Constantinople as Palimpsest

From its origins as Byzantium to the Late Empire, Constantinople has been home to some of the world’s finest and grandest monuments. From the hippodrome to the forum of Constantine, the monuments of Constantinople were major spaces for Byzantines to engage in public life, and spaces for their imperial patrons to control and promote their ideologies. Through these monuments, readers can track the historical development of the city, with many of these monuments being constructed between the 4th-7th centuries, during the territorial height of the Empire.

This map provides an introductory sampling of some of the notable monuments and structures of Constantinople. Readers may find especially interesting the hippodrome and forum of Constantine, both of which provide detailed entries on the sites and artwork present within each monument. Also of interest are the Theodosian Walls of Constantinople, which highlight the military history and longevity of the empire. 

Readers may also wish to consult the Exchange Economy and Imperial Presence, as the sites in these sections shed light on how Constantinople’s monuments interacted with the city’s global economy, and the imperial bureaucracy.

One cannot discuss the growth and development of Constantinople without considering the city’s role as the home of the imperial bureaucracy and the Emperor. Almost every emperor and their administration left their mark on the city from the forums they established to the churches and monasteries they founded. From the artwork to the presence of imperial events and figures a resident of the city could not have avoided the presence of the state.

Major social centers and spaces give the impression of how the public, the aristocracy, and the imperial administration interacted with one another. This newest and ever-expanding section also hopes to live an imprint over how an emperor and his courtiers left their mark on the city, and how they, their predecessors and successors may have “walked” the city. Ultimately, the map shows how the political institutions and changes of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire correspond with the landscape of the Basileuousa (Queen of Cities)   

Readers may also wish to consult the Exchange Economy and Monumental Architecture sections, as the sites in these sections shed light on how the imperial administration and the emperor left shaped the major public and economic sites and centers of the city.

Administrative Regions:

The Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae

This map is a visualization based on the information contained in a document that purports to have been created under Emperor Theodosios II (r. 416-450) in 425. It takes for granted a division of the city into fourteen regions, and catalogues the urban features of each of these regions. Despite the fact that the regions supposedly date back a century to the reign of Constantine the Great (d. 337), there is no corresponding late antique map or detailed text that articulates exactly where these regions lay. Scholars have made various attempts at reconstruction, and the regions that we have re-drawn simply represent a working consensus. The full title of the document in question is:

Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae: Urbs Constantinopolitana Nova Roma

Or,

Register of the city of Constantinople:

The City Constantinople, New Rome

Clicking on each region will highlight its outline, and provide the information from the Notitia as well as a brief commentary composed by a student researcher.

There have been many attempts to make use of the information in the Notitia as there is no other surviving survey of the city with such detail. At the same time, even the Notitia leaves much to be desired, and even the information it provides is difficult to interpret into real economic terms.

Readers should consult as starting places:

Alexander Kazhdan, "Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae," in Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (Oxford, 1991)

Marlia M. Mango, "The Commercial Map of Constantinople," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 54 (2000) 189-207

John Matthews, "The Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae," in Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity ed. L. Grig and G. Kelly (Oxford, 2012) 81-115

Dimitris P. Drakoulis, "The Functional Organization of Early Byzantine Constantinople, according to the Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae," in Ανοιχτοσύνη / Openness: Historical and Philosophical Studies in Honour of Prof. Emeritus Vasiliki Papoulia ed. P. Doukellis, Th. Korres, Sp. Sfetas, and F. Toloudi (Thessaloniki, 2012) 153-184

It is extremely difficult to generate an image of what might be thought of as private life -- at any social level from "the poor" (πτωχοί) to the imperial family -- for the Byzantine period. No text such as Xenophon's Oikonomikos exists that would allow us to feel as though we are peering into the daily life of an elite household, and pieces of information that can be garnered refer almost entirely to the imperial family whose lives by definition were not "private."

The items placed on this map are few, but represent student researchers' work to present a range of items, places, and scholarship that might be pieced together as the beginnings of a mosaic of private domestic experiences.

Insulae (modeled on analogy from those that have been studied at Roman Ostia) and Palaces represent living quarters for those we might think of as being in the "upper" and "middle" classes. Correspondingly, hostels, hospitals, orphanages, and almshouses represent a sampling of possible living quarters for the dependent and powerless residents of the city.

Gardens, baths, fountains, and the hippodrome give the beginnings of an impression of where public congregations and meeting places (whether planned or accidental) might have occurred, and where the city's residents may have spent their leisure time when not at home.

Readers will want to compare the impression generated by this information with that generated by the Exchange Economy and Religious Life maps, as the information collected in those places is obviously relevant for imagining what a citizen of Constantinople might find themselves doing on any given day.

Exchange Economy

Goods and people flowed into and out of Constantinople: from the gates of the city down the more heavily trafficked northern branch of the Mese; from the northern and southern harbors into the central Mese and the Portico of Domninos along the great columned commercial main street of the Makros Embolos; and, from myriad local centers of industry and production.

This map provides an introductory sampling of some of the features of this commercial and economic life. Readers may find especially interesting the recent shipwreck discoveries in the Harbor of Theodosius, the square denoting the granary known as the "Horrea Lamia" between the Harbor of Theodosius and the Harbor of Julian, and the pins describing the life of various commercial guilds in Constantinople (recovered from the tenth-century Book of the Eparch).

This map should be consulted in combination with the Administrative Regions map.

The traditional description of the Byzantine Empire holds that it "combined" Greek culture, Roman government, and the Christian religion. Scholars have since moved away from these over-simplifications as it is difficult to not think (for instance) of the Christian religion as indelibly both Roman and Greek, not to mention its original form as a Jewish schism or cult. Nevertheless, it is the case that the City of Constantinople was founded as an explicitly Christian city. This statement should not to be taken to exclude the fact that the Christianity (or Christianities) of the city were very different from those that can be witnessed or experienced today, nor from the fact that there were many groups that self-identified as not-Christian whose religious practices also left their own material traces.

This map presents a sampling of the material traces of the imperially-sponsored Christian life and practice of the City of Constantinople. The vast number of churches and monasteries (identified as purple or white blocks with an internal cross) on the base map, and how few of them we have catalogued (as denoted by having a green overlay) show how much work we still have to do simply to present what is already known.

Nevertheless, the little that is here can indicate the variety and liveliness of the Christian practices that animated Constantinople. Readers can recover how a shrine to St. Euphemia sprang up between the Palaces of Antiochos and Lausos to dominate the West side of the great Hippodrome, get just a sniff of the sensory overload that would have characterized an entrance into the cathedral of Hagia Sophia, and click on the extended lines to be reminded of how pervasive regular icon processions became in the later empire.

This map combines imperial water management with private or domestic water management, and the places where the two spheres of Constantinopolitan civic life overlapped.

The larger structures of walls and harbors that allowed Constantinople to survive and thrive while surrounded on three sides by water are demarcated by polygons. Furthermore, the imperially funded constructions of massive cisterns (whether open-air or underground) and aqueducts that sustained a population far exceeding the natural fresh water supply to the area are also so demarcated. Control of these was an imperial interest.

On the other hand, while public baths (here exemplified by the Baths of Zeuxippus near the Hippodrome and the Baths of Constantine near the Church of the Holy Apostles on the Fourth Hill) were imperially funded, they were public spaces in the sense of being devoted to use by private persons.

The mass of individual points (represented by pins) was generated by Christopher Wyckoff from the maps in Crow, Bardill, Bayliss, Bono, and Krausmüller's study The Water Supply of Byzantine Constantinople (2008). Each pin denotes a known location of a private water cistern. Though each case is its own story, in general these may be assumed to have been cisterns built to hold fresh water for a single elite residence. Such cisterns may have been built and maintained by elites, but they should not be assumed to have only been used by elites. They may well have functioned as neighborhood water supplies that could be "tapped" for use by lesser households.

In sum, these cisterns allow us to generate many possible research questions. Do the cisterns give us a functionally accurate picture of elite residence patterns? If so, in particular, what can be made of the significant density of cisterns in the (relatively dry) ancient city on the acropolis point, and the lesser clusters (within the Great Palace, around the Theodosian forum, or around the Church of Christ Pantokrator)? How influential was the Valens Aqueduct in determining suitable living quarters? What is to be made of the persistent pattern of residential settlement along the northern half of the peninsula?

Perhaps no event has come to symbolize the end of the Middle Ages in the western psyche than the fall of Constantinople to Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453. Although the Byzantine Empire at this point was far from its territorial heyday and ruled little more than Constantinople itself, the loss had a profound emotional toll on Christendom, as the center of Eastern Christianity fell. The fall had profound effects on the city as it would become the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and many of the city’s churches and landmarks were converted into Islamic and Ottoman spaces, such as the Hagia Sophia. The siege itself was notable in its usage of cannons by the Ottomans in bringing down the great Theodosian Walls that had stood for over a thousand years. The destruction of the walls using cannon fire changed military history overnight, rendering the medieval system of castles and fortifications impractical against heavy cannons.

This map highlights the major sights, events, and monuments related to the siege. It offers a combination of historical narration and architectural cataloging in offering a geographic representation of Mehmed’s assault, Constantinople’s defense, and the ultimate fall of the city. The map shows many of the significant fortifications for the defense of the city that had existed since the city’s founding and had been in use throughout its history. The map also conveys the locations and movement of each side’s armies, fleet, and artillery. 

In thinking about the 1453 defenses and ultimate fall of the city, readers will want to compare the impression generated by this information with that generated by the Imperial Presence and Monumental Architecture maps, as the information collected in those places is relevant for imagining the major sights of the city that stood and would have experienced the siege and fall, many of which would be transformed into new Ottoman spaces in the coming centuries.