If it weren’t for the Golden Horn, an inlet whose calm waters provide shelter from the raging currents of the Bosphorus Straits, making it easier for ancient ships to moor, it’s unclear if the city of Byzantion would have thrived and survived this long. In contrast, the settlement of Chalcedon, just across the Bosphorus on the Asian side, founded before Byzantion, never achieved the greatness of its neighbor. This accident of geography led the two cities on very different trajectories, the one on the European side rich in layers of history, myth, intrigue & legend, and the one on the Asian side a humble outpost, eventually submitting itself to be absorbed into the ever-growing city of Constantinople, and is now the anonymous neighborhood of Kadikoy in Istanbul.
It is true that successive Byzantine emperors spent inordinate amounts of money on the city’s security, building & maintaining the kind of fortifications that were unheard of in contemporary times, with multiple walls protecting the peninsula from the sea as well as the open lands leading to Thrace. Constantinople’s security infrastructure included a number of large underground cisterns to ensure water security in the case of a long siege or an enemy cutting off supply from one of the many aqueducts that served it. The most famous of these ingenious structures is the Basilica Cistern — built on the site of an earlier basilica by who else but Justinian I — which could hold 100,000 tons of water. And it wasn’t even one of the bigger cisterns in Constantinople.
The rough currents of the Sea of Marmara to the south & the Bosphorus to the east provided additional natural protection from most maritime invaders who had to enter the Golden Horn if they hoped to come ashore. To deter such adventurers, the Byzantines came up with another ingenious solution: to construct huge iron chains fastened to towers on both ends that could be hoisted across the mouth of the Golden Horn to prevent enemies from entering the calm waters.
Despite repeated attempts by many armies over the centuries to take over the city, none succeeded. At best some of the foes of the Eastern Roman Empire — and there were many that wanted the prize of Constantinople — effected ‘regime change’ and installed a more pliable Byzantine as Emperor.
But it wasn’t until the Fourth Crusade in 1204, sidetracked from their goal of liberating Jerusalem from the Muslims, that a foreign power attacked and took over the entire city, and hence the Empire. For long the Byzantines despised the Latins to the west for being crude, uneducated & uncultured. So it was a doubly more insulting to have the Latin hordes under Dandolo and Boniface of Montferrat not only overrun their empire, but also unleash the kind of wanton looting never before witnessed. Churches, palaces & homes of the rich were stripped clean of anything of value: gold, silver, gemstones, marbles, mosaics, even melting bronze statues, like the giant statue of Hercules in the spina. Of particular interest to the looting Crusaders were the invaluable sacred relics: the true cross, Virgin Mary’s hair, the head of John the Baptist, Christ’s burial shroud, etc., many of which were looted by Latin clergymen. So savage was the sack of Constantinople that one of the city’s aristocrats who suffered through it, Nicetas Choniates, compared it to Saladin’s sack of Jerusalem and wrote that ‘his city would have fared far better had it been conquered by the Muslims.’
The city never recovered from this. Denuded, depopulated, the empire limped in exhaustion, to the point of even inviting the advancing Turks into their neighborhood and finally falling to Mehmed’s forces in 1453, ushering the long era of significantly more prosperous Ottoman rule.
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Today, the most famous of the three bridges that span the Golden Horn is the Galata Bridge, the one closest to the old town, linking the neighborhoods of Eminonou & Karakoy, the modern Turkish name for Galata, probably derived from the Turkish words kara (black) — as in Karakul, Karakorum, etc. — and koy (village). Although the first reference to the bridge was one supposedly built by Justinian I (who else?), the current double-decker bridge was constructed on the late 1990s after the 4th bridge on that site was destroyed in a fire.
Karakoy/Galata is where foreigners typically lived once Constantinople outgrew the confines of the peninsula in the south. The Genoese were allowed to settle and trade here. Large numbers of other Latin communities have lived here over the centuries, followed by the Jews, Armenians & more recent immigrants from Russia and other parts of Europe. Today along the shore are numerous bars, cafes & restaurants. One of them on the grounds of the Modern Museum affords lovely views of the open waters where the Golden Horn & the Bosphorus meet, with Kadikoy to the east & old Istanbul to the south. Small boats bob in the waves and skirt around the larger ships that ferry visitors to and from Mediterranean & Black Sea ports.
Constantinople’s accident of geography gave it control of most of the land-based trade between Europe & the East in addition to the maritime trade between Black Sea ports and the rest of the world. It was in Constantinople that Genoese, Venetian & Florentine merchants — acting as another layer of intermediaries in a complex network of traders — exchanged Asian silks & spices for European gold (that very nearly bankrupted the Romans).
Not surprisingly, the topic of racial mix of the Turkish people in general, and those of Istanbul in particular, is complex, fascinating, and subject to disagreements & constant scientific revision. Besides major contributions from the Greeks, large populations of Levantines (from Italy, France & Spain), Balkans, Caucasians (Armenians, Circassians, Abkhazians, etc.), neighboring Arab populations lived and intermingled over the centuries, leading to a racial melting pot in the true sense of the word. While the Seljuk Turks with origins in Central Asia (from amongst the many Turko-Mongol tribes) imposed their name, language & culture on the local population, their racial contribution is quite small. There are probably several reasons for this. When the Turko-Mongols emerged out of their homeland and spread throughout the world, they were small in numbers. Most of their armies were made up of peoples they conquered along the way, and large numbers of progeny from local women, many of whom were slaves. So by the time they came to Anatolia, the Central Asian gene pool had significantly diluted.
Recent DNA studies confirm this hypothesis. While there are variations in the conclusions of different studies, in general it is believed that around 15% of the genetic contribution to today’s Turkey is from the Turko-Mongol peoples of Central Asia, the majority being of European origin. One study, interestingly, finds that Turkish & Armenian populations have very close genetic proximity in addition to the geographic one. And, yet, most people who know the historical & cultural arcs these similar peoples took would believe it’s not unreasonable that there’s such a wide gulf between them today.
