Dr. Thomas Madden is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University. He is one of the country’s leading historians of the medieval Mediterranean, the author of Venice: A New History and Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World, and the resident scholar on Cultured Travel’s small-group tours in Venice, Rome and Istanbul.
When Professor Madden joins you on a tour, you get a different experience entirely. He navigates you through the part most trips skip, which is the history behind the building you are standing inside, and the choices a city made 800 years ago that still shape the room you walked into this morning.
Credentials
The Medieval Academy of America awarded him the Haskins Medal in 2007 for Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation named him a Fellow in 2012. The National Endowment for the Humanities named him a Public Scholar in 2018. He is also a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Medieval Academy of America.
Outside the academy his work appears in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, on CNN and on The History Channel. He has written and consulted on the Crusades, on the rise and fall of republics, on Byzantium, and on the cities that sat at the crossroads of east and west.
How he came to Cultured Travel
Professor Madden came to Cultured Travel through a book. Matt McKissock, co-owner of Cultured Travel, had read his work and knew that if he were to develop a tour to Istanbul, Professor Madden would be the best person to bring on board. Istanbul is Matt’s favorite city in the world, and when the idea came up of building an in-depth tour there, while other companies were treating the city as a cruise stop, he looked for the writer he had been reading for years. He sent an email, or maybe two or three, and eventually Professor Madden said yes.
The two built the first Istanbul itinerary together and ran it in the fall of 2019. The trip filled instantly. The partnership has continued every year since and has grown into Venice and Rome as well. Professor Madden serves as resident scholar on multi-day land tours only for Cultured Travel. There is no other small-group company you can travel with him through.
The books behind the trips
The Fall of Republics: A History from Ancient Carthage to the American Constitution arrives from Princeton University Press in June 2026. He traces how the great republics of the past rose, what held them together, and what eventually pulled them apart: Carthage, Rome, Florence, Venice, and the American framers who studied every one of them before drafting a constitution of their own.
Venice: A New History is the pre-trip reading for Venice, and his daily lectures on that trip follow its arc. Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World anchors the Istanbul trip from the founding of Constantinople through the fall of the city in 1453. The New Concise History of the Crusades has been translated into seven languages. Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice is the deep cut for travelers who want to understand the strange brilliance of Venice’s rise to power.