Istanbul and the Civilization of the Ottoman Empire

On Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the young Sultan Mehemmed, known to history as -the Conqueror, - launched the final assault against the walls of Constantinople and added that imperial capital, as coping stone; to the Empire that his fathers had conquered. As the Sultan's Imam intoned the Muslim creed within the walls of Hagia Sophia, the Greek cathedral become a Turkish mosque, and the curtain went up on a new era. In this, the ninth volume of The Centers of Civilization Series, Bernard Lewis describes the city and its civilization in the great age of the Ottoman Sultanate, between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.Under the Ottomans, the city once again became the center of a vest empire and of a flourishing civilization. The conquerors did not destroy the captured Christian city, but took care to preserve and embellish; they added four Muslim minarets to Hagia Sophia, built many fine mosques and palaces of their own, and transformed the shrunken remnant of the Byzantine city into a