Constantinople, the modern Istanbul, was the capital of the Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire from 330 until its takeover by the Ottoman Empire in 1453. After this, it continued to function as the Ottoman capital until the abolition of the Ottoman sultanate in 1922. It was located at the core of the modern city of Istanbul, on a peninsula at the southeastern tip of Thrace in Europe; with the Bosporus strait and the ancient cities of Chalcedon and Chrysopolis in Bithynia, Anatolia (Asia Minor) to the east; the Golden Horn and the citadel of Galata (Pera) to the north; the Sea of Marmara to the south; and the Princes' Islands to the southeast.
Constantinople was founded on the site of the existing city of Byzantium in 324, during the reign of Constantine the Great, initially as Nova Roma ("New Rome"). In 330 it became the new eastern capital of the Roman Empire, and remained as the sole capital of the empire after the western parts were lost in the 5th century. The ascendancy of Constantinople marks the empire's "Byzantine" era.
From the mid-5th century to the early 13th century, Constantinople was the largest and wealthiest city in Europe. The city became famous for its architectural masterpieces, such as Hagia Sophia (a cathedral), the Imperial Palace of the emperors, the Hippodrome, the Golden Gate of the Land Walls, and opulent aristocratic palaces. The University of Constantinople was founded in the 5th century and included a vast Imperial Library, which contained more than 100,000 volumes.
Constantinople was famous for its massive and complex fortifications, which ranked among the most sophisticated defensive architecture of antiquity; the Theodosian walls consisted of a double wall lying about 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) to the west of the first wall and a moat with palisades in front. Constantinople's location between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara reduced the land area that required defensive walls. The city was constructed intentionally to rival Rome, and it was claimed that several elevations within its walls matched Rome's seven hills. The impenetrable defenses enclosed magnificent palaces, domes, and towers, the result of the prosperity Constantinople achieved as the gateway between two continents (Europe and Asia) and two seas (the Mediterranean and the Black Sea). Although besieged on numerous occasions by various armies, the defenses of Constantinople proved impenetrable for nearly nine hundred years.
In 1204, during the Fourth Crusade, the city was sacked by the Latin Crusaders and became the capital of the short-lived Latin Empire (1204–1261). The Byzantine Empire of Nicaea recaptured the city in 1261. Under the following Palaiologan dynasty it enjoyed a partial recovery. With the advent of the Ottoman Empire in 1299, the empire's territories dwindled, and the city began to lose population. By the early 15th century, the empire was reduced to just Constantinople and its environs, along with the territories of the despotate of Morea, in Peloponnese, Greece, making it an enclave inside the Ottoman Empire. The city was finally besieged and conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1453. It served as the Ottoman capital until the empire's dissolution and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, when the capital was moved to Ankara. Now known internationally under its modern Turkish name Istanbul, it has become the most populous city in Europe, with a population of more than 16 million residents, and the economic and financial centre of Turkey, straddling the Bosporus strait and lying in both Europe and Asia.
Names
Before Constantine I, the city was known as Byzantium (Greek Byzantion), the name associated with its original foundation as a Greek colony in the 7th century BC. It was briefly renamed Augusta Antonina in the early 3rd century AD by the Emperor Septimius Severus (193–211), who had razed it to the ground during the civil war of 196 AD, and then had it rebuilt in honour of his son Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, the future Emperor Caracalla. The name appears to have been quickly forgotten and abandoned, and the city reverted to Byzantium after either the assassination of Caracalla in 217 or, at the latest, the fall of the Severan dynasty in 235.
When Constantine transferred the capital of the empire to his newly refounded city in 330, he initially designated it "New Rome" (Nova Roma, Νέα Ῥώμη). During this time, it was also called 'Second Rome', 'Eastern Rome', and Roma Constantinopolitana ('Constantinopolitan Rome'). However, it soon became more widely known as Constantinople (Greek: Κωνσταντινούπολις, romanized: Kōnstantinoupolis, lit. 'city of Constantine') in honour of its founder.
As the city became the sole remaining capital of the Roman Empire after the fall of the West, and its wealth, population, and influence grew, the city also came to have a multitude of by-names, such as Basileuousa (Queen of Cities) and Megalopolis (the Great City). In colloquial speech, it was commonly referred to as just i Polis (ἡ Πόλις) 'the City' by Constantinopolitans and provincial Byzantines alike.
This designation was also the source of what was to become the city's modern Turkish name, Istanbul. It is derived from the Greek phrase eis tin Polin (εἰς τὴν Πόλιν, or in its spoken form in Medieval Greek: stin Poli(n) στην Πόλι(ν), both meaning 'in the City'. Variants of this name are first attested in languages such as Armenian and Arabic from the 10th century, before the name was adopted also by the Ottoman Turks.
During the Ottoman era, the city was referred to either as Istanbul or, in more elevated registers, as Kostantiniyye (قسطنطينيه), originally an Arabic calque of "Constantinople" meaning "city of Constantine". At some times during the Ottoman era, an adaptation of "Istanbul" as "Islambol" (meaning "full of Islam") was also common. Western languages mostly continued to refer to the city as Constantinople until the early 20th century. After 1930, the government of modern Turkey began to urge other countries to use Turkish names for Turkish cities, and the city came to be known as Istanbul and its variations in most world languages.
History
Foundation of Byzantium
Constantinople was founded by the Roman emperor Constantine I (272–337) in 324 on the site of an already-existing city, Byzantium (Ancient Greek: Βυζάντιον, romanized: Byzántion), which was settled in the early days of Greek colonial expansion, around 657 BC, by colonists of the city-state of Megara, across from the town of Chalcedon on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus.
Hesychius of Miletus wrote that some "claim that people from Megara, who derived their descent from Nisos, sailed to this place under their leader Byzas, and invented the fable that his name was attached to the city." Some versions of the founding myth say Byzas was the son of a local nymph, while others say he was conceived by one of Zeus' daughters and Poseidon. Hesychius also gives alternate versions of the city's founding legend, which he attributed to old poets and writers:
It is said that the first Argives, after having received this prophecy from Pythia,
Blessed are those who will inhabit that holy city,
a narrow strip of the Thracian shore at the mouth of the Pontos,
where two pups drink of the gray sea,
where fish and stag graze on the same pasture,
set up their dwellings at the place where the rivers Kydaros and Barbyses have their estuaries, one flowing from the north, the other from the west, and merging with the sea at the altar of the nymph called Semestre"
The city maintained independence as a city-state until it was annexed by Darius I in 512 BC into the Persian Empire, as he considered the site the optimal location to construct a pontoon bridge crossing into Europe, given that Byzantium was situated at the narrowest point in the Bosphorus strait. Persian rule lasted until 478 BC, when, as part of the Greek counterattack to the Second Persian invasion of Greece, a Greek army led by the Spartan general Pausanias captured the city, which remained an independent, yet subordinate, city under the Athenians, and later to the Spartans after 411 BC. A farsighted treaty with the emergent power of Rome in c. 150 BC, which stipulated tribute in exchange for independent status allowed it to enter Roman rule unscathed. This treaty would pay dividends retrospectively as Byzantium would maintain this independent status, and prosper under peace and stability in the Pax Romana for nearly three centuries until the late 2nd century AD.
Byzantium was never a major influential city-state like Athens, Corinth, or Sparta; however, on the other hand, the city enjoyed relative peace and steady growth as a prosperous trading city due to its fortunate location. The site lay astride the land route from Europe to Asia and the seaway from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, and had in the Golden Horn an excellent and spacious harbor. Already then, in Greek and early Roman times, Byzantium was famous for the strategic geographic position that made it difficult to besiege and capture, and its position at the crossroads of the Asiatic-European trade route over land and as the gateway between the Mediterranean and Black Seas made it too valuable a settlement to abandon, as Emperor Septimius Severus later realized when he razed the city to the ground for supporting Pescennius Niger's claimancy. It was a move greatly criticized by the contemporary consul and historian Cassius Dio, who stated that Severus had destroyed "a strong Roman outpost and a base of operations against the barbarians from Pontus and Asia." He would later rebuild Byzantium towards the end of his reign, in which it would be briefly renamed Augusta Antonina, fortifying it with a new city wall in his name, the Severan Wall.
324–337: The refoundation as Constantinople
Constantine had altogether more colorful plans. Having restored the unity of the Empire and, being in the course of major governmental reforms as well as of sponsoring the consolidation of the Christian church, he was well aware that Rome was an unsatisfactory capital. Rome was too far from the frontiers, and hence from the armies and the imperial courts, and it offered an undesirable playground for disaffected politicians. Yet it had been the capital of the state for over a thousand years, and it might have seemed unthinkable to suggest that the capital be moved to a different location. Nevertheless, Constantine identified the site of Byzantium as the right place: a place where an emperor could sit, readily defended, with easy access to the Danube or the Euphrates frontiers, his court supplied from the rich gardens and sophisticated workshops of Roman Asia, his treasuries filled by the wealthiest provinces of the Empire.
Constantinople was built over six years and ceremonially consecrated on 11 May 330. Constantine divided the expanded city, like Rome, into 14 regions, and ornamented it with public works worthy of an imperial metropolis. Yet, at first, Constantine's new Rome did not have all the dignities of old Rome. It possessed a proconsul, rather than an urban prefect. It had no praetors, tribunes, or quaestors. Although it did have senators, they held the title clarus, not clarissimus, like those of Rome. It also lacked the panoply of other administrative offices regulating the food supply, police, statues, temples, sewers, aqueducts, or other public works. The new program of building was carried out in great haste: columns, marbles, doors, and tiles were taken wholesale from the temples of the empire and moved to the new city. In a similar fashion, many of the greatest works of Greek and Roman art were soon to be seen in its squares and streets. The emperor stimulated private building by promising householders gifts of land from the imperial estates in Asiana and Pontica and, on 18 May 332, he announced that, as in Rome, free distributions of food would be made to the citizens. At the time, the amount is said to have been 80,000 rations a day, doled out from 117 distribution points around the city.
Constantine laid out a new square at the center of old Byzantium, naming it the Augustaion (Greek: Augustaeum). The new senate-house (or Curia) was housed in a basilica on the east side. On the south side of the great square was erected the Great Palace of the Emperor with its imposing entrance, the Chalke, and its ceremonial suite known as the Palace of Daphne. Nearby was the vast Hippodrome for chariot races, seating over 80,000 spectators, and the famed Baths of Zeuxippus. At the western entrance to the Augustaion was the Milion, a vaulted monument from which distances were measured across the Eastern Roman Empire.
From the Augustaion led a great street, the Mese, lined with colonnades. As it descended the First Hill of the city and climbed the Second Hill, it passed on the left the Praetorium or law-court. Then it passed through the oval Forum of Constantine, where there was a second Senate-house and a high column with a statue of Constantine himself in the guise of Helios, crowned with a halo of seven rays and looking toward the rising sun. From there, the Mese passed on and through the Forum Tauri and then the Forum Bovis, and finally up the Seventh Hill (or Xerolophus) and through to the Golden Gate in the Constantinian Wall. After the construction of the Theodosian walls in the early 5th century, it was extended to the new Golden Gate, reaching a total length of seven Roman miles. After the construction of the Theodosian Walls, Constantinople consisted of an area approximately the size of Old Rome within the Aurelian walls, or some 1,400 ha.
337–529: Constantinople during the Barbarian Invasions and the fall of the West
The importance of Constantinople increased, but it was gradual. From the death of Constantine in 337 to the accession of Theodosius I, emperors had been resident only in the years 337–338, 347–351, 358–361, 368–369. Its status as a capital was recognized by the appointment of the first known Urban Prefect of the City Honoratus, who held office from 11 December 359 until 361. The urban prefects had concurrent jurisdiction over three provinces each in the adjacent dioceses of Thrace (in which the city was located), Pontus, and Asia, comparable to the 100-mile extraordinary jurisdiction of the prefect of Rome. The emperor Valens, who hated the city and spent only one year there, nevertheless built the Palace of Hebdomon on the shore of the Propontis near the Golden Gate, probably for use when reviewing troops. All the emperors up to Zeno and Basiliscus were crowned and acclaimed at the Hebdomon. Theodosius I founded the Church of John the Baptist to house the skull of the saint (today preserved at the Topkapı Palace), put up a memorial pillar to himself in the Forum of Taurus, and turned the ruined temple of Aphrodite into a coach house for the Praetorian Prefect; Arcadius constructed a new forum named after himself on the Mese, near the walls of Constantine.
After the shock of the Battle of Adrianople in 378, in which Valens and the flower of the Roman armies were destroyed by the Visigoths within a few days' march, the city looked to its defences, and in 413–414 Theodosius II built the 18-metre (60-foot)-tall triple-wall fortifications, which were not to be breached until the coming of gunpowder. Theodosius also founded a University near the Forum of Taurus on 27 February 425.