected their own cultural contexts
and linguistic environments by emphasizing the distinction between the letters’
visual forms and their phonetic substrate. Thus, closely following the correspond-
ing section (De litteris) in Priscian’s work—a work increasingly popular from the
early ninth century162—grammarians of the Carolingian age such as Donatus
Orthigraphus, Sedulius Scottus, and an anonymous author from the Lorsch Abbey
defined letters (litterae) as inscribed and drawn visual characters (figurae, notae, or
caracteres), and set them apart from corresponding spoken sounds termed as elem-
ents (elementa)–––the latter term explained through the similarity of spoken
sounds to the elements of the world (elementa mundi).163 Such ‘liberated’ letter-
forms could be conjoined and mingled with one another to produce visual shapes
that functioned as guardians of meaning,164 and were designed to make their
deeper exegetical significations, or their creators’ intended interpretations of
­corresponding texts, more apparent to the eyes of a reader.
The increasing use of monogrammatic lettering, as well as the appearance of
new forms of monogrammatic initials in Carolingian manuscript culture, bore
further witness to the perceived authority of these ‘script-images’ to function as
visual exegetical anchors for educated minds and eyes. They provided exclusive
access to hidden symbolic meanings within specific sections of religious texts, such
as the passages of the Canon of the Mass introduced by the Te igitur and Vere
dignum monogrammatic initials, which became the hallmarks of the ninth-­
century decorated Carolingian sacramentaries.

161 Cristin, ‘Visible/Legible’, p. 21. 162 McKitterick, The Carolingians, p. 14.

163 Priscianus, Institutionum grammaticarum libri XVIII, I, ed. Hertz, vol. 1, pp. 6–7: ‘Literas autem
etiam elementorum vocabulo nuncupaverunt ad similitudinem mundi elementorum . . . Litera igitur est
nota elementi et velut imago quaedam vocis literatae, quae cognoscitur ex qualitate et quantitatae figurae
linearum. hoc ergo interest inter elementa et literas, quod elementa proprie dicuntur ipsae pronuntia-
tiones, notae autem earum literae.’ Donatus Ortigraphus, Ars grammatica, ed. Chittenden, p. 15:
‘ “Elementa” vocantur pronuntiones in ore; “litterae” autem caracteres in carta vel in cera.’ Sedulius
Scottus, In Donati artem maiorem, ed. Lösdtedt, pp. 6–7: ‘Ergo hoc quod videtur littera est et figura
vel nota vel domus elementi. Igitur si elementum est pars minima vocis articulatae, illud quod remanet
nota est elementi.’ Ars Laureshamensis, Expositio in Donatum maiorem, ed. Lösdtedt, pp. 149–50:
‘Litterae autem etiam elementorum vocabulo nuncupantur ad similitudinem elementorum mundi. . . .
Hoc autem distat inter elementa et litteras, quod elementa proprie dicutur ipsae pronuntiationes,
notae autem earum litterae.’ For more details on Priscian, see Chapter 5.
164 Alcuin called the letters ‘the guardians of history’ (custos historiae) in Disputatio Pippini regalis
et nobilissimi iuvenis cum Albino scholastico, col. 975C.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

8
Monogrammatic Revival in the
Carolingian World

The use of monogrammatic initials and ‘imagistic’ lettering visibly increased in

Carolingian manuscript culture, where they appear not only in gospel-books but
also in sacramentaries and Bibles. Furthermore, a monogrammatic mode expanded
to other types of manuscripts and affected other material media, to an extent that
one can speak of a peculiar monogrammatic revival taking place at the time of the
Carolingian renovatio. Thus, not only did the monograms of Carolingian rulers
become a default graphic feature of royal diplomas, occasionally appearing on
royal seals and coinage too, but other types of monogram also began to be employed
for various purposes in concurrent manuscript and material culture. On the one
hand, they were used as graphic signs of authority for popes and Carolingian
­bishops, abbots, and scribes—signs imitating the graphic insignia of Carolingian
kings and emperors. On the other hand, once again the ability to create and decipher
monograms began to be seen as an ennobling skill, a skill that in this period could
only be taught or passed on in a limited number of royal chanceries as well as
monastic and cathedral scriptoria. In this capacity, monograms were included in
the list of arcane scripts and graphic devices employed by clerical scribes to create
a visual sociolect incomprehensible to people outside their ranks and, thus, to mark
the superiority of educated clerics over lay people.1 Through the use of monograms,
monogrammatic initials, and ‘imagistic’ lettering, clerical scribes ‘sacralized’, as it
were, written Latin and transformed it into the sacred script adequate to represent,
as well as to communicate with, the divine. This transformation underscored the
unique position of the Carolingian clergy as transmitters of sacred knowledge as
well as legitimate ritual specialists negotiating with God on behalf of other social
groups.2 Moreover, this exclusive position relied heavily on the clergy’s crucial role
within Christian liturgy, and its claimed paramount importance for social peace,
order, and prosperity. In this broader social perspective, it is hardly surprising that
in the Carolingian world many monogrammatic devices embellished the folios of
codices produced for liturgical rituals.

1 For a broader discussion of the use of restricted literacy as a form of social power, see Goody,
‘Introduction’.
2 For further details and references, see Garipzanov, Symbolic Language, pp. 269–70, 283–5, 291,
and 307–8.
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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 243

8.1. M O N O G R A M M AT I C I N I T I A L S I N C A RO L I N G I A N
G O S P E L - B O O K S A N D S A C R A M E N TA R I E S

Carolingian manuscript culture embraced the Insular tradition of adorning the

first lines of the Gospels as well as their other important sections with monogram-
matic initials and applied it not just in decorated gospel-books but also in Bibles.
In these texts of the Holy Scripture, Carolingian courtly, monastic, and cathedral
artists appropriated the earlier Insular forms of decorative monogrammatic initials
such as LIber generationis,3 INItium evangelii,4 QUOniam,5 IN Principio,6 and
NOvum opus.7 But as part of this process of creative adaptation, such initials lost
the original kinetic properties of Insular interlacing and curved lettering, and were
redesigned along straight horizontal and vertical axes, in a monumental manner
reminiscent of late antique Italian forms.8 This transformation can, for instance,
be traced in the Carolingian history of the LIber generationis initial, an initial intro-
ducing the first Gospel in the gospel-books. It is one of the earliest graphic devices
to appear in this type of Carolingian manuscript, and a curvy L dominates its early
form featuring prominently in those gospel-books that were produced by the
Court School of Charlemagne around the turn of the ninth century, when a
Northumbrian clerical immigrant, Alcuin (d. 804), played an important role at the

3 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 9387, fol. 18r (Northern France, s. VIII ex.); London, BL, Harley Ms. 2788,
fol. 14r (Court School of Charlemagne, c.800); Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 8850, fol. 18r (Katalog, no. 4568,
Court School of Charlemagne, c.810–14); Munich, BSB, Clm. 28561, fol. 15r (Mainz, c.801–15);
London, BL, Add. Ms. 11848, fol. 18v (Katalog, no. 2361, Tours, c.820–30); London, BL, Add. Ms.
10546, fol. 353r (Tours, c.830–40); Augsburg, Oettingen-Wallerstein Library, Ms. I.2.4.2, fol. 16r
(probably Echternach, s. IX, 2/4, Katalog, no. 146, CLA, 8.1215); Munich, BSB, Clm. 4451, fol. 15r
(Katalog, no. 2962, Mainz, s. X, 2/4); Berlin, SBB, Ms. theol. lat. 3, fol. 19r (Court School of Lothar I,
840–55, KM, vol. 4, pp. 66–70); Lyons, BM, Ms. 431, fol. 12r (Katalog, no. 2549, St Amand, s. IX, ¾);
New York, ML, Ms. M. 640, fol. 12r (Katalog, no. 3617, Belgium, c.850–75); Munich, BSB, Clm.
14000, fol. 17r (Court School of Charles the Bald, c.870, KM, vol. 5, pp. 175–98); Paris, BnF, Ms.
lat. 258, fol. 14r (Katalog, no. 3972, Brittany, s. IX, 3/3).
4 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 9387, fol. 86r; London, BL, Harley Ms. 2788, fol. 72r; Munich, BSB, Clm.
4451, fol. 52r; New York, ML, Ms. M. 728, fol. 64r; New York, ML, Ms. M. 640, fol. 64r; Munich,
BSB, Clm. 14000, fol. 47r; Rome, Abbazia di San Paolo f. le mura, Biblia, fol. 271v (Reims, c.870–1,
KM, vol. 6.2, pp. 109–74, pl. 280); Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 270, fol. 42r (Court School of Charles the
Bald, s. IX, ¾, KM, vol. 5, pp. 157–64; Katalog, no. 3984).
5 Abbeville, BM, Ms. 4, fol. 102r (Court School of Charlemagne, c.800, CLA, 6.704, Katalog, no. 8);
New York, ML, Ms. M. 860, fol. 96r (Tours, 857–62); Boulogne-sur-Mer, BM, Ms. 12, fol. 54r
(Arras, s. IX, ¾, Katalog, no. 658); Lyons, BM, Ms. 431, fol. 116r; Munich, BSB, Clm. 14000, fol. 66r;
Rome, Abbazia di San Paolo f. le mura, Biblia, fol. 278v (KM, vol. 6, pl. 281).
6 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 9387, fol. 203r; London, BL, Harley Ms. 2788, fol. 162r; Paris, BnF, Ms. lat.
8850, fol. 181r; Vatican City, BAV, Pal. lat. 46, fol. 108v (Katalog, no. 6450, West Rhine area, s. IX, 2/4);
Vatican City, BAV, Ott. lat. 79, fol. 104r (s. IX med.); Augsburg, Oettingen-Wallerstein Library, Ms.
I.2.4.2, fol. 127r; New York, ML, Ms. M. 640, fol. 158v; Munich, BSB, Clm. 14000, fol. 98r; Rome,
Abbazia di San Paolo f. le mura, Biblia, fol. 288v (KM, vol. 6, pl. 282).
7 Augsburg, Oettingen-Wallerstein Library, Cod. I.2.4.2, fol. 5r; Lyons, BM, Ms. 431, fol. 1r;
Cologne, EDDB, Ms. 14, fol. 2r. (Katalog, no. 1871, St Amand, s. IX, ¾); Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 257,
fol. 1r (St Amand, s. IX, ¾); Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 270, fol. 2r. On an earlier Insular influence on
the design of gospel-books in the late Merovingian Frankish world, see Netzer, Cultural Interplay.
8 For an Italian influence on Carolingian manuscript illumination, see Belting, ‘Probleme’.
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244 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 8.1. LIber generationis initial in Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 16 Aug. 2°, fol. 5r.
© HAB Wolfenbüttel <http://diglib.hab.de/mss/16-aug-2f/start.htm>

Frankish royal court.9 Yet by the mid-ninth century, some Carolingian scriptoria
such as those in Reims and Tours abandoned this early blueprint and employed,
instead, the straight lines of intercrossing L and I, working to embed the sign of the
cross in the initial’s graphic structure (Fig. 8.1).10

9 On these gospel-books and the court atelier in general, see KM, vol. 2; Mayr-Harting,
‘Charlemagne’, pp. 44–58; McKitterick, Charlemagne, pp. 350–63.
10 Epernay, BM, Ms. 1, fol. 19r (Reims, c.823–9, KM, vol. 6.1, pp. 73–84); Paris, BnF, Ms. lat.
17968, fol. 16v (Reims, s. IX1, KM, vol. 6.1, pp. 150–8); Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 16 Aug.
2, fol. 5r (Tours, 840–3, Katalog, no. 7284); Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 9385, fol. 19r (Katalog, no. 4575,
Tours, 843–51); Laon, BM, Ms. 63, fol. 26v (Katalog, no. 2057, Tours, 843–51); Paris, BnF,
Ms. lat. 266, fol. 23r (Tours, 849–51, Katalog, no. 3980); Reims, BM, Ms. 2, fol. 15r (Reims, s. IX
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 245

Fig. 8.2. IN principio initial in London, BL, Egerton Ms. 768, fol. 63r.

Other initials also experienced noticeable changes around the mid-ninth

c­ entury, for example, in the rich royal abbey of St Amand and the related scriptoria
situated in the northern areas of the West Frankish kingdom, which are known
collectively to modern art historians as the Franco-Saxon School.11 In the gospel-
books produced by this school in the second half of the ninth century, an I and
N at the beginning of the Gospel of John were conjoined in an inseparable mono-
grammatic union that occupies an entire page (Fig. 8.2).12 This monogrammatic

med., KM, vol. 6.2, pp. 101–8, Katalog, no. 5244); Reims, BM, Ms. 7, fol. 22r (Reims, s. IX, ¾, KM,
vol. 6.2, pp. 93–9, Katalog, no. 5247); Cologne, EDDB, Ms. 1, fol. 304r (Katalog, no. 1861, Tours,
c.857–62); New York, ML, Ms. M. 860, fol. 15r; New York, ML, Ms. M. 728, fol. 15r (Reims, s. IX,
¾, KM, vol. 6.2, pp. 83–92, Katalog, no. 3619); Troyes, BM, Ms. 138, fol. 12r (Katalog, no. 6246,
Tours, s. IX, ¾). See also Mütherich, ‘Carolingian Manuscript Illumination’; Denoël, ‘Entre diver-
sité et inventivité’.
11 Denoël, ‘Saint-Amand’.
12 New York, ML, Ms. M. 862, fol. 145v (St Amand, 855–65, Katalog, no. 3621); Lyons, BM, Ms. 431,
fol. 184r; Cologne, EDDB, Ms. 14, fol. 161v; Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 257, fol. 149r; Halle, Universitäts- und
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246 Graphic Signs of Authority

device introducing the first phrase of this Gospel (In principio erat Verbum et
Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum) thus allowed its viewer to visualize
the primordial Word co-existing and co-substantial with God. Moreover, the two
conjoined letters could be seen as referring to the two initials of one of Jesus’
names, Iesus a Nazareth (Acts, 10.38), while the letter I placed on the N with
noticeable horizontal extensions on the top of its vertical column may allude to
the Crucifixion. Thus, to a contemplative eye, this graphic device could also
evoke the Incarnate Word and the Passion. Such contemplation was encouraged
by King Charles the Bald’s intellectual milieu, in which John Scottus Eriugena
completed a new Latin translation of Pseudo-Dionysius’ works and, similar to the
Greek mystic, stated that visual forms of sensible things help viewers to perceive
the Word of God.13
The graphic invention of the Franco-Saxon School thus clearly reflects the
earlier Insular and ninth-century Carolingian perception that the authority of
the divine word in luxurious manuscripts should be highlighted by visual means.
Because of the visual symbolism of their conflated letters and their eye-catching
character, monogrammatic initials were perceived as appropriate for precisely
that function. This point is exemplified further by the fact that Carolingian
­clerical artists introduced new monogrammatic forms for the books of the Bible
starting with the word VERbum Domini or VERba (such as Deuteronomy,
Ecclesiastes, Jeremiah, Joel, and Zephaniah).14 Carolingian inventors were also
capable of appropriating late antique pre-Insular monogrammatic forms such as
the ET initial originating in the sixth century, and they turned this graphic
device projecting the sign of the cross in its structure into a sophisticated mono-
grammatic initial worthy of the books of the Bible,15 as well as commentaries
on them.16
At the same time, the invention of the mid-ninth-century IN initial mirrors
specific Carolingian settings where the nature of divine personas, and Christ in
particular, were brought back into theological debates and the minutes of church
councils. This conclusion is in agreement with a growing awareness among mod-
ern art historians of the powerful impact that such theological matters and specific
historical contexts exercised on the visual agenda of clerical masters producing
Carolingian liturgical as well as, more generally, religious manuscripts.17 Modern
research has also shown that the impact of such contexts and debates on the

Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt, Qu. Cod. 83, fol. 145r; Leiden, Universitetsbibliotheek, BPL 48,
fol. 193r; London, BL, Egerton Ms. 768, fol. 63r (Katalog, no. 2434, possibly Corbie, s. IX, 4/4).
13 For more details, see O’Driscoll, ‘Visual Vortex’, pp. 318–21. On the translations of Pseudo-
Dionysius in the Carolingian age, see Rorem, Eriugena’s Commentary.
14 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 11504, fols 58v, 187v (Katalog, no. 4684, around Paris, 821/2); Rome,
Abbazia di San Paolo f. le Mura, Biblia, fols 130b, 161r, 165v, 194r (KM, vol. 6, pls 268, 285c,
287d, 289b).
15 Rome, Abbazia di San Paolo f. le Mura, Biblia, fols 60v and 163r (KM, vol. 6, pl. 259 and 286);
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 2, fol. 213v (KM, vol. 7, pl. 101d).
16 Boulogne-sur-Mer, BM, Ms. 35, fols 36r and 67v (St Bertin, s. X, c. ¾, Katalog, no. 664).
17 See e.g. Nees, ‘Image and Text’.
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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 247

development of monogrammatic initials in Carolingian sacramentaries was as

important as it was in gospel-books and Bibles.18
Sacramentaries constitute a form of liturgical book typical of the Carolingian
world. They provided priests with the authoritative texts of prayers they had to
recite during the masses of the temporal and sanctoral cycles of the liturgical
year, as well as votive masses performed for special occasions. Along with gospel-
books and lectionaries, Carolingian sacramentaries thus became essential books
that priests required in order to perform masses in a manner sanctioned by the
ecclesiastical hierarchy.19 Two main types of sacramentaries were copied in
Carolingian scriptoria: Gelasian sacramentaries—owing their name to a faulty
attribution of their prototype to Pope Gelasius—constituted the earliest type
disseminated in the Carolingian world from the mid-eighth century, whereas
Gregorian sacramentaries—traditionally connected to Pope Gregory the Great—
represented a new sacramentary type, brought to Francia from papal Rome around
the turn of the ninth century. The latter became the type most often copied in the
ninth century due to its origins and its perceived authoritative nature.20
With a few notable exceptions, most of these liturgical books either lack or have
a limited number of illuminations or ‘imagistic’ lettering of the kind one can see
in the sumptuous Insular and Carolingian gospel-books. After all, unlike gospel-
books that were viewed as the embodiments—so to speak—of the living Word of
God, sacramentaries served their owners, priests and bishops, first and foremost, as
practical manuals.21 Nonetheless, two phrases in these books, namely Vere dignum
and Te igitur, received special treatment from the turn of the ninth century
onwards.22 These formulas introduce specific sections of the Canon, that is, the
permanent core of the mass performed at every eucharistic service. It is probable
that many Carolingian priests learned them, either before taking up their office or
soon thereafter. Such key wordings and the passages that followed them must have
become engraved in their performative memories through every mass they celebrated.
For this reason, the producers of such liturgical manuscripts could assume that the
books’ primary users knew such phrases by heart, and therefore replaced some
lines of text with visual graphic devices, inviting the celebrants to contemplate the
deeper meanings of key phrases they regularly uttered during ritual communication
with the Lord.
The Vere dignum device—a monogrammatic sign abbreviating the phrase with
its conjoined initial letters, V and D—can be traced in surviving manuscript evidence
from as early as c.700. A comparison between two early liturgical manuscripts, the

18 See Leesti, ‘The Pentecost Illustration’; Baert, ‘Le sacramentaire de Gellone’; Chazelle, ‘An
Exemplum’; and Kessler, ‘Dynamic Signs’.
19 On this Carolingian trend to limit various eucharistic practices existing among lower social
ranks and to impose the liturgy of mass performed by a priest in an orthodox manner as the only legit-
imate ritual setting for the eucharist, see Chazelle, ‘Eucharist’; and Chazelle, ‘Mass and Eucharist’.
20 For further details and bibliographic references on eighth- and ninth-century sacramentaries,
see Palazzo, A History, pp. 42–56; and Garipzanov, The Symbolic Language, pp. 55–96.
21 On ornamentation and the visuality of letters in the latter type of liturgical manuscript, see
Méhu, ‘The Colors’, pp. 260–3.
22 Palazzo, A History, p. 57.
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248 Graphic Signs of Authority

Missale Francorum and the Missale Gothicum, produced around that time, allows us
a glimpse of its early history.23 Both manuscripts feature many austere decorated
initials, with some simple monogrammatic initials known as early as the sixth
­century where the body of an initial such as a D or an O is used as an external
frame for a smaller follow-up letter/s. Whereas the Missale Gothicum, which is a fine
example of Gallican liturgy, presents a wide range of such initials, it spells out the
Vere dignum formula entirely without recourse to any abbreviated form.24 By contrast,
the other missal from Merovingian Gaul, the Missale Francorum, features the liga-
ture abbreviation of Vere dignum (VD)—always indicated by a contraction sign
on the top—and its frequent usage in various collects throughout the codex suggests
that this graphic device had already become an established form of abbreviation in
some scriptoria around the time of the manuscript’s production.25
The Frankish Gelasian sacramentaries of the second half of the eighth century,
such as the mid-eighth-century Vatican Sacramentary and the late eighth-century
Sacramentary of St Gall,26 continued to display this VD abbreviation, with an
important innovation: the contraction line was moved down and now crossed the
central horizontal line of the ligature, thus incorporating the symbol of the cross at
its middle (Fig. 8.3a). At the same time, the Vere dignum phrase in the Canon was
still spelled out in its entirety, with an initial V highlighting the beginning of the
section, whereas a larger initial T marked the following section introduced by the

Fig. 8.3. Initials in St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 348: a) Vere dignum (p. 367); b) Te igitur
(p. 368).

23 Missale Francorum, ed. Cunibert; and Missale gothicum, ed. Rose.

24 Vatican City, BAV, Reg. lat. 317, fol. 61r.
25 Vatican City, BAV, Reg. lat. 257, fols 92v, 99r, 103v, 106v, 110v, 114r, 125v, 131r.
26 Vatican City, BAV, Reg. lat. 316 (Chelles or Joaurre); Liber sacramentorum Romanae Aeclesiae, ed.
Mohlberg. St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 348 (Chur, c.796–806); Das fränkische Sacramentarium gelasianum,
ed. Mohlberg.
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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 249

formula Te igitur (Fig. 8.3b).27 The latter initial had a history as old as that of
the VD monogrammatic device, since it already features in the Bobbio Missal,
a lectionary-sacramentary produced north of the Alps c.700.28 In some later Gelasian
sacramentaries, meanwhile, this T initial developed into a decorated tau-cross of
Jesus,29 thus reminding the viewer of the sacrificial nature of Crucifixion—the idea
that the Gellone Sacramentary, created in Cambrai or Meaux around the 790s,
visualizes with its famous image of the crucified Jesus on the tau-cross of the
Te igitur formula.30 The same codex displays a VD decorated initial in the preced-
ing section of the Canon (fol. 143r). This initial is much larger than traditional VD
abbreviations, one of which can be seen on the top of that folio. These parallel
visual emphases on the Vere dignum and Te igitur initials of the Canon were hardly
only due to the lavish decorative program fulfilled in the Gellone Sacramentary.31
In another—rather modest—liturgical book produced in Autun c.800, the
two sections are similarly highlighted with a large decorated T and a large size
VD i­ nitial, the latter in an Insular manner with a range of dots around its edges
(Fig. 8.4).32
A visual emphasis that some Frankish scriptoria gave to the two sections of the
Canon in the second half of Charlemagne’s reign was continued in the Gregorian
sacramentaries, where the text of the Canon is located at the beginning of a manu-
script and often highlighted by the use of special fonts, colours, and other visual
means. Thus, in the earliest surviving liturgical book of this type, produced in
Cambrai in 812, both formulas are embellished with small initials VD and T and,
like much of the Canon, they are written with golden ink.33 The manuscript
­evidence indicates that the above visual emphasis on the two formulas increased
considerably in some Frankish scriptoria in the mid-ninth century. In the
Sacramentary of Marmoutier produced at Tours c.845, the two initials face each
other (Fig. 8.5): the Vere dignum decorated monogram takes the upper side of
folio 8v whereas the initial T of Te igitur dominates the opposite folio (fol. 9r) with
the remaining letters written in gold and twice as large as the remaining text on
the page.34 The producers of the sacramentary obviously treated the two initials
quite differently from the rest of the text of the Canon, allowing both their viewers

27 St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 348, pp. 367–8.

28 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 13246, fol. 11v; The Bobbio Missal, ed. Wilmart et al. For the most detailed
discussion of the manuscript, see Hen and Meens, eds, The Bobbio Missal. For a discussion of the
­initial, see Méhu, ‘The Colors’, p. 261. It is noteworthy that Vere dignum on fol. 11r is spelled out in
full and the VD initial is not used elsewhere in the manuscript.
29 St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 348, p. 368.
30 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 12048, fol. 143v; Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. Dumas and Deshusses.
31 On ‘imagistic’ lettering in this sacramentary and its performative nature, see Hahn, ‘The Performative
Letter’.
32 Berlin, SBB, Ms. Phill. 1667, fols 103r–v; Liber sacramentorum Augustodunensis, ed. Heiming;
Katalog, no. 405.
33 Cambrai, BM, Ms. 164, fols 37v–38r.
34 Autun, BM, Ms. 19 bis, fols 8v–9r; Le sacramentaire de Marmoutier, ed. Décréaux, vol. 1. For
discussion of the VD decorated initial in the Sacramentary of Marmoutier and its various symbolic
meanings, see Kessler, ‘Dynamic Signs’, pp. 124–7.
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250 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 8.4. Vere dignum initial in Berlin, SBB, Ms. Phill. 1667, fol. 103r.

and their performers to contemplate carefully the nature of the liturgical passages
introduced by these formulas, as well as their deeper meanings.
The VD initial introduces the first words ‘vere dignum et iustum est’ (‘it is truly
fitting and just’) of the preface to the Great Prayer of the Mass, a prayer accom-
panying the holy mystery of the eucharist.35 The initial immediately follows the
so-called introductory dialogue, namely an exchange of short utterances between
the priest and mass attendants, reminiscent of late antique acclamations.36 This
similarity should not really surprise us, since both the text of this introductory
­dialogue and the priest’s following phrase ‘vere dignum et iustum est’ are attested by
third-century textual liturgical evidence, and the origin of the last two phrases of
the dialogue can even be traced to the earlier Jewish order of prayer.37 These last
phrases include the priest’s exhortative statement gratias agamus domino deo nostro
(‘Let us give thanks to the Lord, our God’) and the people’s acclamatory response
dignum et iustum est (‘It is fitting and just’). Such early liturgical usage of the latter

35 For a discussion of this initial in medieval liturgical manuscripts, see Millesoli, ‘Il Vere dignum’.
36 On the connection between late Roman acclamations and the early Christian ritual, see Roueché,
‘Acclamations at the Council’; Williams, ‘Hymns’.
37 Didascalia et Constitutiones Apostolorum, VIII, 12, 4–7, ed. Xavier von Funk, vol. 1, p. 497.
Millesoli, ‘Il Vere dignum’, pp. 136–7; Jungmann, The Mass, vol. 2, pp. 110–13.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi
Fig. 8.5. Vere dignum and Te igitur initials in Autun, BM, Ms. 19 bis, fols 8v–9r. © IRHT.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi

252 Graphic Signs of Authority

acclamation is hardly accidental since it was commonly used in the Roman world
to validate and reinforce important collective decisions or elections, including that
of a Roman emperor.38 This late Roman acclamation was adapted to the early
Christian Mass as an empowering form of the collective ritualized speech-act
through which the Christian community, gathered in the church, not only praised
God but also confirmed their collective participation in the eucharistic ceremony.
It is because of its validating power that the priest had to reiterate this acclamation
immediately in the starting lines of the eucharistic prayer: ‘vere dignum et iustum
est . . . gratias agere’ (‘it is truly fitting and just . . . to give thanks [to the Lord]’).
By extending the acclamation’s symbolic performative and validating power beyond
its more limited aural form of existence, the VD monogrammatic initial was simi-
lar to other late antique acclamatory monograms such as the one in the Calendar
of 354 or those produced by circus factions in late antique Aphrodisias and Ephesos.
Moreover, the graphic structure of the VD initial makes it comparable to early
Byzantine cruciform intercessory monograms, in that from as early as the mid-eighth
century the sign of the cross had become its core graphic element. In the aforemen-
tioned sacramentary of Marmoutier, the key role of that sign is underscored further
by four medallions between its arms, which present portraits of monks facing the
redemptive sign in adoration (Fig. 8.5). In the early Middle Ages, the sign of the
cross became the most efficacious Christian graphic sign, a sign that liturgical
­celebrants repeatedly drew in the air with their hands to empower ritualized utter-
ances during liturgical mysteries. Carolingian priests increasingly signed the cross
over eucharistic elements in the liturgy of mass. The cross of the monogrammatic
acclamation fulfilled an identical function by means of graphicacy and empowered
the priest to beseech the Lord on behalf of his liturgical community. As Herbert
Kessler puts it, ‘creating a cross from interlocking circular forms, the ligature mim-
ics the transformation of the bread and wine through the speech-act of uttering the
text the letters adorn.’39
Unlike the VD monogram, the T initial on the opposite folio of the Sacramentary
of Marmoutier evokes the physical shape of the cross used at the Crucifixion,
the tau-cross (Fig. 8.5). The latter initial introduces one of the oldest parts of
the Roman Canon with its origins stretching back to late antiquity,40 namely the
eucharistic prayer of the celebrant pleading that God accept the offerings of
his faithful flock, which by the eighth century was introduced with the formula
Te igitur. In Carolingian times this prayer was already viewed as opening the proper
canon actionis, and the celebrant performed it alone either in a low voice or in
silence.41 The decorated T thus visualized this crucial section of the Canon,42 but
this initial was more than a simple dividing marker. It introduced the liturgical
invocation encapsulating the Christian dogma on the nature of Christ, a topic that
once again became arduously debated in the early Carolingian world with the rise

38 Lang, The Voice, p. 104. 39 Kessler, ‘Dynamic Signs’, p. 121.

40 Moreton, ‘Rethinking the Origin’, pp. 65–6; Lang, The Voice, pp. 60–2 and 77–80.
41 Andrieu, ed., Les Ordines Romani, vol. 2, pp. 95 and 221. See also Jungmann, The Mass, vol. 2,
pp. 147–52; Lang, The Voice, pp. 131–3.
42 Chazelle, The Crucified God, p. 152.
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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 253

of Adoptionism in Visigothic areas and its emphasis on Christ’s ‘adoptive yet

­sinless humanity’. Having misconstrued these Christological views as claiming that
Jesus Christ was adopted into the Trinity, Charlemagne, his clerical advisors, and
Frankish bishops made sure to suppress these views harshly in the 790s.43
The Gregorian sacramentary was thus brought to the Frankish lands at the
time when the succinct expression of Christological orthodoxy in its eucharistic
prayer—namely that Christ was the genuine son of God—was indeed timely:
Te igitur, clementissime Pater, per Jesum Christum Filium tuum Dominum nostrum,
supplices rogamus ac petimus. . . .
(To you, therefore, the most merciful Father, through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord,
we make humble prayer and petition. . . .)
This prayer is also peculiar in its inverted sentence structure whereby its addressee,
God the Father, is mentioned first and the celebrant’s intermediary, God the Son,
is placed second. This sentence has been interpreted as emphasizing the salvific
role of Jesus Christ in the relationship between the Christian community and God,
the bond that every mass confirms; and this belief was visualized in some richly
decorated manuscripts such as the aforementioned Gellone Sacramentary and the
Sacramentary of Metz (c.869) by turning the T initial of that prayer into the tau-
cross of a Crucifixion image.44
Such figurative imagery corresponded to the views that Paschasius Radbertus
expressed in his book on the nature of the eucharist written in 831–3, when he
was a monk in the royal monastery of Corbie. Already as abbot of this abbey, he
presented that work to the West Frankish king Charles the Bald (840–77) in 843/4,
and revisited that topic in a later letter addressed to Frudegard, a monk of
St Riquier, another West Frankish abbey to which Paschasius moved in voluntary
exile in the 850s. The book apparently actively circulated between West Frankish
royal and ecclesiastical centres, and received an indirect critical treatment from
another monastic intellectual in Corbie, Ratramnus, probably in the mid-840s, as
well as other responses in the 850s in what is now known as the Carolingian
Eucharistic controversy.45 For Paschasius, there was no doubt that during the mass,
eucharistic bread and wine turned into the flesh and blood of the historical Christ,
born of Mary. Ratramnus, by contrast, insisted that it was the spiritual body and
blood of the historical Christ that existed under the veil of the eucharistic bread
and wine, and that the spirit of Christ as found in the eucharist was ‘the power of
the divine word’.46

43 For an overview and related references, see Cavadini, The Last Christology; Chazelle, The Crucified
God, pp. 52–74; Ganz, ‘Theology’, pp. 762–6.
44 See Chazelle, The Crucified God, pp. 86–93. For the Crucifixion image in the Sacramentary of
Metz, see Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 1141, fol. 6v (Court School of Charles the Bald. c.869, KM, vol. 5,
pp. 165–74).
45 Paschasius Radbertus, De corpore et sanguine Domini, ed. Paulus, especially at pp. 27–31; Ratramnus
of Corbie, De corpore et sanguine Domini, ed. van den Brink. For more details and references, see Ganz,
Corbie, pp. 83–90; Chazelle, ‘Figure’; Chazelle, The Crucified God, pp. 209–38; Kilmartin and Daly,
The Eucharist, pp. 82–9; Appleby, ‘“Beautiful on the Cross”’, pp. 18–24.
46 Chazelle, ‘Figure’, p. 31 and note 94.
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254 Graphic Signs of Authority

Ratramnus’ work On the Body and Blood of the Lord was written on the request
of Charles the Bald, and it must have soon become known at another monastery
with close connections with the royal court, namely St Amand. After all, in the
second half of Charles’ reign, his son Carloman and archchancellor Gauzlin
were listed as its abbots.47 From the 850s to 870s, the scriptorium of St Amand
produced luxurious copies of the Gregorian Sacramentary destined for various
Frankish ecclesiastical centres.48 The Vere dignum and Te igitur initials became
the two major forms of decoration in these liturgical books, which introduced
an important change in their presentation of the Te igitur initial, reminiscent of a
similar change in the IN principio initial that occurred in the gospel-books produced
in this scriptorium in the very same period. Similarly to the latter monogrammatic
device, the Te igitur initial drawn in St Amand occupies the whole folio: the
curved body of the letter E is crucified on the letter T representing a tau-cross
(Fig. 8.6).49 This initial invites various levels of Christological contemplation.

Fig. 8.6. Te igitur initial in Le Mans, BM, Ms. 77, fol. 9v–10r. © IRHT.

47 For references, see Garipzanov, The Symbolic Language, pp. 89–90.

48 For more details on these sacramentaries, see Deshusses, ‘Chronologie’, and Deshusses, ‘Encore
les sacramentaires’. On the School of St Amand, see Denoël, ‘Saint-Amand’.
49 The Sacramentary of Le Mans (c.851), Le Mans, BM, Ms. 77, fol. 9v; the Sacramentary of
Chelles (c.855), New York, ML, Ms. G. 57, fol. 4v; the Sacramentary of Tournai (c.863), St Petersburg,
National Library of Russia, Lat.Q.v.I.41, fol. 15v; the Sacramentary of St Denis (c.867), Paris, BnF,
Ms. lat. 2290, fol. 20r; the Sacramentary of Noyon (c.869), Reims, BM, Ms. 213, fol. 13v; the
Sacramentary of Sens (c.876–7), Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, Ms. A 136, fol. 28r. See also a
sacramentary fragment from St Amand now kept in Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 958, fol. 5v (c.870). The
same initial can also be seen in the liturgical manuscripts produced in scriptoria nearby in the
­second half of the ninth century and influenced by the style of St Amand, such as the Sacramentary
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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 255

Firstly, it can be interpreted as an abstract Crucifixion image presenting the

­crucified Incarnate Word. One may thus argue that this image graphically refutes
the alleged Adoptionist view that God was not crucified.50 Secondly, the mono-
grammatic initial can be viewed as presenting, to a contemplative mind, the nature
of divinity celebrated by the Mass. This initial Te refers to God the Father, but
the monogram itself can also be perceived as comprising the first Latin initials of
the name Iesus, I and E, placed on the tau-cross. Both personas of God are amalgam-
ated in this monogram through Logos, as described in the well-known first verse
of the Gospel of John. Thirdly, invented at the time of the Carolingian Eucharistic
controversy, this initial probably also attempted to visualize the authoritative verdict
on the nature of the eucharist in liturgical books that themselves operated as material
signs of ecclesiastical authority; and this initial did so more or less in line with
the argument of Ratramnus. The graphic device replaces the figural image of the
Crucified Christ of the kind seen in the Gellone Sacramentary, with its emphasis
on the flesh and blood of the historical Christ.51 Instead, the initial presents Christ
as a crucified Word, leaning towards Ratramnus’ interpretation of the divine word
as the spiritual embodiment of Christ in the eucharist.
Finally, the Te igitur graphic device, as well as other monogrammatic initials
designed by Carolingian clerical artists such as Vere dignum, LIber generationis, and
IN principio, bear witness to the same cognitive mode of visual thinking that
inspired the acclamatory monogram in the Calendar of 354—a late antique work
copied in the Carolingian world.52 At the same time, the choice and configuration
of letters in the latter monogram and the Carolingian monogrammatic devices
were conditioned by different cultural mindsets. In the centuries separating the
monogram of Valentinus from its Carolingian successors, such graphic devices
evolved into an accepted visual attribute of authority, both secular and divine.
In the very same capacity, monograms were also appropriated by the newly
­established Carolingian dynasty to project its royal authority across the Frankish
world and beyond.

8 . 2 . ROY A L , E P I S C O PA L , A N D PA PA L
M O N O G R A M S A S S I G N S O F AU T H O R I T Y
I N T H E C A RO L I N G I A N WO R L D

Royal monograms are noticeably absent in surviving numismatic and diplomatic

evidence from Gaul dated to the late seventh and the first half of the eighth century.
In decentralized late Merovingian silver coinage (the 670s–751), monograms were

of St Vaast of Arras (Cambrai, BM, Ms. 162, fol. 2v) and the Sacramentary of Stavelot (London, BL,
Add. Ms. 16605, fol. 18v), the text of which is similar to the sacramentaries produced in Corbie and
St Amand.
50 On the criticism of this assertion by Agobard of Lyons in the early ninth century, see Ganz,
‘Theology’, pp. 765–6.
51 See Kendrick, Animating the Letter, pp. 84–6.
52 Salzman, On Roman Time, pp. 70–3; Burgess, ‘The Chronograph’.
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256 Graphic Signs of Authority

placed on rare occasions on the reverse of coins. These monogrammatic devices

referred to the names of cities where mints were located (Fig. 7.11b), of ecclesiastical
hierarchs in charge of monastic or episcopal mints or of their holy patrons, and of
local autonomous secular leaders in southern Gaul. Such monogrammatic signs
employed just several first letters of a name. The latter feature, as well as the fairly
simple arrangement of such letters, suggests a declining knowledge of, and interest in,
monograms in Gaul in those decades. In this perspective, it is hardly surprising
that a royal monogram was absent from the royal charters of the first Carolingian
king, Pippin the Short (751–68), as well as from contemporary Frankish silver
coinage, which had been brought back under royal control early in his reign.53
The appearance of the cruciform monogram of Pippin’s son, Charlemagne
(768–814), on his charters—with his earliest surviving charter dated to January
769—was, therefore, a radical departure from the late Merovingian tradition of
royal symbols. Charlemagne’s graphic sign of authority was designed by his clerical
staff in the royal chancery led by chancellor Hitherius, who appropriated the cru-
ciform shape typical of Latin monograms in papal Rome and Visigothic Spain as
well as Greek monograms in contemporary Byzantium.54 The four consonants of
Charles’ name, KAROLVS, were attached to the arms of the cross, with the three
vowels assembled in the lozenge-shaped central part (Fig. 8.8a).
Whereas the cruciform shape of Charles’ monogram indicates the adoption
within his chancery of the visual symbolism of authority deriving from the
Mediterranean world, the placement of a lozenge O at the middle of the royal sign
is quite unique. A similar rhomb appears in the cruciform monograms of Narbonne
and of Nemfidius of Marseilles, both placed on silver coins struck in southern Gaul
in the early eighth century,55 but it is less certain whether notaries in Charles’
chancery knew of such coins some two generations later. It is more likely that the
inventor/s of Charles’ monograms borrowed a lozenge-shaped O from contemporary
manuscript culture in the Frankish world, where it was used in incipit lines in
the late Merovingian period.56 In late sixth-century Gaul, Venantius Fortunatus
employed the lozenge in combination with the sign of the cross as the main
structural principle in one of his visual poems.57 More generally, the lozenge motif
featured in Mediterranean Christian art from late antiquity, and it also appeared in

53 For further discussion and references, see Garipzanov, The Symbolic Language, pp. 169–72.
54 For a detailed discussion of the origins of Charlemagne’s monogram, its symbolic meanings, and
probable designer, Hitherius, see Garipzanov, The Symbolic Language, pp. 173–7. See also a recent
discussion by Schaller, ‘Alte und neue Überlegungen’, who argues that Charlemagne’s monogram was
designed by Fulrad, abbot of St Denis (pp. 169–73). For a critical response to Schaller’s hypothesis and
further argument in favour of Hitherius as the creator of Charlemagne’s monogram, see Janet Nelson’s
discussion of Charlemagne’s charter D.55 at http://www.charlemagneseurope.ac.uk/blog/charlemagnes-
charter-d-55-13-january-769/ [accessed on 1 February 2017].
55 Depeyrot, Le numéraire mérovingien, p. 149; and Prou, Les monnaies mérovingiennes, nos.
1548–55; MEC, p. 143.
56 See e.g. a papyrus manuscript with Augustine’s works currently divided between two libraries:
Geneva, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, Ms. lat. 16, fols 8r, 31v, 32r; and Paris, BnF, Ms. lat.
11641, fols 8v, 42v, 62v (probably Luxeuil, c.700, CLA, 7.**614).
57 Ernst, Carmen figuratum, pp. 149–57.
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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 257

Insular art from early on.58 By the end of the eighth century, the lozenge could be
employed in Insular manuscript decorations as a symbol of the Logos and as an
aniconic representation of Christ, as illustrated by the luxurious Book of Kells.59
The same Christological interpretation of a lozenge-shaped O can also explain the
replacement of an initial O at the beginning of the name of Osius with the sign of
the cross in a manuscript written by an Insular scribe in the first half of the eighth
century, a manuscript that was at Cologne c.750.60 The same intrinsic connection
between the sign of the cross and the lozenge can be traced in the later court of
Charlemagne, where Alcuin imitated Venantius Fortunatus in shaping his carmen
figuratum on the Holy Cross by those two signs—this visual poem emphasized the
transcendent powers of the Holy Cross through its role in the Passion of Jesus
Christ.61 The two poetic lines encoded by this lozenge hailed the holy scarlet that
shattered the shackles of the world and the signs (in plural) revealed to the world
by new saving works.62
It is however less certain that this symbolic interpretation of the lozenge sign
familiar to Alcuin was known to the designer of Charlemagne’s monogram in the
latter’s early chancery. If it was, the lozenge at the centre of the cruciform mono-
grammatic sign might have been intended to hint to erudite viewers cognizant of
Christological visual symbolism at the Incarnate Word crucified on the Cross. The
same symbolic message could have been communicated by the attachment of the
letter R to the monogram’s upper arm, which allowed an inquisitive viewer to discern
a staurogram embedded into Charlemagne’s graphic device. To an educated eye,
such symbolic arrangements must therefore have impregnated the secular sign of
authority with an arcane Christian signification. Regardless of whether or not Charles’
monogram encoded such a complex Christian message, the fact that it incorpor-
ated the three vowel letters O, U, and A within its central lozenge indicates that,
in the process of this monogrammatic invention, the local manuscript tradition of
Frankish Gaul played as important a role as the Mediterranean tradition of cruciform
monograms. After all, notaries in the early chancery of Charlemagne, and Hitherius
in particular, probably knew and understood local writing conventions in both
charters and manuscripts better than the scribal and diplomatic traditions of the
British Isles and the Mediterranean world.
Charlemagne’s graphic sign of authority became known in Carolingian scribal
culture fairly soon, where it inspired both artistic imitations and direct copies, as
in Codex Sangallensis 731.63 This manuscript contains a collection of early medieval

58 King, ‘Diamonds’.
59 O’Reilly, ‘Patristic and Insular Traditions’, p. 71; Tilghman, ‘The Shape’, pp. 292–3.
60 Cologne, EDDB, Ms. 213, fol. 62v. It was first attributed to a Northumbrian scriptorium (CLA,
8.1163), but its Insular origin has been questioned in recent decades. Cologne has been suggested as
a possible alternative; McKitterick, ‘Knowledge of Cannon Law’, pp. 109–15.
61 For more details on this poem, see Chazelle, The Crucified God, pp. 14–16, and Chapter 9.
62 ‘Salve sancta rubens fregisti vincula mundi. // Signa valete novis reserata salutibus orbi.’ Alcuini
carmina, VI, ed. Dümmler, pp. 224–5. Later, Theodulf of Orléans used the same combination of
the cross and lozenge in his visual poem (Theodulfi carmina, XXIII, ed. Dümmler, p. 482).
63 The artistic imitations of Charlemagne’s monogram are discussed in the next section of this
chapter.
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258 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 8.7. Inhabited initials in St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 731: a) p. 113; b) p. 111.

laws that a notary named Wandalgarius transcribed in 793, probably in western

areas of modern Switzerland.64 On page 113, an initial O serves as a frame for
the image of what looks like a seal with Charlemagne’s monogram at the centre
(Fig. 8.7a). Wandalgarius obviously depicts a graphic sign he was familiar with,
and he consciously employs it to introduce an adhortation to all the judges (Omnes
iudicis sciant, ‘All the judges should know’) not to trespass the law so that the
­chapter in question (The Breviary of Alaric, IX. 21) looks as if it were a royal charter
with a circular royal seal attached to it. On page 111, he presents another sample
of Charlemagne’s monogram, this time on his newly introduced silver penny
framed by an initial Q (Fig. 8.7b). This new type of coinage was introduced
in 792/3, and Charlemagne’s monogram became its new recognizable visual

64 St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 731; CLA, 7.950.

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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 259

attribute, reaching out across social strata. With this monogrammatic display of
authority, the Carolingian king distinguished his new silver coins circulating in
the second half of his reign (792/3–814) from all the coins of his seventh- and
eight-century Frankish predecessors.65 Similarly to his charters, he ‘sealed’, as it
were, each of his coins with a graphic royal sign, the form of which imbued
them with transcendent power—thus emphasizing their authoritative nature to
the people handling these tiny metal objects in Gaul and northern Italy. Coin
users most likely understood this message, and so did Wandalgarius, who drew the
image of Charlemagne’s monogrammed penny inside an initial to begin the legal
chapter that threatened forgers of fake coins, and emphasized the authoritative
nature of the new royal coinage.
In the late eighth century, Charlemagne’s monogram most likely served as a
source of inspiration not only for scribes copying manuscripts but also for notaries
of his royal sons reigning over their respective sub-kingdoms. This can be deduced
from a unique charter of Louis the Pious that the notary Hildigarius wrote at his
Aquitanian court in 794. Hildigarius marked this document with the cruciform
monogram of Louis clearly styled after the monogrammatic sign of authority of
his reigning father, including its characteristic O–V–A lozenge.66 The situation
changed in the early ninth century when the chancery of Louis the Pious, led
by Helisachar from 808 to 819, designed a new H-based monogram for Louis
inspired by the late antique box monogram of Theodosius II. It appears first on
Aquitanian royal charters between 808 and 814, and its slightly modified form was
taken over by the chancery in Aachen after Louis replaced Charlemagne at the
imperial throne early in 814 (Fig. 8.8b–c). The imitation of the monogrammatic
symbol of authority of an exemplary Christian emperor, Theodosius II, by a new
imperator Christianus, Louis the Pious, was not especially surprising in light of the
popularity of late Roman symbolism at the imperial court in Aachen at the end of
Charlemagne’s rule and during the reign of Louis (814–40). This diplomatic
change demonstrated to the noble recipients of Louis’ charters the new perception
of the Carolingian polity propagated by the imperial court, whereby the Frankish
empire was perceived as a legitimate successor of the Christian Roman empire
in the Latin West.67 In the 820s and 830s, the chanceries of sons of Louis the
Pious, Lothar I and Pippin I of Aquitaine, modelled their box monograms after
the monogrammatic sign of their imperial father, thus emphasizing dynastic
continuity by graphic means (Fig. 8.8d–e). This process of visual imitation was
especially apparent in the structure of Pippin I’s graphic sign, whose name lacked

65 For a detailed discussion of these images, the codex and its scribe, and Charlemagne’s intro-
duction of the new coinage in 792/3, see Garipzanov, ‘Regensburg’, and Garipzanov, The Symbolic
Language, pp. 178–81.
66 DK, vol. 2, no. XXVIII; ChLA, vol. 19, no. 681. For details of this charter and the monogram
inscribed on it, see Dickau, ‘Studien’, pp. 25–31; Mersiowsky, ‘Graphische Symbole’, p. 351; and
Worm, Karolingische Rekognitionszeichen, vol. 1, p. 46.
67 DK, vol. 2, nos. I–XXVII, XXVIX–LI. For a more technical discussion of Louis’ box mono-
gram, its similarity to Theodosius II’s graphic symbol of authority, and the former’s relation to the
dynamic political culture of the imperial court, see Garipzanov, The Symbolic Language, pp. 182–4.
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260 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 8.8. Carolingian diplomatic monograms, based on DK: a) of Charlemagne; b) of Louis

the Pious in Aquitaine (808–14); c) of Louis the Pious in Aachen (814–40); d) of Lothar I;
e) of Pippin I of Aquitaine; f ) of Odo; g) of Rudolf; h) of Louis IV; i) Lothar III.

a letter H. As a result, his monogram was structured by a letter N, the central bar
of which was often drawn nearly horizontal to resemble an H.
This ‘reinvention’ of the late antique box monogram in Carolingian scribal
­culture in the early ninth century can also be traced in manuscripts—for example,
in the copy of Jerome’s commentaries on Jeremiah written by the scribe Agambertus
in 806, probably in the abbey of Fleury.68 Virtually identical box monograms
appear in two different places: one after the explicit line of Book 5 (fol. 150v) and
the other in the colophon of the manuscript which is splashed with various scribal
devices and scripts with the clear intent to impress the codex’s clerical recipient,
and to confirm the scribe’s proficiency in his art to any educated viewer (fol. 181v;
Fig. 8.9). The colophon starts with the box monogram of the commissioner
­followed by Agambertus’ name and an invocation, all written with a peculiar
­mixture of Greek letters with characters of Aethicus Ister’s alphabet and so-called
‘Marcomannic’ runes.69 These lines are followed by a dating clause in Latin refer-
ring to the sixth year of Charlemagne’s imperial reign and detailing his imperial
intitulatio as it was recorded in some concurrent capitularies and imperial letters,
thus indicating Agambertus’ familiarity with contemporary diplomatic practices.
A cryptic exhortation to the reader to pray for the scribe appears after the dating
clause; each vowel is replaced with a following consonant of the Latin alphabet,
a cryptographic method well known to educated Carolingian scribes.70 The lower
part of the page is filled with classical and Christian ‘magical’ palindromes like
the SATOR, AMOR, and AMEN squares, anagrams of the scribe’s name, one of
which is arranged in the form of a cross. The commissioner’s monogram has in its

68 Valenciennes, BM, Ms. 59; Katalog, no. 6330.

69 ‘N. fieri ordinavit; Agambertus fecit; deo gratias semper domine, amen.’ On the popularity of
these alphabets in Carolingian manuscript culture around the turn of the ninth century, see section 8.3.
70 ‘Qui legis, ora pro scriptore, ut mereas habere deum protectorem.’
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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 261

Fig. 8.9. Scribal colophon in Valenciennes, BM, Ms. 59, fol. 181v. © IRHT.
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262 Graphic Signs of Authority

field abbat., probably presenting the abbreviated title abbatissa (abbess). René
Derolez and Bernhard Bischoff have suggested that the monogram encodes one of
two female names, Hlottildis or Theodildis.71 Yet the monogram in question lacks
the letter S, which means that the suggested decoding is still highly hypothetical.
While the encoded name remains an enigma, its shape is not. It is close to the
official monograms of both Carolingian emperors, Charlemagne and Louis the
Pious, in borrowing the central lozenge from the former’s sign and sharing a box
structure with the latter’s graphic device. With this graphic sign, Adalbertus visually
emphasized the position of authority held by the manuscript’s recipient, the point
underscored by the similarity of that monogrammatic name to the graphic signs of
Carolingian rulers employed in contemporary diplomas.
In a similar fashion, the N-based monogram of the powerful abbot Benedict
of Aniane (BENEDICTO) appears in his Codex regularum, which was possibly
copied at Kornelimünster near Aachen soon after its foundation in 814, before
the manuscript was brought to St Maximin in Trier later in the first half of the
ninth century (Fig. 8.10a).72 Although this monogram decorates the authorial
humble address to the book’s readers, its box shape contradicts this rhetorical topos
of humility by means of graphicacy—thus visualizing the authority of the closest
clerical advisor to the Carolingian emperor Louis the Pious.
In the period of fierce dynastic competition after 840 following the fragmen-
tation of the Carolingian empire, royal monograms became a graphic tool of
visual legitimation. As a result, Carolingian chanceries tended to adopt the dip-
lomatic monograms of earlier rulers for their later namesakes, such as Louis the
German, Charles the Bald, Lothar II, Louis II, and Pippin II, or to adapt the
traditional graphic design for new monogrammatic forms.73 In this later period,
the monograms of previous kings and emperors were appreciated as visible
tokens of dynastic continuity—legitimizing each new Carolingian ruler—and
they were copied with little or no change to their design. Carolingian monograms
thus became graphic devices with a hundred-year-long cultural history, worthy
of being transcribed in codices produced in close proximity to royal palaces.
One such example is a personal reference handbook (vade mecum) of Grimalt,
abbot of St Gall from 841 to 872, who was once chaplain at the court of Louis
the Pious (833) and subsequently served as chancellor and archchaplain of
Louis the German.74 On page 51 of this miscellany written by as many as forty
different hands, four contemporary Carolingian royal monograms were added
at the end of the Notitia Galliarum, a text describing provinces of Gaul
(Fig. 8.10b). As argued by Bischoff, this section of the codex was copied in
Regensburg when Grimalt served there at the royal court of Louis the German.75

71 Derolez, Runica manuscripta, p. 406; Bischoff, ‘Manuscripts’, p. 32, note 53c. See also McKitterick,
The Carolingians, p. 256.
72 Munich, BSB, Clm. 28118, fol. 18r; Hauke, Katalog, p. 7.
73 For a discussion of these diplomatic monograms and for relevant bibliography, see Garipzanov,
The Symbolic Language, pp. 185–8 and 194.
74 St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 397; Katalog, no. 5741; McKitterick, The Carolingians, pp. 183–4.
75 ‘Bücher’, pp. 201–11.
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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 263

Fig. 8.10. a) Monogram of Benedict of Aniane in Munich, BSB, Clm. 28118, fol. 18r; b)
East Frankish diplomatic monograms in St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 397, p. 51; c) mono-
grams of Bishop Hanto in Munich, BSB, Clm. 23631, fol. 245r.

This fact explains the presence in this manuscript of monogrammatic signs of

that king (identical to Louis the Pious’ box monogram, Hludovicus) and his sons
Carloman (in two versions, namely Karlomannus and Karlmannus, imitating
the box structure of his father’s monogram), Louis the Younger (identical to his
father’s and grandfather’s), and Charles the Fat (identical to Charlemagne’s famous
sign of authority, Karolus). These royal signs were thus included in a miscellaneous
compendium of practical knowledge, probably in the 860s, as material useful for a
high-status cleric running a royal chancery.
With the fame of Charlemagne as an exemplary Carolingian ruler growing
from the mid-ninth century onwards, many of his heirs named after him not
only borrowed his cruciform monogram for diplomatic usage but also employed
it on their coinage. Charles the Bald (840–77) started this practice, which was
followed by later Carolingian namesakes such as Charles the Fat (881–7) and
Charles the Simple (897–922). Charlemagne’s monogram thus gradually
became a traditional graphic symbol of royal authority easily recognizable by
most people, even if the vast majority of them were scarcely able to decipher its
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264 Graphic Signs of Authority

linguistic content.76 The visual appeal of Charlemagne’s monogram became

especially noticeable in West Francia/France, where chanceries imitated its
­cruciform shape and central lozenge in every new royal monogram designed in
the late ninth and tenth centuries. When dynastic outsiders to the Carolingian
family, such as Odo (888–98) or Rudolf (923–36), ascended against all the
odds to the throne of West Francia, their new royal monograms (ODO REX
and RUDOLFUS) followed the gist of Charlemagne’s cruciform graphic device
and incorporated the latter’s central lozenge including its letter A. This letter
absent in their names was included for its visual (not phonetic) qualities—namely
to make their graphic signs of authority resemble, as closely as possible, the
graphic sign of the great Charles (Fig. 8.8f–g).77 Even later Carolingians with
traditional names such as Louis IV (936–54) or Lothar III (954–86) had their
diplomatic monograms styled not after their earlier royal namesakes, but after
the graphic sign of authority designed for Charlemagne two hundred years
­earlier (Fig. 8.8h–i).78 This appeal of Charlemagne’s monogram extended in West
Francia beyond diplomatic culture. Thus, for example, a book of commentaries
on Tironian notes, which was produced in Reims around the turn of the
tenth century, employed an easily recognizable lozenge-based cruciform device
for two identical monograms encoding the Italian place name Puteoli at the begin-
ning of Book 5.79
The monogrammatic devices of Carolingian rulers highlight another significant
feature of Carolingian personal monograms, which made them strikingly different
from their late antique predecessors. The former took the nominative case, whereas
the latter the genitive or, later, the dative of possession or association. This grammat-
ical change mirrored a profoundly different usage of personal monograms in the
Latin West from the mid-eighth century onwards. Unlike in late antiquity, personal
monograms in the Carolingian world did not appear on dress accessories or luxurious
objects of personal use, as marks of elevated status for people possessing them or
authorizing their usage. In this culture fixated on the written text and its authori-
tative nature, where luxurious codices and royal charters were appreciated for their
symbolic value in social interaction,80 monograms were predominantly drawn
on parchment to underscore the authority of people whose names were repre-
sented in a monogrammatic form. In this function, personal monograms became
attractive graphic devices not only for kings and abbots but also for Carolingians
bishops, such as Charlemagne’s confidant and a prominent figure of authority in
early Carolingian Bavaria, Arn of Salzburg (bishop from 784–98 and archbishop

76 For more details and references, see Garipzanov, The Symbolic Language, pp. 194–8. For their
diplomatic monograms, see DK, vols 3–5 (for Charles the Bald), vol. 6, nos. I–III, X–XXIV, vol. 7,
nos. I–X, XX–XXVII (for Charles the Fat and Charles the Simple).
77 DK, vol. 6, nos. IV–IX; vol. 7, nos. XI–XIX (for Odo); vol. 8, nos. I–III (for Rudolf ).
78 DK, vol. 8, nos. IV–X (for Louis IV), nos. XI–XIV (for Lothar III). For other examples of the
symbolic importance attributed to the visual features of late Carolingian royal diplomas, see Koziol,
The Politics.
79 Leiden, Universitetsbibliotheek, VLO 94, fols 114v–r; Katalog, no. 2256.
80 See e.g. McKitterick, The Carolingians, pp. 155–64.
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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 265

from 798–821).81 The text of Jerome’s commentaries on the Gospel of Matthew

­originating from St Amand, where Bishop Arn was abbot from 782, concludes
with a monogrammatic reference to the scribe’s superior—with an initial A on the
top of a cross marking Arn’s name and the following cruciform monogram EPCS
rendering his title (episcopus).82 In a similar manner, Hanto, bishop of Augsburg
(807–16) in nearby Swabia, had two cruciform monograms of his personal name
and title (Hantω episcobus) drawn at the end of the luxurious Purple Gospels
(Fig. 8.10c).83 Another ‘living Word of God’, the gospel-book produced in Lorsch
in 826–38, presents a more advanced form of monogrammatic display, where
five golden monograms flank the final part of Jerome’s letter to Pope Damasus
preceding the Gospel tables and encode another message of episcopal authority
by Bishop Folcwich of Worms: ‘Bishop Folcvich has ordered Valhramus to
write [this manuscript]’ (‘Folcvic episc[opus] scrib[ere] iussit Valhr[am]u[m]’,
Fig. 8.11).84 The closest parallels to such encoding of the whole sentence in a set of
cruciform monograms are attested in contemporary Byzantine monuments.85
With active diplomatic exchanges between the Carolingian world and Byzantium
in the first third of the ninth century, the latter Byzantine practice was probably
known to some educated clerics with contacts at the imperial court of Louis the
Pious in Aachen, where a monk from Lorsch, Gerward, served as librarian sometime
between 814 and 828.86
The use of monograms as graphic signs of authority was more widespread in
northern and central Italy, due to both a better preservation of the late antique
monogrammatic tradition and a much closer proximity to the Byzantine world. In
the Carolingian period, monograms were drawn, carved, and stamped on a wider
range of media in Italy than they were in the north, which suggests that the ability
to encode and decode information by means of monograms was better known to
the south of the Alps than in the Frankish world. In the late eighth century, unique
monograms of Charlemagne were designed and placed on the coin issues of the
Lombard duchy of Benevento and the mint of Ravenna. Whereas in Ravenna
­die-carvers transcribed his monogram in Greek and arranged letters in a box shape,
thus mixing late Roman and Byzantine traditions in this process (Fig. 8.12a), in
Benevento the die designer preserved the cruciform structure of Charles’ graphic
sign.87 In the latter mint, the sign of the cross similarly structured personal mono-
grams of Lombard dukes and the title monogram of Louis II of Italy on their silver
coins struck in the ninth century. It is noteworthy that the first numismatic mono-
gram of Beneventan dukes, that of Sico (817–32) adopted not only a cruciform
shape but also the central lozenge of Charlemagne’s device, even though the latter

81 Brown, Unjust Seizure, pp. 102–23.

82 ‘In dei nomine A[rn] episcopus fieri iussit’: Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod.
theol. et phil. 2º 208, fols 156v–157r; Bischoff, Die südostdeutschen Schreibschulen, vol. 2, p. 104.
83 Munich, BSB, Clm. 23631, fol. 245r; Katalog, no. 3339; Bischoff, ‘Manuscripts’, p. 39.
84 Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig II 1, fol. 3v; Katalog, no. 2511; Bischoff,
‘Court Library’, p. 84; Bischoff, Die Abtei, pp. 44–7 and 84, no. 64.
85 For a similar set of cruciform monograms produced in Lorsch a few decades earlier, see section 8.3.
86 Bischoff, ‘The Court Library’, pp. 78–9; McKitterick, The Carolingians, pp. 190–1.
87 For more details, see Garipzanov, The Symbolic Language, pp. 180–1.
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266 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 8.11. Introductory monograms in Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig II
1, fol. 3v.

graphic element carried no phonetic value (Fig. 8.12b). Similar to diplomatic

monograms of later Carolingian kings, the lozenge was thus imitated as a purely
symbolic element, invoking for its viewers the graphic sign of the most powerful
political figure in late eighth and early ninth-century Western Europe.
Furthermore, the papal-imperial coinage of the ninth century employed a
­cruciform shape for monogrammatic titles pius and imperator accompanying the
names of Carolingian emperors, as well as for the mint name of ROMA (Fig. 8.12c).
Yet the vast majority of papal personal monograms that became typical of the
­coinage of Rome from the pontificate of Nicholas I (858–67) onwards followed
the traditional silhouette of late antique box monograms (Fig. 8.12d),88 a regular

88 For more details, see Garipzanov, The Symbolic Language, pp. 188–93; MEC, pp. 71–2, 264–5,
nos. 1048–64 and 1103–21.
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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 267

Fig. 8.12. a) Greek monogram of Charlemagne on Ravennate coins (792/3–814); b)

monogram of Duke Sico on Beneventan coins; c) ROMA monogram on ninth-century papal
coins; d) monogram of Pope Nicholas I (858–67) on papal coinage; e) epistolary monogram
of Bishop John (a. 827/8) from ChLA, vol. 58, no. 14.

feature of concurrent papal monograms in other media, as well as Italian episcopal

monograms of the eighth and ninth century in general.
Unlike in Frankish Gaul, the monogrammatic signs of Italian ecclesiastical
­hierarchs were displayed not only on parchment—as in a letter written in Lucca in
827/8, where the name of its addressee, Bishop John, is encoded with a traditional
box monogram (Fig. 8.12e)89—but also on stone. An earlier example of such
usage is the monogram of Bishop Lopicenus (c.749–85) on a fragmentary funerary
epitaph from Modena (Fig. 8.13).90 In this graphic sign of episcopal authority
built around the letter N, the letters C and S are attached to the upper ends of the
N’s vertical bars in a manner similar to box monograms produced in late antique
Rome and northern Italy.
A more systematic revival of the late antique monogrammatic tradition took
place in papal Rome from the pontificate of Paschal I (817–24), which was
hardly accidental considering that he has been identified as the first in the line of
ninth-century popes asserting papal authority vis-à-vis Carolingian rulers and lay
aristocracy.91 Paschal I’s impressive program of architectural restoration included
three Roman churches entirely rebuilt during his pontificate, namely Santa Cecilia in
Trastevere, Santa Maria in Domnica, and Santa Prassede, where he monumentalized

89 For further details, see Garipzanov, The Symbolic Language, p. 193.

90 Gray, ‘The Paleography’, p. 71, no. 36; Koch, Inschriftenpaläographie, p. 81.
91 For a detailed discussion, see Goodson, Rome.
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268 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 8.13. Fragmentary funerary epitaph of Bishop Lopicenus from Modena. Norwegian
Institute in Rome, H. P. L’Orange Photo Archive.

his achievement not only by means of dedicatory inscriptions and figurative imagery,
but also with the H-based monogram of his name which was added to mosaics at
the apex of the apse and sometimes of the apsidal arch of each church (Fig. 8.14).92
As Caroline Goodson emphasizes, these ‘churches were the places of papal authority,
an authority constructed by ceremony, material splendour and spiritual presence’,93
and Paschal’s graphic sign of authority, itself reminiscent of the box monogram of
Louis the Pious, visualized this point to any believer standing in their naves and
approaching their high altars during the liturgy. The papal monogram was displayed
at the locations that had been traditionally reserved for christograms such as the
chi-rho or iota-chi (Fig. 7.20), by the side of divine personages such as Jesus
Christ, the Lamb of God, and the Virgin Mary. The closest earlier parallels to
Paschal’s monogrammatic usage were the episcopal monograms in the sixth-century
archiepiscopal chapel in Ravenna (Fig. 6.17), which probably served as the direct
source of inspiration for Paschal. As in the earlier case, Paschal’s monograms were
embedded into the sacred visual space of each church, and undoubtedly underscored
the transcendent sources of his pontifical authority.
In the following years, Pope Gregory IV (827–44) imitated Paschal’s monumen-
tal display of pontifical authority by having his own graphic sign placed inside a
newly built church of San Marco, at the top of the apsidal mosaic between the two
portraits of Jesus. But unlike Paschal’s monogram of late antique style, Gregory’s
sign represented a combination of the debased cruciform monogram papa and his

92 Gray, ‘The Paleography’, pp. 97 and 100. 93 Goodson, Rome, p. 4.

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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 269

Fig. 8.14. Monograms of Pope Paschal I in Santa Prassede, Rome.

name Gregorii written in two lines. More elegant are the monograms that appear
on the gigantic epigraphic tabula ansata with the inscription produced for public
display and recording the foundation of Leopolis (twelve miles from Civitavecchia)
by Leo IV in 854.94 A traditional late antique monogram LEONIS was carved on
the left handle of the tabula ansata, whereas the right handle presented a newly
invented cruciform monogram PAPAE (Fig. 8.15a–b). This tabula was most likely
placed over the main gateway to the city, and the papal monograms as high as three
lines of the text in between communicated the authority of the founding pope
to every passer-by. The public visibility of such papal monumental monograms
in Rome and its vicinity from the 810s to 850s provides a wider material context
to the aforementioned popularity of papal monogrammatic signs of a late antique
style on papal-imperial coinage from the mid-ninth century onwards.
This renovatio of the late antique box monogram as a sign of ecclesiastical
authority was not limited to mid-ninth-century papal Rome, but was also revived
in the North Adriatic. Thus, when Bishop Handegis (857–62) renovated the
­cathedral of Pola in Istria in 857, he had it embellished with a plaque, probably a
door lintel, where an inscription recording his achievement is surmounted with a

94 Gray, ‘The Paleography’, p. 102.

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270 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 8.15. Monograms of Pope Leo IV on epigraphic tabula ansata from Civitavecchia
(a. 854): a) left side; b) right side. Norwegian Institute in Rome, H. P. L’Orange Photo
Archive.
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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 271

Fig. 8.16. Monogram of Bishop Handegis from the Cathedral of Pola. Norwegian Institute
in Rome, H. P. L’Orange Photo Archive.

box monogram of his name and episcopal title executed in a late antique style and
flanked by two imperial Roman eagles (Fig. 8.16).95
Contacts between the see of Canterbury and papal Rome must also have con-
tributed to the appearance of urban box monograms on coins issued at the mint of
the archbishops of Canterbury from the 810s onwards (Fig. 8.17a). This innovation
was quite unique for Anglo-Saxon England where monograms were rarely employed
during the early Middle Ages. A reverse type with an urban box monogram was
briefly employed at the mint of London later, during the reign of Alfred the Great
(in 886/7), but its peculiar structure suggests that an influence from concurrent
monogrammatic initials probably played a decisive role in its design (Fig. 8.17b).96
Furthermore, unlike on the Continent, monograms were also virtually absent in
Anglo-Saxon manuscript culture, with the Vespasian Psalter providing the only
known exception. Considering the above numismatic monograms of Canterbury,
it is perhaps not surprising that this early eighth-century luxurious manuscript
was produced in this city or nearby, and in the ninth century two peculiar box
monograms were added inside this codex on the two sides of a vellum patch fixing
one of its holes (Fig. 8.17c–d).97 The red colour of these monograms and their
large size—they are as high as four lines of the surrounding text written in black
ink—clearly demonstrates the significance of these graphic devices for both their
producers and viewers. Yet their unique forms were strikingly different from the
monograms executed in Carolingian Francia and the lack of a specific context
for their addition makes it virtually impossible to decode them.98 At the same

95 Marušić, Spätantike und byzantinische Pula, p. 57; Maracović and Jurković, ‘ “Signatures” ’,
p. 360. A similar monogram was probably also carved on a ciborium from Pola (Maracović and
Jurković, ‘ “Signatures” ’, note 13).
96 MEC, pp. 288–90 and 313.
97 London, BL, Cotton Ms. Vespasian A. I., fols 153r–v; CLA, 1.193; The Vespasian Psalter, ed.
Wright, pp. 31–2 and 79.
98 David Wright suggested that the first monogram included the word abba and the second the
title rex: The Vespasian Psalter, p. 32.
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272 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 8.17. a) urban monogram (Dorobernia civitas) on the pennies of Canterbury during
the episcopate of Archbishop Wulfred (805–32); b) urban monogram of London on
pennies of Alfred the Great; c–d) box monograms from London, BL, Cotton Ms.
Vespasian A. I., fols 153r–v; e) monogram of Sendelenus from Lyons, BM, Ms. 452,
fol. 276r; f ) monogram of Martinus from Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 1603, fol. 192r; g) mono-
grammatic initial of STORAX from Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 9332, fol. 246v.

time, the similarity of their slender silhouettes to the early urban monogram of
Canterbury from the 810s (Fig. 8.17a) and the identical forms of a lozenge O and
an open R suggest common origins for the graphic devices in the two media.

8 . 3 . A M O N O G R A M M AT I C R E V I VA L
I N C A RO L I N G I A N M A N U S C R I P T C U LT U R E
AND DE INVENTIONE LITTERARUM

The increasing use of monograms in early Carolingian scribal culture as signs of

authority for lay rulers and ecclesiastical hierarchs also affected clerics of lower
­status, who emulated their superiors by designing and drawing their own mono-
grams in manuscripts. One of the earliest cases can be found in the late antique
manuscript with Hilary of Poitiers’ commentaries on Psalms, where a certain
Sendelenus added his name and drew his personal cruciform monogram in the
upper margin of fol. 276r (Fig. 8.17e), probably in the last third of the eighth
­century.99 The arrangement of letters in Sendelenus’ graphic device follows the
same directions as in Charlemagne’s monogram—starting at the left arm (SEN),
then proceeding to the upper arm (DE), followed by a movement at the lower arm
(LENV), and finishing at the end of the right arm (S). Furthermore, Sendelenus’
and Charlemagne’s monograms similarly place the letters L and S at the end of the

99 Lyons, BM, Ms. 452 (Italy or Lyons, s. V ex.); CLA, 6.775.

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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 273

lower and right arms respectively. These graphic features indicate that Sendelenus
was probably familiar with Charlemagne’s sign of authority and imitated its graphic
structure while designing his own monogram.
Sendelenus’ urge to inscribe a personal monogram on a parchment leaf was not
unique in the early Carolingian period. For example, a scribal monogram appears
in the colophon of the manuscript containing the Canons and liturgical miscellanea,
which was written in north-eastern France around the turn of the ninth century.
It displays the box monogram of the scribe (Martinus, Fig. 8.17f ) followed by the
word subscripsi (‘I have signed’),100 thus demonstrating the scribe’s mastery of
monogrammatic design to the book’s readers. Furthermore, another scribe drew his
own monogram (UNICAR) in a theological compilation written in the late eighth
century.101 The latter codex was made at the same scribal centre that produced a
miscellany of classical texts around the turn of the ninth century, including the
Latin translation of Dioscorides’ De materia medica. In late antique Greek copies
of this manuscript, each medical herb was illustrated with a drawing.102 Unlike
their late antique forerunners, the producers of the Frankish copy prioritized the
graphic sign over the visual image. The Frankish Dioscorides lacks late antique
illustrations, but provides some chapters with peculiar monogrammatic devices
visualizing the name of an entry’s medical material (Fig. 8.17g).103 Bernhard Bischoff
attributed this manuscript to Fleury, the abbey in which the aforementioned
Agambertus drew the monogram of a commissioner in 806. Taken together, these
examples affiliated with Fleury demonstrate that monograms and monogram-like
forms entered scribal repertoire in this prominent Carolingian abbey under the
abbacy of Theodulf, bishop of Orléans (788–821) and one of the most influential
clerics at Charlemagne’s court in the second half of the latter’s reign.
The same desire to assert scribal prowess by means of monogrammatic devices
can be seen in the earliest surviving text of Dares Phrygius’ De excidio Troiae
historia, copied in another Frankish monastery with close connections to the
Carolingian court, Lorsch, under the abbacy of Richbod (784–804), a former student
of Alcuin at Charlemagne’s court.104 On some pages, cruciform monogrammatic
devices appear in the external side margins. Most of them perished when the external
edge of this manuscript was cut off at a later time, but their traces are still visible
on fols 77v and 80v. A chain of four cruciform devices with capital letters have
survived mostly intact only on fol. 80r (Fig. 8.18): ECC[E] QUOMOD[O] TROIA
CAPTA EST (‘Look here how Troy was captured’). The monogrammatic devices
accompany chapters 39–40 describing the treachery that led to the capture of Troy,
which suggests that cruciform monograms were drawn in margins as the graphic

100 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 1603, fol. 192r; CLA, 5.531.
101 Chartres, BM, Ms. 41 (3), fol. 52r; CLA, 6.746. The manuscript perished in 1944, and no
details of the shape and structure of this monogram have been recorded.
102 Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. Med. gr. 1; Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, Ms. ex-Vind. Gr. 1.
103 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 9332, fols 245v, 246r–v, 256r, 291r–92r, 293v, 295v, 296v; Katalog,
no. 4569.
104 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 7906, fols 59–88; CLA, 12.1744; Katalog, no. 4512; Bischoff, ‘Libraries’,
p. 95; Reimitz, ‘Transformations’, pp. 274–6. For a detailed discussion of this text and of the manu-
script containing it, see Yavuz, Transmission, pp. 50–71 and 218–31.
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274 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 8.18. Marginal cruciform monograms in Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 7906, fol. 80r.

summations of text on corresponding pages. A late antique text believed to have

originated in classical Greece was thus provided with pseudo-classical visual devices.
The innovative graphic forms in the Carolingian Dares were probably inspired by sets
of dedicatory cruciform monograms, which Carolingian travellers were able to observe
on Byzantine monuments on their eastbound journeys.105 Quite intentionally, the

105 For example, in the eighth-century church of St Stephen (Fatih Camii) in Triglia (Trilye) in
Byzantine Asia Minor, where medallions with cruciform monograms on the capitals have been
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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 275

anonymous creator of these cruciform devices in Lorsch arranged their letters in

such a way that the human gaze has to follow an early medieval crossing gesture
in the process of their decoding (from the top to the bottom and from the left
to the right). A generation later, these monogrammatic devices probably inspired
another scribe at Lorsch, Valhramus, to create another set of dedicatory cruciform
monograms in the gospel-book commissioned by Bishop Folcwich.106
The renovatio of monogrammatic art in early Carolingian manuscript culture
as an ennobling scribal practice associated with royal palaces and prominent
royal monasteries took place at a time when Charlemagne’s court promoted a higher
level of literacy and ‘correct’ forms of writing among Frankish clergy, as exemplified
by the Admonitio generalis (a. 789) and De litteris colendis. The use of monograms,
monogrammatic initials, and monogrammatic lettering in early Carolingian manu-
scripts was as symptomatic of this new culture attentive to ‘correct’ visual forms of
the written word as was the dissemination of Carolingian minuscule. The early
Carolingian monogrammatic revival took different forms and found various appli-
cations, some of which have already been discussed earlier in this chapter. A few
examples can provide a wide perspective for this new phenomenon. For example,
the producer of a manuscript with writings of Cyprian produced in St Amand
c.800, during the abbacy of the above-mentioned Arn of Salzburg, embellished
many titles with both monogrammatic letterings and the monogram-like forms of
explicit.107 Furthermore, in a late eighth-century manuscript from the important
abbey of Weissenburg (modern Wissembourg) in Lower Alsace, the monastic scribe
Adallandus drew both monograms and various forms of monogrammatic initials
and lettering (Fig. 8.23a), thus once again highlighting the connection between
interest in monograms and a more general predilection for monogrammatic forms
in Carolingian manuscript culture.108 The same connection can be illustrated further
by the development in some ninth-century Carolingian gospel-books of M-based
quasi-monograms of New Testament figures, such as Mary Magdalene,109 St Mark,
and St Matthew,110 in which the letters of a name were arranged (sometimes in a
cruciform order) inside the box form created by the initial M.
The inventive use of monograms and monogram-like devices in Carolingian
scribal culture was not confined to liturgical and late antique literary texts. For
example, some box and bar monograms appear in later ninth- and tenth-century

decoded as acclamations to its sponsors, e.g. κύριε βοήθει τῶ δουλῶ Νηκήτα πατρικίω (‘Lord, help
your servant Patrician Nikita’): Weigand, ‘Zur Monogramminschrift’, p. 417. For other examples of
medallions with cruciform monograms visible to visitors on monuments in ninth-century Byzantium
and Constantinople in particular, see Chapters 7 and 9.
106 See section 8.2.
107 Munich, BSB, Clm. 208, fols 207r, 240r; CLA, 9.1237 (c.800); Katalog, no. 2922.
108 Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 14 Weiss. For more details on this manuscript, see the end
of this chapter. See also monogrammatic lettering frequently used in titles in a canonical collection
produced in the same abbey at the beginning of the ninth century: Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf.
3 Weiss; Katalog, no. 7366.
109 Arras, BM, Ms. lat. 233, fol. 43r.
110 Munich, BSB Clm. 14000, fols 13v and 44v; Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 323, fols 20v and 67v (Court
School of Charles the Bald, s. IX, ¾, KM, vol. 5, pp. 100–12).
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276 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 8.19. Diagram with a central monogram in St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 237, p. 63.

encyclopaedic and grammatical works to encode some specific terms or expres-

sions.111 Furthermore, a peculiar monogrammatic form of graphic visualization
was drawn in a diagram accompanying a chapter on the path of the sun in a
Carolingian copy of Isidore’s Etymologies (3. 52), a manuscript produced in the
royal East Frankish monastery of St Gall in the first half of the ninth century
(Fig. 8.19).112 The central roundel of this diagrammatic rota is designated as the
centre of the world (medium mundi), with a box M-based monogram conceptualiz-
ing the last word to the text’s readers.
A copy of the Martyrologium of Wandalbert of Prüm from the Vatican, produced
c.850 or slightly later,113 amply illustrates the unique historical context explaining
the growing popularity of scribal monograms during the Carolingian renovatio—a
cultural context characterized by the close ties between royal courts, prominent
royal monasteries, and noble monastic scribes. This manuscript was produced

111 See the HAEC TIBI box monogram in Munich BSB, Clm. 14420, fol. 15r; Katalog, no. 3186
(probably northern France, s. IX2); and various box and bar monograms in Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 8672 (s. X).
112 St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 237, p. 63; Katalog, no. 5675. See also an A-based box monogram
(ADAM) preceding the text of Hrabanus Maurus’ In libros regum in Reims, BM, Ms. 129, 1r; Katalog,
no. 5269 (Reims, s. IX).
113 Vatican City, BAV, Reg. lat. 438; Katalog, no. 6678.
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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 277

Fig. 8.20. Scribal monograms from Vatican City, BAV, Reg. lat. 438, fol. 31v.

either in the aforementioned monastery of St Gall or more likely at the nearby

royal abbey of Reichenau for the East Frankish king Louis the German, who is
depicted on fol. 1v receiving the codex from a humble monk, who might represent
both Wandalbert and this particular manuscript’s producer.114 This self-referential
image and its titulus does not spell out the name of the modest monastic scribe
(referred to as dignatus servus—‘worthwhile servant’), who encoded his name with
two cruciform monograms after the text of the Martyrologium and two following
short poems on planets and months (fol. 31v).115 The second monogram can be
easily decoded as SCRIPSIT (‘has written’), whereas the first eight-armed monogram
with an M at its middle hides the name of the monastic scribe, either Helmkerus or
Helmerikus (Fig. 8.20). Both names are listed in the Liber memorialis of Reichenau.
The former name is mentioned only once as Helmker,116 while the latter is listed
many times in different forms such as Helmerih, Helmerich, or Helmmerich. The
latter name refers to monks from various Frankish abbeys—including those in East
Francia—as well as the abbot Helmmerichus of Lorsch.117 The latter abbot (Helmericus
abba) is attested in late eighth-century Carolingian royal charters.118 A person/s
with the same name is/are listed in monastic charters of Werden (a. 796, 800, 805,
and 806), Regensburg (a. 809), and Mondsee (a. 813).119 Another Helmeric is
mentioned in the charter of Louis the Pious issued in 839, confirming a barter
transaction between the abbot of Fulda, Hrabanus Maurus, and a royal vassal
Helmeric.120 This vassal must also have been listed in the memorial book of
Reichenau, among the lay friends and deceased donors.121 The reappearance of this
name in various East Frankish charters spanning through two or three g­ enerations

114 For more details and references, see Garipzanov, Symbolic Language, pp. 241–2 and note 136.
The depictions of the personification of the twelve months are inspired by imagery from the Calendar
of 354, which was copied in the Carolingian world; see Burgess, ‘The Chronograph’, pp. 364–5.
115 They are composed of lines taken from Dracontius’ Satisfaction and attributed to Columbanus:
Meyer, ed., Anthologia, vol. 2, pp. 51–2.
116 Das Verbrüderungsbuch, ed. Autenrieth et al., p. 103, no. h 283.
117 Das Verbrüderungsbuch, ed. Autenrieth et al., p. 103, no. h 289 (for abbot Helmerik, see facsimile
104C1).
118 Pippini, Carlomanni, Caroli Magni Diplomata, ed. Mühlbacher, nos. 65 and 161.
119 Blok, De Oudste particuliere oorkonden, pp. 165–6, 178–9, and 187–9; Die Traditionen, ed.
Widemann, pp. 8–9; Das älteste Traditionsbuch, ed. Rath and Reiter, pp. 131–2.
120 Bedos-Rezak, When Ego Was Imago, p. XV.
121 Das Verbrüderungsbuch, ed. by Autenrieth and others, facsimile 104B1and 114C2.
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278 Graphic Signs of Authority

indicates that this name must have been employed by a noble family, whose mem-
bers advanced in both lay and clerical hierarchies in the eastern territories of the
Carolingian realm. Such a familial profile fits well a monastic scribe in a prominent
East Frankish royal monastery copying a luxurious codex for a Carolingian king
and proudly ‘sealing’ it with his own monogram.
Helmerik’s eight-armed graphic sign is meanwhile identical in form to a couple
of monograms drawn in a short compilation usually titled De inventione litter-
arum or De inventione linguarum (‘On the Invention of Letters/Languages’)—a
text that, since its first publication by the early modern antiquarian Melchior
Goldast in 1606 and its later reprint in the Patrologia Latina, has traditionally
been attributed to the aforementioned Hrabanus Maurus.122 René Derolez has
undermined this attribution in his diligent study of the text’s early transmission
and related historiography, with a particular focus on its runic alphabet. Derolez
demonstrated that the standard version of this short compilation included
Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and runic abecedaries, as well as the alphabet of Aethicus
Ister, whereas the manuscript tradition deriving from East Francia and later
Germany also included sections on monograms, notae Caesaris (a short list of
Roman epigraphic abbreviations), and the cryptic notae of St Boniface in the final
part.123 Aethicus’ work was written soon after 727, probably in Bobbio, an Irish
monastic foundation in northern Italy, and its early copies were produced in
scribal centres in Bavaria, Alemannia, and Lower Alsace.124 The material com-
piled in other sections was also known in Carolingian scribal culture in the second
half of the eighth century. For example, the name of Orosius was encoded with
the notes of St Boniface in the explicit of the former’s Seven Books of History
against the Pagans, in a codex produced probably in Laon in the mid-eighth cen-
tury.125 Furthermore, as illustrated by the aforementioned manuscript of
Agambertus (a. 806), the replacement of Latin script with exotic letter characters
in scribal colophons became popular in some Frankish writing centres by the turn
of the ninth century,126 when this practice developed into a visual marker of
scribal excellence in addition to being a form of cryptography. As to the text’s
runic material, Derolez argued persuasively that it derived from eighth-century
Anglo-Saxon England and adapted to Old High German phonology, and conse-
quently suggested the eastern parts of the Frankish lands as the areas in which the
De inventione had originated by the early ninth century.127
Many copies of this text appear in grammatical compilations, which began to be
produced actively from the late eighth century on the encouragement of Charlemagne’s

122 Goldast, ed., Alamannicarum rerum scriptores aliquot vetusti, vol. 2, pp. 91–3; PL, vol. 112,
cols 1579–83.
123 Derolez, Runica Manuscripta, pp. 279–371. On the ‘western majuscule’ used for Greek letters
in Carolingian manuscripts, see Kaczynski, Greek, pp. 29–30.
124 The Cosmography of Aethicus Ister, ed. Herren, pp. lxi and lxxii.
125 Laon, BM, Ms. 137, fol. 140r; CLA, 6.765.
126 For example, see Würzburg, UB, M.p.misc.f. 5a, fol. 40r (CLA, 9.1402, s. VIII–IX); Munich,
BSB, Clm. 14325, fol. 74v (CLA, 9.1295, s. VIII ex.)
127 Derolez, Runica Manuscripta, pp. 371–8.
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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 279

court.128 The full version of the De inventione including its monogrammatic sec-
tion was most likely composed originally for one of such grammatical miscellanea
around the same time, probably in one of the prominent eastern monastic scriptoria
where cruciform monograms appear in concurrent manuscripts—for example, in
St Gall, which hosted some Anglo-Saxon and Irish monks and where the use of
Greek is attested from the early ninth century.129
The content of the earliest surviving manuscript with this text produced at
that Alemannic abbey (Codex Sangallensis 876) is indicative in this regard, with
its inclusion of grammatical works of Donatus, Diomedes, and Bede.130 The
De inventione was added to this miscellanea at the beginning of the ninth century
(pp. 278–91), and the errors committed in the process of its copying suggests that
the latter treatise is ‘several removes from the original text’.131 The folio with the
larger portion of the monogrammatic section is missing from the manuscript
(Goldast has been blamed for this damage),132 which hence preserves only the final
part of text on monograms along with the drawings of five cruciform monograms
(Fig. 8.21). The surviving passage on monograms in this manuscript is nearly
­identical to the corresponding text in the 1606 edition of Goldast, and surviving
monograms are exactly the same as their graphic counterparts in the latter edition
(Fig. 8.22). The only difference is the changed positions of the MATHIAS and
BARTHOLOMEUS monograms in the two texts, but it is possible that either
Goldast or the creator of his copy switched their positions because the latter
monogram required more space on the page. Goldast’s edition contains eighteen

Fig. 8.21. Preserved monogrammatic section of the De inventione litterarum in St Gallen,

SB, Cod. Sang. 876, p. 281.

128 Bischoff, ‘Libraries’, pp. 98–9. For this cultural context for the creation of the De inventione,
see Treffort, ‘De inventione’.
129 Kaczynski, Greek; Saenger, Space, p. 103.
130 St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 876; Katalog, no. 5858.
131 Derolez, Runica Manuscripta, pp. 290–5. See Fig. 8.22: ‘solitis’ for ‘soliti s[unt]’, and ‘adnota’
for ‘adnotata’.
132 Derolez, Runica Manuscripta, pp. 294 and 303–4.
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280 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 8.22. Monograms of the De inventione litterarum in the 1606 edition of Goldast.

cruciform monograms, whereas the eleventh- and twelfth-century copies originat-

ing from Lorsch and from the Cistercian monastery of Salem in the vicinity of
St Gall display nineteen.133 Yet the additional monogram DEUS appearing in
the later manuscripts on the second position in the monogrammatic set differ struc-
turally from the others and might have been added at a later date. The latter two
manuscripts lack the textual passage on monograms. This paragraph is meanwhile
present in a twelfth-century manuscript currently kept in Vienna and in a lost
manuscript of the Munich antiquary A. Weinmüller (c.1100), both produced
somewhere in Austria,134 and they preserve this passage in a form nearly identical

133 Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 1761, fols 100v–102v, and Heidelberg, UB, Cod. Sal. IX.39, fols 1r and
2r; Derolez, Runica Manuscripta, pp. 299–302 and 305–8.
134 Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 1010, fol. 90r, and Plassmann and Krause, ‘Die Hrabanische Runenreihe’;
Derolez, Runica Manuscripta, pp. 309–12.
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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 281

to the one in Codex Sangallensis 876 and Goldast’s edition. At the same time, the
Vienna and Munich copies differ from the other manuscripts of this tradition
in preserving only the first cruciform monogram (DOMINUS, ‘The Lord’) from
the original set.
Unlike the other textual paragraphs in this treatise, the passage on mono-
grams does not have earlier textual parallels. In all likelihood, it was written in
the late eighth century as a textual introduction to the cruciform monograms
drawn beneath, in imitation of other passages of the De inventione preceding
the lists of letters and abbreviations. In this textual context, the author’s descrip-
tion of the monograms as a form of lettering is not surprising. In a broader
perspective, this passage bears witness to a growing interest in monograms in
early Carolingian scribal culture, and it provides us with a late eighth-century
innovative ‘re-invention’ of the monogrammatic tradition somewhere in the
south-eastern parts of the Frankish realm. For this reason, this short passage
deserves a closer inspection:
Letters written in the form of a monogram are found in some places, where a repre-
sentative depiction has been made as a wall mosaic or on textiles, or elsewhere in
another manner. In such places, painters were accustomed to present the names of
these [figures] with letters combined in one character, which is called a monogram.
Their meaning is shown below with short notes.
Litterae enim monogrammae scriptae nonnullis in locis inveniuntur, ubi pictura
cum museo in pariete imaginis aut in velis, vel alicubi aliter facta fuerit, ibi
eorum nomina cum congerie litterarum, unum caracterem pictores facere soliti
sunt, quod monogramma dicitur, quorum significatio subtus per pauca adnotata
monstrantur.
A set of cruciform monograms is drawn below the text, starting with those of
the Lord (DOMINUS) and the Holy Mary (SANCTA MARIA)—which are
­followed with the monogrammatic signs of the thirteen apostles preceded by the
related ‘Saint’ (SANCTUS) monogram. In Goldast’s edition, the set ends with an
enigmatic eight-armed monogram ‘King Solomon’ (SALOMON REX), which is
accompanied with a slightly different note, Salomon rex pacificus (‘Solomon,
peace-making king’) (Fig. 8.22).135
The writer of this passage was obviously aware of the practice of placing
monograms on monuments and objects in Italy and the Greek East—especially
those invoking the Lord in a cruciform form (ΚΥΡΙΟΣ ΒΟΗΘΕΙ) and the
box monograms of the Virgin Mary (Η ΑΓΙΑ/ΜΑΡΙΑ)—and might have seen or
heard of some monograms in Ravennate mosaics without a proper understanding
of their meaning. The author must also have observed some Byzantine silk and linen
cloths with Greek cruciform monograms woven on them that were displayed on
altars or kept in shrines and reliquaries in Frankish areas,136 as well as in northern

135 Note that the Patrologia Latina re-edition of the Goldast’s text presents a corrupted form of the
latter monogram.
136 For two early Byzantine monogrammed silks kept in Frankish churches, see Muthesius,
‘Memory and Meaning’, pp. 354–9.
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282 Graphic Signs of Authority

Italy where a monogrammed linen altar cloth has been preserved in the treasury of
Monza Cathedral.137 This sixth-century cloth features a cruciform ΦΩΣ–ΖΩΗ
(‘Light–Life’) monogram at its middle, surrounded by four cruciform Greek
monograms encoding the names of the evangelists—two of them being apostles.
Monograms of that kind may have inspired the author of the monogrammatic
section to design the Latin monograms of the thirteen apostles for his text.138
The designer of the monogrammatic set in the De inventione was clearly influ-
enced by the form of Charlemagne’s monogrammatic device: ten monograms
­feature a central lozenge—a graphic element with a Christological meaning—with
eight imitating the lozenge of Charles’ sign. All the monograms display a letter or
combination of letters at the middle—a feature that became characteristic of the
ninth-century Carolingian monograms. The addition of Solomon’s monogram to
the list of the New Testament names and the choice of Charlemagne’s lozenge for
its middle part are noteworthy because in the late eighth century Charlemagne was
occasionally likened to the peace-making king Solomon, a model king in the early
Middle Ages. In the Carolingian political thought of the 780s and 790s, the latter
was referred to as the Old Testament pre-figuration of peace-making Christ.139
As early as around 775, an Anglo-Saxon monk Cathuulf likened Charlemagne to
this biblical ruler, as did Alcuin later on.140 The final monogram in the De inven-
tione thus visualized this association in a graphic form. Moreover, from the 790s,
the title pacificus rex began to be applied to the Carolingian king in contemporary
­political discourse.141 The very same title was written by the sides of Solomon’s
monogram despite the fact that the latter did not in fact incorporate the appella-
tion pacificus in its graphic structure—the only discrepancy between a monogram
and a corresponding annotation in the entire set, indicating the significance of
this title to the designer of this graphic device.142 This particular feature suggests
the 790s as a likely time for the creation of the De inventione or, at least, of its
monogrammatic section.
A similar cognizance of eastern cruciform devices and a similar interest in the
graphic sign of the Old Testament king can be observed in a late eighth-century
manuscript containing Cassiodorus’ commentaries on Psalms 100–150, which
was produced at the monastery of Weissenburg located on the fringe the larger
area between the Rhine and Moselle, in which the contemporaneous courtly scrip-
torium was probably located.143 The transcriber of this text, Adallandus, is known

137 Merati, Il tresoro, pp. 8–9, figs 5–6.

138 Note that, in order to differentiate the two apostles named Jacob, the designer switched the
locations of the letters B and C in their monograms.
139 Kershaw, Peaceful Kings, pp. 144–6.
140 Epistolae variorum, no. 7, ed. Dümmler, p. 503. On Cathuulf ’s letter, see Garrison, ‘Letters’.
See also Noble, Images, pp. 234–5.
141 For more details and references, see Kershaw, Peaceful Kings, pp. 162–3.
142 In one version of the De inventione transmitted in the high Middle Ages (Vienna, ÖNB, Cod.
1761, and Heidelberg, UB, Cod. Sal. IX.39), this monogram and the annotated text were changed to
SALOMON FECIT (‘Solomon has made’) and pacificus fecit respectively, which suggests that the
early Carolingian political message was lost by the eleventh century where monastic copyists could
interpret that graphic device as an authorial or scribal monogram.
143 Bischoff, ‘Manuscripts’, p. 21; McKitterick, Charlemagne, pp. 359–60.
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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 283

Fig. 8.23. Monogrammatic devices in Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 14 Weiss.:

a) monogrammatic initial and lettering on fol. 221r; b) monogrammatic initial on fol. 18r;
c) monogrammatic initial on fol. 235r; d) the ΦΩΣ–ΖΩΗ monogram on fol. 23v;
e) Solomon’s monogram and sign on fol. 247r. © HAB Wolfenbüttel <http://diglib.hab.de/
mss/14-weiss/start.htm>

to have written various charters for this monastery between 782 and 790,144 and
his manuscript might have been produced in the same years. His numerous
­monogrammatic initials surrounded by red dots are clearly influenced by Insular
forms (Fig. 8.23b–c). In addition, the monastic scribe drew two cruciform mono-
grams of particular interest for the monogrammatic section in the De inventione.145
The first appears in the margins of Cassiodorus’ commentaries on two verses of
Psalm 103: ‘(21) Thou hast appointed darkness, and it is night: in it shall all the
beasts of the woods go about: (22) The young lions roaring after their prey, and

144 Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 14 Weiss.; CLA, 9.1384.

145 The third cruciform monogram of fol. 145r is hard to decode and is omitted from my
discussion.
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284 Graphic Signs of Authority

seeking their meat from God’. Cassiodorus explains these lines as referring to
the sixth hour of the Passion, when Jesus died on the Cross and when the world
was in turmoil and demons seemed to have prevailed. In the same vein, according
to Cassiodorus, the following verse—‘(22) The sun ariseth, and they are gathered
together: and they shall lie down in their dens’—refers allegorically to the
Resurrection.146 Adallandus illustrated these explanations with the aforemen-
tioned cruciform monogram ΦΩΣ–ΖΩΗ (‘Light–Life’), the two attributes of God
particularly relevant to Cassiodorus’ explanation (Fig. 8.23d). It is evident that the
scribe entered troubled waters while transcribing this Greek monogrammatic
sign: the rendering of the phi is odd, and the eta and sigma erroneously switched
their positions. These errors notwithstanding, it is obvious that Adallandus was
familiar with the gist of this early Byzantine device and proudly added it in the
margin as a graphic encapsulation of this particular exposition by Cassiodorus.
Adallandus was not a unique scribe in his knowledge of this Byzantine cruciform
invocation. For example, another scribe added a much better drawn ΦΩΣ–ΖΩΗ
graphic device in a margin of a text written in St Gall in the second half of the
ninth century—this time with a traditional early Byzantine acclamation between
the arm of the cross (Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς νικά, ‘Jesus Christ conquers’).147 Similarly to
Adallandus’ usage, the later graphic invocation was employed appropriately by
illustrating the passage referring to the daytime darkness during the Crucifixion.148
The second cruciform device of Adallandus, the one at the very end of the text
(fol. 247r), represents the monogram of Solomon and thus is directly connected
to the similar monogram in the De inventione. The second device appears in the
margin next to the final phrase of the main text, preceding its explicit. The phrase
referring to follow-up commentaries on the Solomonic writings is thought to
derive from the original text of Cassidorus’ Institutiones, where it introduced the
latter’s explanations on biblical books associated with Solomon, namely Proverbs,
Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom, and Ecclesiasticus (Fig. 8.23e).149 Near
this textual reference to the Old Testament ruler, Adallandus drew a cruciform
monogram of SALOMON, as if that page had been a royal charter of the Jewish
king. In doing so, the scribe undoubtedly imitated Charlemagne’s graphic sign of
authority, by having the vowel letters O and A assembled at the central lozenge
and the four consonants attached to the arms of the cross. Adallandus was probably
cognizant of connections drawn between Charlemagne and King Solomon in
­contemporary political culture and made exactly the same point in this manuscript
by means of graphicacy. To avoid any confusion, he drew a pentalpha, also known
as pentagram, beneath the monogram of the biblical king. The pentalpha was
known among late antique Christians as the powerful apotropaic sign of Solomon.

146 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, 103.20–2, ed. Adriaen, pp. 934–5. For English translation,
see Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. Walsh, pp. 41–2.
147 Zurich, Zentralbibliothek, Ms. C78, fol. 157r; Kaczynski, Greek, p. 42.
148 A Sibylline prophecy at Augustine, De civitate dei, 18. 23, ed. Dombart and Kalb, p. 615.
149 ‘Nunc Solomonis dicta videamus, quae proprios expositores habere noscuntur’, Cassiodorus,
Expositio psalmorum, ed. Adriaen, p. 1352. See also Courcelle. ‘Histoire’, p. 66, note 4; O’Loughlin,
‘The Structure’, pp. 56 and 64.
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Monogrammatic Revival in the Carolingian World 285

According to the fourth-century Christian Greek text known as The Testament of

Solomon and later transmitted in the Byzantine world, this Jewish king received
from God a ring (or seal) inscribed with that symbol and giving its possessor power
over all the demons.150 By the late fourth century, western pilgrims were able to see
the ring of Solomon accessible for veneration in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
in Jerusalem.151 Hence, it is possible that Adallandus drew this symbol on the last
page to protect the text against evil forces. At the same time, it is more probable
that, by adding a pentalpha below the monogram, he provided contemporary and
future readers with a visual clue for decoding his enigmatic monogrammatic
device, resembling the graphic sign of authority of his Carolingian ruler.
All in all, the cruciform monograms in Adallandus’ manuscript and the De
inventione indicate that, in the eyes of their producers, such signs with an estab-
lished tradition of usage in the ‘Empire of the Romans’ and reminiscent of the
widely known Carolingian symbol of royal authority were adequate graphic means
of visualizing the authority of the Lord, his apostles, and the Virgin Mary. In a
similar vein, some members of the ninth-century clergy such as Bishop Hanto or
the monastic scribe Helmerik thought it was appropriate to employ cruciform
monograms to affirm their spiritual authority in the manuscripts they commis-
sioned or produced. Yet in the end, all the cruciform monogrammatic signs that
appear in different media in the Carolingian world—including Charlemagne’s
graphic symbol—derived their transcendent authority from one ultimate source:
the sign of the Cross. Its apotropaic and salvific power remained supreme in the
Carolingian world, and its various graphic forms not only constituted a default
graphic mode of referring to God in all His manifestations, but also developed into
an alternative visual form of beseeching divine protection and intervention.

150 The Testament of Solomon, trans. Condybeare, p. 16; Busch, ed., Das Testament Salomos,
pp. 84–93.
151 For further details and references, see Boustan and Beshay, ‘Sealing the Demons’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

9
The Power of the Cross and Cruciform
Devices in the Carolingian World

The preceding discussion of a monogrammatic revival in the Carolingian era has

demonstrated again and again that, not unlike early Byzantine graphic culture, the
sign of the cross (signum crucis) functioned in the West as the primordial blueprint
for many visual devices. This sign was embedded in the Vere dignum and Te igitur
initials embellishing the pages of Frankish sacramentaries. It structured Charlemagne’s
royal symbol of authority and the graphic signs of his emulators. It defined numerous
monogrammatic signs appearing in various Latin manuscripts and, in particular, the
monograms of the Virgin Mary, the Lord, and His apostles in the De inventione lit-
terarum. Moreover, from late antiquity onwards, the sign of the cross was viewed not
only as a graphic encapsulation of the major tenets at the heart of the Christian faith,
such as Crucifixion and Salvation, but also as a potent sign providing a direct recourse
to divine forces. In early Byzantium, this belief gave birth to various acclamatory and
invocational cruciform devices, some of which became known in the early medieval
Latin West. Yet Carolingian graphic designers were more than simply cultural epi-
gones of their late antique and early Byzantine predecessors, and were able to con-
tribute to the earlier graphic stock by adding new symbolic elements, such as
Charlemagne’s lozenge, or by developing new forms of monogrammatic initials. In
a similar vein, Carolingian clerical masters were able to ‘re-invent’ the late antique
genre of cruciform invocations by skilfully applying them to material media of para-
mount importance for contemporary elite culture, namely manuscripts.

9.1. T H E B I B L E O F S A N PA O L O F U O R I L E M U R A A N D
C RU C I F O R M I N VO C AT I O N S I N C A RO L I N G I A N
RELIGIOUS MANUSCRIPTS

The cruciform devices of an invocational and acclamational nature originating

from late antique manuscript culture, such as ora pro me (‘pray for me’) and amen,
were transmitted into the colophons of books in the early Carolingian period,
particularly in northern Italy. For example, the former device can be seen in the
codex with the Dialogues of Gregory the Great created in East Francia around 800,
probably in the abbey of Lorsch (Fig. 9.1a),1 whereas the latter appears in his h
­ omilies

1 The name Gerunc was added to this formula in the tenth century: Würzburg, UB, M.p.th.f.19,
fol. 67v (CLA, 9.1406; Katalog, 3.7468).
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Cruciform Devices in the Carolingian World 287

Fig. 9.1. Cruciform devices from Carolingian manuscripts: a) Würzburg, UB, M.p.th.f.19,
fol. 67v; b) Munich, BSB, Clm. 6329, fol. 192r; c) Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Msc. Patr. 61,
fol. 103r; d) Rome, Abbazia di San Paolo f.l.m., Biblia, fol. 1r.

written in northern Italy or Switzerland in the late eighth century (Fig. 9.1b).2
In the same period, scribes began to improvise with such traditional cross-shaped
colophon devices, as in the collection of scientific works composed in the abbey of
Montecassino, south of Rome, or in the manuscript with the Passion of St Apollinaris,
probably produced in Ravenna. Their colophons display, respectively, a peculiar cru-
ciform monogram of amen (Fig. 9.1c) and the formula deo gratias (‘by the grace of
God’) written four times in the form of an elaborated cross crosslet.3
Yet a more radical change in the application of invocational devices in Carolingian
manuscript culture took place only in the second half of the ninth century, in the
same period that witnessed the emergence of new conceptual graphic forms of the
Te igitur and In principio initials in sacramentaries and gospel-books respectively.
In this later period, some major scriptoria in Francia were designing new forms
of graphicacy that accommodated the long-established tradition of invocational
monograms to the Carolingian visual culture of religious manuscripts. Three
manuscripts exemplify the different aspects of this creative process.

2 Munich, BSB, Clm. 6329, fol. 192r (CLA, 9.1276; Bischoff, Die südostdeutschen Schreibschulen,
vol. 1, pp. 144–5).
3 Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Msc. Patr. 61, fol. 103r (s. VIII, ex., CLA, 8.1029; Katalog, no. 234a);
St Petersburg, National Library of Russia, Lat.F.v.I.12, fol. 62v (Ravenna, s. VIII, CLA, 11.1608).
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288 Graphic Signs of Authority

The first manuscript, the luxurious Bible of San Paolo fuori le mura, originated
from the prolific cathedral School of Reims around the year 870 or 871,4 under
the stewardship of the closest advisor to King Charles the Bald, Archbishop
Hincmar of Reims (845–82). The manuscript was probably produced as a gift to
Charles, and its iconographic as well as graphic program encapsulated Hincmar’s
message regarding the royal authority of the West Frankish ruler and its spiritual
sources. The Bible was illuminated with various images, including the symbolic
image of its recipient: the enthroned Carolingian king is depicted as flanked by his
noble wife and guards, and holding a red object, traditionally described as an orb,
with a cruciform monogram drawn onto it in golden ink (Fig. 9.1d).5 Several
scholars have attempted to decode this mysterious monogram, all inconclusive so
far. Half a century ago, Herbert Schade attempted to decipher it with reference to
the images of King Solomon in this manuscript and to contemporary textual allu-
sions to that Old Testament ruler at the court of Charles the Bald. Consequently,
Schade decoded this graphic device as an arcane caption to the image: hic rex novae
romae salomon (‘Here is Solomon, the king of the New Rome’).6 Yet his proposed
‘reading’ is highly problematic for several reasons. To begin with, at the time of the
manuscript’s production, the term ‘the New Rome’ was traditionally applied to
Constantinople. For example, in a letter written in 871, another Carolingian ruler,
Louis II of Italy, addressed the Byzantine emperor Basil as emperor of the New
Rome.7 Secondly, King Solomon is never mentioned in the accompanying poem
beneath the royal image, which accentuates instead the special nature of the rela-
tionship between the Divine King, Jesus Christ, and the earthly king, Charles.8
Thirdly, Schade’s suggestion implies that the monogram’s single letters A and E
must have been used thrice, while ninth-century Carolingian monograms tended
to include every letter of encoded words whenever possible and occasionally
allowed the double-reading of some letters. Finally, one may ask why Charles
would be identified on this image in such an unusual way, which does not have any
comparable parallel in the early Middle Ages.
Some years before Schade, Percy E. Schramm decoded this enigmatic monogram
in the context of the poem accompanying the royal image, as Christe, conserva
Carolum et Richildim (‘Christ, protect Charles and Richildis’).9 His deciphering
was inspired by the assumption that the royal spouse depicted to the right of the
king is his second wife, Richildis, an identification that the surrounding text does

4 Earlier studies suggested St Denis as the place of the manuscript’s production: Kantorowicz, ‘The
Carolingian King’, pp. 287 and 299–300; Schramm, Die deutschen Kaiser, pp. 55–6 and 170–2. But
recent research has revealed its connection to the School of Reims on art historical grounds: Gaehde,
‘The Bible’, pp. 11–12; Diebold, ‘The Ruler Portrait’; KM, vol. 6.2, pp. 8–9, 109–74, and 230–2.
5 Rome, Abbazia di San Paolo f.l.m., fol. 1r, originally fol. 337v; Cardinali, ed., La bibbia, p. 20.
For a detailed analysis of this image and related bibliography, see Garipzanov, Symbolic Language,
pp. 255–8.
6 Schade, ‘Studien’, especially 22 (1960), pp. 13–25. For a similar interpretation of this image as a
propagandistic self-representation of Charles the Bald as a new Solomon, see Staubach, Rex Christianus,
p. 281.
7 Ludovici II. imperatoris epistola, ed. Henze, p. 386.
8 KM, vol. 6.2, pp. 126–7.
9 Schramm, Die deutschen Kaiser, no. 41.
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Cruciform Devices in the Carolingian World 289

not corroborate directly. Moreover, the monogram in question lacks a letter D,

which would have been essential if the name of that queen had been encoded in
this graphic device.
In 1994, William Diebold suggested a more plausible solution to this early
medieval monogrammatic puzzle. He pointed out that the two pairs of single let-
ters at the lower and right arms of the cruciform sign, IH and XR, should be read
as monograms of Jesus Christ’s name, perhaps in the vocative, while the remaining
letters C, R, L, and M could be resolved as the accusative form of Charles’ name,
Carolum.10 Based on this incisive observation, Schramm’s reading can be corrected
as follows: Iesu Christe, conserva Carolum (‘Jesus Christ, protect Charles’). The
vocative form of the nomina sacra—IHU XRE (Iesu Christe)—would explain the
location of IH at the bottom, just below the central rhomb, the lower lines of
which provide the nomen sacrum with its final U. The ending of the other nomen
sacrum, an E, is neatly placed in the field between the two sacred names. This E,
together with the combination of AN at the left arm, C on the top, R, S, and L
between the cross-arms, and O, V/U, and M at the middle provide all the necessary
letters for the phrase conserva Carolum. The proposed decoding employs mono-
grammatic letters only once or twice, and the final letter of the phrase is placed
right at the middle.
This decoding makes Jesus Christ the main addressee of the monogrammatic
message, which corresponds to the use of a lozenge at the middle of the monogram,
considering the possible Christological implications of that particular graphic
­element, as discussed in the previous chapter. This decoding of the encrypted message
correlates not only with the accompanying poetic lines but also with the texts of a
dedicatory poem, which describes the manuscript as Charles’ offering to Christ.11
In a similar way to late antique invocational monograms, the graphic message in
this Bible was thus intentionally hidden from uninvited gazes, its intelligibility
restricted to the producer, commissioner, earthly receiver, and, most importantly,
the Divine Lord. The encoded phrase also echoes invocational legends on Carolingian
seals addressing Christ, such as Christe, protege Carolum regem Francorum (‘Christ,
protect Charles, king of the Franks’) for Charlemagne, Christe, protege Hludowicum
imperatorem (‘Christ, protect Emperor Louis’) for Louis the Pious, and Christe,
adiuva Hlotharium augustum (‘Christ, help August Lothar’) for Lothar I.12 The
appearance of the monogrammed disc on the royal image indicates that this simi-
larity with the contemporary sphragistic tradition was hardly accidental. The
round shape of the disc and the range of dots on its rim make it identical to con-
temporary Byzantine lead seals, which could occasionally reach the hands of ninth-
century Carolingian dignitaries in contact with the Byzantine world, and many of
which featured cruciform invocative monograms beseeching the Mother of God or
the Lord for divine assistance.13

10 Diebold, ‘The Ruler Portrait’, p. 8, note 7.

11 Bibliothecarum et psalteriorum versus, ed. Traube, p. 258; Diebold, ‘The Ruler Portrait’, pp. 16–17.
12 Dalas, ed., Corpus, pp. 95–101, nos. 16–17, 19–20, and 22; Schramm, Die deutschen Kaiser,
pp. 34–5, 43–4, 148–9, 156, and 160.
13 For more details, see Chapter 7.
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290 Graphic Signs of Authority

In contemporary Byzantium, such cruciform monograms also addressed Christ,

as demonstrated by the ‘Beautiful Doors’ in the Constantinopolitan church of
Hagia Sophia. In 838/9, these doors were installed in the vestibule at the south-
west end of the narthex, which by that time was used for royal entry. The doors
were embellished with bronze panels inscribed with eight paired monograms, a
couple of which were slightly changed two years later. Placed inside medallions,
these graphic signs undoubtedly imitated the cruciform invocational devices in
contemporary Byzantine sphragistics, and functioned as quasi seals marking the
imperial entrance into liturgical space. They encoded three invocations: ‘Lord, help
the ruler Theophilos’ (Κύριε βοήτει Θεοφίλῳ δεσπότῃ), ‘Mother of God, help the
empress Theodora’ (Θεοτόκε βοήθει Θεοδώρᾳ αὐγούστῃ), and ‘Christ, help the
ruler Michael’ (Χριστὲ βοήθει Μιχαὴλ δεσπότῃ).14 The last monogrammatic
invocation (Fig. 9.2a–b) represents a close match to the graphic device in the Bible
of San Paolo fuori le mura, a device investing Charles with a salvific seal of the Lord
and protecting the Carolingian king from all evil forces. Moreover, it is well known
that the figurative imagery of this codex is suffused with visual similes between
Charles the Bald and King Solomon, which corresponds to a number of similes
between the two rulers in texts related to the contemporary West Frankish court.15
By investing the West Frankish king with a protective seal invoking his Lord, Jesus
Christ, the producer provided yet another parallel between Charles and the exemplary
Old Testament king, who was believed to have possessed a protective seal of God.
Another peculiar graphic device hiding a possible invocational message was
drawn in the Sacramentary of St Maurice of Tours, produced in the abbey of

Fig. 9.2. Two paired monograms on the ‘Beautiful Doors’ in Hagia Sophia, Istanbul:
a) Χριστὲ βοήθει; b) Μιχαὴλ δεσπότῃ. Photo by Joe Glynias.

14 Swift, ‘The Bronze Doors’; Mango, ‘When Was Michael’, 253–4; and Haldon and Brubaker,
Byzantium, pp. 435–7.
15 Staubach, Rex christianus.
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Cruciform Devices in the Carolingian World 291

Fig. 9.3. Te igitur in Paris, BnF, Ms. Nouv. Acq. lat. 1589, fol. 10r.

St Martin of Tours in the last quarter of the ninth century.16 It appears to the left
of the Te igitur initial visualizing the prayer of the celebrant accompanying the litur-
gical transformation of the eucharist into the body of Jesus Christ (Fig. 9.3).
Another near-contemporary sacramentary produced in the same abbey displays this
liturgical moment, with a priest standing in front of a host and chalice praying with
raised hands to the tau cross of Crucifixion, symbolized by the initial T.17 In con-
trast to this figural composition, the former Te igitur page displays a cruciform
monogram with a lozenge at its middle. This graphic device is surrounded by a
textual invocation, probably on behalf of the manuscript’s recipient, written with
Greek and Latin letters in a clockwise movement: ΛΩΝΓΩΒΑΡΔΟΣ ΧΡΙ
ΣΑΚΗΡΔΩΣ VIVAT IN XPO (‘May Longobardos, priest of Christ, live in
Christ!’). The complicated monogram encodes another phrase including the name
Zacharias, probably referring to the monastic producer of this image.

16 Paris, BnF, Ms. Nouv. Acq. lat. 1589, fol. 10r; Katalog, no. 5093.
17 Tours, BM, Ms. 184, fol. 3r.
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292 Graphic Signs of Authority

The same desire to place monogrammatic forms within liturgical settings and,
thus, to address divine agents can be observed in a monogrammatic set added at
the end of Bede’s commentaries on Samuel, a manuscript produced at the abbey
of Corbie in the mid-ninth century.18 These graphic devices are reminiscent of
eight-armed monograms in the De inventione litterarum, and similarly to the
latter work, some of them feature lozenge or the letter A at the middle (Fig. 9.4).
The seven monograms from Corbie encode the following phrase: 1. Sancte Michahel,
2. archangele, 3. defende nos, 4. in praelio, 5. ut non perreamus, 6. in tremendo, 7. iudicio
(‘Saint Michael Archangel, defend us in battle that we might not perish at the
dreadful judgement’). The same phrase is written at the middle of the page, divid-
ing the first three monograms from the other four and finishing with a liturgical
acclamation, alleluia. This text represents an alleluia verse for St Michael’s mass
listed in Frankish sacramentaries on 29 September. Charlemagne promoted the
Lombard cult of St Michael the Archangel at Monte Gargano as a patron saint of
the Roman empire (or imperium Christianum), and by the ninth century the cult
of St Michael was flourishing in the Carolingian world.19
This monogrammatic set does not encode the personal name of its producer,
nor does it conceal a text to be deciphered. The fact that the textual content of
these monograms was spelled out on the same page in a manner reminiscent of the
dedication page in the Calendar of 354 suggests that these graphic devices did not
fulfil an ostensibly textual function. Rather, they enshrined a liturgical invocation
within a graphic form that invited repetitive visual contemplation, and that may
have been perceived as more efficacious in reaching out to the powerful saint. All
in all, they provide yet further, suggestive examples of the importance of liturgical
settings for the development of Carolingian graphicacy.

9.2. T H E S I G N O F T H E C RO S S I N M A N U S C R I P T
A N D M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E

Our understanding of these ninth-century cruciform invocations would be incom-

plete without setting this new graphic development within the broader context of
Carolingian culture—a world in which the sign of the cross enjoyed paramount
importance. Embodied in material liturgical objects such as portable processional
and benedictional crosses, this sign ultimately referred to its prototype, the Cross
of Golgotha, and the related theology of Crucifixion and Salvation; the sign’s tran-
scendent power was thus derived from its wholly unique prototype.20 In this sense,
the deployment of the sign of the cross in the Carolingian world was not radically
different from its use in the late antique Latin West. What was clearly new though
was the much wider scope for the veneration of the cross, and the ubiquitous

18 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 12272, fol. 104v (Ganz, Corbie, pp. 57 and 151; cf. Katalog, no. 4806).
19 Arnold, The Footprints, pp. 93–135; Callahan, ‘The Cult’, p. 182.
20 On the materiality and instrumentality of the sign of the cross, as well as a detailed discussion
of relevant material objects and the pictorial imagery of this sign in the Carolingian period, see
Kitzinger, Cross.
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Cruciform Devices in the Carolingian World 293

Fig. 9.4. Cruciform liturgical monograms from Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 12272, fol. 104v.
Graphic drawing.

­ resence of its sign across different media, accompanied by a drastic decrease in the
p
symbolic use of late antique christograms.
As evidenced by the Frankish Gelasian sacramentaries, two liturgical feasts dedi-
cated to the Cross were celebrated in the early Carolingian realm, namely those of
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294 Graphic Signs of Authority

the Invention of the Cross (3 May) and the Exaltation of the Cross (September 14).21
The latter feast was probably introduced into papal Rome by the mid-seventh cen-
tury, and was transmitted north of the Alps thereafter.22 The Adoration of the
Cross also developed into a significant element of the Good Friday liturgy.23 This
expanding veneration of the cross thus reinforced existing liturgical practices as
well as related theological tenets, and extant written evidence demonstrates that
Carolingian clerical and lay intellectuals supported this liturgical veneration almost
unanimously.24
Manuscript pages provide arguably the best evidence for the unique role that the
sign of the cross fulfilled in Carolingian visual culture. First of all, in the early
Carolingian period, this graphic sign, frequently accompanied by suspended alpha
and omega, could embellish the beginning of a codex or its major sections, which
reminds us of similar, albeit more modest, practices in late antique manuscript
culture. The cross thus ‘sealed’, as it were, the entrance to the sacred space of a
religious book in the same manner as it delineated the sacred space of contempor-
ary churches.25 Furthermore, similar to late antique practices, this sign could also
be employed on book covers, such as the ‘earlier’ back cover of the Lindau Gospels,
crafted in the late eighth century.26 Yet unlike late antique and Insular samples,
cross pages in Continental Latin manuscripts produced in the eighth and the first
half of the ninth centuries were not predominantly confined to gospel-books, but
appeared in a diverse range of books, including sacramentaries, homiliaries, bib-
lical commentaries, monastic rules, and even Christian histories.27 As suggested by
Bernhard Bischoff, this graphic form of book design, which had become especially
popular in the early Carolingian period, gradually lost its appeal and, it seems,
figural images of the crucified Christ increasingly substituted for it from the mid-
ninth century onwards,28—a development visibly marking the end of iconoclastic
controversies in the early Middle Ages. The latter image also appears on the ‘later’

21 See e.g. Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 127–8, and 189–90.
22 For more details, see van Tongeren, Exaltation. Cf. Ó Carragáin, ‘Interactions between Liturgy’,
pp. 184–8.
23 For further details, see Chazelle, The Crucified God, pp. 30 and 139–40; and van Tongeren, ‘Imagining
the Cross’.
24 Noble, Images, pp. 336–7. The only known exception is the decision by Bishop Claudius of
Turin soon after 817 to remove crosses from the churches in his diocese in order to avoid excessive
public reverence to them. This decision immediately sparked outcry on the part of many Frankish
bishops and intellectuals (Noble, Images, pp. 288–312; and Chazelle, The Crucified God, pp. 120–5).
25 For more details, see Kitzinger, Cross, pp. 69–73.
26 Elbern, ‘The “Earlier” Lindau Book Cover’; and Ganz, ‘The Cross’, pp. 258–62.
27 A gospel-book: Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 11959, fol. 20v (near Paris, s. IX1, Katalog, no. 4717); a Gelasian
sacramentary: Vatican City, BAV, Reg. lat. 316, fols 3v, 131v, 132v, 172v, 173r (near Paris, c.750, CLA,
I.105); Alanus of Farfa’s homiliary: Heidelberg, UB, Cod. Sal. X.12a, fol. 1v (northern Italy, c.800,
CLA, 8.1119; Katalog, no. 1519); a collection of canons: Vatican City, BAV, Pal. lat. 574, fol. 2v
(upper Rhine area, s. VIII–IX, Katalog, no. 6534); Augustine’s commentaries: Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 12168,
fol. Cv (northern France, s. VIII, med., CLA, 5.630); the Rule of St Benedict: Munich, BSB, Clm.
19408, fol. 2r (southern Bavaria, s. VIII, ex., CLA, 9.1322); Orosius’ history: Laon, BM, Ms. 137, fol.
1v (probably Laon, s. VIII med., CLA, 6.765).
28 Bischoff, ‘Kreuz’.
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Cruciform Devices in the Carolingian World 295

front cover of the Lindau Gospels, produced in the kingdom of Charles the Bald.29
The two covers of this gospel-book thus epitomized this transition in a material form.
In most cases, book miniatures with a standing Latin cross occupy the entire page.
Such a cross is usually embellished with medallions displaying figurative images—
for example, the Lamb of God and the personifications of the four evangelists—or
with exquisite ornament and jewels, or both. Such a decorative cross could also be
accompanied by apotropaic, invocational, or acclamatory phrases and epithets
positioned between their arms, such as rex (King), lex (Law), lux (Light), and pax
(Peace)—the four words that end with the first letter of Christ’s name and acclaim
the divine attributes of the Lord (Fig. 9.5).30 Furthermore, such richly decorated
crosses were reminiscent of contemporaneous portable crucifixes, and were often
framed by a structure that symbolized an altar baldachin or, more generally, a reli-
gious fastigium.31 Such depictions of the cross sign were not limited to manuscript
culture, but also appear in material media related to ecclesiastical spaces, carved on
stone surfaces and painted in frescoes.32
These visual features underscored the unique role of those decorated crosses in
the eyes of their beholders: in clerical eyes, they were capable of demarcating
Christological space—a symbolic zone recreated during the liturgy of mass and
connected to the sacred past, the liturgical present, and the apocalyptic future.33 In
the eyes of noble laymen, such decorated crosses probably preserved their original
apotropaic qualities and their connection with triumphant power, as encapsulated
by the phrase inscribed by the sides of the decorated cross at the beginning of the
Antiphonary of León—produced in the first half of the tenth century and marked
with the personal monograms of kings of León slightly later34—as well as in later
copies of the Illustrated Beatus.35 The phrase imitated, almost verbatim, the phrase
that was inscribed on the Angel’s Cross from the cathedrals of Oviedo, commis-
sioned by King Alfonso II of Asturias in 808: hoc signo tuetur pius, hoc signo vincitur
inimicus (‘by this sign the pious is protected, by this sign the enemy is defeated’).36
The latter wording was clearly inspired by Eusebius of Caesarea’s famous reference
to the divine sign revealed to Constantine I before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge
and became a popular motto in Christian Spain in the following centuries.
In continuation of the late antique manuscript tradition, the sign of the cross in
Carolingian manuscripts could not only demarcate, but also, quite literally, structure

29 Ganz, Buch-Gewänder, pp. 131–48.

30 Heidelberg, UB, Cod. Sal. X.12a, fol. 1v. For further examples and detailed discussion, see
Bischoff, ‘Kreuz’, pp. 284–6, 291–7, and 301–3.
31 For more details on this visual motif in the early Middle Ages, see Garipzanov, ‘Fastigium’.
32 e.g. on the so-called Priesterstein in Mainz, Bischöfliches Dom- und Diözesansmuseum, inv. no.
PS00164, produced c.850, and in a fresco in the Church of San Julien de los Prados in Oviedo dated
to 791–842.
33 As e.g. in the tenth-century Spanish manuscripts of Beatus of Liébana’s commentaries; see New
York, ML, Ms. M. 644, fol. 219r (probably Tábara, c.940–5; Williams, The Illustrated Beatus, vol. 2,
pp. 21–33, fig. 100).
34 León, Archivio Cathedralico, Ms. 8, fol. 5v; De Luca, ‘Royal Misattribution’.
35 Valladolid, Biblioteca de la Universidad, Ms. 433, fol. 1v (Kingdom of León, 970, Williams, The
Illustrated Beatus, vol. 2, pp. 38–42, fig. 151).
36 Schlunk, Las cruces; Kitzinger, Cross, pp. 90–2.
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296 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 9.5. Cross page in Heidelberg, UB, Cod. Sal. X.12a, fol. 1v.

textual space—as, for example, in a mid-eighth-century manuscript containing

Orosius’ Histories, in which the lines of a dedicatory poem to Augustine of Hippo
form a Latin cross.37 The cross-shaped texts thus became para-signs, providing a
wider conceptual framework of reference to written words; in the Bible of Theodulf,
for example, an introductory text explaining the nature of the Old and New
Testaments (Isidore, Etymologiae, 4.1) is written in golden ink on a purple page in

37 Laon, BM, Ms. 137, fol. 4v.

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Cruciform Devices in the Carolingian World 297

the form of a cross. Similarly, the final explicit at the end of the manuscript is
arranged inside a medallion to create the same cruciform structure.38 The choice of
this graphic form and the absence of any figural image in the Bible produced for
the powerful bishop of Orléans was in no way accidental. In a similar manner, he
employed the sign of the cross as well as the lozenge as the main structural prin-
ciple in the graphic design of his carmen figuratum addressed to Charlemagne.39
After all, Theodulf stated in the 790s, in the so-called Libri Carolini, that the cross
sign was superior to any figural image, because this sign invoked the great mystery
embodied by its holy prototype, because it functioned as a triumphant weapon
against the Devil or any other adversary, and because it had become the badge of
authority (insigne) for the Carolingian ruler (nostri imperatoris), Charlemagne.40
In a similar demarcating function, smaller Latin crosses with suspended alpha
and omega occasionally appeared before some incipits,41 above canon tables, and
on the top of, or inside, decorated frames enclosing text in Carolingian liturgical
manuscripts;42 this practice became especially widespread in the ninth century
with a decreasing use of full-page cross pages. In some luxurious gospel-books and
Bibles produced in the ninth-century royal abbey of St Martin of Tours, monastic
masters also replaced or complemented such small Latin crosses with a peculiar
cruciform monogram of Jesus Christ. The latter graphic device was doubtless cre-
ated in imitation of contemporary cruciform monograms and incorporated the
letters of the corresponding nomina sacra, IHS XPS (Fig. 9.6a).43 Furthermore, the
letter chi was placed at the middle of this graphic device, thus incorporating an
eight-armed radiating cross within its structure. This innovative deployment of the
monogrammatic nomina sacra of Jesus Christ once again exemplified the popular-
ity of cruciform monograms in concurrent scribal culture, and emphasized the
intrinsic connection between the sign of the cross and more direct references to the
heavenly King in contemporary visual culture. Indeed, commenting on Psalm 4.7
around the same time, the monastic intellectual Walafrid Strabo (c.809–49) made

38 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 9380, fols 3r and 347r (Orleans or Fleury, s. IX, in., CLA, 5.576; Katalog, no.
4572). A similar use of cross-shaped frames for religious texts can be found in contemporary manu-
scripts from Coptic Egypt; see New York, ML, Ms. M. 566, fol. 41r (Egypt, 822/3–913/4). See also
an earlier example of a cross-shaped colophon in a seventh-century Syriac gospel-book from
Wolfenbüttel (HAB, Cod. Guelf. 3.1.3.300 Aug. 2˚, fol. 284v) and its discussion in Kitzinger, Cross,
pp. 327–8. For further examples, see Bischoff, ‘Kreuz’, p. 299.
39 Theodulfi carmina, XXIII, ed. Dümmler, pp. 480–2. See also Ernst, Carmen figuratum, pp 188–97;
Chazelle, The Crucified God, p. 21. The poem’s graphic structure imitated one of Alcuin’s carmina figurata
written slightly earlier.
40 Opus Caroli regis, 2.28, ed. Freeman and Meyvaert, pp. 296–300. For more details, see Freeman,
‘Scripture’, p. 194. See also Chazelle, The Crucified God, pp. 39–52; and Noble, Images, pp. 162–215.
41 e.g. Chartres, BM, Ms. 40, fol. 57r (France, s. VIII med., CLA, 6.745); Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 17227,
fol. 6v (Tours, s. IX, ⅓, Katalog, no. 4998; cf. KM, vol. 1.1, p. 369: 796–804); Vienna, ÖNB, Cod.
449, fol. 1r (Cologne, c.870–89, Katalog, no. 7121).
42 e.g. Abbeville, BM, Ms. 4, fol. 102r; London, BL, Harley Ms. 2788, fols 6v–11v, 12v, 72r, 162r
(Court School of Charlemagne, s. IX, ¼, CLA, 2.198; Katalog, no. 2456); St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang.
75, pp. 694 (Tours, 796–804, CLA, 7.904; Katalog, no. 5547); Autun, BM, Ms. lat. 19 bis, fol. 2r
(Tours, 844/5, Katalog, no. 156).
43 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 17227, fols 68r and 110r; London, BL, Add. Ms. 10546, fols 7r, 285r, 370r,
431r, and 441v (c.830–40, Katalog, no. 2360).
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298 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 9.6. Graphic devices in Carolingian manuscripts: a) IHS XPS monogram from Tours
manuscripts; b) IOHANNIS monogram from Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 266, fol. 172r; c) cruci-
form device from Leiden, Universitetsbibliotheek, VLO.41, fol. 19v; d) crosses from
Munich, BSB, Clm. 6270a, fol. 154r.

the same point in plain words: ‘The cross is stamped upon us, as the sign of our
King; it [the cross] is the light of His appearance since God shines in a such special
way’ (Crux nobis impressa est, in signum regis nostri, quae est lumen vultus: quia in talibus
radiat Deus).44
As exemplified by the Gospels of Lothar created for this Carolingian ruler
c.849–51, the monastic masters in Tours could employ other visual strategies to
highlight the significance of the IHS XPS monogrammatic device, namely through
the use of golden ink, through its placement within a purple medallion, or through
the addition of suspended alpha and omega.45 The cruciform monogram of Jesus
Christ in this manuscript functions almost like the diplomatic seal of the Divine
Lord confirming the sacred nature of Gospels as the living Word of God. The first
page of the Gospel of John is especially instructive in this regard. In addition to the
full page initial I, this page is stamped, as it were, with four golden seals (fol. 172r).
The top one displays the cruciform monogram of the Gospel’s author (IOHANNIS),
with a typically Carolingian lozenge O at the middle (Fig. 9.6b), but different
from the cruciform monogram of this apostle in the De inventione litterarum. The
sign at the middle of the page shows an eight-arm star (thus visualizing one of the
Lord’s epithets, lux), whereas the two lower seals feature a chi-rho and the cruci-
form monogram of IHS XPS. The latter seals are located under the last line of
John, 1.1—et deus erat verbum—and may also be seen as a visual commentary on
God being Word.
This IHS XPS monogram appears in the margins of a gospel-book produced
somewhere in Brittany c.800, where it is included in a peculiar list of Christian
graphic devices such as a chi-rho and a cruciform monogram, which probably
encoded the name Emmanuhel (meaning ‘God with us’).46 Yet these marginal
notes were probably added later in that century, since similar forms of the cruci-
form monogrammatic nomina sacra of Jesus Christ were also drawn in two manu-
scripts (containing a gospel-book and the grammatical work of Priscian) produced

44 Commentary in Psalms, 4. 7, col. 849D.

45 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 266, fols 14v, 15r, 71r (Katalog, no. 3980).
46 Paris, BnF, Ms. Nouv. Acq. lat. 1587, fol. 47r (Katalog, no. 5092).
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Cruciform Devices in the Carolingian World 299

in that region in the late ninth century or slightly later.47 So, in all likelihood, the
IHS XPS graphic device was created by clerical masters in St Martin of Tours
around the turn or in the first third of the ninth century, which is unsurprising
considering its list of abbots in those decades. This list featured the probable
inventor of Charlemagne’s monogram, Hitherius (775–91), Charlemagne’s closest
advisor, Alcuin (796–804), and an Anglo-Saxon student of Alcuin, Fridugis (807–34);
the latter was also the archchancellor of Louis the Pious from 819 to 832.48 The
Jesus Christ’s cruciform monogram was invented during the abbacy of one of the
two latter abbots, most likely independently from the monogrammatic tradition of
the De inventione litterarum. But the sign’s overall design was similarly inspired by
the popularity and preeminence of the cross sign and cruciform monograms in
coeval scribal culture, and at the Carolingian court in particular.
Similar to sixth- and seventh-century scribal practices, more schematic cross
symbols (so-called Greek crosses with equal arms) appeared elsewhere in Western
European manuscripts after the mid-eighth century. They could mark incipits
and explicits,49 or could function as the central element of a decorated initial.50
Used as symbols, such crosses could be combined with other symbolic elements,
as, for instance, in a late ninth-century manuscript containing Eutiches’ Ars de
verbo, written in north-eastern France. A distinctive cross symbol introduces the
incipit of the second book of this text: the graphic device features four small
crosses at the ends of its arms and a central lozenge borrowed from contemporary
Carolingian diplomatic monograms (Fig. 9.6c).51 A manuscript containing Jerome’s
Expositio in Isaia, produced in Freising in the second quarter of the ninth century,
displays in its colophon another creative amalgam of cross signs with relevant
graphic elements: beneath the final explicit line the word Amen appears in Greek
along with an alpha and omega, both symbolic letters surmounted by cross signs
(Fig. 9.6d).52
The multifaceted presence of the sign of the cross in Carolingian manuscript cul-
ture was accompanied by a noticeable decrease in a similar symbolic use of chi-rhos,
tau-rhos, and iota-chis. Staurograms or monogrammatic crosses, so fashionable in
late antiquity, were increasingly replaced by decorative crosses or crosses with sus-
pended apocalyptic letters. As for the chi-rho and iota-chi, with a few exceptions,53

47 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 258, fol. 8v (s. IX, 3∕3, Katalog, no. 3972); Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 10290, fols 3r,
10v, 40v, 195r, 196v, 197v, and 198r (s. IX, 4∕4, Katalog, no. 4623).
48 KM, vol. 1.1, pp. 15–21.
49 For incipits, see e.g. Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 67 Weiss., fol. 1v (around Weissenburg, s.
IX1, Katalog, no. 7413), Leiden, Universitetsbibliotheek, VLF 26, fol. 1r (Amiens, s. IX, ⅓, Katalog,
no. 2188). For explicits, see e.g. Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Aug. Perg. 229, fol. 140v
(around Chieti, c.821, Katalog, no. 1719).
50 Munich, BSB, Clm. 14300, fols 1v, 40r, and 69r (Salzburg, s. VIII–IX, Katalog, no. 3150); Paris,
BnF, Ms. lat. 12048, fols 76v (Meaux, s. VIII, ex., CLA, 5.618); Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 81.17
Aug. 2°, fol. 30r (probably St Bertin, s. IX1, Katalog, no. 7287).
51 Leiden, Universitetsbibliotheek, VLO 41, fol. 19v (Katalog, no. 2248).
52 Munich, BSB, Clm. 6270a, fol. 154r (Bischoff, Die südostdeutschen Schreibschulen, vol. 1, p. 105;
Katalog, no. 3020).
53 For the symbolic use of the iota-chi, see e.g. Oxford, Merton College, Ms. 315, fol. 125v
(Alemannia, s. IX, 2∕4, Katalog, no. 3875). For the symbolic use of the chi-rho, see e.g. Paris, BnF,
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300 Graphic Signs of Authority

these signs mostly functioned as scribal or critical signs relegated to the margins of
codices. Such technical usage resulted from a burgeoning interest in classical and
late antique technical signs in Carolingian manuscript culture, exemplified by their
use in textual criticism and by the numerous copies of various treatises describing
these signs and their meanings. Such tracts were produced from the second half
of the eighth century onwards—for example, within relevant sections of Isidore
of Seville’s Etymologiae and the introductory list of such signs in Cassiodorus’
Commentaries in Psalms (Fig. 9.7).54 According to the latter list, a chrismon/chresimon
(identical in its visual form with the chi-rho) marked very important dogmas (in
dogmatis valde necessariis); a frontis, which was occasionally drawn like a tau-rho,
flagged definitions (in definitionibus); and a sign reminiscent of an iota-chi was

Fig. 9.7. Technical signs in Schaffhausen, Stadtbibliothek, Ms. 78, fol. 1v.

Ms. lat. 12048, fol. 1v (Cambrai or Meaux, the 790s, CLA, 5.618; Katalog, no. 4725a); Nancy,
Cathedral Treasury, St Gauzelin Gospels, fol. 2v (Tours, c.835, Katalog, no. 3571, KM, 1.1, pp. 179–86).
For the symbolic use of the tau-rho, see London, BL, Cotton Ms. Caligula A XV, fol. 37r (northern
France, s. IX2, Katalog, no. 2417).
54 For a detailed discussion, see Steinova, Notam, pp. 121–51; and Steinova, ‘Psalmos’.
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Cruciform Devices in the Carolingian World 301

supposed to identify astronomical passages (in astronomia).55 Yet the meaning of

these scribal marks in contemporary scribal culture was not static: for example,
Carolingian scribes could also employ the chrismon in its original classical function,
namely as an attention mark in literary texts.56
In the Carolingian period, the symbolic usage of cross signs was not limited to
religious manuscripts but can also be observed in various diagrams drawn inside
works of an encyclopaedic nature, such as Isidore’s Etymologiae and De natura
rerum, Boethius’ De institutione arithmetica, or Cassiodorus’ Institutiones. Whereas
the earth’s division into three continents (Europe, Asia, and Africa) was presented
to a contemplative eye in the form of a tau-cross (Fig. 9.8),57 the equal-armed cross
was imprinted into the structure of various cosmological, computistical, and wind

Fig. 9.8. T–O map in Munich, BSB, Clm. 6250, fol. 208r.

55 See e.g. Schaffhausen, Stadtbibliothek, Ms. 78, fol. 1v (St Gall, s. VIII–IX, CLA, 7.1002);
Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 4 Weiss, fol. 1v (Weissenburg, s. IX, ¼, Katalog, no. 7367). On
Cassiodorus’ graphic symbols, see Steinova, Notam, pp. 49–50 and 326.
56 See e.g. a scribal comment on such a technical usage of the chrismon in a psalter copied in
Milan: ‘Hec quidem ex voluntate scriptoris ad aliquid notandum ponitur’, Munich, BSB, Clm. 343,
fol. 6v (s. IX, 3∕4, Katalog, no. 2925). For more details, see Steinova, Notam, pp. 212–13 and 312.
57 See e.g. Munich, BSB, Clm. 6250, fol. 208r (Freising, c.810–20, Katalog, no. 3006); Bamberg,
Staatsbibliothek, Msc.Nat. 1, fol. 43v (eastern France, s. IX, ⅓); London, BL, Harley Ms. 2686, fol.
145r (probably western France, s. IX, 2∕4, Katalog, no. 2447); Verdun, BM, Ms. 26, fol. 69r (perhaps
Burgundy, s. IX, c.2∕4, Katalog, no. 7022); Reims, BM, Ms. 425, fol. 137v (Reims, s. IX, med., Katalog, no.
5295); Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 7583, fol. 136r (northern France, s. IX, med., Katalog, no. 4484); Munich,
BSB, Clm. 396, fols 16r, 34r (Brittany or Wales, s. IX, ex., Katalog, no. 2927). For more details and
references on this symbolic design, see Dalché, ‘L’héritage’, pp. 54–66; Carruthers, The Craft, p. 210.
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302 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 9.9. Denier of Louis the Pious (Dorestad, 822–40). Oslo University, Museum of Cultural
History.

rotae, as well as diagrams of other forms.58 The sign of the cross with or without an
alpha and omega could also be drawn inside the central medallion of such diagrams,59
or manifested in a central location by cross-shaped words important for diagram-
matic design.60
The ubiquitous presence of cross signs in Carolingian manuscripts circulating
among clergy and lay nobility corresponded to the public visibility of the sign of
the cross to laity of lower status on royal coinage after the monetary reform of
792/3. Charlemagne’s post-reform coins were sealed, so to speak, by the cruciform
monogram of the earthly king on one side, and the sign of the heavenly King on
the other. These numismatic features visualized to the coins’ users, by graphic
means, the transcendent source of royal authority. In keeping with the words of
Theodulf written in these years, the cross sign was thus displayed almost as a royal
insignia,61 comparable to the triumphant chi-rho of the Constantinian dynasty.
After this reform, the cross sign functioned as a permanent coin type on ninth-
century Carolingian coinage, accompanied by smaller crosses in numismatic legends
(Fig. 9.9). Moreover, the same sign became the main form of ornamentation on
Carolingian dress accessories, such as ninth-century copper-alloy cross-enamel and
cross-shaped brooches. These mass-produced material objects must have become a
popular everyday female dress accessory, since they have been found across a broad

58 See e.g. Laon, BM, Ms. 423, fols 5v, 6v, 7r, 8r, 12r, 43v (Laon, s. VIII, CLA, 6.766); Bamberg,
Staatsbibliothek, Msc.Patr. 61, fol. 87r; Munich, BSB, Clm. 14300, fols 5v, 8r, 18v (Salzburg, s. VIII–IX,
CLA, 9.1294; Katalog, no. 3150); Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Msc.Class. 5, fol. 28r (Tours, c.845,
Katalog, no. 204); Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Aug. Perg. 229, fol. 175r. On Carolingian
diagrams and their design, see Obrist, ‘Wind Diagrams’; Obrist, La cosmologie; Kühnel, The End; Kühnel,
‘Carolingian Diagrams’; and Eastwood, Ordering the Heavens.
59 Cambrai, BM, Ms. 937, fol. 53v (France, s. VIII, ex., CLA, 6.744; Katalog, no. 809a); Karlsruhe,
Badische Landesbibliothek, Aug. Perg. 241, fol. 9r (perhaps northern Italy, s. IX, 3∕3, Katalog, no. 1727).
60 Munich, BSB, Clm. 210, fols 132r–v (Salzburg, c.818, Katalog, no. 2923); Vienna, ÖNB, Cod.
387, fol. 134r (Salzburg, c.818; Katalog, no. 7114).
61 ‘Hoc est signum nostri imperatoris . . . , quod ad proelium nostrae sequuntur cohortes’, Opus
Caroli regis, 2.28, ed. Freeman and Meyvaert, p. 296.
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Cruciform Devices in the Carolingian World 303

swathe of north-western Europe.62 Furthermore, by this time, the sign of the cross
had also become a default form of signum manus (signature) for predominantly male
witnesses in contemporary private charters.63 In these contexts, the cross sign might
still have been viewed as a promise of salvation, but, more importantly, it functioned
as a sign of salient religious identity for men and women of all walks of life. In short,
this primordial Christian symbol of divine authority was not limited to ecclesiastical
spaces, but left a powerful imprint on other public venues of social interaction.

9.3. H R A B A N U S M AU RU S ’ I N H O N O R E M S A N C TA E
C R U C I S : T H E S I G N O F T H E C RO S S A S T H E M A I N
O RG A N I Z I N G P R I N C I P L E O F C A RO L I N G I A N
GRAPHICACY

Considering the supreme importance of the sign of the cross in Carolingian culture,
it is unsurprising that this symbol functioned as the primary blueprint for different
forms of Carolingian graphicacy. As mentioned above, it underpinned the design
of Carolingian diagrams and T–O maps. Furthermore, it became the main organizing
principle for another form of early graphicacy revived at Charlemagne’s royal court
in the late eighth century, namely versus intexti (visual poetry).64 Sometime between
the late 780s and 800, the Anglo-Saxon intellectual Alcuin presented Charlemagne
with six visual poems that he had composed with his pupil, Joseph the Scot, inspired
by the example set by Porfyrius who had sent his carmina figurata to Emperor
Constantine almost five centuries earlier.65 Yet unlike Porfyrius with his particular
emphasis on the chi-rho, the two Carolingian-era poets followed the footsteps of
early medieval Christian authors such as Venantius Fortunatus and Boniface by
making the cross sign a major structural principle in the visual layout of their
collection, complemented by the lozenge in some visual poems. The symbolic
importance of the cross sign was further highlighted by the fact that the first poem
by Alcuin and the final one by Joseph were dedicated to that symbol’s ultimate
prototype, the Holy Cross.
These poems can be read against the broader backdrop of the use of the sign of
the cross in Carolingian visual culture. For example, Alcuin’s poem starts with the
phrase crux, decus es mundi (‘cross, you are the ornament/glory of the world’),66
which finds a visual parallel in the occasional embellishment of the central medal-
lion of Carolingian cosmological rotae with the cross sign or the cruciform graphic

62 For more details and references, see Pedersen, ‘Late Viking and Early Medieval Ornaments’,
pp. 204–5.
63 For further details and references, see Garipzanov, Symbolic Language, pp. 180–1 and 216.
64 For a detailed discussion of Carolingian visual poetry and relevant bibliography, see Ernst,
Carmen figuratum, pp. 168–387.
65 The Insular origins of Alcuin and Joseph hint at the importance of the earlier Insular tradition
of versus intexti as influential sources of inspiration too.
66 Alcuini carmina, VI, ed. Dümmler, pp. 224–5.
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304 Graphic Signs of Authority

device created by the criss-crossing words mundus and cosmos.67 Furthermore,

Joseph’s final visual poem displays the three crosses of Golgotha inside a Christian
basilica, with the text encoded by the crosses exemplifying the connection of these
signs to the sacred past, liturgical present, and apocalyptic future (Fig. 9.10). The two
smaller crosses symbolized the two choices that confronted everybody in the early
medieval West. These choices were epitomized by the contrasting fates of the two
robbers crucified alongside Jesus (Luke, 23, 33–43), one accepting Him as the
Lord and taken to heaven, and the other scornfully rejecting Him and therefore
subjected to eternal damnation: on the left side, crux vita salus credentis (‘the cross
is life [and] salvation to a believer’); and on the right side, crux mors poena negantis
(‘the cross is death [and] punishment to a disbeliever’). A much higher cross at the
middle, visualizing the Cross of Jesus, enshrined the text that emphasized the
intrinsic connection of any cross sign with the prototype, as well as its salvific power:
sancta crucis semper salvet inscriptio corda (‘the inscribing of the cross always saves
the pious hearts’).68 Through graphicacy, Joseph thus masterfully presented a reen-
actment of sacred history within the ecclesiastical space of the liturgical present, a
reenactment promising salvation at the time of the Second Coming of the Lord.
The visual poems of Alcuin and Joseph commenced a series of other Carolingian
versus intexti and acrostic poems, and the sign of the cross structured most of them.
One such acrostic poem appears in a manuscript with Gregory’s Regula pastoralis,
produced somewhere in north-eastern France in the first half of the ninth century
(Fig. 9.11).69 It is written after the list of chapters, which is preceded by two full-
page images of the cross framed by liturgical phrases used for the veneration of the
Cross.70 The anonymous poem looks deceptively simple compared to the carmina
figurata. Yet to a discerning eye, it will unfold as a complex poetic diagram: it
encodes layers of conceptual information that can only be understood by analysing
the spatial positions of different poetic lines, and by decoding the hidden text
encrypted by letters at the ends of poetic lines, letters that are four times as large as
the other phonetic characters in this poetic cypher.
The four lines creating its outer frame refer symbolically to the four sides of the
world:
On the top: Dispicit omnipotens culmen surgentis Eoi.
On the left side: Dat deus Arcturo ut vehemens stet nec ruat umquam.
On the bottom: Mirificas plantas felix colit Hesperus agni.
On the right side: Invisum servans dominus centrum rotat austri.
The Almighty looks down at the summit of the rising Eous.
God makes the vehement Arcturus stay still and not ever fall down.
The happy Hesperus takes care of the marvellous sprouts for the Lamb.
The watchful Lord rotates the invisible centre of Auster.

67 London, BL, Harley Ms. 3017, fol. 128v (France, s. IX, ¾, Katalog, no. 2466); Rouen, BM, Ms.
524, fol. 75r (probably Normandy, after 814, Katalog, no. 5377).
68 Iosephi Scotti carmina, VI, ed. Dümmler, pp. 158–9; Ernst, Carmen figuratum, pp. 186–7.
69 Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 12262, fol. 3r (Katalog, no. 4802).
70 For details and references on these features of the manuscript, see Kitzinger, Cross, pp. 79–82.
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Cruciform Devices in the Carolingian World 305

Fig. 9.10. Carmen figuratum of Joseph the Scot, from Iosephi Scotti carmina, VI, ed. Dümmler,
p. 159.
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306 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 9.11. Acrostic poem from Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 12262, fol. 3r. Graphic drawing.

The morning star Eous and the evening star Hesperus are metonymies for the east
and the west respectively. The brightest star of the northern hemisphere, Arcturus,
refers symbolically to the north, whereas the southern wind Auster is a metaphor
for the south. All four sides of the world thus bear witness to God. Furthermore,
symbolic references to each side correspond exactly to their location on early medi-
eval mappa mundi and diagrammatic representations of the world with the east
located on the top, the west on the bottom, the south on the right side, and the
north on the left.71 The four poetic lines therefore delineate not only the field of
the poem but also the diagrammatic representation of the world with an eight-
armed cross at its middle, which became a widespread organizing principle for
monograms in the first half of the ninth century.
The final four poetic lines creating this inner graphic device indicate that the
educated viewer could have seen this graphic device as a combination of the cross
sign and the letter chi referring to Christ, similar to the design of the IHS XPS

71 For more details and references, see Garipzanov, ‘The Rise of Graphicacy’, pp. 12–16.
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Cruciform Devices in the Carolingian World 307

monogram. The horizontal and vertical arms of the cross directly invoke Christ
and provide poetic references to its sacred prototype, its intrinsic connection to the
Holy Trinity, and the theology of Crucifixion.
From the left to the right: Heri dant panem palmae, magnis pueris lac.
From the top to the bottom: Lignum, Christe, crucis veneratur machina triplex.
The lords provided the bread to the palm (i.e. victory), milk to a great number of
servants.
O Christ, the ‘Triple Device’ [i.e. Trinity] is venerated in the wood of the Cross.
The two diagonal lines of the letter chi then name the four evangelists praising the
deeds of Jesus Christ, as if they were singers in a church choir.
From the upper left corner: Dicunt Mattheus et Marcus magnalia Christi
From the lower left corner: Mystica, concordant Lucae, resonantque Iohanni.
Matthew and Mark tell the sacred feats of Christ,
In unison with Luke and in resonance with John.
The entire graphic structure visualizes the words of St Paul well known in the
Carolingian world (Galatians, 6.14) and later incorporated into liturgical hymns,
‘The world has been crucified to me through him, and I have been crucified to the
world’ (per quem mihi mundus crucifixus est et ego mundo).72 In addition to the above
interplay between graphic forms and poetic lines, the larger letters, also highlighted
with bright colours, provide a third layer of meaning. Their decoding first follows
the lines of the cross and thereafter of the chi, and they present the phrase hec lex
Dei mei (‘here is the law of my God’). The phrase could be seen as summarizing
this poetic representation of the world and its sacred history in a diagrammatic
form. At the same time, it provides an authoritative dictum on the following text,
the rules of pastoral care that every cleric had to abide by and obey.
This brief foray into Carolingian poetic graphicacy and its complete dependence
on the sign of the cross cannot bypass Alcuin’s pupil in the art of visual poetry,
Hrabanus Maurus, whose opus In honorem sanctae crucis is the only early medieval
work in this genre that can be compared in its scope, complexity, and innovative
design to the exemplary late antique versus intexti of Porfyrius. The unique graphic
nature of Hrabanus’ work no doubt contributed to its popularity in medieval liter-
ary culture from the ninth century onwards, as attested by numerous surviving
manuscripts and their widespread provenance in Western Europe. In this poetic
work completed in Fulda in 813/4 and augmented in the following decades with
additional dedicatory versus intexti to Pope Gregory IV (827–44) and Emperor
Louis the Pious, one of the brightest intellectuals of the Carolingian age expounded
on the myriad of symbolic meanings and connotations related to the sign of the
cross. As such Hrabanus elevated the veneration of the cross, by means of graphi-
cacy, to a level unparalleled in the early Middle Ages. Yet his In honorem sanctae
crucis was a masterpiece of graphicacy designed exclusively for reception amongst

72 See e.g. Opus Caroli regis, 2.28, ed. Freeman and Meyvaert, p. 298; and the Antiphonary of León:
León, Archivio Cathedralico, Ms. 8, fol. 40r.
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308 Graphic Signs of Authority

the contemporary intellectual elite. And even for this narrow circle of highly edu-
cated viewers and readers, Hrabanus had to write not only the declaratio figurae
explaining each versus intextus on the opposite page, but also to paraphrase his
carmina figurata in a separate book of prose.73
While exceptional in the variety of its multiple graphic forms, the complexity of
its number symbolism, and the rich palette of its poetic references and evocations, his
work is nonetheless quite representative of its age and of contemporary Carolingian
religious culture. First of all, throughout this poetic work, the sign of the cross is
described not only as a salvific and Christological symbol, but also—through its
fourfold structure—as the blueprint of, and graphic key to, the organization of the
world (mundus). The latter point highlights that the influence of the sign of the cross
on the graphic design of contemporary diagrams was not accidental, but reflected the
worldview shared by Carolingian aulic, monastic, and cathedral culture.
Secondly, only one poem (Poem 22) in Hrabanus’ work is dedicated to the chi-rho
built of twenty-three Greek letters encoding Christ’s name and divine epithets, such
as ΙΗΣΥΣ (Jesus), ΘΕΟΣ (God), ΣΟΤΗΡ (Saviour), and ΑΛΗΘΙΑ (truth)—
thus capturing the fascination of the contemporary Carolingian literary elite with
the cryptic use of Greek letters. In unison with the changing use of the chi-rho in
early Carolingian manuscript culture, Hrabanus first mentions its technical use as
a scribal attention sign (chrismon), and thereafter refers briefly to its meaning as a
christogram, namely a monogram (monogramma) composed of the first initials of
Jesus Christ’s Greek appellation.74 The bulk of his description is dedicated to the
symbolic numerology of the Greek letters employed in this graphic sign, once again
confirming that, by the Carolingian age, the authoritative Christian apotropaic sign
of late antiquity had lost most of its symbolic power.
Furthermore, the vast majority of the work’s twenty-eight main poems are
structured by the interplay between poetic lines and the graphic elements, letters, or
words—such as Adam, alleluia, and crux salus (‘the cross [is] salvation’)—creating
various cruciform shapes and arrangements. While differing in their building
blocks, all these cross symbols are designed equal-armed—thus making it clear that
they are intended as symbolic signs, not as images of the Holy Cross or its material
emulations. This choice was hardly accidental considering that the so-called
Priesterstein—a commemorational gravestone commissioned by Hrabanus Maurus
for the tomb of Boniface in Mainz Cathedral in the mid-ninth century—displays,
by contrast, a processional Latin cross with an invocational phrase inscribed inside
its arms: Crux sancta nos salva (‘Holy Cross, save us!’).75
Even the first poem with its dominating image of Jesus Christ standing with
arms outstretched and a halo with the cross sign behind his head can be viewed as
a symbolic reference to the Cross, in the same manner as the early patristic authors

73 Hrabanus Maurus, Liber de laudibus sanctae cruces, comm. Holter; Rabanus Maurus, In honorem
sanctae crucis, ed. Perrin; Perrin, L’iconographie. For a detailed analysis of this work, modern historiog-
raphy, and all references on this poema figurata, see Ernst, Carmen figuratum, pp. 222–304; Ferrari,
‘Hrabanica’; Ferrari, Il Liber; and Chazelle, The Crucified God, pp. 99–118.
74 Rabanus Maurus, In honorem sanctae crucis, C22, ed. Perrin, pp. 173–7.
75 Schultze-Dörrlamm, ‘Das steinerne Monument’.
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Cruciform Devices in the Carolingian World 309

Fig. 9.12. Poem 28 of In honorem sanctae crucis in Lyons, BM, Ms. 597, fol. 24v. © IRHT.

interpreted the similarly postured Moses in Exodus 17.8–16. Only three other
poems (Poems 4, 15, and 28) are inhabited by figural images, but the latter always
function as auxiliary visual elements to the poems’ central crosses.76 This point is
made plainly obvious in the final poem where the central cross is four times as large
as the image of the kneeling Hrabanus beneath it (Fig. 9.12). Elsewhere in his
oeuvre, Hrabanus repeated the ideas expressed by Theodulf in his Libri Carolini

76 Ernst, Carmen figuratum, pp. 277–89.

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310 Graphic Signs of Authority

Fig. 9.13. Poem 11 of In honorem sanctae crucis in Lyons, BM, Ms. 597, fol. 7v. © IRHT.

regarding the inferiority and deceptiveness of images in the true representation of

the world. In contrast to figural images, Hrabanus saw his graphic devices (figurae)
in the vein of Neoplatonists and Pseudo-Dionysius, as visual keys or aids for the
proper understanding of transcendent reality obscured behind the forms and col-
ours of the transitory, earthly world77—visual keys that required contemplation
and memorization. He makes the latter point clear at the beginning of his prose
exposition to Poem 11 structured by the sign of the cross made of five squares,
symbolizing the five books of Moses (Fig. 9.13): ‘Quisquis legis primae plenam
desiderat habere notitiam, necesse est ut huius figurae per omnia memor sit et eius
factum mente saepius revolvat’ (‘Whoever strives to acquire the full understanding
of the first Law, s/he should have a recollection of this graphic device in everything

77 For more details and references, see Chazelle, The Crucified God, p. 112.
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Cruciform Devices in the Carolingian World 311

and should repeat its form in mind more often’).78 The laws that the Lord gave to
Moses thus receives a firm anchoring within the cruciform cognitive paradigm.
Last but not least, Hrabanus’ carmina figurata was written in honour of both
the sign of the cross and of Christ, whom the author directly addressed on several
occasions throughout his text. This feature makes many passages of this poetic work
reminiscent of invocations and liturgical prayers and hymns directed to the divine
Lord. This similarity is especially pronounced in the final poem, which has the
quality of a personal prayer of Hrabanus to Christ and displays the kneeling
author in front of Christ’s visual proxy and the sacred mediator, the sign of the
cross (Fig. 9.12).79 The distich framed by Hrabanus’ figural image confirms this
­visual perception: ‘Hrabanus memet clemens rogo, Christe, tuere, // o pie iudicio’
(‘O merciful and holy Christ, I, Hrabanus, beg you to keep me safe in the Last
Judgement’). The horizontal and vertical lines of the cross meanwhile encode a
poetic palindrome. Its wording firmly sets Hrabanus’ prayer to the Lord within
a liturgical setting: ‘Oro te Ramus aram, ara sumar et oro’ (I, Ramus, pray to you,
sacrificial device, and I pray that I may be taken up at the altar).80 This final cross-
shaped monostich thus functions as a monogrammatic invocation, conceptually
not so different from other cruciform invocational devices produced in the Frankish
world in the late eighth and ninth centuries. Despite noticeable differences, they
all point to the conclusion that the sign of the cross had become the ultimate
organizing principle of Carolingian graphicacy, a visual form functioning as a
mediator of transcendent authority and allowing the contemplative mind to grasp
the invisible beauty of the sacred truth. In this sense, Hrabanus’ In honorem sanctae
crucis is as representative of Carolingian visual culture as the cruciform invocation
in the Bible of San Paolo fuori le mura, or the monogrammatic liturgical hymn to
St Michael written later in the ninth century.

78 Rabanus Maurus, In honorem sanctae crucis, C11, lines 1–3, ed. Perrin, p. 97.
79 Rabanus Maurus, In honorem sanctae crucis, B–C28, ed. Perrin, pp. 216–21.
80 On the immanent connection between the altar (ara) and the Lord’s Cross or the sacrificial cross
(ara crucis), see Kitzinger, Cross, pp. 62 and 129–30.
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

Conclusion

The cultural history of the graphic signs of authority presented in this book
­encapsulated the socio-political and religious transformation of the late antique
Mediterranean world and highlighted the parting cultural paths of early Byzantium
and Western Europe from the seventh century onwards. This history can be
summed up as follows.
The earliest graphic references to the Crucifixion and the name of Jesus Christ,
namely the staurogram and chi-rho, developed in Early Imperial scribal and
­epigraphic culture, in which the use of abbreviations and ligatures was the norm.
Yet from early on, such graphic signs and their constituent letters acquired various
symbolic meanings known to Christian fathers, meanings referring to Christ and
divine authority and symbolizing Christian identity. These extralinguistic aspects
of christograms became extremely important for their usage in late antiquity. At the
same time, many less-educated Christian believers saw christograms primarily as
protective seals, as powerful as various occult signs gaining in popularity in the
Early Imperial period and frequently appearing in late antiquity, in the so-called
‘Gnostic’ and ‘magical’ texts, amulets, and spells. Traditional distinctions between
Christian, ‘Gnostic’, and ‘magical’ graphic signs tend to obscure the fact that the
latter were conditioned by the common visual culture of late antiquity. People
from different walks of life and persuasions believed in the capacity of such graphic
signs to communicate directly with transcendent powers and dark forces.
Consequently, the use of such potent signs was unbound by religious affiliation in
the cosmopolitan late antique world, and undoubtedly Christian graphic symbols
could appear alongside occult characters on Christian amulets and in church
mosaics as late as the sixth and seventh centuries.
In the course of the fourth century, christograms also developed an intimate
connection with late Roman emperorship. This increasing public profile for early
Christian graphic signs was especially apparent in the case of the chi-rho, which
became an apotropaic as well as victorious imperial sign from the second half of
Constantine I’s reign and was employed on various imperial material media—
especially in the western half of the Roman empire—as a visual token of ­triumphant
rulership for subsequent Constantinian emperors and their officials. This imperial
connotation also encouraged some representatives of the Roman aristocracy to
employ the chi-rho as a visual expression of their Christian devotion. Consequently,
this graphic symbol appeared on various artefacts related to contemporary aristo-
cratic culture. From the second half of the fourth century, the tau-rho increasingly
began to complement the chi-rho in its symbolic use in late Roman visual culture,
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314 Graphic Signs of Authority

as did the iota-chi in the fifth and in the sixth century especially. The official media
of the Theodosian rulers, and empresses in particular, were especially instructive in
their presentation of the interplay between the aforementioned chi-rho and ­tau-rho
as well as the sign of the cross in the visual propaganda of Christian emperorship,
for which piety began to be viewed as a crucial imperial attribute.
The same material media also show the growing significance of the sign of the
cross in the visual representation of Christian emperorship in the fifth century.
As early as the second and third centuries, Christians interpreted different forms
of this sign—drawn, traced with a hand, or imagined in the outside world—as
­apotropaic seals and emblematic symbols for their nascent religious community.
As to the graphic sign of the Greek cross, its usage became especially popular in the
eastern provinces of the Roman empire from the mid-fourth century onwards,
inspired by the parallel rise of the cult of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem and its
­proliferation across the Mediterranean in the second half of that century. From its
early beginnings, the cult was associated with the figure of Constantine I’s mother,
Helena; and Theodosian empresses—namely Eudoxia, Pulcheria, and Eudocia—
utilized this connection in their symbolic public representation. By the early fifth
century, it was already a Latin cross that featured prominently on material artefacts
propagating the authority of these empresses and their male peers—most
­importantly of Theodosius II—in Constantinople and across the Eastern Roman
empire. By the mid-fifth century, the sign of the four-armed cross had become an
important visual attribute of imperial authority in both the Eastern and Western
Roman empires, and in the course of the sixth and early seventh centuries it became
the primary graphic symbol of early Byzantine emperorship—a symbol propagat-
ing an imperial claim to authority directly deriving from, and thus sanctioned by,
God. The increasing presence of this sign in imperial media was paralleled by its
growing public visibility in late antique material culture. This latter development
reflected success in the Christianization of the late Roman and post-Roman worlds,
but it also bore witness to a growing popular belief in the apotropaic and healing
power of the sign of the cross and its ability to access transcendent powers. Such a
belief ensured the strong public appeal of that sign among various social groups. In
such popular usage, the sign of the cross was often used alongside older apotropaic
graphic marks and symbols or conflated with them, as in the case of the ankh sign
or the eight-armed occult character, which were refashioned for late antique
Christian visual culture in the form of the ankh cross and the eight-armed cross.
The growing public profile of christograms in the third and fourth centuries
coincided with the rising popularity of personal monograms, a graphic phenom-
enon with its origins in classical Greece. Yet in the third and fourth centuries,
­monograms departed from their earlier usage as producers’ marks and acquired
new symbolic connotations on media such as Roman catacombs, signet-rings, and
luxury objects. A popular contemporary belief in the protective and intercessory
power of graphic signs no doubt contributed to the monograms’ burgeoning
­popularity among Christians and members of other religious communities. After
all, monograms were not radically different from other graphic signs in their visual
structure; they protected the encoded personal names from misuse in various
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Conclusion 315

occult practices and ensured that any message encrypted in a monogrammatic

manner could communicate with divine and transcendent agents. Furthermore,
from the mid-fourth century onwards, box monograms incorporating all the
­letters of encoded words entered into elite culture where they developed into
­calligraphic devices hiding aristocratic names or acclamations, as in the case of the
unique dedication monogram in the Calendar of 354. These sophisticated devices
perfectly fit the worldviews structured by late antique Neoplatonism as well as
mystic Christianity, whereby such signs were designed to allow contemplative eyes
to comprehend better the hidden truths of the intelligible or divine world and, in
some cases, to establish mystical links between the people whose names were
encoded in such a manner and divine hierarchies. In their perceived ability to
­elevate the human mind towards the invisible divine, monograms thus did not
differ much from christograms and the sign of the cross.
The enhanced aesthetic qualities of calligraphic monograms reflected the new
function of monograms as graphic means to visualize an elevated status, a role that
became especially important in the fifth and sixth centuries. From the mid-fifth
century, monograms also began to function as imperial signs of authority, a func-
tion that became especially noticeable with imperial monograms on copper-alloy
coinage in the second half of the fifth century and imperial monogrammatic
stamps on silverware from the late fifth to the mid-seventh centuries. On silver-
ware as well as on weights and bricks, imperial monograms were complemented by
the monograms of senior imperial officers or other power brokers responsible for
their production. This development exemplified the sixth-century development of
personal monograms into a visual attribute of early Byzantine officials and bishops,
as did the frequent use of personal monograms on lead seals in the early Byzantine
period. Such graphic devices often encoded imperial and ecclesiastical titles, thus
underscoring the authoritative nature of these monograms to their viewers, as well
as marking the precise positions of their possessors within the imperial hierarchy.
In the same period, personal monograms began to express noble identity and social
power on luxury objects, dress accessories, and rings, both in early Byzantium and
the post-Roman world of the Western Mediterranean. In Byzantium, the intro-
duction of cruciform personal monograms in the sixth century and the virtual
disappearance of box monograms in the seventh also mirrored the religious trans-
formation of Byzantine elites, in which an open profession of Christian beliefs
symbolized by the cruciform shape of a monogram became an expected attribute
of an elevated social status.
In the sixth century, the use of monograms also expanded into public spaces,
most importantly Christian churches. Within this material setting, monumental
monograms were employed as calligraphic devices honouring noble patrons, as
well as signs of authority for rulers and ecclesiastical leaders building such churches.
Justinian I and his wife Theodora made the latter practice especially popular, by
having their personal monumental monograms carved in grandiose churches built
or rebuilt on their orders in Constantinople and its environs, with the Church
of Hagia Sophia in the imperial capital setting the most impressive example.
This ­practice was followed by subsequent early Byzantine emperors, albeit on a
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316 Graphic Signs of Authority

much more modest scale. More importantly, ecclesiastical leaders in the Byzantine
world and some Italian cities in direct contact with Constantinople emulated this
­monogrammatic practice on the ecclesiastical edifices that served as the public
manifestation of their increased social power in the sixth century. From a more
general perspective, the appearance and rapid proliferation of episcopal mono-
grams in public buildings as well as other sixth-century material media mirrored
the growing authority that bishops acquired in their cities in the context of disin-
tegrating classical civic institutions. The use of episcopal monograms on other
material media such as rings, seals, and luxury items—as well as the placement of
urban monograms on coinage issued in episcopal cities in the seventh-century
Latin West—testified to the same profound socio-political change.
The late antique use of monograms as visual badges of elevated social status was
continued in the Ostrogothic, Lombard, Visigothic, and Merovingian kingdoms
in the sixth and seventh centuries. Meanwhile, this practice never established a
foothold in the British Isles, which parted from the Roman world before the
­monogrammatic tradition developed into an important visual attribute of its
socio-political habitus. In contrast, the use of personal monograms came to be
especially popular in sixth-century Italy and south-eastern Gaul, where it appealed
not only to bishops and nobles, but also to kings. This way of visualizing social
status and authority became less relevant in the world of the Western Mediterranean
by the turn of the eighth century. Many factors contributed to this change, includ-
ing weakening contacts with the shrinking Byzantine empire and the increasing
importance of northbound channels of socio-political and cultural communication.
In broader terms, the decreasing significance of the monogrammatic ­tradition in
the early medieval kingdoms in this period was a manifestation of the demise of
late antique political culture and its visual pageantry in the Latin West.
The history of invocational cruciform devices from the second half of the sixth
century onwards provides additional evidence of the diverging cultural paths of the
Greek East and the Latin West in the early Middle Ages. Two such devices—one
encoding the divine attributes ΦΩΣ–ΖΩΗ (‘Light–Life’) and the other invoking
the Mother of God or the Lord—became extremely popular in early Byzantium
and appear alongside the sign of the cross in its various material media, especially
in the period of iconoclastic controversies. Such cruciform Greek invocations
remained little known in Western Europe, where the sign of the cross and christo-
grams remained the main visual forms of expressing Christian piety and addressing
God—a cultural trend highlighted by the early history of graphic decorations in
early medieval Latin book culture. In the western manuscripts of the sixth and
seventh centuries, the signs of the cross and monogrammatic cross developed into
an aniconic form of full-page decoration—an artistic form that Insular cross-­carpet
pages managed to perfect around the turn of the eighth century. Such particular
cultural developments reflected both the rising cult of the True Cross in the Latin
West as well as a western response to eastern iconomachy.
The appearance of monogrammatic lettering and initials in early medieval Latin
manuscript culture was another specifically Western development. The early forms of
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Conclusion 317

this visual phenomenon can be traced to sixth-century manuscripts from northern

Italy and south-eastern Gaul, areas over which late antique monogrammatic ­culture
had a particularly strong hold in the Latin West. In the seventh century this form
of decorative lettering and initials spread farther west and north, and by the turn
of the eighth this new scribal practice was brought to entirely new artistic and
­cognitive levels in Insular gospel-books, where monogrammatic initials and letter-
ing were invested with transcendent properties similar to those attributed to the
invocational cruciform devices of the East. Yet unlike the latter, such monogram-
matic letterforms gradually began to be employed within early medieval Latin
manuscript culture as a form of visual exegesis and symbolic interpretation,
a ­function that remained important for monogrammatic initials in Carolingian
­gospel-books, Bibles, and sacramentaries. Thus, new forms of monogrammatic initials
were ­conceived and adopted in Carolingian manuscripts, where they f­ unctioned as
both the visual attributes of divine authority and authoritative visual verdicts on
the nature of Christ and the eucharist—two topics of particular importance in
contemporary theological debates.
The elite culture of the Carolingian world also bore witness to a particular
­monogrammatic revival whereby the art of calligraphic monograms was adapted to
new political and cultural settings. The invention of Charlemagne’s monogram
marked the re-introduction of personal monograms as visual signs of royal authority,
and their history in the Carolingian diplomas of the ninth and tenth centuries
showed both the earlier introduction of new graphic forms to visualize new
­symbolic claims and later adherence to more traditional monogrammatic forms to
­communicate dynastic legitimacy to the diplomas’ noble recipients. Charlemagne’s
­monogram, with its central lozenge clearly influenced by contemporary manu-
script culture, also highlighted the fact that, despite its late antique and early
Byzantine sources of inspiration, the monogrammatic revival in Frankish Gaul was
first and foremost a homegrown scribal phenomenon. Unlike in late antiquity,
monograms did not appear in the Frankish world on dress accessories, domestic or
church utensils, or public monuments, but were drawn in the material media
­especially appreciated for their symbolic value in social communication, namely
diplomas and manuscripts. Consequently, the monograms of bishops, abbots, and
erudite scribes embellished manuscript folios to underscore their ecclesiastical
authority and intellectual prowess to readers, both clerical and lay. Carolingian
scribes also demonstrated their calligraphic proficiency by employing monograms
and ­monogrammatic forms to encode key words, phrases, or concepts in manu-
scripts, a c­ ultural phenomenon that can be defined as a monogrammatic revival.
This unique cultural context led to a special section on monograms added to a
textual compilation—later known as De inventione litterarum—at one of the East
Frankish royal monasteries at the end of the eighth century. This section and its set
of monograms exemplified the adaptation of the early Byzantine monogrammatic
practice for Carolingian usage at a time when imperial claims began to be voiced
at the Carolingian court. At the same time, it was Charlemagne’s monogrammatic
sign of authority that served as the main blueprint for the text’s set of personal
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318 Graphic Signs of Authority

monograms of the Lord, the Virgin Mary, King Solomon, and the apostles—thus
highlighting the intrinsic connection between the royal court and a monogram-
matic revival in Carolingian manuscript culture.
Due to a much more entrenched monogrammatic tradition in Italy, the applica-
tion of monograms south of the Alps took more traditional forms in the Carolingian
period. Thus, some Roman popes and Italian and North Adriatic bishops renewed
the sixth-century use of personal monograms as signs of authority on coins and
public monuments, albeit on a much more moderate scale. In contrast to Italy, the
Insular world remained virtually unaffected by this monogrammatic revival.
Canterbury constituted a notable exception to this Insular cultural trait, since a
few material artefacts connected to this archiepiscopal see exhibit familiarity with
continental monogrammatic culture—a phenomenon deriving from the see’s
active contacts with papal Rome.
The dominance of the cruciform shape as a blueprint for various monogram-
matic forms became a salient characteristic of the Carolingian monogrammatic
revival. The same feature can be observed in the appropriation of the late antique
tradition of monogrammatic invocations in Carolingian manuscript culture. The
newly invented forms of cruciform invocations underscored the significance of
liturgical settings for the development of Carolingian graphicacy, which reflected
the unique position of the clergy in shaping Carolingian culture as we know it
now. More importantly, these new forms once again emphasize the paramount
importance of the sign of the cross within that world. This phenomenon explains
the ubiquitous presence of cross signs in contemporary Western European manu-
script and material culture, accompanied by the decreasing symbolic use of late
antique christograms. In the function of graphic references to Christ, the latter
signs were increasingly replaced with crosses with suspended alpha and omega—
the visual reminders of Christ’s divine nature—and, occasionally, with new cruci-
form monograms of Jesus Christ.
In the Carolingian world, the sign of the cross defined not only graphic signs of
transcendent, royal, and spiritual authority, but also various forms of graphic
­visualization, such as scholarly diagrams, T–O maps, and carmina figurata. The
hallmark of early medieval visual poetry, In honorem sanctae crucis by the ecclesias-
tical intellectual Hrabanus Maurus, illustrated this point beyond any doubt, by
designing a compelling argument for the unique role of the sign of the cross as a
visual template revealing to a contemplative mind Christ’s manifestations in
­biblical history, the basic organizational principles of the earthly world, and the
inexpressible beauty of transcendent reality. This complicated visual exegesis on the
sign of the cross was of course restricted to a very limited circle of intellectuals and
literates, and it was disseminated through high-status social networks of symbolic
exchange linking royal Carolingian monasteries with royal courts and episcopal
headquarters. Yet the cross was a unique sign in that it equally appealed to people
of higher and lower status across the Carolingian world, wherein it could function
as a symbol of religious identity, as a visual promise of future salvation, and as a
protective graphic device against multiple natural, social, and spiritual threats. Due
to this appeal across the whole range of Carolingian social strata, the sign of the
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Conclusion 319

cross also featured prominently on mass-produced objects such as royal coins and
various dress accessories.
The changing destinies of the graphic signs of authority in the first millennium
ad thus epitomized the concurrent transformation of political culture in the
Mediterranean and Western Europe. The urban settings of political life, the wide-
ranging reach of imperial institutions, and cosmopolitan aristocratic networks of
symbolic interaction facilitated the public display of graphic signs of authority on
various material media across the late antique world. In contrast, royal courts and
palaces as well as episcopal headquarters and royal monasteries defined the new
socio-political settings established in Western Europe by the Carolingian period.
On the one hand, these altered contours of political culture made the sign of the
cross the primary visual symbol of authority across diverse early medieval media.
On the other hand, it is hardly surprising that, in a political culture where monas-
tic ‘textual communities’ were so influential in defining its framework and rules, it
was the book that became the symbolic arena for other—older and newly
invented—signs of authority.
Finally, this study provides a more nuanced context for the distinction between
imperial or royal power (potestas) and ecclesiastical authority (auctoritas) that eccle-
siastical authors voiced from the end of the fifth century onwards.1 They insisted
on this distinction because, in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, authority
came to be seen increasingly as deriving from the transcendent sphere and invested
in the world via different channels. Within public consciousness and beliefs, visual
signs were credited with an important role in this transmission. From late antiquity
onwards, letter characters could be seen as connected to cosmic elements. In a
similar vein, invincible occult characters were believed to be linked directly to
powerful cosmic forces. Yet early Christian leaders repeatedly rejected the tran-
scendent efficacy of these deviant graphic signs, and promoted instead the graphic
signs encapsulating Christian authority, such as the staurogram, the chi-rho, and
the sign of the cross. In the same period, personal, acclamatory, and invocative
monograms proliferated in this world of competing visual claims for transcendent
authority. They were reminiscent of the visual forms of ‘magical’ characters, but
unlike the latter, they were not tainted by any affiliation with occult practices.
Furthermore, from the sixth century onwards, monograms assumed the graphic
structure of the sign of the cross and were thus included within the established
corpus of Christian graphic signs of authority, signs that Christian rulers, magnates,
and bishops employed to visualize symbolically their positions in the early medi-
eval hierarchy of authorities and to mark their transcendent sources. Yet as late as
the ninth century, deviant occult characters were still credited with transcendent
authority in popular beliefs not only in the Near East, but also in the Carolingian
world. Until now, no early medieval Latin textual amulet with occult characters
has been known to modern scholarship, which led to the assumption that they fell
into oblivion in the early medieval Christian West and were reintroduced in

1 See e.g. Robinson, ‘Church’, pp. 288–9.

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320 Graphic Signs of Authority

Western Europe in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries from Byzantine and
Islamic sources.2
Yet the existence of one hitherto unknown Carolingian textual amulet questions
the validity of this assumption. This text has been preserved in a ninth-century
manuscript produced in Verona or its environs. The manuscript contains the texts
of the Lombard laws and Italian capitularies of Lothar I issued in 825 and 832.3 A
Latin textual amulet appears on the last blank page of that manuscript, written in
the same script as preceding folios, which makes its dating to the middle or the
second half of the ninth century very likely. The text demands that all evil forces
(omnia mala malorum) do not harm the amulet’s wearer by invoking the name of
God as well as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It also invokes invincible
characters (adamantina nota) and enforces the latter invocation by two lines of the
Coptic (or Greek) abecedary and a line of eight ‘occult’ characters with signes
­pommetés typical of those employed in Coptic ‘magical’ practices. The letters are
also spelled in Coptic with Latin letters, and those spellings indicate the Bohairic
dialect of Coptic, used in lower Egypt and Alexandria, as the original language
from which this Latin amulet was translated.
This unique text exemplifies the multifaceted contacts of the early medieval
Latin West with Coptic Egypt, contacts hinted at by other examples of Coptic
influence in Western Europe in those centuries. Yet what is even more significant
for this study is that, despite the dominance of the sign of the cross in the com-
munication of authority in the ninth-century Latin West, less conventional visual
tools for accessing transcendent powers originating from the late antique graphic
culture of the Eastern Mediterranean world could still be copied in a manuscript
comprising of authoritative texts of royal laws. At the same time, this textual
­amulet clearly raised concerns for some readers and was partly erased at a later
point, which underscores how slim the chances were for texts like these to survive
in, and beyond, the early Middle Ages. The cultural biography of this textual
­amulet thus provides an important caveat to the image of homogeneous Christian
society propagated by the normative and religious texts of the contemporary Latin
West. Despite the repeated rebukes of late antique and early medieval ecclesiastical
leaders, older means of reaching out to transcendent powers—including occult
graphic signs—still appealed to some lay people in their never-ending quest for
supernatural protection and support, a quest that ninth-century Christian media
channelled through the sign of the cross and other derivative cruciform symbols.

2 Gordon, ‘Charactêres’, pp. 290–2.

3 Vatican City, BAV, Vat. lat. 5359; Mordek, Bibliotheca, pp. 881–3. I intend to discuss this text in
more detail elsewhere.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

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Index of Manuscripts

Abbeville, BM, Ms. 4. 243, 297 Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek,

Arras, BM, Ms. lat. 233. 275 Aug. Fr. 144. 234
Augsburg, Oettingen-Wallerstein Library,
Ms. I.2.4.2. 243 Laon, BM, Ms. 63. 244
Autun, BM, Ms. 19 bis. 249, 251, 297 Laon, BM, Ms. 137. 278, 294, 296
Laon, BM, Ms. 423. 302
Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Msc. Class. 5. 302 Le Mans, BM, Ms. 77. 254
Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Msc. Patr. 61. Leiden, Universitetsbibliotheek, BPL 48. 246
287, 302 Leiden, Universitetsbibliotheek, VLF 26. 299
Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Msc. Nat. 1. 301 Leiden, Universitetsbibliotheek, VLO 41.
Berlin, SBB, Ms. Phill. 1667. 249–50 298–9
Berlin, SBB, Ms. theol. lat. 3. 243 Leiden, Universitetsbibliotheek, VLO 94. 264
Bern, Stadtbibliothek, Ms. 417. 240 León, Archivio Cathedralico, Ms. 8. 295, 307
Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, Ms. 701. 229 León, Archivio Cathedralico, Ms. 15. 232,
Boulogne-sur-Mer, BM, Ms. 12. 243 235–6
Boulogne-sur-Mer, BM, Ms. 35. 246 Lichfield, Lichfield Cathedral, Ms. 1. 234
London, BL, Add. Ms. 10546. 243, 297
Cambrai, BM, Ms. 162. 255 London, BL, Add. Ms. 11848. 243
Cambrai, BM, Ms. 164. 249 London, BL, Add. Ms. 16605. 255
Cambrai, BM, Ms. 937. 302 London, BL, Add. Ms. 43725. 34
Canterbury Cathedral Library, Add. Ms. 23. 47 London, BL, Cotton Ms. Caligula A XV. 300
Chartres, BM, Ms. 40. 297 London, BL, Cotton Ms. Nero D IV. 234, 237
Chartres, BM, Ms. 41 (3). 273 London, BL, Cotton Ms. Vespasian A. I.
Cologne, Erzbischöfliche Diözesan- und 271–2
Dombibliothek, Ms. 1. 245 London, BL, Egerton Ms. 768. 245–6
Cologne, Erzbischöfliche Diözesan- und London, BL, Harley Ms. 2686. 301
Dombibliothek, Ms. 14. 243, 245 London, BL, Harley Ms. 2788. 243, 297
Cologne, Erzbischöfliche Diözesan- und London, BL, Harley Ms. 3017. 304
Dombibliothek, Ms. 213. 257 Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum,
Ms. Ludwig II 1. 265–6
Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, Ms. 12. 232 Lyons, BM, Ms. 431. 243, 245
Dublin, Trinity College Library, Ms. 55. 229 Lyons, BM, Ms. 452. 272
Dublin, Trinity College Library, Ms. A. 4. 5. Lyons, BM, Ms. 597. 309–10
(57). 237
Durham, Cathedral Library, Ms. A. II. 10. 237 Munich, BSB, Clm. 208. 275
Munich, BSB, Clm. 210. 302
Epernay, BM, Ms. 1. 244 Munich, BSB, Clm. 343. 301
Munich, BSB, Clm. 396. 301
Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Ms. Plut. Munich, BSB, Clm. 4451. 243
LXV, 1. 231–2, 235 Munich, BSB, Clm. 6224. 232–3
Munich, BSB, Clm. 6250. 301
Geneva, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, Munich, BSB, Clm. 6270a. 298–9
Ms. lat. 16. 256 Munich, BSB, Clm. 6329. 287
Munich, BSB, Clm. 6436. 232
Halle, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Munich, BSB, Clm. 14000. 243, 275
Sachsen-Anhalt, Qu. Cod. 83. 246 Munich, BSB, Clm. 14300. 299, 302
Heidelberg, UB, Cod. Sal. IX.39. 280, 282 Munich, BSB, Clm. 14325. 278
Heidelberg, UB, Cod. Sal. X.12a. 294–6 Munich, BSB, Clm. 14420. 276
Munich, BSB, Clm. 19408. 294
Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Aug. Munich, BSB, Clm. 22501. 232, 236
Perg. 229. 299, 302 Munich, BSB, Clm. 23631. 263
Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Aug. Munich, BSB, Clm. 28118. 262–3
Perg. 241. 302 Munich, BSB, Clm. 28561. 243
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

360 Index of Manuscripts

Nancy, Cathedral Treasury, St Gauzelin Reims, BM, Ms. 425. 301
Gospels. 300 Rome, Abbazia di San Paolo f. le mura,
Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, Biblia. 243, 246, 287–8
Ms. ex-Vind. Gr. 1. 273 Rouen, BM, Ms. 524. 304
New York, ML, Ms. G. 57. 254
New York, ML, Ms. G. 67. 102 Schaffhausen, Stadtbibliothek, Ms. 78. 300–1
New York, ML, Ms. M. 566. 297 St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 75. 297
New York, ML, Ms. M. 640. 243 St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 188. 234
New York, ML, Ms. M. 644. 295 St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 237. 276
New York, ML, Ms. M. 728. 243, 245 St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 348. 248–9
New York, ML, Ms. M. 860. 243, 245 St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 397. 262–3
New York, ML, Ms. M. 862. 245 St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 731. 258
St Gallen, SB, Cod. Sang. 876. 279
Oxford, Merton College, Ms. 315. 299 St Petersburg, National Library of Russia,
Lat.F.v.I.12. 287
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 2. 246 St Petersburg, National Library of Russia,
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 257. 243, 245 Lat.Q.v.lI.3. 219–20
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 258. 243, 299 St Petersburg, National Library of Russia,
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 266. 244, 298 Lat.Q.v.I.14. 234
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 270. 243 St Petersburg, National Library of Russia,
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 323. 275 Lat.Q.v.I.41. 254
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 1141. 253 Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, Ms. A 136. 254
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 1603. 272–3 Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek,
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 1625. 234–5 Cod. theol. et phil. 2° 208. 265
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 2290. 254
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 7583. 301 Tours, BM, Ms. 184. 291
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 7906. 273–4 Troyes, BM, Ms. 138. 245
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 8672. 276 Troyes, BM, Ms. 504. 232
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 8850. 243
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 8913. 229 Uppsala, Universitetsbibliothek, Ms. DG.1.
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 9332. 272–3 232, 236
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 9380. 297
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 9385. 244 Valenciennes, BM, Ms. 59. 260–1
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 9387. 243 Valenciennes, BM, Ms. 495 (455). 234
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 9389. 237–9 Valladolid, Biblioteca de la Universidad,
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 10290. 299 Ms. 433. 295
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 10439. 229, 231 Vatican City, BAV, Gr. 1209. 34
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 11326. 229 Vatican City, BAV, Ott. lat. 79. 243
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 11504. 246 Vatican City, BAV, Pal. lat. 46. 243
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 11641. 236, 256 Vatican City, BAV, Pal. lat. 574. 294
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 11959. 294 Vatican City, BAV, Reg. lat. 257. 248
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 12048. 249, 299–300 Vatican City, BAV, Reg. lat. 316. 248, 294
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 12097. 229, 231–2, 236 Vatican City, BAV, Reg. lat. 317. 248
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 12168. 294 Vatican City, BAV, Reg. lat. 438. 276–7
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 17225. 229 Vatican City, BAV, Vat. lat. 5359. 320
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 17226. 229, 232, 236 Verdun, BM, Ms. 26. 301
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 17227. 297 Verona, Biblioteca capitolare, Ms. XIII
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 12262. 304, 306 (11). 229
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 12272. 292–3 Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 387. 302
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 13246. 249 Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 449. 297
Paris, BnF, Ms. lat. 17968. 244 Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 958. 254
Paris, BnF, Ms. Nouv. Acq. lat. 1587. 298 Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 1010. 280
Paris, BnF, Ms. Nouv. Acq. lat. 1589. 291 Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 1761. 280, 282
Paris, BnF, Ms. Nouv. Acq. lat. 2061. 233 Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. Med. gr. 1. 273

Reims, BM, Ms. 2. 244 Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 16

Reims, BM, Ms. 7. 245 Aug. 2°. 244
Reims, BM, Ms. 129. 276 Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 3.1.3.300
Reims, BM, Ms. 213. 254 Aug. 2°. 297
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

Index of Manuscripts 361

Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 36.23 Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 64
Aug. 2°. 236 Weiss. 219–20
Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 81.17 Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf.
Aug. 2°. 299 67 Weiss. 299
Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 75a Würzburg, UB, M.p.misc.f. 5a. 278
Helmstedt. 231 Würzburg, UB, M.p.th.f.19. 286–7
Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 3 Weiss. 275 Würzburg, UB, M.p.th.f.68. 219–20
Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 4 Weiss. 301 Würzburg, UB, M.p.th.q.1a. 236
Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 14
Weiss. 275, 283 Zurich, Zentralbibliothek, Ms. C78. 284
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

General Index
Aachen 259–60, 262, 265 Androna (al-Anderin), Syria 208
abbot/s 22, 186–7, 220, 242, 253–4, 256, 262, angel/s 32, 41–2, 45, 74, 97, 118–19, 225,
264–5, 277, 299, 317 227, 229, 295
Abraham, bishop of Hermonthis 225 Anglo-Saxon 13, 271, 278–9, 282, 299, 303
Abraham, Old Testament figure 31, 176 Anicia Juliana 144, 160–3, 167–8
acronym 104 ankh-cross, see cross/es
Acts, book of 53, 246 Annes 114–15
Adaloald, Lombard king 203 Anso 214
Adallandus 275, 282–5 Anthemios of Tralles 175
Admonitio generalis 275 Anthemius, emperor 92, 94, 137, 141
Adonai 104 anthropology 18–19
Adoptionism/Adoptionist 252–3, 255 Antioch 54, 90, 99, 137–8, 143
Aemilius Probus 134 Martyrium of St Babylas 90
Aethicus Ister 260, 278 Antiphonary of León 295, 307
Agambertus 260, 273, 278 Apa Apollo, monastery of 223
Agapetos 176 Apahida, Romania 147
Advice to the Emperor Justinian 176 Apamea, Syria 45
Agilulf, Lombard king 203 Aphrodisias 17, 86, 121, 125–7, 165–7, 186,
Agnellus of Ravenna 189, 191–3, 211–12 217, 252
The Books of Pontiffs of the Church of Apocalypse 227
Ravenna 189, 191–3, 211–12 beasts of 92, 227
Agobard of Lyons 255 apostle/s 39, 79, 158, 281–2, 285–6,
Alanus of Farfa’s homiliary 294 298, 318
Albanian Treasure 221 St Jacob (St James) 158, 282
Alcuin of York 61, 130, 240–1, 243–4, 257, St John, see evangelist/s
273, 282, 297, 299, 303–4, 307 St Matthew, see evangelist/s
Disputatio Pippini regalis et nobilissimi iuvenis St Peter 64, 73, 96, 158
cum Albino scholastico 241 St Simon 158
Alemannia 278, 299 Aquileia 57–8, 83–4, 88, 190–1, 235
Alexander the Great 109–10 Aquitanian 259
Alexandria 29, 31, 320 Aramaic 45
Temple of Serapis 101 Arcadius, emperor 72, 74, 76, 89–90, 185
Alfonso II, king of Asturias 295 archaeology 14–15, 19, 83
Alfred the Great, Anglo-Saxon king 271–2 Archangel Michael 222, 236, 292, 311
alpha and omega 39, 41, 53, 59–60, 66, Arcturus 304–6
68–70, 74–6, 79, 92, 104, 212, 229, Areobindus 142, 144–6, 160–1
232–4, 240, 294, 297–9, 302, 318 Ariadne 143
Alps 151, 249, 265, 294, 318 Arian/Arianism 68, 91, 229
Alsace 275, 278 Aripert I, Lombard king 203
Amalasuentha 143, 200 Arles 44, 57, 67, 202, 229
Ambrose of Milan 88 Armenian 187
Amiens 67, 299 Arn of Salzburg 264, 275
Ammianus 166 Arnegunde, Merovingian queen 204
amulet/s 5, 15, 45–7, 101, 104, 217, 313 Arras 243, 255, 275
Canterbury Amulet 47 Artemidorus 164
Gnostic amulets 15 Asia Minor 30, 120, 166, 184, 186, 274
‘magical’ amulets 15, 44–5, 126 astronomy 175
textual amulets 16, 103–4, 225, 319–20 Athalaric, Ostrogothic king 143, 200–1
Anastasis rotunda, see Church of the Holy Athanasius of Alexandria 99
Sepulchre Life of St Anthony 99
Anastasius I, emperor 136–9, 143, 160–1, 173, auctoritas, see authority
200–2 Augsburg 243, 265
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

364 General Index

Augustine of Hippo 1, 6, 44, 103, 130, Benevento 265
219–20, 223, 241, 256, 294, 296 Beratius Nikatoras 30, 51
De civitate dei 284 Beronicianus 142
De doctrina Christiana 1, 6, 44 Bertildis, Merovingian queen 203–4
Aurelian Wall 30 Bias of Priene 156–7
Aurelius Filtatus 56–7 Bible/s 91, 236, 242–3, 246–7, 297, 317
Auster 304–6 Bible of San Paolo fuori le mura 286–90, 311
authority 8, 10–13, 18–23, 39, 47, 50, 74, 87, Bible of Theodulf 296
89, 91, 98, 105, 111, 130, 133, 137, 139, bishop/s 9, 21–3, 45, 50, 54, 57, 64, 82, 86–7,
142, 144, 149, 152, 160, 162, 164, 166, 91, 96, 99, 104, 130, 141, 186–93, 199,
168, 174–5, 187, 190, 195, 199–200, 203, 205, 209–10, 224–5, 242, 247, 253,
204, 207, 210, 214–16, 219, 241–2, 246, 263–5, 267–9, 271, 273, 275, 285, 294,
255–7, 259, 262–5, 268–9, 272–3, 297, 315–19
284–8, 297, 311, 313–20 Bobbio, monastery of 220, 278
auctoritas 11, 319 Bobbio Missal 249
divine authority 2, 11, 29, 38, 47, 80, 92, Boethius 125, 142
199, 303, 313, 317 De institutione arithmetica 301
ecclesiastical authority 255, 269, 317, 319 Bohairic 320
episcopal authority 189–90, 194–5, 205, Boniface, pope 142
208–9, 265, 267 Bonifatius 121
imperial authority 21–2, 57, 65, 74–5, 89, Book of Ceremonies 92, 175
94–5, 111, 133–4, 136, 139, 152, 175–6, Book of Durrow 234, 237
185, 195, 314 Books of Jeu/The Book of the Great Initiatory
papal authority 188, 267–8 Discourse 35–8, 82
royal authority 12, 20, 23, 204, 216, 255, Book of Kells 237, 257
263, 285, 288, 302, 317 Bosporian 149
spiritual authority 20–2, 285, 318 Brácana 206
urban authority 319 bread 217, 252–3, 307
Autun 225, 249, 251, 297 Breviary of Alaric 232, 236, 258
Avar 222 brickstamps, see stamp/s
Avitus of Vienne 9, 205 Britain 41, 44, 65–6
Epistolae ad diversos 9, 203 British Isles 41, 44, 67, 98, 234, 257, 316
Brittany 243, 298, 301
Bacchus/Bacchic 67, 167–82, 188, 195, brooch/es 66, 94–5, 152, 302, see also crossbow
225, 227 fibula/s
balsam/balsamaria 110–11 Bruce Codex 35–42, 126, 223
baptism/baptismal 36, 38, 79, 82, 223 Bulgarian 147
Baptistery of Albenga 79–80 Burgos 208
Baptistery of San Giovanni in Fonte, Napoli 79 Burgundy/Burgundian 22, 151, 199, 201–2,
Basil I, emperor 288 229, 234, 301
Basilica S. Sylvestri, in Rome 114 Byzantium 11, 19, 21, 45, 96–8, 105, 131,
Basilica of Aquileia 57–8, 83–4 140, 143, 148–9, 152, 154, 156, 162,
Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio, in Milan 75–6 180, 186–7, 199, 214, 216, 221, 236,
Basilica of St Eufemia, in Grado 190–2 256, 265, 275, 286, 290, 313, 315–16
Mausoleum of St Eufemia 191
Basilica of St Felix/Basilica nova, in Nola 39 Caesarius of Arles 44–5
Basiliscus, emperor 136 Sermons 44–5
Battle of the Milvian Bridge 51–4, 56–7, 86, Calendar of 354 118–19, 121, 126, 129–31,
88, 295 236, 252, 255, 277, 292, 315
Bavaria 264, 278, 294 calligraphic culture 21, 133–4, 159
Beatus of Liébana 295 calligraphic device/s 118, 121, 136, 315, 317
Bede 279, 292 Cambrai 249, 255, 300, 302
Commentary on Samuel 292 Canon of the Mass 22, 229, 241
Beit Méry, Lebanon 45 Canosa 141
Belgium 243 Canterbury 47, 271–2, 318
belt/s 149, 151, 206, 213–14, 219 Canterbury Amulet, see amulet/s
belt buckle/s 149–52, 208, 213–14, Capernaum 28
219, 221 Caracalla, emperor 111, 124
Benedict of Aniane 262–3 Carloman, Carolingian king 254, 263
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

General Index 365

Carolingian 22–3, 237, 240–4, 246–7, 252–3, Christian identity 99, 105, 313
255–7, 259–60, 262–7, 271–8, 281–2, mystic Christianity 21, 315
285–90, 292–5, 297–304, 307–8, 311, christogram/s 2, 5–6, 9–11, 15, 21, 28–9, 35,
317–20 39, 48, 50, 52, 60, 62–3, 67–70, 74, 77,
Carthage 81–2, 97, 137–9, 201, 206 79, 118, 125, 130, 154, 223, 225, 227,
Cassiodorus 282–4, 300–1 229, 268, 293, 308, 313–16, 318
Commentaries in Psalms/Expositio psalmorum chi-rho 6, 19–20, 27–30, 33, 39, 41, 44,
282–4, 300 47–8, 51–80, 86, 88, 92, 96, 102–3, 115,
Institutiones 301 117–18, 122, 141, 208–9, 223, 225, 229,
Castel Trosino, Emilia Romana 213 268, 298–300, 302–3, 308, 313–14, 319
catacomb/s 5, 20, 30, 56, 62, 65–6, 68, 70–1, iota-chi 28–9, 30, 35, 225, 227, 229, 268,
83, 104, 112–18, 120–1, 124–5, 130, 299–300, 314
133–4, 218, 314 iota-eta 28–31
Catacombs of Cyriaca, in Rome 113–14 tau-rho/staurogram 19–20, 27–30, 34–5,
Catacombs of Domitilla, in Rome 112, 121 39, 47–8, 51–4, 63, 70–2, 74–5, 77–80,
Catacombs of Ponziano, in Rome 115 82, 84, 101–2, 104, 112, 223, 229, 232,
Catacombs of Pretestato, in Rome 257, 299–300, 313–14, 319
114–15, 121 Church of the Annunciation, in Nazareth 79
Catacombs of Priscilla, in Rome 70, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in
114–15, 133 Jerusalem 86–7, 89, 91–2, 285
Catacombs of San Callisto, in Rome 112 Anastasis rotunda 86
Catacombs of San Gennaro, see Naples Martyrium basilica 86
Catacombs of St Agnes, in Rome 121 Church of Pegé 185
catechumens 82 Church of San Clemente, in Rome 166, 187
Cathach of Colum Cille 232 Church of San Julien de los Prados, in
Cathuulf 282 Oviedo 295
Catulinus 140 Church of San Marco, in Venice 163–4,
Chalcedonian 160 185, 268
charactera/charactêres, see ‘magical’ characters Church of San Vitale, in Ravenna 188–90,
chariots 116 227–8, 230
Charlemagne, Carolingian king 23, 249, 253, Church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, in
256–67, 272–3, 275, 278, 282, 284–6, Rome 267
289, 292, 297, 299, 302–3, 317 Church of Santa Maria in Domnica, in
Charlemagne’s monogram, see monogram/s Rome 267
Court School of 243, 297 Church of Santa Maria de Lara at Quintanilla
Charles the Bald, Carolingian king 246, 253–4, de las Viñas, near Burgos 208–9
262–4, 288, 290, 295 Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, in
Court School of 243, 275 Rome 92–3
Charles the Fat, Carolingian king 263–4 Church of Santa Prassede, in Rome 267–9
Charles the Simple, Carolingian king 263–4 Church of Santa Pudenziana, in Rome 91–2
charm/s 2, 44–5, 217 Church of Sant’Apollinare, in Classe 92
charter/s 17–19, 96, 204–5, 220, 256–9, 264, Church of Santi Marco e Andrea, on
277, 283–4, 303 Murano 212
Chelles 248, 254 Church of Santi Silvestro e Martino ai Monti,
chi-rho, see christograms in Rome 212
Chieti 299 Church of St Andrew, in Ravenna 191
Chilon of Sparta 156 Church of St Gregory the Illuminator, in
Chindasvinth, Visigothic king 216 Zvart’nots 187
Chlothar I, Merovingian king 204 Church of St John, in Ephesos 184
Chlothar II, Merovingian king 205 Church of St Justus, in the Celone valley 141
Christ 1, 6, 20–1, 28–9, 31–6, 39, 41, 45–9, Church of St Mary, in Casaranello 92
51–4, 56–8, 62, 67, 70–1, 74, 77, 79–83, Church of St Michael, in Germia 179, 184
86, 92, 99, 104, 115, 123, 130, 193, 207, Church of St Polyeuktos, in
209, 218, 221–2, 225, 227, 229, 232, 237, Constantinople 144, 160, 162–5, 167–8,
240, 246, 249, 252–3, 255, 257, 268, 282, 174–5, 188, 227
284, 288–91, 294–5, 297–9, 304, 306–8, Church of St Stephen, in Ravenna 191–2
311, 313, 317–18 Church of St Stephen (Fatih Camii), in Triglia
Christianity 6, 14–16, 20–1, 31, 33, 35, 48, (Trilye) 274
67, 86, 101, 118, 315 Church of Sts Cosmas and Damian, in Rome 188
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366 General Index

Church of Sts Sergius and Bacchus, in Constantine I, emperor 2, 30, 50, 54–5, 57–8,
Constantinople 167–81, 195, 225, 227 60–1, 68, 77, 103, 295, 313–14
Cilicia 219, 221 Constantine V, emperor 180, 185
circle/s 5, 10, 21–2, 42, 45, 64, 79, 104, 115, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos, emperor 175
121, 129, 203, 229, 234 De ceremoniis 92, 175
circus/es 116, 125–6, 168, 252 Constantinople/Constantinopolitan 1, 61,
Blues, circus faction 125–6 72–5, 87–91, 97–8, 103, 134–48, 151,
Greens, circus faction 125–6 159–63, 166–7, 175, 184–5, 188, 190–1,
Civitavecchia 269–70 195, 200, 203, 208–9, 220, 223, 225,
Classe 92, 151 227, 275, 288, 290, 314–16
Claudius, bishop of Turin 294 Aqueduct of Valens 74
Clement of Alexandria 10, 34–5, 129–30 Arch of Theodosius 90
Exhortation to the Heathen 129 Column of Arcadius 74, 76, 90, 185
Fragments 34–5 Forum Tauri 90
Stromata 10, 31, 39, 128 Golden Gate 74–5, 90
Clementinus 142–4 Great Palace 136, 185
Cleobulus of Lindus 156 Hebdoman Palace 136
Clichy 204 Hormisdas Palace 167
clipeus 57, 119, 142, 144 Land Wall 208–9, 220
Clodius Ablabius Reginus 116–17 Mangana 227
cloth/s 55, 101, 281–2 Maritime Gate 185
linen cloth 219, 281–2 Theodosian Walls 74
liturgical cloth 219 Constantius I (Chlorus), emperor 52
Clovis II, Merovingian king 203–4 Constantius II, emperor 68, 70, 77, 86
cochlearia 153–4, 158 contorniate/s 116
Codex Arcerianus 236 Copts/Coptic 35, 45, 47, 77, 101–2, 105, 219,
Codex Argenteus 236 222–3, 225, 234, 297, 320
Codex Corbeiensis 229 Corbie, abbey of 233, 246, 253, 255, 292
Codex regularum 262 Corinthians, book of 81
Codex Sinaiticus 31, 34 Corippus, Flavius Cresconius 225
Codex Usserianus Primus, see Ussher Gospels Council of Constantinople 87
Codex Valerianus 232–3, 235 Council of Nicea 61
coin/s, coinage 6, 16, 20, 22–3, 29, 54–7, Council of Trullo 100
61–2, 67–8, 72–5, 88–92, 97–8, 109–11, Crispus, emperor 54–5
122, 133–9, 142, 151, 159, 166, 172, cross/es 1–2, 5–6, 10–11, 14–15, 17, 20, 22–3,
180, 199–206, 214–16, 225, 229, 231, 27, 29, 31–4, 45, 47, 51–5, 70–5, 77–8,
242, 255–6, 258–9, 263, 265–7, 269, 80–92, 94, 102–5, 117, 126, 134–5,
271–2, 302, 315–16, 318–19 142–4, 154, 156, 159, 166, 176, 180,
ceremonial issues 72, 75 182, 186, 188–9, 192–3, 195, 204,
coin-medallion/s, see medallion/s 207–9, 212, 216–23, 225, 227, 229,
decanummia 215 231–5, 240, 244, 246, 248–9, 252–7,
denarii 109 260, 265, 284–7, 289, 291–9, 301–4,
follis/folles 137, 200 306–11, 314–16, 318–20
minimi 137 cross-pendants 219
nummus/nummi 90, 137–8, 143 crux ansata (ankh-cross) 77–8, 101–2,
pentanummia 137–8, 215 104, 209
semissis/semisses 72–3, 97, 139 crux decussata 82, 84
siliqua/ae 72, 89, 137, 201 crux gammata (swastika) 45, 83, 117
solidus/solidi 54, 57, 70, 72–4, 79, 88, 97, crux gemmata (jewelled cross) 80, 88, 91–2,
139–40, 189, 202 229, 232, 234
tremissis/tremisses 72–3, 89, 92, 94, 97–8, crux quadrata (Greek cross) 82–4, 86, 102,
204, 231 299, 314
Cologne 243, 245, 257, 297 four-armed cross 20, 314
Columbanus 277 Holy Cross 23, 33, 81, 87–9, 98–9, 105,
comites sacrarum largitionum 139, 142 257, 303, 308, 314
compendium scripturae 16–17 Latin cross 73, 89–90, 92, 96–7, 188, 209,
Consecratio panel 131–3 233, 295–7, 308, 314
Constans I, emperor 65, 68 monogrammatic cross 51, 70–1, 82, 84, 94,
Constantina, empress 83 102, 154, 229, 231–3, 299, 316
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General Index 367

sepulchral crosses 219 Durobrivae 39
tau-cross 32, 34, 101, 249, 252, 254–5, 301
crossbow fibula/s 66, 147, 150–1 Ecclesiastes, book of 246, 284
Crucifixion 28–9, 31, 47–8, 77, 79, 83, 229, Ecclesiasticus, book of 284
246, 249, 252–3, 255, 284, 286, 291–2, Ecclesius, bishop of Ravenna 188
307, 313 Echternach 243
Cupid/s 118–19 Echternach Gospels 237–9
curse tablets/defixiones 41–2 Edict of Milan 50, 57
Cyprian of Carthage 82–3, 275 Edict of Rothar 233
Testimoniorum libri tres adversus Judeos 82 Egica, Visigothic king 216
Cypros 153 Egypt 2, 15, 29, 35–6, 42–3, 45, 71, 84,
Cyril of Jerusalem 86–8, 99 99, 101–4, 111, 140, 175, 220, 222–3,
Catecheses 86 297, 320
Eleuteria 117
Dagobert I, Merovingian king 204 Elias, archbishop of Grado 190–1
Dalmatia 190, 213 Eloe 104
Damasus I, pope 62, 118, 123 Emilia Romana 213
Dares Phrygius 273 Encaenia 87
De excidio Troiae historia 273 encolpion 77–8, 102–3
De inventione litterarum (De inventione Eous 304, 306
linguarum) 22, 272, 278–86, 292, Ephesos 17, 121, 125–6, 179, 184, 252
298–9, 317 Ephraim the Syrian 34
De litteris colendis 275 In sanctam Parasceven 34
De litteris latinis quidam sapiens epigram/s 118, 156, 158, 162, 166, 168
interpraetatus est 240 Epigram on the Seven Sages 156
Dead Sea 71 epigraphy 16, 19, 70, 105, 130
Decentius 67 Epirus 186
defixiones, see curse tablets Episemon 33
demon/s 45, 99, 104, 234, 284–5 Epistle of Barnabas 31–2
Deuteronomy, book of 246 epitaph/s 5, 17, 30, 71, 115, 267–8
Devil 44–5, 297 Esquiline Hill, see Rome
dextera Dei (hand of God) 74 Esquiline Treasure 121–4, 131, 152
diagram/s 7–8, 36–7, 276, 301–4, et-Tereif, Sudan 219, 223
306–8, 318 Étrépagny 205
die-engravers 33, 216 eucharist/eucharistic 125, 227, 247, 250,
Diocletian, emperor 50 252–3, 255, 291, 317
Diomedes 159, 279 Carolingian Eucharistic controversy
Dionysius, cult 234 253, 255
Dioscorides 273 Eucherius, brother of Empress Maria 77
De materia medica 273 Eudocia, empress 72–4, 89, 136, 161–2, 314
diplomatic/s 16–17, 19, 203, 205, 255, 257, Eudoxia, empress 72–4, 89, 91, 161, 314
259–60, 262–4, 266, 298–9 Eudoxius 100
diptych/s 131, 133, 138, 142–6, 159–60 Eufrasius, bishop of Poreč 189
dish/es 95, 153, 220 Eumeneia 30
Djémila 56 Eusebius of Caesarea 52–6, 61, 86–8, 295
domus Faustae 52, 70 Ecclesiastical History 53–4, 88
Donatus 159 Life of Constantine 53–5
Ars maior 159 Eutiches 299
Donatus Orthigraphus 240–1, 279 Ars de verbo 299
Ars grammatica 240 Eutychios, bishop of Poreč 209
Dorchester, see Durnovariae evangelist/s 96, 158, 209, 219, 236–7, 282,
dove/s 39, 79, 115 295, 307
Dracontius 277 St John 307
Satisfaction 277 St Luke 158, 307
Dumetios, bishop of Nicopolis 186 St Mark 158, 236, 275, 307
Dura-Europos 28 St Matthew 158, 236, 275, 307
Domus ecclesiae 28 exile/s 58, 60, 91, 161, 253
Durham Gospels 237 Exodus, book of 32, 309
Durnovaria (Dorchester) 66 Ezekiel, book of 32, 82
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368 General Index

faith 29, 286 Gepids 201
fastigium 295 Gerace, Sicily 123
Fausta 52 Germia 179, 184
feasts of the Holy Cross 87, 89, 98, 293–4 Gerward 265
Exaltation of the Cross 87, 98, 294 Gestalt 3, 5, 9, 121
Invention of the Cross 89, 294 Ghor es-Safi 71
Filocalus, Furius Dionysius 118, 120–1, 123, gift/s 58, 65, 78, 91, 116, 123, 128, 142, 144,
126, 129–30, 236, 240 147, 161, 188, 225, 288
Flaccilla, empress 72–3, 89 glass/es 20, 62, 64, 73, 111–12, 139–40, 212
Flavius Anicius Olybrius, emperor 160 Glazier Codex 102
Flavius Anicius Olybrius Junior 160 Gnosticism 35
Fleury, abbey of 240, 260, 273, 297 Gnostic 15, 20, 35, 38–9, 44, 48, 67, 82,
Florus 123 126, 128, 313
Folcwich, bishop of Worms 265, 275 gnostics 35, 38–9
formula/s 41, 44, 75, 105, 120, 124–5, 220–1, God 2, 21–2, 27–8, 30, 32–5, 39, 47, 49, 51,
247–50, 252, 286–7 55, 57, 70, 74, 79–82, 86, 92, 105, 120,
Fraga 66 124–6, 129, 156, 176, 192, 204, 208,
Frampton, Dorset 66 220–3, 229, 242, 246–7, 250, 252–3,
France 13, 42, 236, 243, 264, 273, 276, 294, 255, 257, 265, 268, 284–5, 287, 289–90,
297, 299–302, 304 295, 298, 304, 306–8, 310, 314, 316, 320
Francia 247, 271, 287 Godepert, Lombard king 204
East Francia 277–8, 286 Golgotha 86, 91–2, 96–7, 292, 304
West Francia 264 gospel-book/s 22, 96, 220, 229, 232, 234–5,
Franco-Saxon School 245–6 237, 242–4, 247, 254, 265, 275, 287,
Frankish 96, 243–4, 248–9, 253–9, 265, 267, 294–5, 297–8, 317
273, 275, 277–8, 281, 286, 292–4, Gospel of John 80, 229, 237, 245, 255, 298
311, 317 Gospel of Luke 34, 125, 232, 237, 304
East Frankish 263, 276–8 Gospel of Mark 237
West Frankish 248, 253, 288, 290 Gospel of Matthew 237, 265
Freising 299, 301 Gothic 142, 211, 236
fresco/es 52, 70, 223, 295 Gothic Bible 236
Fridugis 299 Grado 189–91
Frudegard 253 Grado Baptistery 189–91
fuglinae 141 graffito/graffiti 28, 86, 90, 99–100, 217
Fulda, abbey of 277, 307 graph/s 4, 6–8
Fulrad, abbot of St Denis 256 graphic devices 8, 10–11, 16, 19–22, 30, 35,
funerary inscriptions, see inscriptions 47–8, 58, 60, 77, 105, 109, 111, 115,
funerary plaques 20, 83, 114 117, 120–1, 127, 132–3, 135, 142, 159,
funerary stelae, see stelae 163, 171, 176, 180, 192, 194, 205, 208,
funerary tabulae 39, 65, 114, 130 214–21, 225–9, 234–7, 242–8, 255, 257,
Furnos Minus 70 262, 264, 271–2, 282, 284, 288–92,
297–9, 306, 310, 315, 318
Gaius, epitaph of 30 apotropaic graphic devices 20, 41, 44–5, 47,
Galatians, book of 307 51, 53–4, 56, 61, 65–6, 81–2, 86, 99–101,
Galerius, emperor 50 103, 142, 216, 221–2, 225, 234–5,
Gallican 248 284–5, 295, 308, 313–14
Gaul 45, 53, 65, 67, 98, 199, 201–6, 215, cryptographic graphic devices 22, 260
232–4, 236, 248, 255–7, 259, 262, 267, graphicacy 3, 6–8, 13, 23, 30, 48, 79, 96, 105,
316–17 120, 134, 143–4, 238, 252, 262, 284,
Gauzlin, bishop of Paris 254 287, 292, 303–4, 306–7, 311, 318
Gelasius I, pope 21, 247 Great Prayer of the Mass 250
Gelasian sacramentaries, see sacramentary Greek 14, 27–35, 39–47, 52, 71, 78, 82–4, 86,
Gelasius of Caesaria 87–8 102, 104, 109–14, 117, 120, 124, 128,
Church History 88 133, 135, 137, 140–4, 147–9, 151, 154,
Gelimer, Vandalic king 201 156, 158, 162–3, 167, 176, 186, 189, 208,
Gellone Sacramentary, see sacramentary 213, 217–22, 229, 231–2, 239–40, 246,
gematria 14 256, 260, 265, 267, 273, 278–9, 281–2,
gem/s 30, 33–4, 41, 87, 90, 110–11, 126 284–5, 291, 299, 308, 314, 316, 320
Genesis, book of 31–2, 176 Gregory I, pope 232–3, 247, 286, 304
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

General Index 369

Gregorian sacramentaries, see sacramentary iconotext 3
Regula pastoralis 232, 304 ideogram 126
Gregory IV, pope 268, 307 ideology 13
Gregory of Nyssa 87, 99 Illiricum 232
The Life of St Macrina 87, 99 illuminated manuscripts, see manuscripts
Grimalt 262 Illustrated Beatus 295
Grimoald, Lombard king 204 imagetext 3, 19, 23
Gundila 154 imagistic lettering 19, 238, 242, 247, 249
Gundobad, Burgundian king 201 ingots 65
Gundomar II, Burgundian king 201 initials 18, 22, 28, 229, 232, 235–7, 240–58,
271, 275, 283, 286–7, 308, 316–17
Hagia Irene, in Constantinople 103, 169, monogrammatic initials 22, 232, 235–7,
172–3, 179–82, 184–5 240–3, 246–8, 252, 255, 271–2, 275,
Hagia Sophia, in Constantinople 1, 98, 143, 283, 286, 317
168–9, 172–83, 187–8, 195, 290, 315 Te igitur 22, 241, 247–9, 251–5, 286–7, 291
‘Beautiful Doors’ 290 Vere dignum 22, 241, 247–55, 286
templon screen 1, 180 Innocent I, pope 91
hagiography/hagiographic 48, 99 inscription/s 19, 28–9, 32, 41, 45, 47, 52,
Handegis, bishop of Pola 269, 271 56–7, 62–72, 75, 83–5, 111–18, 124,
Hanto, bishop of Augsburg 263, 265, 285 139, 143–4, 156, 158–9, 166–7, 186,
hastae 38, 42 189, 193, 208–10, 220, 268–9
Hebrew 27, 31–3, 81–2, 84, 278 funerary inscription/s 32, 56, 62, 68, 71–2,
Helena, empress 88–9, 91, 98–9, 207, 314 75, 85, 115
Helena legend 88–9, 99, 207 Insular 18, 190, 234, 237, 243, 246–9, 257,
Helisachar 259 283, 294, 303, 316–18
Hellenistic 27, 29, 47, 57, 109–12, 133, Insular decorated manuscripts,
166, 223 see manuscripts
Helmeric, royal vassal 277 Iona 232
Helmerik, monk 277–8, 285 iota-chi, see christograms
helmet/s 55–6, 65–6, 207 iota-eta, see christograms
Helmmerichus/Helmericus, abbot of Lorsch 277 Ireland/Irish 232, 234, 240, 278–9
Heraclius, emperor 97–8, 141, 151–2 Irenaeus of Lyons 35, 39
heraldry/heraldic devices 8, 18 Against Heresies 35, 39
Hermopolis, Egypt 220 Isaiah, book of 32, 34, 46
Herod the Great, Judean king 29 Isidore of Seville 31, 44, 205, 239–40, 300
Hesperus 304–6 De natura rerum 301
hieroglyphs 36, 42 Ecclesiastical Offices 205
Hilary of Poitiers 272 Etymologies/Etymologiae 296, 300–1
Hildigarius 259 Isidoros of Miletus 175
Hincmar of Reims 288 Islamic 320
Hinton St Mary, Dorset 66–7 isopsephy 14, 30, 47
Hippo Regius 206 Israel 28
Hitherius, chancellor 256–7, 299 Istanbul 150, 152, 169, 177–8, 181–6, 225,
hoard/s 39–41, 123, 143, 147–8, 154 227, 290
Desana hoard 147–8, 154 Hippodrome 185
Reggio Emilia hoard 147 Tekfur Saray palace 185–6
Holy Sion, monastery of 209–10, 220 Yenikapi 151–2
Honoratae 161 Istria/Istrian 189, 208, 269
Honorius, emperor 70, 77 Italy 50, 56–7, 75, 79, 84, 88, 96, 111, 131,
horse bit/s 207 137, 140–2, 144, 147–8, 150–1, 165,
hostage/s 200 167, 191, 199–204, 208, 213, 220, 229,
Hrabanus Maurus 23, 276–8, 303–11, 318 231–7, 259, 265, 267, 272, 278, 281–2,
In honorem sanctae crucis 23, 303–11, 318 286–8, 294, 302, 316–18
In libros regum 276 ivory/ivories 16, 131–3, 142, 144, 159, 208
Hyakinthos of Nicea 186, 220
Jacob, Old Testament figure 83
Iao 104 Jeremiah, book of 246, 260
Iconoclasm/Iconoclastic era 11, 22, 221, 223, Jerome 87, 260, 265, 299
294, 316 Expositio in Isaia 299
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

370 General Index

Jerusalem 32, 82, 86–91, 98, 285, 314 Lateran 52
Mount of Olives 86 Latin 9–10, 14, 27, 31–2, 41, 44, 47,
Temple of Jerusalem 86 51–2, 54, 58, 73, 78, 88–92, 94, 96–7,
Jesus, see Christ 102, 109–11, 113, 115, 118, 120, 124,
Jeu 35–8, 82 128, 135–6, 140–1, 143–4, 148, 151,
jewel/s 77, 80, 87–8, 91–2, 295 154, 156, 158–9, 187–8, 200, 206,
Jews 27, 31–2, 38–9, 44, 48, 81–3, 86, 99, 208–9, 213, 216, 219–20, 232–7,
104, 128, 218, 240, 250, 284–5, 295 239–42, 246, 255–6, 260, 273, 278,
Jewish 27, 33, 44, 82–3, 86, 99, 103, 128, 218, 282, 286, 291, 294–7, 308, 314, 316–17,
250, 284–5 319–20
Joaurre 248 Latin America 9, 19
Joel, book of 246 Lebanon, Lebanese 45, 70
John II (Mercurius), pope 166, 187–8 lectionary/lectionaries 247, 249
John, bishop of Tomis 186 Leo 121
John, magister militum 141–2 Leo I, emperor 92, 136, 139
John Chrysostom 91, 95, 99, 103, 231 Leo IV, pope 269–70
Homilies to the Colossians 99 León 232, 235–6, 295, 307
John of Ephesus 97 Leopolis 269
Ecclesiastical History 97 Lesbos 149
John of Gaza 229 letter/s (epistolary) 1, 4, 86, 127, 131, 133,
John Scottus Eriugena 246 253, 265, 267, 282, 288
Joseph the Scot 303, 305 letter/s (graphic character/s) 1, 6, 8–9, 14, 16,
Judas Kyriakos 89 18–19, 22, 27–35, 39, 42, 44, 47–8,
Julian the Banker (argentarius) 189 51–2, 54, 57–8, 60, 68, 70–1, 77, 80–2,
Julius Nepos, emperor 137 84, 91, 105, 109–18, 120–1, 128–9,
Julius Victor 132 132–5, 137, 142, 150, 156, 159, 163,
Ars rhetorica 132 166, 169, 171–3, 176, 186, 192, 202–3,
Justin I, emperor 137–8, 143, 161–4, 167 205–6, 214, 217–20, 225, 229, 235–43,
Justin II, emperor 91, 137–8, 143, 180, 185, 225 246–9, 252, 254–7, 260, 262, 264–5,
Justin Martyr 32, 52, 81–2 267, 272–3, 275, 278, 281–4, 288–9,
Dialogue with Trypho 32 291–2, 295, 297, 299, 304, 306–8, 313,
First Apology 52 315–17, 319–20
Justina 68 Lex Romana Visigothorum 232, 235
Justinian I, emperor 1, 21, 98, 137–8, 141, 143, Libius Severus, emperor 136–7
156, 161–4, 167–8, 171–82, 185–90, 206, Libri Carolini 297, 309–10
213, 215, 225, 229, 231, 315 Libyssa (Gebze) 184
Justinian II, emperor 208–10, 220 Licinius, emperor 50, 52, 59, 61
ligature/s 28, 38, 109, 113, 115, 118, 235,
Kaper Koraon Treasure 158 248, 252, 313
Karlsruhe 233–4, 299, 302 limestone 41, 223
Kiev 221 Lindau Gospels 294–5
Kings, book of 32 Lindisfarne Gospels 234, 237–8
kingship 13, 23, 133, 199 literacy 3, 6–7, 18, 28, 30, 42, 120, 134, 143,
knot/s 57 242, 275
Solomon’s knot/s 45, 101, 103 liturgy 6, 87, 120, 176, 241–2, 247–8, 252,
koine 222 268, 294–5
Kornelimünster, abbey of 262 liturgical 21, 39, 44–6, 65, 82, 87–8, 91, 97,
Kratigos/Mytilene Treasure 149 99, 158, 190, 193, 219–20, 242, 246–7,
Kumluka Treasure 209 249–50, 252, 254–5, 273, 275, 290–5,
Kuvrat, khan 147 297, 304, 307, 311, 318
logo/s 6, 18, 20, 23, 27
La Vedrenne 42 Logos 80, 130, 156, 255, 257
labarum 54–6, 61, 65 Lombard 96, 190, 203–4, 212–14, 233–4,
Lactantius 2, 10, 50–4, 86 265, 292, 316, 320
De mortibus persecutorum 51–4 London 271–2
lamella/ae 41–2, 44 Longobardos 291
lamp/s 109, 111, 209, 212–13, 218 Lopicenus, bishop of Modena 267–8
Lampsakos Treasure 156, 220 Lorsch, abbey of 241, 265, 273, 275, 277,
Laon 204, 244, 278, 294, 296, 302 280, 286
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

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Lothar I, Carolingian king 243, 259–60, martyrium/martyria 86–7, 90, 118
289, 320 Martyrologium of Wandalbert of Prüm 276
Court School of 243 Mary Magdalene 275
Lothar II, Carolingian king 262 mathematics 175
Lothar III, Carolingian king 260, 264 Mauretania Caesariensis, Roman province 56
Louis II, Carolingian king 262, 265, 288 Maurice, emperor 97, 141
Louis IV, Carolingian king 260, 264 Maurinus, priest 229
Louis the German, Carolingian king 262, 277 Mausoleum of St Eufemia, see Basilica of
Louis the Pious, Carolingian king 259–60, St Eufemia
262–3, 265, 268, 277, 289, 299, 302, 307 Maxentius, emperor 50–1, 54, 86
Louis the Younger, Carolingian king 263 Maximian, bishop and archbishop of
Lucca 215, 267 Ravenna 188–9, 191–3, 208–10
Lucian 31 Meaux 249, 299–300
Lis Consonantium 31 medallion/s 5, 46–7, 55–8, 61, 67, 73, 79, 92,
Lullingstone, Kent 76 116, 119–20, 129–31, 149–50, 154, 163,
Luni 215 166, 169, 172–3, 185–6, 189, 191–3,
Luxueil, abbey of 234 200, 206, 208, 212, 220, 222, 225, 227,
Lyons 67–8, 188, 201–2, 229, 272 252, 274–5, 290, 295, 297–8, 302–3,
see also contorniate/s
M. Scribonius Libo Drusus 42 coin-medallion/s 55, 61
Macrobius 148 Senigallia gold medallion 200
Magna Bulgaria 147 Megiddo 28
magic 2, 5, 14–16, 20–3, 38–9, 41–8, 82, 99, Melchior Goldast 278
103–5, 124, 126, 128, 142, 225, 234, Melkite 128
260, 313, 319–20 menorah 218
Magical Book of Mary and the Angels 45 Merovingian 44, 97, 151, 199, 202–6, 215–16,
‘magical’ characters 22, 41–8, 104, 128, 229, 231, 243, 248, 255–6, 316
234, 319 Mersin, Cilicia 219, 221
charactera/charactêres 15, 20, 41–8, 82, Milan 50, 57, 75–6, 88, 94, 301
103–4, 126, 142, 234 milestone/s 56
signes pommetés 45, 105, 320 Miletus 223
magician/s 44, 48 theatre of 45
Magnentius 67–8, 72 mint/s 11, 29, 54, 56, 67, 89, 109–10, 135–7,
Mainz 243, 295, 308 200, 202–4, 215–16, 256, 265–6, 271
Malaja Pereshchepina, Ukraine 147–8 Minucius Felix 34, 82
Mamas 186 Octavius 34
manuscript/s 5, 18–19, 22–3, 27–9, 41, 45, Missale Francorum 248
47, 51, 96, 102, 118, 134, 161–2, 209, Missale Gothicum 248
216–311, 316–20 missorium 68–70
illuminated manuscripts/s 18, 288 Modena 267–8
Insular decorated manuscript/s 18, 237 Mondsee, abbey of 277
map/s 6–8, 301, 303, 306, 318 Moneta, figure of 139
mappa mundi 306 monogram/s
T–O maps 301, 303, 318 acclamatory monograms 21–2, 113, 115,
marble 55–6, 65, 100, 112, 114–15, 117, 121, 118, 126–7, 216, 252, 255, 286, 319
125–6, 133, 144, 163, 166, 168, 175, calligraphic monograms, see calligraphic
180, 185–8, 190–2, 200, 208, 212, 220, devices
223, 225, 227 Charlemagne’s monogram 256–60, 263–5,
breccia marble 168 272–3, 282, 284–6, 299, 317
porphyry 55, 103, 175 cruciform monograms 10, 22, 57, 81–105,
Proconnesian marble 163, 168, 175, 188, 191 125–6, 140–3, 147, 148–59, 169, 172–3,
Synnada marble 168 180, 184–7, 205–35, 252, 256–9, 263–9,
Marcian, emperor 136, 139, 225 272–311, 315–20
Marciana 123 dedicatory monograms 274–5
‘Marcomannic’ runes 260 episcopal monograms 189–93, 209,
Marcus 39, 136, 148 267–8, 316
Marcosian ‘Gnostics’ 39 imperial monograms 1, 134–41, 152, 172,
Marcus Aurelius, emperor 111, 124 175–8, 180, 182, 184, 195, 206, 216,
Maria, empress 77–8, 103 227, 315
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

372 General Index

monogram/s (cont.) North Africa 1, 44, 56, 70, 81–2, 151, 199,
intercessory monograms 21–2, 51, 112, 201, 206, 213, 219, 232
124–7, 209–10, 216–17, 220, 252, 314 Northumbria/Northumbrian 243, 257
monogrammatic culture 20–1, 105, 199, notae Caesaris 278
212, 235–7, 317–18 Notitia Galliarum 262
monogrammatic initials, see initials Novatian 83
Palma et laurus 17, 114, 116–18 Treatise Concerning Trinity 83
urban monograms 204, 214–15, 272, 316 Nubia 219, 222–3
Monophysite 160, 167 Numbers, book of 32, 52
Monte Gargano 292 numeracy 6–7
Montecassino, abbey of 287 Numidia 56
Montejo de Tiermes 206 numismatic/s 16, 54, 56, 61, 67–8, 72–3, 89,
Monza 96, 204, 212, 219, 282 92, 98, 109, 112, 133–9, 200–3, 214–15,
mosaic/s 28, 39, 45, 57, 66–7, 70, 79, 83–4, 255, 265, 271, 302
90–2, 96, 98, 100, 103, 168, 176, 191–3,
195, 227–30, 268, 281, 313 occult characters 5, 15, 50, 313, 319–20
Moses, Old Testament figure 32, 52, occult signs, see signs
309–11 Odo, West Frankish king 260, 264
mosque 171 Odovacar 137, 151
Mount Sinai 219, 223, 229 Old High German 278
Justinianic basilica 229 Old Testament 31–2, 81–2, 229, 282, 284,
Moselle 150–1, 282 288, 290
müezzin mahfili 171 Omaharus 147
mural 52 omicron 135, 142, 172
Muslim/s 22, 98, 140 orality (oracy) 7
Myra 209 Orestes 143–4
The Mystery of the Greek Letters 128 Origen 33, 82, 234
Orosius 231, 235, 278, 294, 296
Naples 96, 273 Seven Books of History against the Pagans 231,
Catacombs of San Gennaro 96 278, 294, 296
Narbonne 256 Orpheus/Orphic 67
Narratio de S. Sophia 179 Osius, bishop 257
Navira 114–15 ossuary/ossuaries 32, 83
Nazareth 79, 246 Ostia 166
Near East 18–19, 81, 319 temple of the Fabri Navales 166
Nectarios 152 Ostrogothic 22, 125, 137, 140, 143–4, 147–8,
Nemfidius of Marseilles 256 151, 164, 166, 190, 199–203, 214–15,
Neon, bishop of Ravenna 192–3 236–7, 316
neophytes 79 ouroborus 126
Neoplatonism 21, 127, 129 Oviedo 295
Neoplatonic 129, 176 Oxyrhynchus papyri, see papyrus/papyri
Nero, emperor 110–11
Nerses III, katholikos 187 Pacatianus 117
Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople 220 pagan/s 1, 31, 39, 41, 44, 53, 82–3, 86, 99,
New Testament 29, 31, 240, 275, 282, 296 117, 123, 131, 156, 215, 278
Nicea 61, 186, 220 pagan temples 41, 99
Koimesis church 186, 220 paideia 21, 154–9, 163
Nicholas I, pope 266–7 Pakos 186
Nicomachus Flavianus Senior 127 palaeography 14, 16, 18
Nicomedia 50, 134–5 palaeographic 27–8, 115, 235
Nicopolis 186 palaeolithic 2
basilica A 186 Palatine Anthology 156
Nicosia 153 Palestina Tertia, Roman province 71
niello 122, 150, 153 Palestinian/Palestine 45, 83–8, 91, 96, 99,
Nika revolt 161, 182 103–4, 111, 128
nomina sacra 27–8, 237, 289, 297–8 palindrome/s 260, 311
Normandy 304 pallium 67
North Adriatic 57, 188, 190, 192, 269, 318 Palma et laurus, see monograms
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

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panegyric 1, 225 porphyry, see marble
papyrus/papyri 5, 15, 38, 41–7, 71, 102–3, potestas, see power
105, 256 power 2, 5, 10, 12–15, 18, 20–3, 36, 41–2, 44,
Oxyrhynchus papyri 70–1, 84 48, 81–2, 86, 91–2, 99, 105, 125–6, 133,
Paris 294 136, 139, 147–9, 151–2, 161–2, 168, 176,
Paschal I, pope 267–9 190, 195, 201, 208, 210, 215–16, 223,
Paschasius Radbertus 253 234–5, 242, 252–3, 257, 259, 285–6,
paten 125 292, 295, 304, 313–16, 319–20
patronage 13, 74 episcopal power 190
Paul the Silentiary 1, 176, 180 imperial power 136, 152, 161, 176
Descriptio Sanctae Sophiae 1, 176, 180 potestas 319
Paulinus of Nola 39, 88, 129–30 royal power 215, 319
Carmina 129–30 Pragmatic Sanction 190
Epistolae 39 prefect/s 58, 100, 139–40, 142, 164,
Pegasus 212–13 166, 199
Pelegrina Turcia 123–4, 131, 152 praetorian prefects 100, 140, 142, 199
Peloponnese 175 urban prefects/eparchs 58, 97, 139­­–40, 142,
pentalpha (pentagram) 284–5 164, 166
Perctarit, Lombard king 201, 204 Priesterstein, in Mainz 295, 308
performativity/performative 11, 18, 129, 247, principes 20
249, 252 Priscian 159, 241, 298–9
Pergamon 186 Institutiones grammaticae 159, 241, 298–9
Periander of Corinth 156, 158 Probinus, archbishop of Grado 190
Peter, bishop of Salona 190 Proclus 130
Peter II, bishop of Ravenna 192 Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides 130
Peter III, archbishop of Ravenna 192 Proconnesus, Proconnesian 133, 163, 166,
Petronia 114 168, 175, 188, 191
Philip III Arrhidaeus 109 Proiecta 123
Philippians, book of 125 ‘Proiecta Casket’ 123
Philippianus 123 Protestantism 18
Phocas, emperor 97, 185 Provence 202, 204
Phrygia 30, 168 Proverbs, book of 284
Piacenza 212 Psalms 32, 272, 282, 300
pictorial turn 3 Pseudo-Dionysius 10, 129, 246, 310
pilgrim/s 87–8, 285 The Divine Names 129
Bordeaux pilgrim 87 Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius 57–60, 303, 307
Egeria 87–8 Puglia 92
Paula 87 Pulcheria, empress 72, 74, 89, 91, 136, 314
Pippin I of Aquitaine, Carolingian Purple Gospels 265
king 259–60 Puteoli 264
Pippin II of Aquitaine, Carolingian king 262
Pippin the Short, Carolingian king 256 Quadratinus 114
Pittacus of Mytilene 156 queenship 89
Pla de Nadal, near Valencia 208–9 Quintus Aurelius Symmachus 1, 127, 131–3, 147
Placidia 160–1 Epistolae 1, 127, 131
plate/s 70, 121–3, 131, 150–3
Plato 52, 128 Ratramnus of Corbie 253–5
Timaeus 52 On the Body and Blood of the Lord 253–5
Plotinus 10, 129 Ravenna 21, 70, 79, 92, 94, 137–8, 147–8,
Poitiers 97, 225 151, 164–5, 188–95, 200–1, 208–12,
Pola 208, 269, 271 215, 223–5, 227–9, 231–2, 235, 237,
political culture 8–13, 21–2, 199–204, 259, 265, 267–8, 281, 287
284, 316, 319 Archiepiscopal Chapel 189, 191–2, 194,
polycandelon/polycandela 209–12, 220 227, 268
polytheistic cults 48 basilica Herculis 165
pompa circensis (circus procession) 116 ecclesia Gothorum 165
Poreč (Parentium) 188–90 Mausoleum of Galla Placidia 92, 94
Eufrasian Basilica 188–90 Neonian (Orthodox) Baptistry 192–3
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374 General Index

Reccesvinth, Visigothic king 216 Sacramentary of Sens 254
Regensburg 262, 277 Sacramentary of St Denis 254
Reichenau, abbey of 277 Sacramentary of St Gall 248
Liber memorialis 277 Sacramentary of St Maurice of Tours 290–1
Reims 243–5, 264, 276, 288, 301 Sacramentary of St Vaast of Arras 254–5
Resurrection 234, 284 Sacramentary of Stavelot 255
Revelations, book of 39, 46, 68, 227 Sacramentary of Tournai 254
Rhine 151, 243, 282, 294 Vatican Sacramentary 248
Rhone 232 saint/s 20, 48, 62, 67, 87, 90, 99, 162, 168,
Richbod, abbot 273 281, 292
ring/s 16, 34, 45, 65–6, 84, 87, 90, 96, 99, St Apollinaris 92, 287
101, 111–12, 126–7, 144, 147–9, 151–2, St Babylas 90
203–6, 218, 221, 285, 314–16 St Boniface 278, 303, 308
finger-rings 34, 148 St Macrina 87, 99
signet-rings 148, 203–6, 314 St Michael, see Archangel Michael
ritual/s 2, 6, 11, 16, 21, 36, 41, 44, 92, 112, St Paul 53, 81, 96, 231, 307
120, 166, 195, 225, 242, 247, 250, 252 St Saba 128
Roman empire 20, 42, 47–8, 50, 61, 66–7, 71, St Sisinios 103
74–5, 82, 87, 90, 124, 135, 141, 143, Salaman 104
154, 199–200, 216, 259, 292, 313–14 Salem, abbey of 280
Eastern Roman empire 74–5, 90, 135, Salona (Solin) 189–90
143, 314 Salzburg 264, 275, 299, 302
Western Roman empire 20, 61, 67, 216, 314 Sampi 33
Romania 147, 186 San Lorenzo in Pallacinis, abbey of 212
Romano-British 44, 67 Sanctus 46–7
Rome 2, 17, 21, 30, 50, 52–3, 61, 68, 70, 73, Santa María de Hito, Cantabria 206
76–7, 83, 89, 91–4, 96, 98, 109, 113–17, sarcophagus/sarcophagi 55–7, 61, 65, 75–6,
121–5, 131, 138, 140–3, 164–6, 187–8, 79, 103, 114, 119, 204, 223–5
195, 202, 210, 212–13, 215, 224, 232, Sarcophagus of Stilicho 75–6
243, 246–7, 256, 266–71, 287–8, Sasanian 163
294, 318 scribe/s 22, 28, 120, 205, 219, 242, 257,
Basilica of St Peter 77 259–60, 265, 273, 275–8, 283–5, 287,
Crypta Balbi 141, 212, 213, 216 301, 317
Esquiline Hill 122–3 script-image/s 19, 241
Flavian Amphitheatre 116–17 Sea of Marmara 184–5
Mausoleum of Augusta Constantina 83 seal/s 1, 15–16, 18, 32, 35–6, 38–9, 41, 44,
rotae 301–4 47–8, 50, 65, 82–4, 92, 105, 126–8, 131,
Rothschild Cameo 77 133, 140–1, 147, 200, 205, 219, 221,
Rudolf, West Frankish king 260, 264 223, 227, 242, 258–9, 278, 285, 289–90,
Rufilla 114–15 294, 298, 313–16
Rufinus of Aquileia 88, 101 baptismal seals 38, 82
Ecclesiastical History 88 conical seals 140
Rule of St Benedict 294 ‘eagle’ seals 147
runes/runic 260, 278 esoteric seals 48, 50, 126
Rusticius 114–15, 133 ‘Gnostic’ seals 38–9, 44
lead seals 16, 65, 140–1, 205, 221,
Sabaoth 47, 105 289, 315
Sabinus 141 mystical seals 15
sacramentary/sacramentaries 22, 241–3, 247–9, seals of Revelation 92
252–5, 286–7, 290–4, 317 sigillography 16, 19, 38, 42, 141
Bobbio Missal 249 sphragistics 290
Gelasian sacramentaries 247–9, 293–4 Sedulius Scottus 241
Gellone Sacramentary 249, 253, 255 In Donati artem maiorem 241
Gregorian sacramentaries 247, 249, 253–4 Segontium (Caernarvon), Wales 42
Sacramentary of Chelles 248, 254 semiotic/s 9, 11, 17–18, 241
Sacramentary of Le Mans 254 semissis/semisses, see coin/s
Sacramentary of Marmoutier 249, 252 Sendelenus 272–3
Sacramentary of Metz 253 Septuagint 27
Sacramentary of Noyon 254 Serena, mother of Empress Maria 77
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/02/18, SPi

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shield/s 2, 51–4, 70, 73, 180, 214 St Amand, abbey of 243, 245, 254–5, 265, 275
Sibylline 284 St Bertin, abbey of 246, 299
Sicily 123, 151 St Chad Gospels 234
Sico, Lombard duke 265, 267 St Denis, abbey of 204–5, 254, 256, 288
Side 186 St Gall, abbey of 234, 248–9, 258, 262–3,
sigillography, see seals 276–7, 279–80, 284, 297, 301
Sigismund, Burgundian king 201 St Martin of Tours, abbey of 212, 291, 297, 299
sign/s 1–23, 27–36, 38–9, 41–2, 44–5, 47–57, St Maximin, abbey of 262
60–6, 70–5, 77–84, 86–92, 95–102, St Riquier, abbey of 253
104–5, 109, 111, 115–17, 124–6, 130–9, stamp/s 11, 19, 101, 109–11, 123–4, 133,
141–3, 147, 149, 152–4, 156, 164, 168, 138–9, 141–4, 148, 159–60, 172, 210,
174–6, 179–80, 182, 185–95, 199–203, 217, 221, 265, 298, 315
205, 208, 210–12, 214, 216–17, 219–23, brickstamps 141–4, 160
225, 227, 229, 231–2, 234, 236–7, 240, staurogram, see christograms
242, 244, 246–8, 252, 255–9, 262–9, staurology 82
272–3, 278, 281–304, 306–8, 310–11, stelae 71, 75, 83, 102, 104
313–20 stigmata 223, see also tattoo/s
cruciform signs 81, 103, 289, see also cross/es Stilicho, father of Empress Maria 75–8
geometric signs 81 Sudan 219, 223
graphic signs 1–23, 27–8, 31, 33–6, 41–2, Swabia 265
47–8, 50–1, 56, 62, 64, 75, 79, 80, 83, swastika, see cross/es, crux gammata
105, 111, 116, 124, 126, 130, 133, 137, Switzerland 258, 287
139, 149, 152, 154, 156, 168, 176, 180–2, Syagrius of Autun 225
185–7, 189–90, 192–5, 202, 210–11, 214, Symbaticius 166
216, 219, 223, 234, 240, 242, 252, 256–9, symbol/s 5–15, 17, 20–3, 27–34, 39, 41–2,
262, 264–8, 273, 278, 282, 284–6, 290, 47–57, 59–61, 65–8, 70–1, 73–7, 79–82,
294, 308, 313–14, 318–20 84, 86, 88–92, 95–6, 98–101, 103–5,
iconic signs 9, 237 115, 117–18, 126, 134–5, 137–9, 142,
indexical signs 9 144, 149, 151, 154, 168, 176, 185, 190,
‘magical’ signs 15, 23, 44, 45, 103, 204–5, 208–9, 214–18, 225, 227, 234,
see also ‘magical’ characters 248, 256–7, 259, 263, 285–6, 288, 299,
occult signs 15, 42, 45, 49, 313 301, 303, 308, 313–14, 318–20
protective signs 32, 34, 38–9, 101 decorative symbols 8
signa 1–2, 17 fish symbols 57
symbolic signs 9–10, 67, 98, 117, 225, 308 political symbols 12
signes pommetés, see ‘magical’ characters solar symbols 53
siliqua/ae, see coin/s symbolic 7–11, 13–15, 21–2, 28–32, 35–6,
silk/s 152, 219, 281 52–4, 57, 67–8, 77, 80–4, 89–90, 92, 95,
Sirmium, Pannonia 201 98, 117, 133–4, 138, 142, 144, 168, 175,
Siscia 56, 61–2 181, 192, 195, 199, 203–4, 208–9, 217,
Sixtus III, pope 92 225, 229, 237–41, 249, 252, 256–7, 264,
Socrates Scholasticus 91, 101 266, 286, 288, 293, 295, 299–301,
Sol Invictus 53, 57 303–4, 306–8, 313–14, 317–19
solidus/solidi, see coin/s symbolism 31–2, 39, 57, 61, 81, 88, 90, 128,
Solinus 134 237, 246, 256–7, 259, 308
Solomon, Old Testament king 46, 103, 281–2, Symmachi 118, 131
284–5, 288, 290, 318 synagogues 103
Solomon’s knot, see knot/s Synod of Arles 57
Solon of Athens 156 Syracuse 139
Song of Songs, book of 284 Syria, Syrian 15, 28, 30, 34, 45, 90–1, 103,
Sophia, empress 138, 185 140, 152, 158, 208, 210, 223
Sozomenus 101 Syriac 297
Spain 44, 66, 110, 151, 199, 205–8, 214–15,
219, 232, 256, 295 Tábara 295
Spania, Byzantine province 98, 206 Tabarka 70
speech-act/s 252 tabula/ae 39, 65, 83, 104, 112, 114–15,
sphragistic/s, see seal/s 117–19, 125, 130, 143–4, 269–70
spolia 163, 175 Tacitus 42
spoon/s 65, 153–9, 220 Annales 42
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376 General Index

tattoo/s 219, 223 Ukraine 147, 221
tau-rho, see christograms Ussher Gospels 229
Te igitur, see initials
Teodemir 208 Valencia 208
Tertullian 32, 34, 81–2 Valens I, emperor 68
Apology 34, 82 Valentinian I, emperor 68–9
The Chaplet, or de corona 82 Valentinian III, emperor 92, 160–1
Five Books Against Marcion 32 Valentinus 118, 120, 129–31, 133, 255
The Testament of Solomon 285 Valhramus 265, 275
Tetragrammaton 27 Vandalic 199–201
textile/s 102, 219, 281 Vatican 34, 119, 212, 243, 248, 276–7,
textual amulet/s, see amulet/s 294, 320
Thales of Miletus 156 Vatican Sacramentary, see sacramentary
Theodahad, Ostrogothic king 200 Venantius Fortunatus 97, 225–6, 256–7, 303
Theodebald, Merovingian king 203 Venice 163–5, 185, 235
Theodebert I of Metz, Merovingian king 151, Monastery of Sant’Apollonia 185
202–3 Piazza del Popolo 165
Theodelinda, Lombard queen 96 pilastri acritani 163–5
Theoderic, Ostrogothic king 125, 137, 140, San Marco Cathedral 163–5, 185
147–8, 164–6, 192, 199–202, 237 Venus 123
Theodora, empress 21, 143, 167–9, 171–6, Vere dignum, see initials
178–87, 290, 315 Vergil 158
Theodorus, bishop of Aquileia 57, 64–5 Eclogues 158
Theodorus, bishop of Ravenna 224 Verona 320
Theodosian 20, 72, 74–5, 79, 89–91, 122, versus intexti (visual/calligraphic poetry) 57, 60,
136–7, 314 303–11
Theodosius I, emperor 72, 89, 123 Vespasian, emperor 110–11
Theodosius II, emperor 72, 88–91, 100, Vespasian Psalter 271
134–5, 137, 159, 161–3, 240, 259, 314 Victor, bishop of Ravenna 188–92
Theodulf of Orléans 257, 273, 296–7, 302, Victory, personification of 73
309–10 Vienna Dioscorides 161–2
Libri Carolini 297, 302, 309–10 Villa Fortunatus, Fraga 66
Theophanes 91 Villareggia 121, 125
Theotokos (Mother of God) 74, 105, 186, 208, Virgin Mary 45, 223, 236, 268, 281, 285–6,
220–2, 283, 290, 316 318, see also Theotokos
Thermantia, sister of Empress Maria 77 Visigothic 44, 204–8, 214–16, 239, 252–3,
Thessalonica 138 256, 316
Thessaly 168 visual studies (visual literacy) 3, 6–7, 18
Thomas, Byzantine local governor 208 visual thinking 3–6, 255
Tiberius II, emperor 97 visualcy 3, 143–4
Ticinum 55–6, 61 visualization 3–4, 6–8, 120, 276, 318
Tironian notes 264 Vitalian 141
Toledo 205 Volusianus (Lampadius), C. Ceionius
Tomis (Constanza) 186 Rufius 166
Toscana 212 votive plaques 39–40, 44
Totila/Baduila, Ostrogothic king 200 Vrap, Albania 221
Toulouse 79, 223
Tours 212, 243–5, 249, 290–1, 297–300, 302 Walafrid Strabo 297–8
Trastevere 267 Commentary in Psalms 297–8
tremissis/tremisses, see coin/s Wales 42, 301
Trezzo sull’Adda 212 Wandalbert of Prüm 276–7
Triconch Church, in Aphrodisias 166 Wandalgarius 258–9
Trier 2, 53–4, 65, 67, 86, 262 Water Newton, Cambridgeshire 39–44, 65
Triglia (Trilye) 274 wax 41
Trinity 221–2, 229, 240, 253, 307 weights 138–43, 315
Troy 273 Weissenburg (Wissembourg), abbey of 275,
Turcii 123 282, 299, 301
Turcius Secundus 123 Werden 277
Turkic 147 Wisdom, book of 284
Tzobon 222 Wittiza, Visigothic king 207, 216
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General Index 377

Woodeaton, Oxfordshire 44 Zacharias 291
Worms 265 Zahrani, church of, in Lebanon 70
wreath/s 5, 54–5, 61, 70–4, 77, 79, 89–92, Zeno, emperor 136–7
111, 117, 122, 130, 134, 142, 152–6, Zenobios 221–2
164, 187, 203, 215, 225 Zephaniah, book of 246
Zoora 71–5, 83–5, 104–5
Yalova Caplicari 185 Zvart’nots 187–9