Byzantium's Rise to Constantinople
Long ago, settlers sailed across a narrow strait and built their town on the first shore they reached. Just across the water sat a far better shore — deep harbors, high ground, a place fit for a great city. They never looked. For that, later peoples gave them a hard name: the blind. A treasure sat in plain sight, and they could not see it.
Key Terms
- Byzantion
- The Greek colony that settlers led by Byzas founded around 667 BC on a triangular spit of land jutting into the sea.
- Chalcedon
- A colony built seventeen years before its more famous neighbor, on the flatter shore across the water — later mocked as the choice of the blind.
- Golden Horn
- A long, sheltered harbor stretching more than 6 miles inland, deep enough to anchor an entire fleet.
- Landward Wall
- The single stretch of fortification a defender needed to guard, since the sea already protected the other three sides of the peninsula.
- Bosporus
- The narrow strait that every ship carrying grain, silk, or spice had to pass through to travel between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
- Kommerkion
- A toll of 10 percent charged on every cargo ship that passed through the strait between two seas.
- Solidus
- A coin of pure 24-carat gold, weighing about 4.5 grams, struck in AD 312 and trusted by merchants for more than 700 years.
- Antoninianus
- A Roman coin that began as roughly half silver but, by the AD 200s, had thinned to a wash of barely 2.5 to 5 parts silver in a hundred over plain bronze.
- Herodotus
- The historian whose account judged the founders of the lesser shore as blind for missing the better site in plain view.
- Annona civica
- The free daily bread ration — some 80,000 loaves a day — that the state handed out to draw and calm the growing population.
- Altar of Victory
- A pagan monument set up in 29 BC that Old Rome’s proud families fought for decades to keep, believing it protected their city.
- New Senate
- A governing body that grew from 300 members to more than 2,000 in the fresh capital, loyal to the ruler who built it.
- Justinian’s Law Code
- A great book of laws, compiled under one emperor, that kept the state running no matter who sat on the throne.
- Population of 200,000
- The number the city’s residents swelled toward as newcomers poured in, ranking it among the largest cities on earth at the time.
- Rhomaioi
- What the people of the eastern empire called themselves — Romans — even while speaking Greek and never believing their empire had fallen.
- Anastasius
- An earlier emperor who stored about 320,000 pounds of gold in reserve, roughly the weight of two dozen elephants.
- Justinian
- The emperor who spent a predecessor’s stored gold reserve to raise a great domed church, finished in AD 537.
- Hagia Sophia
- A brick-domed church whose roof spans about 102 feet and is ringed by 40 windows, so it seems to float on light.
- Pendentive
- The curved triangle of stone that lets a round dome rest on top of a square room.
- Peninsula
- A piece of land surrounded by water on three sides, with only a narrow neck connecting it to the mainland.