Greenhalgh Michael. Constantinople to Córdoba: Dismantling Ancient Architecture in the East, North Africa and Islamic Spain

Brill, 2012. — 510 p. — ISBN10: 9004212469 / ISBN13: 978-9004212466.Offering a multitude of examples through the centuries, this book examines how the architecture of the ancient world was transformed or destroyed under Byzantium and Islam, to produce new forms which often owed their materials and sometimes their styles to the past.This book chronicles the destruction of ancient architecture along the “cres-cent” that runs from Constantinople through the Levant and North Africa to Islamic Spain. The Roman, Late Antique, and medieval heritage of this cres-cent, unlike that of Europe, had survived well into the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries. It was then that colonial and indigenous forces conspired to plunder and reuse the region’s antiquities. Greenhalgh’s primary line of evi-dence is hundreds of travel accounts from colonists and tourists from all over Europe, especially from France and England. According to the preface, this book is intended to expand on the author’s earlier works, especially his Monumental Past, Marble Present (Brill, 2009).From Constantinople to Córdoba is not a conventional scholarly monograph, but rather “a catalogue inter- weaved with a running commentary” (p. xxiv). Indeed, the 󰁦􀁩rst thing one notices about this book is the sheer scale of the scholarly apparatus. Readers are treated to a feast of references and citations from Greenhalgh’s vast reposi-tory of travel accounts. The abundance and frequency of these citations can be overwhelming, even to the point of distraction (some sentences, for instance, contain three footnotes and three endnotes each). By the end of the work, however, it is clear that a synthesis this ambitious could not have been written any other way. Readers must therefore work harder, swimming against a cur-rent of data and resigning themselves to return to the book later to mine its citations. The 70-page bibliography is divided by region and type of source, which will surely be helpful to specialists of individual regions or writers.