Audiobook. Rather wonderful. vast sweep of history is all there even the links between King Arthur's Tintagel and Byzantium. sometimes almost mythical in making the City come alive as personality. Well read, Bettany: she is and did. ( )

I would have given this 5 stars, but I felt like, due to certain things, I could only give it 4 stars.
Bettany Hughes does a very good job in compiling the history of Istanbul, and I enjoyed this book very much.
However, there are some parts of the book where Hughes doesn’t do it so well:
1. She spends a lot of paragraphs on certain things while other things - things that would seem to be equal importance - she only skims over
2. She tends to use a lot of big adjectives
There were a few other things, but these stuck out to me the most throughout the book.
Again, I really loved this book, and I would have given it 5 stars if it weren’t for the two things I mentioned above. ( )

Skip the Prologue.

With the main narrative clocking in at around 600 pages long, “Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities” by Bettany Hughes is extensively well-cited with copious amounts of endnotes and a substantial bibliography. It’s clear that Hughes wrote this book with the eye of a historian. The problem? It’s not a very compelling narrative.

Hughes chronologically tracks the history of Istanbul from prehistory through the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires to the modern day. It’s a massive undertaking for a city that is literally viewed as a gateway between Europe and Asia; sitting directly on the ancient Silk Road. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with the tone of the writing itself, the choice of topics is somewhat strange. Expecting more of a broad geo-political history, the book instead comes off as a chronological series of vignettes on various people and the occasional geographical landmark. Indeed, each chapter is only a handful of pages long. For whatever reason, the narrative fizzles out following WWI with the end of the Ottoman Empire. Hughes does make an attempt to portray Istanbul as a very cosmopolitan city, but sadly it all gets drowned out in the morass of biographical sketches of numerous emperors, sultans, princes, and slaves in the city on the Bosporus Strait. Examinations of the economic and political influence of the Byzantine or Ottoman Empires come off as fairly mundane and the narrative bogs down too heavily in individual stories that you lose sight of the broader picture. As a result, it can be difficult for the reader to really piece together a comprehensive view of how the city has changed throughout the centuries.

To be fair, the book is no slouch when it comes to its historiography. Hughes is definitely well-versed in the culture and history of the region. This is a worthwhile book to understand how people influenced the city. The book is very well-researched and cited. As a result, it strikes a much more scholarly tone in its writing than other offerings out there. This is a very good book for a historian or the historically-minded reader. ( )

Overall, the main problem with this book is that it is far too long. I read many long books; I am an ardent lover of history, a student of the ancient world and the eastern Mediterranean. What is wrong with this picture? The amount of information contained in it is enormous; but the story it imparts is fragmentary and incoherent. Part of the problem – and one that contributes to its excessive length - is living up to its clever title; the tale of the “first” city of Istanbul is a rather thin one, and the connections that the author tries to make between then and now are far too tenuous. Nothing much happened in ancient pre-Constantinople Byzantion that didn’t happen in 50 other ancient Greek cities. One of the few securely historic figures from this period with a connection to this city, is the Spartan general Pausanius, for whom Byzantion was just one short episode in a checkered career. But even that connection is somewhat tenuous; there is a “strong possibility” that he built the city’s first walls; the Serpent Column at Delphi, on which Pausanius had inscribed his name, was moved to Constantinople 800 years after his death, a development for which Pausanius might have been “secretly pleased”. Byzantion was one of many cities that changed hands during the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta, but the fact is that Chalcedon and Chrysopolis – two cities on the Asian side of the Bosphorus – were far more important at that time. Byzantion seems to have consistently missed its opportunities to make history; although his father Philip of Macedon tried besieging Byzantion, Alexander the Great apparently bypassed the city on his way to conquer the east. At the end of the second century AD, a challenger to the Roman emperor Septimus Severus made Byzantium his center of operations; the ruling emperor swiftly put an end to both the upstart and his putative capital. Severus did at least later rebuild Byzantium, preparing the way for its next more significant reincarnation as the city of Constantine.

The second part of the book consists of a series of portraits – roughly chronological in order – of Constantine and his successor emperors, of the city, and its inhabitants. It is occasionally interesting, but not compelling. Even if the formidable city walls were often all that stood between Byzantium and its extinction, the story of Constantinople is not a match for the really fascinating story of the Byzantine empire; how the sprawling, essentially indefensible collection of territories, of which Constantinople was the center, twisted and turned, and managed to negotiate its – sometimes tenuous - survival for over 1,000 years despite the assaults of Persians, Goths, Vandals. Avars, Slavs, Huns, Muslims, Mongols and Crusaders. In fact the most interesting chapters are the ones where the author ventures outside the city - describing the multiple trade routes to and from Constantinople, or the implications of the Byzantine artifacts discovered at Anglo-Saxon sites in England. The author’s knowledge of the city – ancient and modern – is encyclopedic; but somehow the constant referral back - to what or who might have stood on this very spot in ancient Byzantion - and forward to what district of modern Istanbul now covers it, becomes tedious. It is almost like reading the script of a future Istanbul BBC series.

I am afraid that – after several attempts to reengage – I only skimmed though part three, dealing with the city's final incarnation; maybe I will read it again carefully before visiting Istanbul, as it does have more of the feel of a guide book than anything else. ( )