Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium

This is a revised and translated edition of Gilbert Dagron’s Empereur et pretre, an acknowledged masterwork by one of the great Byzantine scholars of our time. The figure of the Byzantine emperor, a ruler who sometimes was also designated a priest, has long fascinated the western imagination. This book studies in detail the imperial union of ‘two powers’, temporal and spiritual, against a wide background of relations between church and state and religious and political spheres. Presenting much unfamiliar material in complex, brilliant style, it is aimed at all historians concerned with royal and ecclesiastical sources of power.

Table of Contents

List of plates; List of plans; Acknowledgements; Bibliographical abbreviations; Introduction; Part I. The Principles: 1. Heredity, legitimacy and succession; 2. Proclamations and coronations; 3. Ceremonial and memory; Part II. The Emperors: 4. Constantine the Great: imperial sainthood; 5. Leo III and the iconoclast emperors: Melchizedek or antiChrist?; 6. Basil the Macedonian, Leo VI and Constantine VII: ceremonial and religion; Part III. The Clergy: 7. The kingship of the patriarchs (eighth to eleventh centuries); 8. The canonists and liturgists (twelfth to fifteenth centuries); 9. ‘Caesaropapism’ and the theory of the ‘two powers’; Epilogue: the house of Judah and the house of Levi; Glossary; Index.

Author Biography

Gilbert Dagron is Professor Emeritus of Byzantine History and Civilisation at the College de France and Honorary President of the International Committee on Byzantine Studies.