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In 1453, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II captured the city of Constantinople and ended the Byzantine tenure of the city. As part of his imperial bragging rights, he claimed dominion over two continents-Europe and Asia-and two seas: the... more
In 1453, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II captured the city of Constantinople and ended the Byzantine tenure of the city. As part of his imperial bragging rights, he claimed dominion over two continents-Europe and Asia-and two seas: the Mediterranean or White Sea (Ak Deniz) and the Black Sea (Kara Deniz). Since antiquity, the Straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles not only linked these two seas but created an imagined geographical division between Europe and Asia. The start of a universal Islamic rule centered at Constantinople precipitated a cultural and ideological backlash that resonated through the Mediterranean world. Responses to this sudden transition from Byzantine to Ottoman and from Orthodox Christianity to Sunni Islam varied from the reluctant cooperation of Genoese Pera to the polemics of Pope Pius II. While one end of the spectrum represented the semi-cooperative response of Genoese Pera, the other encapsulated the visceral response of the papacy-best expressed in the so-called Renaissance Crusader literature. 1 Scholars tend to divide the Mediterranean region along an East-West axis and so misread the 1453-capture of Constantinople and its fifteenth century context. This impoverished view obscures the reality that Constantinople and the cluster of cities, suburbs and settlements surrounding it acted as a cultural and economic nexus for a broader unified Mediterranean world. Equally important, Ottoman historiography has diminished the Mediterranean role of the Ottoman Empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in favor of the sixteenth century. The Venetian Republic took part in Eastern Mediterranean commerce and exchange. Constantinople engaged with the Papacy and the Western Mediterranean. Constantinople played a crucial role in the political and economic dynamics of the entire Mediterranean, a role that continued to evolve with the Ottoman dynasty and state in the fifteenth century. In contrast to traditional, narrow, narratives of the city's urban history, this paper contextualizes the role of Constantinople into a larger Mediterranean world. It uses a political and cultural-historical reading of its urban history during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This Mediterraneanizing approach removes the baggage of Greek and Turkish imperial readings of the Eastern Mediterranean. It highlights the intricate dynamics of the evolving Mediterranean economic and geopolitical spheres in the fifteenth century. The
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