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This chapter explores the history of fish, fishermen, and fishing in early modern Ottoman Istanbul. Accounts from the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries reveal various techniques used by fishermen in the Black and Marmara Seas and in the Bosporus Strait. These sources also explain which varieties of fish were caught and consumed in the city. Examining the consumption of fish reveals differences along class and religious lines, and also helps to explain the diet and—since fish were a major source of protein—relative health of the residents of early modern Istanbul. To better understand changes in the catching and consumption of fish in Istanbul, this chapter also compares early modern experiences to those of the early twentieth century, showing remarkable continuity between the two periods.

This chapter describes contemporary Greek Orthodox celebrations on an island in the Bosporus that are attended by many Muslims from Istanbul, few of whom have any knowledge of the Christian faith. It draws on archival evidence to investigate the nature of syncretic activities in the late Ottoman years and finds that there was neither a crude antagonism nor the full positive embrace of “the other” that some nostalgic romanticists imagine.

This chapter examines epigraphic and sculptural monuments from the Cimmerian Bosporus with a view to tracing the formation of a trans-cultural network of elite cooperation. More specifically, it considers the political system in which Greco-Scythian art and other objects were crafted. It first reviews the archaeology and history of the Bosporan state with the aim of integrating texts and objects in other ways and of placing Greco-Scythian metalwork within a broader spectrum of monuments. It then looks at the history of scholarship on Bosporus, with particular emphasis on Russian scholar Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff's seminal account of Bosporan statehood and culture in terms of Greco-Iranian dualism. It argues that this dualism is a feature of the ideological self-fashioning of the Bosporan elite that was consciously cultivated already in antiquity. The chapter also analyses statue dedications as a major type of political monument and concludes by describing the dualism embodied in epigraphy and material culture as an organising principle capable of shaping the dispositions of the Bosporan elite in relation to each other and to outsiders.

This chapter examines the evidence of Greco-Scythian art in practice by focusing on tombside feasts from burial mounds on the Bosporus. It suggests that those feasts provided one of the primary sites for the use and display of Greco-Scythian metalwork and defined elite power as a religious system independent of other forms of statehood on the Bosporus, especially the Greek polis. It also considers religion in ancient Bosporus in relation to the views expressed by Russian scholar Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff and his successors.

This book has explored the social lives of Greco-Scythian art over an extensive chronological span from the perspective of the disciplinary traditions of classical archaeology, making ample reference to a selection of the most important grave assemblages from mounded tombs on the Cimmerian Bosporus that were excavated in pre-Revolutionary times. It has also analysed a variety of status occupations represented on the Greco-Scythian implements, particularly the noble feast, and has highlighted commensality as a fundamental political institution. Citing the work of Russian scholar Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff, especially his inference from the Greco-Scythian depictions of conviviality to the presence of Iranian rites of communion in the northern Black Sea region, the book has shown how images can reveal what the past really looked like and what the ancients believed, rather than how they constructed their beliefs about the world.

This chapter focuses on the imperial dynasty founded in the thirteenth century on the edge of Bosporus by men who hailed from the edge of the North Sea. It examines the public image that dynasty promulgated of itself not only within the immediate confines of the erstwhile Byzantine capital, through coronations and the organization of court ceremonial and culture, but also more widely, by means of the issuing of official documents and, it would seem, coinage. The period under consideration stretches from 1204 to 1261 — that is, from the reign of Baldwin I, who was the first of the crusader emperors, up to and including that of his nephew and namesake, Baldwin II, who was the last of them. The analysis concentrates on what was perhaps the most arresting feature of the new regime, namely its extensive appropriation of the symbols of status — the ornaments or trappings of power — that had been characteristic of the rulers it supplanted.

This chapter examines “the Ottoman Red Sea” from the perspective of time and space through the objectivist analytic of Braudellian-inspired thalassology. It considers the genealogical layers that explain the surprising absence of a proper history of the Ottoman Red Sea by offering six theses on the fundamental question of what frames Ottoman history. It first discusses the three domains that lie at the basis of history writing—the conceptual, the archival, and the empirical—before expounding on each of the six theses. One thesis is that the Ottoman Red Sea does not exist because of a long-standing identification of maritimity with Europe, and the collateral affitmation of the incompatibility of Islam and the sea. The chapter reveals what the philosophy of history looks like from the Bosporus and explains why the history of the Ottoman Red Sea does not exist.

An introduction to the themes explored in this book, the relationship between the Bosporus and the city of Byzantium, and the ways in which this book attempts to differ itself from previous work on the city as well as other local histories. The reasons why certain themes are emphasized are outlined, and the sources used are discussed. There is also an exploration of previous scholarship on the city of Byzantium.

An exploration of the geographic and hydrographic features of the Bosporus strait, and the ways in which they impacted on the lives of the inhabitants of Byzantium. This chapter investigates how the currents, winds, and dangerous, winding shores of the Bosporus made it possible to tax or to exploit the strait. It also, in this connection, uses Dionysius of Byzantium’s treatise of the region to recreate a vivid tableau of mythological and epichoric traditions which bound the various villages and communities along the shores of the Bosporus together.

The fishing industries of the Bosporus are famous, and in this chapter the economy of ancient Byzantium is illustrated through an explanation of fishing and fish processing techniques in the region. Minimalist interpretations of ancient fishing are contested in this chapter, which explores how specific regions, such as enclosed straits like the Bosporus, could enjoy regular surpluses which could be processed and exported. The local economy, it is shown, enjoyed a thriving trade in fish, and the methods used to both catch fish and regulate the fishing industries are explored.