Constantinople: building and maintenance

It is possible to see the story of Constantinopolitan construction in the city’s first 200 years as a single undertaking. The concentration of political will, economic capacity, and logistic conditions combined to facilitate the influx of the necessary building materials, specialized knowledge, and technological skills from a pan-Mediterranean architectural catchment. The enormity of this enterprise led to a radical change in the urban ecosystem, transforming what had been a minimally urbanized territory into a concentrated urban center. In the following centuries this concentration of buildings determined the survival of the urban organism. Materials recovered from abandoned buildings supplied the raw material for new construction and restoration. More importantly, it provided Constantinople with the infrastructures necessary to the survival and operation of a city of its dimensions, a concentration of buildings that offered its inhabitants the necessary resources for urban living and created the administrative center so essential to the functioning of the complex state that was the Byzantine Empire. It was this concentration of building that attracted first the admiration and then the destructive lust of western medieval observers that resulted in the debacle of the Fourth Crusade (1204). It also put Constantinople in the sights of Mehmed II the Conqueror (1441–6/ 1451–81) as he searched for an established and reusable administrative center for his new complex state organization.