De Topographia Constantinopoleos

IN THE MID-SIXTEENTH CENTURY François I ruled France, and Suleyman the Magnificent sat on the throne of the Ottoman Empire. Although the two leaders were separated by culture, religion and politics, the Catholic François and the Muslim Suleyman joined forces for a time in a political alliance to check the Hapsburg threat to both their empires. In 1544 Pierre Gilles of Albi, an established scholar and author, arrived in Constantinople as a member of a French embassy aimed at furthering this alliance.


Called the father of French zoology, Pierre Gilles (1490–1555) [1]edited ancient texts and published a book about fish, which he dedicated to Francis I. The latter sent him to the East to collect Greek manuscripts, a passion of the French court. Arriving in Constantinople in 1544, Gilles encountered the large and prosperous city of Süleyman the Magnificent. Its "inhabitants [were] daily demolishing, effacing, and utterly destroying the small remains of antiquity"; hence the need to study and record the city's topography and monuments.


Mavi Boncuk |


Gilles' mission was to find and purchase ancient Greek manuscripts for François' humanist library. But while in Constantinople Gilles conceived his own project: to study the history and monuments of the former Byzantine capital on the spot and to publish his findings bolstered and compared with what he could learn from the ancient and medieval sources.


The result was his "Topography of Constantinople and Its Antiquities in Four Books." Kimberly Byrd offers a new edition of Gilles' important work. This is published in three parts. This part presents the first complete modern edition of the Latin text of the original (1561) edition of Gilles' "De Topographia Constantinopoleos, et de illius Antiquitatibus Libri Quatuor."


After Gilles' death in 1555, his nephew used his journals to complete the book. Gilles' book serves notice that the break with the Byzantine empire as a living entity is complete. Long influential, his topography was translated into English in 1729.

De topographia Constantinopoleos by Pierre Gilles, 1561 Lyon | Printed book | 10 1/8 x 6 3/4 in. (26 x 17 cm) 

In this, the first scholarly account of Constantinople, Gilles systematically discusses the sections and hills of the city, mixing the methods of the naturalist and the classicist, as befits a Renaissance humanist. He measures distances between structures and records inscriptions, but passes quickly over artistic details, taking no account, for example, of the gilded mosaics of Hagia Sophia or the reliefs on the then-extant column of the emperor Arkadios (r. 395–408). He ignores completely the art and architecture from the Late Byzantine period. Gilles' Constantinople is distant, for he views it through the framework of early texts, chiefly the Notitia urbis Constantinopolitanae, a fifth-century Latin description of the city, and he disparages its current inhabitants, whom he finds hostile and uninterested in monuments.


[1] PIERRE GILLES, or Petrus Gyllius as he is known from his Latin texts, was born in Albi in 1490. We do not know very much about his youth and early education. Judging from his later work and interests, however, it is clear that he shared the education and enthusiasms of the new generation of French humanists. This included his contemporaries François Rabelais, Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples, and Guillaume Budé, all humanist friends or disciples of Erasmus and the Italian humanists.