(described by J Arnott Hamilton, Byzantine Architecture and Decoration (1956 pp16-17)
Byzantine administration circled round the holy person of the Emperor, and his palace must needs reflect such august majesty. The Sacred Palace was not a single stately edifice but a whole cluster of buildings set almost haphazard in a wide garden at the eastern end of the peninsula. Constantine began the work and other emperors added to the series. Stately halls and audience rooms, sumptuous sleeping-chambers, churches, terraces and porticoes were scattered throughout the spacious gardens, whence a magnificent prospect extended across the sea to the Asiatic shore. Broad flights of marble stairs led from one level to another, and the gardens were beautified with trees and flowers. The buildings were of different shape, rectangular, octagonal, cruciform, and some of them were roofed with the Byzantine dome.
The The Emperor Constantine VII (Porphyrogenitus) has described the magnificence of the palace in his Book of the Ceremonies, and the splendour of its decoration evoked an amazed and universal admiration. The walls were panelled with polychrome marble; ranges of porphyry and marble columns upheld the roofs; gay hunting scenes in glittering mosaics spread themselves around the rooms; pavements charged with eagles and peacocks formed the floors; cupolas and ceffings gleamed with golden tesserae. There was a terrace whose golden roof rested on fifteen columns of Phrygian marble. There was a bronze fountain with a golden pineapple and bronze lions spouting water from their mouths.
Thousands of candelabra lit the spacious halls when darkness fell, revealing all the details of the rare brocades and tapestries.
Hardly anything has survived of the great Palace of the Emperors at Constantinople.
Beside the Sea of Marmora not far from the Church of SS. Sergius and Bacchus there rest the remains of a building which has been called the "House of Justinian". It is said to have been the residence of that monarch before his accession, but, though Df the Byzantine era, is of much later date. There were four doors Dpening out on to a balcony which faces the sea, and there were vaulted rooms inside. Near by was the Bucoleon, an addition to the Sacred Palace which was enlarged and fortified by the Emperor Nicephorus Phocas and which was the scene of his assassination. It received its name from the statue of a bull and a lion which adorned its quay, whence the Emperors were rowed in state in the imperial barge to visit sacred shrines upon or near the shore. William of Tyre in the twelfth century wrote with admiration of the statues of animals and the stately staircases and the marble quay. Excavations undertaken at the Sacred Palace within recent years have uncovered a magnificent mosaic pavement which is one of the most important discoveries of Byzantine archaeologists.
The Sacred Palace was the habitation of the Emperor, and every method was adopted to surround him with glamour and mystery. He was the supreme autocrat, the arbiter of destiny, the vicegerent of God, "the equal of the Apostles". A great army of functionaries, designated with grandiloquent titles, formed his court. Their costumes were of silk and other costly fabrics, appropriate for the long elaborate ceremonies which constantly took place. Perhaps it was the reception of foreign ambassadors which afforded the best occasion for display. The sovereign, clad in his imperial robes, stiff with cloth of gold and glittering with jewels, sat on his golden throne in the apse at the end of the great apart ment. Near him was a golden plane tree on which mechanical birds were perched. Two golden lions crouched beside the throne and two gryphons flanked its sides. The rarest treasures were exhibited in the alcoves. In their rich embroidered robes the court dignitaries, ranged in order of etiquette, awaited the entrance of the envoy. As he entered the mechanical birds on the plane tree began to sing and flutter: the lions roared and the notes of an organ pealed. The ambassador prostrated himself on the floor.
When he looked up he beheld the throne suspended in the air with the Emperor clad in a different but equally magnificent robe. The throne which had been carried through an aperture in the roof descended slowly to the floor. The ceremony will seem trivial to the modem mind, but it can well be imagined how it would astound the envoy of some barbaric nation whose mind had already been dazzled beyond conception by all the opulence of the imperial palace.
