Istanbul, the city, sits at the junction of Europe and Asia, literally and metaphorically. Istanbul, the book, moved my perception of history eastward, away from an inevitable march toward western cultural hegemony. As Americans, our history often begins with ancient Greece and its democratic ideals. Yet, ancient Greece is adjacent to modern Turkiye. Greeks inhabited Turkiye and the eastern Mediterranean. When Rome supplanted Greece, it too inhabited Turkiye. The Roman emperor Constantine brought the center of the burgeoning religion of Christianity to Constantinople, Istanbul’s forerunner. When the city of Rome collapsed, the Eastern Roman Empire continued from the 4th to the 15th centuries, as Roman rule persevered in Istanbul. All of which is to say that Greece and Rome expanded to the east at least as much as they did toward the west.
Covering 10,000 years of history is no simple task, but to Bettany Hughes great credit, she delivers more than wars, dates, and chieftans. Combining extant writings with modern archaeological analysis, Hughes spends time with peasants caught up in the religious cross-winds of history, explaining why and when Christianity displaced Roman gods, and how, where, and why Islam overtook Christianity. She details the cultural significance of harems and how Victorian westerners turned harems into dens of iniquity. She tells us how people farmed and what they ate and how ships and bridges and tides and seawalls all played their part in shaping history. Most of all she moves the center of the world away from Paris and London eastward across the Eurasian continent through Istanbul Damascus, Baghdad, Ifsahan and beyond. Istanbul was the center of it all.
The Silk Road ran through Istanbul. Products, ideas, and diseases, e.g., the plague, all moved through the city on route from China to England and back. Byzantines battled Persian and Indian empires, reminding me that while the history I learned focused on the Dark Ages, Crusades, and squabbles among European nobles, Byzantines fighting for territory were enormous empires farther east.