Goodwin 1977 Reuse of marbles in Medieval Eastern Mediterranean.pdf

THE REUSE OF MARBLE IN THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN IN MEDIEVAL TIMES

By Godfrey Goodwin

i

Precious building materials have always been used over and over again - the

spoils of the architectural war. A section of the Colosseum is now the Palazzo Farnese and the Church of the Wisdom of God in the respectable Surrey town of Kingswood harbours capitals from Ephesus, the Studion, and the Myrelaion in Istanbul, besides a quantity of Byzantine marble. Precious marbles were trans

ported far and wide by sea and, although it is not surprising that porphyry from the Red Sea coast of Egypt is used in the Pantheon, it is interesting that Giallo

Antico from Algeria or Tunisia and Pavonazzetto from Phrygia which decorated, for example, the Basilica Julia in Rome have been found at provincial Colchester.1

The quarries of Proconessus supplied a low-grade but harmonious grey and white marble in great quantities to both the Byzantines and the Ottomans. The effect of these marbles on the character of Ottoman architecture, matched by the reuse of others not procurable fresh cut, is important not because of the influence of the past in terms of polychrome beauty but because of its influence on the proportions of columns on portico and colonnade.2

Like Ephesus, Constantinople was a depot for marbles and there are still marble shops in the former Phanariot section of the city today. Without such wholesalers, Hagia Sophia could never have been built so rapidly.3 Our know ledge of the marbles in the church comes not only from Procopius but from the detailed authorized account of Paul the Silentiary, Poet Laureate and Head of the Civil Service. His accuracy is vindicated by former doubts over a statement

that black rivers crossed the pavement of the nave, which were resolved when

the prayer rugs were removed to reveal that it was divided by dark ribs of marble which might at least be called brooks.

Only the provenance of the huge porphyry columns of the exedrae is in doubt. They may have come from Rome and, indeed, been stored for some

grandiose use because of their unique value, although the bronze bands probably mark where several have been broken or are composite. Porphyry, which is the hardest of all marbles, is notorious for wearing out cutting tools, yet it cracks

easily.4 The columns of the courtyard completely disappeared, probably before the

Ottoman conquest and so at the time when the Venetians stripped the principal, west faqade of the church, leaving one fractured panel of Proconessian marble hanging still as evidence of its former grandeur. This piece was probably one of a series, like the 36 floor slabs in the centre of the West Gallery, that were cut in

Pierre-OlivierTexte tap la machineGOODWIN, Godfrey, The Reuse of Marble in the Eastern Mediterranean in Medieval Times , Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, No 1 (1977), p. 17-30

18 REUSE OF MARBLE IN THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN

PLATE I

Venice. St. Mark's. The Tetrarchs and marble panels from Constantinople.

slices from a single block through which the veins ran true and opened up to pro duce a continual pattern of mirror images.5 It was only this west face of the Great Church that could be seen properly because the other flanks were masked

by the palace and secretariat, library, and other subsidiary buildings. Its marbles went to enhance the basilica of St. Mark along with materials from the immense church of St. Polyeuctus, which had been built between A.D. 524 and 527 by Anica Juliana, the sister of Justinian. As with Hagia Sophia this was a very short time in which to erect a stone and brick building almost as large as the Suley

maniye mosque. The so-called Syrian pedestals which stand outside St. Mark's on the Piazzetta side were matched by identical pedestals discovered during the excavation of St. Polyeuctus at ?ehzadeba?i.6

It was at this time that Dr. Firath of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum retrieved the lost half foot of one of the Tetrarchs on the Piazzetta corner of St. Mark's while working in the enormous buried rotunda which forms part of the remains of the palace of Romanus Lecapenus, below the Church of the

Myrelaion (Bodrum Cami). The Proconessian and other marble of St. Mark's and other churches in Venice

in part, at least, was not mint cut, but looted from dead and living monuments of Constantinople. Those used on the Piazzetta wall were as haphazardly slapped up as other marbles hung on kiosks of Topkapisaray later.

REUSE OF MARBLE IN THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN 19

PLATE II

Marmara Island (Proconessus). The Maible Quarry.

II

The Proconessian quarries cover the southern extremity of the modern Mar mara Island between Istanbul and the Dardanelles opposite Erdek. The centre of life is the battered, formerly Greek village of Palatya, which is set into a well

protected bay and is one of several villages or hamlets in the area. It can be reached by jeep over hill tracks and more easily by sea, although this is usually rough even when the water off the northern tourist coast is dead calm. The site is large, for the marble has been quarried almost at random for thousands of

years. The present track leads up the hillside past giant, overgrown blocks which


PLATE III

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Marmara Island (Proconessus). Plato back to back with Socrates.

relate to those at Palmyra and Baalbek, where three 2nd-century monsters measure 62 x 11 ft. and weigh 600 tons;7 but these were quarried locally: the blocks at Marmara had to be shipped in stouter boats than the takkas which ply the route from Palatya to Istanbul today.

15 years ago, the owner of a small quarry opened a new section in an area unworked since Hellenic times. He came upon an unfinished column and a tran som with Sophocles carved on one side and Pl&to on the other. Thus they were

worked to an advanced stage in the quarry where conditions were sufficiently bad to reduce a man's average working life to ten years: hence the use of slave or


PLATE IV

Marmara Island (Proconessus). Quarrying tools.

criminal labour by Christians and Muslims alike ? which is why the population was Greek until recent times.

After the Ottoman conquest, columns as such were no longer shaped until the 18th century, for the quantity of Byzantine columns available obviated the need to preserve such a skill, although the segmental facets of the enormous piers of the mosque of Sultan Ahmet were, in a sense, an exception. The quarry was

employed cutting blocks to be sliced into thin revetments or pavement or to be carved into the standard stalactite or lozenge capitals of the Ottomans. The tech

niques have altered little down to the present day. Formerly small holes were bored into the quarry face with the aid of water and sand until the block broke from the bedrock. The historic tools included picks, some of which were chisel ended, jumpers, which nowadays are driven into the stone to make holes for blasting charges, masons' points, and lifting dogs or scissors. Instead of being dragged, the rough-cut blocks now go down to the quay by lorry and thence to the next bay where there is a factory with one engine to drive the four cutting

machines, each armed with 50 saws. These cut a block into 50 slabs in six days. Sand is still filtered into the groove to eat into the marble and water to cool the blade just as when the work was done by hand. Unlike the Greeks and Byzantines, the Ottoman masons appear to have finished their work on the building site just


PLATE V

Edirne. Courtyard of the Mosque of Selim II.

as the Saljuqs did before them.8 I have watched a young mason start on a roughly chalked block and copy a stalactite capital in less than a week in the Tabhane court of the Siileymaniye complex.

Because Marmara Island was a quarantine station, we have numerous refer

ences to the quarries throughout Ottoman times and this paper is but a traveller's tale to add to a long list. Ahmet Refik quotes an order in council for marble that

has been shipped to Eregli to be taken to Edirne for use in the great mosque of Selim II there9 and a more elaborate order for the mosque of the Atik Valide at Oskudar in 1570. This order to the Qddti of Iznik and Sapunca states that some buildings contain marble in his district. The intendent of the mosque had been


PLATE VI

Istanbul. The courtyard of the Mosque of Ahmet I, requiring 28 marble columns, including Proconessian and Egyptian granite.

obstructed by local people and it was therefore decreed that no-one might inter fere or frustrate him from extracting marble; and the qadThad to see that trans

port was paid to deliver the material to the location of the mosque. He was to avoid negligence but also damaging property while the marble was extracted.10 This order is likely to refer to the columns of Byzantine and even Roman build

ings needed for the madrasa and hospital colonnades of the complex. An order for stone from Karamursel would imply that materials were gathered

at the depot there from Anatolia, but in 1604 Ahmet I ordered that marble was to be brought directly from Marmara Island for his father's tomb and since the

ships sent were late further ships were to be sent there.11 A further order states that the marble still had not reached the architect, Ahmet Dalgic, (or "the

Diver"). Ahmet I had continual difficulty in getting his orders obeyed as his troubles over Iznik tile supplies also make plain.12

When George Sandys visited the island at the same period he stated that it was

"formerly called Proconessus... celebrated for the quarries of white marble: and thereof now called Marmara where a number of poor Christian slaves do hew stones for the magnificent mosque which is now building at Constantinople by this sultan."13 In 1723 La Mottraye reports that "marble is extracted in large quantities from Pallatia, Marmara, for mosques employing 200 vessels".14


Lechevalier, however, says that where there were once sizeable towns one now

sees nothing but a few miserable Greek villages and a few monasteries,15 while Texier, 40 years later, states that one exploits blocks of little size, slabs, and tombstones for Constantinople. One detaches the block from the mountain with chisels after which one lifts it from its bed with iron wedges.16 Today the annual

output is 12,000 cubic metres and its cheapness is due to low labour costs and

primitive living conditions.17

Ill

Their stripping by Ottoman builders and peasants explains the lack of Byzan tine monuments in Anatolia, so that a small church near Nigde has a spurious importance. Before the coming of the Saljuqs, cities like Kayseri and Konya had cathedrals and many churches. Inevitably they made way stone by stone for

Saljuq hospitals, colleges, and mosques. The Saljuqs, in common with the Armenians, whom they employed among others as builders, had an appreciation of some facets of architecture, yet were blind to others. While the Armenians

disregarded symmetry to such a degree that one wonders whether the placing of doors off axis were not deliberate, the Saljuqs were unable to distinguish between capitals and bases, at least not at first, and used none at all if a column fitted

without them. It was not, we may be sure, because of that spurious hadith, to

quote Michael Rogers,18 that alleges that nothing so much wastes the substance of a believer as architecture.

The saray and citadel at Konya were built with care and so was the Ala'ettin mosque, which required a great number of columns of the Byzantine and Roman

periods. At Sivas, when we inspect the Gok madrasa or the Barugidi madrasa, we also meet with the rough reuse of columns and marble facets, carefully recut

when necessary. It should be noted that the Byzantines and the Saljuqs did not use true ashlar like the Greeks but economized by insetting a rubble and mortar core. Neither in Saljuq nor even in Ottoman times, when smooth columns became increasingly hard to find, were segmented or fluted columns reused. Indeed the borrowing of an antique fluted column was so rare that their appear ance in the mosque of Ivaz Pasha at Manisa in the 15th century is almost the

only occasion.

The worst despoilers of Anatolian antiquities were Western museums such as the Bode in East Berlin, which harbours a great amount of Miletus: so much that

Ilyas Bey, who built a mosque at Balat out of the ruined city, or Isa Bey, who

quarried the ravished hulk of the church of St. John at Ayaslug, by contrast behaved with restraint. At both mosques the marble is recut and remodelled in a

Syrian manner where necessary.

Already the Beylik period of these mosques presaged the exactitude and

engineering skills of the Ottomans, although its beginnings were not auspicious.


PLATE VII

Istanbul. Suleymaniye Complex. Tabhane Courtyard with reused Proconessian columns. The capital in the foreground is in the process of carving.

The mosque of the Hudavendigar was built at Assos in the midst of unlimited materials from moribund ruins and yet, because an inscription was meaningless to the patron, it was used clumsily as a decorative lintel.

In such circumstances, it is surprising that, although old buildings from the tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadae downwards were used as mosques, and ruins used as

quarries, the forms of antique monuments were copied so rarely that the Aqsa mosque at Jerusalem surprises just because its plan relates to that of a Constantin ian basilica. But spendthrifts have empty purses and by the end of the 16th cen

tury materials were increasingly hard to find, which accounts for the clumsy reuse of transoms, akin to those in the church of Constantin Lips, and in the

mosque of the Yeni Valide, both in Istanbul. A huge complex like that of Suleyman I with ten columned courtyards

required copious quantities of columns, including nearly all remaining in the

Hippodrome, while Gyllius reported seeing the pillar, meaning the column of the Virgin near the church of the Holy Apostles, on top of the Fifth Hill being broken up for the mosque19 but elsewhere says of Suleyman's tomb, "now build

ing", that elegant marbles were sent from all over the empire, old quarried slabs from palaces of Byzantium, Greece, and all Egypt.20

It was Dr. Cyril Mango who found the edict of Manuel which had hung in the


church of Hagia Sophia by pursuing an observation of Pigafetta's in 1567.21 The slab had been placed over the porch of Suley man's tomb. Sinan, who had sur

veyed the cathedral, had an acquisitive eye.22 A less conspicuous but more

devouring form of waste was the employment of Byzantine capitals, not just graciously as coffin rests, but in foundations. Masses of miscellaneous Byantine objects pack the garden of Hagia Sophia due to road works, where a city is built over a city. The Emperor Theodosius' triumphal arch was dug out of the widened road at Beyazit and related reliefs can be seen in the exposed foundations of the hammdm across the road. The porphyry sarcophagi of the first Eastern emperors have been found in the courts of the saray and on the railway embankment. The foundations of the baths of Sinan Pasha at ?ehzadeba?i proved to be a storehouse of Byzantine cut stone.

The same wastage was true of Egypt, where no marble was quarried after the Islamic conquest. This resulted in the curious Mamluk technique of cutting thin

strips of marble veneer sometimes from columns. This method simplified the intricacies of arching with joggled voussoirs,23 which otherwise needed the gift

of magic to erect, although Roland Mainstone has now offered a solution to the

problem. I would here add that Egypt was so short of wood that it came to be

prized as much as marble and bronze and to be purchased or stolen when needed in new buildings.24

The Ottoman sultans were thrifty too. When an old kiosk was demolished, the marble and tiles were stored for reuse elsewhere, the latter in beds of fern and moss. When Ahmet III built his library in the Third Court of Topkapisaray, the columns of the Kiosk of the Pool which preceded it were re-erected as the colonnade before the present Treasury.25 Elsewhere the dearth of columns had a

more serious effect, like that on the otherwise important mosque of Semiz Ali Pasha at Babaeski built by Sinan where the portico is sadly ignoble for a work

acknowledged by the master, although he certainly delegated the actual erec tion to a subordinate. Even at the saray, where the redoubtable Murat IV was

the patron, the famous Revan and Baghdad Kiosks were faced with a hotchpotch of marbles and awkward pieces of poryphyry that were too intractable to be recut.

Villagers have borrowed stones from monuments and still do, and this accounts for those kervansaray and other walls where the footings and several courses above them have been nibbled away all over Anatolia to expose the rubble core of the masonry for the instruction of architectural historians. Just so, but with concepts of grandeur, did Selim the Grim strip the chamber where the Caliph kept the momentoes of the Prophet in Cairo and brought them back

along with the loot to be reset in the outside wall of the Pavilion of the Prophet's Mantle at Topkapisaray. There they are less unexpected than are similar revet ments at the mosque of the Beylerbey of Egypt, forban Mustafa Pasha, at Gebze.


PLATE VIII

Istanbul. Edirnekapi. The Mosque of Mihrimah. Reused Byzantine Proconessian columns, one clearly showing the holes to which crosses and icons were fixed.

IV

Just as the Byzantines began a building by buying columns for it, so did the Ottomans collect columns before starting to erect their buildings

- the same


PLATE IX

Istanbul. The Mosque of Hekimoglu AH Pasha, showing a reused Byzantine granite column cut roughly at the neck to fit the capital.

columns. With the imperial mosques of Beyazit II or Suleyman I - and of the

erstwhile mosque of Fatih - the preparation of the pair of huge columns between

the central piers had to be related to the height of all other columns, including


those of the courtyard. This also affected the span of the arches and therefore the area of both mosque and court.

With viziers' mosques there might be no important internal columns, with the result that those of the portico, when it was ideally related to the proportions of the mosque itself, were modules of the whole.26 Where the relationship is success

fully achieved at the mosque of Selim II at Konya or Karapinar, or of Rustem Pasha at Tekirdag, the result is a concordance of parts: if the relationship is not

achieved, the result, as at the Kur?unlu Cami at Kayseri, is a discordance between the bulk of the prayer hall and the elegance of the double portico. The same is true to some extent of the mosque of Pertev Pasha at Izmit where the inner series of columns is insufficiently grand to sustain aesthetically an outer, subsidiary portico.

And indeed one of the many touches of genius about the organization of the

Selimiye mosque at Edirne is the manner in which Sinan ordered a disparate col lection of columns in the courtyard with deceptive ease by resorting to corner

piers of unusual design. We can then enjoy the paradox arising from the power of the past to control

the future through the raw materials of architecture matched by an architect of a new era who was capable of solving the problems created by the scarcity of

precisely these materials.

NOTES 1 N. Davey, A history of building materials, London, 1961, 5. 2 The column is also important because its use by Byzantines and then Ottomans was a

revolutionary advance in terms of structure. The inertia of Roman building was replaced by a quasi-ribbed construction which was to be the greatest achievement of Gothic architects. 3 The depot at Ephesus may lighten the darkness of the balderdash about the proven ance of the columns in Hagia Sophia since some may have been purchased there. The author of myths of Hagia Sophia was the Anonymous of Banduri, 11th century, who invented what he did not know.

4 I have been unable to locate large circular slabs, such as those before the great door of Suleyman's mosque or in the Pantheon, which are neither cracked nor patched. s At least nowadays, it is impossible to predict before cutting whether a block will open in this manner or not.

6 M. Harrison and N. Firath, 1964-1965 Sarachane Arastirmalan, Istanbul, 1966, 133 n.8, and 134. The debris layers fit a 13th-century date for the transportation of the Pilastri Acritani to Venice.

7 Davey, op. cit., 16. 8 See the unfinished columns of the f ifte Minare Medrese, Erzerum, for example. In

Cairo there is the Mosque of Sultan Hasan; see M. Rogers, The spread of Islam, London, 1976,103. 9 Ahmet Refik, Istanbul hayati, on altinci asirda (1553-1591), Istanbul, 1935, lists a

number of orders in respect of this mosque. ,0

ibid., 21, Sect. 15. 11 Ahmet Refik, Istanbul hayati, onbirinci asirda (1,000-1,100), Istanbul, 1930-1, 26, Sect. 29.

12 ibid., 33, Sect. 64-5; 34, Sect. 66; and 36-7, Sect. 70.


13 G. Sandys, A relation of a voyage begun Anno Domini 1610, London, 1627, 22. 14 A. de la Mottraye, Travels through Europe, Asia, and into parts of Africa, trans., 3 vols., London, 1723-32, 344.

,s J. B. Lechavalier, Voyage de la Propontide, Paris, 1800,1, 24. 16 C. Texier, AsieMineure, Paris, 1882, 162. 17 Information supplied by the Muhtar of Palatya, quarry owner. 18

Rogers, op. cit., 12. 19 P. Gilles (Gyllius), The antiquities of Constantinople, London, 1729, 219. 20 ibid., 51.

21 C. Mango, "The conciliar edict of 1166", Dumbarton Oaks Papers, XVII, 1963, 315-30.

22 So had the architect of Ibrahim Pasha's mosque at Nev?ehir, who for this 18th-century monument purloined the columns of the nearby Sungur Bey foundation of the 14th cen

tury. See A. Gabriel, Les monuments turcs d'Anatolie, Paris, 1931-4, 156. 23 Joggled voussoirs occur as early as A.D. 526 in the mausoleum of Theodoric at

Ravenna. 24

Rogers, op. cit., 104. 25 S. H. Eldem, Koskler ve kasirlar, I, Istanbul, n.d., 104. 26 It is worth considering whether the abandonment in mosques such as that of Ahmet I of the lateral columns of a model such as the Suleymaniye, at the cost of a contraction of the diameter of the dome, may not simply be due to the exhaustion of columns after the

pair in the Piyale Pasha mosque of 1573.

Article Contentsp. [17]p. 18p. 19p. 20p. 21p. 22p. 23p. 24p. 25p. 26p. 27p. 28p. 29p. 30

Issue Table of ContentsThe Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, No. 1 (1977)Volume InformationFront MatterWorking in Metal: Mutual Influences between the Islamic World and the Medieval West [pp. 3-16]The Reuse of Marble in the Eastern Mediterranean in Medieval Times [pp. 17-30]"Mamd" and "Laudable" [pp. 31-40]Learned and Popular Attitudes to the Arabs in the Middle Ages [pp. 41-52]Early Muslim Sea-Charts [pp. 53-61]A Group of Arabic-Latin Translators Working in Northern Spain in the Mid-12th Century [pp. 62-108]The Alfonsine School of Translators: Translations from Arabic into Castilian Produced under the Patronage of Alfonso the Wise of Castile (1221-1252-1284) [pp. 109-117]Reviews of BooksNear and Middle East; IslamReview: untitled [pp. 118-119]Review: untitled [p. 119-119]Review: untitled [pp. 119-120]Review: untitled [pp. 120-121]Review: untitled [pp. 121-122]Review: untitled [pp. 122-124]Review: untitled [pp. 124-125]

South Asia: BuddhismReview: untitled [pp. 125-126]Review: untitled [p. 126-126]Review: untitled [p. 127-127]Review: untitled [pp. 127-128]Review: untitled [pp. 128-129]Review: untitled [pp. 129-130]Review: untitled [pp. 130-132]Review: untitled [pp. 132-133]Review: untitled [pp. 133-134]Review: untitled [pp. 134-135]

Far EastReview: untitled [p. 136-136]Review: untitled [pp. 136-137]Review: untitled [p. 137-137]

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Goodwin 1977 Reuse of marbles in Medieval Eastern Mediterranean.pdf