Saint Sophia and the Adjoining Monuments of Byzantine Constantinople through the Lens of Renaissance Scholars and Travellers

From the descriptions delivered by the European travelers who, for diplomatic missions, commercial interests, and religious reasons, sojourned in Constantinople during the 15th and 16th centuries, a peculiar attention to the Hagia Sophia and its fate in Ottoman times clearly emerges. The recurrence of the same topoi in these literary texts – such as the extolling of the dome hugeness and of the marble decoration – allow us to see that the tour of the Hagia Sophia was planned so as to achieve the maximum emotional impact on visitors; together with the cathedral church then reduced to a mosque, the surrounding monuments of Byzantine age, such as the Column of Justinian at the Augusteion and the Christian churches reused as the sultan’s menageries, became part of the same set of imperial memories, that were depicted by Renaissance draughtsmen and artists who left us a precious image of these relics of the Byzantine past of the city.