Queen of Cities

"If the world were a single country, Istanbul would be its capital" -  Napoleon Bonaparte

Under the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople prospered due to its strategic location which allowed it to control trade between Europe and Asia and Russia and the Mediterranean.  It became not only the largest city in Europe, but the largest city in the world, and is believed to be the first city with over a million inhabitants.   During the Middle Ages when other European cities, such as London and Paris, were towns of a few thousand, Constantinople's size and prosperity led it to be called the Queen of Cities.  

The security and wealth of Constantinople encouraged an active intellectual life.  Education and literacy were widespread among the population and not matched in Western Europe until the 1700s.  The libraries, universities, and scholars in Constantinople preserved classical knowledge from the Greeks and Romans.  Many of the classical texts that helped invigorate the rest of Europe during the Renaissance came from Constantinople.  Legal scholars preserved and re-worked Roman laws into a new legal code (known as Justinian's Code) that would later become the foundation for the laws of most of the nations of Europe and Latin America.  The cultural life of Constantinople, which was a mix of Christianity, Roman customs, and Greek classical culture, acted as a bridge that between ancient and modern Europe.

The social and sporting center of life in Constantinople was the Hippodome, a stadium with a capacity of 100,000 people.  The Hippodome was most famously used for chariot races, but it was also the location for other important events such as coronations, parades, and ceremonies.  Below is an animated video of what the four horse chariot races in the Hippodome would have looked like.