The city, on the Bosporus Strait that separates Europe and Asia, began as Byzantium, a Greek colony founded in the 7th century BC. When the Roman Empire overwhelmed Greece, Byzantium became a free city, albeit under the overall dominion of Rome.
When Emperor Constantine defeated his rival Licinius at the Battle of Chrysopolis in 324 AD, he spent the next night in nearby Byzantium, which was no more than a small town on a peninsula overlooking the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara. He said afterwards that he had a vision (not the first he had had in his life) in which the spirit of the town, an old woman, became transformed into a beautiful young woman on whose head Constantine placed a diadem. This persuaded him to rebuild and expand the town into a magnificent city.
A few days later he led a party of troops to mark the boundary of his new city, which would be three times the size of the old one and defended by huge walls. In 330 AD he renamed it Constantinople and declared that it would be the new capital of the Roman Empire.
The foundation of Constantinople marked the split between the eastern and western halves of the Empire, with the eastern half surviving for nearly a thousand years after the western half had disappeared. It is always referred to as the Byzantine Empire, although the name of Byzantium had long since been displaced by that of Constantinople.
The name Istanbul derives from “Istinpolin” from the Greek for “in the city”. It sounds as though it might have been the answer to a question like “Where does X live?” or “Where are you going?” At any rate, it was understood by the Turks of Anatolia to be the name of the city, and this is what they called it from as early as the 13th century.
Officially, it was always Constantinople until the change in 1930, but by that time very little remained that was of Greek or Roman origin, and there was certainly nothing left of Byzantium.
© John Welford
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