Suleiman the Magnificent by André Clot

Author:André Clot
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780863568039
Publisher: Saqi

9

The Greatest City of East and West

The capital of the Byzantine Empire for fifteen centuries, Constantinople – Istanbul1 – naturally became the Ottomans’ capital as soon as they had conquered it. Once the city had been built up again from the ruins, not to mention the devastation caused by the Franks of the Fourth Crusade and long periods of decadence and misery, Mehmed II established himself there. Bursa and then Edirne (Adrianople) had never been more than provisional capitals for the first sultans. From the beginning of the Hegira (the Muslim era which was established when Mohammed fled from Mecca to Medina in AD 622), the ultimate aim had always been Constantinople. Had the Prophet not promised immortal glory to whoever should take possession of it? And what place could possibly make a worthier seat for the greatest empire of the Orient?

For a start, its geographical situation is one of the most beautiful in the Mediterranean. Seven hills – as in Rome – look down on a sea which opens up and then cuts into the land in the West to form the Golden Horn; to the North, a deep and narrow strait, the Bosphorus, forms the juncture between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, the North and South, the Slav lands and the Islamic countries of the Orient. From the terraces of Topkapi Saray the eye can take in the last slopes of the Balkans and the first slopes of the Asian plateau, the waters of the Sea of Marmara and the entrance to the Black Sea.

For millennia, the promontory had been one of the great meeting points, since it offered exceptional facilities for important military or maritime as well as political undertakings. A thousand years before Christ, populations who no doubt came from Europe had founded a village at the bottom of the Golden Horn and then at the tip of the promontory where the Seraglio stands. In 657–8 BC, Byzas, a sailor from Megara, established the city which would preserve his name. The Delphic Oracle had even described as ‘blind’ all the other Megarans who had established themselves in Chalcedonia on the Asian shore and did not realize what a magnificent port the Golden Horn, protected from tempests from the North and South, offered – the only safe spot, apart from Salonica, between Piraeus and the Black Sea. None of the great conquerors of history made the same mistake. Philip of Macedon, the Avars, the Persians, the Bulgars, the Arabs – all of them tried in vain to take control of it. Bayezid I laid siege to the city in 1391, Murad II in 1422. It was Mehmed II who achieved immense glory by conquering it, on the morning of 29 May 1453.

Nothing, or almost nothing, then remained of the city of the Basileus. It had withstood so many attacks that no major buildings were left standing. The imperial palaces, said to have surpassed in splendour those of the Sassanid emperors and Abbasid caliphs, were no more than ruins.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.