Dedication of Constantinople
Constantine dedicates his refounded city on the site of Byzantium. It is deliberately a second Rome: a Senate, grain distributions redirected from Egypt, monumental building. Within a century the empire's demographic, fiscal and administrative centre of gravity has moved east, which is most of the reason the western half is the half that fails first.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- Constantinople · city · Türkiye
- Alexandria · city · Egypt
- Rome · city · Italy
- The Mediterranean Sea (Mare Nostrum) · geographic_feature · Mediterranean basin
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent. This is the standing of the weakest source, not an average.
Periodisation of Roman civilisation and the Roman/Byzantine continuity debate
Where to end the Roman Empire is an open scholarly question with several defensible answers - 476, 480, 554, 602, 800 and 1453 among them - and the choice reflects the historian's criterion (western imperial office, state continuity, material culture, self-identification) rather than a discoverable fact. A substantial 'continuity' school treats the eastern Roman state as unbroken to 1453.
Wikipedia (survey article with scholarly citations); Momigliano, Brown, Ward-Perkins, Kaldellis · accessed 2026 · Partly verified
Survey and bibliography at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_period ; key positions: A. Momigliano (1936 onwards), P. Brown (late antiquity as transformation), B. Ward-Perkins (2005, 'The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization'), A. Kaldellis (Roman continuity)
Corpus Iuris Civilis (Codex, Digesta, Institutiones, Novellae)
Justinian's compilation preserves the bulk of surviving classical Roman jurisprudence and was issued from Constantinople in the name of the Roman emperor in the 530s CE - fifty-plus years after the conventional 476 'fall'. It is the transmission channel through which Roman law reached medieval and modern European legal systems.
Weidmann, Berlin (Mommsen, Krueger, Schoell & Kroll critical edition) · compiled 529-534 CE; critical edition 1872-1895 · Partly verified
Corpus Iuris Civilis, edd. T. Mommsen, P. Krueger, R. Schoell, W. Kroll, 3 vols, Berlin: Weidmann; standard citation e.g. Dig. 1.1.1 (Ulpian)
Recorded on Constantinople
- Traditional foundation of the Roman Republic
- Construction of the Via Appia begins
- The Punic Wars
- The Augustan settlement: Octavian becomes Augustus
- Battle of Actium
- Assassination of Julius Caesar
- Caesar crosses the Rubicon
- Inauguration of the Flavian Amphitheatre
- Dedication of Constantinople
- Administrative division of the empire on the death of Theodosius I
- Alaric's Goths sack Rome
- Odoacer deposes Romulus Augustulus - the contested 'fall' of the Western Roman Empire
- Plague reaches the Mediterranean
- Ottoman capture of Constantinople
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.
- Ottoman capture of Constantinople · 1453-05-29
- Plague reaches the Mediterranean · 1347
- Odoacer deposes Romulus Augustulus - the contested 'fall' of the Western Roman Empire · 0476-09-04
- Alaric's Goths sack Rome · 0410-08-24
- Administrative division of the empire on the death of Theodosius I · 0395
- Inauguration of the Flavian Amphitheatre · 0080
- Caesar crosses the Rubicon · -0049-01-10
- Assassination of Julius Caesar · -0044-03-15