Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

An exploration of the cultural and intellectual accomplishments of a specific city that achieved prominence in a particular time period, and had substantial impact and influence on human civilization. Examines the political, social, religious, and cultural factors that help to explain a city's significance and investigates the achievements of its citizens. Students may repeat this course for further credit under a different topic. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

Great Cities in Their Time: Constantinople/Istanbul

In the twilight of the ancient world, less than a century before the sack of Rome by the Visigoths (410 CE), the Romans built a New Rome in the East (11 May 330 CE). They named it Constantinople after its founder, Constantine, the first emperor to adopt Christianity. The Queen of Cities, as it came to be known, was to become the capital of two powerful polities: the Roman empire (which we call Byzantium when describing its medieval history) and the Ottoman empire. This course looks at this great world city from the perspective of the emperors but also the sultans that shaped it but also in relation to the people – rich and poor, men and women, clerics and lay, who walked its streets and, to this day, remain in its thrall. 

From the official adoption of Christianity by the Roman state early in the 4th century to 1453, when Mehmet the Conqueror turned Constantinople into the Ottoman capital and adopted the title of Augustus even as he became leader of a vast Muslim world, Constantinople was a wondrous world to itself even as it ruled larger, often diverse worlds. As we study it, we ask: How do “capitals” function within the states they help manage? How do their monuments “speak” to subjects and to posterity? How are urban history and landscapes turned into “texts” that evoke “pasts” out of which new identities are forged? How does one city come to be associated with larger states, which it inexorably marks with its economic and cultural power. As we investigate these questions through discussions and the reading of modern scholarship on the subject matter, we will also learn how to handle the different kinds of sources from the period under examination. Most seminar sessions will therefore bring together literary sources, evidence from archaeology and art history, as well as modern scholarship. We will focus on the development of critical skills for analyzing sources and of informed imagination for what our sources do not tell us. 

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

• Students will gain an interdisciplinary insight into the history and culture of late antiquity, the Byzantine and Ottoman empires through examination of sources from this era and the study of modern scholarship on the subject at hand. 
• Students will learn to analyze art, architecture, and literature from Byzantium and, to a lesser extent, the Ottoman Empire, and the era of the Modern Turkish republic and interpret it in comparison with similar material related to different cities and empires, past and present. 
• Students will evaluate our ideas about capitals and empires in diverse contexts (political, ideological, economic), and consider how these ideas shape our beliefs about empires today. 

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: