This monograph is centred around the Notitia urbis Constantinopolitanae, a short text in Latin describing Constantinople, written under Theodosius II around the year 425 and dedicated to him. M. has already discussed the Notitia on a smaller scale in his contribution to the volume Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity, edited by L. Grig and G. Kelly (2012).

The Notitia is, as emphasised at the beginning, a cumulative text that contains information about the city from its refoundation by Constantine the Great in 324 and even from the time before, when it still was Byzantium. It therefore allows us to trace the development from a rather small Graeco-Roman city to the imperial residence of the Roman East until the age when the text was compiled.

The eleven chapters of the book are as follows: Chapter 1 starts with a brief historical outline of the origins and rise of Constantine the Great. Chapter 2 describes the context of Byzantium’s Graeco-Roman history, its status as a Roman colony under the Severan emperors, the circumstances of its refoundation by Constantine and its initial development as an imperial capital. Chapter 3 offers an overview of the literary and other evidence from the later Byzantine age about this period of Constantinople. Chapter 4 presents the Notitia urbis Constantinopolitanae with an English translation of the text; it is largely based on M.’s 2012 contribution. Chapter 5 provides an overview of the fourteen regions into which the city is divided by the Notitia. Chapter 6 uses the regions to define the topographical and social character of early Constantinople, from old Byzantium to the new urban areas and up to city walls. In Chapters 7–9 the Notitia is used to trace in detail the urban development from Constantine to Theodosius. Chapter 10 analyses the composition of the city with its palaces, colonnades, harbours and warehouses, houses and baths, and draws conclusions about the size of the population, its living conditions and its distribution. Chapter 11, finally, supplements the somewhat dry evidence of the Notitia with information about life in the streets, the origins of the city’s senatorial class and the character of the legal evidence. The book is concluded by a bibliography and a general index.

It is interesting to note that in several places M. argues in favour of older views that have been completely or partially abandoned by researchers in the last few decades. The most notable case is the historicity of the reports that Byzantium was restored as a Roman colony after its destruction by Septimius Severus in the civil war of 196, which has mostly been regarded as a later fiction since G. Dagron’s La naissance d’une capitale in 1974. The renaming of Byzantium to Antonina, as reported by a later source, may be a good argument for the historicity of a Severan phase of Byzantium, but it should be noted that there is still no archaeological evidence of the emperor’s alleged building activities. This phase plays a major role in Chapters 5 and 6, where, in the topographical description of the city, a ‘new monumental zone to the south of the acropolis’ (p. 103) is attributed to it, and the founding of the Zeuxippos bath and hippodrome by Severus are accepted as historical.

Another ‘conservative’ view is that Constantine the Great had planned Constantinople both as a Christian city and a new Rome with its own senate from the beginning. Current scholarship mostly assumes that he established a pagan or semi-pagan cult in his new city and that Constantinople was only transformed into a Christian city and Roman capital from the final years of his son Constantius, more than 20 years after his death in 337. This explains some facts that M. notes with astonishment, such as the almost complete lack of documentation for the earliest phase of the city, the absence of major church buildings in Constantine’s age or the inauguration of the ‘great church’, later called Hagia Sophia, only long after his death.

The bibliography used is rather selective, and several new hypotheses that have been put forward in recent years are not discussed. The following comments are an attempt to supplement and occasionally correct some statements. Pp. 65–6 and 186–8: the term vicus in the Notitia probably refers to compounds of high-quality residential buildings, whose numbers are to be added to those of the houses. Pp. 73 and 97: a statue of a bull, from which the name Taurus for the Forum of Theodosius would be derived, is nowhere mentioned. Pp. 86 and 117: the ‘golden tetrapylon’ in the summary at the end of the Notitia may either be the Milion in Region IV or the tetrapylon on the Mese in Region VII, which is missing in the text. P. 90: Theodoros Anagnostes explains the name Homonoea (‘Concord’) by the fact that the second Ecumenical Council in 381 was held in this church. P. 97: the ‘Colossus’ must have been a huge statue, probably of Constantine; it has nothing to do with the obelisk of masonry, with which this name is only connected by the tenth-century inscription. The ‘Gothic column’ was assembled in the fourth century from spolia to support a statue of Tyche; the inscription, which refers to an imperial victory over the Goths, is also reused. Pp. 103–5: the Tetrastoon, a courtyard with four surrounding porticoes, is an architectural term rather than the name of a specific building; Malalas apparently uses it for the precursor of the Byzantine Augusteum square, Zosimus for a building on the site of the later Basilica. Pp. 116–17: Constantine’s mausoleum and the church of the Apostles are not buried under the Fatih mosque, but lay a bit further east with a different alignment, see C. Mango’s Le développement urbain de Constantinople (1985) and others. Pp. 189–92: is it possible that both domus and insulae are summarised under the term domus in the Notitia? Pp. 134–9: the statues of the Tetrarchs, now in Venice, were probably brought to Constantinople by Theodosius I in 380 and reused as images of his family, as shown by P. Niewöhner and U. Peschlow (Istanbuler Mitteilungen 62 [2012]). The name Philadelphion appears first in the ninth-century Parastaseis, where the statues are interpreted as the sons of Constantine. Pp. 143–5: the column of Theodosius was crowned by his standing statue destroyed by an earthquake in 480. When the equestrian statue of Arcadius was reused as that of Justinian in 543 near Hagia Sophia, that of Honorius remained on the Taurus square, but was later identified as Theodosius I or as the biblical hero Joshua. P. 169: the four horses now at San Marco and the lost quadriga to which they belonged are much older than Constantine’s age. Pp. 173–5: the church of Saint Mokios was probably founded already under Constantine, though not as part of his religious policy, but rather as a Christian response to it, intended to counter the pagan celebration of the city’s foundation on 11 May with the anniversary of a saint on the same day. P. 180: the story of the chapel under a walnut tree in the courtyard of a large tenement house appears only in the church history of Socrates and the sources depending on it; it cannot be reconciled with what we know about the long-existing big church of Saint Acacius.

These minor remarks do not alter the fact that this is, all in all, a fluently written account of the first hundred years of Constantinople’s history with well-chosen illustrations, which is a pleasure to read.