Names of Istanbul

The city of Istanbul has been known by a number of different names. The most notable names besides the modern Turkish name are Byzantium, Constantinople, and Stamboul. Different names are associated with different phases of its history, with different languages, and with different portions of it.

Names in historical sequence

Lygos

According to Pliny the Elder the first name of Byzantium was ''Lygos''. This may have been the name of a Thracian settlement situated on the site of the later city, near the point of the peninsula ( Sarayburnu).

Byzantium

''Byzantion'' ( grc, Βυζάντιον, Byzántion, la, Byzantium) was founded by Greek colonists from Megara in 667 BC. The name is believed to be of Thracian or Illyrian origin and thus to predate the Greek settlement. It may be derived from a Thracian or Illyrian personal name, ''Byzas''. Ancient Greek legend refers to a legendary king of that name as the leader of the Megarean colonists and eponymous founder of the city.

''Byzántios,'' plural. ''Byzántioi'' ( grc, Βυζάντιος, Βυζάντιοι, la, Byzantius) referred to Byzantion's inhabitants and ''Byzántios'' ( grc, Βυζάντιος, la, Byzantius) was an adjective, also used as an ethnonym for the people of the city and as a family name. In the Middle Ages, ''Byzántion'' was also a synecdoche for the eastern Roman Empire. (An ellipsis of ). ''Byzantinós'' (, la, Byzantinus) denoted an inhabitant of the empire. The Anglicization of Latin ''Byzantinus'' yielded "Byzantine", with 15th and 16th century forms including ''Byzantin'', ''Bizantin(e)'', ''Bezantin(e)'', and ''Bysantin'' as well as ''Byzantian'' and ''Bizantian''.

The name ''Byzantius'' and ''Byzantinus'' were applied from the 9th century to gold Byzantine coinage, reflected in the French ''besant'' (''d'or''), Italian ''bisante'', and English ''besant'', ''byzant'', or '' bezant''. The English usage, derived from Old French ''besan'' (pl. ''besanz''), and relating to the coin, dates from the 12th century.

Later, the name ''Byzantium'' became common in the West to refer to the Eastern Roman Empire, whose capital was Constantinople. As a term for the east Roman state as a whole, ''Byzantium'' was introduced by the historian Hieronymus Wolf only in 1555, a century after the empire, whose inhabitants called it the Roman Empire (), had ceased to exist.

Augusta Antonina

The city was called ''Augusta Antonina'' () for a brief period in the 3rd century AD. The Roman Emperor Septimius Severus (193–211) conferred the name in honor of his son Antoninus, the later Emperor Caracalla.Necdet Sakaoğlu (1993/94a): "İstanbul'un adları" The names of Istanbul" In: 'Dünden bugüne İstanbul ansiklopedisi', ed. Türkiye Kültür Bakanlığı, Istanbul.

New Rome

Before the Roman emperor Constantine the Great made the city the new eastern capital of the Roman Empire on May 11, 330, he undertook a major construction project, essentially rebuilding the city on a monumental scale, partly modeled after Rome. Names of this period included "the New, second Rome", ''Alma Roma''  , , "Eastern Rome", ''Roma Constantinopolitana''.

The Third Canon of the First Council of Constantinople (360) refers to the city as New Rome.

The term "New Rome" lent itself to East-West polemics, especially in the context of the Great Schism, when it was used by Greek writers to stress the rivalry with (the original) Rome. ''New Rome'' is also still part of the official title of the Patriarch of Constantinople.

Constantinople

''Kōnstantinoúpolis'' (Κωνσταντινούπολις), ''Constantinopolis'' in Latin and ''Constantinople'' in English, was the name by which the city became soon more widely known, in honor of Constantine the Great who established it as his capital. It is first attested in official use under Emperor Theodosius II (408–450). It remained the principal official name of the city throughout the Byzantine period, and the most common name used for it in the West until the early 20th century. This name was also used (including its Kostantiniyye variant) by the Ottoman Empire until the advent of the Republic of Turkey.

According to Eldem Edhem, who wrote an encyclopedia entry on Istanbul for ''Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire'', "many" Turkish members of the public as well as Turkish historians often perceive the use of Constantinople for the Ottoman city, despite being historically accurate, as being " politically incorrect".Edhem, Eldem. "Istanbul." In: Ágoston, Gábor and Bruce Alan Masters. ''Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire''. Infobase Publishing, 21 May 2010. , 9781438110257. Start and CITED: p
286
"Originally, the name ''Istanbul'' referred only to ..n the 18th century." and "For the duration of Ottoman rule, western sources continued to refer to the city as Constantinople, reserving the name ''Stamboul'' for the walled city." and "Today the use of the name ..s often deemed politically incorrect ..y most Turks." // (entry ends, with author named, on p
290

Other Byzantine names

Besides ''Constantinople'', the Byzantines referred to the city with a large range of honorary appellations, such as the "Queen of Cities" (), also as an adjective, Βασιλεύουσα, the 'Reigning City'. In popular speech, the most common way of referring to it came to be simply ''the City'' (Greek: ''hē Polis'' /iˈpo.lis/, , Modern Greek: ''i Poli'', η Πόλη /i ˈpoli/ ). This usage, still current today in colloquial Greek and Armenian (Պոլիս, pronounced "Polis" or "Bolis" in the Western Armenian dialect prevalent in the city), also became the source of the later Turkish name, ''Istanbul'' (see below).

Kostantiniyye

''Kostantiniyye'' (Arabic: , translit. ''Qusṭanṭinīyya'', Persian: , translit. ''Qosṭanṭanīye,'' Ottoman Turkish: , translit. ''Ḳosṭanṭīnīye'') is the name by which the city came to be known in the Islamic world. It is an Arabic calque of ''Constantinople''. After the
Ottoman conquest of 1453, it was used as the most formal official name in Ottoman Turkish, and remained in use throughout most of the time up to the fall of the Empire in 1922. However, during some periods Ottoman authorities favoured other names (see below).

Istanbul

The modern Turkish name ''İstanbul'' () ( ota, استانبول) is attested (in a range of variants) since the 10th century, at first in Armenian and Arabic (without the initial ''İ-'') and then in Ottoman sources. It probably comes from the Greek phrase "στην Πόλι" " , meaning "in the city", reinterpreted as a single word;Marek Stachowski, Robert Woodhouse, "The Etymology of İstanbul: Making Optimal Use of the Evidence" ''Studia Etymologica Cracoviensia'' 20: 221–245 (2015) a similar case is Stimboli, Crete. It is thus based on the common Greek usage of referring to Constantinople simply as ''The City'' (see above).

The incorporation of parts of articles and other particles into Greek place names was common even before the Ottoman period: Navarino for earlier Avarino, Satines for Athines, ''etc.'' Similar examples of modern Turkish place names derived from Greek in this fashion are İzmit, earlier ''İznikmit,'' from Greek Nicomedia, İznik from Greek ''Nicaea'' (z nikea, Samsun (''s'Amison'' from "se" and "Amisos"), and ''İstanköy'' for the Greek island Kos (from ''is tin Ko''). The occurrence of the initial ''i-'' in these names, including Istanbul's, is largely secondary epenthesis to break up syllabic consonant clusters, prohibited by the phonotactic structure of Turkish, as seen in Turkish ''istasyon'' from French ''station'' or ''ızgara'' from the Greek ''schára''.

''İstanbul'' originally was not used for the entire city and referred to the portion of Istanbul within the city walls. ''İstanbul'' was the common name for the city in normal speech in Turkish even before the conquest of 1453, but in official use by the Ottoman authorities other names, such as ''Kostantiniyye'', were preferred in certain contexts. Thus, ''Kostantiniyye'' was used on coinage up to the late 17th and then again in the 19th century. The Ottoman chancery and courts used ''Kostantiniyye'' as part of intricate formulae in expressing the place of origin of formal documents, such as ''be-Makam-ı Darü's-Saltanat-ı Kostantiniyyetü'l-Mahrusâtü'l-Mahmiyye''.Necdet Sakaoğlu (1993/94b): "Kostantiniyye". In: 'Dünden bugüne İstanbul ansiklopedisi', ed. Türkiye Kültür Bakanlığı, Istanbul. In 19th century Turkish book-printing it was also used in the impressum of books, in contrast to the foreign use of ''Constantinople''. At the same time, however, ''İstanbul'' too was part of the official language, for instance in the titles of the highest Ottoman military commander ''(İstanbul ağası)'' and the highest civil magistrate ''(İstanbul efendisi)'' of the city,A.C. Barbier de Meynard (1881): ''Dictionnaire Turc-Français.'' Paris: Ernest Leroux. and the Ottoman Turkish version of the Ottoman constitution of 1876 states that "The capital city of the Ottoman State is İstanbul". ''İstanbul'' and several other variant forms of the same name were also widely used in Ottoman literature and poetry.

T. R. Ybarra of ''The New York Times'' wrote in 1929 that "'Istambul' (our usual form for the word is 'Stamboul') has always been the Turkish name for the whole of Constantinople". ''The Observer'' wrote that "To the Turks themselves it never was Constantinople, but Istanbul." In 1929 Lloyd's agents were informed that telegrams now must be addressed to "Istanbul" or "Stamboul", but ''The Times'' stated that mail could still be delivered to "Constantinople". However ''The New York Times'' stated that year that mail to "Constantinople" may no longer be delivered. In 1929, Turkish nationalists advocated for the use of Istanbul in English instead of Constantinople. The U.S. State Department began using "Istanbul" in May 1930.

Names other than (''İstanbul'') had become obsolete in the Turkish language after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. However, at that point Constantinople was still used when writing the city's name in Latin script. In 1928, the Turkish alphabet was changed from the Arabic to the Latin script. Beginning in 1930, Turkey officially requested that other countries use Turkish names for Turkish cities, instead of other transliterations to Latin script that had been used in the Ottoman times.

In English, the name is usually written "Istanbul". In modern Turkish, the name is written "İstanbul" ( dotted i/İ and dotless ı/I being two distinct letters in the Turkish alphabet).

Stamboul

''Stamboul'' or ''Stambul'' is a variant form of ''İstanbul.'' Like ''Istanbul'' itself, forms without the initial ''i-'' are attested from early on in the Middle Ages, first in Arabic sources of the 10th century and Armenian ones of the 12th. Some early sources also attest to an even shorter form ''Bulin'', based on the Greek word ''Poli(n)'' alone without the preceding article."Istanbul", in ''Encyclopedia of Islam''. (This latter form lives on in modern Armenian.) The word-initial ''i-'' arose in the Turkish name as an epenthetic vowel to break up the ''St-'' consonant cluster, prohibited in Turkish phonotactics.

''Stamboul'' was used in Western languages to refer to the central city, as ''Istanbul'' did in Turkish, until the time it was replaced by the official new usage of the Turkish form in the 1930s for the entire city. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Western European and American sources often used ''Constantinople'' to refer to the metropolis as a whole, but ''Stamboul'' to refer to the central parts located on the historic peninsula, i.e. Byzantine-era Constantinople inside the walls.

Islambol

The name ''Islambol'' ( ) appeared after the Ottoman conquest of 1453 to express the city's new role as the capital of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. It was first attested shortly after the conquest, and its invention was ascribed by some contemporary writers to sultan Mehmed II himself. Some Ottoman sources of the 17th century, most notably Evliya Çelebi, describe it as the common Turkish name of the time. Between the late 17th and late 18th centuries, it was also in official use. The first use of the word "Islambol" on coinage was in 1730 during the reign of sultan Mahmud I. The term ''Kostantiniyye'' still appeared, however, into the 20th century.

Other Ottoman names

Ottomans and foreign contemporaries, especially in diplomatic correspondence, referred to the Ottoman imperial government with particular honorifics. Among them are the following:
* ''Bāb-i ʿĀlī'' (, "The Sublime Porte"); A metonym referring to the gate of Topkapı Palace.
* ''Der-i Devlet'' ( "Abode of the State")
* ''Der-i Saʿādet'' ( "Abode of Felicity" or "Abode of Eudaimonia")
* ''Āsitāne'' ( "Threshold"), referring to the imperial court, a Farsi-origin word spelled in English as ''Asitane'' or ''Asitana''.
* ''Pāy-taḫt'' or sometimes ''Pāyitaḫt'' (, "The Seat/ Base of the Throne")

The "Gate of Felicity", the "Sublime Gate", and the "Sublime Porte" were literally places within the Ottoman sultans' Topkapı Palace, and were used metonymically to refer to the authorities located there, and hence for the central Ottoman imperial administration. Modern historians also refer to government by these terms, similar to the popular usage of Whitehall in Britain. The sublime Gate is not inside Topkapı palace; the administration building whose gate is named Bâb-ı Âlî is between Agia Sofia and Beyazit mosque, a huge building.

Historical names in other languages

Many peoples neighboring the Byzantine Empire used names expressing concepts like "The Great City", "City of the Emperors", "Capital of the Romans" or similar. During the 10th to 12th century Constantinople was one of the largest two cities in the world, the other being Baghdad.

Old Norse

The medieval Vikings, who had contacts with the Byzantine Empire through their expansion through eastern Europe ( Varangians), used the Old Norse name ''Miklagarðr'' (from ''mikill'' 'big' and ''garðr'' 'wall' or 'stronghold') as seen in the Icelandic sagas. This name lives on in the modern Icelandic name ''Mikligarður'' and Faroese ''Miklagarður''.

Slavic and Romanian

East and South Slavic languages referred to the city as Tsarigrad or ''Carigrad,'' 'City of the Tsar (Emperor)', from the Slavonic words ''tsar'' (' Caesar' or 'Emperor') and ''grad'' ('city'). Cyrillic: Царьград, Цариград. This was presumably a calque on a Greek phrase such as Βασιλέως Πόλις ''(Basileos Polis),'' 'the city of the emperor mperor. The term is still occasionally used in Bulgarian, whereas it has become archaic in Russian, and Macedonian. In Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian and Slovene, ' is a living alternative name for the modern city, as well as being used when referring to the historic capital of the medieval Roman Empire or the Ottoman Empire. In Czech (a West Slavic language) this Slavic name is used in the form ''Cařihrad'' (used in the 19th century, now only occasionally). It was also borrowed from the Slavic languages into Romanian in the form ''Țarigrad'', though ''Constantinopol'' remained the far more widely preferred term.

Persian, Urdu, and Arabic

Besides ''Kustantiniyyah'', Persian, Arabic and other languages of the Iranian Plateau and Indian subcontinent used names based on the title ''Cesar'' ('Emperor'), as in Persian and Urdu

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