Byzantium

• 1. Introduction

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  Byzantium sat at the mouth of the Black Sea, controlling the only passage between that inland sea and the Mediterranean, and every civilization that wanted a piece of that trade had to reckon with it. The Greeks called it Byzantion. The Romans refounded it as Nova Roma. The Ottomans knew it as Istanbul. Today, the world knows it as the largest city in Turkey. One city, at least three names, and a continuous human story stretching from the 7th century BCE to the present day. How did a Greek colonial outpost become the hinge of the ancient world? What drove emperors and kings to besiege it, rebuild it, and rename it? And how did a single goddess, credited with repelling an army in the dark, leave her mark on flags still flying across the globe today?

• 2. Megarian Roots

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  Byzas of Megara, a city-state near Athens, is the figure ancient legend credits with sailing northeast across the Aegean and planting the first Greek settlement on the narrow strait. The date most commonly accepted is 667 BCE, drawn from the authority of Herodotus, who calculated it as 17 years after the founding of the rival city Chalcedon just across the water. Eusebius, writing nearly eight centuries after those events, offered a different figure of 656 BCE, and noted that the margin could shift by a few years depending on the edition consulted.

  The name of the city may carry an older, non-Greek memory. Scholars have suggested a Thracian origin, and one proposal links it to the Thracian personal name Byzas, meaning "he-goat." Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, mentions an even earlier name for the site: Lygos, which likely corresponds to a Thracian settlement that predated the Greek arrival. Whether Byzas was a historical person, a mythological construct, or both, the Greek legend formalized his role as the city's oikistes, the official founder.

  Byzantium's greatest natural asset was not its harbor alone but the chokepoint it commanded. As a trading city defined by its location at the Black Sea's only entrance, it had a commercial leverage that would attract the attention of every major power in the ancient Mediterranean world. Byzantium later pressed that advantage by conquering Chalcedon, the city across the Bosphorus on the Asiatic side, the very rival whose founding Herodotus had used to date Byzantium itself.

• 3. Siege After Siege

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  In 513 BCE, the Persian Emperor Darius I swept through the region during his Scythian campaign and absorbed Byzantium into the administrative province of Skudra. Achaemenid control here was never as firm as elsewhere in Thrace, but the city was rated, alongside Sestos, as one of the foremost Persian ports on the European coast of the Bosphorus and the Hellespont.

  Then came the long Greek civil wars. During the Peloponnesian War, Sparta seized the city in 411 BCE as part of a strategy to cut off the grain supply routes flowing to Athens. Athenian forces retook it in 408 BCE, after the Spartans withdrew following a settlement. The back-and-forth of those three years illustrated what would become a recurring pattern: whoever held Byzantium held the key to the strait, and the strait was worth fighting over.

  The cycle repeated under Rome. After the city backed the losing side in a Roman succession struggle, supporting Pescennius Niger against Septimius Severus, Roman forces besieged it in 196 CE and left it extensively damaged. Severus, once he became emperor, turned around and rebuilt it, and the city quickly recovered its former prosperity. It was bound administratively to the nearby city of Perinthus for a period. Byzantium lost its city status and the rights of a free city after the war, but the emperor Caracalla persuaded Severus to restore them. In gratitude, the Byzantines named Caracalla an archon of their city, a mark of civic honor that carried real political significance.

• 4. Constantine's New Rome

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  Roman Emperor Constantine I recognized in Byzantium what every previous conqueror had recognized: a site almost entirely surrounded by water, inherently defensible, and positioned where Europe and Asia nearly touch. In 330 CE he refounded the city as an imperial residence, calling it Nova Roma and modeling it on Rome itself. The name that stuck, though, was Constantinople, meaning "city of Constantine" in Greek.

  Constantine's choice of this site was not without a sense of historical ceremony. He celebrated what he considered Byzantium's 1,000th anniversary between the years 333 and 334, using Herodotus's dating as his authority. The city he built on those ancient foundations became a commercial, cultural, and diplomatic hub for centuries, forming the capital of what later historians would call the Byzantine Empire, a name that did not come into use during the empire's own lifetime.

  That name, "Byzantium" as a term for the eastern Roman state, was introduced by the German historian Hieronymus Wolf only in 1555, a full century after the empire had ceased to exist. The people who actually lived within it continued to call their polity the Roman Empire, using the Greek phrase Basileia ton Rhomaion. It was not until the 19th century that the retronym "Byzantine Empire" became standard in Western scholarship. On the 29th of May 1453, Ottoman Turks conquered the city. The Turks called it Istanbul, a name derived from the Greek phrase meaning "to the city," though it was not officially renamed until 1930. It remains the largest and most populous city in Turkey to this day, even though Ankara now serves as the national capital.

• 5. Hecate and the Crescent

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  In 340 BCE, Byzantium was under siege by the forces of Philip of Macedon, allied with Athens in resistance. On a particularly dark and wet night, Philip attempted a surprise assault. The Byzantines credited their survival to a bright light that appeared suddenly in the sky, thwarting the attack. Later interpreters described the light variously as a meteor or the moon, and some accounts added the detail of barking dogs, though the earliest sources mention only the bright light itself.

  To mark the deliverance, the Byzantines erected a statue of Hecate lampadephoros, meaning "light-bearer" or "bringer." This story survived in the writings of Hesychius of Miletus, who most likely lived during the reign of Justinian I. His works themselves only exist today in fragments preserved by Photius and by the tenth-century lexicographer known as Suidas. The tale was also recorded by Stephanus of Byzantium and by Eustathius.

  Devotion to Hecate became particularly strong in Byzantium after this episode, and her symbols, the crescent and the star, were treated as emblems of the city's walls and protector. By the late Hellenistic or early Roman period, roughly the 1st century BCE, the star and crescent motif was already associated to some degree with Byzantium. Some Byzantine coins of the 1st century BCE and later show the head of Artemis with bow and quiver, and feature a crescent with what appears to be an eight-rayed star on the reverse. The motif also appeared more widely as the royal emblem of Mithradates VI Eupator, who at one point incorporated the city into his empire. How exactly a symbol tied to a single goddess came to represent the city as a whole is not entirely clear, but the parallel with Athens, whose name honored Athena after her credited intervention in a moment of war, suggests the process was a familiar one in ancient Greek civic life.

• 6. A City's Many Names

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  The word "Byzantine" entered English through a winding path. The Latin form Byzantinus spawned the English adjective "Byzantine," and 15th and 16th century writers rendered it variously as Byzantin, Bizantine, Bezantine, Bysantin, Byzantian, and Bizantian before the spelling settled. Long before that, the name Byzantius and Byzantinus had been applied from the 9th century to a specific gold coin of Byzantine minting. The French borrowed it as besant d'or, the Italians as bisante, and the English as besant, byzant, or bezant. The English coin term, drawn from the Old French besan, dates from the 12th century.

  In parallel, the Greek word Byzantios described the inhabitants of Byzantion, and Byzantinoi was its plural. In the Middle Ages the term Byzantion itself became a synecdoche for the eastern Roman Empire as a whole, an ellipsis of the Greek phrase meaning "the Byzantion state." Other places also carried variants of the name: a city in Libya cited by Stephanus of Byzantium, another on the western coast of India mentioned in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, and a city in Cilicia that was the home of the chronicler Faustus of Byzantium. In those cases the names were most likely local adaptations rather than direct Greek transplants.

  Among the notable figures the city produced across its classical centuries were the tragedian Homerus, active in the early 3rd century BCE; Philo, an engineer who lived around 280 BCE; Epigenes, an astrologer working in the 3rd to 2nd century BCE; Aristophanes of Byzantium, a scholar who flourished in Alexandria in the same broad period; and Myro, a Hellenistic female poet. Their work spread well beyond the city walls, a reminder that Byzantium was not only a military and commercial crossroads but an intellectual one.