Chapter 10, “Commercial Constantinople,” examines the commercial developments in the capital. It concentrates on the city’s commercial topography, its provisioning, trade networks, merchant class, and manufacturing industries as well as government control over them.

Chapter 6, “Constantinople: Building and Maintenance,” considers the built environment of Constantinople as a thermodynamic system, examining such issues as the supply of materials, construction legislation, and architectural techniques in the context of three basic categories: urban infrastructure, public monuments, and vernacular architecture.

Chapter 7, “The Defence of Constantinople,” examines the factors at play in the defense of Constantinople – geography, fortifications, land and naval forces, adequate supply of water and provisions, and, most importantly in the eyes of its inhabitants, the miraculous tutelary powers resident in the God-guarded city.

Chapter 8, “Imperial Constantinople,” maps the imperial presence in Constantinople’s urban and suburban space during its lifetime as a Roman capital, looking at the space reserved to the emperor and the court hierarchy, at satellite residences of the imperial hub, and at the use and politicization of public space

Chapter 21, “Byzantium in Early Modern Istanbul,” highlights the multiple ways in which the Byzantine past was present in and had a bearing on the lives and imaginations of Istanbulites in the post-Byzantine city within the framework of four topics: rupture and ruin, structures of longue durée, translation and notions of antiquarianism, and, finally, the lives and the reflections of Byzantine monuments and spolia.

Chapter 20, “Encountering and Inventing Constantinople in Early Modern Europe,” discusses the idea of Constantinople in medieval and early modern Europe, and the lure it held for early modern antiquarians. It examines the nature of the city these scholars imagined against the reality of the city they found.

Chapter 5, “The Supply of Food to Constantinople,” discusses the supply, distribution, preparation, and consumption of food to the capital, noting the importance of the relationship between the urban center, its hinterland, and the empire’s distant provinces.

Chapter 17, “Entertainment,” considers Constantinople as a nexus of social space, civic ceremony, commercial entertainment, and endless diversion where streets and plazas were regularly taken over by processions, churches and monasteries were filled with clergy and worshipers, and competitive games and performances took place in the open-air hippodrome.

Chapter 18,” Medieval Travellers to Constantinople: Wonders and Wonder.” From its very beginnings, in the 330s, Constantinople attracted a steady flow of visitors from around the empire and the territories beyond its borders, travellers who arrived from the cardinal points to experience the city from various stations in life and in myriad ways. Their interactions with the city are the subject of this chapter, which offers an overview of the people who came to the city, their motives for travel, and their perceptions of the capital and the empire of which it was a hub.

From its foundation in the fourth century, to its fall to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century, the name “Constantinople” not only identified a geographical location, but also summoned an idea. On the one hand, there was the fact of Constantinople, the city of brick, mortar, and marble that rose to preeminence as the capital of the Roman Empire on a hilly peninsula jutting into the waters at the confluence of the Sea of Marmora, the Golden Horn, and the Bosporos. On the other hand, there was the city of the imagination. To pronounce the name Constantinople conjured a vision of wealth and splendor unrivalled by any of the great medieval cities, east or west. The commanding geographical location together with the city’s status as an imperial capital, the correspondingly monumental scale of its built environment, the richness of its sacred spaces, and the power of the rituals that enlivened them drove this idea, as its urban fortunes waxed and waned in the course of its millennial history. The devastations of earthquakes, fire, plague, and pillage notwithstanding, the idea of Constantinopolitan greatness prevailed. If there was one thing about which the diverse and often quarrelsome populations of the Middle Ages could agree, it was on Constantinople’s status as the “Queen of Cities.”

Chapter 11, “Sacred Dimensions: Church Building and Ecclesiastical Practice,” examines the relationship between church building and ecclesiastical practice in Byzantine Constantinople. It outlines the ways in which architecture accommodates and responds to the exigencies of ritual both on a practical, and on a symbolic level to reveal how church buildings were understood symbolically as worship spaces, manifestations of piety, wealth, power, and prestige, and places of perpetual commemoration.