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Constantinople was
founded by Emperor Constantine
the Great in 333 AD as the "New
Rome,” but after the
sack of the old Rome in 410 it became
the Only Rome (so far as the emperor
was concerned). The capital of the Roman
Empire was now on the Bosphorus.
Though most of western Europe—formerly
the heartland of the empire—had fallen
to “barbarian” peoples
such as the Visigoths and Vandals,
the eastern territories, Emperor
Justinian (527-565AD), a great
general and statesman, preserved and
expanded the empire’s power to
include Greece and the Balkans, Anatolia,
Syria, Palestine, Egypt, eastern North
Africa, and even parts of Italy.
Today people remember Justinian for Constantinople’s
grandest building, the great Church
of the Holy Wisdom, or Hagia
Sophia (Ayasofya).
Finished in 537, it reigned as the greatest
church in Christendom for
almost a thousand years.
Able emperors reigned at times through
the centuries after Justinian, but
they were not great enough to keep
the empire from decline.
In the 11th century the Seljuk
Turks invaded Anatolia from
the east and built a powerful
empire in central and
eastern Anatolia, once the Byzantine
heartland.
The Crusader armies of
Europe marched through in the 12th
and 13th centuries, doing battle
with the Seljuks as
well as threatening—and
in 1204 even attacking,
conquering and sacking—Constantinople.
By the late 1200s, Byzantine power
was much reduced in Anatolia, and Turkish
warlords on its eastern borders
around Nicaea (Iznik)
and Sögüt had
become serious threats. One of these
warlord principalities, founded by
a chieftain named Osman,
grew into the Ottoman
Empire which in
1453 conquered the imperial capital
of Constantinople (Istanbul)
and soon thereafter swept away the
last vestiges of Byzantine rule.
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