Tea at Trianon: How Hagia Sophia Was Built

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, September 6, 2015

How Hagia Sophia Was Built

From Medievalists:

The fourth and final book of the Patria contains an account of how Hagia Sophia was built. While historians should be wary about trusting if these stories are true, it does offer an entertaining look at what, centuries later, the Byzantines believed to be how the construction of the church took place.

This building was the third church to be built at this location. The second church, which was only about a hundred years old, was a victim of the Nika Revolt that took place in January of 532, and was burned to the ground in the riots. A few weeks later, Emperor Justinian decided to rebuild an even bigger church. As the Patria states, “God inspired him to build a church such as had never been built since Adam’s time.”

The Byzantine government soon began making plans for the new building, with Justinian sending out orders to all the corners of his empire:

wrote to all his generals, satraps, judges and the tax officials of the themes that they all should search for columns, revetments, parapets, slabs, chancel barriers and doors and all the other materials which are need to build the church. All those who had received his order sent materials, from pagan temples and from old baths and houses, to the emperor Justinian by rafts, from all themes of the east and west, north and south, and from all islands.

(Read more.)