2024/11/28 by Rolf Strootman · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Islamic Studies and History #Byzantine Studies and History #Ottoman and Turkish Studies
paper · doi:10.1163/9789004710986_010
openalex publication_date 2024/11/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/16
From the reign of Constantine the Great, Constantinople had been deliberately shaped as a city with imperial allure. Nowhere could this more evident than in and around the Hippodrome, and along the main thoroughfare leading to it, the Mese. Later emperors continued to add monuments, statues, sacred icons and holy relics to enhance the city’s imperial pretensions, including the Obelisk of Theodosius, the Hodegetria icon and the Haghia Sophia, the greatest church in all of Christendom. After the Ottoman conquest, successive sultans continued the policy of expressing Constantinople’s prestige as a symbolic center of the world through (religious) architecture, the accumulation of relics, and rituals. This chapter examines the development of Constantinople’s urban landscape in the context of universalistic imperial ideology, focusing on the changes and continuities that occurred after the conquest of the city by ‘the new Constantine’, Mehmet II, in 1453.