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This is Volume 1 of a comprehensive history of Constantinople, established by Constantine the Great as a capital of the Roman Empire. It subsequently became the capital of the Byzantine Empire and a focal point of politics in both Europe and the Middle East. Today, it is known as Istanbul, but its culture and history are still widely celebrated and studied. From the intro: "The reading world, both of Europe and America, has long needed a history of Constantinople which will enable one wandering through the modernities of the city to identify its hills and sites, and at least measurably reconstruct it. So only can it be redeemed, not merely from unsentimental guide-books, but more particularly from the Agopes, Leandros, and Dimitries, and the guild of couriers, hungry, insolent, insistent, and marvelously ignorant, whom the landlords of Pera permit to lie around their halls and doors in lurk for unprotected travelers. Such a book would be a surprise to visitors who, having been led down through Galata and across the beggar haunted bridge over the Golden Horn, to the Hippodrome, the Janissary Museum, the Treasury, and Sancta Sophia, are solemnly told they have seen all there is worth seeing. But of the components of the reading world within the meaning of the opening reference, no class would be so greatly profited by such a history as students of the East, who know that under the superficies of Stamboul lie the remains of Byzantium, Queen of the Propontis, for whose siren splendors the Greeks forgot their more glorious Athens, and the Latins, in the following of Constantine, actually abandoned Rome, leaving it a moldy bone to be contended for by the hordes first from the North. In the light of that volume, an inquirer delighting in comparison will be astonished to find that the present Constantinople, overlying Byzantium, as the dead often overlie each other in Turkish cemeteries, is yet clothed with attractions rivaled only by Rome and Cairo. It were hard rendering