Hagia Sophia
Constantinople grew quickly. It became the largest city in all of Europe if not all of the medieval world. It was the center of the Roman Empire. It was the Roman Empire. Hagia Sophia (Sancta Sophia in Latin and Holy Wisdom in English) built by the Emperor Justian (483-565) was the largest cathedral in the world until a larger cathedral was built in Seville, Spain in 1520, after Hagia Sophia had been converted into a mosque.
The papacy, struggling then to be the highest episcopal authority in the empire—the world—would remain in old Rome. But the earthly glory and the treasures of Christendom were in Constantinople. It was the seat of government for a vast empire, the center of art and scholarly endeavor. It founded the first school of higher learning that could be called a university. It would remain so for a long time.
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Constantinople
Small Greek City on the Bosporus
Hagia Sophia
Constantine the Great
The Macedonian Dynasty
The Purple Room
The Fall and Rise of Zoe
Constantine VII, the Untypical Emperor
Curcuas Captures the Image of Edessa
The Image of Edessa in Constantinople
Alexios Komnenos to Robert of Flanders
Questions About Authenticity of the Letter
The List the Boggles the Mind
Robert de Clari
Accuracy in Translations
Saint Mary of Blachernae
The Habitual Miracle
McNeal’s Sudarium
The Sudarium Envisioned
Constantinople’s Vast Treasury
Two Cloths?
In this place He rises again
Man of Sorrows
Monastery of St. Panteleimon
St. Panteleimon Fresco
Hungarian Pray Manuscript
Portrait of an Empty Shroud
Is the Sudarium There?
The Real Sudarium?
First Written Record of the Sudarium
Mark Guscin
The Sudarium was Carbon Dated