The site Constantine chose was an ancient city enjoying a superb strategic site at the entrance to the Black Sea and the command of trade routes east and west: Byzantion. He renamed the city after himself, as previous emperors had done in imitation of Alexander’s precedent: Constantinople. The old name persisted, eventually modified in academic Latin to Byzantium. It was destined to provide a new identity for the Eastern Roman state, whose capital it remained over the next millennium, in what has commonly become known in history as the Byzantine Empire.12 But for countless numbers of people of
...more
