Sacred Relics and Imperial Ceremonies at the Great Palace of Constantinople

Holger A. Klein's Sacred Relics and Imperial Ceremonies at the Great Palace of Constantinople, published in 2006 within Byzas 5, a monograph series of the German Archaeological Institute's Istanbul department, examines how Byzantine emperors used the imperial collection of Christian relics, including fragments of the True Cross, within court ceremonial to assert sacred legitimacy for their rule. Klein is an art historian at Columbia University whose scholarship specializes in Byzantine relic culture specifically. Its strength is that specialist grounding in both the ceremonial texts, the Book of Ceremonies chief among them, and the material and architectural evidence for how relics were actually displayed and processed at court. Its limit is that the surviving ceremonial texts describe idealized court protocol rather than necessarily how every ceremony was actually performed in practice, so a claim treating the described ceremonial as a literal transcript of events rather than as the court's own normative record needs that distinction kept in view.