Constantinople in the Middle Ages

How did Constantinople, the last great urban settlement of the Greco-Roman world, transform into the largest city of medieval Christian Europe? What were the differences between the city that haunted the caliphs' conquest dreams in the seventh century and the city conquered by Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror in 1453? The reason Constantinople survived the collapse of the ancient world was that its solid infrastructure and the fundamental structures of urban life essentially remained unchanged. Institutions such as the harbor, market, imperial palace, and churches, which came into being in the mid-sixth century, continued to serve throughout the "Dark Ages" of the seventh and eighth centuries and served as a model during the long period of revival that followed. The early Christian character of the city only began to change from the tenth century onwards with the construction of new monasteries and aristocratic houses, and with the transformation of commercial life in the Golden Horn. However, this new development was still organized around the core that existed at the time. The continuity of urban life was interrupted by the Fourth Crusade of 1203-4 and the subsequent plunder and fires. In the last two centuries of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople became a decentralized city spread across a scattered periphery.

Paul Magdalino, one of the world's leading Byzantine historians, helps us imagine medieval Istanbul by drawing on written sources as well as archaeology and architecture. In the author's own words, "This book is a deep excavation into the layers of urban experience accumulated in or around the historical peninsula throughout that long Byzantine past from 330 to 1453, beneath Ottoman and Republican Istanbuls."