Constantinople
Constantinople (Roman name: Constantinopolis; Greek: Konstantinoupolis or Κωνσταντινούπολη) is the former name of the city of Istanbul in Turkey. Its original name was Byzantium (Greek: Byzantion or Bυζαντιον, pronounced roughly Booz-dan-tion). The name is a reference to the Roman emperor Constantine I who made it the capital of the Roman Empire on May 11, 330 AD. Constantine named the city Nova Roma (New Rome), but that name never came into common use.
Constantinople became the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire after the Roman Empire was officilly split into its Eastern and Western halves. The moniker "Byzantine Empire" is an invention of modern scholars: The citizens of the empire considered themselves Romans, Greek-speaking though they were.
Constantinople is even today the seat one of the five ancient Christian Patriarchates -- see the Orthodox Church of Constantinople -- that flourished under the Eastern Roman Empire after its conversion to Christianity. It was captured and sacked by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 and then recaptured by Nicaean forces under the command of Michael VIII Palaeologus in 1261.
Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire finally fell to the Ottoman Empire on May 29, 1453 (See the Fall of Constantinople). The great city thereafter became the capital of the Ottoman Empire. In Ottoman times, both the names Constantinople and Istanbul were used, although westerners invariably called the city Constantinople. Istanbul only became the official name in 1930. When the Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923, the capital was moved from Istanbul to Ankara.
In Byzantine times the Greeks called Constantinople i Poli ("the City"), since it was the centre of the Greek world and for most of the Byzantine period the largest city in Europe. while the second suggests that the name is merely a Turkish contraction of Constantinoupolis. The sound rendered by "i" is prepended by the virtue of the language. Many Turkic languages forbid certain combinations of consonants at the beginning of the word, hence certain borrowed words acquire a vowel chosen according to the rule of vowel harmony. In this way Smyrna became Izmir and Nicaea became Iznik, just as "machine" became "amashina" in e.g., Abkhaz language. The intermediate form Stamboul was commonly used in the 19th century.
Another hypothesis about the etymology of the name is that the name Istanbul comes from the Greek words "eis tin Poli" meaning "at the City" (the City/Polis being Constantinoupolis).
See also
