Constantinopolis/Istanbul

Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision, and the Construction of the Ottoman Capital Çiğdem Kafescioğlu

Publish Date: 1/20/2010
Dimensions: 9 x 10
Page Count: 346 pages

Illustrations:

Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-02776-0
Series Name: Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies Series

Hardcover Edition: $100.00Add to Cart

Winner of the 2011 Spiro Kostof Award sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians.

“Çiğdem Kafescioğlu’s elegant study examines the creation of the Ottoman capital of Istanbul through the reformulation of the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. The book provides clarity, nuance, and new perspectives on a formative period in the city’s history. It is well written, engaging, packed with valuable observations, and based on important new archival documents. This is a significant contribution to urban history in general and to the history and architecture of Byzantine Constantinople and Ottoman Istanbul in particular.” —Robert Ousterhout, University of Pennsylvania

“Linking the rebuilding of the conquered city to the building of the empire, Kafescioğlu traces interventions to urban and architectural forms, interweaving them with shifting political, ideological, and religious issues. The arguments are powerful and convincingly presented. The research is top-notch and integrates material from many sources, including an impressive range of hitherto untapped archival documents.” —Zeynep Çelik, New Jersey Institute of Technology

“Kafescioğlu argues that the foundations of Istanbul’s later development were laid out in the first decades following the conquest, but this involved a complex dynamics in which diverse cultural traditions, Ottoman and Byzantine, along with Renaissance ideas of ordering the urban environment encountered each other. . . . [Constantinopolis/Istanbul] will undoubtedly remain an important resource for new Istanbul studies for years to come.” —Ipek Türeli, CAA Reviews

“For Byzantinists, 1453 is an ending, for Ottomanists, a beginning. For the history of the city neither is correct, one of the important contributions of this book. Byzantinists need to engage this new book and to rise to its challenges. . . . Constantinopolis/Istanbul is our best analysis of the early history of the Ottoman City.” —Robert S. Nelson, Art Bulletin

“Constantinopolis/Istanbul is a painstakingly researched and documented and lavishly illustrated account of the city from 1453–1581. Its numerous maps, photographs, and plates combine with the written analysis to produce an in-depth study which will be of great value to both specialists and general readers.” —Valerie Kennedy, Sixteenth Century Journal

A symbolic locus embodying myriad meanings, the political center of the eastern Mediterranean, and one of the old world’s largest urban centers, Constantinople was the site of large-scale urban and architectural interventions. Changing visions—the changing political, cultural, and religious orientations of those who lived there and those who ruled from there—inscribed themselves in its spaces, transforming it and lending it new meanings. Constantinopolis/Istanbul is about such a period of change and remaking: following its capture in 1453, the city was host to a grandly conceived urban project meant to rebuild and transform the capital of Eastern Rome as the capital of the Ottoman Empire.

Çiğdem Kafescioğlu traces the construction and representation of Ottoman Istanbul, threading histories of politics, culture, and architecture into the fabric of the urban landscape. Attentive to the preservation and destruction of artifacts from the past, Constantinopolis/Istanbul shapes an understanding of emerging modes of spatiality and visuality in Ottoman Istanbul as central components of a complex and fascinating urban process, that of the creation of a capital city through the interpretation and appropriation of another.

Çiğdem Kafescioğlu is Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Boğaziçi University.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1. Between Edirne and Kostantiniyye: The City’s First Ottoman Years

2. Constructing the City: The Architectural Projects

Part 1: The Urban Program and Mehmed’s Foundation

Part 2: The Patronage of the New Ruling Elite

Part 3: Memory, Space, and Vision in Constructions of the Ottoman Capital City

3. Representing the City: Constantinople and Its Images

4. Istanbul Inhabited

Epilogue: A Picture from Circa 1537