PS, Part Four: About Distinctions

Large Spotted Cats

In working on the entries for the Leopard Wranglers, I read five different books on Gozzoli and the frescos in the Medici Chapel. Not one of the authors in those books -- all art historians and so presumably trained to look at details -- managed to make the distinction between leopards and cheetahs that Gozzoli did in the frescos, although one did use a shotgun-technique of referring arbitrarily to "leopards," "cheetahs," and "hunting leopards." [Late note: Joan Lloyd in African Animals in Renaissance Literature and Art makes the distinction.] Gozzoli paints both cats together here.

 The cheetah -- the hunting leopard -- is on the horse.  The leopard is on the ground.  Cheetah spots are single, like thumb-prints.  Leopard spots come in clusters, as if printed by your fingertips bunched together.   Gozzoli makes the animals different colors, though they are actually about the same, and shows clusters of four spots for the leopard: it is much more likely to be five. The spot distinction is really all one needs for the cheetah-leopard issue.  If you bring in other species of spotted cats, which we will not do here, you may need more help.  If you are concerned with hunting any of them them, you have no business here at all. The medievals did not help the distinction by calling cheetahs "hunting leopards," except that it indicated that they were well-aware that there was a distinction. For them, the essential difference was that cheetahs are easily trained to hunt with humans.  They are magnificent fast animals, perfectly designed for Art Deco imagery, with exaggeratedly small heads and large haunches. A leopard of the same body length as a cheetah is, but with a larger, proportionately broader skull.  They are over all heavier, bulkier, and highly resistant to training. They are killers, tracking and pouncing over comparatively short distances, but they are not good over long distances.  Leopards were collected for their beauty and exotic qualities, along with lions, ostriches, and cheetahs -- and that is why two of them are shown in the Medici frescos -- but serious hunters wanted the cheetahs. The painters, frankly, did not pay much attention to the head and skeletal distinctions between the animals, but they were very clear about the spots. In the entry (link above) I wrote about Nick Nicholas' exhaustive article on the topic of nomenclature.  Knowing the differences between the names and animals is not a major life skill necessary for most people: knowing that there are differences and how to look for them is. [Late note: that may not be a leopard.  Please read the comments at the end of this.]         

Hats

I have read too many comments this year identifying the imperial Palaiologan hat as a skiadion, a shade-hat. Interestingly, it is almost impossible to find a contemporary Greek representation.  The only one I know, I have used here before, but it has nice detail. 

Pseudo-Kodinos, who told us about the Leopard-Wranglers, has a lot of entries on the skiadion. "The skiadion of the despot is entirely covered with pearls, on his aer (see the tails on Manuel's hat below) is his name in gold embroidery. . . . If [the despot is a young boy] he is on horseback, he wears the skiadion. When he becomes an adolescent, he wears the skiadion in the palace. . . the skiadia of the relatives of the emperor, who are despots, are red and gold, embroidered with gold thread, and have a cross embroidered with pearls. . . The skiadion of the sebastokrator is red and gold, embroidered with gold thread.  His aer is like that of the despot."   Headgear is not enough to distinguish rank at the Palaiologan court.  You need the full description of robes and colors, embroidery on robes, and colors of shoes to have any sense of security, but it does let you know that however poor the empire had become, there was full employment for the gold-embroiderers. The skiadion has been repurposed in the witch hat.

Update: one of my most faithful readers sent me another late 15th C image of skiadia, from the Istituto Ellenico in Venice. Emperors might have worn the skiadion in private, but in public performance -- at least in the West because that is where the images come from -- they wore the kamelaukion.  I don't know if the name refers to a camel's hump.  It is rounded and sectioned, rather like a melon, and is sometimes called a melon hat.  John's had jewels on top that could be changed.  To my knowledge, there is no Byzantine image of an Emperor in a kamelaukion, but the Westerners loved it and made images of Manuel II, John VIII, and Thomas Palaiologos.  This is Manuel, more or less -- his beard was white -- from the Tres Riches Heures of the Duc du Berry.

John's hats are more familiar, and he was more concerned about his personal style.

It is difficult to get good photographs of images of Thomas, but he is shown here from the tomb of Pius II who made a feeble effort to make him Emperor:

Western artists, when not painting visiting Palaiologoi, used the kamelaukion to represent "exotic person from Eastern country where they have better hats than us." 

There is only one Byzantine representation of a kamelaukion that I have been able to find, and I have given it an entry of its own, the portrait of Manuel Laskaris Chatzikis at Mistra.  There are, I think, exceptional reasons for this portrait, but you will have to read about them there.

Further update: the same reader found a miniature image of kamelaukia in the 14th-C manuscript of the Tale of Alexander in the Istituto Ellenico of Venice.  Here, even though by a Greek artist, they are used to identify exotic foreigners.  So it may not indicate Palaiologan use.

The Leopard-Wranglers

XII: Concerning the imperial bride:

One should know that at the arrival of the imperial bride (δεσποίνης νύμφης), whether by land or by water, when the day when she is to be be brought safely into port at The City is known, the emperor, her husband-to-be (ἀνὴρ αὐτῆς ὁ νεόνυμφος) goes to meet her with his father, if he is living; if not, he goes alone. If she comes by land, it is the custom that she alight in the neighborhood of Pēgē; if she comes by ship, near the church of the Blachernes outside the city, where it happens to be suitable. When she arrives at one place or another, the wives of the dignitaries, senators, and the other highest and most well-born archons, welcome the lady and bride-to-be warmly and attend her as an empress. Both the emperors come to meet her, if the bridegroom has no father, he does as has been said. If then she comes by ship, he meets her at the acropolis at the Evgenikos Gate, and if by land, outside the city as has been said. After that, the emperors, or the emperor, leave her there; the wives of the archons mentioned, whether the wives of the despots, or the wives of the sebastokrators, or of the caesars, or of the other well-born, put the red shoes on her. Dressed in the imperial robes prepared in advance, and escorted as an empress, she comes up to the palace on horseback; after that the marriage ceremony is held on the selected day.

Equally, one should know this: when the leopard-wranglers (παρδοβάγιλοι) bring in their leopards, they enter the palace on horse, and similarly leave on horse. Also, those bearing the cold drinks enter the palace on horse.

* * * *

This is my translation of the chapter on imperial brides from Pseudo-Kodinos, a book compiled about 1360 with later additions about protocol at the Palaiologan court in Constantinople, and it got me to thinking about Sophia of Montferrat who was so scalded by her marriage to John VIII.  He rejected her immediately after the wedding, apparently because he did not like her appearance.

But look at the sequence of events in the light of this protocol.  Sophia arrived in Constantinople on a Venetian galley in November of 1420.  It docked on the Golden Horn, under the Blachernae, probably about where the pretty little mosque is now.  She was welcomed by the court ladies as if she were an empress.  She was John's third cousin, her family used Greek names, and she had probably already learned to speak a little Greek.

Then John and Manuel arrived.  These two slight imperial males dressed as stiffly as icons, and behaving almost as stiffly, greeted her.  Then they left and the court ladies put the imperial scarlet shoes on her feet, and dressed her in robes something like her mother-in-law Helena is wearing here. Then they processed along those narrow twisting streets up the steep hill to the Blachernae  on horseback, and we know nothing about how Byzantine women sat a horse.  If they rode astride like Maria of Trebizond, no one has left any information.  

The procession was led by the leopard wranglers, and the picture above, identified as young Giuliani de Medici in the Gozzoli fresco below, leads off the processions of the Magi as one of them.

The boy was about seven years old when the fresco was painted in 1460, anjd the procession of the Byzantines and John VIII into Florence had happened fourteen years before he was born.  He was murdered in the Duomo in 1478 in the Pazzi Conspiracy.  That is a shame, but it has nothing to do with us here.

The wedding was on 19 January 1421.  John was crowned that day -- Pseudo-Kodinos gives meticulous directions for the ceremony, and then, apparently on the next day, John crowned Sophia.  Byzantine emperors crowned their wives.  He never spoke to her again. 

Why was there a wedding at all?  John had two months between meeting her at the boat, and the ceremonies in Agia Sophia and he must have judged this big blond woman instantly.  Would it have been possible for him to have rejected the bride who had been delivered to him (with a great deal in the way of jewels, gold, and financing)?  Does "incompatibility" make a non-marriage easier to accomplish? Did anyone tell her what was going on before it happened?

When she left, it was on a Majorcan ship chartered at such short notice that it had to leave the Genoese imports it had been charted for on the wharf.  The ship brought Sophia and small group of courtiers across the Golden Horn to Galata, where the Genoese all came down to the waterfront and paid homage to her as their Empress.  The Majorcan ship took her to Chios, where she was provided a Genoese galley back to Genoa.  When she arrived home in Montferrat, she was welcomed as Empress.  All the way along, everyone, with the exception of John, was very kind to her.

She took her crown when she left.  I had thought it might be her wedding crown -- Greek rite weddings crown the bride and bridegroom, and exchange their crowns -- but Pseudo-Kodinos says nothing about that.  John was crowned at the wedding, as Emperor, and the imperial crown can be exchanged for nothing else.  Sophia was crowned Empress of the Eastern Empire and all she had to show for it was the crown John had put on her head

 * * * * * *

I am giving a paper this weekend at the meeting of the Australian Association for Byzantine Studies at the University of New South Wales in Armindale entitled "The Brides of 1420," in which I will be discussing Sophia's face, and Cleofe's clothes.

The animal in the picture above is actually a cheetah (on the ground below it is a leopard), but "cheetah-wrangler" doesn't work in English nearly as well as "leopard-wrangler." Besides, cheetahs were also called "hunting leopards." Nick Nicholas wrote a paper a few years back -- "A Conundrum of Cats: Pards and their relatives in Byzantium," in which he analyzed all the Byzantine terms for members of the cat family, and then tried to identify each one. Byzantines called a cheetah a pardos.  Gozzoli got it right.  That is, by the way, Benozzo Gozzoli's self-portrait -- the man with the blue and white hat in front of the horse, below.

To be continued.