Lecture: Aleksandar Shopov ~ Growing the Imperial City: Agriculture and the Rebuilding of Istanbul after the Conquest (1453)

Join us at 3 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 2, in the IASH Conference Room, LN-1106, for the lecture on "Growing the Imperial City: Agriculture and the Rebuilding of Istanbul after the Conquest (1453)" with guest speaker Aleksandar Shopov, assistant professor of Early-Modern Ottoman history at Binghamton University

After the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1453, Istanbul underwent a dramatic transformation into the imperial capital. The making of this new capital was crucial to Ottoman empire-building and the centralization policies initiated by Mehmed II and subsequent Ottoman sultans. However, not everyone was happy with Istanbul's new centrality. By the 1470s, opposition to Istanbul as the capital emerged within Ottoman society, which found expression in apocalyptic narratives. In an anonymous Ottoman chronicle written in the late-fifteenth century, agriculture and agricultural metaphors play a crucial role in arguments about Istanbul's unsuitability as a capital; Istanbul is characterized as an ecologically unstable and unproductive space, prone to natural disasters and decay. As if in reaction to this, in the following decades the rebuilding of Istanbul would incorporate agriculture into the city's very foundation; produce gardens (bostans) would come to be seen as a metaphor for the city itself as a flourishing, nutritive, and productive space, likening techniques of urban farming to the techniques of political power.

Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies | Website | View More Events

Contact the organizers