Places of Encounter, Volume 1 by MacKinnon Aran; MacKinnon Elaine McClarnand;

Author:MacKinnon, Aran; MacKinnon, Elaine McClarnand;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Westview Press

Map 7.2. Istanbul Under Mehmed the Conqueror, 1453–1481

Following the conquest Mehmed II consciously preserved great continuity in the urban fabric. He turned the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, built his own mosque over the Church of the Holy Apostles, and erected the Topkapı Palace over the ancient acropolis. The Covered Bazaar was constructed in the market area, close to the fora that remained open space. The hippodrome served as plaza for festivities. The Theodosian walls, with the addition of Yedikule Fortress, continued to protect the city.

Following the Islamic practice of dividing responsibility for major building projects among the ruler’s officials, Mehmed II ordered his viziers to contribute actively to the construction of the new capital in the form of houses, baths, inns, markets, and places of worship. As Constantine the Great had done more than a millenium before him, the Ottoman sultan divided the urban area into about a dozen districts. The sultan’s Greek court historian, Kritovoulos, recorded how he assigned each district to an official who then was requested to construct the necessary infrastructure there. They each commissioned a mosque complex—smaller in scale than the sultan’s and with a variety of ancillary structures—and financed its upkeep with endowments that drew funds from urban real estate and landholdings from as far away as the outmost Balkan and Anatolian provinces. These complexes formed the core of each district and—by providing employment opportunities as well as amenities such as worship spaces, fountains, educational institutions, bathhouses, food markets, and health services—were meant to attract residents.

Mehmed II promised to the future residents houses, gardens, tax-exempt status, and religious freedom. He installed an Orthodox patriarch, made sure that not all churches were converted into mosques, and also gave to the Genoese merchant colony of Galata an imperial decree allowing them to continue worshipping in their usual manner, except for the ringing of church bells. These policies allowed, if not for a free intermingling of, at least an exposure to and relatively close contact with and relations between different faiths and cultures. In spite of Mehmed II’s measures, the city’s population at first did not increase as much as he desired. Therefore, a policy of forced settlement was instituted, bringing especially skilled craftsmen from various provinces of the empire. Postconquest resettlement, whether in the era of Constantine the Great’s or Mehmed II’s, was one of the few instances when the whirlpool lost its strength and needed to be stirred in a deliberate manner. By 1500 Konstantiniyye—“Constantine’s city,” as it was called in official Ottoman documents in contrast to the more popularly used “Istanbul” that was derived from the Greek eis ton polis (“from the city”)—was home to Turks from Anatolia; the descendants of the Byzantine aristocracy who had remained in the city; Genoese and Venetian merchants; an Armenian community with its own patriarchate; Romaniot Jews whose ancestry dated to Late Antiquity; Sephardic Jews who settled in the city following the Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula; and an untold number of traders and travelers from both East and West.

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