Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World

In this fast-paced account of Europe’s largest city, Madden (Venice: A New History), director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at St. Louis University, recounts how Istanbul gained its status as “a meeting place and a battlefield for cultures.” Founded by Greeks as Byzantium in 667 B.C.E., it served as a kind of urban bridge between Asia and Europe. As Constantinople, it became the eastern center of Christianity until it was conquered by the Ottomans in 1453. Thereafter, it was, until the modern period, a strikingly cosmopolitan place, about 40% non-Muslim in 1700, with significant populations of Greek Orthodox, Jews, and Armenian Christians. Madden adroitly describes the succession of the often bloodthirsty rulers of premodern Constantinople, including Murad III (who ordered the strangulation of his five brothers in 1574), as well as health crises, such as the bubonic plague epidemic of 542 that claimed an average of 5,000 lives per day. Unfortunately, Madden races through the city’s modern period, from the Young Turks’ 1909 uprising to the 21st century, including a mere paragraph on the anti-Greek riot of September 1955 that caused most of Istanbul’s remaining Greeks to flee the city. This flaw aside, Madden succinctly captures the city’s often key role in global political and religious history. (Dec.)