Walking through Constantinople during its Peak in 540 AD. 

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Constantinople was truly magnificent. One of the best aspects of this channel is attention to urban structure.

I live in Istanbul in European side. How exciting it is to listen and see the things and relate it to the old structures, whatever of it have remained.

I live in Istanbul. I can see the European side from my balcony and it's awesome to look at it and imagine how it looked 1500 years ago like in your video.

The most beautiful city of world. The Queen of Cities.

Imagine the greatness of a city which took 900 years after its zenith to exhaust.

I see a lot of inspiration for King’s landing, in Game of thrones, coming from Constantinople, from the city architecture to its layout. Although I don’t think anything would compare to Rome itself, the eastern capital had a charm of its own, something even Rome lacked. It must have been glorious. Congratulations for the video

Something fascinating that not many people know about Constantinople is that it probably hosted one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world for a while. According to some historians the statue of the Olympian Zeus was transferred from Ancient Olympia to Constantinople where it was eventually burned in the great fire at the palace of Lausus. Kind of insane if you think about it.

My two most favorite ancient cities-Rome and Constantinople!👍👍😀

Loved taking a tour with you, thank you! I'd love to walk through Rome from the Campus Martius through Forum Romanum up the steps of the temple of J.O.M. like a general in a triumph

Oh, I would have loved to have seen Constantinople at its height. :) Thank you, for a delightful start to my day. :)

My favorite ancient city by far and my favorite church, Hagia Sophia. Thank you for giving them the attention they deserve. If you ever want to do a special on Hagia Sophia, you will have my vote. I also liked your work on Starship. That would be also a good topic to explore.

This man makes you feel a deep desaire to experience the greatness of Const.

Enjoyed this Immensely! Felt as if i were walking the streets of this glorious imperial city! Who can comprehend a thousand years? What a place it must have been!Thank you so much for sharing your passion for this history with us. You bring life to a long gone era. Thx.

Constantinople is an unforgettable Capital!!!

I personally walked through the land and south sea walls many times. All I can say that those walls massive man. Incredibly large scale and looks magnificent even today.

Many thanks for this marvellous video. Fascinating urban layout and design. Great work.

The Greeks had a chance to take back Constantinople in 1921 during the Greek-Turkish War but they overextended themselves trying to take back historical "Byzantine Rome" in western Turkey. If the Greeks had conquered Constantinople, the King of Greece would be declared Roman Emperor Constantine XII.

Video için çok teşekkürler emeğine sağlık. Şu güzel videonun altında bir Türk ve türkçe yorum görmemek ne kadar üzücü ve acı. Tarihimize ne kadar yabancıyız.

Fantastic video with great maps and pictures. Thank you!

Love your channel, thank you for your work!

Wonderful video. Thank you for creating it.

The Hellenic origins of the city and many of the populace never disappeared and in the case of Christianity and the new Christian Rome it intensified over the years. However, Greek always was the major language of the Church in the Eastern Roman Empire. Also, it might be mentioned that the most beautiful church was possibly Holy Apostles which does not exist today but St. Mark's in Venice is a close copy containing much looted gold & gems from Constantinople. Thank you for an excellent video - really enjoyable to watch.

You present the city like you have lived there back at 540AD! Magnificent!

There's some mistakes I noticed... the mechanical throne and singing tree did not exist yet in the 6th century, that was in the 10th, and before 1204 Constantinople was sacked a number of times although during Byzantine civil wars. But still very great video!

What a calming voice you have

You're getting better and better, keep it up!

Omg. It must have been so beautiful.

Wow, thank you so much sir for your insight and sharing. I'm obsessed almost with Byzantine history and this really fills in some blanks.

The very thought that such a magnificent city existed cannot fit my mind.

This is gradually becoming my new favorite RU-vid channel

They even had fountains, vending machines and automated doors (just like any modern building in our days)

This was great, thank you!

Really great work on this video. Very cool!

Amazing, the double glazing of the windows is incredible for the time of byzantine !!

Amazing. Thank you.

I simply adore your channel 🥰

The magnificence of old Constantinople would be on a level with Tokyo and New York city. It would have overwhelmed the senses. To see how it look like it does today hurts.

Thank you for the video, always looking forward to them. _Oh Constantinople...been a long time gone..._

Fascinating! Thank you very much!

Bravo! Great video.

Just stumbled to your channel and I'm impressed by the quality of this video. Great work! Love your pronunciation of the Latin names also.

Beautiful!

I always found it interesting how the Byzantines reused Pagan statuary for structural support, incorporating them into a revised Christian context. There are two large beautifully carved Medusa heads; one placed upside down, the other on its side, supporting two of the columns within the vast cistern in Constantinople. At a glance, you would imagine it as a practical solution for lengthening a shorter column. But I think in reality, it demonstrates in the Byzantine mind, the triumph over, and subjugation of the Pagan world. I doubt very much if a carved image of Christ, would have been used in the same way.

Great work!... gracias... cheers from Mexico!

Another great video, you are genius and you bring amazing information to us. Congratulation.

Great video thank you

As a time traveler if I was in this most beautiful city I wouldn't want to leave. I would stay and get married and have children. This is so close to heaven that a city could look like. The people the fun and the love I would be in my glory here. I want to be there in that time. I know I would be in total bliss and so happy being with my beautiful Roman wife there. I hope I can have something similar to this when I am in heaven. The world today is horrible there is no love for me here. Ugh 😩😩😭😭

I've been to Istanbul it's still an impressive city

Thank you so much for this gorgeous video! One thing... the resurgence around the year 1000 did last a long time. Longer than many empires, in fact. Later Byzantium is usually regarded as being very strong again at least from the reign of Basil I to the reign of Basil II- over 150 years. But the Empire of Basil II was essentially untouched 45 years after his death in 1070, making it over 200 years- longer than many empires last- and in my mind the late peak really began even earlier with Theophilus, for over 230 years from the end of Theophilus's reign. Anyway, thank you so much for the beautiful video, I agree that around 540- after the building of the Hagia Sophia and before the Justinian plague- must have been the absolute pinnacle of the city, at least as Constantinople and not Istanbul (which would have had a different flavor certainly), as the city as the capital of the entire eastern Mediterranean must have exceeded the later capital! (And I appreciate that architectural monuments are your specialty and not chronological history, don't think that I don't think you aren't doing a wonderful job... I'm sure specialists in chronological history could learn a lot about the monuments from you!) Thank you for this beautiful video! The classical cities were breathtakingly beautiful, including Constantinople! I love Byzantium and Constantinople, and I love this kind of history!

Heartbreaking to see such an advanced society as Constantinople with all its magnificent wonders to be conquered by islam.

I've never had any sense before of what Constantinople looked like and how it functioned as a city. Sort of miss not having to been able to walk its streets. Thank you.

cool video..thanks guyssss

Fascinating!

I liked the detail given in this video. One thing not brought out is that the old Roman capital in Italy was a ghost town with weeds growing in the streets and the fact that Constantinople was multiples greater than the old Rome. People that visited Constantinople at its heyday were in shock at how magnificent it was.

Ave Maioranus, novus suscriptor! Truly impressed with your narrative of the capital of the first Christian Empire, cheers!!

Wonderful!

amazing work

As a trained archaeologist, I was completely enchanted by this video. Over fifty years ago I was introduced to the wonders of archaeology, when my aunt, as a welcome gift , gave a little guidebook to ancient Rome made up of colour postcards of modern Rome, with the neatest acetate overlays showing ancient Rome in all its reconstructed glories; simply by aligning the plastic images with the coloured modern reality, you could clearly make out the extent of the destruction, but more importantly, reconstructed the true magnificence of ancient Rome! I have always been enchanted by ancient Constantinople(Russian grandfather was born in Buyuk Dere, a distant suburb on the Bosphorus). I had the great privilege of visiting Istanbul for two weeks. As an Orthodox Christian, I organized my stay around visiting everyone of the many ancient Churches of Contantinople. The most remembered was my first visit to the Aya Sofya Mosque, during which I experience the first of many transformative experiences of my Orthodox faith,, when I realized that even the marble floor had been laid out with strictest respect for every social, political and spiritual requirements to focus the full atention on the Emperor, slightly to one side of the main altar and his Empress, sitting far away in the first gallery, with all the other women and infidels stood with a perfect view over all the liturgical action going on at their feet far below.. What's more, even many of the infidels felt compelled to share their mark ,'ERIK was here" grafitti scarred all over the exquisite marble railing of the second balcony, in every script in the known world - runic, coptic, egyptian demotic, greek demotic, islamic demoticc urdu script, ancient latin and modern italian demotic scripts, among others, the truest manifestation of the magnificence of ancient Constantiople! Thankk you, Majoranus, for making my dreams come true!

There's an anime movie called A Wizard of Earthsea, it's based on a book series by Ursula K Le Guin. In the beginning of the film the main characters are introduced in a magnificent capital city, very much like Constantinople in the time of Justinian the 1st. Even the emperor and his court are attired in Byzantine imperial garb. If you ever get a chance, check it out. Great video, by the way...I'm a lifelong( 56 years old) devotee of Roman/Byzantine culture and I just found your channel and subscribed this very morning. Cheers!

Excellent video, dude. If u continue the show I'll sign this channel up, no doubt. And please, if you could produce something about Cartago, its rivalry with Rome and, perhaps, its trends with the entire World and Tarshish Land that would be great. Obviously, it's only an idea. Thanx for all.

Thank you so much for doing the right thing. Thank you for stressing that this city was very culturally Roman.

Late Antiquity is a fascinating period, I’m so glad I found your channel! I would love a video on the water-delivery systems to these cities. I think both old Rome and new Rome/Constantinople have fairly well-understood aqueduct and/or reservoir systems, but what about Alexandria? They must have used the Nile for supply, but do we know if there were any attempts at treatment, or a city-wide water distribution system? I know it had large lakes and water features.

Wonderful video💯👏😯

This brought back so many fond memories when I visited this city in 2014. Istanbul is still a beautiful city but sadly forgotten by Westerners. I highly recommend visiting this city and getting lost in rich history.

Wonderful

Awesome video

My second viewing and well worth it. Your Latin and Ancient Greek pronunciation is far, far superior to that of native English speakers, even those who have studied classics, but who don’t even bother to try. It’s not even difficult to learn in a single afternoon! Watching most videos and documentaries about Rome is anus, anus, anus in every name, over and over again (with its English pronunciation, unfortunately). Your English pronunciation is so much better, too! It’s a true pleasure to listen to you!

every year turkey makes a big festivity to celebrate the capture of constantinopolis , showing the whole world that it is not theirs but just captured by war and may be returned someday to the real greek owners , so god will.

It's sad that the height of the Eastern Roman Empire was so early on. Basically for 1000 years the Empire was in decline after its height

It was great, thank you! I think that the time traveler should have visited the city five years earlier, in 535 AD, as 536 AD is seen by some historians as "the worst year in history" (because of extremely bad weather and famines with that).

nice recontruction interior hagia sophia. you can see the sanctuary and the templon. The iconostasis is a development that was not completed until the 15th century. The Rood Screen is the Western equivalent. It was sometimes filled in between the columns. Take a look at hagia Sophia without all the later junk buildings and minarets.

Truly magnificent ------I traveled to another great city ---Ephesus -----it is not in old ancient Constantinople but on the coast of modern day Turkey...The ruins are just as grand as when the purely marble city of Gold was standing in 540 A.D -----The Library of Ephesus is complete , except for it's hollowed interior and it would be at its whole , if not by Earthquakes which covered throughout the so-called dark ages around 1000. !

Cool vid!

Due to the eruption Krakatoa in 535/536, the whole world was bleak for a decade (basically like a nuclear winter). The skies would have been reddish. Summers were colder. Food harvests were meager. etc.

Gloria eterna all'Impero Bizantino 👑👑👑✝️✝️✝️

What amazes me is that despite of all those disasters,the ERE still lasted for a 1000 years until 1453.

Impressive video

The Great City, to paraphrase the Vikings.

Great video! Thanks! Could you make some vídeos last years of Román Empiere in Hispania,Gaul,Britannia,and other provinces in the west Roman Empire,and then in the east, Greece,Egypt,Siria,Middle East,etc...

What I wouldn't give to visit the city at its peak.. Might go back to it this summer to explore it again

Where I live, Big Island of Hawaii, the population density is ~ 19.2 people/square kilometer. Big difference!

Where can I get one of those antique time machines? :)

Lately pretty much historical lstanbul (Constantinapole) videos are on the scene.😊 A part of a secret goal of some world powers?

I believe its peak lasted until 1204 AD, great video though.

People at that time didn't pronounce Augustaion the way you pronounce it , they pronounce it like in modern Greek, "Avgusteon".

Would love to see all this soon ✌again under the sign of the Roman Dubble Eagel

When those riders @4:30 are outside the Theodosian walls and can see the hippodrome outside the city, does anyone know what series that is from? thanks.

There are quite a few good books showing reconstructions of ancient Rome and how things looked back then. Are there any similar books dealing with Constantinople?

It would be interesting to know the source of some of the background images, such as the black and white photos

Pagan temples were used as treasuries most often and when paganism came to be forbidden as a religion, well, these temples went on serving the same purpose as profane, utilitarian, commercial buildings, that is to say as private banks or depositories, hence the greek temple's shape of so many modern banks. They didn't fall into ruins though most probably their most precious ornaments were sold to adorn churches or palaces.

Very good job but you forgot to saw us the palaces!

I been there. It's nice.

I would be curious about what the average house in Constantinople looked like and how did they vary from roman town houses?

I was amazed when i first read about medieval Constantinople. I really didn't expect I had to draw, stereotypically labelled, classical buildings. It's a shame that we think of Byzantium as a backwards civilization.

Does anyone know which BBC show the footage at the beginning is from, showing the city at a distance?

Constantinople seems like a fantasy place, I can’t believe how advanced the Romans were at this point in terms of general organization, city design and architecture

Saint Paisios of Mount Athos, pray for us.

when i look at the accumulated splendor of architecture i cant but think that even the most impressive centers of our times cannot match it. after all what do we have? glass skyscrapers of the financial elite? yea that and not much more.

this is so interesting do it for other cities