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Nicomedia (; , Nikomedeia; modern İzmit) was an ancient Greece city located in what is now Turkey. In 286, Nicomedia became the eastern and most senior capital city of the Roman Empire (chosen by the emperor Diocletian who ruled in the east), a status which the city maintained during the Tetrarchy system (293–324).
The Tetrarchy ended with the Battle of Chrysopolis (Üsküdar) in 324, when Constantine defeated Licinius and became the sole emperor. In 330 Constantine chose for himself the nearby Byzantium (which was renamed Constantinople, modern Istanbul) as the new capital of the Roman Empire.
The city was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire with the victory of Sultan Orhan Gazi against the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantines managed to retake it in the aftermath of the Battle of Ankara, but it fell definitively to the Ottomans in 1419.
Nicomedia was the metropolis and capital of the Roman province of Bithynia under the Roman Empire. It is referenced repeatedly in Pliny the Younger's Epistles to Trajan during his tenure as governor of Bithynia. Pliny, in his letters, mentions several public buildings of the city such as a senate-house, an aqueduct, a forum, a temple of Cybele, and others, and speaks of a great fire, during which the place suffered much.Pliny the Younger, Epist. 10.33. Diocletian made it the eastern capital city of the Roman Empire in 286 when he introduced the Tetrarchy system.
The destruction of the Nicomedia church incited panic in the city, and at the end of the month a fire destroyed part of Diocletian's palace, followed 16 days later by another fire. Although an investigation was made into the cause of the fires, no party was officially charged, but Galerius placed the blame on the Christians. He oversaw the execution of two palace eunuchs, who he claimed conspired with the Christians to start the fire, followed by six more executions through the end of April 303. Soon after Galerius declared Nicomedia to be unsafe and ostentatiously departed the city for Rome, followed soon after by Diocletian.
A major earthquake, however, on 24 August 358, caused extensive devastation to Nicomedia, and was followed by a fire which completed the catastrophe. Nicomedia was rebuilt, but on a smaller scale.See Ammianus Marcellinus 17.7.1–8 In the sixth century under Emperor Justinian I the city was extended with new public buildings. Situated on the roads leading to the capital, the city remained a major military center, playing an important role in the Byzantine campaigns against the Caliphate. From inscriptions we learn that in the later period of the empire Nicomedia enjoyed the honour of a Roman colony.
In 451, the local bishopric was promoted to a Metropolitan see under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. The metropolis of Nicomedia was ranked 7th in the Notitiae Episcopatuum among the metropolises of the patriarchate. In the eighth century the Emperor Constantine V established his court there for a time, when plague broke out in Constantinople and drove him from his capital in 746–47.David Turner, The Politics of Despair: The Plague of 746–747 and Iconoclasm in the Byzantine Empire, The Annual of the British School at Athens, Vol. 85 (1990), p. 428 From the 840s on, Nicomedia was the capital of the thema of the Optimatoi. By that time, most of the old, seawards city had been abandoned and is described by the Persian geographer Ibn Khordadbeh as lying in ruins, with settlement restricted to the hilltop citadel. In the 1080s, the city served as the main military base for Alexios I Komnenos in his campaigns against the Seljuk Turks, and the First Crusade and Second Crusade Crusades both encamped there.
The city was briefly held by the Latin Empire following the fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade in 1204: in late 1206 the seneschal Thierry de Loos made it his base, converting the church of Saint Sophia into a fortress; however, the Crusader stronghold was subjected to constant raids by the Emperor of Nicaea Theodore I Laskaris, during which de Loos was captured by Nicaean soldiers; by the summer of 1207 Emperor Henry of Flanders agreed to evacuate Nicomedia in exchange for de Loos and other prisoners Emperor Theodore held.Geoffrey de Villehardouin, translated by M. R. B. Shaw, Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades (London: Penguin, 1963), pp. 147, 154–156 The city remained in Byzantine control for over a century after that, but following the Byzantine defeat at the Battle of Bapheus in 1302, it was threatened by the rising Ottoman beylik. The city was twice besieged and blockaded by the Ottomans (in 1304 and 1330) before finally succumbing in 1337.
The major religious shrine was a temple of Demeter, which stood in a sacred precinct on a hill above the harbor. The city adopted official cults of Rome avidly, there were temples dedicated to the Emperor Commodus, a sacred precinct of the city dedicated to Augustus, and a temple of Roma dedicated during the late-Republic.
The city was sacked in AD 253 by the Goths, but when Diocletian made the city his capital in 283 AD he undertook grand restorations and built an enormous palace, an armory, mint, and new shipyards.
The 1999 İzmit earthquake, which seriously damaged most of the city, also led to major discoveries of ancient Nicomedia during the subsequent debris clearing. A wealth of ancient statuary was uncovered, including statues of Hercules, Athena, Diocletian and Constantine.
In the years after the earthquake, the Izmit Provincial Cultural Directorate appropriated small areas for excavation, including the site identified as Diocletian's Palace and a nearby Roman theatre. In April 2016 a more extensive excavation of the palace was begun under the supervision of the Kocaeli Museum, which estimated that the site covers 60,000 square meters (196,850 square feet).
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