title: Charles II of England

text: After the death of Cromwell in 1658, Charles's initial chances of regaining the Crown seemed slim; Cromwell was succeeded as Lord Protector by his son, Richard. However, the new Lord Protector had little experience of either military or civil administration. In 1659, the Rump Parliament was recalled and Richard resigned. During the civil and military unrest that followed, George Monck, the Governor of Scotland, was concerned that the nation would descend into anarchy. Monck and his army marched into the City of London, and forced the Rump Parliament to re-admit members of the Long Parliament who had been excluded in December 1648, during Pride's Purge. Parliament dissolved itself, and there was a general election for the first time in almost 20 years. The outgoing Parliament defined the electoral qualifications intending to bring about the return of a Presbyterian majority.


title: Charles II of England

text: The restrictions against royalist candidates and voters were widely ignored, and the elections resulted in a House of Commons that was fairly evenly divided on political grounds between Royalists and Parliamentarians and on religious grounds between Anglicans and Presbyterians. The new so-called Convention Parliament assembled on 25 April 1660, and soon afterwards welcomed the Declaration of Breda, in which Charles promised lenience and tolerance. There would be liberty of conscience, and Anglican church policy would not be harsh. He would not exile past enemies nor confiscate their wealth. There would be pardons for nearly all his opponents except the regicides. Above all, Charles promised to rule in cooperation with Parliament. The English Parliament resolved to proclaim Charles king and invite him to return, a message that reached Charles at Breda on 8 May 1660. In Ireland, a convention had been called earlier in the year and had already declared for Charles. On 14 May, he was proclaimed king in Dublin.


title: Charles II of England

text: He set out for England from Scheveningen, arrived in Dover on 25 May 1660 and reached London on 29 May, his 30th birthday. Although Charles and Parliament granted amnesty to nearly all of Cromwell's supporters in the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, 50 people were specifically excluded. In the end nine of the regicides were executed: they were hanged, drawn and quartered, whereas others were given life imprisonment or simply excluded from office for life. The bodies of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw were subjected to the indignity of posthumous decapitations.


title: Charles II of England

text: The English Parliament granted him an annual income to run the government of £1.2 million, generated largely from customs and excise duties. The grant, however, proved to be insufficient for most of Charles's reign. For the most part, the actual revenue was much lower, which led to attempts to economise at court by reducing the size and expenses of the royal household and raise money through unpopular innovations such as the hearth tax.


title: Charles II of England

text: In the latter half of 1660, Charles's joy at the Restoration was tempered by the deaths of his youngest brother, Henry, and sister, Mary, of smallpox. At around the same time, Anne Hyde, the daughter of the Lord Chancellor, Edward Hyde, revealed that she was pregnant by Charles's brother, James, whom she had secretly married. Edward Hyde, who had not known of either the marriage or the pregnancy, was created Earl of Clarendon and his position as Charles's favourite minister was strengthened.


title: Charles II of England

text: The Convention Parliament was dissolved in December 1660, and, shortly after the coronation, the second English Parliament of the reign assembled. Dubbed the Cavalier Parliament, it was overwhelmingly Royalist and Anglican. It sought to discourage non-conformity to the Church of England and passed several acts to secure Anglican dominance. The Corporation Act 1661 required municipal officeholders to swear allegiance; the Act of Uniformity 1662 made the use of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer compulsory; the Conventicle Act 1664 prohibited religious assemblies of more than five people, except under the auspices of the Church of England; and the Five Mile Act 1665 prohibited expelled non-conforming clergymen from coming within five miles (8 km) of a parish from which they had been banished. The Conventicle and Five Mile Acts remained in effect for the remainder of Charles's reign. The Acts became known as the Clarendon Code, after Lord Clarendon, even though he was not directly responsible for them and even spoke against the Five Mile Act.


title: Charles II of England

text: The Restoration was accompanied by social change. Puritanism lost its momentum. Theatres reopened after having been closed during the protectorship of Oliver Cromwell, and bawdy "Restoration comedy" became a recognisable genre. Theatre licences granted by Charles required that female parts be played by "their natural performers", rather than by boys as was often the practice before; and Restoration literature celebrated or reacted to the restored court, which included libertines such as John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester. Of Charles II, Wilmot supposedly said:


title: Charles II of England

text: To which Charles is reputed to have replied "that the matter was easily accounted for: For that his discourse was his own, his actions were the ministry's".


title: Charles II of England

text: In 1665, the Great Plague of London began, peaking in September with up to 7,000 deaths per week. Charles, his family, and the court fled London in July to Salisbury; Parliament met in Oxford. Plague cases ebbed over the winter, and Charles returned to London in February 1666.


title: Charles II of England

text: After a long spell of hot and dry weather through mid-1666, the Great Fire of London started on 2 September 1666 in Pudding Lane. Fanned by strong winds and fed by wood and fuel stockpiled for winter, the fire destroyed about 13,200 houses and 87 churches, including St Paul's Cathedral. Charles and his brother James joined and directed the firefighting effort. The public blamed Catholic conspirators for the fire.


title: Charles II of England

text: Since 1640, Portugal had been fighting a war against Spain to restore its independence after a dynastic union of sixty years between the crowns of Spain and Portugal. Portugal had been helped by France, but in the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659 Portugal was abandoned by its French ally. Negotiations with Portugal for Charles's marriage to Catherine of Braganza began during his father's reign and upon the restoration, Queen Luísa of Portugal, acting as regent, reopened negotiations with England that resulted in an alliance. On 23 June 1661, a marriage treaty was signed; England acquired Catherine's dowry of Tangier (in North Africa) and the Seven Islands of Bombay (the latter having a major influence on the development of the British Empire in India), together with trading privileges in Brazil and the East Indies, religious and commercial freedom in Portugal and two million Portuguese crowns (about £300,000); while Portugal obtained military and naval support against Spain and liberty of worship for Catherine. Catherine journeyed from Portugal to Portsmouth on 13–14 May 1662, but was not visited by Charles there until 20 May. The next day the couple were married at Portsmouth in two ceremonies—a Catholic one conducted in secret, followed by a public Anglican service.


title: Charles II of England

text: The same year, in an unpopular move, Charles sold Dunkirk to his first cousin King Louis XIV of France for about £375,000. The channel port, although a valuable strategic outpost, was a drain on Charles's limited finances.


title: Charles II of England

text: Before Charles's restoration, the Navigation Acts of 1650 had hurt Dutch trade by giving English vessels a monopoly, and had started the First Dutch War (1652–1654). To lay foundations for a new beginning, envoys of the States General appeared in November 1660 with the Dutch Gift. The Second Dutch War (1665–1667) was started by English attempts to muscle in on Dutch possessions in Africa and North America. The conflict began well for the English, with the capture of New Amsterdam (renamed New York in honour of Charles's brother James, Duke of York) and a victory at the Battle of Lowestoft, but in 1667 the Dutch launched a surprise attack on England (the Raid on the Medway) when they sailed up the River Thames to where a major part of the English fleet was docked. Almost all of the ships were sunk except for the flagship, "Royal Charles", which was taken back to the Netherlands as a prize. The Second Dutch War ended with the signing of the Treaty of Breda.


title: Charles II of England

text: As a result of the Second Dutch War, Charles dismissed Lord Clarendon, whom he used as a scapegoat for the war. Clarendon fled to France when impeached for high treason (which carried the penalty of death). Power passed to five politicians known collectively by a whimsical acronym as the Cabal—Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley (afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury) and Lauderdale. In fact, the Cabal rarely acted in concert, and the court was often divided between two factions led by Arlington and Buckingham, with Arlington the more successful.


title: Charles II of England

text: In 1668, England allied itself with Sweden, and with its former enemy the Netherlands, to oppose Louis XIV in the War of Devolution. Louis made peace with the Triple Alliance, but he continued to maintain his aggressive intentions towards the Netherlands. In 1670, Charles, seeking to solve his financial troubles, agreed to the Treaty of Dover, under which Louis XIV would pay him £160,000 each year. In exchange, Charles agreed to supply Louis with troops and to announce his conversion to Catholicism "as soon as the welfare of his kingdom will permit". Louis was to provide him with 6,000 troops to suppress those who opposed the conversion. Charles endeavoured to ensure that the Treaty—especially the conversion clause—remained secret. It remains unclear if Charles ever seriously intended to convert.


title: Charles II of England

text: Meanwhile, by a series of five charters, Charles granted the East India Company the rights to autonomous government of its territorial acquisitions, to mint money, to command fortresses and troops, to form alliances, to make war and peace, and to exercise both civil and criminal jurisdiction over its possessions in the Indies. Earlier in 1668 he leased the islands of Bombay to the company for a nominal sum of £10 paid in gold. The Portuguese territories that Catherine brought with her as a dowry proved too expensive to maintain; Tangier was abandoned in 1684. In 1670, Charles granted control of the entire Hudson Bay drainage basin to the Hudson's Bay Company by royal charter, and named the territory Rupert's Land, after his cousin Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the company's first governor.


title: Charles II of England

text: Although previously favourable to the Crown, the Cavalier Parliament was alienated by the king's wars and religious policies during the 1670s. In 1672, Charles issued the Royal Declaration of Indulgence, in which he purported to suspend all penal laws against Catholics and other religious dissenters. In the same year, he openly supported Catholic France and started the Third Anglo-Dutch War.


title: Charles II of England

text: The Cavalier Parliament opposed the Declaration of Indulgence on constitutional grounds by claiming that the king had no right to arbitrarily suspend laws passed by Parliament. Charles withdrew the Declaration, and also agreed to the Test Act, which not only required public officials to receive the sacrament under the forms prescribed by the Church of England, but also later forced them to denounce transubstantiation and the Catholic Mass as "superstitious and idolatrous". Clifford, who had converted to Catholicism, resigned rather than take the oath, and died shortly after, possibly from suicide.


title: Charles II of England

text: By 1674, England had gained nothing from the Anglo-Dutch War, and the Cavalier Parliament refused to provide further funds, forcing Charles to make peace. The power of the Cabal waned and that of Clifford's replacement, Lord Danby grew, as did opposition towards him and the court. Politicians and peers believed that Charles II favoured a pro-French foreign policy that desired to emulate the absolutist (and Catholic) sovereignty of Louis XIV. In numerous pamphlets and parliamentary speeches between 1675 and 1678, "popery and arbitrary government" were decried for fear of the loss of English liberties and freedoms.


title: Charles II of England

text: Charles's wife Queen Catherine was unable to produce an heir; her four pregnancies had ended in miscarriages and stillbirths in 1662, February 1666, May 1668, and June 1669. Charles's heir presumptive was therefore his unpopular Catholic brother, James, Duke of York. Partly to assuage public fears that the royal family was too Catholic, Charles agreed that James's daughter, Mary, should marry the Protestant William of Orange. In 1678, Titus Oates, who had been alternately an Anglican and Jesuit priest, falsely warned of a "Popish Plot" to assassinate the king, even accusing the queen of complicity. Charles did not believe the allegations, but ordered his chief minister Lord Danby to investigate. While Danby seems to have been rightly sceptical about Oates's claims, the Cavalier Parliament took them seriously. The people were seized with an anti-Catholic hysteria; judges and juries across the land condemned the supposed conspirators; numerous innocent individuals were executed.


title: Charles II of England

text: Later in 1678, Danby was impeached by the House of Commons on the charge of high treason. Although much of the nation had sought war with Catholic France, Charles had secretly negotiated with Louis XIV, trying to reach an agreement under which England would remain neutral in return for money. Danby had publicly professed that he was hostile to France, but had reservedly agreed to abide by Charles's wishes. Unfortunately for him, the House of Commons failed to view him as a reluctant participant in the scandal, instead believing that he was the author of the policy. To save Danby from the impeachment trial, Charles dissolved the Cavalier Parliament in January 1679.


title: Charles II of England

text: The new English Parliament, which met in March of the same year, was quite hostile to Charles. Many members feared that he had intended to use the standing army to suppress dissent or impose Catholicism. However, with insufficient funds voted by Parliament, Charles was forced to gradually disband his troops. Having lost the support of Parliament, Danby resigned his post of Lord High Treasurer, but received a pardon from the king. In defiance of the royal will, the House of Commons declared that the dissolution of Parliament did not interrupt impeachment proceedings, and that the pardon was therefore invalid. When the House of Lords attempted to impose the punishment of exile—which the Commons thought too mild—the impeachment became stalled between the two Houses. As he had been required to do so many times during his reign, Charles bowed to the wishes of his opponents, committing Danby to the Tower of London, in which he was held for another five years.


title: Charles II of England

text: In Charles's early childhood, William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, was governor of the royal household and Brian Duppa, the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, was his tutor. Neither man thought that the study of science subjects was appropriate for a future king, and Newcastle even advised against studying any subject too seriously. However, as Charles grew older, the renowned surgeon William Harvey was appointed his tutor. He was famous for his work on blood circulation in the human body and already held the position of physician to Charles I; his studies were to influence Charles's own attitude to science. As the king's chief physician, Harvey accompanied Charles I to the Battle of Edgehill and, although some details are uncertain, he had charge of Prince Charles and the Duke of York in the morning but the two boys were back with the king for the start of battle. Later in the afternoon, with their father concerned for their safety, the two princes left the battlefield accompanied by Sir W. Howard and his pensioners.


title: Charles II of England

text: During his exile, in France, Charles continued his education, including physics, chemistry and mathematics. His tutors included the cleric John Earle, well known for his satirical book "Microcosmographie", with whom he studied Latin and Greek, and Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher and author of "Leviathan", with whom he studied mathematics. In France, Charles assisted his childhood friend, the Earl of Buckingham, with his experiments in chemistry and alchemy, with the Earl convinced he was close to producing the philosopher's stone. Although some of Charles's studies, while abroad, may have helped to pass the time, on his return to England he was already knowledgeable in the mathematics of navigation and was a competent chemist. Such was his knowledge of Naval Architecture that he was able to participate in technical discussions on the subject with Samuel Pepys, William Petty and John Evelyn.


title: Charles II of England

text: The new concepts and discoveries being found at this time fascinated Charles, not only in science and medicine, but in topics such as botany and gardening. A French traveller, Sorbier, while visiting the English court, was astonished by the extent of the king's knowledge. As king, Charles now freely indulged in his many interests, including astronomy, which had been stimulated by a visit to Gresham College, in October 1660, to see the telescopes made by the astronomer Sir Paul Neile. Charles was so impressed by what he saw that he ordered his own 36' telescope which he had installed in the Privy Garden, at Whitehall. The king would invite his friends and acquaintances to view the heavens through his new telescope and, in May 1661, John Evelyn describes his visit to the Garden, with several other scientists, to view Saturn's rings. Charles also had a laboratory installed, in Whitehall, with easy access to his bedroom. There, he carried out experiments of his own, or observed those carried out by his staff.


title: Charles II of England

text: From the beginning of his reign, Charles appointed experts to assist him in his scientific pursuits. These included: Timothy Clarke a celebrated anatomist, who performed some dissections for the king; Robert Morison as his chief botanist (Charles had his own botanical garden); Edmund Dickinson, a chemist and alchemist, who was tasked with carrying out experiments in the king's laboratory; Sir Thomas Williams, who was skillful in compounding and inventing medicines, some of which were prepared in the royal presence; and Nicasius le Febure (or Nicolas LeFevre), who was invited to England, as royal professor of chemistry and apothecary to the king's household, (Evelyn records visiting his laboratory with the king). Sir Christopher Wren, who was to become the king's Chief Architect, constructed a detailed model of the moon which he presented, in May 1661, to a delighted king.


title: Charles II of England

text: In addition to his many other interests, the king was fascinated by clock mechanisms and had clocks distributed all around Whitehall, including seven of them in his bedroom. Robert Bruce (later to become the Earl of Ailesbury), a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, complained that the continual noise of the clocks chiming disturbed his sleep, whenever it was necessary for him to stay close by to the king. Also, Charles had a sundial installed in the Privy Garden, by which he could set his personal pocket watch. (For a while, the king personally recorded the performance of the latest spring-balance watch, presented to him by Robert Hooke.)


title: Charles II of England

text: In 1662, Charles was pleased to grant a royal charter to a group of scientists and others who had established a formal society in 1660 to give a more academic and learned approach to science and to conduct experiments in physics and mathematics. Sir Robert Moray, a member of Charles's court, played an important part in achieving this outcome, and he was to be the first president of this new Royal Society. Over the years, Moray was an important go-between for Charles and the Society, and his standing with the king was so high that he was given access to the royal laboratory to perform his own experiments there.


title: Charles II of England

text: Initially, Charles showed interest in the activities of the new society, where Robert Hooke, and others, gave weekly demonstrations, and it was expected he would soon attend a meeting. On 1 July 1663, a special sub-committee was set up, to meet weekly, to prepare for the King's visit. However, after several months and many meetings, preparing for the visit, the King had still not attended. Even so, on 7 December 1663, in renewed anticipation of a visit, Hooke was moved in to permanent residence, at Wadham House, for a fee of £20 p.a., to be on hand to perform demonstrations for the king.


title: Charles II of England

text: In fact, Charles never did attend a Society meeting, but he remained aware of the activities there from his discussions with Society members, especially Morey. In addition, Robert Boyle gave him a private viewing of the Boyle/Hooke air-pump, which was used at many of the Wednesday meetings. However, Charles preferred experiments which had an immediate practical outcome and he laughed at the efforts of the Society members "to weigh air". He seemed unable to grasp the significance of the basic laws of physics being established at that time, including Boyle's Law and Hooke's Law and the concept of atmospheric pressure and the barometer and the importance of air for the support of life.


title: Charles II of England

text: Although Charles lost interest in the activities of the society, he continued to support scientific and commercial endeavours. He founded the Mathematical School at Christ's Hospital in 1673 and, two years later, following concerns over French advances in astronomy, he founded the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. He maintained an interest in chemistry and regularly visited his private laboratory. There, dissections were occasionally carried out, and observed by the king. Samuel Pepys noted in his diary that on the morning of Friday, 15 January 1669, while he was walking to Whitehall, he met the king who invited him to view his chemistry laboratory. Pepys's scientific knowledge was not great and he confessed to finding what he saw there beyond him.


title: Charles II of England

text: Charles developed painful gout in later life which limited the daily walks that he took regularly when younger. His keenness was now channelled to his laboratory where he would devote himself to his experiments, for hours at a time, sometimes helped by Robert Moray. Charles was particularly interested in alchemy, which he had first encountered many years earlier, during his exile with the Duke of Buckingham. The practices and beliefs of alchemy, especially regarding the transmutation of metals, were widely held in Charles's time. Particularly popular were the teachings of Geber who advocated that all metals could be derived from sulphur and mercury, according to the proportions used. Influenced by this theory, Charles resumed his experiments with mercury and would spend whole mornings attempting to distill it. Heating mercury in an open crucible releases mercury vapour, which is toxic and may have contributed to his later ill health. However, Charles was not alone in suffering from the effects of mercury poisoning as a number of his contemporaries, also alchemists, showed the symptoms of mercury poisoning in later life, including Buckingham, Isaac Newton, George Starkey, and Evelyn's manservant Richard Hoare.


title: Charles II of England

text: Charles faced a political storm over his brother James, a Catholic, being next in line to the throne. The prospect of a Catholic monarch was vehemently opposed by Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury (previously Baron Ashley and a member of the Cabal, which had fallen apart in 1673). Shaftesbury's power base was strengthened when the House of Commons of 1679 introduced the Exclusion Bill, which sought to exclude the Duke of York from the line of succession. Some even sought to confer the Crown on the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, the eldest of Charles's illegitimate children. The "Abhorrers"—those who thought the Exclusion Bill was abhorrent—were named Tories (after a term for dispossessed Irish Catholic bandits), while the "Petitioners"—those who supported a petitioning campaign in favour of the Exclusion Bill—were called Whigs (after a term for rebellious Scottish Presbyterians).


title: Charles II of England

text: Fearing that the Exclusion Bill would be passed, and bolstered by some acquittals in the continuing Plot trials, which seemed to him to indicate a more favourable public mood towards Catholicism, Charles dissolved the English Parliament, for a second time that year, in mid-1679. Charles's hopes for a more moderate Parliament were not fulfilled; within a few months he had dissolved Parliament yet again, after it sought to pass the Exclusion Bill. When a new Parliament assembled at Oxford in March 1681, Charles dissolved it for a fourth time after just a few days. During the 1680s, however, popular support for the Exclusion Bill ebbed, and Charles experienced a nationwide surge of loyalty. Lord Shaftesbury was prosecuted (albeit unsuccessfully) for treason in 1681 and later fled to Holland, where he died. For the remainder of his reign, Charles ruled without Parliament.


title: Charles II of England

text: Charles's opposition to the Exclusion Bill angered some Protestants. Protestant conspirators formulated the Rye House Plot, a plan to murder him and the Duke of York as they returned to London after horse races in Newmarket. A great fire, however, destroyed Charles's lodgings at Newmarket, which forced him to leave the races early, thus inadvertently avoiding the planned attack. News of the failed plot was leaked. Protestant politicians such as the Earl of Essex, Algernon Sydney, Lord Russell and the Duke of Monmouth were implicated in the plot. Essex slit his own throat while imprisoned in the Tower of London; Sydney and Russell were executed for high treason on very flimsy evidence; and the Duke of Monmouth went into exile at the court of William of Orange. Lord Danby and the surviving Catholic lords held in the Tower were released and the king's Catholic brother, James, acquired greater influence at court. Titus Oates was convicted and imprisoned for defamation.


title: Charles II of England

text: Thus through the last years of Charles's reign, his approach towards his opponents changed, and he was compared by Whigs to the contemporary Louis XIV of France, with his form of government in those years termed "slavery". Many of them were prosecuted and their estates seized, with Charles replacing judges and sheriffs at will and packing juries to achieve conviction. To destroy opposition in London, Charles first disenfranchised many Whigs in the 1682 municipal elections, and in 1683 the London charter was forfeited. In retrospect, the use of the judicial system by Charles (and later his brother and heir James) as a tool against opposition, helped establish the idea of separation of powers between the judiciary and the Crown in Whig thought.


title: Charles II of England

text: Charles suffered a sudden apoplectic fit on the morning of 2 February 1685, and died aged 54 at 11:45 am, four days later, at the Palace of Whitehall. The suddenness of his illness and death led to suspicion of poison in the minds of many, including one of the royal doctors; however, a more modern medical analysis has held that the symptoms of his final illness are similar to those of uraemia (a clinical syndrome due to kidney dysfunction). Charles had a laboratory among his many interests, where prior to his illness he had been experimenting with mercury. Mercuric poisoning can produce irreversible kidney damage; but the case for this being a cause of his death is unproven. In the days between his collapse and his death, Charles endured a variety of torturous treatments including bloodletting, purging and cupping in hopes of effecting a recovery, which may have exacerbated his uraemia through dehydration instead of helping alleviate it.


title: Charles II of England

text: On his deathbed Charles asked his brother, James, to look after his mistresses: "be well to Portsmouth, and let not poor Nelly starve". He told his courtiers, "I am sorry, gentlemen, for being such a time a-dying", and expressed regret at his treatment of his wife. On the last evening of his life he was received into the Catholic Church in the presence of Father John Huddleston, though the extent to which he was fully conscious or committed, and with whom the idea originated, is unclear. He was buried in Westminster Abbey "without any manner of pomp" on 14 February.


title: Charles II of England

text: The escapades of Charles after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester remained important to him throughout his life. He delighted and bored listeners with tales of his escape for many years. Numerous accounts of his adventures were published, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the Restoration. Though not averse to his escape being ascribed to divine providence, Charles himself seems to have delighted most in his ability to sustain his disguise as a man of ordinary origins, and to move unrecognised through his realm. Ironic and cynical, Charles took pleasure in retailing stories which demonstrated the undetectable nature of any inherent majesty he possessed.


title: Charles II of England

text: Charles had no legitimate children, but acknowledged a dozen by seven mistresses, including five by Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine, for whom the Dukedom of Cleveland was created. His other mistresses included Moll Davis, Nell Gwyn, Elizabeth Killigrew, Catherine Pegge, Lucy Walter and Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth. As a result, in his lifetime he was often nicknamed "Old Rowley", the name of his favourite racehorse, notable as a stallion.


title: Charles II of England

text: His subjects resented paying taxes that were spent on his mistresses and their children, many of whom received dukedoms or earldoms. The present Dukes of Buccleuch, Richmond, Grafton and St Albans descend from Charles in unbroken male line. Diana, Princess of Wales, was descended from two of Charles's illegitimate sons: the Dukes of Grafton and Richmond. Diana's son, William, Prince of Wales, heir to the British throne, is likely to be the first British monarch descended from Charles II.


title: Charles II of England

text: Charles's eldest son, the Duke of Monmouth, led a rebellion against James II, but was defeated at the Battle of Sedgemoor on 6 July 1685, captured and executed. James was eventually dethroned in 1688, in the course of the Glorious Revolution.


title: Charles II of England

text: In the words of his contemporary John Evelyn, "a prince of many virtues and many great imperfections, debonair, easy of access, not bloody or cruel". John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, wrote more lewdly of Charles:


title: Charles II of England

text: Looking back on Charles's reign, Tories tended to view it as a time of benevolent monarchy whereas Whigs perceived it as a terrible despotism. Professor Ronald Hutton summarises a polarised historiography:


title: Charles II of England

text: The anniversary of the Restoration (which was also Charles's birthday)—29 May—was recognised in England until the mid-nineteenth century as Oak Apple Day, after the Royal Oak in which Charles hid during his escape from the forces of Oliver Cromwell. Traditional celebrations involved the wearing of oak leaves but these have now died out. Charles II is depicted extensively in art, literature and media. Charleston, South Carolina, and South Kingstown, Rhode Island, are named after him.


title: Charles II of England

text: The official style of Charles II was "Charles the Second, by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc." The claim to France was only nominal, and had been asserted by every English monarch since Edward III, regardless of the amount of French territory actually controlled.


title: Charles II of England

text: Charles's coat of arms as Prince of Wales was the royal arms (which he later inherited), differenced by a label of three points Argent. His arms as monarch were: Quarterly, I and IV Grandquarterly, Azure three fleurs-de-lis Or (for France) and Gules three lions passant guardant in pale Or (for England); II Or a lion rampant within a double tressure flory-counter-flory Gules (for Scotland); III Azure a harp Or stringed Argent (for Ireland).


title: Charles II of England

text: By Elizabeth Killigrew (1622–1680), daughter of Sir Robert Killigrew, married Francis Boyle, 1st Viscount Shannon, in 1660:


title: Charles II of England

text: By Barbara Villiers (1641–1709), wife of Roger Palmer, 1st Earl of Castlemaine, and created Duchess of Cleveland in her own right:


title: Charles II of England

text: By Louise Renée de Penancoet de Kérouaille (1649–1734), created Duchess of Portsmouth in her own right (1673):


title: Charles II of England

text: Letters claiming that Marguerite or Margaret de Carteret bore Charles a son named James de la Cloche in 1646 are dismissed by historians as forgeries.


title: Riley Keough

text: Danielle Riley Keough ( ; born May 29, 1989) is an American actress, notable for being the daughter of musicians Lisa Marie Presley and Danny Keough, and granddaughter of actress Priscilla Presley and singer Elvis Presley, and starting a successful breakout career in film/television acting and modeling, appearing at fashion shows for Dolce & Gabbana and Christian Dior, and cover featuring of "Vogue". Keough has resided with her father in Hawaii and Los Angeles, and with her mother in California and in Tennessee's Graceland.


title: Riley Keough

text: Keough made her feature film debut at age 20, appearing in a supporting part in the musical biopic "The Runaways" (2010), portraying Marie Currie. She subsequently starred in the independent thriller film "The Good Doctor" (2011) followed by the horror film "Jack & Diane" (2012), before being cast in a minor role in Steven Soderbergh's comedy film "Magic Mike" (2012). Keough appeared in several additional independent films in 2012, including "Yellow" and "Kiss of the Damned", before appearing in the big-budget action feature "" (2015), the fourth film in the "Mad Max" series.


title: Riley Keough

text: In 2016, Keough had her breakthrough role as a law student-turned-escort in the first season of the anthology series "The Girlfriend Experience", executive-produced by Soderbergh and based on his 2009 film of the same name. She received critical praise for her role, and earned a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television. Keough's following performance as a wayward young woman in the drama "American Honey" (2016) earned her further acclaim, including an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Supporting Female.


title: Riley Keough

text: The same year, Keough starred the apocalyptic horror film "It Comes at Night" (2017), and reunited with Soderbergh to appear in his heist film, "Logan Lucky". She followed this with roles in a number of horror and thriller films in 2018, including Lars von Trier's "The House That Jack Built", the neo-noir "Under the Silver Lake", and "Hold the Dark". In 2019, Keough starred as the lead in the psychological horror film "The Lodge", followed by another leading role in the comedy-drama "Zola" (2020) and a supporting role in Netflix's "The Devil All the Time" (2020). Keough made her directorial debut in 2022 with the drama "War Pony", co-directed with Gina Gammell, in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. The film went on to win the Caméra d'Or Award.


title: Riley Keough

text: Keough was born on May 29, 1989, at Providence Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California. She is the eldest child of singer-songwriter Lisa Marie Presley and musician Danny Keough, and the eldest grandchild of Elvis Presley and actress and businesswoman Priscilla Presley. Keough's father met her mother while performing as a bass guitarist in her mother's band. She had a full brother, Benjamin Storm Keough, who died by suicide in July 2020, and has two half-sisters, twins Harper and Finley, from her mother's fourth marriage to Michael Lockwood. According to Keough, her father's ancestry is Irish and mostly Sephardic Jewish (Portuguese-Jewish) and Ashkenazi Jewish (Eastern European Jews), whereas her maternal grandfather, Elvis Presley, was allegedly of Creek, Cherokee, Scots-Irish and Norman descent; Keough's maternal grandmother, Priscilla, is of part Norwegian descent.


title: Riley Keough

text: When Keough was six years old, her parents divorced, and her mother was briefly married to Michael Jackson from 1994 to 1996. Of her upbringing, Keough said that she "grew up very privileged with my mother, but my dad didn't live like that. And I think experiencing both sides has been helpful. My father had mattresses on the floor of his apartments. He lived in cabins and trailer parks. He just didn't have much money... Actually, my memories of growing up with him were so colourful and eccentric and fun. It was a good vibe, you know? When I was like eight I told him, 'I want to grow up and be poor like you!' He was eating a bowl of cereal. I didn't realise how wildly offensive that was!" Keough was raised primarily by her father in Hawaii and Los Angeles, though she at times lived at her mother's Los Angeles home, as well as at the Graceland Estate in Memphis, Tennessee, which was inherited by her mother following her grandfather Elvis's death. In 2002, when Keough was 13 years old, her mother married actor Nicolas Cage, though this marriage was also short-lived, ending two years later in divorce. For a time, Keough attended a public school in the San Fernando Valley, but was ultimately homeschooled due to her having to frequently travel between her parents' homes.


title: Riley Keough

text: Prior to beginning a film career, Keough began modeling at age 15, appearing in the Autumn/Winter 2004 ready-to-wear show for Dolce & Gabbana, followed by the Christian Dior ready-to-wear show for the Spring/Summer 2005 collection. Keough subsequently appeared on the United States cover of "Vogue" in August 2004. She subsequently appeared on the cover of the Japanese "Elle" magazine and Korean "Vogue", both in 2005, as well as the covers of the French magazines "Jalouse" and "L'Officiel", also in 2005.


title: Riley Keough

text: In 2010, at the age of 20, Keough made her film debut in "The Runaways" based on the 1970s all-girl rock band of the same name. Keough portrayed the role of Marie Currie, the sister to Cherie Currie, the band's lead singer, portrayed by Dakota Fanning. The film also starred Kristen Stewart and Tatum O'Neal and premiered in 2010 at the Sundance Film Festival to favorable reviews.


title: Riley Keough

text: In April 2011, Keough starred as the female lead in the drama "The Good Doctor" alongside Orlando Bloom and Taraji P. Henson. Keough portrayed Diane Nixon, a young patient with a kidney infection who's kept ill to make her doctor gain the respect he craves. The film received mixed reviews from critics.


title: Riley Keough

text: In May 2010, she replaced actress Olivia Thirlby as the protagonist in the werewolf drama "Jack & Diane" alongside Juno Temple, who portrays her love interest. Filming took place in New York City, and in May 2011 Magnolia Pictures picked up the film for distribution; it was released theatrically in November 2012.


title: Riley Keough

text: In September 2011, Keough joined the Steven Soderbergh film "Magic Mike", alongside Channing Tatum, Matthew McConaughey and Alex Pettyfer, about a group of male strippers. Keough portrayed the role of Nora, a young stripper. The film was released in June 2012. Keough also co-starred in the independent drama "Yellow", alongside Sienna Miller, Luke Wilson and David Morse, followed by a supporting role opposite Milo Ventimiglia in the independent vampire film "Kiss of the Damned", which premiered at the 2012 Venice Film Festival.


title: Riley Keough

text: On August 4, 2013, the Australian fashion brand Bonds announced that Keough had been signed as "Summer 2013 ambassador". In October 2013, Keough co-starred in the video for Justin Timberlake's "TKO", portraying a bitter girlfriend who knocks out Timberlake and ties him to the back of a pickup truck, dragging him through the desert and throwing him off a cliff.


title: Riley Keough

text: Keough appeared in director So Yong Kim's short film "Spark and Light" commissioned by fashion brand Miu Miu in 2014. Keough had a supporting role in "", the fourth installment of the "Mad Max" series. The film was released in May 2015 to critical and commercial success and receiving numerous Academy Award nominations including Best Picture.


title: Riley Keough

text: In February 2015, Keough married stuntman Ben Smith-Petersen in Napa, California, having announced their engagement the previous year. The couple had met while filming "Mad Max: Fury Road". Later that year, in December 2015, "Dixieland" was released by IFC Films, in which Keough starred as a woman living in a Mississippi trailer park who becomes embroiled in a crime. The film had previously screened at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2015.


title: Riley Keough

text: In January 2016, Keough's following film, the lesbian drama "Lovesong", premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. The film, directed by So Yong Kim, features Keough co-starring with Jena Malone as two best friends who fall in love with each other. Keough had her breakthrough role portraying a law student-turned-escort in the first season of the anthology series "The Girlfriend Experience", based on the film of the same name from director Steven Soderbergh. The 13-episode series premiered on Starz on April 10, 2016. Her performance in "The Girlfriend Experience" garnered rave reviews and awards buzz from critics. She went on to receive a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television.


title: Riley Keough

text: Also in 2016, Keough appeared in Andrea Arnold's drama film "American Honey", alongside Shia LaBeouf. The film premiered in competition at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize. Keough received praise for her role in the film, and received a nomination at the Film Independent Spirit Awards for Best Supporting Female. The same year, she appeared in "The Discovery" directed by Charlie McDowell. It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2017, and was released on March 31, 2017, by Netflix. She subsequently starred as the daughter of a dysfunctional family in the drama "We Don't Belong Here" (2017), co-starring with Catherine Keener and Anton Yelchin, which was filmed in 2014. Keough's subsequent film was "It Comes at Night", an apocalyptic-themed horror film, in which she starred opposite Joel Edgerton and Christopher Abbott, and directed by Trey Edward Shults. The film was released theatrically in the United Kingdom and United States in the early summer of 2017.


title: Riley Keough

text: In August 2017, it was announced that Keough had launched her own production company called Felix Culpa with producer Gina Gammell. Plans are already in place to adapt three novels, including: "Sweet Lamb of Heaven: A Novel", the graphic novel "Heartthrob", and "The Curse of Beauty: The Scandalous & Tragic Life of Audrey Munson, America’s First Supermodel". She also appeared in Steven Soderbergh's heist comedy "Logan Lucky", released in August 2017.


title: Riley Keough

text: In 2018, Keough appeared in a number of films, including the independent drama-thriller "Welcome the Stranger", followed by the Netflix-released thriller "Hold the Dark", directed by Jeremy Saulnier, and the Barry Levinson-directed television film "Paterno", a biographical film about Joe Paterno released through HBO in April 2018. In May 2018, Keough debuted two films at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival: Lars von Trier's controversial psychological horror film "The House That Jack Built", which was subsequently given a limited release in the United States by IFC Films, and David Robert Mitchell's neo-noir "Under the Silver Lake", which was given a limited release in April 2019.


title: Riley Keough

text: Next, Keough starred in the lead role in the psychological horror film "The Lodge" (2019), portraying a woman raised in a cult. The film, which premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival before being released theatrically in February 2020, garnered Keough praise, with Michael Roffman of "Consequence of Sound" deeming it a "career-best performance." Justin Chang of the "Los Angeles Times" also lauded her performance as the film's "strongest asset. [Keough] can seize and hold the screen with electrifying force." Keough subsequently had a lead role opposite Alicia Vikander in the thriller film "Earthquake Bird", directed by Wash Westmoreland and based on the 2001 novel of the same name, which premiered at the British Film Institute in October 2019 before being released digitally via Netflix in mid-November 2019.


title: Riley Keough

text: In early 2019, Keough was cast in the Netflix-produced psychological thriller "The Devil All the Time", based on Donald Ray Pollock's 2011 novel of the same name. The project began filming in Alabama in the spring of that year, and premiered on Netflix in September 2020. On November 19, 2019, it was announced that Keough had joined the cast of the upcoming Amazon series "Daisy Jones & The Six" in a leading role, portraying a rock musician in the 1970s. In January 2020, the comedy-drama "Zola", premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.


title: Istanbul

text: Istanbul ( , ; ), formerly known as Constantinople (; ), is the largest city in Turkey, serving as the country's economic, cultural and historic hub. The city straddles the Bosporus strait, lying in both Europe and Asia, and has a population of over 15 million residents, comprising 19% of the population of Turkey. Istanbul is the most populous European city, and the world's 15th-largest city.


title: Istanbul

text: The city was founded as Byzantium (, ) in the 7th century BCE by Greek settlers from Megara. In 330 CE, the Roman emperor Constantine the Great made it his imperial capital, renaming it first as New Rome (, ; ) and then as Constantinople () after himself. The city grew in size and influence, eventually becoming a beacon of the Silk Road and one of the most important cities in history.


title: Istanbul

text: The city served as an imperial capital for almost 1600 years: during the Roman/Byzantine (330–1204), Latin (1204–1261), late Byzantine (1261–1453), and Ottoman (1453–1922) empires. The city played a key role in the advancement of Christianity during Roman/Byzantine times, hosting four (including Chalcedon (Kadıköy) on the Asian side) of the first seven ecumenical councils (all of which were in present-day Turkey) before its transformation to an Islamic stronghold following the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 CE—especially after becoming the seat of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1517.


title: Istanbul

text: In 1923, after the Turkish War of Independence, Ankara replaced the city as the capital of the newly formed Republic of Turkey. In 1930, the city's name was officially changed to Istanbul, the Turkish rendering of ( ; 'to the City'), the appellation Greek speakers used since the 11th century to colloquially refer to the city.


title: Istanbul

text: Over foreign visitors came to Istanbul in 2018, eight years after it was named a European Capital of Culture, making it the world's eighth most visited city. Istanbul is home to several UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and hosts the headquarters of numerous Turkish companies, accounting for more than thirty percent of the country's economy.


title: Istanbul

text: The first known name of the city is "Byzantium" (, ), the name given to it at its foundation by Megarian colonists around 657 BCE. Megarian colonists claimed a direct line back to the founders of the city, Byzas, the son of the god Poseidon and the nymph Ceroëssa. Modern excavations have raised the possibility that the name Byzantium might reflect the sites of native Thracian settlements that preceded the fully fledged town. Constantinople comes from the Latin name Constantinus, after Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who refounded the city in 324 CE. Constantinople remained the most common name for the city in the West until the 1930s, when Turkish authorities began to press for the use of "Istanbul" in foreign languages. () and were the names used alternatively by the Ottomans during their rule.


title: Istanbul

text: The name (, ) is commonly held to derive from the Medieval Greek phrase (pronounced ), which means "to the city" and is how Constantinople was referred to by the local Greeks. This reflected its status as the only major city in the vicinity. The importance of Constantinople in the Ottoman world was also reflected by its Ottoman nickname meaning the 'Gate to Prosperity' in Ottoman Turkish. An alternative view is that the name evolved directly from the name "Constantinople", with the first and third syllables dropped. Some Ottoman sources of the 17th century, such as Evliya Çelebi, describe it as the common Turkish name of the time; between the late 17th and late 18th centuries, it was also in official use. The first use of the word () on coinage was in 1730 during the reign of Sultan Mahmud I. In modern Turkish, the name is written as , with a dotted İ, as the Turkish alphabet distinguishes between a dotted and dotless I. In English the stress is on the first or last syllable, but in Turkish it is on the second syllable (). A person from the city is an (plural: ); "Istanbulite" is used in English.


title: Istanbul

text: Neolithic artifacts, uncovered by archeologists at the beginning of the 21st century, indicate that Istanbul's historic peninsula was settled as far back as the 6th millennium BCE. That early settlement, important in the spread of the Neolithic Revolution from the Near East to Europe, lasted for almost a millennium before being inundated by rising water levels. The first human settlement on the Asian side, the Fikirtepe mound, is from the Copper Age period, with artifacts dating from 5500 to 3500 BCE, On the European side, near the point of the peninsula (Sarayburnu), there was a Thracian settlement during the early 1st millennium BCE. Modern authors have linked it to the Thracian toponym "Lygos", mentioned by Pliny the Elder as an earlier name for the site of Byzantium.


title: Istanbul

text: The history of the city proper begins around 660 BCE, when Greek settlers from Megara established Byzantium on the European side of the Bosporus. The settlers built an acropolis adjacent to the Golden Horn on the site of the early Thracian settlements, fueling the nascent city's economy. The city experienced a brief period of Persian rule at the turn of the 5th century BCE, but the Greeks recaptured it during the Greco-Persian Wars. Byzantium then continued as part of the Athenian League and its successor, the Second Athenian League, before gaining independence in 355 BCE. Long allied with the Romans, Byzantium officially became a part of the Roman Empire in 73 CE. Byzantium's decision to side with the Roman usurper Pescennius Niger against Emperor Septimius Severus cost it dearly; by the time it surrendered at the end of 195 CE, two years of siege had left the city devastated. Five years later, Severus began to rebuild Byzantium, and the city regained—and, by some accounts, surpassed—its previous prosperity.


title: Istanbul

text: Constantine the Great effectively became the emperor of the whole of the Roman Empire in September 324. Two months later, he laid out the plans for a new, Christian city to replace Byzantium. As the eastern capital of the empire, the city was named "Nova Roma"; most called it Constantinople, a name that persisted into the 20th century. On 11 May 330, Constantinople was proclaimed the capital of the Roman Empire, which was later permanently divided between the two sons of Theodosius I upon his death on 17 January 395, when the city became the capital of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire.


title: Istanbul

text: The establishment of Constantinople was one of Constantine's most lasting accomplishments, shifting Roman power eastward as the city became a center of Greek culture and Christianity. Numerous churches were built across the city, including Hagia Sophia which was built during the reign of Justinian the Great and remained the world's largest cathedral for a thousand years. Constantine also undertook a major renovation and expansion of the Hippodrome of Constantinople; accommodating tens of thousands of spectators, the hippodrome became central to civic life and, in the 5th and 6th centuries, the center of episodes of unrest, including the Nika riots. Constantinople's location also ensured its existence would stand the test of time; for many centuries, its walls and seafront protected Europe against invaders from the east and the advance of Islam. During most of the Middle Ages, the latter part of the Byzantine era, Constantinople was the largest and wealthiest city on the European continent and at times the largest in the world. Constantinople is generally considered to be the center and the "cradle of Orthodox Christian civilization".


title: Istanbul

text: Constantinople began to decline continuously after the end of the reign of Basil II in 1025. The Fourth Crusade was diverted from its purpose in 1204, and the city was sacked and pillaged by the crusaders. They established the Latin Empire in place of the Orthodox Byzantine Empire. Hagia Sophia was converted to a Catholic church in 1204. The Byzantine Empire was restored, albeit weakened, in 1261. Constantinople's churches, defenses, and basic services were in disrepair, and its population had dwindled to a hundred thousand from half a million during the 8th century. After the reconquest of 1261, however, some of the city's monuments were restored, and some, like the two Deesis mosaics in Hagia Sophia and Kariye, were created.


title: Istanbul

text: Various economic and military policies instituted by Andronikos II, such as the reduction of military forces, weakened the empire and left it vulnerable to attack. In the mid-14th-century, the Ottoman Turks began a strategy of gradually taking smaller towns and cities, cutting off Constantinople's supply routes and strangling it slowly. On 29 May 1453, after an eight-week siege (during which the last Roman emperor, Constantine XI, was killed), Sultan Mehmed II "the Conqueror" captured Constantinople and declared it the new capital of the Ottoman Empire. Hours later, the sultan rode to the Hagia Sophia and summoned an imam to proclaim the Islamic creed, converting the grand cathedral into an imperial mosque due to the city's refusal to surrender peacefully. Mehmed declared himself as the new "Kayser-i Rûm" (the Ottoman Turkish equivalent of the Caesar of Rome) and the Ottoman state was reorganized into an empire.


title: Istanbul

text: Following the conquest of Constantinople, Mehmed II immediately set out to revitalize the city. Cognizant that revitalization would fail without the repopulation of the city, Mehmed II welcomed everyone–foreigners, criminals, and runaways– showing extraordinary openness and willingness to incorporate outsiders that came to define Ottoman political culture. He also invited people from all over Europe to his capital, creating a cosmopolitan society that persisted through much of the Ottoman period. Revitalizing Istanbul also required a massive program of restorations, of everything from roads to aqueducts. Like many monarchs before and since, Mehmed II transformed Istanbul's urban landscape with wholesale redevelopment of the city center. There was a huge new palace to rival, if not overshadow, the old one, a new covered market (still standing as the Grand Bazaar), porticoes, pavilions, walkways, as well as more than a dozen new mosques. Mehmed II turned the ramshackle old town into something that looked like an imperial capital.


title: Istanbul

text: Social hierarchy was ignored by the rampant plague, which killed the rich and the poor alike in the 16th century. Money could not protect the rich from all the discomforts and harsher sides of Istanbul. Although the Sultan lived at a safe remove from the masses, and the wealthy and poor tended to live side by side, for the most part Istanbul was not zoned as modern cities are. Opulent houses shared the same streets and districts with tiny hovels. Those rich enough to have secluded country properties had a chance of escaping the periodic epidemics of sickness that blighted Istanbul.


title: Istanbul

text: The Ottoman Dynasty claimed the status of caliphate in 1517, with Constantinople remaining the capital of this last caliphate for four centuries. Suleiman the Magnificent's reign from 1520 to 1566 was a period of especially great artistic and architectural achievement; chief architect Mimar Sinan designed several iconic buildings in the city, while Ottoman arts of ceramics, stained glass, calligraphy, and miniature flourished. The population of Constantinople was 570,000 by the end of the 18th century.


title: Istanbul

text: A period of rebellion at the start of the 19th century led to the rise of the progressive Sultan Mahmud II and eventually to the "Tanzimat" period, which produced political reforms and allowed new technology to be introduced to the city. Bridges across the Golden Horn were constructed during this period, and Constantinople was connected to the rest of the European railway network in the 1880s. Modern facilities, such as a water supply network, electricity, telephones, and trams, were gradually introduced to Constantinople over the following decades, although later than to other European cities. The modernization efforts were not enough to forestall the decline of the Ottoman Empire.


title: Istanbul

text: Sultan Abdul Hamid II was deposed with the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 and the Ottoman Parliament, closed since 14 February 1878, was reopened 30 years later on 23 July 1908, which marked the beginning of the Second Constitutional Era. A series of wars in the early 20th century, such as the Italo-Turkish War (1911–1912) and the Balkan Wars (1912–1913), plagued the ailing empire's capital and resulted in the 1913 Ottoman coup d'état, which brought the regime of the Three Pashas.


title: Istanbul

text: The Ottoman Empire joined World War I (1914–1918) on the side of the Central Powers and was ultimately defeated. The deportation of Armenian intellectuals on 24 April 1915 was among the major events which marked the start of the Armenian genocide during WWI. Due to Ottoman and Turkish policies of Turkification and ethnic cleansing, the city's Christian population declined from 450,000 to 240,000 between 1914 and 1927. The Armistice of Mudros was signed on 30 October 1918 and the Allies occupied Constantinople on 13 November 1918. The Ottoman Parliament was dissolved by the Allies on 11 April 1920 and the Ottoman delegation led by Damat Ferid Pasha was forced to sign the Treaty of Sèvres on 10 August 1920.


title: Istanbul

text: Following the Turkish War of Independence (1919–1922), the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in Ankara abolished the Sultanate on 1 November 1922, and the last Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed VI, was declared "persona non grata". Leaving aboard the British warship HMS "Malaya" on 17 November 1922, he went into exile and died in Sanremo, Italy, on 16 May 1926. The Treaty of Lausanne was signed on 24 July 1923, and the occupation of Constantinople ended with the departure of the last forces of the Allies from the city on 4 October 1923. Turkish forces of the Ankara government, commanded by Şükrü Naili Pasha (3rd Corps), entered the city with a ceremony on 6 October 1923, which has been marked as the "Liberation Day" of Istanbul (Turkish: "İstanbul'un Kurtuluşu") and is commemorated every year on its anniversary. On 29 October 1923 the Grand National Assembly of Turkey declared the establishment of the Turkish Republic, with Ankara as its capital. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk became the Republic's first President.


title: Istanbul

text: A 1942 wealth tax assessed mainly on non-Muslims led to the transfer or liquidation of many businesses owned by religious minorities. From the late 1940s and early 1950s, Istanbul underwent great structural change, as new public squares, boulevards, and avenues were constructed throughout the city, sometimes at the expense of historical buildings. The population of Istanbul began to rapidly increase in the 1970s, as people from Anatolia migrated to the city to find employment in the many new factories that were built on the outskirts of the sprawling metropolis. This sudden, sharp rise in the city's population caused a large demand for housing, and many previously outlying villages and forests became engulfed into the metropolitan area of Istanbul.


title: Istanbul

text: Istanbul is located in north-western Turkey and straddles the strait Bosporus, which provides the only passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean via the Sea of Marmara. Historically, the city has been ideally situated for trade and defense: The confluence of the Sea of Marmara, the Bosporus, and the Golden Horn provide both ideal defense against enemy attack and a natural toll-gate. Several picturesque islands—Büyükada, Heybeliada, Burgazada, Kınalıada, and five smaller islands—are part of the city. Istanbul's shoreline has grown beyond its natural limits. Large sections of Caddebostan sit on areas of landfill, increasing the total area of the city to .


title: Istanbul

text: Despite the myth that seven hills make up the city, there are, in fact, more than 50 hills within the city limits. Istanbul's tallest hill, Aydos, is high.


title: Istanbul

text: The nearby North Anatolian Fault is responsible for much earthquake activity, although it doesn't physically pass through the city itself. The fault caused the earthquakes in 1766 and 1894. The threat of major earthquakes plays a large role in the city's infrastructure development, with over 500,000 vulnerable buildings demolished and replaced since 2012. The city has repeatedly upgraded its building codes, most recently in 2018, requiring retrofits for older buildings and higher engineering standards for new construction.


title: Istanbul

text: Istanbul has a borderline Mediterranean climate (Köppen "Csa," Trewartha "Cs"), humid subtropical climate (Köppen "Cfa," Trewartha "Cf") and oceanic climate (Köppen "Cfb," Trewartha "Do") under both classifications. It experiences cool winters with frequent precipitation, and warm to hot (mean temperature peaking at to in August, depending on location), moderately dry summers. Spring and fall are usually mild, with varying conditions dependent on wind direction.


title: Istanbul

text: Istanbul's weather is strongly influenced by the Sea of Marmara to the south, and the Black Sea to the north. This moderates temperature swings and produces a mild temperate climate with low diurnal temperature variation. Consequently, Istanbul's temperatures almost always oscillate between and , and most of the city does not experience temperatures above for more than 14 days a year. Another effect of Istanbul's maritime position is its persistently high dew points, near-saturation morning humidity, and frequent fog, which also limits Istanbul's sunshine hours to levels closer to Western Europe, and gives the city its noticeable seasonal lag; Istanbul is one of the few cities in the temperate Northern Hemisphere where March is, on average, colder than December.


title: Istanbul

text: Because of its hilly topography and maritime influences, Istanbul exhibits a multitude of distinct microclimates. Within the city, rainfall varies widely owing to the rain shadow of the hills in Istanbul, from around on the southern fringe at Florya to on the northern fringe at Bahçeköy. Furthermore, while the city itself lies in USDA hardiness zones 9a to 9b, its inland suburbs lie in zone 8b with isolated pockets of zone 8a, restricting the cultivation of cold-hardy subtropical plants to the coasts.


title: Istanbul

text: As Istanbul is only slightly rain shadowed from Mediterranean storms and is otherwise surrounded by water, it usually receives some amount of precipitation from both Western European and Mediterranean systems. This results in frequent precipitation: the average number of rainy days in the city is 131, and in some parts it may reach up to 152 days. Furthermore, during early and mid-winter, the city's frequency of precipitation is virtually unparalleled in the Mediterranean basin; January averages 20 days of precipitation when counting trace accumulations, 17 when using a 0.1 mm threshold, and 12 when using a 1.0 mm threshold. Summer is considerably drier; unlike a true Mediterranean climate however, there is no true dry season as defined by Köppen.


title: Istanbul

text: According to a study, an average of more than of snow falls every year on the area of the airport, making Istanbul the snowiest major city in the Mediterranean basin, despite not having the cold winters typical of snowy cities. Snowfall varies widely between years and different areas of the city, with districts facing north more prone to receive snow than southerly ones. This is largely caused by lake-effect snow, which forms when cold air, originating from the North Pole or Siberia, develops into moist and unstable air that ascends to form snow squalls along the lee shores of the Black Sea, upon contact with the relatively warm water. These snow squalls are heavy snow bands and occasionally thundersnows, with accumulation rates approaching per hour.


title: Istanbul

text: The highest recorded temperature at the official downtown observation station in Sarıyer was and on 13 July 2000. The lowest recorded temperature was on 9 February 1929. The highest recorded snow cover in the city center was on 4 January 1942, and in the northern suburbs on 11 January 2017.


title: Istanbul

text: As with virtually every part of the world, climate change is causing more heatwaves, droughts, storms, and flooding in Istanbul. Furthermore, as Istanbul is a large and rapidly expanding city, its urban heat island has been intensifying the effects of climate change. Considering past data, it is very likely that these two factors are responsible for urban Istanbul's shift, from a warm-summer climate to a hot-summer one in the Köppen climate classification, and from the cool temperate zone to the warm temperate/subtropical zone in the Trewartha climate classification. If trends continue, sea level rise is likely to affect city infrastructure, for example Kadıkoy metro station is threatened with flooding.


title: Istanbul

text: The Fatih district, which was named after Sultan Mehmed II (Turkish: "Fatih Sultan Mehmed"), corresponds to what was, until the Ottoman conquest in 1453, the whole of the city of Constantinople (today is the capital district and called the "historic peninsula" of Istanbul) on the southern shore of the Golden Horn, across the medieval Genoese citadel of Galata on the northern shore. The Genoese fortifications in Galata were largely demolished in the 19th century, leaving only the Galata Tower, to make way for the northward expansion of the city. Galata (Karaköy) is today a quarter within the Beyoğlu (Pera) district, which forms Istanbul's commercial and entertainment center and includes İstiklal Avenue and Taksim Square.


title: Istanbul

text: Dolmabahçe Palace, the seat of government during the late Ottoman period, is in the Beşiktaş district on the European shore of the Bosporus strait, to the north of Beyoğlu. The former village of Ortaköy is within Beşiktaş and gives its name to the Ortaköy Mosque on the Bosporus, near the Bosporus Bridge. Lining both the European and Asian shores of the Bosporus are the historic "yalıs", luxurious chalet mansions built by Ottoman aristocrats and elites as summer homes. Inland, north of Taksim Square is the Istanbul Central Business District, a set of corridors lined with office buildings, residential towers, shopping centers, and university campuses, and over of class-A office space in total. Maslak, Levent, and Bomonti are important nodes within the CBD.


title: Istanbul

text: The Atatürk Airport corridor is another such edge city-style business, residential and shopping corridor with over of class-A office space.


title: Istanbul

text: During the Ottoman period, Üsküdar (then Scutari) and Kadıköy were outside the scope of the urban area, serving as tranquil outposts with seaside "yalıs" and gardens. But in the second half of the 20th century, the Asian side experienced major urban growth; the late development of this part of the city led to better infrastructure and tidier urban planning when compared with most other residential areas in the city. Much of the Asian side of the Bosporus functions as a suburb of the economic and commercial centers in European Istanbul, accounting for a third of the city's population but only a quarter of its employment. However, Kozyatağı–Ataşehir, Altunizade, Kavacik and Umraniye, all together having around 1.4 million sqm of class-A office space) are now important "edge cities", i.e. corridors and nodes of business and shopping centers and of tall residential buildings.


title: Istanbul

text: As a result of Istanbul's exponential growth in the 20th century, a significant portion of the city is composed of "gecekondus" (literally "built overnight"), referring to illegally constructed squatter buildings. At present, some "gecekondu" areas are being gradually demolished and replaced by modern mass-housing compounds. Moreover, large scale gentrification and urban renewal projects have been taking place, such as the one in Tarlabaşı; some of these projects, like the one in Sulukule, have faced criticism. The Turkish government also has ambitious plans for an expansion of the city west and northwards on the European side in conjunction with the new Istanbul Airport, opened in 2019; the new parts of the city will include four different settlements with specified urban functions, housing 1.5 million people.


title: Istanbul

text: Istanbul does not have a primary urban park, but it has several green areas. Gülhane Park and Yıldız Park were originally included within the grounds of two of Istanbul's palaces — Topkapı Palace and Yıldız Palace—but they were repurposed as public parks in the early decades of the Turkish Republic. Another park, Fethi Paşa Korusu, is on a hillside adjacent to the Bosphorus Bridge in Anatolia, opposite Yıldız Palace in Europe. Along the European side, and close to the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge, is Emirgan Park, which was known as the "Kyparades" (Cypress Forest) during the Byzantine period. In the Ottoman period, it was first granted to Nişancı Feridun Ahmed Bey in the 16th century, before being granted by Sultan Murad IV to the Safavid Emir Gûne Han in the 17th century, hence the name "Emirgan". The park was later owned by Khedive Ismail Pasha of Ottoman Egypt and Sudan in the 19th century. Emirgan Park is known for its diversity of plants and an annual tulip festival is held there since 2005. The AKP government's decision to replace Taksim Gezi Park with a replica of the Ottoman era Taksim Military Barracks (which was transformed into the Taksim Stadium in 1921, before being demolished in 1940 for building Gezi Park) sparked a series of nationwide protests in 2013 covering a wide range of issues. Popular during the summer among Istanbulites is Belgrad Forest, spreading across at the northern edge of the city. The forest originally supplied water to the city and remnants of reservoirs used during Byzantine and Ottoman times survive.


title: Istanbul

text: Istanbul is primarily known for its Byzantine and Ottoman architecture. Despite its development as a Turkish city since 1453, it contains many ancient, Roman, Byzantine, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish monuments.


title: Istanbul

text: The Neolithic settlement in the Yenikapı quarter on the European side, which dates back to c. 6500 BCE and predates the formation of the Bosporus strait by approximately a millennium (when the Sea of Marmara was still a lake) was discovered during the construction of the Marmaray railway tunnel. It is the oldest known human settlement on the European side of the city. The oldest known human settlement on the Asian side is the Fikirtepe Mound near Kadıköy, with relics dating to c. 5500-3500 BCE (Chalcolithic period).


title: Istanbul

text: There are numerous ancient monuments in the city. The most ancient is the Obelisk of Thutmose III (Obelisk of Theodosius). Built of red granite, 31 m (100 ft) high, it came from the Temple of Karnak in Luxor, and was erected there by Pharaoh Thutmose III (r. 1479–1425 BCE) to the south of the seventh pylon. The Roman emperor Constantius II (r. 337–361 CE) had it and another obelisk transported along the River Nile to Alexandria for commemorating his "ventennalia" or 20 years on the throne in 357. The other obelisk was erected on the "spina" of the Circus Maximus in Rome in the autumn of that year, and is now known as the Lateran Obelisk. The obelisk that would become the "Obelisk of Theodosius" remained in Alexandria until 390 CE, when Theodosius I (r. 379–395 CE) had it transported to Constantinople and put up on the "spina" of the Hippodrome there. When re-erected at the Hippodrome of Constantinople, the obelisk was mounted on a decorative base, with reliefs that depict Theodosius I and his courtiers. The lower part of the obelisk was damaged in antiquity, probably during its transport to Alexandria in 357 CE or during its re-erection at the Hippodrome of Constantinople in 390 CE. As a result, the current height of the obelisk is only 18.54 meters, or 25.6 meters if the base is included. Between the four corners of the obelisk and the pedestal are four bronze cubes, used in its transportation and re-erection.


title: Istanbul

text: Next in age is the Serpent Column, from 479 BCE. It was brought from Delphi in 324 CE, during the reign of Constantine the Great, and also erected at the "spina" of the Hippodrome. It was originally part of an ancient Greek sacrificial tripod in Delphi that was erected to commemorate the Greeks who fought and defeated the Persian Empire at the Battle of Plataea (479 BCE). The three serpent heads of the high column remained intact until the end of the 17th century (one is on display at the nearby Istanbul Archaeology Museums).


title: Istanbul

text: Built in porphyry and erected at the center of the Forum of Constantine in 330 CE to mark the founding of the new Roman capital, the Column of Constantine was originally adorned with a sculpture of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great depicted as the solar god Apollo on its top, which fell in 1106 and was later replaced by a cross during the reign of Byzantine emperor Manuel Komnenos (r. 1143–1180).


title: Istanbul

text: There are traces of the Byzantine era throughout the city, from ancient churches that were built over early Christian meeting places like the Hagia Irene, the Chora Church, the Monastery of Stoudios, the Church of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus, the Church of Theotokos Pammakaristos, the Monastery of the Pantocrator, the Monastery of Christ Pantepoptes, the Hagia Theodosia, the Church of Theotokos Kyriotissa, the Monastery of Constantine Lips, the Church of Myrelaion, the Hagios Theodoros, etc.; to palaces like the Great Palace of Constantinople and its Mosaic Museum, the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus, Boukoleon Palace and Palace of Blachernae; and other public places and buildings like the Hippodrome, the Augustaion, the Basilica Cistern, Theodosius Cistern, Cistern of Philoxenos and Cistern of the Hebdomon, the Aqueduct of Valens, the Prison of Anemas, the Walls of Constantinople and the Porta Aurea (Golden Gate), among numerous others. The 4th century Harbor of Theodosius in Yenikapı, once the busiest port in Constantinople, was among the numerous archeological discoveries that took place during the excavations of the Marmaray tunnel.


title: Istanbul

text: However, it is the Hagia Sophia that fully conveys the period of Constantinople as a city without parallel in Christendom. The Hagia Sophia, topped by a dome in diameter over a square space defined by four arches, is the pinnacle of Byzantine architecture. The Hagia Sophia stood as the world's largest cathedral in the world until it was converted into a mosque in the 15th century. The minarets date from that period. Because of its historical significance, it was reopened as a museum in 1935. However, it was re-converted into a mosque in July 2020.


title: Istanbul

text: Over the next four centuries, the Ottomans transformed Istanbul's urban landscape with a vast building scheme that included the construction of towering mosques and ornate palaces. The Sultan Ahmed Mosque (Blue Mosque), another landmark of the city, faces the Hagia Sophia at Sultanahmet Square (Hippodrome of Constantinople). The Süleymaniye Mosque, built by Suleiman the Magnificent, was designed by his chief architect Mimar Sinan, the most illustrious of all Ottoman architects, who designed many of the city's renowned mosques and other types of public buildings and monuments.


title: Istanbul

text: Among the oldest surviving examples of Ottoman architecture in Istanbul are the Anadoluhisarı and Rumelihisarı fortresses, which assisted the Ottomans during their siege of the city. Over the next four centuries, the Ottomans made an indelible impression on the skyline of Istanbul, building towering mosques and ornate palaces.


title: Istanbul

text: Topkapı Palace, dating back to 1465, is the oldest seat of government surviving in Istanbul. Mehmed II built the original palace as his main residence and the seat of government. The present palace grew over the centuries as a series of additions enfolding four courtyards and blending neoclassical, rococo, and baroque architectural forms. In 1639, Murad IV made some of the most lavish additions, including the Baghdad Kiosk, to commemorate his conquest of Baghdad the previous year. Government meetings took place here until 1786, when the seat of government was moved to the Sublime Porte. After several hundred years of royal residence, it was abandoned in 1853 in favor of the baroque Dolmabahçe Palace. Topkapı Palace became public property following the abolition of monarchy in 1922. After extensive renovation, it became one of Turkey's first national museums in 1924.


title: Istanbul

text: The imperial mosques include Fatih Mosque, Bayezid Mosque, Yavuz Selim Mosque, Süleymaniye Mosque, Sultan Ahmed Mosque (the Blue Mosque), and Yeni Mosque, all of which were built at the peak of the Ottoman Empire, in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the following centuries, and especially after the "Tanzimat" reforms, Ottoman architecture was supplanted by European styles. An example of which is the imperial Nuruosmaniye Mosque. Areas around İstiklal Avenue were filled with grand European embassies and rows of buildings in Neoclassical, Renaissance Revival and Art Nouveau styles, which went on to influence the architecture of a variety of structures in Beyoğlu—including churches, stores, and theaters—and official buildings such as Dolmabahçe Palace.


title: Istanbul

text: Since 2004, the municipal boundaries of Istanbul have been coincident with the boundaries of its province. The city, considered capital of the larger Istanbul Province, is administered by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (MMI), which oversees the 39 districts of the city-province.


title: Istanbul

text: The current city structure can be traced back to the "Tanzimat" period of reform in the 19th century, before which Islamic judges and imams led the city under the auspices of the Grand Vizier. Following the model of French cities, this religious system was replaced by a mayor and a citywide council composed of representatives of the confessional groups ("millet") across the city. Pera (now Beyoğlu) was the first area of the city to have its own director and council, with members instead being longtime residents of the neighborhood. Laws enacted after the Ottoman constitution of 1876 aimed to expand this structure across the city, imitating the twenty arrondissements of Paris, but they were not fully implemented until 1908 when the city was declared a province with nine constituent districts. This system continued beyond the founding of the Turkish Republic, with the province renamed a "belediye" (municipality), but the municipality was disbanded in 1957.


title: Istanbul

text: Small settlements adjacent to major population centers in Turkey, including Istanbul, were merged into their respective primary cities during the early 1980s, resulting in metropolitan municipalities. The main decision-making body of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality is the Municipal Council, with members drawn from district councils.


title: Istanbul

text: The Municipal Council is responsible for citywide issues, including managing the budget, maintaining civic infrastructure, and overseeing museums and major cultural centers. Since the government operates under a "powerful mayor, weak council" approach, the council's leader—the metropolitan mayor—has the authority to make swift decisions, often at the expense of transparency. The Municipal Council is advised by the Metropolitan Executive Committee, although the committee also has limited power to make decisions of its own. All representatives on the committee are appointed by the metropolitan mayor and the council, with the mayor—or someone of his or her choosing—serving as head.


title: Istanbul

text: District councils are chiefly responsible for waste management and construction projects within their respective districts. They each maintain their own budgets, although the metropolitan mayor reserves the right to review district decisions. One-fifth of all district council members, including the district mayors, also represent their districts in the Municipal Council. All members of the district councils and the Municipal Council, including the metropolitan mayor, are elected to five-year terms. Representing the Republican People's Party, Ekrem İmamoğlu has been the Mayor of Istanbul since 27 June 2019.


title: Istanbul

text: With the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and Istanbul Province having equivalent jurisdictions, few responsibilities remain for the provincial government. Like the MMI, the Istanbul Special Provincial Administration has a governor, a democratically elected decision-making body—the Provincial Parliament—and an appointed Executive Committee. Mirroring the executive committee at the municipal level, the Provincial Executive Committee includes a secretary-general and leaders of departments that advise the Provincial Parliament. The Provincial Administration's duties are largely limited to the building and maintenance of schools, residences, government buildings, and roads, and the promotion of arts, culture, and nature conservation. Ali Yerlikaya has been the Governor of Istanbul Province since 26 October 2018.


title: Istanbul

text: Throughout most of its history, Istanbul has ranked among the largest cities in the world. By 500 CE, Constantinople had somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 people, edging out its predecessor, Rome, for the world's largest city. Constantinople jostled with other major historical cities, such as Baghdad, Chang'an, Kaifeng and Merv for the position of the world's largest city until the 12th century. It never returned to being the world's largest, but remained the largest city in Europe from 1500 to 1750, when it was surpassed by London.


title: Istanbul

text: The Turkish Statistical Institute estimates that the population of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality was 15,519,267 at the end of 2019, hosting of the country's population. 64.4% of the residents live on the European side and 35.6% on the Asian side.


title: Istanbul

text: Istanbul ranks as the seventh-largest city proper in the world, and the second-largest urban agglomeration in Europe, after Moscow. The city's annual population growth of ranks as one of the highest among the seventy-eight largest metropolises in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The high population growth mirrors an urbanization trend across the country, as the second and third fastest-growing OECD metropolises are the Turkish cities of Izmir and Ankara.


title: Istanbul

text: Istanbul experienced especially rapid growth during the second half of the 20th century, with its population increasing tenfold between 1950 and 2000. This growth was fueled by internal and international migration. Istanbul's foreign population with a residence permit increased dramatically, from 43,000 in 2007 to 856,377 in 2019.


title: Istanbul

text: According to 2020 TÜİK data around 2.1 million people in a population of over 15.4 million have been registered in Istanbul, meanwhile the vast majority of the residents ultimately originate from Anatolian provinces, especially those in the Black Sea, Central and Eastern Anatolia regions due to internal migration since the 1950s. People registered in Kastamonu, Ordu, Giresun, Erzurum, Samsun, Malatya, Trabzon, Sinop and Rize provinces represent the biggest population groups in Istanbul, meanwhile people registered in Sivas has the highest percentage with more than 760 thousand residents in the city. A 2019 survey found that only 36% of the Istanbul's population was born in the province.


title: Istanbul

text: Istanbul has been a cosmopolitan city throughout much of its history, but it has become more homogenized since the end of the Ottoman era. The dominant ethnic group in the city is Turkish people, which also forms the majority group in Turkey. According to survey data 78% of the voting-age Turkish citizens in Istanbul state "Turkish" as their ethnic identity.


title: Istanbul

text: With estimates ranging from 2 to 4 million, Kurds form one of the largest ethnic minorities in Istanbul and are the biggest group after Turks among Turkish citizens. According to a 2019 KONDA study, Kurds constituted around 17% of Istanbul's adult total population who were Turkish citizens. Although the initial Kurdish presence in the city dates back to the early Ottoman period, the majority of Kurds in the city originate from villages in eastern and southeastern Turkey. Zazas are also present in the city and constitute around 1% of the total voting-age population.


title: Istanbul

text: Arabs form the city's other largest ethnic minority, with an estimated population of more than 2 million. Following Turkey's support for the Arab Spring, Istanbul emerged as a hub for dissidents from across the Arab world, including former presidential candidates from Egypt, Kuwaiti MPs, and former ministers from Jordan, Saudi Arabia (including Jamal Khashoggi), Syria, and Yemen. The number of refugees of the Syrian Civil War in Turkey residing in Istanbul is estimated to be around 1 million. Native Arab population in Turkey who are Turkish citizens are found to be making up less than 1% of city's total adult population.


title: Istanbul

text: 2019 survey study by KONDA that examined the religiosity of the voting-age adults in Istanbul showed that 57% of the surveyed had a religion and were trying to practise its requirements. This was followed by nonobservant people with 26% who identified with a religion but generally did not practise its requirements. 11% stated they were fully devoted to their religion, meanwhile 6% were non-believers who did not believe the rules and requirements of a religion. 24% of the surveyed also identified themselves as "religious conservatives". Around 90% of Istanbul's population are Sunni Muslims and Alevism forms the second biggest religious group.


title: Istanbul

text: Into the 19th century, the Christians of Istanbul tended to be either Greek Orthodox, members of the Armenian Apostolic Church or Catholic Levantines. Greeks and Armenians form the largest Christian population in the city. While Istanbul's Greek population was exempted from the 1923 population exchange with Greece, changes in tax status and the 1955 anti-Greek pogrom prompted thousands to leave. Following Greek migration to the city for work in the 2010s, the Greek population rose to nearly 3,000 in 2019, still greatly diminished since 1919, when it stood at 350,000. There are today 50,000 to 70,000 Armenians in Istanbul down from a peak of 164,000 in 1913. As of 2019, an estimated 18,000 of the country's 25,000 Christian Assyrians live in Istanbul.


title: Istanbul

text: The majority of the Catholic "Levantines" (Turkish: "Levanten") in Istanbul and Izmir are the descendants of traders/colonists from the Italian maritime republics of the Mediterranean (especially Genoa and Venice) and France, who obtained special rights and privileges called the Capitulations from the Ottoman sultans in the 16th century. The community had more than 15,000 members during Atatürk's presidency in the 1920s and 1930s, but today is reduced to only a few hundreds, according to Italo-Levantine writer Giovanni Scognamillo. They continue to live in Istanbul (mostly in Karaköy, Beyoğlu and Nişantaşı), and Izmir (mostly in Karşıyaka, Bornova and Buca).


title: Istanbul

text: Istanbul became one of the world's most important Jewish centers in the 16th and 17th century. Romaniote and Ashkenazi communities existed in Istanbul before the conquest of Istanbul, but it was the arrival of Sephardic Jews that ushered a period of cultural flourishing. Sephardic Jews settled in the city after their expulsion from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and 1497. Sympathetic to the plight of Sephardic Jews, Bayezid II sent out the Ottoman Navy under the command of admiral Kemal Reis to Spain in 1492 in order to evacuate them safely to Ottoman lands. In marked contrast to Jews in Europe, Ottoman Jews were allowed to work in any profession. Ottoman Jews in Istanbul excelled in commerce and came to particularly dominate the medical profession. By 1711, using the printing press, books came to be published in Spanish and Ladino, Yiddish, and Hebrew. In large part due to emigration to Israel, the Jewish population in the city dropped from 100,000 in 1950 to 15,000 in 2021.


title: Istanbul

text: Politically, Istanbul is seen as the most important administrative region in Turkey. In the run-up to local elections in 2019, Erdoğan claimed 'if we fail in Istanbul, we will fail in Turkey'. The contest in Istanbul carried deep political, economic and symbolic significance for Erdoğan, whose election of mayor of Istanbul in 1994 had served as his launchpad. For Ekrem İmamoğlu, winning the mayorlty of Istanbul was a huge moral victory, but for Erdoğan it had practical ramifications: His party, AKP, lost control of the $4.8 billion municipal budget, which had sustained patronage at the point of delivery of many public services for 25 years.


title: Istanbul

text: More recently, Istanbul and many of Turkey's metropolitan cities are following a trend away from the government and their right-wing ideology. In 2013 and 2014, large-scale anti-AKP government protests began in İstanbul and spread throughout the nation. This trend first became evident electorally in the 2014 mayoral election where the center-left opposition candidate won an impressive 40% of the vote, despite not winning. The first government defeat in Istanbul occurred in the 2017 constitutional referendum, where Istanbul voted 'No' by 51.4% to 48.6%. The AKP government had supported a 'Yes' vote and won the vote nationally due to high support in rural parts of the country. The biggest defeat for the government came in the 2019 local elections, where their candidate for Mayor, former Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım, was defeated by a very narrow margin by the opposition candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu. İmamoğlu won the vote with 48.77% of the vote, against Yıldırım's 48.61%, but the elections were controversially annulled by the Supreme Electoral Council due to AKP's claim of electoral fraud. In the re-run İmamoğlu gathered 54.22% of the total vote and widened the defeat margin.


title: Istanbul

text: Administratively, Istanbul is divided into 39 districts, more than any other province in Turkey. Istanbul Province sends 98 Members of Parliament to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, which has a total of 600 seats. For the purpose of parliamentary elections, Istanbul is divided into three electoral districts; two on the European side and one on the Asian side, electing 28, 35 and 35 MPs respectively.


title: Istanbul

text: Istanbul had the eleventh-largest economy among the world's urban areas in 2018, and is responsible for of Turkey's industrial output, of GDP, and of tax revenues. The city's gross domestic product adjusted by PPP stood at in 2018, with manufacturing and services accounting for and of the economic output respectively. Istanbul's productivity is higher than the national average. Trade is economically important, accounting for of the economic output in the city. In 2019, companies based in Istanbul produced exports worth and received imports totaling ; these figures were equivalent to and , respectively, of the national totals.


title: Istanbul

text: Istanbul, which straddles the Bosporus strait, houses international ports that link Europe and Asia. The Bosporus, providing the only passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, is the world's busiest and narrowest strait used for international navigation, with more than tons of oil passing through it each year. International conventions guarantee passage between the Black and the Mediterranean seas, even when tankers carry oil, LNG/LPG, chemicals, and other flammable or explosive materials as cargo. In 2011, as a workaround solution, the then Prime Minister Erdoğan presented Canal Istanbul, a project to open a new strait between the Black and Marmara seas. While the project was still on Turkey's agenda in 2020, there has not been a clear date set for it.


title: Istanbul

text: Shipping is a significant part of the city's economy, with of exports and of imports in 2018 executed by sea. Istanbul has three major shipping ports – the Port of Haydarpaşa, the Port of Ambarlı, and the Port of Zeytinburnu – as well as several smaller ports and oil terminals along the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara.


title: Istanbul

text: Haydarpaşa, at the southeastern end of the Bosporus, was Istanbul's largest port until the early 2000s. Since then operations were shifted to Ambarlı, with plans to convert Haydarpaşa into a tourism complex. In 2019, Ambarlı, on the western edge of the urban center, had an annual capacity of 3,104,882 TEUs, making it the third-largest cargo terminal in the Mediterranean basin.


title: Istanbul

text: Istanbul has been an international banking hub since the 1980s, and is home to the only active stock exchange in Turkey, Borsa Istanbul, which was originally established as the Ottoman Stock Exchange in 1866.


title: Istanbul

text: In 1995, keeping up with the financial trends, Borsa Istanbul moved its headquarters (which was originally located on Bankalar Caddesi, the financial center of the Ottoman Empire, and later at the 4th Vakıf Han building in Sirkeci) to İstinye, in the vicinity of Maslak, which hosts the headquarters of numerous Turkish banks.


title: Istanbul

text: By 2023, the Ataşehir district on the Asian side of the city will host the new headquarters of a number of state-owned Turkish banks, including the Central Bank of Turkey, currently headquartered in Ankara.


title: Istanbul

text: Istanbul expects 1 million tourists from cruise companies after the renovation of its cruise port, also known as Galataport in Karaköy district.


title: Istanbul

text: Istanbul was historically known as a cultural hub, but its cultural scene stagnated after the Turkish Republic shifted its focus toward Ankara. The new national government established programs that served to orient Turks toward musical traditions, especially those originating in Europe, but musical institutions and visits by foreign classical artists were primarily centered in the new capital.


title: Istanbul

text: Much of Turkey's cultural scene had its roots in Istanbul, and by the 1980s and 1990s Istanbul reemerged globally as a city whose cultural significance is not solely based on its past glory.


title: Istanbul

text: By the end of the 19th century, Istanbul had established itself as a regional artistic center, with Turkish, European, and Middle Eastern artists flocking to the city. Despite efforts to make Ankara Turkey's cultural heart, Istanbul had the country's primary institution of art until the 1970s. When additional universities and art journals were founded in Istanbul during the 1980s, artists formerly based in Ankara moved in.


title: Istanbul

text: Beyoğlu has been transformed into the artistic center of the city, with young artists and older Turkish artists formerly residing abroad finding footing there. Modern art museums, including İstanbul State Art and Sculpture Museum, National Palaces Painting Museum, İstanbul Modern, the Pera Museum, Sakıp Sabancı Museum and SantralIstanbul, opened in the 2000s to complement the exhibition spaces and auction houses that have already contributed to the cosmopolitan nature of the city. These museums have yet to attain the popularity of older museums on the historic peninsula, including the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, which ushered in the era of modern museums in Turkey, and the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum.