Byzantium / Constantinople

The original Greek name of the city, Byzántion, the Megarian colony planted around 657 BCE on the point where the Bosphorus opens toward the Sea of Marmara. The name is taken from its legendary founder Byzas, in the regular Greek way of naming a colony for its oikist, and it names a modest but strategically golden city, the gatekeeper of the strait and the Black Sea grain trade, for the thousand years before Constantine.

Byzántion is the first of the city’s names and the one that, by a historical irony, the modern world reattached to its last great age. The Greek colony’s name was officially retired in 330 CE when Constantine renamed the city for himself; yet Western scholars, centuries later, coined “Byzantine” from this very Byzántion to label the Christian Greek empire ruled from Constantinople, an empire whose own people called themselves Romans and their city the New Rome. The name the city bore as a small Greek port thus became, long after it had been dropped, the adjective for the medieval superpower that the city had grown into under an entirely different name.

The Latin name of the city, Byzantium, taken straight from the Greek, the form under which Rome knew the Greek city it absorbed: Tacitus recounts the embassy in which the Byzantines pleaded their loyal services to win tax relief, and Pliny sets the city at the mouth of the strait. The Latin keeps the Greek shape unchanged.

Byzantium is the form English has kept, but for a thing the Romans never meant by it. To Pliny and Tacitus it was simply the Greek port on the Bosphorus; it is modern usage that took Byzantium and made from it “the Byzantine Empire,” the name for the Greek-speaking Roman state that ruled from the same site under the name Constantinople. The Latin word for the old colony became, in the hands of later historians, the label for the empire of the new capital, so that the city’s earliest name and its imperial afterlife are joined only in a coinage neither the Greeks nor the Romans would have recognized.

The Greek name Constantine gave the city when he refounded it as his capital and dedicated it on 11 May 330 CE: Kōnstantinoúpolis, “the city of Constantine,” built on his own name with -polis. Its official dedicatory title was Néa Rhōmē, the New Rome, and on that ground the council of 381 ranked its bishop second only to Rome’s; for eleven centuries it was the seat of the Roman emperors of the East and the greatest Christian city in the world.

Kōnstantinoúpolis is the imperial name, and it all but buried the old Byzántion. Yet the Greeks who lived there rarely used its towering full form in speech; the city was so preeminent that they called it simply hē Pólis, “the City,” and to travel there was to go eis tḕn pólin, “into the City.” That ordinary phrase, not the grand imperial compound, is what survived the empire: misheard and reanalyzed, eis tḕn pólin became the Ottoman Istanbul. The name of Constantine raised the greatest city of the Middle Ages, but it was the offhand Greek for “the City” that outlived it.

The Latin name of the city, Constantinopolis, the form in which the western and official Roman world named Constantine’s foundation, beside the calque Nova Roma, “New Rome.” Latin administrative and legal texts, the regionary catalogue of the city’s quarters and the imperial law codes, use Constantinopolis for the eastern capital that had become the empire’s center of gravity.

Constantinopolis carries the Greek name into Latin and through it into the languages of the West, which kept “Constantinople” for the city until the twentieth century. It preserves the claim built into the Greek, that this was Nova Roma: a second Rome on the Bosphorus, equal in rank and, in time, far greater in wealth and endurance than the old. The name is a political assertion as much as a label, and Latin repeated it faithfully, naming the eastern city as the renewal of the western one whose empire it would outlast by a thousand years.

The Syriac name of the city, Qusṭanṭīnupolis, a transparent transcription of the Greek Kōnstantinoúpolis carried straight into the Syriac of the eastern churches, who named the imperial capital constantly in their chronicles and synods. It was the seat of the emperor and of the councils, Ephesus, Chalcedon, and the rest, whose rulings split the Syriac-speaking churches from the imperial one, so that Constantinople figures in Syriac writing as both the great Christian city and the source of the doctrines the eastern churches rejected.

Qusṭanṭīnupolis shows the same eastern q for the Greek k as the Arabic al-Qusṭanṭīniyya, the mark of the Aramaic route. Its exact spelling varies from manuscript to manuscript, as transcriptions of long foreign names in Syriac often do, sometimes clipped or respelled; the form given here is the full transcription of the Greek. Through the Syriac chronicles the name of Constantine’s city passed into the historical memory of a Christian world that lay outside his empire and often against it, named in the language of the churches that the New Rome had condemned.

What the Byzantines actually called their capital, hē Pólis, “the City,” with no further specification: in a Greek world full of cities, the definite article alone was address enough. The usage runs through the whole medieval period in histories, saints’ lives, and everyday speech, beside the formal Kōnstantinoúpolis of documents and coins, and it survives in the cry that carried the news of 1453, heálō hē Pólis, “the City has fallen.” From the phrase eis tēn Pólin, “to the City,” on the roads and in the mouths of everyone who traveled there, Turkish usage eventually distilled Istanbul: the modern name of the metropolis is a fossilized Greek direction, the way to a city so singular it needed no name.

Every other form on this page is built from something, a founder’s name, an emperor’s name, a Greek compound; this one is built from nothing but a definite article, and it is the most Byzantine name of all. To say “the City” and mean only one place, from the Danube to the Euphrates, was to state the empire’s geography of prestige in two syllables: there were other poleis, but no other Pólis. Emperors fell, the formal name changed hands and languages, and the article held; Constantinople could be captured, but “the City” could only be the place it had always been. It is the one name here that is less a word than a gesture, an entire civilization pointing at its own center.

The medieval Latin continuation of Constantinopolis, the name the Latin entry above carries to 600. Through the Middle Ages the city’s Latin name never wavered, in papal letters, crusade chronicles, and merchant documents alike, and for fifty-seven years it was the name of the government itself: after the Fourth Crusade took the city in 1204, the crusader realm styled its ruler emperor of Constantinopolis, and a Latin patriarch of Constantinople sat in Hagia Sophia until the Greeks retook the city in 1261. The name held from there to the morning in 1453 when the last emperor died at the walls.

On a page where the city’s name migrates through Greek, Arabic, Syriac, and Ottoman Turkish shapes, the Latin thread runs eight and a half centuries without change, indifferent to whether the Latins were the city’s pilgrims, its conquerors, or its mourners; that constancy is its distinction. The other languages renamed the city as their relation to it changed, and the change of masters in 1453 promptly produced Kostantiniyye; Latin’s relation to the city changed as much as anyone’s, and its name never moved. It was in this fixed name that Latin Europe wrote down the news of 1453, the one stable coordinate from which the fall of everything else could be measured.

The Arabic name of the city, al-Qusṭanṭīniyya, “the Constantinian,” taken from the Greek and worn into Arabic shape, the name of the great Christian capital that the early caliphate besieged and could not take, and whose eventual conquest a famous prophecy promised to a blessed commander and army. To the medieval Islamic world al-Qusṭanṭīniyya was the very image of the imperial city beyond the frontier.

The Arabic keeps the Greek k of Constantine as a qāf, the regular treatment of the sound in names received through the Aramaic-speaking Christian East, the same q that stands in the Syriac form. After the Ottoman conquest of 1453 the city’s colloquial Greek name, eis tḕn pólin, gradually displaced it as Isṭanbūl, though al-Qusṭanṭīniyya lingered in formal Ottoman use for centuries more. The name of Constantine thus reached its widest currency not in Christian Europe but in the Arabic and Turkish of the empire that finally made the city its own.

Kostantiniyye (قسطنطينيه) is the Ottoman Turkish name of Constantinople, the Arabic al-Qusṭanṭīniyya taken over with the spelling intact and the pronunciation turned Turkish. From the conquest of 1453 it served as the city’s formal name in the Ottoman state’s own usage, on documents and, for centuries, on the coinage, the mint-name of the imperial capital; it belongs to this atlas under the continuity clause, the early Ottoman continuation of a naming tradition the page has carried since Constantine. Beside it in speech ran the popular name that would eventually win, İstanbul, from the Greek eis tḕn pólin, “to the City,” whose story the page’s Greek entries tell; the two names shared the city for over four centuries until the republic retired the formal one in the twentieth.

The entry’s significance is who is using the name. Every earlier form in the constantinople family belongs to outsiders naming the Christian capital; this one belongs to the Muslim dynasty that took the city and then went on calling it Constantine’s for as long as the empire lasted, the founder’s name outliving the founder’s faith in the founder’s own city. Conquerors on this atlas usually rename or re-pronounce; the Ottomans did both at once and let the forms divide the labor, Constantine on the coins and the Greek street-phrase in the street. The emperor lost his city in 1453 and kept his name on it until 1922; few defeats have been so thoroughly survived.