OLD ISTANBUL (CONSTANTINOPLE)

In 1453 Constantinople fell to Sultan Mehmed II Fatih (1432-81) of the Ottomans and marked the end of the Byzantine Empire.

A seventeenth-century pictographic map of Istanbul. The view is from the Asian shore, the Bosphorus in the centre, moving right to the Black Sea beyond and left toward the Sea of Marmara. Opposite is the Golden Horn cutting into the European sector of the city.

Istanbul (Constantinople, Turkey); view in a print of 1635. The Europen quarter, called Galata or Pera, is in the foreground; the old city on the other side of the Golden Horn (Halic), is in the distance.

Constantinople in the ninth-eleventh centuries; reconstruction view.

Islamic townscape: a drawing after Nasuh al-Matraki's Itinerary (X/16th century) showing the Turkish city of Bitlis.