Byzantine Culture

History · Article

Constantinople to Istanbul

Mehmed II repopulated a half-empty city and made it an Ottoman capital. What happened to the Byzantine buildings, the Greek population, the name, and what survives in Istanbul today.

The city Mehmed II entered on 29 May 1453 was not a metropolis. Its population had fallen to perhaps fifty thousand, it had fields and orchards inside its walls, whole districts stood derelict, and three days of sack had emptied what remained.

Within thirty years it was the largest city in Europe again, with a population approaching a hundred thousand and rising. That recovery was deliberate policy, and it is the most important fact about the transition.

Repopulation

Mehmed moved fast. He ordered the return of the inhabitants who had fled or been enslaved, ransoming some himself. He then applied sürgün, compulsory population transfer, bringing in Muslims, Christians and Jews from across his territories — Anatolians, Balkan Christians, Armenians, and Sephardic Jews welcomed after the expulsion from Spain in 1492.

Incoming groups were given houses, tax exemptions and, in many cases, whole quarters. Markets were built, the water supply restored, and the covered bazaar begun.

The result was a city more religiously and ethnically mixed than the Byzantine one had been. By the sixteenth century it was, by some measures, the largest city in the world.

The Name

Istanbul is not a Turkish invention or a 1453 renaming. It derives from the Greek phrase eis tin polin — “to the city” — which is what people in the surrounding region had said for centuries when they meant going to Constantinople.

For most of the Ottoman period several names were in official and informal use: Kostantiniyye on coins and documents, Dersaadet and Der-i Saadet (“gate of felicity”) in court usage, Istanbul in speech. The Turkish Post Office formalised Istanbul as the sole name in 1930 and asked foreign correspondents to use it.

The city was also no longer the capital after 1923, when Ankara took the role — the first time in sixteen centuries that the settlement on the Bosphorus did not govern an empire.

What Happened to the Churches

The pattern was neither wholesale destruction nor preservation.

Converted to mosques: Hagia Sophia immediately, as the sultan’s own foundation; the Chora in 1511; the Pantokrator shortly after 1453; Hagia Eirene became an armoury; and a substantial number of smaller churches over the following century, usually as a quarter’s population changed.

Left to the Christians: a significant number, including the church that housed the patriarchate. The terms varied by district — quarters that had surrendered rather than been stormed retained more.

Demolished or collapsed: the Great Palace, already ruinous in 1453, disappeared under later building; the Church of the Holy Apostles, the burial place of the emperors and the second church of the city, was demolished in 1461 to make way for the Fatih mosque. Its loss is the single greatest architectural casualty of the transition.

Conversion generally preserved. Mosaics and frescoes were plastered or boarded over rather than destroyed, which is why the Chora and Hagia Sophia programmes survived to be uncovered in the twentieth century. Had those buildings remained in Christian use, they would have been redecorated repeatedly.

The Patriarchate

Mehmed reconstituted the Orthodox church under his authority within months. He summoned Gennadios Scholarios — a monk, the leading opponent of the union of Florence, and therefore a man with no western sympathies — and installed him as patriarch in January 1454.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate received jurisdiction over the Orthodox population of the empire, with authority over marriage, inheritance, education and internal justice — the millet system described in Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire. It moved premises several times and settled in 1600 at the church of St George in the Phanar district, where it remains.

The Greeks of the City

A Greek Orthodox community — the Rum of Istanbul — continued without interruption for five centuries, concentrated in the Phanar and later in Pera and the Princes’ Islands.

The Phanariot families supplied the Ottoman state with dragomans, diplomats and the princes of Moldavia and Wallachia, as the Byzantine legacy in Romania describes.

The twentieth century ended it. The community numbered perhaps 200,000 in 1900. It was explicitly exempted from the Greek–Turkish population exchange of 1923, and then reduced by the wealth tax of 1942, which fell disproportionately on non-Muslims; by the Istanbul pogrom of 6–7 September 1955, in which Greek homes, businesses and churches were attacked over two nights; and by expulsions in 1964. Today the Greek population of Istanbul is counted in the low thousands, and the Ecumenical Patriarch is required by Turkish law to be a Turkish citizen — which, with a community that small, is a real constraint on the institution’s future.

What Survives

For a visitor, Byzantine Istanbul is there but requires looking for.

Standing and visitable: Hagia Sophia; the Chora (Kariye); Hagia Eirene; the Zeyrek mosque (Pantokrator); the Fethiye mosque (Pammakaristos), with fourteenth-century mosaics in its side chapel; the Kalenderhane mosque; the Little Hagia Sophia (Sergios and Bakchos, 530s); the Basilica Cistern and several other cisterns.

Ruins and traces: the land walls, walkable for kilometres; the Hippodrome’s spine, with the Egyptian obelisk, the Serpent Column and the Walled Obelisk still standing where they were placed; the burnt Column of Constantine; the Aqueduct of Valens; the Tekfur Sarayı palace; the substructures and mosaic floor of the Great Palace, displayed in a small museum.

Removed: the four gilt bronze horses in Venice; the relics in Paris, Venice and dozens of European treasuries; the manuscripts in the Vatican, Paris, Venice and Oxford.

The Two Cities

Modern Istanbul carries both histories awkwardly. Turkish national narrative has at various times treated the Byzantine past as the defeated other, as part of an inclusive Anatolian heritage, or simply as a tourism asset. The reconversion of Hagia Sophia and the Chora to mosques in 2020 was read internationally as a statement about which history takes precedence.

For Greeks, the loss of the city remains a live cultural memory, expressed in the Megali Idea of the nineteenth century and in folk tradition long after — the legend of the marble emperor waiting in a cave, and of the priest who will return to finish the interrupted liturgy.

What is not in dispute is the physical continuity. The same walls, the same water system, the same harbours, the same hills, and in several cases the same buildings, have served two empires and a republic. Very few cities can say as much.

The Repopulation, in Numbers

Mehmed’s demographic engineering is documented in Ottoman surveys, and the figures show how deliberate it was.

The city’s population in 1453 has been estimated at between 30,000 and 50,000 — a fraction of its Justinianic peak of perhaps half a million. Large districts were fields, orchards and ruins inside the walls.

The first Ottoman survey of the city, conducted in 1477, counted households by community. The totals give roughly:

CommunityHouseholds
Muslimc. 8,950
Greek Orthodoxc. 3,150
Jewishc. 1,650
Armenianc. 370
European (Galata, Latin)c. 330
Othersseveral hundred

At a conventional multiplier of five persons per household, that is a population somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 within twenty-five years of the conquest, and rising sharply thereafter. By the mid-sixteenth century Istanbul was probably the largest city in Europe and among the largest in the world.

The composition is the significant part. Muslims were a clear majority and the city was also, by design, a place of several substantial non-Muslim communities, each administered through its own religious authority under the millet arrangement described in Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire.

A Walking Route

For a visitor who wants to see Byzantine Istanbul specifically, a route in roughly chronological order is more useful than a list.

Morning, the centre. Start at the Hippodrome: the Egyptian obelisk of Thutmose III on its Theodosian base, the Serpent Column from Delphi, the Walled Obelisk. Then Hagia Sophia, then the Basilica Cistern opposite, then the Great Palace Mosaic Museum behind the Blue Mosque. Walk to the burnt Column of Constantine (Çemberlitaş) on the line of the Mese.

Midday, the middle city. Little Hagia Sophia (Sergios and Bakchos, 530s) down toward the Marmara. Then north to the Aqueduct of Valens, and the Zeyrek Mosque — the Pantokrator monastery — on the ridge above the Golden Horn.

Afternoon, the walls. Taxi or tram out to Edirnekapı for the Chora. Then the land walls, which can be walked in sections; the stretch from Edirnekapı south is among the better preserved. The Tekfur Sarayı palace is at the northern end near Blachernae.

If time allows. The Fethiye Mosque (Pammakaristos) with its parekklesion mosaics; the Kalenderhane Mosque; the Yedikule fortress enclosing the walled-up Golden Gate; and the Archaeological Museum, which holds the sarcophagi, the Porphyrius charioteer bases and a great deal else.

Two days is enough to see all of it without hurrying. One is enough to see the centre.

What Is Still Being Found

Byzantine Istanbul continues to produce discoveries, generally because of construction rather than research.

The Yenikapı excavations, conducted from 2004 during work on the Marmaray rail tunnel, uncovered the silted harbour of Theodosius: thirty-seven shipwrecks of the fifth to eleventh centuries, the first Byzantine hulls ever excavated, along with vast quantities of pottery, organic material and — beneath the harbour deposits — Neolithic occupation levels dating back some eight thousand years.

The dig delayed the rail project by years and produced the most important body of Byzantine maritime archaeology in existence, discussed in the Byzantine navy.

Smaller finds are continuous. Cisterns turn up beneath shops; stretches of wall and substructure appear during roadworks; the Theodosian harbour’s neighbours remain unexcavated.

The implication is that the Byzantine city is largely still there, under a modern one of fifteen million people, and that most of it will never be dug because there is a city on top of it.

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