Constantinople


Constantinople is the older and traditional name of the modern city of Istanbul in Turkey. It is located between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara.

Name
The name is a reference to its founder, the Roman emperor Constantine the Great. He made it a second capital of the Roman Empire on May 11, AD 330, naming the city Nova Roma (New Rome)), but that name came little into common use, and it was as the City of Constantine that it lived through the centuries.

Byzantium
Constantine was responsible for a re-foundation. The site has 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, when in 667 BC the legendary Byzas established it with a group of citizens from the town of Megara. This city was named Byzantium.

Foundation
Constantine had altogether more ambitious plans. Having restored the unity of the empire, and being in 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: it offered an undesirable playground for disaffected politicians; and 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, he 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.

He built the city, divided it into 14 regions, and ornamented it with great public works. Yet initially Constantinople did not have all the dignities of Rome. It had a proconsul, not a prefect of the city. It had no praetors, tribunes or quaestors. Although it had senators, they held the title clarus, not clarissimus as did those of Rome. Nor did it have the panoply of other administrative offices regulating the food-supply, the police, the statues, the temples, the sewers, the aqueducts and other public works. And the building was carried out in great haste: columns, marbles, doors and tiles were taken wholesale from the temples of the empire and removed to the new city, and 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 to householders lands from the imperial estates in Asiana and Pontica, and on 18 May 332 he announced that, as at 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, given out from 117 distribution points.

Public buildings
Constantinople was a Christian city, lying in the most Christianised part of the Empire. Constantine made the temples of Byzantium into ruins, and erected the splendid St Sophia, the Church of the Holy Apostles, and St Irene.

He also laid out the square at the centre of old Byzantium anew, and named it the Augusteum in honour of his mother, Helena. St Sophia lay on the north side of the Augusteum. The new senate-house was in a basilica on the east side. On the south side was the Great Palace of the emperor with its imposing entrance the Chalke and its ceremonial suite known as the Palace of Daphne, near to a great Hippodrome for chariot-races seating over 80,000 spectators, and to the Baths of Zeuxippus (both originally built in the time of Severus). At the entrance at the western end of the Augusteum was the Milestone, a vaulted monument from which distances were measured across the Eastern Empire.

From the Augusteum a great street, the Mese, led, 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 centre 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.

Constantinople in the Divided Empire
The first known Prefect of the City of Constantinople was Honoratus, who took office on 11 December 359 and held it until 361. Valens built the Palace of Hebdomon on the shore of the Propontis near the Golden Gate, probably for use when reviewing troops, and up to Zeno and Basiliscus all the emperors who were elevated at Constantinople were to be crowned and acclaimed at the Hebdomon. Theodosius I founded the church of John the Baptist to house a relic of the saint, put up a memorial pillar to himself in the Forum of Taurus, and turned the ruined temple of Aphrodite into a coachhouse for the Praetorian Prefect; Arcadius built a new forum named after himself on the Mese, near the walls of Constantine.

Gradually the importance of the city increased. Following the shock of the Battle of Adrianople in 376, when the emperor Valens with the flower of the Roman armies was destroyed by the Goths within a few days' march of the city, Constantinople looked to its defences, and Theodosius II built in 413-414 the 60-foot tall walls which were never to be breached until the coming of gunpowder. Theodosius also founded a University at the Capitolium near the Forum of Taurus, on 27 February 425.

In the fifth century, when the barbarians overran the western Empire, and its emperors retreated to Ravenna and then failed altogether, Constantinople became in real truth the greatest city of the Empire, and the greatest in the world. Emperors were no longer peripatetic. They remained in their palace in the Great City, and sent generals to command their armies. And the wealth of the Eastern Mediterranean flowed into Constantinople, and was spent there.

The City under Justinian
The emperor Justinian (527-565) became known for his successes in war, for his legal reforms and for his public works. It was from Constantinople that his expedition for the reconquest of Africa set sail on or about 21 June 533. Before their departure the ship of the commander, Belisarius, anchored in front of the Imperial palace, and the Patriarch offered prayers for the success of the enterprise.

Chariot-racing had been important in Rome for centuries. In Constantinople, the hippodrome became over time increasingly a place of political significance. It was where (as a shadow of the popular elections of old Rome) the people by acclamation showed their approval of a new emperor; and also where they openly criticised the government, or clamoured for the removal of unpopular ministers. In the time of Justinian, public order in Constantinople became a critical political issue. The entire late Roman and early Byzantine period was one where Christianity was resolving fundamental questions of identity, and the dispute between the orthodox and the monophysites became the cause of serious disorder, expressed through allegiance to the horse-racing parties of the Blues and the Greens, and in the form of a major rebellion in the capital of 532 AD, known as the "Nika" riots (from the battle-cry of "Victory!" of those involved).

Fires started by the Nika rioters consumed the basilica of St Sophia, the city's principal church. Justinian commissioned Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus to replace it with the incomparable St Sophia, the great cathedral of the Orthodox Church, whose dome was said to be held aloft by God alone, and which was directly connected to the palace so that the imperial family could attend services without passing through the streets [St Sophia was converted into a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of the city, and is now a museum]. The dedication took place on Christmas Day of 537 AD in the presence of the Emperor, who exclaimed, "Glory be to God who found me worthy of this deed! I have outdone you, Solomon!".

Justinian also had Anthemius and Isidore pull down and replace the Church of the Holy Apostles, built by Constantine, with a new church with the same dedication. This was designed in the form of an equally-armed cross with five domes, and ornamented with beautiful mosaics. This church was to remain the burial place of the emperors from Constantine himself until the eleventh century. When the city fell to the Turks in 1453, the church was demolished to make room for the tomb of Mehmet II the Conqueror.

The City after Justinian
Justinian was succeeded in turn by Justin II, Tiberius II and Maurice, able emperors who had to deal with a deteriorating military situation, especially on the eastern frontier. Subsequently there was a period of near-anarchy, which was exploited by the enemies of the Empire. After the Avars came to threaten Constantinople from the west and simultaneously the Persians from the East, Heraclius, the exarch of Africa, set sail for the city and assumed the purple. He found the situation so dire that at first he contemplated moving the imperial capital to Carthage, but with military genius he succeeded in expelling the invaders. No sooner had he carried war into their own territories, however, and achieved an advantageous peace with Persia, than he was faced with the Arab expansion. Constantinople was besieged twice by the Arabs, once in a long blockade between 674 and 678, and once again in 717.

Importance of the City in its prime
Constantinople was historically important for a number of reasons.

First, by the 5th century, it was the largest and richest urban center in Europe, a position it would hold for nearly a thousand years. As the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire (now commonly known as the Byzantine Empire), the Greeks called Constantinople simply "the City", while throughout Europe it was known as the "Queen of Cities", the richest and largest city both culturally and economically. A Russian 14th-century traveller, Stephen of Novgorod, wrote, "As for St Sophia, the human mind can neither tell it nor make description of it". Moreover, alone in Europe until the 13th century Italian florin, the Empire continued to produce sound gold coinage, the solidus of Diocletian becoming the bezant prized throughout the Middle Ages.
Secondly, Constantine assured the position of the bishop or Patriarch of Constantinople. His position so near to the counsels of the Emperor inevitably made him first among equals alongside the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, and later those that arose in the Slavic Orthodox churches.
Third, the city provided a defence for the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire against the invasions of the 5th century, for Europe against the Arabs, and for European Christendom against Islam.

The Isaurians
In the eighth and ninth centuries the iconoclast movement caused serious political problems in the Empire. In 726 Leo III issued a decree against images, and ordered the destruction of a statue of Christ over one of the doors of the Chalke, an act which was fiercely resisted by the citizens. Constantine V convoked a church council in 754 which condemned the worship of images, after which many treasures were broken, burned, or painted over. Following the death of his son Leo IV in 780, the empress Irene restored the veneration of images through the agency of the Second Council of Nicaea in 787.

The Comneni and Palaeologi
Following the catastrophic defeat in 1071 of the emperor Romanus IV Diogenes by the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert in Armenia, his successor Michael VII pleaded for assistance from the West. In due course this was to lead to the First Crusade, which assembled at Constantinople in 1096 in the reign of Alexius I Comnenus, and moved on towards Jerusalem. The Crusades were, however, to lead in time to the disastrous capture and sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade on April 12, 1204. The city was retaken by Byzantine forces under Michael VIII Palaeologus in 1261. The Comneni founded a beautiful new imperial palace at Blachernae in the north-west of the city, and the Great Palace fell into disuse.

End of the City
Constantinople and the Empire finally fell to the Ottoman Turks on May 29, 1453, during the reign of Constantine XI Paleologus. Even now 29 May remains an unlucky date in Greece.

The Ottoman Turks called the city Stamboul or Istanbul, adopting a usage in Greek "eis tin Poli" (to or at the City). But they still used "Konstantiniyye" ("Constantine's City", or Constantinople) as the official name. When the Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923, the capital was moved to Ankara. Constantinople was officially renamed Istanbul by the Republic of Turkey in 1930. The use of the name in English even for the modern city remained current for some time.