Istanbul |
|
11 February 2025 - Konstanz
The grey, drab melanchony of February has set in. Coming off of a long weekend in Konstanz where I thought a change of scenery might help. It has not. I did have time for reading though, and finished Bettany Hughes' history of Istanbul. I picked up the book last year during a layover in that city. It was a thick book as the city has thousands of years of history. The site was occupied by humans in the depths of prehistory, but emerges into history in the era of the Greeks. As Byzantium it passed from Greek to Roman rule in the last few centuries BC as that empire conquered the Mediterranean basin. Rome waxed & the city propsered and eventually became the eastern capitol. Emperor Costantine, who also made the empire Christian, renamed the city after himself as Constantinople. Then the Roman empire split into east and west and it was gobbled up piecemeal by Goths, Franks, and Slavs from the west and north and Arabs, Turks, Mongels and Persians from the east. The western empire, including Rome, eventually disappeared into these kingdoms, but the eastern with Constantinople at its center endured. Constantinople eventually even enlisted the help of these western kingdoms on crusades to reconquer territories from the Arabs, turning the Muslim idea of a holy war against them. But, in the end, it was to another group of Muslims, the Turks, that Constantinople eventually fell in 1453. The emperor would had been ruling over just a city was replaced by a sultan who was the head of a large empire. Constantinople thus prospered again as the Ottoman empire waxed. Then came the inevitable decline ending in the dissolution of the empire after the first world war. Hughes doesn't speak much to modern Istanbul unfortunately, but the scope of her work is nevertheless impressive. Definitely an enjoyable read.
