One of the few monuments of Constantinople that survived the Crusader mayhem was a statue of Justinian on horseback standing atop a tall column. It wasn’t taken down only because it was way to high and heavy to be brought down and melted for its bronze. The equestrian Justinian held a golden orb in his left hand and his right hand was stretched towards the east. It was a message to the Persians whom he had defeated in the early 540s.
The Byzantines attributed all kinds of mystical powers to this column & the statue. It had protected the city against invaders for centuries. But a storm blew the orb right out of Justinian’s hand and it cracked. Despite multiple attempts at putting it back in its place, it kept falling. To many it foretold the impending fall of the empire. The city was already surrounded on all sides by the rapidly-expanding empire the Turks had established. It was only a matter of time before the city itself fell.
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Suleiman the Magnificent was the Justinian I of the Ottoman Empire. Under him, Istanbul grew as did the empire. Like Justinian I, he went against convention. He was the first Ottoman Sultan to formally marry. The love of his life was Hurrem (also known as Roxelana), who came to his harem as a slave after having been captured in her native Ukraine and sold at Istanbul’s busy Avret Pazari (Aurat Bazar, or Women’s Market). As Suleiman’s attachment to her & her power over him grew, she became increasingly unpopular and even hated by large sections of the court and the populace. She was the first consort to have a tomb built for her. The hamam she had built still stands as an expensive spa between the Hagia Sophia & the Blue Mosque.
On his building spree, Suleiman teamed up with master architect Sinan, who went on to design over 500 structures, presumably with a large team of apprentices, one of whom would go on to design the Blue Mosque. Armenians claim Sinan was one of them. Other sources claim he was of Greek or Albanian origin. Regardless, he was born a Christian and, as was the custom in those days, he was enslaved and brought into the Janissary corps (the Praetorian Guards of the Ottomans) as a young boy after having been converted to Islam. His masterpiece is the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne (the ancient Adrianople), in the far northwest corner of Turkey where it meets Bulgaria & Greece. But in Istanbul, the complex he built as the final resting place of Suleiman, is his most famous work. Largely due to ignorance and poor planning, unfortunately I did not visit the Suleimanieh Mosque although it’s highly visible due to its location atop a hill by the Golden Horn.
You can easily get mosqued out in Istanbul, given the large number of converted Byzantine churches as well as the ones that various Ottoman sultans built to outdo one another. But no visit to Istanbul is complete without a visit to the Sultanahmet Mosque. It was built by Sultan Ahmed I (the Fortunate), Suleiman’s great-grandson, on the grounds of the erstwhile Great Palace of the Byzantine Emperors. Designed by Sedefkar Mehmed Agha, and ex-Albanian slave converted to Islam and student of Sinan, it reuses a lot of the materials from the Byzantine palace as well as the Hippodrome which was already in ruins by then. The stones that make up the floor of the central courtyard, for instance, were from the seats in the stands of the Hippodrome.
Although Sultan Ahmed was pious, he had the mosque built with six minarets, the same number as in Mecca. It was seen as a symbol of his ego. So he later commissioned the 7th minaret to be added to the one in Mecca.
Like all Ottoman mosques the Blue Mosque is characterized by blue Iznik tiles, geometric designs & calligraphy of Koranic verses. Under the Ottomans, Iznik, southeast of Constantinople, became the center for pottery. In Byzantine times, the town was known as Nicea, the place where the First & Second Councils of the Christian churches were held. Iznik Çini (or Iznik china) tiles, with their exquisite, predominantly cobalt blue arabesques, is what gives the mosque its name.
While Suleiman and his successors beautified the city’s skyline, they apparently didn’t pay much attention to its planning or its sewage system. So haphazard & filthy the city was that the Englishman George Sandys wrote after a visit in 1610, “I think there is not in the world any object that promiseth so much afar off; and entered, that so deceiveth the expectation.”
But the city continued to attract foreigners. Even at the end of the Ottoman rule, by when its power & economy had waned, it was a cosmopolitan city with a babel of languages spoken. Ironically, it was the secular, modernizing nationalism that took over Turkey in the beginning of the 20th century that resulted in the city becoming highly Turkified, losing most of its ethnic minorities through the subsequent decades. After the population exchange (or ethnic cleansing, as we’d call it today) between Turkey & Greece in 1923, Istanbul’s Greek population dropped precipitously. This exchange of peoples between the two countries was similar to the larger-scale one that would occur in 1947 between India and Pakistan, although it was far less horrific than the latter. (Turkey reserved that horror for the Armenians and the Assyrians in the east and southeast of the country earlier in the century.) By the 1920s most of the remaining Armenians had emigrated too. By historical standards, what remained was a much more (culturally) homogeneous population, and repeated reinforcement of the secular nationalism of Ataturk over the subsequent decades (even after his death), gave it a cultural & national unity that Istanbul and the greater Anatolian region had perhaps lacked in the past.
