IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 274

For more than a thousand years Constantinople stood at the meeting point of Europe and Asia. It had been founded by the emperor Constantine and dedicated in 330 as a new capital for the Roman Empire, and it remained the seat of the eastern emperors long after the western half of the empire had collapsed. Built on a peninsula, the city was washed by the sea on two sides; on the landward side it was protected by a line of walls built in the fifth century, under the emperor Theodosius II.

By the middle of the fifteenth century, however, the empire had shrunk almost to nothing. Constantinople itself, with a strip of land around it and a few outposts in Greece, was all that remained. The city's population had fallen dramatically, and visitors reported fields, orchards and abandoned districts within the walls. The last emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, ruled a state that could not pay its own soldiers without borrowing from Italian merchants and from the Church.

The Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, who had taken the throne for a second time in 1451, was resolved to change this. His first step was to cut the city off from the Black Sea. In 1452 his workmen built a fortress on the European shore of the Bosphorus, a few miles north of Constantinople, in the space of a few months. Any ship that tried to pass without permission could be sunk by the guns mounted on its towers.

Mehmed also invested in artillery on a scale no previous siege had seen. A founder of cannon named Orban, a Hungarian who had first offered his services to the emperor, cast for the sultan a bronze gun of extraordinary size. Contemporary accounts describe it being hauled to the walls by dozens of oxen and hundreds of men. It could be fired only a few times a day, and the noise alone was terrifying.

Against this force stood the defenders. Their number is disputed: most accounts put them at a few thousand, including a contingent of Genoese soldiers under Giovanni Giustiniani. The Ottoman army was many times larger, though here too the figures in the sources vary widely, and modern historians do not agree on them. On the seaward side a heavy chain stretched across the entrance to the Golden Horn, the inlet that served as the city's harbour, and was guarded by ships.

The bombardment opened on 6 April 1453. The defenders repaired at night what had been broken during the day, filling gaps with barrels, stones, earth and timber, so that the walls were rebuilt almost as often as they were damaged. The sultan's advisers had expected the city to fall within weeks; instead the siege settled into a grim routine.

In late April Mehmed achieved something the defenders had thought impossible. Rather than force the chain, he had a number of his ships dragged overland on greased rollers, across the hill behind the Genoese colony of Galata, and launched into the Golden Horn. The feat dismayed the defenders, who now had to guard the harbour wall as well. Ottoman miners were also digging tunnels beneath the land walls, and the defenders, listening for the sound of digging, replied with tunnels of their own, collapsing or flooding the enemy workings.

By the end of May food was running short and the defenders were exhausted. In the early hours of 29 May the final assault began. Wave after wave of attackers threw themselves at the weakest stretch of wall, near the gate of St Romanus, and were driven back with heavy losses. Then Giustiniani, the Genoese commander, was wounded and withdrew, and his men followed him. The line broke, and Ottoman soldiers forced their way through the gate. Constantine XI died in the fighting, and his body was never certainly identified among the dead.

Custom allowed a captured city to be plundered for three days, and the troops poured in. Many inhabitants were killed and thousands more were enslaved, though the sultan later allowed captives to be ransomed. In the afternoon Mehmed entered the city himself and rode to Hagia Sophia, the greatest of the churches, where he ordered that the building be turned into a mosque. He now took the title Kayser-i Rûm, Caesar of the Romans, claiming to be the heir of the emperors he had defeated.

Mehmed set about repopulating the city, offering homes and property to settlers from across his empire, and within a generation Constantinople was once again a large and prosperous capital. The last fragments of the old empire survived a little longer: the rulers of the Peloponnese held out until 1460, and Trebizond fell in 1461. Many Greek scholars made their way to Italy, taking manuscripts with them; how far they contributed to the Renaissance is debated, but the traffic in Greek texts certainly increased.

Historians once treated 1453 as a sharp break, the moment when the Middle Ages ended and a new period began. In the same year the English were finally defeated in France, at Castillon, and Gutenberg was at work on his printing press. Most modern historians are more cautious, pointing out that the Ottoman conquest was one stage in a long process. Yet the news shocked Christian Europe, and the image of the fallen city haunted writers for centuries.

A photograph carries no date of its own. Anyone who wants to know when a picture was made must work from clues, and the result is usually a range of years rather than a single point. Photography was announced to the public in 1839, when the details of Louis Daguerre's process were published in Paris, and that date sets the earliest limit for almost everything a researcher is likely to see. The earliest surviving photograph, made by Nicéphore Niépce in the 1820s on a metal plate coated with bitumen, is older still, but it stands at the very beginning of the story.

The daguerreotype, the first process to be widely used, produces a single unique image on a silvered copper plate. Nothing is left from which copies can be made, so an original daguerreotype is always one of a kind. Daguerreotypes were normally sealed under glass in a hinged case, and the mirror-like surface of the plate is unmistakable. Plate sizes were fairly standard, so measurement tells a researcher what they are looking at, but it does not date the image closely.

Paper processes followed. William Henry Fox Talbot's calotype, patented in 1841, used a paper negative, and the fibres of the paper gave the prints a softer, slightly blurred appearance quite unlike the sharpness of a daguerreotype. Relatively few calotypes were made, however, and they are rare in ordinary family collections.

Far commoner is the albumen print, introduced in 1850, for which the paper was coated with egg white before being sensitised. Albumen prints are thin and glossy, and were nearly always mounted on card. The most familiar form is the carte de visite, a small card-mounted portrait patented in France by André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri in 1854; his camera carried several lenses, so that a number of exposures could be made on one plate. Cartes were cheap and fashionable in the 1860s, and albums of them, including those assembled by Queen Victoria, survive in great numbers. Towards the end of that decade the larger cabinet card began to take their place.

Meanwhile the negative material had changed again. The wet collodion process, introduced in 1851, was fast and sharp, but the plate had to be coated, exposed and developed within minutes, which meant that a photographer working outdoors carried a portable darkroom. Only with the gelatin dry plate, which became available commercially in the late 1870s, could a plate be prepared in advance and developed later. That change made hand cameras practical and produced quantities of casual outdoor snapshots after about 1880.

Then there is the mount itself. A photographer's name and address were often printed or stamped on the card, and a studio that occupied several premises over the years can be dated by checking those addresses against trade directories, which list the occupiers of each street. The card's own features are useful too: early card mounts were thin, with square corners, while later ones were thicker, with rounded corners, gilt edges and decorative backs. A note of a royal or other appointment can help as well, since such distinctions were usually recorded at the time they were granted.

Within the picture, other evidence accumulates. Clothes are the most reliable guide in portraits: the shape of a woman's skirt or sleeve, the height of a man's collar and the length of a child's dress all changed quickly, and the customers of a professional photographer were usually dressed in the fashion of the day. Studio props — painted backdrops, imitation balustrades, a table with a book on it — were standard equipment, and they too altered over the decades. In outdoor views, gas lamps, telegraph poles, horse-drawn trams and, from the mid-1890s, the earliest motor cars can set limits on the date.

None of this amounts to proof. A sitter might wear an old-fashioned dress, or a studio might keep a favourite prop for thirty years. Prints were often made many years after the negative was exposed, when a customer ordered extra copies, so that the paper dates from a later period than the image. A photograph may also be a copy of an older photograph. Such possibilities mean that the researcher produces a range, sometimes a wide one, and must then look for documentary evidence: an inscription on the back, a dated presentation label or a family letter.

Modern techniques can narrow the range. Conservators can identify a process from a small sample, and instruments that read the spectrum of a print can show whether it was toned with gold or made with platinum, both of which point to particular periods. Colour photographs are the easiest of all to place, since the first practical colour process, the autochrome, went on sale in 1907. Even so, no technique can date a photograph to the year.

When Robin Hood Gardens, a housing estate in east London designed by Alison and Peter Smithson and completed in 1972, was partly demolished in 2017, a three-storey section was cut out and taken to the Victoria and Albert Museum. The episode sums up a quarrel that has been running for decades. To some, the estate was a brave attempt to give working families decent homes; to others it was a grim failure that should have gone years earlier. Both descriptions were offered in earnest, and neither can be shown to be simply true.

The case against keeping such buildings is easily stated. Concrete, as mixed and placed on many post-war sites, has not lasted well. Water and carbon dioxide penetrate it, the steel reinforcement inside begins to corrode, and the resulting expansion cracks and eventually breaks up the surface. Repairs are possible, but they are expensive and must be repeated. Many of the flats also have low ceilings, single glazing and heating systems that were cheap only while fuel was cheap. To a hard-pressed owner, demolition can look like common sense.

Against this it is argued that the best of these buildings are documents of a particular moment in social history: the years when governments built mass housing, new universities and health centres on a scale that will not recur. There is also an environmental argument that has gained force as concern about carbon has grown. Demolition and rebuilding carry a heavy cost in embodied carbon, and architects have increasingly maintained that the most sustainable building is often the one already standing.

The theoretical case has a long history. The Austrian art historian Alois Riegl, writing in 1903, distinguished historical value, which a building possesses because it bears witness to a past moment, from what he called age value — the pleasure people take in the visible marks that time has left on a surface. Age value, he argued, is precisely what restoration destroys, since a wall repaired and painted to look new no longer shows its age. A concrete building stained by decades of rain does not appeal to everyone, but Riegl's argument suggests why some people value it.

Similar claims have been made in economic terms. Jane Jacobs, in her study of American cities published in 1961, argued that old buildings are essential to a healthy district because they provide cheap space for the small businesses, workshops and clubs that could never afford new premises. Her point was not that old buildings are beautiful but that they are useful.

Campaigning bodies have taken up the cause. Docomomo, founded in the late 1980s, set out to record buildings of the modern movement before they disappeared, on the grounds that a heritage which has not even been catalogued cannot be protected. In Britain the Twentieth Century Society argues that the public is often ahead of the experts. Listing, however, has not kept pace: these buildings are recent, unfashionable and sometimes unloved by the people who live in them.

There is a further difficulty peculiar to concrete. Conservation normally prizes original fabric: a medieval church is valued partly because its stones were laid by its builders. But the only way to keep a corroding concrete frame standing may be to replace much of its surface, and, if the reinforcement is badly affected, to rebuild in new material. How much can be renewed before the result is a replica rather than a preserved building? The Nara Document on Authenticity, agreed at an international conference in Japan in 1994, argued that judgements about authenticity must take account of the culture a building belongs to and not merely the survival of original material.

Engineers tend to be blunt. Many of them accept that a concrete structure can almost always be kept standing if enough money is spent, but they point out that the spending never ends: a repaired slab will need attention again in twenty years. Where a building is also poorly planned or simply unwanted, the honest course, in their view, may be to record it thoroughly — in drawings, photographs and the memories of those who used it — and then let it go.

My own view is that both sides hold part of the truth. The argument that concrete is fragile and expensive is correct often enough to rule out any blanket presumption in favour of keeping every building of the period. But the opposite presumption — that a concrete building is disposable unless somebody famous designed it — is equally indefensible, and it has already cost us structures that were sound, adaptable and quietly loved. What is needed is a test applied building by building: is it of demonstrable quality, can it be adapted at a reasonable cost, and is there anyone who wants it?

One further consideration should make us less anxious about loss. The twentieth century is the first period whose buildings have been photographed exhaustively and whose drawings, films and planning files survive in bulk. We can afford to be selective in a way that earlier generations could not, because we can document what we choose not to keep. Preserving everything would not save the past; it would merely ensure that nothing was ever judged.