The city of Istanbul has been known by a number of different names. The most notable names besides the modern Turkish name are Byzantium, Constantinople, and Stamboul. Different names are associated with different phases of its history, with different languages, and with different portions of it.
Names in historical sequence Lygos According to a brief remark in Pliny the Elder's Natural History, Byzantium was first known as Lygos. The origin and meaning of the name are unknown. It may have been the name of a Thracian settlement situated on the site of the later city near the point of the peninsula (Sarayburnu). Simon Zsolt has suggested it was etymologically related to the Greek name for the Ligures and derived from the Anatolian ethnonym Ligyes,Zsolt, Simon. (2022). "The Ligyes: A forgotten people in Ancient Anatolia." Res Antiquae, 19, pp. 259-270. a tribe that appears to have been neighbors to the Paphlagonians.LaBuff, J. (2022). The Peoples of Anatolia. Netherlands: Brill.
Byzantium
Byzantion (, ) was founded by Greek colonists from Megara in 667 BC. The name is believed to be of Thracian or Illyrian origin and thus to predate the Greek settlement. It may be derived from a Thracian or Illyrian personal name, Byzas. Ancient Greek legend refers to a legendary king of that name as the leader of the Megarean colonists and eponymous founder of the city.
Byzántios, plural. Byzántioi (, ) referred to Byzantion's inhabitants and Byzántios (, ) was an adjective, also used as an ethnonym for the people of the city and as a family name. In the Middle Ages, Byzántion was also a synecdoche for the eastern Roman Empire. (An ellipsis of ). Byzantinós (, ) denoted an inhabitant of the empire. The Anglicization of Latin Byzantinus yielded "Byzantine", with 15th and 16th century forms including Byzantin, Bizantin(e), Bezantin(e), and Bysantin as well as Byzantian and Bizantian.
The name Byzantius and Byzantinus were applied from the 9th century to gold Byzantine coinage, reflected in the French besant (d'or), Italian bisante, and English besant, byzant, or bezant. The English usage, derived from Old French besan (pl. besanz), and relating to the coin, dates from the 12th century.
Later, the name Byzantium became common in the West to refer to the Eastern Roman Empire, whose capital was Constantinople. As a term for the east Roman state as a whole, Byzantium was introduced by the historian Hieronymus Wolf only in 1555, a century after the empire, whose inhabitants called it the Roman Empire (), had ceased to exist.
Augusta Antonina The city was called Augusta Antonina () for a brief period in the 3rd century AD. The Roman Emperor Septimius Severus (193–211) conferred the name in honor of his son Antoninus, the later Emperor Caracalla.Necdet Sakaoğlu (1993/94a): "İstanbul'un adları" ["The names of Istanbul"]. In: 'Dünden bugüne İstanbul ansiklopedisi', ed. Türkiye Kültür Bakanlığı, Istanbul.
New Rome Before the Roman emperor Constantine the Great made the city the new eastern capital of the Roman Empire on May 11, 330, he undertook a major construction project, essentially rebuilding the city on a monumental scale, partly modeled after Rome. Names of this period included "the New, second Rome",According to the Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, vol. 164 (Stuttgart 2005), column 442, there is no evidence for the tradition that Constantine officially dubbed the city "New Rome" (Nova Roma or Nea Rhome). Commemorative coins that were issued during the 330s already refer to the city as Constantinopolis (see, e.g., Michael Grant, The climax of Rome (London 1968), p. 133).The 5th-century church historian Socrates of Constantinople writes in his Historia Ecclesiastica, 1:16 (c. 439) that the emperor named the city "Constantinople" while decreeing that it be designated a "second Rome" (‘Κωνσταντινούπολιν’ μετονομάσας, χρηματίζειν ‘δευτέραν Ῥώμην’ νόμῳ ἐκύρωσεν). Alma Roma , , "Eastern Rome", Roma Constantinopolitana.
The Third Canon of the First Council of Constantinople (381) refers to the city as New Rome."The Seven Ecumenical Councils | Christian Classics Ethereal Library". Ccel.org. 2005-06-01. Retrieved 2017-05-22.
The term "New Rome" lent itself to East-West polemics, especially in the context of the Great Schism, when it was used by Greek writers to stress the rivalry with (the original) Rome. New Rome is also still part of the official title of the Patriarch of Constantinople.
Constantinople
Kōnstantinoúpolis (Κωνσταντινούπολις), Constantinopolis in Latin and Constantinople in English, was the name by which the city became more widely known, in honor of Constantine the Great who established it as his capital. It is first attested in official use under Emperor Theodosius II (408–450). Stephanus of Byzantium mention both the terms Konstantinoupolis (Κωνσταντινούπολις)Stephanus of Byzantium, Ethnica, B189.12 and Kostantinoupolis (Κωσταντινούπολις).Stephanus of Byzantium, Ethnica, K404.3 Constantinopolis remained the principal official name of the city throughout the Byzantine period, and the most common name used for it in the West until the early 20th century.
This name was also used (including its Kostantiniyye variant) by the Ottoman Empire to describe the entire urban area of the city until the advent of the Republic of Turkey—the core Walled City was always Istambul for the Ottomans.Finkel, Caroline, Osman's Dream, (Basic Books, 2005), 57; "Istanbul was only adopted as the city's official name in 1930…". According to Eldem Edhem, who wrote an encyclopedia entry on Istanbul for Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire, "many" Turkish members of the public as well as Turkish historians often perceive the use of Constantinople for the Ottoman city, despite being historically accurate, as being "politically incorrect".Edhem, Eldem. "Istanbul." In: Ágoston, Gábor and Bruce Alan Masters. Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire. Infobase Publishing, 21 May 2010. , 9781438110257. Start and CITED: p. 286. "Originally, the name Istanbul referred only to[...]in the 18th century." and "For the duration of Ottoman rule, western sources continued to refer to the city as Constantinople, reserving the name Stamboul for the walled city." and "Today the use of the name[...]is often deemed politically incorrect[...]by most Turks." // (entry ends, with author named, on p. 290)
Other Byzantine names Besides Constantinople, the Byzantines referred to the city with a large range of honorary appellations, such as the "Queen of Cities" (), also as an adjective, Βασιλεύουσα, the 'Reigning City'. In popular speech, the most common way of referring to it came to be simply the City (Greek: hē Polis /iˈpo.lis/, , Modern Greek: i Poli, η Πόλη /i ˈpoli/ ). This usage, still current today in colloquial Greek and Armenian (Պոլիս, pronounced "Polis" or "Bolis" in the Western Armenian dialect prevalent in the city), also became the source of the later Turkish name, Istanbul (see below).
Kostantiniyye
Kostantiniyye (Arabic: , translit. al-Qusṭanṭīniyya, Persian: , translit. Qosṭanṭanīye, Ottoman Turkish: , translit. Ḳosṭanṭīnīye) is the name by which the city came to be known in the Islamic world. It is an Arabic calque of Constantinople. After the Ottoman conquest of 1453, it was used as the most formal official name in Ottoman Turkish,G. Necipoğlu. "From Byzantine Constantinople to Ottoman Kostantiniyye: Creation of a Cosmopolitan Capital and Visual Culture under Sultan Mehmed II" Ex. cat. "From Byzantion to Istanbul: 8000 Years of a Capital", June 5 – September 4, 2010, Sabanci University Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul. Istanbul: Sakip Sabanci Museum, 2010 p. 262 and remained in use throughout most of the time up to the fall of the Empire in 1922. However, during some periods Ottoman authorities favoured other names (see below).
Istanbul
The modern Turkish name İstanbul () () is attested (in a range of variants) since the 10th century, at first in Armenian and Arabic (without the initial İ-) and then in Ottoman sources. Some sources have speculated that it comes from the Medieval Greek phrase "", meaning "to the city", reinterpreted as a single word, but a 2015 review of the literature found a more likely explanation to be that: "The form of the etymon is the colloquial Middle Greek phrase , not the puristic literary ancestor of this. The meaning of the etymon is probably ‘in Constantinople’, possibly ‘to Constantinople’ and just possibly ‘into Constantinople’".
The incorporation of parts of articles and other particles into Greek place names was common even before the Ottoman period: Navarino for earlier Avarino,Detailed history at Pylos#The Name of Navarino Satines for Athines, etc. Similar examples of modern Turkish place names derived from Greek in this fashion are İzmit, earlier İznikmit, from Greek Nicomedia, İznik from Greek Nicaea ([iz nikea]), Samsun (s'Amison from "se" and "Amisos"), and İstanköy for the Greek island Kos (from is tin Ko). The occurrence of the initial i- in these names, including Istanbul's, is largely secondary epenthesis to break up syllabic consonant clusters, prohibited by the phonotactic structure of Turkish, as seen in Turkish istasyon from French station or ızgara from the Greek schára.
İstanbul originally was not used for the entire city, instead the name referred to the core of Istanbul—the walled city. İstanbul was the common name for the city in normal speech in Turkish even before the conquest of 1453, but in official use by the Ottoman authorities other names, such as Kostantiniyye, were preferred in certain contexts. Thus, Kostantiniyye was used on coinage up to the late 17th and then again in the 19th century. The Ottoman chancery and courts used Kostantiniyye as part of intricate formulae in expressing the place of origin of formal documents, such as be-Makam-ı Darü's-Saltanat-ı Kostantiniyyetü'l-Mahrusâtü'l-Mahmiyye.Necdet Sakaoğlu (1993/94b): "Kostantiniyye". In: 'Dünden bugüne İstanbul ansiklopedisi', ed. Türkiye Kültür Bakanlığı, Istanbul. In 19th century Turkish book-printing it was also used in the impressum of books, in contrast to the foreign use of Constantinople. At the same time, however, İstanbul too was part of the official language, for instance in the titles of the highest Ottoman military commander (İstanbul ağası) and the highest civil magistrate (İstanbul efendisi) of the city,A.C. Barbier de Meynard (1881): Dictionnaire Turc-Français. Paris: Ernest Leroux. and the Ottoman Turkish version of the Ottoman constitution of 1876 states that "The capital city of the Ottoman State is İstanbul". - Page 341 has a direct translation of the line about the capital being Istanbul. // Original document: Kanun-ı Esasi (Ottoman Turkish) (Modern Turkish transliteration) , Article 2: "Devleti Osmaniyenin payıtahtı İstanbul şehridir" İstanbul and several other variant forms of the same name were also widely used in Ottoman literature and poetry.
Names other than (İstanbul) had become obsolete in the Turkish language after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. However, at that point Constantinople was still used when writing the city's name in Latin script. In 1928, the Turkish alphabet was changed from the Arabic to the Latin script. Beginning in 1930, Turkey officially requested that other countries use Turkish names for Turkish cities, instead of other transliterations to Latin script that had been used in the Ottoman times.Stanford and Ezel Shaw (27 May 1977): History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vol II, , 9780521291668. p. 386; Robinson, Richard (1963), The First Turkish Republic: A case in national development, p. 298