Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Constantinople [a] (see other names) was a historical city located on the Bosporus that served as the capital of the Roman, Byzantine, Latin, and Ottoman empires between its consecration in 330 until 1930, when it was renamed to Istanbul.
Map of the regions of Byzantine Constantinople. The ancient city of Constantinople was divided into 14 administrative regions (Latin: regiones, Greek: συνοικιες, romanized: synoikies). The system of fourteen regiones was modelled on the fourteen regiones of Rome, a system introduced by the first Roman emperor Augustus in the 1st ...
Old map of Constantinople showing the location of the wall (border) of the city (Modern day Fatih) According to tradition, the city was founded as Byzantium by Greek colonists from the Attic town of Megara, led by the eponymous Byzas, around 658 BC. [1]
Hagia Sophia Cathedral — a symbol of Byzantine Constantinople. The history of Constantinople covers the period from the Consecration of the city in 330, when Constantinople became the new capital of the Roman Empire, to its conquest by the Ottomans in 1453. Constantinople was rebuilt practically from scratch on the site of Byzantium.
Constantinople jostled with other major historical cities, such as Baghdad, Chang'an, Kaifeng and Merv for the position of the world's largest city until the 12th century. It never returned to being the world's largest, but remained the largest city in Europe from 1500 to 1750, when it was surpassed by London .
For more than 700 years, the Church of the Holy Apostles was the second most important church in Constantinople, after that of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia).But whereas the church of the Holy Wisdom was in the city's oldest part, that of the Holy Apostles stood in the newer part of the expanded imperial capital, on the great thoroughfare called Mese Odós (English: Central Street), and became ...
The Great Palace of Constantinople (Greek: Μέγα Παλάτιον, Méga Palátion; Latin: Palatium Magnum), also known as the Sacred Palace (Greek: Ἱερὸν Παλάτιον, Hieròn Palátion; Latin: Sacrum Palatium), was the large imperial Byzantine palace complex located in the south-eastern end of the peninsula today making up the ...
This combination of imperialism and location would affect Constantinople's role as the nexus between the continents of Europe and Asia. It was a commercial, cultural, and diplomatic centre and for centuries formed the capital of the Byzantine Empire , which decorated the city with numerous monuments, some still standing today.