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.

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.