Nicomedia

• 1. Introduction

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  Nicomedia sits beneath the streets of modern İzmit, Turkey, its marble foundations buried under one of the most densely populated cities in the country. For centuries it was the eastern capital of the Roman Empire, the seat from which emperors launched persecutions, survived palace fires, and watched the old world crack apart. What made a city on the edge of Asia Minor the hinge of so much history? That is the question this documentary sets out to answer.

  The city's story begins not with Rome but with a single Greek word: Astacus, meaning lobster. That was the name of the Megarian colony founded here in 712-711 BC. After destruction and rebuilding, it emerged as Nicomedia, named for the Bithynian king who raised it from the rubble in 264 BC. By the time Roman emperors chose it as their home, it had already outlived one civilization and was mid-way through a second.

• 2. From Colony to Capital

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  Nicomedes I of Bithynia rebuilt the city in 264 BC, and in doing so he gave it both a new name and a new destiny. From its perch on the northeastern edge of Asia Minor, Nicomedia commanded the roads leading deep into the continent. That geography would define its purpose for the next thousand years.

  Under the Roman Empire it became the metropolis and capital of the province of Bithynia. The governor Pliny the Younger wrote repeatedly to the Emperor Trajan about it in his Epistles, and those letters read like dispatches from a city always under construction, always slightly over budget. Pliny describes a senate-house, an aqueduct, a forum, a temple of Cybele, and a great fire that left the city badly damaged. His letters from 110 AD record one particularly embarrassing episode: the Nicomedians had spent 3,318,000 sesterces on an aqueduct that ran into engineering troubles not once but twice and was never completed. Trajan wrote back instructing Pliny to finish the job and to look into whether official corruption explained the waste.

  The city was cosmopolitan and commercially prosperous, well supplied by two to three aqueducts, one of which dated to Hellenistic times. Its public face included a theatre, a colonnaded street, and a large Roman garrison under Trajan. A temple of Demeter stood in a sacred precinct on a hill above the harbor, and the city collected the official cults of Rome eagerly, with temples to the Emperor Commodus, a sacred precinct dedicated to Augustus, and a temple of Roma from the late Republic.

• 3. Diocletian's Eastern Throne

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  In 286 AD the Emperor Diocletian designated Nicomedia the eastern capital of the Roman Empire, the most senior of the imperial capitals under the system he was building. When he formally introduced the Tetrarchy in 293, the city's position at the top of that hierarchy was locked in for the next three decades.

  Diocletian had already begun reshaping Nicomedia physically. After the Goths sacked it in 253 AD, the city had suffered, but when Diocletian made it his capital he undertook grand restorations. He built an enormous palace, an armory, a mint, and new shipyards. The city he constructed was designed to project imperial authority from the edge of the known world, and for a generation it did exactly that.

  The historian Arrian was born in Nicomedia, and the great Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca came there in his final years, dying by suicide in the nearby settlement of Libyssa, which modern maps place at Diliskelesi, Gebze. The city drew remarkable figures across centuries, from generals fleeing lost wars to scholars building new ones.

• 4. The Persecution of 303

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  On the 23rd of February 303 AD, the pagan festival of the Terminalia, Diocletian ordered the newly built Christian church at Nicomedia torn down, its scriptures burned, and its precious stones confiscated. The following day he issued what history calls his First Edict Against the Christians, extending those same measures to every church across the Empire.

  The destruction of the church set off a chain of events that spiraled beyond anyone's control. By the end of February a fire consumed part of Diocletian's palace. Sixteen days later a second fire broke out. An investigation followed but no one was officially charged. Galerius, Diocletian's Caesar, placed the blame on the Christians and ordered the execution of two palace eunuchs he accused of conspiring to start the fires. Six more executions followed through the end of April 303.

  Among those recorded as dying in Nicomedia during this period were Saint George, Anthimus the bishop, Theopemptus the bishop, and Juliana of Nicomedia in 304. Pantaleon of Nicomedia died in 305, and Adrian of Nicomedia in 306. Galerius eventually declared the city unsafe and left ostentatiously for Rome; Diocletian followed soon after. The emperor who had made Nicomedia the seat of empire departed it in the shadow of fires he could not explain.

• 5. Constantine and the Transfer of Power

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  The Tetrarchy that Diocletian built finally collapsed at the Battle of Chrysopolis, fought at Üsküdar in 324 AD. The western emperor Constantine the Great defeated Licinius there and became the sole ruler of the Roman world. Nicomedia served as his interim capital for the next six years.

  Constantine died in 337 in a royal villa near Nicomedia, having spent his final years near the city he had used as a stepping stone. By then he had already moved the empire's symbolic center. In 330 he declared the nearby city of Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople, the new Roman capital. Nicomedia did not collapse after that transfer. Its position at the convergence of the Asiatic roads leading toward the new capital meant it remained a major military and commercial node. An eighth-century plague drove the Emperor Constantine V from Constantinople in 746-47 and he established his court at Nicomedia for a time.

• 6. Earthquake, Crusade, and Ottoman Conquest

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  On the 24th of August 358, a major earthquake struck Nicomedia and caused extensive devastation. A fire followed the quake and completed the destruction. The city was rebuilt, but on a smaller scale than before. By the time the Persian geographer Ibn Khurdadhbih described it, most of the old seaward city had been abandoned and was in ruins, with habitation restricted to the hilltop citadel.

  The First and Second Crusades both encamped at Nicomedia, and in 1204 the city fell briefly into the hands of the Latin Empire after Constantinople was taken by the Fourth Crusade. The seneschal Thierry de Loos made the city his base in late 1206 and converted the church of Saint Sophia into a fortress. Theodore I Laskaris, Emperor of Nicaea, subjected the Crusader position to constant raids. De Loos was captured by Nicaean soldiers, and by the summer of 1207 the Emperor Henry of Flanders agreed to evacuate Nicomedia in exchange for de Loos and other prisoners.

  The city returned to Byzantine control but faced a new threat after the Byzantine defeat at the Battle of Bapheus in 1302. The Ottomans besieged it in 1304 and again in 1330. It finally fell to them in 1337. The Byzantines briefly recovered it after the Battle of Ankara, but in 1419 it passed definitively into Ottoman hands under Sultan Orhan Gazi's successors, closing a chapter that had run for over two thousand years.

• 7. What the Rubble Holds

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  The ruins of Nicomedia lie beneath İzmit, and the density of the modern city has made systematic excavation difficult. Before the twentieth century transformed the area, sections of Roman defensive walls and several aqueducts were still visible to observers on the ground. A second-century AD marble nymphaeum on Istanbul Street, a large cistern in the city's Jewish cemetery, and fragments of the harbor wall are among the traces that survive.

  A third-century CE tomb inscription found in Nicomedia, belonging to Aurelius Esthelasios and Aurelia Thamar, shows Jewish symbols including a menorah, shofar, and the Sukkot species of lulav and etrog. Aurelius is described in the inscription as a "reader," meaning a reader of the Hebrew scriptures. The inscription is evidence of Jewish migration from Macedonia to Asia Minor and of a diasporic community present in the city during the Roman period.

  The 1999 İzmit earthquake, which seriously damaged the modern city, also uncovered a wealth of ancient statuary during debris clearing, including statues of Hercules, Athena, Diocletian, and Constantine. In April 2016 a more extensive excavation of Diocletian's Palace began under the supervision of the Kocaeli Museum, which estimated the palace site covers 60,000 square meters. The ground beneath İzmit is still giving back pieces of the city that once shaped an empire.