ISTANBUL

Turkish Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, ancient Byzantium largest city and seaport in Turkey. Strategically situated on a hilly triangular peninsula at the entrance to the Black Sea, the city lies on either side of the Bosporus (Bosphorus) Strait and thus is located in both Europe and Asia. Byzantium was founded as a colony by Greeks at about the end of the 8th century BC. The settlement passed to the Persian Empire in 512 BC and later to Alexander the Great. A free city under the Roman Republic, it came under direct Roman rule during Vespasian's reign (AD 6979). In 324 Constantine I made the city his capital (renamed New Rome), and in 330 he made it the seat of the Roman Empire, later naming it Constantinople. Under Constantine it was decreed a Christian city, and in 381 it became the seat of a patriarch who was second only to the bishop of Rome; the patriarch of Constantinople is still the nominal head of the Orthodox church. Constantinople remained the capital of the Byzantine Empire (i.e., the eastern half of the former Roman Empire) after the fall of Rome itself in the late 5th century. In the 6th13th century, the city was frequently besieged by the Persians, Arabs, Bulgars, and Russians. It was captured in 1203 by the armies of the Fourth Crusade, who sacked it and turned it over to Latin Christian rule. The city was returned to Byzantine rule in 1261, but in 1453 it fell to the Ottoman ruler Mehmed II, under whom it became popularly known as Istanbul and was made the capital of the Ottoman Empire. A period of peaceful growth followed, lasting until 1922. The Turkish Republic moved the capital to Ankara in 1923, and Constantinople was officially renamed Istanbul in 1930. Istanbul is divided into European and Asian parts by the Bosporus Strait, and the European part is itself divided into the old city of Stamboul (south) and the new city of Beyoglu (north) by the channel known as the Golden Horn. The European section of the city, with some three-fourths of the total population, is the site of major businesses and hotel and office complexes. Within the old walled city (Stamboul) lie seven hills, with flat summits and steep slopes, where an essentially medieval appearance is still preserved; lying across the Golden Horn, Beyoglu, with theatres and many Turkish government offices, is the modern section of Istanbul. The climate of the city is subtropical and Mediterranean. Afternoon temperatures in July and August, the warmest months, average 82 F (28 C), while in January, the coolest month, they drop to 46 F (8 C). Nighttime lows are some 10 to 15 F (6 to 8 C) cooler. Annual precipitation ranges from 30 to 35 inches (760 to 900 mm). About one-third of Turkey's manufacturing plants are located in Istanbul. The major industries are the manufacture of textiles, cement, glass, and leather goods; the processing of tobacco; and automobile and truck assembly, printing, and shipbuilding and ship repairing. Many large Turkish banks and foreign insurance companies are located in the city, and tourism is an important source of income. Istanbul is a city of great historical interest, and many reminders of its past remain. The Underground Palace (Yerebstan Sarayi) and Constantine's Palace (Tekfur Sarayi; built a thousand years after Constantine) are among its well-preserved monuments. Many of the ancient Christian churches are still in use, some as mosques; the largest of these is the Hagia Sophia, which in 1453 was converted into a mosque and in 1935 a museum. Among the city's Ottoman buildings are the Mosque of Sleyman (155057) and the Blue Mosque. The walled Topkapi Palace (Seraglio) houses important Turkish collections of manuscripts, china, armour, and textiles. The city has been the cultural centre of Turkey for centuries. Among its newer facilities is the Atatrk Palace of Culture, opened in 1969 as a centre for the arts. There are several learned societies, research institutes, museums, and libraries. The University of Istanbul (founded 15th century) is the oldest and largest institution of higher learning in the country. Other important cultural institutions are the Istanbul Technical University (1773), Marmara University (1883), the University of the Bosporus (1863), Mimar Sinan University (1883), and Yildiz University (1911). Fatih Sultan Mehmed Bridge (Bosporus II) in Istanbul. Ferries running below the Bogazici (Bosporus I) Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey The city is connected by railroads with eastern and western Europe and the Middle East (Syria and Iraq). The Bosporus bridges, which link the European and the Asian sections of Istanbul, are among the longest highway suspension bridges in the world. Yesilky International Airport is situated about 17 miles (27 km) to the west of the city. The port of Istanbul handles a large part of the country's imports and exports. Area city, 98 square miles (254 square km). Pop. (1990 prelim.) 6,748,435. Turkish Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, ancient Byzantium, largest city and seaport of Turkey. It was formerly the capital of the Byzantine Empire, of the Ottoman Empire, anduntil 1923of the Turkish Republic. The Blue Mosque (Mosque of Ahmed I) with its distinctive ensemble of six minarets, Istanbul. The old, walled city of Istanbul stands on a triangular peninsula between Europe and Asia. Sometimes as a bridge, sometimes as a barrier, Istanbul for more than 2,500 years has stood between conflicting surges of religion, culture, and imperial power. For most of those years it was one of the most coveted cities in the world. The name Byzantium may derive from that of Byzas, who, according to legend, was leader of the Greeks from the city of Megara who captured the peninsula from pastoral Thracian tribes and built the city about 657 BC. In AD 196, having razed the town for opposing him in a civil war, the Roman emperor Septimius Severus rebuilt it, naming it Augusta Antonina in honour of his son. In AD 330, when Constantine the Great dedicated the city as his capital, he called it New Rome. The coinage, nevertheless, continued to be stamped Byzantium until he ordered the substitution of Constantinopolis. In the 13th century Arabs used the appellation Istinpolin, a name they heard Byzantines useeis ten polinwhich, in reality, was a Greek phrase that meant in the city. Through a series of speech permutations over a span of centuries, this name became Istanbul. Until the Turkish Post Office officially changed the name in 1930, however, the city continued to bear the millenary name of Constantinople. Additional reading Antiquities A. Van Millingen, Byzantine Constantinople: The Walls of the City and Adjoining Historical Sites (1899); Philip Sherrard, Constantinople: Iconography of a Sacred City (1965); Philip Grierson, The Tombs and Obits of the Byzantine Emperors, 3371042 (1962); Bernard Lewis, Istanbul and the Civilization of the Ottoman Empire (1963); Dean A. Miller, Imperial Constantinople (1969); Michael MacLagan, The City of Constantinople (1968), well illustrated, with good annotated bibliography and index. Churches W.R. Lethaby and H. Swainson, The Church of Sancta Sophia (1894); T. Whittemore, The Mosaics of St. Sophia at Istanbul, 4 vol. (193352); Paul Atkins Underwood, The Kariye Djami (1966). Contemporary descriptions E. Mamboury, Istanbul touristique (1951); Robert Boulanger, Istanbul et ses environs (1957; Eng. trans. 1960); Peter Mayne, Istanbul (1967); John Freely, Istanbul (1983), in the Blue Guide Series. Blake Ehrlich History The early period Byzantium Byzantium was one of the many colonies founded from the end of the 8th century onward along the coasts of the Bosporus and the Black Sea by Greek settlers from the cities of Miletus and Megara. The Persian king Darius I took the settlement in 512 BC; it slipped from Persian grasp during the Ionian revolt of 496, only to be retaken by the Persians. In 478 an Athenian fleet captured the city, which then became a rich and important member of the Delian League. As Athenian power waned during the Peloponnesian War, Byzantines acknowledged Spartan overlordship. Although Alcibiades besieged and retook the city, Sparta reasserted its domination after defeating Athens in 405 BC. In 343 BC Byzantium joined the Second Athenian League, throwing off the siege of Philip II of Macedon three years later. The lifting of the siege was attributed to the divine intervention of the goddess Hecate and was commemorated by the striking of coins bearing her star and crescent. Byzantium accepted Macedonian rule under Alexander the Great, regaining independence only with the eclipse of Macedonian might. In the 3rd century BC, the city's treasury was drained to buy off marauding Gauls. A free city under Rome, it gradually fell under imperial control and briefly lost its freedom under the emperor Vespasian. When, in AD 196, it sided with the usurper Pescennius Niger, the Roman emperor Septimus Severus massacred the populace, razed the walls, and annexed the remains to the city of Perinthus (or Heraclea, modern Marmaraereglisi), in Turkey. Subsequently, Septimus Severus rebuilt the city on the same spot but on a grander scale. Although sacked again by Gallienus in 268, the city was strong enough two years later to resist a Gothic invasion. In the subsequent civil wars and rebellions that broke out sporadically in the Roman Empire, Byzantium remained untouched until the arrival of the emperor Constantine Ithe first Roman ruler to adopt Christianity. Overcoming the army of the rival emperor, Licinius, at nearby Chrysopolis, on September 18, 324, Constantine became head of the whole Roman Empire, east and west. He decided to make Byzantium his capital. Constantinople Within three weeks of his victory, the foundation rites of New Rome were performed, and the much-enlarged city was officially inaugurated on May 11, 330. It was an act of vast historical portent. Constantinople was to become one of the great world capitals, a font of imperial and religious power, a city of vast wealth and beauty, and the chief city of the Western world. Until the rise of the Italian maritime states, it was the first city in commerce, as well as the chief city of what was, until the mid-11th century, the strongest and most prestigious power in Europe. Constantine's choice of capital had profound effects upon the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. It displaced the power centre of the Roman Empire, moving it eastward, and achieved the first lasting unification of Greece. Culturally, Constantinople fostered a fusion of Oriental and Occidental custom, art, and architecture. The religion was Christian, the organization Roman, and the language and outlook Greek. The concept of the divine right of kings, rulers who were defenders of the faithas opposed to the king as divine himselfwas evolved there. The gold solidus of Constantine retained its value and served as a monetary standard for more than a thousand years. As the centuries passedthe Christian empire lasted 1130 yearsConstantinople, seat of empire, was to become as important as the empire itself; in the end, although the territories had virtually shrunk away, the capital endured. Constantine's new city walls tripled the size of Byzantium, which now contained imperial buildings, such as the completed Hippodrome begun by Severus, a huge palace, legislative halls, several imposing churches, and streets decorated with multitudes of statues taken from rival cities. In addition to other attractions of the capital, free bread and citizenship were bestowed on those settlers who would fill the empty reaches beyond the old walls. There was, furthermore, a welcome for Christians, a tolerance of pagan beliefs, and benevolence toward Jews. Constantinople was also an ecclesiastical centre. In 381 it became the seat of a patriarch who was second only to the bishop of Rome; the patriarch of Constantinople is still the nominal head of the Orthodox church. Constantine inaugurated the first ecumenical councils; the first six were held in or near Constantinople. In the 5th and 6th centuries emperors were engaged in devising means to keep the Monophysites attached to the realm. In the 8th and 9th centuries Constantinople was the centre of the battle between iconoclasts and the defenders of icons. The matter was settled by the seventh ecumenical council against the iconoclasts, but not before much blood had been spilled and countless works of art destroyed. The Eastern and Western wings of the church drew further apart, and after centuries of doctrinal disagreement between Rome and Constantinople a schism occurred in the 11th century. The pope originally approved the sack of Constantinople in 1204, then decried it. Various attempts were made to heal the breach in the face of the Turkish threat to the city, but the divisive forces of suspicion and doctrinal divergence were too strong. By the end of the 4th century, Constantine's walls had become too confining for the wealthy and populous metropolis. St. John Chrysostom, writing at the end of that century, said many nobles had 10 to 20 houses and owned from one to 2,000 slaves. Doors were often made of ivory, floors were of mosaic or were covered in costly rugs, and beds and couches were overlaid with precious metals. The pressure of population pressing from within, and the barbarian threat from without, prompted the building of walls further inland at the hilt of the peninsula. These new walls of the early 5th century, built in the reign of Theodosius II, are those that stand today. In the reign of Justinian I (527565) medieval Constantinople attained its zenith. At the beginning of this reign the population is estimated to have been about 500,000. In 532 a large part of the city was burned and many of the population killed in the course of the repression of the Nika Insurrection, an uprising of the Hippodrome factions. The rebuilding of the ravaged city gave Justinian the opportunity to engage in a program of magnificent construction, of which many buildings still remain. In 542 the city was struck by a plague that is said to have killed three out of every five inhabitants; the decline of Constantinople dates from this catastrophe. Not only the capital but the whole empire languished, and slow recovery was not visible until the 9th century. During this period the city was frequently besiegedby the Persians and Avars (626), the Arabs (674 to 678 and again from 717 to 718), the Bulgars (813 and 913), the Russians (860, 941, and 1043), and by a wandering Turkic people, the Pechenegs, (109091). All were unsuccessful. In 1082 the Venetians were allotted quarters in the city itself (there was an earlier cantonment for foreign traders at Galata across the Golden Horn) with special trading privileges. They were later joined by Pisans, Amalfitans, Genoese, and others. These Italian groups soon obtained a stranglehold over the city's foreign tradea monopoly that was finally broken by a massacre of Italians. Not for some time were Italian traders permitted once more to settle in Galata. In 1203 the armies of the Fourth Crusade, deflected from their objective in the Holy Land, appeared before Constantinopleostensibly to restore the legitimate Byzantine emperor, Isaac II. Although the city fell, it remained under its own government for a year. On April 13, 1204, however, the crusaders burst into the city to sack it. After a general massacre, the pillage went on for years. The crusading knights installed one of themselves, Baldwin of Flanders, as emperor, and the Venetiansprime instigators of the crusadetook control of the church. While the Latins divided the rest of the realm among themselves, the Byzantines entrenched themselves across the Bosporus at Nicaea (now Iznik) and at Epirus (now northwestern Greece). The period of Latin rule (1204 to 1261) was the most disastrous in the history of Constantinople. Even the bronze statues were melted down for coin; everything of value was taken. Sacred relics were torn from the sanctuaries and dispatched to religious establishments in western Europe. In 1261 Constantinople was retaken by Michael VIII Palaeologus, Greek emperor of Nicaea. For the next two centuries the shrunken Byzantine Empire, threatened both from the West and by the rising power of the Ottoman Turks in Asia Minor, led a precarious existence. Some construction was carried out in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, but thereafter the city was in decay, full of ruins and tracts of deserted ground, contrasting with the prosperous condition of Galata across the Golden Horn, which had been granted to the Genoese by the Byzantine ruler Michael VIII. When the Turks crossed into Europe in the mid-14th century, the fate of Constantinople was sealed. The inevitable end was retarded by the defeat of the Turks at the hands of Timur (Tamerlane) in 1402; but in 1422 the Ottoman sultan of Turkey, Murad II, laid siege to Constantinople. This attempt failed, only to be repeated 30 years later. In 1452 another Ottoman sultan, Mehmed II, proceeded to blockade the Bosporus by the erection of a strong fortress at its narrowest point; this fortress, called Rumeli Hisari, still forms one of the principal landmarks of the straits. The siege of the city began in April 1453. The Turks had not only overwhelming numerical superiority but also cannon that breached the ancient walls. The Golden Horn was protected by a chain, but the sultan succeeded in hauling his fleet by land from the Bosporus into the Golden Horn. The final assault was made on May 29, and, in spite of the desperate resistance of the inhabitants aided by the Genoese, the city fell. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaeologus, was killed in battle. For three days the city was abandoned to pillage and massacre, after which order was restored by the sultan.