by Jesse Howell, PhD ’17, CMES Academic Programs Manager and Associate Director of the AM Program
Certain dates stand out in the collective historical consciousness. On May 29, 1453, Ottoman forces under the command of the twenty-one-year-old Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II took control of the city of Constantinople. To many Muslim observers, this was the long-awaited fulfillment of a pronouncement (hadith) attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. To many Christians, it was a catastrophe. For historians looking to divide human events into coherent periods, it a definitive signpost, often invoked to mark the endpoint of the medieval era. The Republic of Turkey highlights the date every year with official celebrations. In recent years, the government’s festive announcements on Twitter have carried a catchy hashtag: #29Mayıs1453.
Dates endure, but they can also obscure. Thinking of the world historical ramifications of a pivotal moment, it is easy to overlook commonalities and continuities. The Ottoman conquest was not simply the case of an upstart newcomer arriving from distant steppes to displace an ancient political order. In fact, when looking more closely, it can be hard to see precisely where one empire ended and the other began. By the mid-fifteenth century, the Ottoman and Byzantine Empires had been neighbors, antagonists, and allies for 150 years. Their military, political, cultural, and demographic fortunes were deeply intermingled.
Prior to 1453, the borderlands of Western Anatolia were largely populated by Greek-speaking Christians and an increasing number of Turkish-speaking Muslims. As the Ottomans grew in power and prestige, they attracted support from across confessional lines. Christian commanders and their followers, including such formidable leaders as Köse Mihal and Evrenos Bey, joined the Ottoman side. They contributed to the young dynasty’s military successes and brought expertise and local knowledge to the settlement and administration of conquered areas in formerly Byzantine territory.
Byzantium, meanwhile, was fractured internally by political conflicts and rivalries between powerful dynastic lines. Warring factions relied on good relations and the support of their growing Ottoman neighbors. Marriage was a key as a tool of alliance-building, as when Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos gave his daughter Theodora in marriage to the Ottoman ruler Orhan Gazi. Theodora, like countless other Ottoman subjects, remained a Christian.
Despite his notoriety as the individual responsible for obliterating the final vestiges of the Eastern Roman Empire, Sultan Mehmed II held Greco-Roman culture and learning in high esteem. As a young man, his tutors read to him in Greek and Latin sources. His library came to include thousands of manuscripts, including foundational Greek texts. Well known for bringing Italian Renaissance artists—including the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini—to his new court in Istanbul, the Sultan also valued Byzantine scholars. George Amiroutzes was a learned Byzantine official who became a privileged member of Mehmed’s court. One of Amiroutzes’s tasks was to prepare an edition of Ptolemy’s works for the Sultan, along with explanatory charts.
Despite such profound linkages, Byzantine and Ottoman histories have largely been studied in isolation, divided by ingrained academic traditions and specialized linguistic demands. With this artificial separation in mind, it was a fruitful decision by Dimiter Angelov, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine History, and Cemal Kafadar, Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies, to partner with Nevra Necipoğlu, Professor of History at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. Their efforts led to the establishment of the Byzantine Studies Initiative, a multi-year collaboration between CMES and the Byzantine Research Center (BSRC) at Boğaziçi University. Funded by a grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the initiative centers on cross-cultural contacts and comparative perspectives, locating the Byzantine Empire in the context of the Eastern Mediterranean world.
The CMES community benefitted tremendously from the Byzantine Studies Initiative, particularly with the participation of two exceptional postdoctoral scholars-in-residence: Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Siren Çelik. Both are specialists in Byzantine history whose work deals with political developments in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Byzantine–Ottoman interactions were at their peak.
While at CMES, Aschenbrenner, currently teaching at the University of California, San Diego, worked on his monograph, “Universal Monarchy Between Sultan and Pope: Reorienting Constantinople in the Fifteenth-Century Mediterranean.” Çelik, now Assistant Professor at Marmara University in Istanbul, completed her book project, Manuel II Palaiologos (1350–1425): A Byzantine Emperor in a Time of Tumult. It was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.
In addition, the initiative allowed CMES to support Harvard history PhD candidate Jake Ransohoff as he completed his degree. Ransohoff, now a Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University, co-edited the remarkable volume The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe, together with Aschenbrenner. Their work was published by Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in 2022.
The Covid-19 pandemic divided us physically with our partners at Boğaziçi University. Despite challenges and delays, collaboration continued. It was a joyful moment when, in June of 2022, we were finally able to gather together in Nafplio, Greece, for an academic conference organized by Angelov and Necipoğlu. Titled “Geography and Cosmography in the Byzantine and the Ottoman World,” the conference brought together faculty and graduate students from CMES, Boğaziçi University, and beyond. Four sessions featuring ten speakers addressed key issues and new approaches. The Center for Hellenic Studies in Greece—led by Managing Director Christos Giannopoulos, with support from Mina Tsentourou and Evan Katsarelis—gave us the perfect venue for lively scholarly exchange.
Gathering in Nafplio, we had an opportunity to learn from one another and to develop approaches that accounted for the centuries of parallel experience and dialogue that marked Byzantine and Ottoman history. Geography and cosmography represent ways that humans make sense of their physical, celestial, and metaphysical surroundings. A growing body of scholarship has shown how Byzantine and Ottoman thinkers in these fields were grounded in shared Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions as they developed their own distinct modes of thought and culture. Speakers at the conference dived into these interwoven roots, revealing new ways that the two empires continuously reacted and learned from each other.
In the initial session, Maria Mavroudi deftly laid out fluid patterns of intellectual exchange. Her paper described how translations of Ptolemy were studied at the Ottoman court, while Byzantine scholars were deeply indebted to Arabic sources. Angelov revealed ways that medieval Byzantine writers looked to ancient Roman texts to explore the Central Asian origins of the Turkic people who had begun to arrive in increasing numbers in their eastern borderlands in the eleventh century.
Sessions two and three, with papers by Anne-Laurence Caudano, Didar Akbulut, Immaculada Pérez Martin, and Sonja Brentjes, articulated the interplay between diagrams, maps, and texts as distinct modes of transmitting geographical information. One particularly vivid image, described by Akbulut (a PhD candidate at CMES), located the origins of the universe not in an act of divine generation, but in the decay of an immense pearl, which created the earth and its heavenly spheres as it melted.
The final paper, presented by Cemal Kafadar and myself, broadened the already wide temporal framework. We looked at the Ottoman invention and adaptation of a mythic pre-history of the city of Constantinople/Istanbul. King Solomon and Queen Belkis—as the Queen of Sheba is known in the Islamic tradition—were key figures in these legends, around whom narratives of an Ottoman past that pre-dated Byzantine history were constructed.
Once the talks were completed, we loaded into buses and headed inland to a searingly hot valley near the site of ancient Sparta. Anastasios Tantsis, a Byzantine archaeologist from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, was our guide as we approached the remains of a medieval city located on the slopes of the Taygetos Mountains. Mystras, our destination, became prominent in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, becoming the capital of the Byzantine Despotate of the Morea. The city experienced great prosperity at a time when Byzantine Constantinople was increasingly isolated within the expanding sphere of Ottoman power.
The sloping site of Mystras consists of an array of stone buildings built on a sharp incline. Their fine construction and ornamental programs are a vivid reminder of the city’s wealth and prestige. Mystras was the center of what became known as the Palaiologan Renaissance. At the center is the Despot’s Palace, with a spacious, recently renovated central hall. Surrounding the palace are multiple churches and monasteries. The remains of elaborate fresco cycles are visible in the city’s sacred buildings—crowds of overlapping haloed saints, pointy clouds of winged angels, seated Marys with wizened child Christs in their laps—a vivid reminder of the cultural connection to far-away Constantinople. Mystras, we were reminded, was the city where the renowned philosopher Gemistos Plethon spent much of his adult life.
Our visit to Mystras brought the geography and cosmography of the late Byzantine moment sharply into focus. The site, which now feels remote and somewhat forgotten, was an important center of scholarship and artistic production. It thrived even as the millennium-old capital of the Eastern Roman Empire was taken over by newcomers, a reminder that culture can innovate, adapt, and endure even in volatile political circumstances.