The following is an encore presentation of everything everywhere daily.

In the year 330, the Roman Emperor Constantine decided that the capital of the entire Roman Empire should be moved.

The location he selected was a small Greek town by the name of Byzantium

located in the middle of the Bosphorus Strait approximately 500 miles or 800 kilometers from Rome.

From there it grew into one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world

and was the seat of more than one major empire.

Learn more about Constantinople, now known as Istanbul, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. Before I get into the history of the city I should address the issue of the name.

Today the city is known as Istanbul and it was changed to this in 1930.

So when you refer to Constantinople you're referring to the city pre-130. This is very similar to the use

of Leningrad and St. Petersburg. If you refer to the Siege of Leningrad you are

referring to St. Petersburg during the Soviet period when the city was known as

Leningrad. There is also an issue of geography. Today Istanbul is a huge sprawling city,

one of the largest in the world. Most of what is Istanbul today was never part of

Constantinople. Even if you wanted to be cheeky and said that you were flying to Constantinople, you really wouldn't be.

The historical city of Constantinople is only a small part of modern Istanbul.

To that extent, it's a lot like Manhattan. Manhattan used to be synonymous with New York, but when the Burrows merged a little over a hundred years ago,

Manhattan just became a smaller part of a larger city.

So when I say Constantinople, I'm referring to both a particular place within the city of Istanbul and a particular time before 1930

So with that being said let's go back to the very beginning going back over 3,000 years ago, the settlement in the current

location was probably a Thracian city by the name of Ligos. This Thracian settlement was abandoned

and was resettled as a colony in the year 657 BC by Greeks from the city of

Megara who called it Byzantineum. No one is sure the origin of the word Byzantine

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