Carmen de Incendio

The Carmen de Incendio is an extensive narrative poem composed in iambic verse by the Byzantine teacher, literatus, and deacon Konstantinos Stilbes, and transmitted via the manuscript Marcianus Graecus 524. It is an invaluable source for examining the worldview of a Byzantine ecclesiastical dignitary in the face of tragedy and urban crisis, and his sense of collective sin and potential collective redemption. It describes in an ekphrastic mode a disastrous fire ravaged Constantinople on July 25th, 1197, and the way it swept away houses, workshops, warehouses neighborhoods, churches, and whole swathes of the city along with their inhabitants, regardless of their station in life. As the poem relates, it was this fire which consumed the Church of the Theotokos Kyriotissa, which would be rebuilt between the fire and the Fourth Crusade in its current iteration, now known as the Kalenderhane Camii, a fact which allows the current structure to be dated. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the richly decorated churches of the city which, to the clerical Stilbes, represent the most regrettable architectural losses from the fire and which occasion his most poignant lament upon the subject. Drawing upon a variety of classical and Biblical exempla to describe the fire, its human cost, and its deleterious effect on the urban fabric (an act which demonstrates the intellectual fertility of the Komnenian Age and the degree to which classicizing learning was a catalyst, rather than an impediment, to freedom of expression), Stilbes ultimately positions the fire as an instrument of God's judgement against a sinful population, comparing it to a cautery and the tears of the city's women to purifying waters, and expressing a hope that the contrition of the population will allow for a new beginning and a chance to rebuild. Yet, even so, such moral certainties are rendered ambiguous by his deeply trenchant descriptions of the innocent victims of the conflagration. The poignancy of his lament for a smoke-blackened Constantinople is rendered more acute by the way in which it anticipates the trauma and violation of the imperial capital during the Fourth Crusade and the literary responses to it. Moreover, it allows us an oblique view into the beliefs and sense of theodicy nurtured by a Byzantine ecclesiastical dignitary in the waning years of the twelfth-century.