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VI.—Notes on a Vellum Album containing some original sketches of public buildings and monuments, drawn by a German artist who visited Constantinople in 1574

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2011

E. H. Freshfield
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Extract

The interest in the unpublished document now submitted to the Society lies, mainly, in three large sepia drawings of a triumphal column, erected by the Emperor Arcadius in honour of his father the Emperor Theodosius the Great. My purpose is to draw attention to the historical importance attaching to these drawings, for, excepting some fragmentary sketches to be referred to presently, they are the only evidence we now possess to corroborate the narratives of contemporary historians who describe an important episode in later Roman history, when Theodosius the Great was engaged in a war on the Danube with a ‘new Scythian people who had not been seen before by any one’. We shall have no difficulty in identifying these new-comers, thus described by Zosimus, with the Tartar Huns, the forerunners of Attila and his host, who now, and for the first time, faced the Roman army in battle and were utterly defeated. The victory thus won for Theodosius and his imperial colleague, the second Valentinian, was considered, and not without reason, to be important enough to merit record in this triumphal column, for the westward invasion of the Huns, though not stopped, received a check from which it did not recover for another half-century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Archaeologia , Volume 72 , 1922 , pp. 87 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1922

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References

page 89 note 1 Zedler's, Universal-Lexicon, xlix, 1554.Google Scholar

page 89 note 2 Maximilian, the nephew and son-in-law of Charles V, was emperor from 1564 to 1576. He had concluded a treaty with Sultan Suleiman in 1567, and did not therefore join Don John of Austria and the Venetians at the Battle of Lepanto (1571).

page 90 note 1 Constantinople Byzantine et les Voyageurs du Levant, Paris, Leroux, 1919.Google Scholar A summary of the then known drawings of the Column of Arcadius is given on p. 68, with a short bibliography.

page 91 note 1 The families of Valentinian and Theodosius thus united by the marriage of Galla and Theodo-sius furnished the Romans with princes for ninety-one years, representing four generations. The table below (see next page) gives the dates of the accessions of these princes, and may help us to identify the chief personages represented on this pillar.

page 92 note 1 Ἒθνοѕ тι Σκυθικòν πãσιν ᾰγνωστον, Zosimus, 1, iv, p. 252 [38]. The whole story of this war deduced from Zosimus and Claudian is told in Gibbon's, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (ed. Professor Bury, J. B., vol. iii, p. 134).Google Scholar

page 95 note 1 Ebersolt, , Constantinople etles Vqyageurs du Levant, p. 68Google Scholar, enumerates them.

page 97 note 1 The figures do not help this identification. Perhaps the scene is allegorical.