Title: The Making of Constantinople: Constantine’s “New Rome”
Headings: The Making of Constantinople: Constantine’s “New Rome”
The Making of Constantinople: Constantine’s “New Rome”
The Christian emperor Constantine was ever pragmatic; he could only push his pagan subjects so far. One act of his, in the end, ensured the position of Christianity: the establishment of a new capital that would be known as Constantinople.
Four Emperors, Four Capitals
Learn more about a conservative emperor named Diocletian
A New Rome in Byzantium
Building an Urban Mob
Christianity—The Faith that Mattered
An Economic and Political Center
The Walls that Saved the Eastern Empire
Common Questions about the Making of Constantinople
This article was updated on May 12, 2020
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Content: The second important point about Constantinople is that Constantine ensured that the bishop of Constantinople was elevated to be the equal of the pope in Rome, Saint Peter’s successor. That would cause a great deal of dispute, in time, between the western and eastern churches. Economically, Constantinople was ideally located. It had an enormous amount of wealth coming in from trade and pilgrimages. The construction of a vast number of imperial monasteries and churches brought in the whole pilgrimage trade. Constantinople, in contrast to Rome, had a viable economic basis, which Rome did not have through most of the Middle Ages. In addition to that economic power was the fact that Constantinople was the center of a civilian bureaucratic professional class of a great city. It ensured there would be a professional government in place in Constantinople that could keep control over policy, frontiers, and armies. It could continue to tax its citizens, something the western emperors never really had. Rome certainly didn’t offer it in the 4th and 5th centuries.