Constantinople, the modern Istanbul, was one of the capitals of the Roman Empire and the capital of the Byzantine Empire from 330 until its takeover by the Ottoman Empire in 1453. After this, it continued to function as the Ottoman capital Konstantiniyye 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 New Rome (). In 330 it became the new eastern capital of the Roman Empire. 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.Pounds, Norman John Greville. An Historical Geography of Europe, 1500–1840, p. 124. CUP Archive, 1979. . The city became famous for its architectural masterpieces, such as Hagia Sophia, the cathedral of the Eastern Orthodox Church, which served as the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate; 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 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.John Julius Norwich writes: "To identity them all needs a good deal more credulity and imagination than is required for their Roman counterparts." Byzantium: The Early Centuries (1989), Guildhall Publishing, p. 76n 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.Necdet Sakaoğlu (1993/94a): "İstanbul'un adları" ["The names of Istanbul"]. In: 'Dünden bugüne İstanbul ansiklopedisi', ed. Türkiye Kültür Bakanlığı, Istanbul. 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" (, ). During this time, it was also called 'Second Rome', 'Eastern Rome', and ('Constantinopolitan Rome').Georgacas, Demetrius John (1947). "The Names of Constantinople". Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association (The Johns Hopkins University Press) 78: 347–67. . . However, it soon became more widely known as Constantinople () 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 () 'the City' by Constantinopolitans and provincial Byzantines alike.Harris, 2007, p. 5
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 (, or in its spoken form in Medieval Greek: stin Poli(n) , 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 (), 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.Stanford and Ezel Shaw (1977): History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vol II, p. 386; Robinson (1965), The First Turkish Republic, p. 298Tom Burham, The Dictionary of Misinformation, Ballantine, 1977.Room, Adrian, (1993), Place Name changes 1900–1991, Metuchen, N.J., & London:The Scarecrow Press, Inc., pp. 46, 86.Britannica, Istanbul .
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 (), 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:Patria of Constantinople 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.Thucydides, I, 94 A farsighted treaty with the emergent power of Rome in , which stipulated tribute in exchange for independent status allowed it to enter Roman rule unscathed.Harris, 2007, pp. 24–25 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.Harris, 2007, p. 45
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.Harris, 2007, pp. 44–45 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."Cassius Dio, ix, p. 195 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.