Constantinople
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50 free Constantinople trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
For more than a thousand years Constantinople was the place the rest of Europe measured itself against. Founded by a Roman emperor on a spit of land between two continents, it grew into the richest and best-defended capital of the Middle Ages, and its loss in 1453 is still treated as the end of an age. This quiz collects the fun facts people look for about Constantinople: how it was founded and named, the emperors and empresses who ruled it, the riots, sieges and secret weapons, the churches, walls and monuments that still stand in Istanbul, and what happened after the Ottomans marched in. Later questions follow the name itself into songs, trains and modern Turkey. It is written for history fans, students of Byzantine and Ottoman history, and travellers planning a trip to Istanbul. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which mythological monster's face is carved on two reused blocks beneath columns in Istanbul's Basilica Cistern?
Medusa
Medusa stares out from both blocks, and nobody knows which older building the two heads were taken from.
Q 02The Blues and Greens, whose fans set Constantinople ablaze in the Nika riots of 532, were rival teams in which sport?
Chariot racing
Chariot racing stirred loyalties so fierce that a week of rioting by the two fan clubs burned nearly half the city and left tens of thousands dead.
Q 03Two monks broke China's monopoly on which luxury good by smuggling its secret to Constantinople inside hollow canes?
Silk
Silk workshops opened in Constantinople soon after the monks carried silkworm eggs west, hidden in their bamboo canes.
Q 04Which Italian city displays four bronze horses that crusaders looted from Constantinople's Hippodrome in 1204?
Venice
Venice set the horses on the front of St Mark's Basilica, where they stayed until Napoleon hauled them off to Paris in 1797; they came home in 1815.
Q 05Greek fire, the secret weapon Byzantine ships sprayed at fleets attacking Constantinople, had which alarming property?
It burned on water
It burned on water, and writers of the time said only sand, strong vinegar or old urine could put it out.
Q 06Which band released the best-known cover, in 1990, of the 1953 novelty song "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)"?
They Might Be Giants
They Might Be Giants revived a tune written exactly 500 years after the city fell to the Ottomans.
Q 07The fall of Constantinople on 29 May 1453 is the reason many Greeks consider which day of the week unlucky?
Tuesday
Tuesday has carried the stigma ever since the final Ottoman assault, launched shortly after midnight, broke into the city.
Q 08Which Ottoman weapons, hurling half-tonne balls, smashed gaps in Constantinople's thousand-year-old land walls in 1453?
Cannons
Cannons could fire from more than a kilometre away, and their success against such famous defences heralded a change in siege warfare.
Q 09When the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed in 1923, which city replaced Constantinople as the national capital?
Ankara
Ankara was chosen as part of a deliberate plan for a new, secular state, though the old imperial city remained the country's largest.
Q 10Which luxury train from Paris made Constantinople its famous terminus, first running there direct in 1889?
Orient Express
The Orient Express kept the city as its easternmost stop until 1977, pulling in at Sirkeci Terminal beside the old harbour.
Q 11Which Ottoman sultan, later nicknamed the Conqueror, captured Constantinople in 1453 when he was only 21?
Mehmed II
Mehmed II went on to claim the title Caesar of Rome and turned the city into a thriving capital of his own empire.
Q 12Which expedition set out to recapture Jerusalem but instead sacked Christian Constantinople for three days in 1204?
Fourth Crusade
The Fourth Crusade never reached its target, and Pope Innocent III, who had called it, had told its army not to attack fellow Christians.
Q 13Which invader's presence in the Balkans in the 440s drove Constantinople to rebuild its shattered walls in only 60 days?
Attila the Hun
Q 21Which inlet beside Constantinople did the Byzantines close to enemy ships with a great chain stretched to Galata?
Golden Horn
The Golden Horn stayed shut in 1453 until the Ottomans gave up on breaking the chain and towed their ships overland on greased logs instead.
Q 22Which elite unit protecting Constantinople's emperors was recruited largely from Norsemen and, later, Anglo-Saxons?
Varangian Guard
The Varangian Guard suited emperors because northerners had no local loyalties, and Anglo-Saxons flocked to it after the Norman conquest of England.
Q 23By which Old Norse name, usually translated as "the Great City", did Vikings know Constantinople?
Miklagard
Attila the Hun was close enough that the city's rival fan clubs, the Blues and the Greens, sent 16,000 men to the building work.
Q 14Florence Nightingale made her name at a hospital in Scutari, across the Bosporus from Constantinople, in which war?
Crimean War
The Crimean War brought British troops through the Ottoman capital, and Nightingale reached the Scutari barracks hospital with her volunteer nurses in November 1854.
Q 15Allied troops occupied Constantinople for nearly five years after the Ottoman Empire's defeat in which conflict?
World War I
World War I ended for the Ottomans with an armistice in October 1918; French and British troops marched in two weeks later and stayed until 1923.
Q 16A Byzantine emperor's children delivered in a special chamber of Constantinople's Great Palace were "born in the" what?
Purple
Purple was the imperial shade, and the birth chamber was built of porphyry, so the title Porphyrogennetos marked a child born to a ruling emperor.
Q 17Constantinople was said to copy Rome by being built across how many hills within its walls?
Seven
Seven hills were claimed for the new capital on purpose, and Istanbul is still nicknamed the City on the Seven Hills.
Q 18Which Turkish president turned Hagia Sophia from a working mosque into a museum in 1935?
Kemal Atatürk
Kemal Atatürk's change lasted 85 years: a Turkish court annulled the museum decree in 2020 and the building became a mosque again.
Q 19Which emperor rebuilt Hagia Sophia in under six years and reportedly boasted that he had outdone Solomon?
Justinian I
Justinian I opened the new church in December 537, five years and ten months after work began.
Q 20Which empress, a former stage performer, talked her husband out of fleeing Constantinople during the riots of 532?
Theodora
Theodora argued, by one account, that it was better to die a ruler than to live as an exile, and the court stayed to fight.
Miklagard appears in the sagas as the place where Norsemen went to serve the emperor and, with luck, come home rich.
Q 24What does the Greek name of Hagia Sophia, the great domed church of Constantinople, mean in English?
Holy Wisdom
Holy Wisdom was the dedication of three successive churches on the site; the one standing today replaced a church destroyed by rioters in 532.
Q 25What became of Constantine XI, the last Byzantine emperor, when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453?
He died fighting
He died fighting, by most accounts in a last stand, though Greek legend says an angel turned him to marble to await his return.
Q 26Which event in the sky a week before Constantinople fell in 1453 was taken as fulfilling a prophecy of doom?
A lunar eclipse
A lunar eclipse on 22 May was followed four days later by a thick fog that blotted out the whole city.
Q 27Which disease reached Constantinople in 542, reportedly killing thousands a day and infecting the emperor himself?
Plague
Plague killed about a fifth of the city's people at the height of the epidemic; the emperor caught it and recovered.
Q 28Constantinople's Serpent Column, a trophy of the Greek victory over Persia at Plataea, was taken from which sanctuary?
Delphi
Delphi lost the bronze column when Constantine the Great carried it off to adorn his new capital's Hippodrome.
Q 29What do historians call the crusader state that ruled Constantinople from 1204 until the Byzantines retook it in 1261?
Latin Empire
The Latin Empire got its name from later historians; its last ruler, Baldwin II, went into exile when the city was retaken.
Q 30Tradition says Byzantium, the future Constantinople, was founded by colonists led by Byzas from which Greek city?
Megara
Megara, a small city-state near Athens, planted the colony in the 7th century BC, about a thousand years before it became an imperial capital.