Byzantine Constantinople: The Walls of the City and Adjoining Historical Sites

One of the most detailed works describing the walls of this renowned city, Alexander Van Milligen’s Byzantine Constantinople: The Walls of the City and Adjoining Historical Sites (1899) is of use to anyone interested in Byzantine architecture, the Byzantine Empire, and medieval history more generally. Van Milligen uses his expertise as a historian who had lived and taught in Constantinople to provide a detailed account of the Byzantine capital before it fell in 1453. Complete with meticulous verbal descriptions, illustrations, maps and plans, Van Milligen combines historical accounts with physical surveys, tracing Constantinople’s expansion. He describes how the city spread and how the walls adapted, pausing to outline the importance of certain structures within the city, and of the hierarchy of gates within the walls. He also includes a table of emperors to assist the general reader, while his painstaking detail makes the book useful to professional scholars as well.