When I studied world history in middle school, I was very troubled by the difficult names of foreign names and place names, but strangely there were two foreign place names that were particularly strongly remembered.
"After the Turkish Empire's Sultan Mehmed II captured Constantinople in 1453, it was renamed Istanbul." I don't know if it is because these two place names are more rhymed together, so many years have passed, and the two place names of Constantinople and Istanbul have been lingering in the mind.
At that time, it was only rote memorization, and I knew nothing except that Constantinople in the past and Istanbul in present-day Turkey. It was not until I later read the volume "Constantine the Great and His Time" in the series of books "Born to Be King" that I knew that the city of Constantinople had a great history.
Constantinople is named after the famous Constantine the Great in history. His full name was Gaius Flavius Valerius Constantius, the first monarch of rome to convert to Christianity, and was revered as Constantine the Great.
No matter where in this world, since the ancient emperor's family has been full of various dog blood incidents such as chicken flying and dog jumping, leaving aside the various political measures of Constantine the Great, just from the perspective of the family, it is enough to make people look at the hilarity of half a day.
His father, Constantius I Kroll, was augustus in the west of the Roman Empire, a position equivalent to a historical emperor. He was the eldest son of his father, but many considered an illegitimate son, only because his mother, Helena, was nothing more than a maid in a small inn, and it did not seem to be worthy of his noble father.
In China's succession of thrones, it was natural for the son to inherit his father's inheritance, but this was not the case in the succession system of the Roman Empire.
At that time, Rome practiced the co-rule of the four emperors. There was an Augustus in the east and the west, and each Augustus had a Caesar as his deputy. Augustus voluntarily abdicated after a certain number of years, and the two Caesars were automatically promoted to Augustus, and two Caesars were promoted again.
At the time of his death, Constantius I actually had his own Caesar, that is, the historically unknown Severus II, but the British legions were established as Constantine Caesar, and from the traditional system, Constantine's move was tantamount to a usurpation.
What happened next was even more noisy, Constantine's father-in-law, augusto Maximian, plotting to kill the son-in-law, who thought that at the crucial moment his daughter Fausta was still ignoring her father to her husband.
The plot eventually went bankrupt, and Constantine took the opportunity to declare Maxime an enemy of the state, thus breaking the imperial ideology that had always ruled the four Roman emperors.
If all this were true and not wild history, we might think that without Fausta's crucial choice, there would be no historical Constantine the Great. However, more than twenty years later, it was precisely because of her that Constantine's family staged another family ethics drama in which the stepmother killed her stepdaughter and was later executed by her husband, and it is said that a large number of other family members and friends were implicated this time.
The unsettling of the backyard caused an even greater storm, with the inhabitants of Rome cursing him as a way to vent their grievances. Coupled with the fact that the economic and cultural center of gravity of the empire had shifted eastward, Constantine finally decided to build a victorious city of his own. In 330 AD, Constantine moved its capital to Byzantium and expanded it, later renaming it Constantinople, which is now Istanbul.
In the "Born to Be King" series of books, "Constantine the Great and His Time", the length of the book can only be regarded as a pamphlet of historical figures, but it is a big drama in history.
In addition to Constantine, there are also Ehnaton, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Caesar, Cleopatra, Augustus, Nero and other historical emperors who have appeared in this series.
Each volume is written by a well-known historical researcher, and although it is short in length, it is absolutely rich in content, and the language is wonderful and not cumbersome. Perhaps history has prejudiced some of them because of the times, but after reading this series of books, you will have a more comprehensive understanding of their history.
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