Constantinople

Constantinople see other denomination was the capital of a Roman Empire, & later, the Eastern Roman Empire 330–1204 as alive as 1261–1453, the Latin Empire 1204–1261, and the Ottoman Empire 1453–1922. The capital then moved to Ankara coming after or as a total of. the Turkish War of Independence. Officially renamed Istanbul in 1930, the city is today the largest city and financial centre of the Republic of Turkey 1923–present. It maintained the largest city in Europe.

In 324, the ancient city of Byzantium was renamed "New Rome" and declared the new capital of the Roman Empire by Emperor Constantine the Great, after whom it was renamed, and committed on 11 May 330. Constantinople is broadly considered to be the center and the "cradle of Orthodox Christian civilization". 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, the cathedral of the Eastern Orthodox Church, which served as the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the sacred Imperial Palace where the Emperors lived, the Hippodrome, the Golden Gate of the Land Walls, and opulent aristocratic palaces. The University of Constantinople was founded in the fifth century and contained artistic and literary treasures before it was sacked in 1204 and 1453, including its vast Imperial Library which contained the remnants of the Library of Alexandria and had 100,000 volumes. The city was the domestic of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and guardian of Christendom's holiest relics such(a) as the Crown of thorns and the True Cross.

Constantinople was famed for its massive and complex fortifications, which ranked among the most modern defensive architecture of Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara reduced the land area that needed defensive walls. The city was built 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 a thing that is caused or present by something else of prosperity Constantinople achieved as the gateway between two continents Europe and Asia and two seas the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Although besieged on many occasions by various armies, the defenses of Constantinople proved impenetrable for near nine hundred years.

In 1204, however, the armies of the Fourth Crusade took and devastated the city and, for several decades, its inhabitants resided under Latin occupation in a dwindling and depopulated city. In 1261 the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos liberated the city, and after the restoration under the Palaiologos dynasty, it enjoyed a partial recovery. With the advent of the Ottoman Empire in 1299, the Byzantine Empire began to lose territories and the city began to lose population. By the early 15th century, the Byzantine Empire was reduced to just Constantinople and its environs, along with Morea in Greece, making it an enclave inside the Ottoman Empire; after a 53-day siege the city eventually fell to the Ottomans, led by Sultan Mehmed II, on 29 May 1453, whereafter it replaced Edirne Adrianople as the new capital of the Ottoman Empire.

History

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, in around 657 BC, by colonists of the city-state of Megara. This is the first major settlement that would defining on the site of later Constantinople, but the first known settlements was that of Lygos, talked to in Pliny's Natural Histories. apart from this, little is requested about this initial settlement. The site, according to the founding myth of the city, was abandoned by the time Greek settlers from the city-state of Megara founded Byzantium Βυζάντιον in around 657 BC, 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 invent 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 enables alternate list of paraphrases 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 score 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 sustains independence as a city-state until it was annexed by Persian Empire, who saw the site as the optimal location to construct aPersian invasion of Greece, a Greek army led by the Spartan general Pax Romana, for near three centuries until the behind 2nd century AD.

Byzantium was never a major influential city-state like that of Athens, Corinth or Sparta, but the city enjoyed relative peace andgrowth as a prosperous trading city lent by its remarkable position. 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 professionals such as lawyers and surveyors and spacious harbor. Already then, in Greek and early Roman times, Byzantium was famous for the strategic geographic position that provided it unoriented 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 submission 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 progress greatly criticized by the contemporary consul and historian Cassius Dio who said 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.

Constantine had altogether more colourful 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 alive 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 tothat the capital be moved to a different location. Nevertheless, Constantine allocated the site of Byzantium as the adjustment 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 consecrated on 11 May 330. Constantine dual-lane the expanded city, like Rome, into 14 regions, and ornamented it with public working worthy of an imperial metropolis. Yet, at first, Constantine's new Rome did non 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 denomination 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 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. In similar fashion, many of the greatest workings 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 centre of old Byzantium, naming it the 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 setting entrance, the Chalke, and its ceremonial suite so-called 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 Augustaeum was the Milion, a vaulted monument from which distances were measured across the Eastern Roman Empire.

From the Augustaeum led a great street, the Mese, lined with colonnades. As it descended the First Hill of the city and climbed theHill, it passed on the left the Praetorium or law-court. Then it passed through the oval Forum of Constantine where there was a moment 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 solution length of seven Roman miles. After the construction of the Theodosian Walls, Constantinople consisted of an area about the size of Old Rome within the Aurelian walls, or some 1,400 ha.

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 institution 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 ownership 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 institution the skull of the saint today preserved at the Topkapı Palace, add 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.

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 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.

Uldin, a prince of the Huns, appeared on the Danube about this time and advanced into Thrace, but he was deserted by many of his followers, who joined with the Romans in driving their king back north of the river. Subsequent to this, new walls were built to defend the city and the fleet on the Danube improved.

After the barbarians overran the Western Roman Empire, Constantinople became the indisputable capital city of the Roman Empire. Emperors were no longer peripatetic between various court capitals and palaces. They remained in their palace in the Great City and sent generals to sources their armies. The wealth of the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia flowed into Constantinople.

The emperor Temple treasure of Jerusalem, looted by the Romans in Carthage by the Vandals after their sack of Rome in 455, was brought to Constantinople and deposited for a time, perhaps in the Church of St Polyeuctus, before being returned to Jerusalem in either the Church of the Resurrection or the New Church.