What follows the Fall in the City? How is the Ottoman capital born and developed, and how do the Romans—its founding people—survive within it, return or migrate there, and organize their lives? What is the break and what is the continuity with the time before the Fall? Chronicles of Constantinople, accounts from travelers, diaries of certain Westerners who mingled with the Greeks, not only honoring their past but also interested in their present condition as Christians, sermons from preachers revealing social issues, heroic new martyrs commemorated in the Synaxarion; all these are added to older texts by Greek historians from Constantinople and articles from contemporary Ottomanists forming the reservoir of information that led to the composition and drafting of this book.

Travelers take today’s reader by the hand and explore with them the Constantinople of that time, the historical center, as well as the surroundings. Philhellenes and philistines lament the loss of one after another Byzantine or ancient monument: these are the years when the image of the decaying Byzantine City gradually sinks into oblivion—just as Byzantium becomes dim in the souls—while it is succeeded, and for a time coexists with it, by the triumphant panorama of the Ottoman capital during its own flourishing years. A flourishing that is marred by chronic plagues: fires, earthquakes, epidemics, famines, misfortunes against which everyone is powerless. To these are added the frequent transgressions of the janissaries. The world of the Roman— and not only— is the neighborhood, the parish, the workshop, the market, the corner of the passerby, the fisherman’s boat.

Finally, it is the period of the first but crucial contacts with the West, mainly Protestant, as well as with the distant Orthodox Russia.