This latest contribution to our understanding of how Christianity reciprocally shaped the late Roman city taps into methodological approaches such as the social construction of reality and tradition formation to present a compelling fresh interpretation of how Constantinople became a Christian imperial capital over the course of its first hundred years. Late antique sources and modern accounts alike commonly depict Constantine's decision to found the city in 324 as having been motivated by the emperor's desire to turn his back on a pagan urbs Roma in favor of a Christian New Rome. Yet, Byzantium boasted a venerable history as a Greek polis and received considerable embellishments under Septimius Severus so that the chosen site on the Bosporus could hardly have appeared as terra nullius to an emperor intent upon founding a pristine Christian capital. Nor did Constantine bear only the identity of a Christian ruler. As emperor, he and his court imbued Constantinople with expectations about how an imperial capital ought to function as a stage for the discharge of imperial rituals, especially in and around the Hippodrome-Palace complex that was modeled on Rome's Circus Maximus-Severan Palace ensemble. How then did Christian communities in the new capital come to terms with Byzantium's past, Constantinople's civic cult, and the trenchant claims of a resident imperial court so as to arrive at an image of the city as a Christian imperial capital?

Falcasantos approaches the question by means of an archaeology of knowledge that takes as its point of departure the examination of ancient ideals regarding the classical city, specifically how competing groups, including Christians, appropriated these notions and even redeployed them within a narrative framework suffused with Christian triumphalism. Her analysis turns on the three main topics signaled in the book's subtitle. “Ritual” refers not only to the processions or liturgical services that took place in sacralized Christian spaces in the city but also to civic and imperial public rituals that long continued to eclipse the former in scale and impact. She presents these three spheres as moving according to a varied choreography, at times joining forces and at times competing with each other to define Constantinople's principal modes of expression as a community and, ultimately, its identity as a Christian capital. While “violence” may appear an endemic phenomenon—not least in the context of an urban community that would later (a century after the book's chronological scope) experience catastrophic urban violence in the form of the Nika Riot—Falcasantos evaluates intra-Christian sectarian competition in terms of how representations of violence were mobilized by church leaders to fashion identities for their own groups by strengthening boundaries separating them from out-groups. Violence in this chapter is read as a group management tool in fourth-century ecclesiastical disputes and as a narrative lens through which fifth-century church historians would write the history of Constantinople as a Christian capital. Meanwhile, “memory” points to the operation of tradition formation that not only promotes specific narratives but also erases or omits alternative ones. Readers are invited to reexamine Constantinople's history so as to recognize the complexity of the original religious landscape and the multiple interests and groups that competed to shape the city's identity.

Chapter 1, “Religion in Late Antiquity,” explores how the ancient city is rhetorically invoked in classical texts, especially in those belonging to the genre of ekphrasis. These self-reflexive works describing and praising ancient monuments reveal the prevalent mental paradigm that shaped how Christian and non-Christian elites thought about the city and why they acted as they did in relation to it. The complex traditions surrounding Constantine's foundation of Constantinople form the subject of chapter 2, which concludes with an insightful reading of Eusebius of Caesarea's ekphrasis on Constantine's mausoleum, the Apostoleion, as an early effort to put a Christian imprint on the new imperial city. The contingency of the identity of Constantinople as a Christian capital is the topic of the next two chapters. References to fourth-century intra-Christian sectarian violence served the needs of both Christian leaders (such as Macedonius, bishop of Constantinople under Constantius II) who desired stronger solidarity among their followers as they engaged in disputes with other Christians and those of fifth-century ecclesiastical historians (such as Socrates Scholasticus and Sozomen) who used the representation of past violence to emphasize the centrality of Constantinople to the unfolding story of theological controversies that drew in Christian communities throughout the empire through the fifth century and beyond. In chapter 4, the Constantinopolitan sermons of John Chrysostom provide the basis for examining how his exhortations for the reform of the habits of Christians along ascetic lines dialectically shaped Constantinople's image as a Christian capital. Chrysostom's homilies aimed to usher into being an ideal Christian community that could compete with and supplant civic and imperial public acts within Constantinople with its own rituals. While John's earlier tenure as a preacher in Syrian Antioch—for which there exists a relative abundance in sources that allow historians to triangulate interplays of ecclesiastical, civic, and imperial approaches to public life—has been well studied by others in similar terms, extending the analysis to Constantinople remains a welcome move. Chapter 5, “Imperial Piety under the Theodosius II (408–450) and the Writing of Christian History,” homes in on the career of Emperor Theodosius II to argue for the centrality of his agency behind the literary projects that retroject the mid-fifth-century image of Constantinople as a Christian imperial capital to the fourth century.

The book begins with the premise that Constantinople was not a city devoid of a polytheistic past when Constantine made it an imperial capital in 324 and asks how and why this past came to be written out of Christian accounts of the city's foundation and early history. It finds the answer in Theodosian II's views on Christianity and his promotion of Constantinople's status as a patriarchal see. This Theodosian project that aimed to bind imperial authority and solidarity around an orthodox Christian identity provides the answer to the questions of how, why, and even by whom this process was carried out. Falcasantos's intelligent and thought-provoking book at once decenters and historicizes Constantine's role as the conditor of Christian Constantinople by suggesting that we should credit Theodosius II instead as the principal author of Constantinople's enduring image as a Christian imperial capital.