Constantinople and the Three Romes

Constantine did not choose an empty shore. Byzantion was an old Greek city on the European side of the Bosporus, the narrow passage between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. Its peninsula had water on two sides and a sheltered harbour in the Golden Horn. A ruler established there could watch routes toward the Balkans and Asia Minor, tax moving goods, and communicate with wealthy eastern provinces. The geography did not make the city invulnerable. It gave a state with ships, money, engineers and a functioning administration unusually good material to work with.

After defeating Licinius in 324, Constantine developed Byzantion as his imperial capital; the new city was ceremonially dedicated on 11 May 330. Constantinople means Constantine's city. New Rome expressed its claim to imperial standing. Those are related names, not identical descriptions: one names a founder, the other a political place in the Roman world. Rome itself remained a city of enormous prestige, and the empire had already been governed from several imperial residences. The move should not be pictured as one emperor carrying the whole Roman state out of Italy in a single procession.

The familiar label Byzantine Empire is a later historians' convenience. Its Christian, increasingly Greek-speaking inhabitants called themselves Romans. Roman identity could coexist with Greek language, Christian theology and a very different political landscape from that of Augustus. When a medieval source calls the emperor Roman, it is not usually making a romantic claim to be a copy of something dead. It is naming the state to which the writer belongs. A reader who forgets this will repeatedly mistake continuity for imitation.

Nor did Constantine invent Christianity at his new capital. The Church already had Scriptures, bishops, martyrs and a Eucharistic life. Nicaea met in 325, before the dedication of Constantinople. Imperial patronage changed the Church's public circumstances enormously, bringing resources and new dangers, but it did not create the faith that had survived imperial persecution. The earlier chapters trace that history. Here the question is what happened when the once-persecuted Church found itself living beside the throne.

A new capital required more than a palace. Ceremonial spaces, roads, food distribution and public works made sovereignty visible and daily life possible. The Hippodrome joined entertainment to politics: crowds could acclaim a ruler or confront him. The Senate and court attracted people seeking influence. Churches and shrines drew other kinds of journeys. This mixture matters because Constantinople was never only a monastery enlarged to the size of a city. It was a capital, with the appetites and obligations that a capital brings.

The first Rome in this discussion is Rome in Italy, the old imperial capital and the apostolic church associated with Peter and Paul. Constantinople is the second, or New Rome. Its rise in ecclesiastical rank was not a claim that Jerusalem had ceased to matter or that Alexandria and Antioch lacked apostolic roots. It reflected the emergence of a Christian imperial capital and the practical importance of its bishop. The Church's map had to contend with the state's map without simply becoming the same thing.

Canon 3 of the Council of Constantinople in 381 gave its bishop the prerogative of honour after the bishop of Rome because Constantinople was New Rome. Canon 28 of Chalcedon in 451 developed the parallel between Old and New Rome and specified responsibilities in the eastern world. The connection to imperial status is explicit. But Rome did not accept the whole settlement as Constantinople understood it. Pope Leo's opposition to canon 28 is part of the history, not an inconvenience to leave out when explaining the Orthodox position.

There are therefore two arguments to keep separate. One concerns order among churches: who presides, who hears appeals, and how bishops cooperate. The other concerns the grounds and extent of that authority. Catholic theology gives the bishop of Rome a Petrine primacy not reducible to the city's political position. Orthodox accounts affirm a primacy in the ancient order while disputing the later Roman account of universal jurisdiction. Orthodox churches also disagree about some present implications of Constantinople's privileges. A numbering system cannot settle those arguments for us.

The creed commonly called Nicene is more fully described as Nicene-Constantinopolitan. Its reception links Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381, with the conciliar history becoming explicit at Chalcedon. For the worshipper, this is the city entering ordinary prayer. The confession of the Holy Spirit as Lord and giver of life is not an imperial boast; it is a theological claim about who God is. Constantinople's lasting importance rests partly in work like this, which a congregation can receive without possessing a palace, army or state.

There was no doctrine that a capital's prosperity guaranteed the holiness of its clergy or the correctness of its emperor. The fourth-century struggles over the Trinity and the later conflict over icons are enough to prevent that conclusion. Bishops could suffer under Christian rulers. Monks could resist policies presented with imperial authority. The city housed both defenders of teachings the Church received and powerful advocates of teachings it rejected. Its history is a reason to distinguish the Church's faith from political success, even when the two were closely entwined.

Hagia Sophia means Holy Wisdom. It does not mean a church dedicated to a female martyr named Sophia. The immense building that survives belongs to Justinian's reign and was dedicated in 537, after an earlier church burned during the Nika revolt of 532. Its designers, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, brought mathematical and structural imagination to a project that challenged what a church interior could be. The dome is carried through a complex arrangement of arches, pendentives and supporting structures, opening an interior whose effect still exceeds what an exterior photograph suggests.

Procopius, writing in praise of Justinian's buildings, describes a church transformed by light, coloured stone and the apparent suspension of its dome. His language is deliberately admiring; it is imperial praise as well as architectural testimony. Yet it gives us a contemporary witness to the astonishment. A person entering the church encountered coloured surfaces, a vast upward space, lamps, voices and movement. The building was not designed as a silent museum with empty floors. Its splendour served an enacted worship.

We must resist assembling a single timeless picture from every century. The original dome partly collapsed in 558 and was rebuilt, with the church rededicated in 562. Many surviving figural mosaics belong to later phases, especially after iconoclasm. The exterior minarets visible in modern photographs belong to the Ottoman mosque, not Justinian's cathedral. The building we see is a survivor repeatedly repaired, altered and reinterpreted. A truthful caption should identify which of those histories a photograph actually shows.

The greatness was real, but the setting of its construction was not innocent. The Nika revolt was suppressed with enormous loss of life, and Justinian's rebuilding followed that catastrophe. Imperial art can speak truthfully about divine beauty while also advertising an earthly ruler. Christians need not choose between refusing to see the beauty and refusing to see the human cost. A cathedral's consecration does not retrospectively sanctify every act of the government that paid for it.

Orthodox worship does not depend on duplicating Hagia Sophia's dimensions. A small parish may inherit its liturgical world without reproducing its architecture. The connection is in the gathering around the Eucharist, the proclamation of Scripture, sung prayer, the movement of clergy and people, and an understanding of material beauty as capable of serving worship. Gold is not God. Stone is not heaven. But the Incarnation gives Christians reason to believe that material things need not be obstacles to encountering their Maker.

This is also why photographs should be read slowly. An image of the south vestibule mosaic shows the Theotokos and Child between Constantine, offering the city, and Justinian, offering the church. That mosaic is a later representation of imperial benefaction, not a portrait made when the founders stood together; they lived in different centuries. Its point is theological and political memory. Recognising the difference lets the image teach what it actually says.

A skyline can hide the work that supports it. Constantinople's position was strategically excellent but its local freshwater supply was inadequate for the capital it became. Aqueducts brought water from outside; open reservoirs and covered cisterns stored it. The surviving Valens aqueduct and the city's cisterns belong to this practical history. Their function was not ornamental. Drinking, bathing, workshops and public institutions all required water, and dependence on distant supply was a vulnerability that storage helped address.

The Theodosian land walls, developed in the fifth century and repeatedly repaired, gave the city an extraordinary defensive depth. Walls facing the sea protected the other approaches. Defence depended on maintenance, trained people and access to provisions, not the mystical strength of masonry. The walls were formidable because generations invested in keeping them useful. In that respect a mason repairing damage belongs in the city's story beside the emperor whose name a visitor remembers.

The surviving art can make Byzantine life look as though everybody wore purple and handled gold. Most people did neither. The capital depended on cultivators beyond its walls, sailors, carriers, artisans, shopkeepers and households whose names seldom appear in histories. Manuscripts reached later readers because people copied, corrected and taught from them. The survival of ancient Greek learning was not a single last-minute rescue in 1453. It was work carried on across centuries, then transmitted through many routes.

Charity belonged to Christian public expectations, though those expectations were never met evenly. The gap between a rich church and a hungry neighbour was precisely the sort of gap John Chrysostom preached about. His presence in this city is a useful corrective to admiration that stops at expensive surfaces. If the poor disappear from our description of Christian greatness, we have made it less Christian than some of Constantinople's own most demanding teachers would permit.

Beauty also changed. The art of the sixth century was not the art of the eleventh, and neither was the art produced under the Palaiologoi after 1261. The Chora's early-fourteenth-century mosaics and frescoes belong to a politically diminished empire capable of extraordinary visual expression. Power and artistic vitality did not rise and fall in a perfectly shared rhythm. A small remnant state could still produce a great image; a powerful state could still mistreat a human being. Remembering both makes the word greatness more exact.

Constantinople survived major sieges long before its final fall. In 626 an Avar-led assault, involving allied forces while Persian armies threatened across the Bosporus, failed. The city remembered deliverance through the protection of the Theotokos. That memory entered liturgical life, including the tradition associated with the Akathist. Liturgical thanksgiving and military explanation answer different questions: one describes what believers give thanks for, the other examines walls, fleets, coordination and decisions. Treating them as if one must erase the other impoverishes both.

The Umayyad siege of 717–718 was another decisive survival. Land and naval pressure, the difficulties of sustaining a vast expedition, Byzantine resistance and Bulgarian intervention formed part of its outcome. Greek fire belongs to the history of imperial naval defence, but it should not be turned into a magical substance that explains every victory. Nor should we state a hypothetical future of an entire continent as though it were a witnessed event. Constantinople's survival preserved the state and communities that were actually there. That is already a consequence of enormous importance.

At home, the eighth and ninth centuries brought the icon controversy. Imperial opposition to sacred images was not a simple, uniformly executed policy across every province and year. The Council of Nicaea in 787 defended the veneration of icons; a later restoration of iconoclast policy was finally reversed in 843. The Sunday of Orthodoxy remembers that restoration. The history makes a point uncomfortable for any easy identification of throne and altar: a Christian emperor could use state power against a practice the Church ultimately affirmed.

Orthodox veneration distinguishes the honour offered through an image from the worship due to God. The theological case is connected to the Incarnation: the Son truly became visible in human flesh. The dispute was therefore not simply a quarrel between people who liked decoration and people who preferred empty walls. It concerned what could be said and shown about Christ, what inherited practice meant, and who had authority to judge it. The doctrine chapters explain this more fully; the city shows how costly those questions could become.

When a modern congregation carries icons in procession, Constantinople's story is present without any restoration of its government. That is a recurring pattern in this chapter. Forms of prayer can cross borders more successfully than armies. Liturgical memory can survive the collapse of the state that once gave it a public setting. The worshipper inherits the thanksgiving and the theological confession, not an obligation to approve every policy of the Byzantine court.

The famous imperial bodyguard was the Varangian Guard. Varangian and Venetian sound similar in English, but they lead into different histories. The Varangians came from the northern and eastern networks linking Scandinavia, the lands of the Rus', and the empire. Venice was an Adriatic maritime power with commercial and naval interests. Emperors used the services of both at different times, and confusing them obscures an important connection between the Viking world and Byzantine Christianity.

Around 988, amid Basil II's struggle against rebellion, Vladimir of Kyiv supplied a substantial force conventionally numbered at six thousand. The military arrangement belonged to a wider alliance involving Vladimir's baptism and marriage to Basil's sister Anna. The sequence and details require care, but the enduring result was a northern guard closely associated with imperial service. Its members could be useful because they stood outside many local aristocratic networks. Paid loyalty was a practical political resource, not proof that every guardsman was immune to ambition.

The guard became famous for its axes and for service near the emperor. Its composition changed: Scandinavian and Rus' connections were followed by a strong English element, especially after the Norman conquest of England. Harald Sigurdsson, later Harald Hardrada of Norway, served in the Byzantine world before his kingship. The story links places modern readers often keep in separate mental compartments. A northern warrior could travel to Constantinople, earn wealth in imperial service, and return to a world in which baptism, kingship and warfare were also being renegotiated.

Anna Komnene describes the axe-bearing troops in the army of her father Alexios I. Her account of the disastrous battle at Dyrrachium in 1081 also prevents romantic invincibility: courageous guardsmen could become separated, exhausted and destroyed. Anna wrote as an educated imperial daughter defending her father's memory. Her testimony is valuable, but it is not a modern operational report or an impartial portrait of every enemy. The same source criticism applied to Western chronicles belongs here.

Venice enters a different part of Alexios's problem. Facing Norman naval pressure, he needed ships and maritime help; Venetian assistance was rewarded with major commercial privileges in the late eleventh century. Such bargains could save a ruler in the short term while increasing foreign influence over trade. Relations between the empire and Italian maritime communities included cooperation, rivalry, privileges, resentment and violence. There is no honest single line from a useful alliance to an inevitable betrayal.

In 1204 Venice helped bring the Fourth Crusade against Constantinople. In 1453 Venetians were among the city's defenders. These facts are separated by two and a half centuries and must both remain visible. One people's name is not a moral character that stays unchanged across all generations. The record asks us to distinguish governments, commanders, merchants and ordinary participants, even when a collective memory is understandably painful.

The Fourth Crusade's capture of Constantinople in April 1204 is a distinct catastrophe from the Ottoman conquest of 1453. Confusing the two removes a central part of Orthodox memory. An expedition undertaken in the name of crusading became entangled in debts, Venetian interests and Byzantine dynastic promises. The result was an assault on a Christian capital and its sack. The separate Crusades chapter traces the decisions in detail; here their consequence for the city must be faced.

Niketas Choniates, an imperial official and eyewitness, describes plunder, sexual violence, the violation of churches and the dispersal of sacred objects. His writing is impassioned and morally charged. That does not make the underlying suffering unreal. It means the reader should hear a devastated witness rather than extract every rhetorical flourish as a statistical statement. Sacred wealth became booty; places built to hold communities together became places of terror.

The Latin Empire established in Constantinople lasted until 1261. Greek successor states survived elsewhere, and the polity centred on Nicaea ultimately recovered the capital. This was not a simple pause followed by the restoration of the old world. Territories, revenues, trade and relationships had been altered. Even where worship and institutions could be restored, losses were not undone by an emperor walking back through a gate.

For relations between Catholic and Orthodox Christians, the sack helped turn theological and jurisdictional division into inherited grief. It is possible to explain the complicated decisions leading to the expedition without excusing what followed. It is also possible to acknowledge the crime without treating Catholics born centuries later as its perpetrators. John Paul II explicitly expressed sorrow over the bloodshed of 1204 when addressing Patriarch Bartholomew in 2004. Christian truthfulness includes both remembrance and the possibility of repentance.

A shared resource for Catholic and Orthodox readers ought to make that position inhabitable. The history should not be softened to protect an institution's reputation, and the reader should not be recruited into hatred. Some of the most compelling witnesses are precisely those who can name the wrong committed by their own side. Historical honesty is useful to reconciliation because forgiveness cannot attach to an event we first insist did not happen.

By the fifteenth century Constantinople was the centre of a greatly reduced empire surrounded by expanding Ottoman power. The city still possessed imposing walls and an immense inherited name, but it could no longer draw upon the resources of Justinian's or Basil II's state. Repeated internal conflict, territorial loss and economic weakness formed the background. Its fall was neither proof that its citizens lacked faith nor a mechanical result that every earlier century had been leading toward.

Mehmed II began the final siege in April 1453. Constantine XI Palaiologos directed the defence with a small force that included Greeks and Latin Christians. The Genoese commander Giovanni Giustiniani played a major role on the land walls; Venetians served in the defence as well. The defenders' cooperation is worth remembering alongside earlier hostility. People divided in communion could still share danger, labour and a desperate military purpose.

Artillery battered the walls while defenders repaired damage. The harbour chain impeded direct entry into the Golden Horn, but Ottoman ships were moved overland into it. Naval encounters, assaults, tunnelling, supply and fatigue all mattered. Medieval witnesses give sharply varying army numbers; very precise totals on a modern illustration should not be mistaken for a surviving muster roll. Nicolo Barbaro's diary is unusually detailed, but his loyalties to fellow Venetians also shape how he assigns credit and blame.

The final assault broke the defence on 29 May. Constantine XI died during the fall. His exact last moments and the identification of his body are uncertain, and later legend filled the space left by that uncertainty. A moving final speech is not automatically a verbatim transcript. Stories of an emperor preserved in marble and awaiting restoration belong to the subsequent life of popular hope, not to a verified account of what happened on the battlefield.

The conquest brought killing, enslavement, displacement and the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque. It also began a long Ottoman history of the city, which should not be reduced to one morning of violence. Mehmed made Constantinople his capital and sought to repopulate and govern it. Recognising the later city's life does not erase the suffering at its capture. Nor does mourning that suffering require a contempt for the people who live in Istanbul now.

The Council of Florence and the attempted reunion of East and West belong to the setting of the last decades. Byzantine hopes for Western help and disputes over the terms of union were both real. It is misleading to reduce every supporter of union to a cynic buying troops, or every opponent to someone who preferred conquest. People made theological and political judgments under terrible pressure. A catastrophe does not make their arguments simple in retrospect.

Christian history also continues beyond the capital. Other Byzantine successor territories survived for a time; the Morea fell in 1460 and Trebizond in 1461. More fundamentally, the Church's life was never coextensive with the emperor's possessions. The end of Roman rule in Constantinople ended a state. It did not end the Eucharist in the Christian East, erase its bishops, or exhaust its capacity to teach, pray and make saints. That distinction is the bridge from the fall to the next part of the story.

Third Rome most often refers, in this context, to Moscow. The idea developed in a world where Constantinople had fallen and the rulers of Muscovy increasingly understood themselves as protectors of Orthodox Christianity. Philotheus, or Filofei, a monk associated with Pskov, gave the idea its best-known expression in early-sixteenth-century letters. The precise dating and textual history of those letters are subjects for scholarship; it is safer to place the formulation in that period than to treat every popular quotation as an uncontested decree issued on a known day.

The argument made a theological reading of history. Old Rome was said to have departed from true faith; New Rome had fallen under non-Christian rule; Moscow was called to guard what remained. Its language was warning as much as congratulation. A ruler entrusted with Christian responsibility faced judgment. In later reception, the idea could become a claim about geopolitical destiny, but that later use should not be read automatically into every early text.

The marriage of Ivan III to Sophia Palaiologina in 1472 contributed to the symbolism of continuity. A marriage into the former imperial family, however, was not a sacrament transferring the Roman Empire. Nor did it abolish the standing of the ancient patriarchates. Moscow's patriarchate was established in 1589, long after Constantinople's fall. These developments need their own dates; combining them into a single moment when the Church simply moved north conceals most of the real history.

Orthodoxy does not confess three Romes in the Creed. The phrase is a historical and political-theological concept with an influential Russian reception, not a universally binding doctrine that Moscow replaced Constantinople as head of the Church. Constantinople's patriarchate continued. Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem continued. Other Orthodox peoples did not become temporary guests in somebody else's religious history. A Greek Orthodox reader and a Russian Orthodox reader can share the faith while evaluating this political language differently.

Catholic readers likewise should not mistake the phrase for a neutral historical judgment accepted by all Christians about Rome's loss of faith. That judgment belongs to the polemical premises of the idea. Explaining it accurately requires identifying who made the claim, what they meant, and which churches did not accept it. A history chapter can explain a conviction without asking the reader to adopt it.

The three names can therefore be remembered without a misleading succession chart. Rome is an ancient imperial and apostolic centre. Constantinople is New Rome, with a historically grounded conciliar rank. Moscow is the focus of a later Third Rome claim, developed in specific Russian circumstances. These are three different kinds of statement. Putting Roman numerals beside them does not make their authority or theological status identical.

Istanbul and Constantinople refer to the same historic city, although modern metropolitan Istanbul is much larger than the medieval walled capital. They do not literally mean the same thing. Constantinople means Constantine's city. The prevailing explanation of Istanbul derives it from a Greek expression meaning to or in the City, often presented as eis ten polin; scholarship discusses the more immediate spoken form stin Poli and the sound changes by which the Turkish name developed. That distinction preserves the irony without making the etymology say something it does not.

For Greek speakers, the city could be simply the Polis, the City. A name arising from ordinary speech could cross into another language and become the familiar name of the place. There is something historically suggestive here: political sovereignty changed, yet a Greek way of referring to the capital helped shape its Turkish name. The continuity is linguistic, not evidence that conquest was unreal or that the words carry identical political claims.

The names coexisted for a long time. Ottoman usage included forms of Constantinople as well as Istanbul and other designations. It is misleading to imagine that everyone awoke after the conquest in 1453 to an entirely new name, or that Istanbul was invented in 1930. Twentieth-century standardisation of international usage is one chapter in a much older naming history. When reading a travel book, diplomatic document or church title, its language and period matter.

Today Istanbul is the city's ordinary modern name. Constantinople remains essential in historical writing and in the title of its Orthodox patriarchate. Using the historical name when discussing a Byzantine council is accurate; using Istanbul for a contemporary address is also accurate. Neither choice has to be a provocation. The real history is substantial enough without turning every mention of a place into a test of religious allegiance.

This principle guides the pictures here. A photograph of Hagia Sophia with minarets is a photograph of the building in its later history. It can help us understand the surviving structure, but it cannot be labelled a view of sixth-century Constantinople. A mosaic of Constantine presenting the city is an image of remembered foundation. Each tells the truth more clearly when the caption names what sort of witness it is.

Under Ottoman rule the patriarchate continued in profoundly changed circumstances. Gennadios Scholarios became the first patriarch after the conquest in 1454. Survival brought responsibilities and constraints; it did not mean that nothing important had changed. The history of Christian communities under Ottoman rule contains accommodation, intellectual and religious life, legal inequality, periods of relative security and episodes of violence. Neither an uninterrupted golden tolerance nor an undifferentiated five-century persecution describes every place and period.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate still bears the title of Constantinople and New Rome. The title records an ecclesial continuity that does not depend on the existence of a Christian emperor. Its relationship to Greek Orthodoxy in America makes this living history especially visible for a reader in a Greek parish. Other American Orthodox jurisdictions have other immediate ecclesiastical connections, yet share much of the Byzantine liturgical inheritance. The story continues in the America chapter through migration, mission, translation and local communities.

Hagia Sophia became a museum in the twentieth century and was reconverted to a mosque in 2020. UNESCO raised questions about the protection and accessibility of the World Heritage site's heritage. For Christians its earlier life as the Great Church remains spiritually significant, even though it is not now their cathedral. The mosaics and architecture belong to a history that deserves careful conservation, and they can be valued without denying the building's later centuries or the dignity of contemporary worshippers.

For Orthodox and Catholic readers, the city's most fruitful inheritance is not a fantasy of undoing every century since its fall. It is a more exact knowledge of the creed, the councils, the saints, the arts of worship, and the reasons unity was damaged. In 1965 Rome and Constantinople removed the mutual excommunications of 1054 from ecclesial memory; that act did not restore full communion. It nevertheless expressed the possibility that a shared past could be approached through repentance and dialogue rather than repeated accusation.

The city also corrects a temptation common to religious histories written around battles. An army can defend a community and preserve the conditions in which worship continues. That is a real service and sometimes a sacrificial one. But the Church honours martyrs who possessed no army, confessors who opposed emperors, teachers who lived in exile, and holy people whose neighbours never knew their names. Military victory is not the test by which all holiness is measured.

Constantinople matters because it helped form the world in which Christians learned to confess, paint, sing and live the faith, and because its losses reveal how much can be entrusted to fragile human institutions. Its grandeur deserves admiration; its violence deserves truth; its fall deserves remembrance. The Church that survived it is not a consolation prize for losing an empire. It is the continuing community for which the finest things in that empire were supposed to have existed.