Quotes About Constantinople

It was the possibilities of this site – what it offered for trade, defense, and food – that made Constantinople the key to imperial destinies and brought so many armies to its gate. "The seat of the Roman Empire is Constantinople," wrote George Trapezuntios, "and he who is and remains Emperor of the Romans is also the Emperor of the whole earth.

They had no particular reason to evolve because siege warfare itself remained static. The basic techniques and equipment – blockade, mining, and escalade, the use of battering rams, catapults, towers, tunnels, and ladders – these were largely unchanging for longer than anyone could recall. The advantage always lay with the defender; in the case of Constantinople its coastal position increased that weighting.

Had the Saracens captured Constantinople in the seventh century rather than the fifteenth, all Europe – and America – might be Muslim today.

At dawn on May 25, 1453, the bells of Constantinople's churches rang out an urgent appeal.

Constantinople, the largest city in the world and capital of the Byzantine Roman Empire (Rum to Arabs and Turks), had fallen. Europe's last surviving link to the age of the Caesars would be remade as a Muslim city and renamed Istanbul. It would remain the headquarters of the sultan's descendants for the next 460 years.

1453: Coffee is introduced to Constantinople by Ottoman Turks. The world's first coffee shop, Kiva Han, opens there in 1475. Turkish law makes it legal for a woman to divorce her husband if he fails to provide her with her daily quota of coffee.

A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once—not oftener.

formal declaration of jihad in Constantinople, followed by well-organized demonstrations on the streets."32 Proclamations and pamphlets were distributed.

So too the famous preacher and bishop of Constantinople, John, who was so eloquent in the pulpit that he earned the sobriquet Chrysostom, which means "golden-mouthed.

And after the sack of Constantinople in 1204, we have few examples of any literary activity except by religious writers (who, like cockroaches, seem capable of surviving any catastrophe).

The history of this place with three names–Byzantion or Byzantium (c. 670 BC to AD 330), Constantinople, al-Qustantiniyye then Kostantiniyye (c. AD 330 to 1930), Istanbul or Stimboli (c. AD 1453 onwards)–is often isolated into discrete blocks: ancient, Byzantine, Ottoman, Turkish.

Turks have long admired the sultan, Mehmet II, for his military triumphs, especially his capture of Constantinople, now known as Istanbul, in 1453.

At the end of the Roman Empire, in the Byzantine period, the empire shrinks and shrinks until it consists of one city, Constantinople, and the Ottoman Turks can encircle it.

1453: FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE You might not think it was a big deal (after all, cities were falling all over the place all of the time)

As to Constantinople. That jewel in the crown of the Byzantine Empire. That continent-straddling stronghold of the Eastern Orthodox Church. That famously inviolable walled city ruled by generations of interbred usurping nut-jobs a pantheon of families so tortuously intertwined as to be the basis of our modern adjective byzantine.

The trauma pervaded and persisted in many ways. Since Constantinople was taken on a Tuesday, Christians regarded every Tuesday thereafter as an unpropitious day.

Lots of people have been afraid of the vanity of things! I´ve overcome it. Lots reflect hard; I have no need to reflect. I don´t rejoice over the good and don´t despair over the bad. If I hear that the Greeks have taken Constantinople, it´s just the same to me as if the Turks were taking Athens.

As from the 1490s, the double-headed eagle began to appear as the symbol of state in Moscow as in Vienna, as indeed in Constantinople.

Also in 1492, and also for the first time, the 'new Constantinople—Moscow' may have been given its more familiar label of 'the Third Rome'.

The global spice trade underwent an upheaval in 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Turks

Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which was the largest roofed building to be built in Europe until the thirteenth century.

Female infanticide was as high in Mecca as in Constantinople, Athens, and Rome - a practice the Quran was to address directly and condemn repeatedly.

Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.

At Ravenna in Italy, where the buildings of Justinian's time have remained unaltered, one can study, better even than at Constantinople and Rome, the graceful Byzantine capitals and columns and brilliant mosaics, and the early Christian basilican type of architecture.