Constantine’s New Rome ruled until Ottoman 1453
Constantinople, today’s Istanbul, became Roman capital in 330 after Constantine refounded Byzantium as New Rome in 324. It stayed Byzantine until the 1453 Ottoman conquest, then served as Ottoman Konstantiniyye until the sultanate ended in 1922—nearly sixteen centuries as an imperial seat.
Before Constantine it was Byzantium, founded as a Greek colony in the seventh century BC. Septimius Severus razed it during the civil war of 196 and rebuilt it as Augusta Antonina in honour of his son, the future Caracalla, but the new name faded and Byzantium returned by 235 at the latest. Constantine called his refounded capital New Rome, and it was also known as Second Rome, Eastern Rome and Constantinopolitan Rome before the name Constantinople, city of Constantine, won out.
From the mid-fifth to the early thirteenth century it was Europe’s largest and wealthiest city, home to Hagia Sophia, the cathedral of Eastern Orthodoxy and seat of its patriarch. Admirers called it the Queen of Cities or the Great City, while its own people and provincials alike simply said the City. The Theodosian Walls, a double line with a moat built about two kilometres west of an earlier wall, ranked among the strongest defences of the ancient world.
In 1204 the Fourth Crusade sacked it and made it capital of a short-lived Latin Empire, until the Byzantine state based at Nicaea retook it in 1261. The Palaiologan dynasty brought a partial recovery, but after the Ottoman state arose in 1299 imperial territory shrank and the population fell. By the early fifteenth century the empire held little beyond the city and the Morea in the Peloponnese, an enclave inside Ottoman lands.
The Ottomans besieged and captured it in 1453, and it remained their capital until the empire dissolved and the new Turkish republic moved the seat of government to Ankara in 1923.
Source: Constantinople
