Although Europe deserves condemnation for the ethnocentric and racist notions and attitudes that flourished within it both before and during the era of imperialism, these were preceded, accompanied, and countered by a singular interest in and openness to other peoples and cultures. The marks of this openness were an exceptional interest in travel and writings about it, in learning non-European languages and translating and circulating texts written in them, in correcting their own forbears’ calumnies and defamations of others by exposing myths and legends for what they were, and by acknowledging the historical and cultural achievements of other peoples. The notion that Asian governments were despotic spread chiefly because those who adopted it feared the spread of autocracy in their own countries, and it drew forth harsh criticism. Images of other countries or regions, especially China and the Near East, became mirrors in which Europeans contemplated the limitations and narrow prejudices of their own way of life.

The physical destruction of the bronze horseman did not cause it to vanish from the Ottoman imperial imagination. Key sixteenth-century Ottoman manuscripts testify to its afterlife as a curious artefact and historical marvel. Even though the bronze horseman lost its association with Justinian, it continued to be seen as an important symbol of the pre-Ottoman past. Its physical absence could even magnify its stature. In the fascinating illustrated version of the prophetic manuscript of Al-Bistami's “Translation of the key to the comprehensive prognostication,” the reader encounters the horseman among a diachronic, curated display of the city’s monumental wonders: Hagia Sophia, the obelisk of Theodosios, the serpent column, and the masonry obelisk. They shared pre-Ottoman origins, they stood in the spaces of power associated with Byzantine culture, and they exercised power over the contemporary Ottoman imagination. Justinian’s monument stood for a discursively complicated and inconvenient past. Even though its physical presence was eliminated, its memory could not be completely erased. It continued to haunt Ottoman imagination in narratives of wonders and apocalyptic scenarios, populating an unnerving landscape of a marvelous foreign past, which lurked everywhere in the great city.