Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [79]
RECOMMENDED READING
The Antiquities of Constantinople, by Pierre Gilles (Italica, 1988). This notable work is a second edition of John Ball’s 1729 English translation of the Four Books of the Antiquities of Constantinople, written by Pierre Gilles and published posthumously in 1561. No other edition of an English translation has been available since that time, which is odd only because this is “a fundamental text on one of the principal cities of both East and West,” according to Eileen Gardner of Italica Press, which has a series of historical travel guides. The oft-quoted Gilles, or Petrus Gyllius in Latin (“While other cities are mortal, this one will remain as long as there are men on earth”), left France in the service of François I on a fact-finding mission to Constantinople, which at the time of his visit in 1544 “was the largest and wealthiest city of the Mediterranean, in fact of the Western world,” according to Ronald Musto in the introduction.
Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453-1924, by Philip Mansel (St. Martin’s, 1996). The subject of this book, writes Mansel in his foreword, “is the story of a city and a family. It is written in the belief that dynasties have been as decisive in shaping cities as nationality, climate and geography.… Constantinople is the story of what was, for a long time, the greatest dynastic city of all.” Mansel, a historian and biographer of courts and royal dynasties, brilliantly argues his thesis. Without giving away the epilogue, I do want to share one of Mansel’s conclusions: Istanbul is beginning to resume its role as meeting place. He writes, “For the first time since the 1920s the city is part of the world economy, with a fully convertible currency. In 1995 the Istanbul Stock Exchange, equipped with the latest technology, opened at Istinye on the Bosphorus. Most Istanbullus accept modern international culture as whole-heartedly as the city’s nineteenth-century élite accepted French culture. Only the occasional dome and minaret distinguishes part of modern Istanbul from other European cities. Clothes, music, night-clubs, in most of the city, are the same as in Paris or New York.”
1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West, by Roger Crowley (Hyperion, 2005). “I shall tell the story of the tremendous perils … of Constantinople, which I observed at close quarters with my own eyes,” notes Leonard of Chios, one of the many who claim to have accurately recorded the fall of the city. Crowley expertly sets the stage for the siege and recounts what he can from the sources available (“the band of witnesses is actually quite small,” he notes, “and largely Christian”), and it seems he leaves no second of the siege unrecorded. Yet Crowley reminds us that even with all accounts we have today, we still do not know exactly how Constantine XI died: “Constantine was glimpsed for the last time surrounded by his most faithful retinue … his last moment reported by unreliable witnesses who were almost certainly not present, struggling, resisting defiantly, falling, crushed underfoot, until he vanished from history into the afterlife of legend.” In paperback, and at 305 pages, this is a great bring-along volume of “the prototype of global ideological conflict.”
Istanbul: City of a Hundred Names, with photographs by Alex Webb and an essay by Orhan Pamuk (Aperture, 2007). Webb first visited Istanbul in 1968, for one day, and didn’t return for thirty years. By this time, he had become drawn to “borders and the edges of societies, where different cultures come together, sometimes clashing,