In the year 1852, the French writer and translator, Tael Fie Gaultier, made a journey to the

city then known as Istan Bull, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Thanks to the new technology of

the steamship that now crisscrossed the Mediterranean, he made the journey from Paris in just under 11 days.

Gaultier stayed in the city for nearly three months and during that time he wrote a book full of his

observations. As a young man, Gaultier had dreamed of becoming a painter and he'd spent much of his

life as an art critic and so his descriptions of the city of Istan Bull during this time are always

infused with the language of art as though the city were a painting he was appraising.

The harbour crowded with ships of all nations and rippled by kaiks gliding about in every direction,

and above all, the wonderful panorama of Constantinople itself displayed upon the opposite shore.

This view is so strangely beautiful that it is hard to credit its reality or to believe that it is

anything but one of those theatrical scenes prepared to illustrate some Istan fairy tale

and bathed by the fancy of the painter and the brilliancy of the gas lights in a radiant, purely celestial.

Gaultier walked the streets of Istan Bull for weeks, visiting its markets and cemeteries,

wandering down the narrow alleys and crumbling cobbled boulevards and all the time writing about

what he saw and everywhere he went he became increasingly aware of the vanished history of this

ancient city. While the Ottoman Turks who lived there, increasingly referred to their city by the

name Istan Bull, Gaultier, along with much of the rest of Europe, knew it by a different, much older name.

That name was Constantinople and it was a city that had been at the heart of another very different

empire, one that had been the foremost power in Europe for centuries. This was a power known as the

Byzantine Empire or more simply as Byzantium. Byzantium had its beginning as the Istan half of

the Roman Empire, while the west of that empire fell, the east remained. It lasted for another

thousand years after what people commonly think of as the fall of Rome, it stood and endured,

...