For 470 years Istanbul was the capital of the Ottoman empire, which at its heyday stretched from Morocco to Ukraine, from the borders of Iran to Hungary. This was the artistic and intellectual centre of the Ottoman world, a commercial magnet for merchants from across the globe and the political piston of the empire. Its citizens lived surrounded by the pageantry of power and spectacle, caught up in the violence of the capital, and sustained by the enormous web of welfare that kept the city together. Our book offers a social portrait of this vibrant, violent, dynamic and cosmopolitan capital.

Captured in 1453 by Mehmed II (1444–46, 1451–81), known in Turkish as the conqueror, Istanbul became the capital of an ever-expanding empire as Mehmed II's successors, Bayezid II (1481–1512), Selim I (1512–20) and Süleyman I (1520–66) – the magnificent for the West, the lawgiver for the Ottomans – expanded the frontiers, conquering eastern Anatolia, parts of Iran, Syria, Egypt, the North African coast to Morocco, Rhodes, much of the Balkans, and reaching as far west as the gates of Vienna, which was besieged twice but not taken.