The turning point in the city’s history occurred when Emperor Constantine I dedicated it as the capital of the Roman Empire in 330 CE.
The third century historian Polybios could not imagine a location better suited to control the trade from the Black Sea into the Aegean which was so important for supplying Ancient Greece with honey, wax, grain, slaves and much more, “a site that is absolutely the most advantageous, for safety and prosperity, in the world as we know it.” Beginning in the second century BCE this town of Byzantion flourished under Roman control but in the 190s CE incurred the wrath of Emperor Septimus Severus and was to a considerable degree destroyed. Renamed Istanbul under the Turks, the city again became the capital of a great empire and played a central role in east-west cultural and economic exchange.Īs early as the 7th century BCE, Greek colonists occupied the tip of a peninsula on the western shore of the Bosphorus Strait where the current is favorable and, of greatest importance, there is a wonderful natural harbor known today as the Golden Horn. Even in its long centuries of decline down to its conquest by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the wealth of the city was legendary, and its location ensured it a role in the trade with the East. 200 CE), but for a much longer time, beginning in the fourth century, the “Rome” to which all roads led in the Mediterranean world was “Eastern Rome” or Constantinople. Indeed Rome must have been an important destination for Chinese silk during the first two or three centuries of the Silk Road (perhaps to ca. The narrator intones as much at the end of each film in the 30-part NTK/CCTV series, and the final scene of that sprawling epic shows the “expedition” arriving at the Roman Coliseum. It is common to think that the western terminus of the Silk Road was Rome in Italy.
A detailed map of Byzantine Constantinople
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