Konstantiniyye/Istanbul:

Constructing
an Empire on a City
Hilmi Kaçar – Ghent University

Istanbul1 is a unique place that has served as the capital of three of the world’s great empires
namely Roman, Eastern Roman and Ottoman. The city was originally founded as Byzantium
around 665 BD, then it was chosen as the ‘New Rome’ for the Roman Empire in 330 AD and
with the Ottoman conquest in 1453, it became Istanbul. Throughout its almost three thousand
years of history, the city’s strategic position, situated between the continents of Asia and Europe,
gave it a prominent role in the intercontinental trade, reaching China. Istanbul was also the
crossroads of different cultures. All roads in the Mediterranean world, the famous Silk Road
included, led to the city. However, after the city’s sack by the Latin crusaders in 1204,
Constantinople entered a period of decline and depopulation. During the Ottoman period,
Istanbul became once again the largest and richest urban center in the Eastern Mediterranean
world, well until the rise of the Atlantic trade route in the seventeenth century.

As the political center of Roman and Ottoman empires, the city has also been the site of large-
scale urban and architectural interventions. Changing visions, changing political, cultural and
religious orientations of those who lived and ruled there have been inscribed in its urban spaces,
which were transformed and lent new meanings. Istanbul was a symbolic locus representing
various meanings. The city has also seen many riots, fires, natural disasters; and it was besieged
many times throughout its history. But Constantinople was in 1453 conquered by the young
Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II. During the decades following the city’s conquest, Mehmed II
implemented an urban project to transform ‘Eastern Rome’ into the seat of his throne (pâyitaht)
and he took measures to rebuild and repopulate it. As the Ottoman state in the fifteenth century

1
The modern Turkish name İstanbul derives from the Greek phrase eis tin polin, meaning ‘in the City’ or ‘to the
City’. This name was used in Turkish side by side with among others Kostantiniyye, one of the more formal
adaptation during the period of Ottoman rule. However, the western languages continued to refer to the city as
Constantinople until the early 20th century. After the creation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the Turkish
government began to formally object to the use of Constantinople in other languages and introduced Istanbul as
common name for the city.
was further built up around political centralization and the creation of a new ruling elite and a
new concept of sovereignty, likewise the spaces and image of Kostantiniyye were also
reconstructed. In this paper, I will shed more light on the Ottoman reconstruction of the ruinous
Eastern Roman capital and on the making of Istanbul as the new Ottoman capital. In exploring
the projected visions and claims on the city’s image and its contrasting perceptions, I will take as
case study the ‘bird-eye’view’ miniature of Matrakçı Nasuh painted around 1535. But first, a
brief overview of the state of the art on the Ottoman urban historiography.

The state of the art

Until recently, urban history was a relative understudied topic within the Ottoman historiography.
The premises of the early historical researches were mainly shaped by the orientalist or
nationalist legacies. Early Turkish historiography for example rejected any Eastern Roman
‘influence’ in Ottoman architecture.2 The orientalist scholarship then has often categorized
Ottoman Istanbul as an ‘Islamic city’, which was largely based on an essentialist interpretation of
Islam as the predominant urban culture in the Middle East.3 Tacit acceptance of the received
notion that religion determined the urban practice of Middle Eastern cities has at times led
scholars to interpret the shape and structures of Ottoman Istanbul within this framework.4 The
‘Islamic city’ concept was in turn based on Weberian urban theory that heavily relied on
definitions of the city in medieval Europe. Concerning the urban spatial configuration, the
Western model of the ‘Islamic city’ assumed the absence of a geometric ordering of the urban
environment, geometry regarding as an aspect of Western cities. The lack of a geometric
principle shaping the Ottoman cities has been read as the indicator of a spontaneous and
unplanned development of its urban structures or/and as a sign of its Muslim religion.

Recent work has brought important changes to this picture. The writings on urban history from
the 1990’s has been problematizing the essentialist aspects of the ‘Islamic city’ model.5 Recent

2
Ekrem Hakki Ayverdi, Fatih devri mimarisi (Istanbul, 1953).
3
Bernard Lewis, Istanbul and the Civilization of the Ottoman Empire (Norman, 1963); Stefanos Yerasimos, La
Fondation de Constantinople et de Sainte-Sophie dans les traditions turques (Paris, 1990); idem, Constantinople. De
Byzance à Istanbul (Paris, 2000).
4
Halil Inalcik, ‘Istanbul: An Islamic City’, Journal of Islamic Studies, 1 (1990): 1-23.
5
Janet Abu-Lughod, ‘The Islamic City – Historic Myth, Islamic Essence and Contemporary Relevance’,
International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 19 (1987): 155-76; André Raymond, ‘Islamic city, Arab city:
Orientalist Myths and Recent Views’, British Journal of Middle East Studies, 21 (1994): 1-18; Zeynep Çelik ‘New
Approaches to the ‘non-Western’ city’, Journal for the Study of Architectural Historians, 58 (1999): 374-81; Rafa’at
historiography on Ottoman and Byzantine architectural practices show more and more interest in
the cultural exchange and interconnectivity between these two cultural traditions.6 The writings
on Ottoman cultural history of the last decade has thus been changing the antagonistic perception
of Middle Eastern vs. Western and rigid religious (Islam vs. Christianity) divides. New work has
also introduced important insights into shared histories, contacts among the different cultural
spheres. These works highlighted the similarities in the emerging early modern world, of which
the Ottoman realm was a part, and the hybridity of Ottoman borders with Europe or with Safawid
Iran.7 In recent years, the publication of in-depth studies on the already mature topic of Ottoman
social history have flourished.8 At the same time, works on Ottoman urban history were booming
as well. Recent works on Ottoman Istanbul present a layered picture of the city, highlighting the
complexity of the urban transformation of Constantinople into Istanbul and the hybridity of its
spaces and images.9 This new theory in Ottoman urban history subscribes to Henri Lefebvre’s
conceptual framework. It proposes a reading of the city through its perceived and lived space as
well as its represented urban space; and so it steps outside of the geometric paradigm within
which urbanism often have been evaluated. I will go deeper into this further on in the
presentation.

Sources
One of the primary sources for urban history of Istanbul in the fifteenth century are the visual
images: Ottoman city maps and views, topographic miniatures (Matrakçi) and European maps
and city views (Buondelmonti, Vavassore, Schedel,..). Situating these in their cultural and

Abou-El-Haj, Irene Bierman and Donald Preziosi eds., The Ottoman City and Its Parts: Urban Structure and Social
Order (New York, 1991).
6
Gülru Necipoğlu, ‘The Life of An Imperial Monument: Hagia Sophia After Byzantium’, in: Hagia Sophia from the
Age of Justunian to the Present, ed. Robert Mark and Ahmet Cakmak (Cambridge, 1992): 195-225; idem, The Age of
Sinan. Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (London, 2005); Robert Ousterhout, ‘Ethnic Identity and
Cultural Appropriation in Early Ottoman Architecture’, Muqarnas, 12 (1995):48-62. Some major reference works on
the period are Aptullah Kuran, The Mosque in Early Ottoman Architecture (Chicago, 1968), Gülru Necipoğlu,
Architecture, Ceremonial and Power. The Topkapi Palace in the fifteenth and sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge,
1991).
7
Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002); Palmira Brummett,
‘Imagining the early modern Ottoman space, from world history to Piri Reis’, in: The Early Modern Ottomans.
Remapping the Empire, eds. Virginia H. Aksan and Daniel Goffman (Cambridge, 2007): 15-58.
8
Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge, 2010). See also: Suraiya Faroqhi,
Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia: Trade, Craft and Food Production in an Urban Setting, 1520-1650
(Cambridge, 1984); idem, Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (London, 2005).
9
Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis / Istanbul. Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision and the Construction of the
Ottoman Capital (Pennsylvania, 2007).
political context of production and consumption, it can shed light on the meaning and perception
of these visual representations. Concerning archival documentation, the fifteenth century lacks
the rich mines such as court records or chancellery (Mühimme) registers that are available for
later periods. Available Ottoman archival sources for fifteenth-century urban history are surveys
of urban property, sales and ownership documents and the account books of endowment deeds
(waqf). These deal with builders, inhabitants and buildings of the city. Another set of valuable
Ottoman sources are the citywide surveys of endowed property (waqf), which provide important
information on Istanbul’s buildings and social fabric, on patronage patterns involved in the
building of monuments and in the creation of residential and commercial areas.

Another series of primary sources are the literary descriptions, such as epics, poetry, chronicles or
Ottoman historical writing that flourished in the fifteenth century. The rebuilding of Istanbul and
the endeavors of the ruling elite received attention from many chroniclers. Significantly, two
works on the reign of Mehmed II were written between 1470 en 1480: the chronicles of
Kritovoulos and Tursun Beg. Anonymous chronicles of the Ottoman dynasty, as well as those by
Oruç, Aşıkpaşazade, Ruhi and Nesri were written during the reign of Bayezid II. They provide
historical accounts of the previous two centuries of Ottoman experience, while at the same time
articulating critics on Mehmed’s harsh measures to build a centralized state. Early sixteenth-
century Ottoman chroniclers are then Ibn Kemal and Sa’adeddin, members of the religious elite
who introduced a new, more literate style. Another literary source for Istanbul, is the eloquent
description of the city’s various facets such as guilds, people, buildings, waqf’s etc. by the
seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi. Finally, there are the Greek chroniclers
such as Doukas or Sphrantzes and the European travel accounts such as Bertrandon de la
Broquière, Gilbert de Lannoy or Busbecq. These sources provide additional information to the
city’s history.

Conquest and state ideology

The first step in the making of Istanbul was undoubtedly its conquest. Constantinople was a
powerful symbol and catalyst for the Ottoman state building. Possession of the city was the
primary factor in the transformation of the Ottoman state into a centralized empire. The previous
capital of the Eastern Roman empire became the site that would house and represent the new
identity of the Ottoman state. The sixteenth-century Ottoman chronicler Hoca Sa’adeddin
described Istanbul as a locus amoeunus, in which he pointed out that the city loomed large in
Muslim legends.10 Subsequently he used a typical metaphor of the virgin bride for the conquest
of the city.11 Mehmed II’s conquest of Constantinople signified the realization of not only the
dream of his grandfather Bayezid I, but also of the Muslim realm and he earned the title of Ebu’l
feth, ‘father of conquest’. Mehmed II was also the motor force behind the cultural and political
reorientations and transformations that took place at the Ottoman realm. Further conquests in the
Balkans and in Anatolia erased the last remnants of Byzantine and other Turkish principalities in
the region, he diminished the dominance of Genoese and Venetian trading fundazione’s in the
eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and brought so under Ottoman unitary rule a politically
fragmented region. The primary motive that shaped Mehmed II’s reign was the creation of a
world empire governed from Istanbul, as he was inspired by the legend of Alexander.

In this respect, his endeavors in the making of Ottoman capital reflected the political tensions
between Mehmed’s imperial vision and the interests of the centrifugal forces such as the frontier
gazi warlords. The huge army that laid siege on Constantinople in 1453, reflected the whole
spectrum of the Ottoman state: the sultan as empire-builder, state officials of Balkan and Roman
aristocratic origin, kapikulu soldiers of conscripted Christian-born recruits owing loyalty to the
House of Osman, a Turkish aristocracy that had constituted the ruling elite of the state into the
reign of Mehmed II, martial class of akinci’s and gazi’s of the frontiers and their retinues of
dervishes, adventurers uprooted from the late medieval Anatolia and the Balkans.

The two main groups within this wide spectrum were the builders of the centralized state and the
gazi-soldiers of the frontier, whose alliance was based on their semi-independence and their
political and military interests. To Mehmed II and his fledgling military-administrative elite,
Istanbul was the natural site to achieve the vision of a world empire; ruling from this city would
give the Ottoman state a prominent role in the realm of Islam and make them the inheritors of
Eastern Rome. But, to the conquest-ethos of the semi-independent gazi’s, Constantinople was no
more than a prestigious object of conquest; the meaning of its conquest represented merely the
removal of the intimidating Byzantine presence midst of Ottoman realm. The conquest of the city
marked the final resolution of the continuous tension between the state building ambitions of
Mehmed II and the semi-independent activity of the aristocratic lords of the frontier. In this
10
Hoca Sa’adeddin Efendi, Tacü’t-Tevarih, vol. I, (Ankara, 1992), 216.
11
Sa’adeddin, Tacü’t, 216.
process, power of the landed aristocracy within the Ottoman political spectrum was marginalized
and they were increasingly replaced by the new military and administrative class of the
centralizing state.

After the conquest of Istanbul, Mehmed II assumed royal titles of the highest order such as
hünkar, han, sultan, caesar and ebu’l feth. The mode of rule articulated through his reign relied
on ancient Turkish, Muslim Persian and Roman notions of kingship and sovereignty, and it
shaped the conduct of the Ottoman state in the following century. His law code of 1477 encoded
for the next generations the imperial ideology and practice; it defined the structure of the military,
administrative and religious institutions. Mehmed II also patronized Persian and Italian artists and
scientists.12 The wide scope of Mehmed’s cultural patronage reflected his self-image as a world
emperor. The dynamic eclecticism and inclusivism of the Ottoman world made this cultural
symbiosis also possible. This shows the interconnectivity between different cultures in the late
medieval and early modern times, of which I have spoken in the beginning of my presentation.

Repopulation of Istanbul
Just before the conquest, Constantinople was little more than a ruin and bore the traces of
economic decline. Within its great walls the population had shrunk to some fifty thousand, still a
large population by late medieval standards. Mehmed II’s first and principal concern was to
encourage the repopulation of the city, so that he proclaimed amān: any fugitive who returned
within a specified time should freely re-occupy his home and practice his religion. Many Greeks
returned and were invited to elect a Patriarch as religious head of their community.13 The Greek
Orthodox Church was so granted a secure position in the Ottoman state, which meant that
Mehmed II made it into a pillar of the state side by side with the Muslim institutions. Further on,
he issued orders across his realm that Muslim, Christian, and Jewish families should repopulate
the new capital. The newly conquered city was however not a particularly desirable place at that
time, in part caused by the widespread apocalyptic prophecies. The most effective measure then
taken to populate the city was certainly that of sürgün, the compulsory major re-settlement of
Muslim people from Anatolia and Rumelia. The Jews also increased in numbers, especially
during the Inquisition when many of them came from Europe seeking a refuge from Christian

12
Julian Raby, ‘A Sultan of Paradox: Mehmed the Conqueror as a Patron of the Arts’, Oxford Art Journal, 5, 1
(1982): 3-8.
13
Halil Inalcik, ‘The Policy of Mehmed II toward the Greek …’(1969), pp. 229–249.
oppression under the tolerant protection of Ottoman state. In Galata then, the Genoese and later
other European merchants established their warehouses, their offices and their homes.

Even though the conquered populations of former Constantinople came under Muslim Ottoman
rule, it did not change their religious identities in significant ways. This is in sharp contrast to the
earlier Orientalistic image of Ottoman rule. In accordance with Muslim and Ottoman law,
Christians and Jews enjoyed freedom of religion and were accorded a large communal autonomy.
This co-existence was easily reconciled with social and economic reality in Istanbul. Already
from the very beginning Muslims and non-Muslims worked side by side in the commercial
districts and even lived intermingled in residential areas. The non-Muslims, in commercial
dealings among themselves, would resort to the Ottoman court (ḳāḍī), and a feeling of ‘fellow-
city-inhabitant’ of the cosmopolitan capital transcended distinctions of religion and origin.

The earliest Ottoman property survey of Istanbul dates from 1477, listing 16.324 households that
lived in the walled city Istanbul and in Galata. Taking into consideration that two plague
epidemics in 1466 and 1470 had dealt harsh blows to the new inhabitants, we can say the
following about Istanbul’s population: In the old city of Istanbul, 60 percent of the inhabitants
were Muslims, while the remaining 40 percent consisted of Orthodox Greeks, Jews, Armenians
and Gypsies. In Galata, the former Genoese colony that would become the main European
settlement, the majority consisted of Orthodox Greeks and Europeans. The city’s population at
this date has been estimated at between seventy and eighty thousand.

Reconstruction of Istanbul
As you can hear from the previous examples, the Ottomans who conquered Istanbul were not the
simple barbarians depicted by many European writers, but the heirs and carriers of the ancient
civilizations, to which they added important contributions. The Ottoman architecture had already
an established style and the Ottomans had the skills and resources to preserve and embellish the
city. The reconstruction of Istanbul was aimed to recreate the city as the center of the Ottoman
world. In this process, imperial legacy of Byzantine Constantinople was selectively appropriated
or rejected. For example, when sultan Mehmed Han entered the city, he toured the city to inspect
its buildings. Entering Hagia Sophia, the political center of Eastern Christianity, Mehmed Han
proclaimed it to be converted into the royal mosque of the city. The structure was maintained,
strengthened and a minaret was added; the other minarets were completed by the later sultans.
But the new ruler of the city demolished the nearby statue of the Byzantine emperor Justunian.
The urban program of sultan Mehmed II aimed to establish and communicate Istanbul’s new
identity as the center of a new political and urban order.

This was created through the construction of Ottoman monuments and the selective appropriation
of Byzantine sites and monuments. In other words, the Byzantine cultural sites and buildings
were maintained and reconfigured and only the state symbols were erased from the city scape.
The particular building projects of Mehmed II such as his palace, mosques and charitable
endowments were parts of a collective enterprise to recreate the capital. It entailed the building of
monuments in an Ottoman idiom, through the creation of a network of significant buildings and
sites to manifest an Ottoman identity. As Mehmed’s centralizing policies were crystallized in the
later decades of his reign, the city was also reshaped to house these transformations.

The making of Istanbul followed also the urbanization pattern of earlier Ottoman capitals. The
two basic features of the Ottoman city (as in Bursa or Edirne, former Ottoman capitals) were a
royal mosque and around it a district of commercial center. This city pattern appears also in
Istanbul, which started with Aya Sofya mosque and its Bedestan (commercial center with shops,
etc). Mehmed built in 1470 a mosque together with its dependent complex for academic and
charitable use. Particularly, the academic part of his mosque became a center for higher
education. The Eight Colleges (Shemaniye) formed a kind of university, which taught law,
theology, medicine and the other sciences. It was here that the ulema (religious elite) and
administrators of the highest rank were educated. Many structures were set up as endowments or
waqf. Thus, the city started to develop a series of such waqf complexes, created by the sultans
and other members of the ruling class, including high positioned women. Other less prominent
individuals also had the freedom to finance the construction of smaller waqf complexes with a
mescid (smaller mosque), its medrese (schools for high education). These served then again as
the center of a new developping maḥalle (neighborhood). The charitable and religious
endowments (wakf’s) were established to provide in the welfare of the population and to build the
infrastructure of the city in general, such as water-supply, paving of roads, public security,
hospitals, street-cleaning, the shelter and feeding of the poor and of travellers.

In order to foster the city’s economic life and to make Istanbul again into a commercial center for
international trade, Mehmed II constructed in 1456 the Bedestan of Istanbul and the bazaar
around it. As the locus of the city’s commerce and wealth, the Ottoman bedestan14 was a space of
social interaction and at times a public forum for its inhabitants. Istanbul’s bedestan was a
commercial center where the merchants did business, a place where valuable merchandise was
displayed and sold. Wealthy merchants of all communities sat there, chatting, eating, drinking,
buying and selling. Nearby were the hans or caravanserais established, where the travelling
merchants were lodged. The members of the principal crafts were also gathered in the shops
(dükkan), which constituted the great çarşı (bazaar) around the bedestan. Each craft was
concentrated systematically in one çarşı. Its architectural design was based on that of the
Ottoman mosques. The bedestan had four economic functions. First, it was a place for the
merchants to store safely and sell their valuable imported goods, such as textiles. Second, it was
the center where the resident merchants conducted their financial transactions and organized their
overland transport of commodities and commercial sea voyages. Third, it was a place where all
sorts valuable individual belongings – jewelry and money – were guarded under state protection.
Lastly, the bedestan played in many respects the role of modern banks and financial exchanges.15

An Ottoman view of Istanbul, a picture from 1537

In one of the most celebrated Ottoman topographic images of Istanbul, Matrakçi Nasuh
represents Ottoman Istanbul at the end of the 1530’s. Matrakçi painted Istanbul in bird’s-eye-
view. As is the case with medieval European city views produced within this tradition, the
monuments are placed within the city walls in bird-eye-view. The most striking difference with
European bird-eye-view is the multiple points of view employed. Relying on Persian manner of
spatial representation, the Ottoman painter invented a new mode of representing the urban
environment. Individual monuments and their parts are depicted as seen from different angles.
The painting of Matrakçi transforms European bird-eye-view through the use of conventions of
miniature painting. As in other bird’s-eye-views, the emphasis is not on representation of the
urban space but on individual monuments. This is a city conceived as a collection of important
sites, which are suggested by their size and by the degree of precision in their depiction. The most
significant sites of Ottoman Istanbul together form a symbolic entity. He represents Byzantine
buildings and sites that are appropriated by the Ottoman order: Hagia Sophia, Hippodrom, the

14
Halil Inalcik, ‘The Hub of the City : The Bedestan of Istanbul’, International Journal of Turkish Studies, I/1
(1979-80): 1-17.
15
Inalcik, ‘The Hub of the City..’, p. 2-7.
monumental columns. The Ottoman and Byzantine monuments represented, express the city’s
royal character and Muslim identity and rendering an Ottoman visual order. Matrakçi represents
Istanbul as a city boasting of civic and religious monuments, all built or converted from
Byzantine structures by sultans and their households. The view of Matrakçi presents thus the
results of Mehmed’s enterprise to create the imperial Ottoman capital.

Conclusion
Thanks to the new research on Ottoman urbanism, we now know that the Ottoman urbanization
process was very complex and was characterized by interconnections between different cultures.
The cultural syncretism of the Ottomans was heir to a longstanding nomadic culture that had
always included, appropriated and embodied elements from different cultures and made it into
benefits for its own goals. The urban project that transformed Eastern Rome into the Ottoman
capital was a product of one of these momentous encounters with the ‘other’. Through different
ways of reconstructing and imagining urban space, this urban project sought to reproduce a new
Ottoman political and social order.