From Hippodromos to Atmeydanı: Continuity and change in the urban layout of Constantinople after the Ottoman conquest

Abstract

From the reign of Constantine the Great, Constantinople had been deliberately shaped as a city with imperial allure. Nowhere could this more evident than in and around the Hippodrome, and along the main thoroughfare leading to it, the Mese. Later emperors continued to add monuments, statues, sacred icons and holy relics to enhance the city’s imperial pretensions, including the Obelisk of Theodosius, the Hodegetria icon and the Haghia Sophia, the greatest church in all of Christendom. After the Ottoman conquest, successive sultans continued the policy of expressing Constantinople’s prestige as a symbolic center of the world through (religious) architecture, the accumulation of relics, and rituals. This chapter examines the development of Constantinople’s urban landscape in the context of universalistic imperial ideology, focusing on the changes and continuities that occurred after the conquest of the city by ‘the new Constantine’, Mehmet II, in 1453.