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Constantinople
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Constantinople was founded by Constantine in 330 as the eastern capital of the Roman Empire. Although placed on the early town of Byzantium, this city was created as a Christian city without a pagan past (unlike Rome). At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, it was made one of the first five Patriarchates of the church. After Rome was "lost" to the barbarians and the Patriarchates to the Moslems, Constaninople and its Patriarch and Emperor remained the center of Christianity. It lead the Orthodox Church after the split with Rome and the Pope in 1054. From 1204-1261, it was captured and ruled by the Crusaders.
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Constantinople was historically important for a number of reasons. Constantinople was one of the larger and richer urban centers in the Eastern Mediterranean during the late Roman Empire, mostly due to its strategic position commanding the trade routes between the Aegean and the Black Sea. During the Fourth Century AD the Emperor Constantine relocated his eastern capital to Byzantium, which was renamed Constantinople (Constantine's City), in an attempt to reinvigorate the Empire. It would remain the capital of the eastern, Greek speaking empire, short several interregnums, for over a thousand years. As the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire (now commonly known as the Byzantine Empire), the Greeks called Constantinople simply "the City", while throughout Europe it was known as the "Queen of Cities." In its heyday, roughly corresponding to what is now known as the Middle Ages, it was the richest and largest European city, exerting a powerful cultural pull and dominating economic life in the Mediterranean.
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The Convention of Constantinople was a treaty signed by Great Britain, Germany, Austro-Hungary, Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, and Turkey on March 2, 1888. The signatories comprised all the great European powers at the time, and the treaty was interpreted as a guaranteed right of passage of all ships through the Suez Canal during war and peace.— Excerpted from Convention of Constantinople [O]n Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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With Theodoric Strabo having died, the emperor troubled with conspiracies and Theodoric the Amal realizing that in any case he could never conquer the hugely fortified City of Constantinople, the emperor and the Ostrogoth eventually agreed terms. Theodoric the Amal was made master of the soldiers (the very position Theodoric Strabo had demanded) and received fresh grants of land for his followers.
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"We know that volcanism can cause strange effects in the atmosphere, and that the volcano erupted around the same time that Constantinople fell," says Haraldur Sigurdsson, a volcanologist at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. He finds the evidence intriguing, but he remains skeptical because it is circumstantial.
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The volcanic dust that belched into the atmosphere probably contributed to the stormy weather, the unusually dark eclipse, the luminescent phenomena and the red skies seen over Constantinople in May, 1453. In fact, there is now a submerged crater there, measuring 12 by 6 by 1 kilometres (7.5 by 4 by 0.5 miles). Approximately 40 cubic kilometres (10 cubic miles) of rock and dust were spewed into the atmosphere.
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Constantinople