Constantinople

The only city situated on two continents, Constantinople has always been both meeting-place and battlefield. This remarkable new study describes the city and its dual role when it was the capital of the Ottoman Sultans, dominating an empire which at its height stretched from Morocco to Russia and from the Danube to the Persian Gulf.

At once scholarly and entertaining, Constantinople depicts the Ottoman capital as a place of shifting boundaries and categories. It was capital of both Islam and the Orthodox church, part of “the system of Europe” and a magnet for people and ideas from Paris to Isfahan. It was also a city of critical strategic importance, coveted at different periods by Russia, Germany, Bulgaria and Greece. After the Great War, in its last years as an imperial capital, it was occupied by British, French and Italian forces. Within a broad chronological framework, here is the story of the city and of the impact on it of the Ottoman Sultans and their dynasty; here too are the families who settled in Constantinople and served the Sultans, among them the Turkish Koprulu, the Italian de Testa, the Greek Mavrocordatos and the Hashemites from Mecca.

The story begins in 1453 with the triumphant entry into the city of Sultan Mehmed the Conqeror on a white horse. It ends in 1924 with the hurried departure of the last Ottoman ruler, Abdulmecid, on the Orient Express. In studying the five hundred years between those two events, the author goes beneath the surface of the traveller’s bustling and cosmopolitan Constantinople to record the history of what was at once an imperial capital, a holy city, a trading entrepot, a pleasure resort and, in it’s cultural and intellectual life, a laboratory of modernization. It was indeed “the city of the world’s desire” – irresistable, insidious, capable of driving its inhabitants to extremes of grandeur, piety and depravity.