The Ancients - Origins of Constantinople

Episode Date: October 22, 2026

Why did Emperor Constantine abandon Rome to build a spectacular new capital from scratch? In the year 312 a bloody civil war and a miraculous heavenly vision changed the Roman world forever.Tristan Hughes and Professor Judith Herrin uncover the epic origins of Constantinople. Discover how Constantine ruthlessly eliminated his imperial rivals, harnessed the strategic power of the Bosphorus, and erected a glittering metropolis that outshone the failing West.MORERavenna and the Fall of RomeListen on AppleListen on SpotifyDecline & Fall of the Ancient WorldListen on AppleListen on SpotifyPresented by Tristan Hughes. Edited and produced by Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™Want even MORE Ancients? Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS ad-free, early access podcasts AND exclusive subscriber-only Ancients episodes. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. 312 AD was a fateful year, a year in which the seeds of one of the greatest cities in history were planted. The Roman Empire was gripped by crisis. Four different emperors locked horns for control of the empire, and on the banks of the River Tiber, at a crossing known as the Milvian Bridge, a battle raged. Emperor Constantine met the forces of his imperial rival Emperor Maxentius, in fierce, bloody combat. Spears shattered, shields splintered, horns used to signal orders on the battlefield, echoed over the din of slaughter. But for Constantine, this was to be no ordinary battle.

Before the bloodsletting, the emperor had allegedly witnessed an extraordinary vision. Blinded by radiant light, he saw a cross in the heavens, bearing the inscription, In this sign, you shall conquer. A signal of divine providence, portending a glorious future under the protection of the Christian God. With their strength renewed, as the story goes, Constantine and his men pushed Maxentius headlong into the rushing waters of the river, where he and his army were swept away.

The victory at the Milvian Bridge secured Constantine the western half of the Roman world, but his ambition didn't stop. at the Tiber. More civil war followed to unite the divided empire, and in 324 AD he finally defeated his last rival in the east. To stamp his sole authority on the empire, that same year, Constantine ordered the foundation of a new city. Over the next six years, its walls rose around a sea-bound peninsula jutting out into the Bosphorus, the bustling waterway that spills, Asia from Europe, a shipping lane as busy and vital in ancient times as it is today. Constantine ordered that the city be fit for an emperor, its palaces built to rival even those of

Rome. It was duly called Constantinople and over the next thousand years it would become a jewel of the eastern Mediterranean, a grand metropolis with a deep water harbour that brought the glittering sea right into the heart of the city, a hub of magnificent churches, of revolutionary intellectual thought, and of dazzling ambition, where the riches of old Rome were recast and made new. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, welcome to the ancients, and this is the story of how Constantinople began. Today I'm thrilled to be joined by a returning guest, Professor Judith Heron. Judith, she is an expert on all things Byzantine history. She's the author of Byzantium, the surprising life of a medieval empire, and was last on the ancients to talk about Ravenna,

the last capital city of the Western Roman Empire. Let's get into it. Judith, it is such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast. It's been too long since we last spoke. My pleasure and delighted to be back. And to talk all about the origins of Constantinople and of all cities. in human history, Judith. I don't like using superlatives too much, but this must surely be one of the greatest cities of all time because it has such a larger-than-life influence on world history. I think you've summed it up very well,

and Napoleon is said to have said, and this is only rumour, but if the world were to be governed by only one capital, it would have to be Constantinople. It has the world in its hand, as if it was in some sense a controlling factor in world history. And of course, Napoleon would have very much liked to have conquered Ottoman Constantinople in the early 19th century. He certainly would have, wouldn't he? And just give us a sense, first of a taste of what's to come, Judith, as to what does make Constantinople so remarkable of a city?

Here's the fact that it's at the meeting of Europe and Asia, in that across that very, very narrow strip of very deep channel of water that flows both ways. It has a northward and a southward flow at different levels. It's a complex riverway, but at the same time, it connects the Egean Sea with the Black Sea, the Mediterranean world with the northern world of the Caucasus and Russia, and that notion that you can actually see across from Asia into Europe and vice versa. And you can witness today, of course, it's enormous, or it used to be enormous tankers going up and down and grain ships from Odessa and Krianath. It must have been a very significant waterway through all history, and that's one of the distinguishing features.

And Constantinople was chosen to be built on the site of a rather higher bluff overlooking that riverway, where it had a capacity to control trade, shipping movement up and down and across the Bosphorus. And so in that sense, it was an ideal place to assess movement and to control the produce that went up and down by taxing every ship that went through. And that was another aspect of its prominence. but I do think it's the joy of being in a very well-protected city surrounded by sea on two sides and a very good stark wall on the third side. That made it very special. We'll certainly get more to those walls as we go on, Judith. But the strategic value of this city, it's so linked to the waters around it, as you say, that defence factor, but the trade factor as well,

and the fact that that key waterway where you said you can see Asia the other side of Constantinople was so heavy, so high in traffic from antiquity, from the time of ancient Athens having its empire all the way down, as you hinted earlier, to when grain ships were leaving Ukraine and their tankers into the present day. That's very much at the center of the strategic value of Constantinople, is it, of its location? Yes, absolutely. And I think the ancient Greeks from Megarra, in central Greece, who went to found a colony in the way that at that stage, ancient Greece was sending out colonists to Sicily, to the Crimea, to Turkey, Asia, as it was. They were looking

for connections with very important sites. And in choosing Constantinople, which was then had its other name Byzantion, they established a colony that was, like many others, based on facilities that would increase the prosperity of the colonists who had built the new colony to the exclusion of other actors. So it was a very exploitative colonial venture, but they chose a very good site. Absolutely. We'll get to Byzantium in a moment, but let's keep on that Greek part of the story. Is it right if I ask, first of all, about mythology? Because in the ancient Greek mindset, did they have any key myths or key stories that they linked to that particular area of the world, you know, between what is now the Black Sea and the Hellespont and the Aegean Sea today?

Yes, indeed. And they made great stories out of it. There's the story of Helle, who is said to have fallen off a golden ram that was flying around and drowned in the sea at this point. In the Pontus that she fell, they put together Helleespontus. And that was one way of accounting for that name. And then, of course, the boss Poros is the box crossing the river. And the notion of Bissas, allegedly a king of the region who gave his name to Byzantion, in much later medieval sources, there's even an antis that he has to fight. And so then you put together Bissas and antis and you get Byzantion. I mean, these etymologies are so ridiculous. But at the same time, they stick. So we have Hellespontan Byzant, Byzantion, and of course Jason and the golden fleece,

and the notion of this transit from the Greek world into the exotic world of Colchis, of the Black Sea, where you could purchase so many very special things that were not available in Greece, amber. Apparently, there are amber beads, probably mined in scabes, probably mined in Scabre. Scandinavia in Mycenaeanian tombs, so way before what we call ancient Greece. And that notion that amber came from the north and was very, very valuable and glowed and glistened in a way that was unrivaled. That meant that jewelry made of amber was so precious. So all these connections come together when we see how the site of Constantinople facilitated all these contacts. So people from the city of Meghara, as you say, they found Byzantion, and that goes back

into the 7th century BC and linked to that founder of Bizas. When someone says kind of the ancient Greek world, people might immediately think of Athens, of Sparta, of Corinth, of Thebes. Judith, how powerful was Byzantine in comparison to those other independent city states over those next few centuries, does it become a really important centre of trade and yet at the same time less focused on in the surviving literature, in the surviving sources? Well, there's very little known about it, and it seems it must have been a very ordinary small city, a pulse, like so many others, like some of the colonies in Sicily, which were very flourishing, but did not produce great scientists, great learning, didn't have any reputation

for having a great centre of a library or anything, a small place, doing good business. And I think the fact that we know so little about it is partly because there was nothing very, very notable to record. The Greek city of Byzantium, it didn't have a monopoly over the ships going back and forth through that narrow passage, because that was what I was thinking, like, maybe that was a case, but evidently that doesn't seem to be in the case, then, Judith. I'm not sure if there are any references to actual control of the shipping. I'm sure that that's what the inhabitants of Byzantion intended and wanted, but presumably there were also other, I mean, there was the opposite polis of Chrysopolis, there were other police in the Black Sea. I expect they all had alliances and trading arrangements, but I'm not sure that there was an actual control manifested in such a monopolistic fashion by Byzantion.

important point to highlight Judith as you say actually there are loads of independent Greek cities founded along the coast around that area so Byzantion Greek Byzantion is just one of many Greek cities at that time okay Judith well let's move forward into the Roman period and so when is Byzantian when is it brought into the Roman world and how do the Romans change Byzantium or do I even say improve it before we get to the time of Constantine the big man himself there doesn't seem to be very much change in as much as Rome conquered all the East Mediterranean and established new provincial systems of government which took in these cities. The cities had their own councils

and we know that these councils were the little thickers of democratic control that they exercised over their own business. And of course, that gave them a little bit of independence, but basically they were paying their taxes to the Roman emperor. And they benefited from whatever protection the Roman emperors could give them against attack or in case of dire failure of harvests or whatever. I think the main interest is shown by Septimius Severus, who is said to have campaigned against Byzantium, it must have angered him in some way, and determined to bring it to heal and also to expand and increase its monuments. The beginning of a Hippodrome is attributed to Septimus. I don't know whether that is actually the case, but certainly

he saw that it was an important site and he appears to have done some building and to have left a mark on it. That is the story. Recently, Doubt has been cast on the extent of his real interest, but he was determined to punish the inhabitants of Byzantium for opposing him, and he is said to have raised the city walls and built another. So that may be the instance in which Byzantium gained a slightly larger city wall and the beginnings of more municipal monuments, in addition to, of course, the ones that it would have had its temples to the Greek gods, its agorah for the marketplace and so on. All that would have been standard in Byzantion, as in most Greek cities.

It's interesting what you say, though, with Septimius Severus, making of bigger new walls for a city that had resisted him because he does actually something quite similar in London, which is another city that is owned by one of his rivals, but a different one. So maybe you can see this trend of what Severus does with particular cities once they back into the fold. But let's move on then, Judith, into the time, the main time with the story of the origins of Constantinople, which is we get to the beginning of the 4th century AD or CE. And who is this figure, this rising figure of Constantine? What do we know about his background and his rise to power? Because it's quite a story in itself. It is indeed. He was the son of a Roman general, much praised, much admired. And as the son of the Roman general, he must have had a very military education and accompanied his father on campaign. And as we know, he was in York.

in the early 4th century, and when news came of the death of the emperor, not his father, Constantine Cloris, but the emperor in Rome, the soldiers of the army that had been taken to Britannia and were campaigning in York acclaimed Constantine as their emperor, and they said, let us march to Rome and impose you as emperor. A common way of the army choosing the next ruler, sometimes successful. But of course, he was not the only candidate for the role of Emperor, and he had to fight his way to Rome, and there were many pitched battles before he got anywhere near Rome. Now, it seems to me that he must have collected support, military support, other armed units, and people who remembered his father, people who knew of his reputation,

people who felt that he was a strong leader and what Rome needed was a real general to manage the empire and to win battles. And his rival was indeed another of exactly the same style of leader, Maxentius, and he was to be his great rival and they were to fight it out. and the great story of the vision that Constantine is said to have had before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge just outside Rome was that he had had a vision of a cross in the sky and that he understood that this was a symbol under which his troops would be victorious. And so the story goes he adopted the cross as his symbol and without knowing very much about Christ and the Christian religion, his troops were successful,

and he duly entered Rome and was a claimed emperor. The only slight trace of his understanding of Christianity is that he did not immediately go to the capital of Rome and make the traditional sacrifice to the gods who had given him victory. So he was not going to actually follow. the traditional pattern to emperorship. He wanted to do it his own way and he decided for reasons, which sadly we can never know, not to make the traditional pagan sacrifice. But he still had to fight the other emperors who were in control of different parts of the empire and his main rival was this emperor Licinius who had been acclaimed in the east and was.

ruling over most of the East Mediterranean and the Greek provinces of the Roman Empire. And their long battles and their rivalries were finally ended by a great battle at Chrysopolis, opposite Byzantium, where Constantine defeated Lyssinus and sent him into exile and later had him murdered. And at that point in 324, Constantine could effectively claim to be the only real emperor. And indeed, he wished to assert rule over the entire Roman world. He wasn't going to go back to the division between East and West or the notion of emperors and their junior emperors called Caesars, who would inherit their power in the fashion that had been established

by Diocletian in the late third century. He said, I will be the sole Roman emperor and I will rule over the entire Roman world, and he did. So we have to give him credit for battling to make himself the supreme commander and the sole emperor over what was then a really vast area, and how to rule it and how to control it and how to make sure that it was all obedient to his laws and his military forces. That was a real challenge. So Judith, Constantine, he's defeated all of his rivals. It's been this bloody civil war for almost 20 years. When does he decide to found Constantinople?

In 324, he had decided, after some investigation, to make the site of Byzantion his new capital. He has firmly established his authority and there are no rival emperors within sight. And he is determined. then to do something which I think most great emperor always like to do, which is to name a city after themselves. Alexander said to have said Alexander the great 4th century BC, and he went around saying, let's have a new city, shall we call it Alexandria? And the supporters would say, well, but sire, we've already funded three or four of them. However, they had another one in Egypt as well. Anyway, Constantine decided like Alexander that he would like to have a city named after himself, And Constantine-Nupolis is indeed the city of Constantine.

So that's how the name comes about. But how he decided on Byzantian is obviously that took a little longer, and he must have looked at other sites, partly because Licinius had made Nica Media his capital and had beautified it with magnificent buildings, monumental structures, which gave it the sense of being a very imperial city. And of course, Constantine had traveled from York right through the Roman Empire, staying in other capital cities like Trier, Rome itself, Milan, which had been a very

major center for Western Roman government, and then Thessaloniki in Greece and Sirmium in the Balkans. These were all imperial cities that he had visited, which could considered themselves to be very important capital cities, governing areas, very, very large areas. And so he had seen many other cities. And clearly he wished his city to be superior to all of them. But it was like starting with a rather small acorn in order to grow a very big oak. And it did take a long time.

Judith, this is so interesting because my next question was going to be, why did Constantine think that Rome needed replacing, that he needed a big new kind of grand capital city? But from what you were saying there, Judith, I mean, there are already precedents throughout the empire with these previous emperors to make their own capitals. Maybe almost are, I say, to make mini-Romes elsewhere in the empire, Sirmium, Milan, Nicomedia, as you say. So is Constantine when he's making Constantinople? is he very much just following in that mould, but then going to the next level to think, right, actually, I'm going to make a new capital, going to name it after myself, going to glorify this place, but I'm going to step it up by a hundred or so to kind of make it even greater, quite frankly. I think you're right. That's exactly it. And part of the reason is that old Rome itself on the Taiba had been displaced, was no longer a very important. centre of government. From the late third century when Milan became a much, much better place from which to control routes in and out of Italy, leading both to the west and to the east, major roads

along which you could move armies very quickly. Rome was far too far to the south, and it had been dominated by the Senate of Rome, the aristocracy, for a very long time, and the emperors, certainly from Diocletian on wanted very much to assert their own authority over that of the Senate. And using perhaps as strategic arguments, they also enhanced their own power by moving the center of administration, the imperial court, the law courts, the major foci of government, away from Rome and into the place where the emperor lived. And as I said, under the system that Diocletian established of two emperors, one in the east, one in the west, each with a successor, a junior, who would accede to power after a limited period. And it was designed to prevent the sort of chaos

that happened when an emperor died, and four or five people immediately said, as happened with Constantine himself, me first, I want to be the next emperor. And so the so-called tetrarchy, the rule of four, two emperors and their two juniors, was a very first. effectively abolished by Constantine in his determination not only to found a new capital city called Constantinople, but also to diminish all the other capital imperial centres where these tetrarchic rulers had built magnificent palaces, wonderful fortifications. You look at the black tower of trier and the bridge across the river and the amazing bar. that still stand and give you a sense of the enormous quantities of water and heat required

for people to actually use them. These magnificent buildings were to be put down a peg and everything was now to be concentrated in Constantinople. So a contemporary, a pragmatic reason for the building of Constantinople by Constantine is also to say, hey, the time of this joint rule, the time of these many different capitals is over and this is going to be the big. new capital. Judith, when he's deciding to found Constantinople, of course, we've mentioned the location of Byzantian already and its key strategic location. Does Constantine, do we think he looks at Byzantium and thinking, right, this is going to be my new capital, we're going to demolish everything and start again? Or does he start from scratch nearby? Or does he kind of just extend

Byzantium, old Greek Byzantium? What do we know about that? The source is for what Constantine actually did, let alone what he thought, are very, very mixed and rather spare. His biographer, Eusebius, was a bishop and a Christian and wanted constantly to stress the emperor's great devotion and the fact that he was a deeply, profoundly Christian ruler. And he has a notion that Constantine felt obliged in a way to use the ancient system of ploughing the line of the new fortification. that would extend Byzantium. Apparently the area of the old city of Byzantium was trebled. So he tripled the size by building a much, much larger wall well to the west of the original

city of Byzantium. And by tripling the size, he gave himself scope to build and to plan for the building of many monuments that would glorify the city and make it an imperial capital. The roads that led out of the ancient city of Byzantium now led to a new wall on the line that Constantine had plowed. In ancient Greek tradition, you had to take a plow and you drag the plow or you drove the plow along the line and that's where the wall was going to be built. So that was done in 324, and six years later, he dedicated the city. There must have been a lot of scrambling to get the buildings up, and not many of them were finished,

and perhaps some of them were a bit built too hastily and not very secure. But there was a system for the building and extension of Byzantium, and using the old city monuments, Constantine is said to have transformed some of the pagan temple for another use. But some were left because we read about the temple of Aphrodite much later. And again, Eusebius in his biography does not pay very much attention to these pagan remnants that were actually included in the city of Constantinople, partly because, as in Rome, you wanted a central point from which all roads would be measured, all roads lead to Rome. All roads were now going to lead to Constantinople.

So there was a very splendid monument encased in gold called the Milion, which was the place from which all roads were measured and distances were measured. And then there must have been, well, we know that Constantine was very anxious to build his own tomb. And there was a huge mausoleum, which was to be the imperial mausoleum. And it was to be attached by his son, Constantius, to a church. but that church was not built by Constantine. He was very much more interested in his tomb, which was to be as grand as the Tomb of Hadrian in Rome. So a lot of the notional building was to make quite sure

that Constantinople was as impressive as ancient Rome, without imitation, but with the relevant monuments that would mark it as a great new city. And so the mausoleum was definitely one of those important elements, and Constantine had a hand in it, and wanted very much for his burial to be very, very grand. He paid attention to the forum that he built. Clearly, every emperor has to have a forum, and this was a very magnificent oval forum with a big statue on top of a column in the middle, and this statue was said to be a re-used statue of Apollo, refashioned to look like

Constantine, or to represent Constantine. And parts of that column still survive to this day. So that shows that there was quite a lot of truth in some of the very mythic accounts of the foundation of Constantinople and the buildings that were put up by the emperor. And of course, later medieval, early medieval writers want to give a different interpretation to these monuments and many of them want to show that Constantine respected the ancient pagan style of building and he wanted his city to be as grand as the oldest grand cities

like Athens and Sparta and so on. So he had ambitions but he realised them in a fourth century style. So Judith, Constantine wants all these different monuments built, including, as you say, at the centre, his great tomb to rival that of emperors in Rome like the Tomb of Hadrian. The fact that it takes six years for him to decide it's ready to be commemorated, you know, three times twice the size of original Byzantian, is incredible. Do we know how he was able to amass so many builders from all parts of his empire to come to Constantinople to help build his city? That must have been such an impressive task to

complete. Yes, indeed, it must have been, but I suppose there were very many people who'd been following the emperor, watching his progress, admiring his skill, thinking this is the court I want to be attached to, not necessarily craftsmen and builders and workers, but artists and intellectuals and philosophers and people who thought he was going to be the next great ruler. And he was, of course, middle-aged by now. He wasn't a young man. And he'd made his mark. So I think probably people flocked to his victory celebrations and offered their services. So the architects and the people who had actually have designed and planned what he wanted were there. And then the workers probably had been working in Nica Media with Lusinia's were actively engaged in many other cities and were tempted by the fact that the new emperor had set up. the idea of a new capital, which was going to bear his own name, and that this was the place

to work, this was the place to be, to meet patrons, to gain money, to be involved in something which was obviously intended to be very grand. Now, whether it actually turned out to be very grand in six years is another matter. But the additional bits to the Acropolis and the Agorra of the Greek Polis were the imperial palace and the Hippodrome were joining it. Then the forum of Constantine with his statue on a pillar, the mausoleum where he wanted to be buried. And incidentally, there was a bishop of Byzantium, and he had to be given a much greater status. And so various subordinate bishoprics were taken away from other metropolitan seas and given to him to expand the scope and the range of the bishop of Byzantium. and in addition the fact that there were two local martyrs called Machius and Akakis

who had suffered in the persecutions, their relics and their shrines could be promoted as a sign of local Christian fervor and to satisfy those local Christians who felt it was very important that their martyrs should be recognized. So the church played its part in the building of what was not essentially a Christian city with a lot of pre-Christian baggage and monuments and impressive architectural buildings that anyone should be proud of. There were fragments of what was already in existence that were enhanced by Constantine's determination to make them the foundation office new city. So that's interesting. I mean, keeping on that Christian part of the story now, Judith, because as you say, Christianity

he's still quite a small part of the Roman Empire and it's not the dominant religion. There's clearly Christian architecture being built, but it's very much alongside the traditional architecture that you would associate with somewhere like ancient Rome for many, many centuries. Yes, I think that's it. They go in tandem and Constantine seems to be very much more interested in the pre-Christian imperial foundations. He leaves the building of a major church, the great basilica of St. Irene, followed by the even

larger basilica of St. Sophia. Holy Peace and Holy Wisdom, they are really only achieved in the fourth century after his death. So he's not particularly concerned about enhancing that Christian element of the city. He is determined to build a great imperial capital, which has all the essential monuments that a Roman emperor needs. So his court, within the palace, he's got to have very, very grand reception rooms, basilicas, he's got to have dining rooms, Trichlinia, he's got to have all these administrative places where his officials will work to bring in the tax that pays for the army, that pays for the building of the city, that pays for his ceremonies, his court, his courtiers, and the local guardsmen who are going to look after his family

and make sure that everything is secure and peaceful and wonderfully arranged. So there's a lot more going on than a Christianisation. They're going in tandem, but they're not very closely connected in the person of Constantine. I'm glad you mentioned that money part now, Judith, because, you know, all the money that he has to pay to the soldiers, the builders and so on, One of the buildings that he makes early on, does he build almost the equivalent of the Bank of England? Does he build a big new grand imperial mint at Constantinople and mint new coinage there as well? He had already minted a very important new coin, the gold solidus,

and that he had introduced in order to establish a standard of good quality gold coinage that would stand the test of time. and he brought it with him to Constantinople, and the mint appears to have been established within the imperial palace. Probably a separate building, but nothing that we can identify today, and there were mints, of course, under his control in other cities, and they too were producing the gold solidus, always at the same rate of 72 to the pound of gold,

with subordinate silver and bronze, the bronze being the coinage used by ordinary people in their probably not daily purchases, but for basic trading and everybody handled those coins. And so the emperor's portrait on the coins and particularly the reliability of the new system set up under the gold standard. That was a major achievement. And it did last. That's one of the things that people forget. There was monetary stability in the empire of Byzantium through to the mid-11th century,

which is why they are collected and made into necklaces in Italy, and they're used in exchanges in Sri Lanka by Indian merchants, and they are found scattered all over Scandinavia and Russia by merchants traveling to the north to purchase things like amber. and that these coins become very, very collectible and very valuable, and people know that they are not like the silver pennies minted in the West. In the provinces of the Roman Empire, there was often silver pennies, but they bent in your teeth. If you chewed on them, you could bend them. And of course, everybody tried to file off a bit of the coinage. It was always convenient to have a little bit of gold, but the solidus had to be sure the stipulated weight, and it managed to preserve a stability which gave the empire a tremendous

renown and fame. And people did collect these coins. They hoarded them. I'm glad we covered the coinage because that seems to be a real lasting legacy of Constantine in his brand new city right there. Judith, I could ask so many more questions about the original founding of Constantinople by Constantine. I will ask one more, more about the layout of the city. itself. Because with Rome divided into districts, of course, there's the kind of the palatial area, there's seven hills of Rome as well. Do we see Constantinople, is it divided up similarly into districts and other hills as well? Do we know much about that part of the dividing up of the city itself into different quarters? Well, we do, thanks to the notitia, written in the early 5th century,

which preserves a record of the monuments in the 14 districts, the Regionnes, the region, the region, of the city and which pays reference to the seven hills. There are in fact quite a lot of hills in Constantinople, but they don't look quite like the hills of Rome. And indeed, that may be just a sort of reference, a deference. We should have seven hills because Rome had seven hills. But there are indeed 14 districts, and one and two are the districts which enclose the imperial palace and the acropolis. So the ancient Greek polis with its acropolis, with the temples, and the palace, the imperial palace with the adjoining hippodrome, are the dominant features of districts one and two. And then the other districts are labeled out as moving towards

the west, with a considerable emphasis on the ports that are the harbors, which are found both on the golden horn, which is the inlet that gives the northern boundary of the city and the southern boundary of the city with two major harbors, of which the theodosian harbour was only excavated in the early 21st century. They wanted to build the subway station at a point where it would have been the node for several crossing lines, and it required very deep foundations. And as they dug the foundations for the new subway, they found the harbor of Theodosius in the mud. And in the mud were these 33 complete shipwrecks with all their goods, their containers, Amfrey, thousands and thousands and thousands of Amfrey, with the traces of wine in them, and so on and so on. An incredible find.

So that southern edge of the city, which orders the Sea of Marmara, had two big harbors. And the districts of the harbors were where the commercial activity took place. There were the meat markets, the grain supplies, the grain silos, which could be held in the city, a very, very large silo on the island of Tenedos, which is just off the coast of the Dardanelles, so that there were storage supplies were built in, ways to feed what was going to be a very large population, if it was going to be three signs larger than Byzantian, it was going to need a lot of people living in it, and when the buildings all filled up, there were indeed a very large number of palaces built for members of the Senate who came from Rome to join the new Senate in Constantinople.

And having set up an Eastern Senate, it was Constantius, the son of Constantine, the Great, who established that the Eastern Senate should have the same privileges and the same status as the Roman Senate. And this meant that quite a number of Roman senators saw which way the wind was blowing. and they moved to the east. And they built themselves palaces and villas, and they brought in all their servants and their vast increase in population that followed those aristocrats from Rome

who decided to abandon old Rome to the bishop of Rome. And the Pope became the caretaker of the ex-imperial capital. So that's how the Pope almost becomes, well, not quite the emperor, but you know, kind of the senior figure in Rome now that the emperors have moved east. And of course, so Constantine, he passes away.

He dies seven years after the inauguration of Constantinople in 337. And so it's interesting what you were saying there, Judith, this migration of lots of people to the new capital, including, he said, the elites formerly in Rome, because they know is where the wind is sailing, that this is the new power base. Do you see kind of a rapid increase in the population size of what was Byzantine, what is now Constantinople, over those early. decades, first during those last years of Constantine the Great Constantine I, and then during the reign of his son, Constantius, and then on. You just see more and more people flocking to Constantinople, this new Rome, this new capital. Indeed, it is the capital and it is the centre of the administration. And therefore, should you be seeking a job as an ambitious young man and you want to get into the administration or you're a military commander and you want to make

sure that you get promotion and that your achievements have been recognized. All these are reasons why both civilians and military and, of course, ecclesiastics in the end, they all need to go to the court in Constantinople and present their credentials and ask for or make it evident that they want good jobs and they're prepared to invest in the new city and give it even greater glory by their presence and so on. So certainly there are important people who feel it's very necessary to go to the court. And then there are the great masses of people who can see that they're building a new capital city. They must need all those workers who are going to maintain it. And indeed, the city was built with the most amazing sewers to bring the water in and take the waste out.

And those huge brick substructures must have been built by many people who could see that their skills would be needed and they'd be rewarded if they'd rush to Constantinople to assist in this great venture. And I think they saw very clearly that there was a demand for housing which would be met by the emperors who wanted to house the new workers who were coming to live and work in the city. So there was a mutual benefit expanding the area that was going to be occupied with housing for those people who are going to work in the city. And it seems to have worked, although the emperors, the successors of Constantine, were rarely there. They were very busy fighting each other and fighting the Persians. One reason for Constantinople being such an important point, simply from the military point of view, was that it was so much closer to the Persian border. and Persia was the great enemy, and indeed the Persian emperors wished to conquer as much of Rome in the East as they could. And in the 7th century, we learned that Cozreux is bathed in the Mediterranean and was very, very happy that he had made this journey right across the desert to get to Antioch, where he could swim in the waters of the Mediterranean.

So that was a constant pressure from the East, and Constantinope was much better side. to organise, to manipulate, to strategise the movement of troops to defend the city, defend the empire against Persia. So that was another reason why it was a place that the military wished to be associating with. Judith, over those following decades from the inauguration of Constantin, it's founding by Constantine. You mentioned already how there are Christian elements from the get-go, but not overwhelmingly. There's still the traditional Roman gods, solemn victors and all those temples and that's still there. But how quickly do you see a rise in Christianity in the new capital, in Constantinople? And dare I say the development of a new

Christian identity there too? This is a very complex situation because it brings into account the difficulties that the Christians had in defining their own religion. Constantine had already presided over quarrelsome bishops in Gaul, and he'd assembled various councils, and he'd said to them, sort out these problems. We don't want you fighting each other and quarreling like this. And when he came to the east, he did exactly the same thing in 325 when he ordered all the bishops under his control from all parts of the Roman Empire to come to the city of Nicaea and hammer out a policy that they could then use as a statement of faith, the creed. You would have thought they would have got it by now, but in fact, there were different

wordings used in different churches in different places, and Christianity was so widely spread by the fourth century. There were bound to be variations. So the bishops assembled in Nicaea, duly worked out a creed, which is indeed the Christian creed, I believe in one god, and with only a very slight change of warning, confirmed at Chalcedon in 451, which was the major point at which Christianity became a very, very much more dominant religion to the exclusion of pagan observance. In 381, there had been another very important council in Constantinople, which banned the pagan worship. Now, the real problem is that

because the Christians were divided right through the 4th century, until 381, the Council of Constantinople, there really was no agreement. But in 381, Theodosius I established through the bishops that he summoned to Constantinople, that the Orthodox, which we now call Catholic, definitions were correct. But of course, the resolution did not achieve instant agreement. The theological problems rumbled on. As the decades go on, Judith, and we get towards, say, the end of the 4th century, and of course, this is a time where you start seeing the Western Roman Empire, starting to buckle the dividing of power between East and West, culminating ultimately at the sack of Roman 410. Is old Rome's loss during this period when the West is struggling?

Is it new Rome's gain? Do you see Constantinople increase even more, get even more bountiful, even stronger? Conversely, at the same time that it looks like Rome in the West is getting weaker? Yes, it does appear to be the beneficiary of Rome's decline. And, of course, the real problem in Rome is that the city, as laid out by Augustus and then the Great Walls of all really, mean that it is too large for any military force to defend. They can't defend every wall and every gate, and therefore it is constantly threatened by these non-Roman forces that we call barbarian, but who were probably very familiar with Roman rule, and indeed many had served in Roman armies as

auxiliary troops, but their determination to get to Rome, partly because it was full of golden statues and women with beautiful jewelry and resources which they wanted, it meant that Rome was an aim for all non-Roman conquerors, and there were many, many of them. So yes, while Rome struggled, Constantinople defended itself and was also able to pay off the enemy more frequently better control of money, more resources, ability to send large sacks of gold, and on occasion, very, very large quantities of silken robes or bags of pepper, much appreciated as a form of tribute, sacks of peppercorns. They were really valuable. So there were ways in which Constantinople could pay off the barbarian attacks, and Rome had not the resources to do the same.

And therefore there is a decline on the West and a rising New Rome in the East. And by 381, Constantinople is indeed called the New Rome, the replacement. And of course, when we get into the 5th century, you mentioned Pepper there, so I think of Egypt, I think of all the trade along the Red Sea from the Indian coast, going through a place like Alexandria. Where do many of the traders likely go after that by that time? Probably not to Rome, but to Constantinople, but to New Rome. Hence why it also becomes such a rich trading place. Judith, I could ask about so much more,

but I think I'd like to finish this off by asking about another key structure, key fortification in the success and growth of early Constantinople, which are the famous Theodosian walls that you can go and see today. Now, what are these and why are they so important, significant? Theodosius II was the grandson of Theodosius I. The first. The emperors were very boring in the fact that they always named their sons after their fathers.

and so, yes, names repeat in an incredibly complicated fashion. Judith, trust me, it's nothing compared to the Ptolemies and the Seleucids of the Hellenistic period, so there you go. Only 11 Constantine, so after Constantine the first, but certainly several Theodosius. And the second Theodosius was a young emperor. He inherited authority as a young boy, and he was very much under the influence of his older sister, Pulcheria. And Pulcheria was a very strong, powerful woman. and with the problems of Constantinople's success came a need to expand yet further to the West. And the wall that had been built for the extension of Byzantium by Constantine, when he plowed that line, was again doubled by a new wall, a new barrier that was built according to a law passed in 413.

Now, the young emperor Theodosius could not have understood what was going on, but the walls are named after him. Following the decades of building, a very, very substantial line of triple fortifications was constructed, and these are the now very ruined rules that you can still see. Many areas have been restored, and they do give a sense of the incredible amount of building that actually went into these fortifications, very, very deep in a wall with towers every 50 metres, an outer wall that is very substantial, and then along a deep moat and another wall, they are really very substantial fortifications, and they were successful in holding off all adventurers and enemies until 1,204. And even then, the Venetians who knew about the fortifications,

could see that the sea walls were actually less strong than the land wall, and so they went over the sea defences rather than over the land walls, which remained until the great canon of 1453 blew them away. Judith, this has been so much fun. I could ask so many more questions about early Constantinople, but it's remarkable its origin story and how it rises over those following decades so that by, can we say that by the mid-fifth century, Constantinople, it really has taken over,

it's completed its rise, the origins of the city, it's now gone, the rise of the city, it is now the place to be, it is the beating heart, and it will continue to be the beating heart for many centuries to come. Indeed, I think that's absolutely correct,

and one of the most extraordinary features of this big expansion under Theodosius II with the nuisable walls, is that although quite a lot of that area was devoted to vineyards, to market gardening, and the area beyond the moat was certainly given over to farming, there was a very substantial increase in population because of the expansion that Theodosius had ordered, and the city became one of the largest of the known world, and it also attracted all the people whom we've described as seeking positions in the imperial court through the emperor's patronage.

Theodosius was also interested in an idea of a university, and he set up a center for intellectual endeavor. Libraries were built, books were collected to rival the museum of Alexandria. The notion that there were great medical libraries in Pergamon, they bought Galen's books, to Constantinople, and people read them and went on becoming very good doctors as a result. So there was a drawing in of all the resources of the Roman world to bring them to a focus in Constantinople, which made it the great leading city of the empire. And although the Western Empire continued to flail under the tax of these non-Romans, in the East, Constantinople expanded, became stronger, became richer, and the emperors never moved away.

One of its great strengths was that the imperial court remained there in Constantinople through even centuries of relative decline and then returned to power. So it became that one sort of fixed point in the world history, which people knew to be the center of a very great civilization. Absolutely. Judith, this has been absolutely brilliant. Last but certainly not least, you include much more than just the story of the origins of Constantinople in your book on this city, which is called... Byzantium, the surprising life of a medieval empire. Judith, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show. Thank you. My pleasure.

Well, there you go. There was the one and only Professor Judith Heron, talking all about the origins of the great city of Korn. Constantinople, the continent straddling capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. I really hope you enjoy the episode, and if you want to learn more about the Byzantine Empire and this fascinating period of late antiquity, the early Middle Ages too, then do go and check out our previous episodes, one on Ravenna and another on the decline and fall of the ancient world. We'll put links to both of those episodes in the show notes. Now for our subscribers we've also got another episode coming up for you. We have the latest Q&A between myself and our producer Joseph

where we answer all the questions that you've submitted. Thank you so much for all of those. And we've also got, Dare I tease, some brand new formats, subscriber episode formats, coming out very soon. Just you wait for those. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Enchance. Please make sure to follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get to your podcasts. That really helps us and will be doing us a big favour.

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