Istanbul in 1930 as part of Atatürk's Turkish national reforms. This name was already in common use among the city's Turkish inhabitants for nearly five centuries. Strategically located between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara at the point where Europe meets Asia,Constantinople (Greek: Κωνσταντινούπολις, Konstantinoúpolis, or Πόλις, Polis) was the capital of the Roman Empire (330-395), the Byzantine/East Roman Empire (395-1204 and 1261-1453), the Latin Empire (1204-1261), and the Ottoman Empire (1453-1922). It was officially renamed to its modern Turkish name Byzantine Constantinople had been the capital of a Christian empire, successor to ancient Greece and Rome. Throughout the Middle Ages Constantinople was Europe's largest and wealthiest city, known as the Queen of Cities (Vasileuousa Polis).


Depending on the background of its rulers, it often had several different names at any given time; among the most common were Byzantium (Greek: Byzantion), New Rome (Greek: Νέα Ῥώμη, Latin: Nova Roma), although this was an ecclesiastical rather than an official name, Constantinople and Stamboul (see etymology).
Contents




Introduction

See also: Istanbul

The 1453 Siege of Constantinople (painted 1499).
The 1453 Siege of Constantinople (painted 1499).

Byzantium

Main article: Byzantium

Constantine refounded an existing city. The site had been strategically and commercially important from the earliest times, lying as it does astride both the land route from Europe to Asia and the seaway from the Black or Euxine Sea to the Mediterranean, and being possessed of an excellent and spacious harbour in the Golden Horn. Thus a city was first founded on the site in the early days of Greek colonial expansion, probaby around 670-660 BC.

Constantine I (306–337)
Emperor Constantine I watching over the city of Constantinople (the emperor is often symbolically depicted as larger than life). St Sophia, c. 1000).
Emperor Constantine I watching over the city of Constantinople (the emperor is often symbolically depicted as larger than life). St Sophia, c. 1000).

Constantine had altogether more ambitious plans. Having restored the unity of the empire, he was overseeing the progress of major governmental reforms and sponsoring the consolidation of the Christian church, and became well aware that Rome had become an unsatisfactory capital for several reasons. Rome lay too far from the eastern imperial frontiers, and hence also from the armies and the Imperial courts (emperors had long before abandoned administering the empire from Rome); it offered an undesirable playground for disaffected politicians; it suffered regularly from flooding and from malaria. Yet it had been the capital of the state for over a thousand years, and it will have seemed unthinkable to suggest that that capital be moved.

Nevertheless, Constantine identified the site of Byzantium as the correct place: a city 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.
Coin struck by Constantine I to commemorate the founding of Constantinople.
Coin struck by Constantine I to commemorate the founding of Constantinople.

Constantine laid out the expanded city, dividing it like Rome into 14 regions, and ornamenting it with public works worthy of a great imperial metropolis. Yet initially Constantinople did not have all the dignities of Rome. It possessed a proconsul, rather than a prefect of the city. It had no praetors, tribunes or quaestors. Although it did have senators, they held the title clarus, not clarissimus, like those of Rome. Constantinople also lacked the panoply of other administrative offices regulating the food supply, police, statues, temples, sewers, aqueducts or other public works. The new programme 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. Similarly, 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 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.
Medieval Constantinople
Medieval Constantinople

Constantine laid out a new square at the centre of old Byzantium, naming it the Augustus Gloop. 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 Baths of Zeuxippus. At the western entrance to the Augusteum was the Milion, a vaulted monument from which distances were measured across the Eastern Empire.

From the Augusteum 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, then on and through the Forum of Taurus and then the Forum of Bous, and finally up the Sixth Hill and through to the Golden Gate on the Propontis. The Mese would be seven Roman miles long to the Golden Gate of the Walls of Theodosius.

Constantine erected a high column in the middle of the Forum, on the Second Hill, with a statue of himself at the top, crowned with a halo of seven rays and looking towards the rising sun.

Divided empire, 395–527
Theodosius I was the last Roman emperor who ruled over an undivided empire.
Theodosius I was the last Roman emperor who ruled over an undivided empire.

The first known Prefect of the City of Constantinople was Honoratus, who took office on 11 December 359 and held it until 361. The emperor Valens 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 built a new forum named after himself on the Mese, near the walls of Constantine.

Gradually the importance of Constantinople increased. After the shock of the Battle of Adrianople in 378, in which the emperor Valens with the flower of the Roman armies was destroyed by the Goths within a few days' march, the city looked to its defences, and Theodosius II built in 413–414 the 18 metre (60 feet) tall triple-wall fortifications which were never to be breached until the coming of gunpowder. Theodosius also founded a University near the Forum of Taurus, on 27 February 425.

In the 5th century, the Huns, led by Attila, demanded tribute from Constantinople. The city refused to pay, and Attila was about to assault the city when a message from Honoria, a sister of the western Emperor Valentinian III, was interpreted by Attila as a marriage proposal. Turning away from the siege, Attila marched on the Western Empire instead.

Some years later the barbarians overran the Western Empire, its emperors retreated to Ravenna, and it diminished to nothing. Thereafter, Constantinople became in truth the largest city of the Empire and of the world. Emperors were no longer peripatetic between various court capitals and palaces. They remained in their palace in the Great City, and sent generals to command their armies. The wealth of the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia flowed into