Turkey

Five hundred years ago Constantinople—long a bastion of the Western world—fell to the armies of the Grand Turk. G.R. Potter gives his account of how the last remnants of the Byzantine Empire finally disappeared.

The popular image of crusading is derived almost entirely from western accounts of the victorious First Crusade. Yet when historians examine Byzantine sources about the campaign a very different picture emerges, argues Peter Frankopan.

To mark the 400th anniversary of his birth, UNESCO has declared Evliya Çelebi a ‘man of the year’. His Seyahatname, or Book of Travels, is one of the world’s great works of literature. Caroline Finkel celebrates a figure little known in the West.

The quest for spiritual virtue through personal austerity drove many Eastern Christians to lead solitary lives as hermits surviving in the wilderness. Andrew Jotischky describes how indifference to food became an integral part of the monastic ideal in the Byzantine era, one revived in the West in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Bernard Lewis writes that the fall of Constantinople was no “victory of barbarism, but rather of another and not undistinguished civilization.” 

Roger Crowley finds that modern European concerns about Turkey are anticipated in an article by Bernard Lewis, first published in 1953.

The building of Istanbul’s new underground railway has uncovered thousands of years of history, including the first complete Byzantine naval craft ever found. Pinar Sevinclidir investigates.

The Turkish government’s plans to flood two ancient towns with the reservoirs created by two dams are being fiercely resisted – but time is rapidly running out, as Pinar Sevinclidir reports.

Jonathan Phillips sees one of the most notorious events in European history as a typical ‘clash of cultures’.

The final moments of Byzantine control of the imperial capital.