de la Motraye, himself an exile from persecution, “there is no country on earth where the exercise of all sorts of Religions is more free and less subject to being troubled, than in Turkey”.It was the gradual erosion of that tradition of tolerance under the tidal wave of 19th-century nationalism that as much as anything finally brought down the Ottomans. The last Sultans condoned the anti-Armenian pogroms that culminated in the unparalleled horror of the massacres of 1916. Then, in the darkest moment in Turkish history, perhaps 1.5 million Armenians were starved, beaten or bayoneted to death in a campaign of genocide that is said to have inspired Hitler.The result of that bigoted and violent nationalism, was that Istanbul, once home to an inspirational ferment of different ethnicities, is today a culturally barren and financially impoverished mono-ethnic megalopolis, 99 per cent Turkish. The Jews have gone to Israel; the Greeks to Athens; the Armenians to Armenia and the States The great European merchant houses have returned home.

For the first time in two millennia, Istanbul now feels almost provincial.Who would now know, if they did not read Mansel’s wonderful book, that it was once a city where the grandest European ambassadors once squabbled over the number of the kaftans they were presented with by the Sultan (the French generally received 21, the British 16 and the Dutch 12); where the level of intrigue was such that the Venetians tried no less than 14 times to poison Mehmed the Conqueror; where the passage of the seasons was marked by a strict sequence of different furs (ermine in Autumn, followed by an interval of squirrel, before moving on to sable in midwinter); and where, in the Slave Bazaar that once offered Pushkin’s great-grandfather for sale, potential buyers were allowed to take female slave girls home for the night, on a sale or return basis, to make sure – so Mansel would have us believe – that the new purchases “did not snore”?. Plot: One of the greatest creations of the medieval imagination, this epic poem in 100 cantos recounts the poet’s vision of a journey throuph Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, concluding with a luminescent union with God. Dante, middle-aged and scared, is lost in a tangled forest. The shade of Virgil has been asked to rescue him, providing Dante is prepared to undertake an arduous physical and spiritual adventure.
They burrow down the funnel of Hell where the damned are both tortured and continue to wallow in self-justification.

Dante meets old friends, old enemies, and figures from both history and myth. Their punishments are literal representations of their spiritual states; the lustful are hurled about on ceaseless winds, the schismatics are regularly bisected.Slowly the heroic pair ascend the mountain of Purgatory. The penitent spirits are here punished in an improving way; for instance, the slothful are made to undertake compulsory runs, the gluttonous to starve.Near the top, Dante crosses a wall of flame to be re-united with his lost love, Beatrice, who replaces Virgil as the poet’s mentor. She now conducts Dante through the ascending circles of Heaven where he meets the theologians, scholars and saints who expound the intricacies of God’s design.