No English writer knows the highways and byways of 19th-century Italy better than Jonathan Keates. For a year, Venice held out alone against the might of the Austrian empire.

Few modern tourists know that in 1848-49 Venice made one last bid for independence as impressive as any episode in its 1,000-year history. Its glorious history as an independent city state ended with its conquest by Bonaparte, and cession to the Austrian monarchy, in 1797. No city had done more to weaken Byzantine Constantinople than Venice. His book is an excellent travellers' guide to how and why Istanbul became a Muslim city. In Constantinople: The Last Great Siege 1453, Roger Crowley gives a vivid and readable account of the siege that transformed the city from a Byzantine remnant into the most grandiose of Muslim capitals - though he does not see the flaw in his remark that one Greek chronicle 'seems too detailed to be invented'. No city played the role of political capital over a longer period than Constantinople.

Paris and Moscow, in contrast, remain trapped in their role, both aggrandising and emasculating, as political capital. Like the great city states of 15th-century Italy, modern cities such as New York and Hong Kong have become dynamos of wealth and creativity, increasingly distinct in tempo and mentality from their surrounding state. The Siege of Venice by Jonathan Keates (512pp, Chatto & Windus, £20)Ĭities are entering a new golden age. Constantinople: The Last Great Siege 1453 by Roger Crowley (304pp, Faber, £16.99)

Crowley 1453