In the mid-sixteenth century Francois I ruled France, and Suleyman
the Magnificent sat on the throne of the Ottoman Empire. Although
the two leaders were separated by culture, religion and politics,
the Catholic Francois and the Muslim Suleyman joined forces for a
time in a political alliance to check the Hapsburg threat to both
their empires. In 1544 Pierre Gilles of Albi, an established
scholar and author, arrived in Constantinople as a member of a
French embassy aimed at furthering this alliance. Constantinople
was then the largest and wealthiest city in Europe. Its nearly
700,000 inhabitants outnumbered the combined populations of western
cities such as Venice, Palermo, Messina, Catania and Naples. It was
the Mediterranean capital, and home to a truly international
population of Turks, Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Gypsies, Arabs,
Africans, Slavs, French and others who lived side by side, for the
most part in peace. They worshipped in over 400 mosques and dozens
of Christian churches, engaged in commerce in tens of thousands of
small ateliers and shops, and sailed the waters of the Bosporus,
Golden Horn and Marmara in thousands of small boats, ferries and
ships. Each year the populace consumed over 100,000 tons of wheat
and other grains and hundreds of thousands of head of cattle and
sheep. It was an age of bold architecture, dazzling ceramics and
textiles, brilliant poetry, history, and philosophy. Gilles'
mission was to find and purchase ancient Greek manuscripts for
Francois' humanist library. But while in Constantinople Gilles
conceived his own project: to study the history and monuments of
the former Byzantine capital on the spot and to publish his
findings bolstered and compared with what he could learn from the
ancient and medieval sources. The result was his "Topography of
Constantinople and Its Antiquities in Four Books." Kimberly Byrd
offers a new edition of Gilles' important work: "Pierre Gilles'
Constantinople" includes her complete English translation of the
Topography with references to Gilles' sources and to the most
important recent scholarship on the city and its monuments.
English-speaking readers have long relied on John Ball's 1729
translation and on its modernization published by Italica Press in
1988. This fine edition supplants that volume and offers a fresh
and important addition to the scholarship on Constantinople, its
ancient heritage, and to the evolving study and practice of
classical archaeology in Renaissance Europe. 328 pages, 59
illustrations, 5 maps. Preface, bibliography, index.
General
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