In 839/40 the horseman caused the emperor Theophilos (829–42) and the residents of Constantinople tremendous concern by dropping its gilded toupha, the plumed helmet-crown. The horseman’s behavior was interpreted as an ominous, foreboding action. Theophilos had repeatedly aligned himself with the horseman in his triumphs of 831 and 837 by wearing a toupha, and a toupha also makes an unprecedented appearance on Theophilos’ copper coins. The golden toupha encapsulated the splendors of triumphal rulership and interlinked Theophilos with Justinian. The bronze horseman had become the symbol of victory and a testament to the return of Byzantine martial prowess. The horseman dropped the toupha in the aftermath of Theophilos’ humiliating defeat by the Abbasids in 838. An urgent and ingenious restoration is narrated in the chronicle of Symeon the Logothete. While previous scholarship has recognized Theophilos’ architectural competition with the Abbasids, the horseman has not been included in analyses of cross-cultural dialogue. This chapter argues that Justinian’s horseman came to symbolize the city and serve as a harbinger of the imperial future. The bronze horseman's "actions" were interpreted in Constantinople as divinatory indications of the future of the Byzantine–Abbasid rivalry.

The physical destruction of the bronze horseman did not cause it to vanish from the Ottoman imperial imagination. Key sixteenth-century Ottoman manuscripts testify to its afterlife as a curious artefact and historical marvel. Even though the bronze horseman lost its association with Justinian, it continued to be seen as an important symbol of the pre-Ottoman past. Its physical absence could even magnify its stature. In the fascinating illustrated version of the prophetic manuscript of Al-Bistami's “Translation of the key to the comprehensive prognostication,” the reader encounters the horseman among a diachronic, curated display of the city’s monumental wonders: Hagia Sophia, the obelisk of Theodosios, the serpent column, and the masonry obelisk. They shared pre-Ottoman origins, they stood in the spaces of power associated with Byzantine culture, and they exercised power over the contemporary Ottoman imagination. Justinian’s monument stood for a discursively complicated and inconvenient past. Even though its physical presence was eliminated, its memory could not be completely erased. It continued to haunt Ottoman imagination in narratives of wonders and apocalyptic scenarios, populating an unnerving landscape of a marvelous foreign past, which lurked everywhere in the great city.