Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World - my review

[gridlore]

Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World by Thomas F. Madden

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I love Istanbul. I've been fascinated by the Queen of Cities for a very long time, and even got to visit in 2016 (just before the coup attempt, yikes!) and have read many books about this city, the empires it ruled, and the area.

This book was a good, fun read. Nothing really in-depth, but a nice walk through the history from the earliest founders through to the aforementioned coup. What I really enjoyed was the detours that Madden took into some of the more obscure moments, like how the transit of an Egyptian mummy through the city set off Ottoman fears of the legend that Constantine XI, the last Roman Emperor, was in fact lying in wait for the right time to return. To protect themselves, they beheaded the mummy, cut it in half, and sealed it up in the Theodosian Walls. (A Frenchman later stole the head.

Madden also goes into detail about the modern era of Istanbul, recounting in detail how directed hatred almost eliminated the Greek and Jewish populations of the city, and how the city grew explosively as shantytowns were quickly replaced by sometimes illegal apartment blocks.

As I said, a fun read, and I recommend it to anyone interested in this, the Queen of Cities.



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Comments

[pauldrye]

I'm slowly working my way through the Cambridge History of Byzantium myself, just some light reading for over the holidays!

[gridlore]

Nice!

[delosharriman]

My Dad actually went to Istanbul in the course of writing a lightweight but very readable (lots of people say so!) self-published history book which takes the fall of Constantinople in 1453 as a kind of pivot point for the evolution of the modern world.

I was there just yesterday, due to some extremely poor planning on my part, which is a much less interesting story.