Imperial Library of Constantinople
Byzantine Empire 1204 AD
The Crusaders In 1204, the library became a target of the knights of the Fourth Crusade. The library itself was destroyed and its contents burned or sold. The great part of the library that was saved later became absorbed into the Ottoman Sultan's library after the Muslim forces of Mehmed II, Sultan of the Ottoman Turks, captured Constantinople at the end of the siege of 1453.
Over the centuries, several fires in the Library of Constantinople destroyed much of the collection. The library was burnt in the year 473 and about 120,000 volumes were lost. However, the attempts of Themistios and Constantius were not fruitless, as some works were saved and recopied and circulated through other texts. Consequently, modern knowledge of Classical Greek literature is greater than would be the case if not for their efforts.
In 1204, the library was destroyed by the Normans of the Fourth Crusade.
Whilst there were many reports of surviving texts into the Ottoman era, no substantive portion of the library's has ever been recovered. Professor Carlyle was provided access in 1800 to the Seraglio, the supposed repository of post-Ottoman conquest surviving texts, but no texts from the Imperial Library were located. A notable exception is the Archimedes Palimpsest, that surfaced in 1840, was translated in 1915 and was unaccountably found in a private collection and sold in 1998.
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