Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 05 Mar 2022


Taken: 05 Mar 2022

0 favorites     2 comments    7 visits

See also...


Keywords

Published
2001
Author
Michael Angold
Book


Authorizations, license

Visible by: Everyone
All rights reserved

7 visits


Byzantium

Byzantium

Comments
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
2 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Byzantine civilization was far more original and creative than it is usually given credit for. Its domed churches challenge classical temple and Gothic cathedrals in their originality and daring, while, while its mosaics vie with classical sculpture and Renaissance painting as supreme works of art. Byzantine civilization was largely the creation of the city of Byzantium, or Constantinople, which is where we must begin. The massive hugely impressive transformation that the city underwent in the centuries after 1453 -- when it became Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire -- did not obliterate the Byzantine city.. . . ix -Notes for Travelers

Chapter One

THE CITY OF CONSTANTINE


Byzantium was an old Greek polis, or city-state, on the Bosphorus, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosporus never in antiquity of great significance. But this changed when Emperor Constantine the Great (306-37) refounded it a a new imperial capital in 324 and renamed it Constantinople -- the city of Constantine -- in his own honour. It was to serve as a new Rome, from which the Emperor could survey the most vulnerable frontiers of the empire, which stretched along the Danube and the Euphrates. . . . Page 1

. . . The capital city and the civilization thus created derived added significance from the way they were seen as a thanks-offering to the Mother of God, who, it was fervently believed, safeguarded them. The Byzantines were the chosen people of the New Testament, the new Israelites’ Constantinople was the God-guarded city, the new Jerusalem. . . . Page 2


. . . . Another way of setting his stamp of Constantinople was by enlarging the Hippodrome, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippodrome where emperor and citizens were united in the enjoyment of the chariot racing. Theodosius had an obelism brought from Karnak in Egypt and set it up along the central ridge, the ‘spina,’ of the hippodrome . . . Page 5

. . . At last in 412, the government of Theodosiu’s grandson and namesake built a line of walls, which still stands, nearly a mile west of Constantine’s walls. Perhaps a third was added to the area of the city. A contemporary noted that the population of the new Rome was now beginning to outstrip that of the old. We can therefore think in terms of the population of at least quarter of a million. ~ Page 5
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walls_of_Constantinople
2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.

Sign-in to write a comment.