New histories of Istanbul

Istanbul: Tale of Three Cities. By Bettany Hughes. Orion; 800 pages; £25. To be published in America by Da Capo Press in September; $35.

Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World. By Thomas Madden. Viking; 400 pages; $30.

FOR more than 2,000 years, the city on the Bosporus has by turns dazzled, enticed, horrified and scared the world. Over the generations, its inhabitants have excelled in art and architecture, wielded political and spiritual power over big swathes of the earth, and suffered in catastrophes ranging from earthquakes to fires. In recent years, the city has surged in importance as an economic and cultural hub and suffered awful terrorist attacks.

Yet for all its colourful drama, the city’s history can be hard to narrate in a way that is coherent and gripping. When studying the Byzantine era, readers can easily get lost in a succession of emperors with confusingly similar names, all embroiled in ruthless family feuds. Bettany Hughes, a prolific British broadcaster and classical scholar, and Thomas Madden, an American professor of history, take up that challenge in new books about Istanbul, and in both cases the result is impressive.

In “Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities” Ms Hughes plays intriguing, sophisticated games with time and space: both those concepts, in her view, need to be reconsidered when contemplating something so vast and fluid as Istanbul’s historical pageant. Of course, that impulse is not completely original: any visitor attuned to the city will get the sense at times that every phase of local history is simultaneously present and in some way still unfolding.

But by making unlikely connections between well-described locations and events separated by aeons, she gives voice to those witchy, diachronic feelings in a spectacular fashion. What could have been a failed literary conceit succeeds. It is typical of Ms Hughes that she opens the book with something new and something very old: engineering work to extend the city’s transport system, and the fresh archaeological evidence of the area’s earliest human settlement which that work has unearthed. Among the finds is an 8,000-year-old wooden coffin.

Ms Hughes draws parallels between the protests of 2013, ruthlessly suppressed by the security forces of an elected Islamist government, and the uprising of 532AD, known as the Nika riots, from the Greek for “victory”. In the earlier event, passions felt by rival factions at the hippodrome somehow fused into a general uprising against authority. As the author observes, the city has always lent itself to rioting: crowds can assemble in its great public squares, and then its steep, narrow alleys can serve either as escape routes or traps.

To introduce the city’s Jewish community in late antiquity, who were accomplished metalworkers, Ms Hughes invites readers down the backstreets where copper-bashing is still practised today, albeit by Muslim Turks. One of her recurring themes is that through an endless succession of despotic emperors and sultans, the city’s underdogs have always had their say in its destiny. That includes the female sex. Ms Hughes relishes the story of Theodora, the powerful consort of the great emperor Justinian. The daughter of a bear-tamer, she went on to become an erotic dancer, and then used her charms to attract the attention of the city’s bigwigs.

As the author also points out, a more subtle female presence in early Byzantium was Holy Wisdom, or Hagia Sophia, to which the greatest place of worship in eastern Christendom was dedicated. This epithet can refer to a feminine form of divine power, mentioned fleetingly in the Hebrew scriptures, whose role is to impart inspiration and creative force.

Like many a teller of Istanbul’s tale, Ms Hughes suggests that the city’s conquest in 1453 by the Ottoman Turks was not quite such a watershed as conventional wisdom holds. By that year, the place had long been reduced to a shrunken shadow of its imperial glory, obliged to parley with the Ottoman emirs entrenched nearby. Nor did the conquest spell instant doom for the city’s Greek Orthodox authorities, who initially at least kept many of their finest churches. That argument has some force, but it can be overstated: the fact that a change was gradual does not mean that it was trivial.

Mr Madden is also a skilled narrator, negotiating the twists and turns in the city’s destiny without getting hopelessly mired in detail. His book lacks the strong emphasis on the physical and built landscape which is a hallmark of Ms Hughes’s writing. But it gives a wonderfully vivid and clear account of an episode which Westerners have forgotten: the conquest and desecration of the city in 1204 by crusaders from the Christian West.

Mr Madden brings home both the reckless looting and vandalism perpetrated by the Latin forces, including the accompanying clergy, and the anger laced with arrogance felt by the city’s defeated GreekOrthodox, who felt they had been vanquished by their intellectual and cultural inferiors. Reading his book would be a fine way to prepare for a visit to Istanbul, but while actually treading the streets or contemplating the murky waters of the Golden Horn, a traveller would find Ms Hughes’s volume a better companion: bulky at over 500 pages but well worth humping up and down the hills.