The Majestic City of Constantine

Thomas Madden remains, especially after the death of Jonathan Riley-Smith, one of the most important Crusades scholars in the world today. Madden, an award-winning and widely respected scholar who teaches history at Saint Louis University (where he directs their Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies) is the author of such studies as The New Concise History of the Crusades and Crusades: The llustrated History.

This short essay of his, discussing one of Riley-Smith's books, is invaluable for highlighting the problems discussing "the Crusades" today, a discussion marred by what the psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan calls "time collapse" and group identities built on "chosen traumas."

Madden is a wide-ranging scholar, and in addition to his several studies on the Crusades, he has also authored other works dealing with cities that have had a huge influence on the fortunes of Eastern Christianity, including Venice: a New History and Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice

He has, next month, a new book coming out that remains at the centre of the Eastern Christian imaginary (to borrow Charles Taylor's phrase). I look forward to reading:Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World (Viking, 2016), 400pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

For more than two millennia Istanbul has stood at the crossroads of the world, perched at the very tip of Europe, gazing across the shores of Asia. The history of this city--known as Byzantium, then Constantinople, now Istanbul--is at once glorious, outsized, and astounding. Founded by the Greeks, its location blessed it as a center for trade but also made it a target of every empire in history, from Alexander the Great and his Macedonian Empire to the Romans and later the Ottomans. At its most spectacular Emperor Constantine I re-founded the city as New Rome, the capital of the eastern Roman empire, and dramatically expanded the city, filling it with artistic treasures, and adorning the streets with opulent palaces. Around it all Constantine built new walls, truly impregnable, that preserved power, wealth, and withstood any aggressor--walls that still stand for tourists to visit.

      From its ancient past to the present, we meet the city through its ordinary citizens--the Jews, Muslims, Italians, Greeks, and Russians who used the famous baths and walked the bazaars--and the rulers who built it up and then destroyed it, including Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the man who christened the city "Istanbul" in 1930. Thomas F. Madden's entertaining narrative brings to life the city we see today, including the rich splendor of the churches and monasteries that spread throughout the city.

     Istanbul draws on a lifetime of study and the latest scholarship, transporting readers to a city of unparalleled importance and majesty that holds the key to understanding modern civilization. In the words of Napoleon Bonaparte, "If the Earth were a single state, Istanbul would be its capital."

Greek Orthodox Music in Ottoman Istanbul

For the Greeks, Ottomans, and musicians in your life: Indiana University Press is set to release today, January 2nd, a new study that you will want to order as a continuing celebration of Christmas, or perhaps a pre-Theophany gift. In any event, it is a welcome study in an area that has long cried out for more research: Orthodox music in all its diversity. 

Merih Erol, Greek Orthodox Music in Ottoman Istanbul: Nation and Community in the Era of Reform (IU Press, 2016), 288pp.

About this book we are told:

During the late Ottoman period (1856–1922), a time of contestation about imperial policy toward minority groups, music helped the Ottoman Greeks in Istanbul define themselves as a distinct cultural group. A part of the largest non-Muslim minority within a multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire, the Greek Orthodox educated elite engaged in heated discussions about their cultural identity, Byzantine heritage, and prospects for the future, at the heart of which were debates about the place of traditional liturgical music in a community that was confronting modernity and westernization. Merih Erol draws on archival evidence from ecclesiastical and lay sources dealing with understandings of Byzantine music and history, forms of religious chanting, the life stories of individual cantors, and other popular and scholarly sources of the period. Audio examples keyed to the text are available online.