The edited volume is a peculiar form of academic publication. Apart from a vague mandate to bundle together a series of articles under the imprimatur of a specific theme or occasion, there are few concrete expectations for the genre. As such, edited volumes slip very easily into incoherence. Good edited volumes escape this tendency, and they generally fall into two broad categories. The first is a volume that successfully unites its individual authors in collective work on a well-formulated and interesting problem; this is frequently the precipitate of a well-planned conference. The second is essentially a companion volume with a narrow or novel focus. Like a good companion volume, it provides readers with an accessible and up-to-date picture of scholarly knowledge on a given topic, but at a higher level of resolution than is typical for most companion volumes. City of Caesar, City of God: Constantinople and Jerusalem in Late Antiquity, edited by Konstantin M. Klein and Johannes Wiendand, is a good edited volume of the second, companionate type.

The preface articulates a narrow and novel focus for the articles that follow: “This book explores the entangled histories of Constantinople and Jerusalem, two pivotal urban centers of the late-antique world. Each city experienced an unparalleled rise to prominence between the fourth and seventh centuries AD, but the relationship between the two hubs as a result of their new status has gone unexplored.” This is an interesting and well-conceived theme, but too vague to form the basis of a specific problem. As such, the task of the editors was to collect high-quality and up-to-date work on Constantinople and Jerusalem in Late Antiquity which also points toward the broader principles shaping their mutual interaction. They did an excellent job. The articles are high quality and written by well-selected experts, divided across four sections, “The Centers of a New World Order,” (introductory survey articles) “Urban Topographies Connected,” (archaeology and material culture) “The Power of Religion and Empire,” (church history), and “Jerusalem, Constantinople, and the End of Antiquity” (religious dimensions of imperial ideology in the seventh century). In practice, there are really two kinds of articles: some authors sketch out an accessible and up-to-date picture of one or another element of the late antique history of either Constantinople or Jerusalem, whereas others apply themselves to a specific episode of interaction between the two cities.

The articles in the former category are especially strong, making the volume useful as a first port of call for those without a deep prior background in the history of either city. The opening articles by Kai Trampedach and Rene Pfeilschifter, introducing the late antique histories of Jerusalem and Constantinople respectively, are worth the price of admission on their own (although, happily, the volume is open access). Both give an extremely learned, well-organized, and readable survey of their respective cities throughout the period covered by the volume and provide the reader with the necessary background for the more specific articles that follow. When comparing these opening articles with some of the other authors in this category, such as Neslihan Asutay-Effenberger on the walls of Constantinople (coauthored with Shlomit Weksler-Bdolah, who treats the walls of Jerusalem), or Jan-Markus Kötter on the ecclesiastical politics of Palestine, it becomes apparent that the book is also an act of grace for benighted Anglophones. Rene Pfeilschifter’s article in particular makes an entire trajectory of crucial German work on the political dynamics of the sedentary Constantinopolitan monarchy—running through Egon Flaig and Steffen Diefenbach—accessible to a much larger audience. The articles by Marlena Whiting on the communications network of Roman Oriens and Kai Trampedach on the Nea Church in Jerusalem are likewise notable for summarizing the author’s previously developed positions on some crucial issues, and Lutz Greisiger’s article on the history of Christian triumphal entries to Jerusalem from Heraclius to the present is an interesting and innovative survey.

Of the articles that focus on episodes of entanglement between the two cities, Johannes Wienand’s analysis of the multiple speeches that Eusebius gave before Constantine—in both Jerusalem and Constantinople—is particularly outstanding. Konstantin Klein’s article on the phenomenon of wealthy Constantinopolitans endowing martyria in Jerusalem and Constantinople, and Nadine Viermann’s article on the “surpassing Solomon” motif in Constantinopolitan church-building are fascinating micro-studies. Paul Magdalino’s examination of the Church of St. John the Apostle as the last free-standing church construction of late antique Constantinople and its link with the idea of the capital as a “New Jerusalem,” and James Howard-Johnston on the return of the True Cross to Jerusalem are more speculative but extremely stimulating.

The one consistent disappointment of the volume, which opens with an epigraph from Theodore Syncellus hymning Constantinople as the new Jerusalem, is the lack of any sustained engagement with the cultural and intellectual genesis of that identification. Magdalino insists that Constantinople’s claim to be the New Jerusalem rested on “its unrivaled concentration of churches and relics,” a thesis which is “too self-evident to require demonstration.” I disagree. More than one author in the volume falls back on the irritating Byzantinist habit—when faced with a cultural development that seems difficult to explain—of rippling their shoulders suggestively in the direction of “eschatology” as a cure-all explanation. This is especially frustrating given that many of the key ingredients for a more fully textured picture of Constantinople’s emergence as a New Jerusalem are incipient in the volume itself. Pfeilschifter’s arguments about the unusually coherent political consciousness of the urban populace of Constantinople, Viermann’s analysis of how the people of the capital were encouraged to see themselves as subjects of corporate punishment for sin at times of crisis, and Magdalino’s reflections on the apotropaic function of church building and relic acquisition—all point to a different dimension of how Constantinopolitans gradually came to see themselves as party to a covenantal relationship with God like that of the Jerusalemites of old. We already have the elements of a more interesting story of this development than attributing it to an irrational spasm of eschatological frenzy brought on by the year 500. But that does not distract too much from the virtues of the present volume. Perhaps it points instead towards the possibility of another good edited volume of the type that is focused on a single problem: bringing scholars together for a focused discussion of Constantinople’s shifting identifications with Rome, Babylon, and Jerusalem in late antique culture.