Chapter 2, “Urban Development and Decline, Fourth–Fifteenth Centuries,” tracks the development of the city’s infrastructure and monumental public architecture from the period of its fourth-century foundation to its fifteenth-century collapse, noting periods of prosperity and decline together with the transformation from an ancient to a medieval urban center.

The Introduction situates the reader in our present social and environmental era, specifically in a globally enmeshed United States. It explains our conception of the book’s three central terms: America, Environment, and Literature. It gives an overview of the history of ecocriticism, especially pertaining to North America, and how our authors contribute to, and innovate, that tradition. It ends with a summary of each chapter.

Chapter 16, “Schools and Learning,” offers an overview of Constantinople as an educational center. It considers the city’s role as an imperial center in attracting scholars, outlines the organization of the educational system, and examines the types of opportunities available to students.

Chapter 13, “Sacred Dimensions: Death and Burial,” examines burial practices in Constantinople between the fourth century and the fifteenth century. Particular attention is given to aristocratic and imperial burial practice.

Chapter 15, “Philanthropic Institutions,” looks at the range of social services available to Constantinopolitan residents from the fourth century through the fifteenth century. It notes the contributions of monastics to the institution and organization of such institutions as orphanages, hospitals, leprosaria, and old age homes.

This chapter intervenes in ongoing queer ecocritical debates about reproductive futurity by turning to Henry David Thoreau’s engagement with nurse insects and trees. It demonstrates how Thoreau dislocates biological reproduction in both space and time, urging us to attend to a broader range of participants – and a broader range of contributing actions – in our account of the reproductive process. Arguing that such a complex, multispecies understanding of reproduction distinguishes Thoreau from both contemporary environmentalists, whose rhetoric often relies on normative logics of reproductivity, and queer theorists, who often critique such logics, the chapter theorizes an environmental ethic informed by the extant queerness of reproduction itself. In contrast to the contemporary activist organization “Conceivable Future,” which helps women decide whether to have children in a time of climate catastrophe, such a reading of Thoreau offers possibilities for solidarity and social change that customary definitions of reproduction have rendered inconceivable.

Chapter 1, “Before Constantinople,” discusses ancient Byzantion, the town selected as the location for Constantine’s new capital. It explores the site’s strategic value from its earliest settlement in the eighth century BC until the fourth century AD, paying particular attention to the political, military, and economic implications of its relationship to the Bosporos.

For decades, the Environmental Justice movement in the US has been assessing and opposing the ongoing, harmful material legacies of the plantation for people of African descent. Recently, a few scholars have been trying to think with but also beyond the harm paradigm in order to represent the complexity of the past and possibilities for the future. Paramount to this effort is a prying apart of the malevolent human actions which brought and bring about environmental injustices from a nonhuman world which did not, and does not, innately operate on any race-based ideology. A number of visual artists, in particular, are investigating, and using new media to represent, ancestral Black environmental imaginaries. This chapter focuses on one contemporary photographer, Dawoud Bey, who produced a photographic series in 2017, Night Coming Tenderly, Black, in which he visualizes how a fugitive slave might have moved through, and looked at, northern US woods. Bey seems to recognize that to dismantle the naturalized racism that undergirds the US, he must disencumber nature of its white properties and Black bodies of their disastrous associations, as he investigates what it could mean for Black people to watch nature carefully, all the while feeling for its tenderness.

Chapter 14, “The Administration of Constantinople,” examines how the city was governed in the period between the fourth century and the fifteenth century. Particular attention is paid to the organization of the office of the City Prefect or Eparch. Aspects of continuity and change between the early and late city governance are observed.

Chapter 4, “Waters for the Capital: Hydraulic Infrastructure and Use in Byzantine Constantinople,” provides an overview of the history of water supply and distribution to Constantinople, discussing the construction and maintenance of hydraulic infrastructure and its importance in determining the ways in which the city grew and developed.