"After walking through many places, I came to Istanbul, it was like a fairy tale, there were churches and castles..."
"Istanbul" was included in Jay Chou's first album JAY. Located at the junction of Asia and Europe, Istanbul is turkey's ancient capital and the largest city, its long history and civilization tolerance, so it is also an excellent city for travel - Xu Ruoxuan wrote the lyrics of this love song, it is one of the thousands of foreign tourists on the streets of Istanbul, her Istanbul is full of sweet warmth, people almost forget the city's thousands of years of war and vicissitudes.
Istanbul and Istanbul are different translations of the same city, the former is commonly used in Taiwan and overseas, while the latter is the official translation of the Chinese mainland. Both are transliterated names for the Turkish word "?stanbul", "Istanbul" is based on transliteration and paraphrasing, and the word "fort" not only vividly expresses the image of a thousand-year-old city, but also has a wonderful cultural coincidence with its other ancient name, Constantinople, and "Istanbul" is blunt in comparison.
As Xu Ruoxuan wrote the lyrics, Istanbul "has a church and a castle", but it does not look like a fairy tale. As an outpost of the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor, as a bridgehead between European and Asian civilizations, the history of Istanbul was built by the swords and cannons of countless imperial armies. The eastern shores of the Mediterranean have always been known for their collection of ancient civilizations, so when did is Istanbul's first civilization fire burned? This brings us to another ancient name, Byzantium.
Byzantium: From the Divine Age to the Human World
The name Byzantium has a much older history than the more famous Byzantine Empire.
Just as the name of Rome derives from its founder, Romulus, the name by Byzantium comes from the first ruler, or colonizer Byzas. If Romulus was the pioneer of ancient Roman civilization, then Byzantium was the pioneer of ancient Greek civilization.
A distinctive feature of Greek civilization was that instead of forming a unified empire, it gave birth to scattered city-states on the winding Greek Peninsula and the Aegean Islands, collectively known as the Greek city-states, the most powerful and famous of which were Athens and Sparta. The decentralized ruling structure may be related to the fact that ancient Greece did not have a heroic monarch who could unify the entire Greek peninsula, but more importantly, the Greeks regarded the city-state system as the most ideal form of government- the ancient Greek name Gerato suggested that the ideal number of citizens of a country was 5040, Aristotle also emphasized that the population of the city-state should not be too large or too small, and under the guidance of this idea, even the city-state at its peak still maintained the development route of small countries and widows, and once the population of the city-state surged or for other reasons, The Greeks would leave their mother states to colonize overseas. The colonies here are different from the colonies opened up around the world by the European powers during the Great Voyage: although the Greek colonies generally imitate the political system of the suzerainty and retain certain ties with the mother state, they are politically independent and not subordinate to the mother state, that is to say, these colonies are in fact the new Greek city-states, with the same legal status as the so-called "suzerainty", and the Greek colonies are not pejorative in this sense. On the contrary, at that time, these colonies were proud to be the outposts of Greek civilization.
Greek colonies spread throughout the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and Byzantium was one of these colonies. Byzantium' founder, Byzantium, came from Megara, a city-state known for its wealth in central Greece, and was the son of the latter's king, Nessus. In the oracle of Apollo accepted by Delphi, Nessus instructed Byzantium to settle on the other side of the "Kingdom of the Blind", and when Byzantine realized that the "Kingdom of the Blind" referred to The Gate of Ghacca, he led a group of Megara colonists to its opposite shore, and finally completed the task of the oracle in the establishment of Byzantium in 667 BC. Guided by the oracle, 667 BC became the starting point of Byzantine history, although at the time it seemed so insignificant.
Soon Byzantium annexed the "blind nation" of Gac dun, and the privileged location of guarding the outlet of the Black Sea allowed the city-state to prosper quickly, but time was running out for Byzantium. The united Greek city-states resisted the invasion of the Persian Empire from the East but were disorganized by the Attack of the Roman Empire, and as the entire Mediterranean Became rome's inner lake, Byzantium gradually became the eastern province of the Roman Empire. The Assassination of the Roman Emperor Petinacus in 193 AD, the Empire presented the three-legged battle of Severus, Nigel and Albanus. Rome seems to be more prone to a three-headed divide than china's frequent north-south antagonisms, such as the "first three heads" Of Caesar, Crassus and Pompey during the Roman Civil War, or the "last three heads" Octavian, Antony and Rebida. Severus was governor of Pannonia, whose territory was in the middle of the Roman Empire and the first to enter Rome; Nigel was the governor of Syria, based in the eastern Mediterranean—and Byzantium was sandwiched between the two. Which side should be supported?
It was an extremely dangerous venture, but unfortunately Byzantium ended up on the wrong side. The Byzantine-supported Nigel was eventually defeated by Severus in the Valley of Issus, where Alexander defeated Darius five hundred years earlier. Byzantium was almost razed to the ground during the war, and the glorious history of an ancient city came to an end.
It was gold that always shone, and Severus, a Roman knight, certainly estimated the importance of Byzantium, and immediately rebuilt it after the war and quickly restored it to its former glory. More than a hundred years later, the Eastern and Western Roman Empire split, Constantine the Great established a new Rome in Byzantium, and later people honored its name as Constantinople, and this ancient city has since had a second name, which has been used for more than a thousand years.
Constantinople: from Europe to the East
When Byzantium was renamed Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire emerged.
It should be noted that the Byzantine Empire appeared only as a historical concept - its royal family and its people had been calling themselves the Roman Empire in the empire for more than a thousand years, and the Byzantine Empire was not even its informal name, until 1557, when the German historian Herónimo Wolff introduced the term "Byzantine Empire" in his Compilation of Manuscripts of Byzantine Historians in All Dynasties to distinguish between classical Greek literature before the Roman era and Greek literature of the medieval Eastern Roman Empire. This name is obviously more convenient for historians to discuss, so it gradually becomes a common name, just like the "Western Han", "Northern Song", "Later Zhou" and other dynasties in the Chinese dynasty.
Although Constantinople is named after Constantine the Great, its origins can be traced back to Severus. Severus eventually gained imperial power through war, but his succession also unveiled the "crisis of the third century" in the history of the Roman Empire. During this period, frequent civil wars, foreign enemies and economic collapse made the Roman Empire almost subjugated, until Diocletian ascended the throne and abolished the system of hereditary dictatorship of the throne and adopted the four-emperor system of co-governance in order to change the pattern of poverty and weakness, which eventually led to the division of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires. The capital of Western Rome is still Rome, while the capital of Eastern Rome is New Rome, and this naming method represents the succession and transfer of imperial power: from then on, the capital of the empire became the city along the Bosphorus, and Rome, the "city of God", seems to have left the wheel of the times behind.
Constantine the Great's migration was extremely realistic. As the empire's center of gravity shifted eastward, Rome was no longer able to effectively control the empire's eastern territories. After inspecting the cities of Troy, Jerusalem, and Sofia, Constantine the Great built the new capital in Byzantium, on the one hand, he valued its status as a commercial hub and a military fortress, and on the other hand, he also had the ambition of "the gate of the son of heaven and the death of the king". In fact, this is exactly the case: in the history of more than a thousand years, the Byzantine Empire was repeatedly divided by strong neighbors until only a small piece of projectile land remained in Constantinople and, but it was still able to rise from the dead as a bridgehead for Roman and European civilization, and it is not difficult to find that Constantine the Great had a unique vision.
The churches and castles of Constantinople also began to be built in this era, and they were no less large than in Rome - the Grand Palace, the Hippodrome, the Golden Gate, the rows of towers, corner towers and pillboxes... The most famous is the Hagia Sophia, which, after two reconstructions and numerous restorations, maintained its status as the most cathedral for a thousand years until the completion of the Cathedral in Seville.
With such boldness, it is not difficult to understand why the Byzantine Empire would consider itself the Roman Empire — especially when Western Europe entered the so-called "Dark Ages" with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire for a thousand years, the Byzantine Empire was the fire of Western culture, and Constantinople was the center of Western civilization, as described in Steven Ranciman's Byzantine Civilization:
"It has left a glorious legacy in academia and art. It freed all European countries from barbarism and gave other countries the essence of their cultures. Its power and wisdom have protected Christendom for centuries. Constantinople remained the center of the Western civilized world for 11 centuries. ”
Only this quote follows a sentence: "On May 29, 1453, a culture was ruthlessly wiped out." "The destroyed nature was the Byzantine civilization that had survived for thousands of years, and its successor was another ethnic Turk from the East. In 1453, after a long siege, Constantinople finally fell, and the ancient city that had gone through vicissitudes had a new name under the rule of the new master, the Ottoman Empire: Istanbul.
Istanbul: From Christ to Islam
From the 10th century onwards, Turks and Arabs began to call Constantinople "Istanbul", and this name also comes from Constantinople.
Just as many times the capital of China was simply called "Jing" and "Capital", the Byzantine subjects usually simply referred to Constantinople as "city", and the word "Istanbul" is derived from the Greek word for "in the city" and "into the city". After the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in 1453, the official name of the city was used in conjunction with the name of "Constantinople", in fact, in many cases western Europeans called Italinople, while the Turks and Arabs used Istanbul, referring to the same place.
The Byzantine Empire was passed down through the Twelve Dynasties to the Ninety-Three Emperors, and Constantinople even fell during the Fourth Crusade, but it did not affect the continuity of the Byzantine Empire as a whole. But when the pointer of history points to 1453, the situation is no longer the same.
If the really dangerous attacks of the previous thousand years ago had come from Christianity in the broad sense of the word, the Ottoman invasions had their roots in a "pagan" Islam. Religion is another key word in human competition besides politics, and for Constantinople this keyword is particularly heavy.
The first official name of Constantinople was New Rome, which was not an honorary title, but a political and religious affirmation and declaration. Although the imperial capital was Constantinople, the Patriarch of Constantinople also became second only to the Pope, and the original unified Christianity was divided into the Western Church led by Rome and the Eastern Church headed by Constantinople. The former is Catholic, while the latter is Greek Orthodoxy, also known as Orthodox Christianity.
In 1054, Catholicism and orthodoxy were formally divided, and the name "New Rome" in Constantinople became a proverb. The conflict between Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, similar to the dispute between Mahayana buddhism and Hinayana Buddhism, belongs to the "internal contradictions" of the sects; with the fall of Constantinople and the entry of Islam into the king, the "New Rome" is no longer the New Rome. In the years that followed, Orthodoxy gradually spread to Russia, eventually Moscow revived Orthodoxy and was called the "Third Rome" by its congregation, while Istanbul became a gathering place for Muslims.
In 1453, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II ordered the conversion of hagia Sophia into a mosque, removed bells, altars, shrines, ritual vessels, covered Christian mosaics with stucco, and gradually added some Islamic architecture – the most dazzling of which was the four tower-like towers on the outer edge. From this moment on, Hagia Sophia ended its mission as a thousand-year-old church, and in the next five hundred became the most important mosques in the Islamic world. As the Islamic proverb says:
"The Quran was born in Mecca, the reader is in Egypt, and it is treasured in Istanbul."
The fate of a church is also the fate of an ancient city. The ottoman Empire, which flourished at its peak, made Istanbul the size of the world's largest metropolis and became the center of Islam and the seat of the Ottoman Caliphate, and the shallow Bosphorus never lacked glorious legends until the turning point of fate reappeared...
Cao Pi, the Wei emperor of the Three Kingdoms period of China, said in the "Final System": "Since ancient times and today, there has not been an immortal country, nor has there been a tomb." The once-prominent Hagia Sophia became a "pagan" mosque, and Istanbul eventually ushered in another decline. In the early 20th century, the Ottoman Empire was reduced to the "sick man of Europe" until the Turkish Republic was founded, leaving only a corner of the peninsula of Asia Minor, and Istanbul was no longer the capital of the new republic.
epilogue
Located at the junction of the "Black Sea-Mediterranean Sea", Istanbul watches over the two continents of Europe and Asia, and such a place is destined to be without legends. In 1935, Hagia Sophia reopened to the world as a museum – in fact, Istanbul itself is a vast museum that displays not only an architectural symphony, but also an invisible poem intertwined with culture and art.
"Busy searching every day, what exactly do I want..." Jay Chou sang. Istanbul is not a fairy tale, but when you travel through many places and finally come to Istanbul, will you have some similar feelings?
Author: Jiang Yinlong
Editor: Li Siwen