Constantinople - City of the World's Desire, 1453-1924
by Philip Mansel
John Murray, HK$165
It was a somewhat bedraggled Byzantine Constantinople that fell to 20-year-old Mehmed II, sultan of the Ottoman empire, in 1453. But soon it became what Philip Mansel calls 'the most grandiose of Muslim capitals' until the last caliph, Abdulmecid II, who, perhaps thankful for Constantinople's cosmopolitanism, boarded the Orient Express in 1924 and fled west. The Republic of Turkey made its capital at Ankara, though the magnitude of history is felt by any traveller reaching Istanbul straddling east and west. In this paperback edition of Constantinople, Mansel calls himself a 'historian of courts and dynasties' and records the city's fortunes and privations from the perspective of the young sultan and his descendants. There is plenty of intrigue and bloodshed. The squeamish should skip the city's solution to a stray dog problem (dumping them all on a barren islet) and focus on the convincingly documented and colourful ebb and flow of economy and society. But what to make of his statement that Constantinople was 'the last bastion of the sedan chair - a conveyance suited to a city of steep hills and cheap labour'? Surely not.