Byzantium

Byzantium was a city now known as Istanbul, pronounced 'biz-ANT-i-erm (or oom'), IPA: /bɪz ˈænt ɪ ə (or u)m/, or, less commonly, 'buy-ZANT-i-um (or oom), /baɪ ˈzænt ɪ ə (or u)m/. Between these two names, it was called Constantinople. The adjective meaning 'to do with Byzantium' is Byzantine.

• The original city was a Greek colony. The legends state that it was founded by king Byzas of Megara around 670 BCE. Its Greek name, Βυζάντιον (byzantion) is derived from his name (Βὐζας).
• Its site, on the southern tip of the northern side of the Hellespont at the gateway to the Black Sea, with good anchorage in the Golden Horn, made it ideal for the Emperor Constantine to choose for the new capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Building of a new city on the old site was begun in 326 CE, and Constantinople (from the Greek meaning 'city of Constantine') was consecrated in 330. It was the capital of the Empire, and home of the Eastern Emperors, until it fell.
• In 1453, the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed or Mehmet II ('Mehmed the Conqueror') captured Constantinople. (He was aged 21 at the time, and deserves much credit for his strategy and determination.) The Fall of Constantinople was marked by looting of plunder, rape and enslavement of the able-bodied Christian defenders and slaughter of many of the rest. The city was renamed Istanbul, and served as the capital of the Ottoman Empire until 1923, when, with the foundation of the Republic of Turkey, the capital was moved to Ankara. Istanbul is still the name of the city on the Bosporus.

There are several theories as to how Byzantium (Byzantion in Greek) got its name. One legend is that Byzas, son of the King of Megara, was sent forth to find a site for a new Megarian colony. He came across the point where the Sea of Marmara met the southern end of the Bosporus. He then married the daughter of the King of Thrace who brought as her dowry the land on which, in 658 bc, he built the city which he named after himself. There are variations of this legend. Another is that the name is actually derived from the Proto-Indo-European bhugo ‘stag’. In 196 Septimius Severus (146–211), Roman emperor (193–211), destroyed the city but decided to rebuild it and name it briefly Augusta Antonina in honour of his son, nicknamed Caracalla (his imperial name was Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus Augustus) (188–217). In 324 building of the new, and bigger, city began. When Constantine I the Great made the city the capital of the Roman Empire in 330—because of its better strategic position—he gave it his own name, the ‘City of Constantine’ from the Greek Constantinoupolis. It was thought of and sometimes referred to as the New Rome (in Greek Nea Romē) although it was not until 381 that that title was first used in an official document. In the 10th century it was known by the Greeks as Stanbulin or Bulin. It remained the capital of the Byzantine Empire until captured by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Thereafter, it was popularly known as Istanbul, a spoken Turkish corruption of the Greek eis tin polin ‘into the city’. Having been the capital of the Ottoman Empire between 1453 and 1923 (Everett-Heath, 2020)

Two poems by W.B. Yeats, 'Sailing to Byzantium' (1926) and 'Byzantium' (1930), use Byzantium as a symbol of riches, and of spirituality and religion. The sacred city is a home of art and seriousness.