Talk:1509 Constantinople earthquake

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	A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on February 12, 2010. The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that in the 1509 Istanbul earthquake, the only damage suffered by the dome of the Hagia Sophia mosque was that plaster covering up the Byzantine mosaics fell off, revealing the Christian images?
	Facts from this article were featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on September 10, 2012, September 10, 2013, September 10, 2019, September 10, 2020, September 10, 2021, and September 10, 2023.

Archives

Archive 1

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was not moved. --BDD (talk) 16:42, 21 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

1509 Constantinople earthquake → 1509 Istanbul earthquake – No current discussion took place prior to this move and the move was left incomplete. We have the new article without its associated talk page (the talk page was not also moved). Several other articles were left in this state today by the same user. Dawnseeker2000 02:20, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Reserving vote for now, but as I recall, the name Istanbul hadn't yet been coined in 1509; I don't know what the Turkish/Ottoman form of the name Constantinople was at the time, but it's anachronistic to apply a relatively modern name to a long-established historical name that was also used, in whatever adaptation by its conquerors, for a long time after it ceased being a Byzantine-ruled city. The name Istanbul did not come into modern use in English until after the Ataturk era.Skookum1 (talk) 03:08, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Support - A google search on '"1509 Constantinople earthquake" -wikipedia' returns just 17 hits - virtually all that use text from this article. In contrast "1509 Istanbul earthquake" gets 4 hits on Google Books and 10 on Google Scholar. It would be overstating it to say that the earthquake is commonly known as the 1509 Istanbul earthquake, but it's certainly more commonly known as that than the current title. See also Names of Istanbul, which suggests that Istanbul was the common name by 1453, if not yet the official name. Mikenorton (talk) 06:55, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment By "suggests that" it sounds like you are making a somewhat original research or speculative conjecture about what Names of Istanbul has in it, which is not valid at all as a reason. And "common to whom?? Certainly not the rulers and population of Constantinople before 1543, and certainly not in the West, or in the Balkan countries. Even the Ottoman Empire, in its official correspondence with the West and the embassies of the Porte, did not use "Istanbul" but used "Constantinople". I don't have my histories of the Ottoman Empire or The City here (Ostrogorsky, Obolensky, and Runciman were, granted, Byzantine historians, but Mansel and others I've read continued the usual usage in writings in English and other European languages) but I don't recall seeing any mention of the term in Istanbul in them for the city until it was officially designated as such in the late 19th Century if at all before Ataturk. And what do you mean "Wikipedia returns 17 hits, virtually all that use text from this article"....DUH, of course wiki-clones use text from this article, that's what they do with wiki-content. What the Ottoman-Turkish form of the name "Constantinople" exactly was I'm not sure, but I know that that language (now dead/defunct) is not the same as modern Turkish. Eis tin polis ("to the city"), the Greek phrase which is thought to be one of the origins of the term Istanbul, was not a name but a reference or monicker.Skookum1 (talk) 17:43, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The search string was exactly "1509 Constantinople earthquake" -wikipedia [1], which is to try to remove the clones from the results - although most of them were still clones. The name that is given to the earthquake does not necessarily follow how the city is generally known in English in that period. The google scholar sources all use the name "1509 Istanbul earthquake" [2]. We should be considering here the name of the earthquake rather than the city. Mikenorton (talk) 21:24, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose strongly - Constantinople was the contemporary name for Istanbul then. Almost every article of Istanbul before 1930 has Constantinople as its page name.--Chauahuasachca (talk) 11:05, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. Constantinople was the common name for the city in English-language sources until at least the 1920s, whatever it may have been called in Turkish. -- Necrothesp (talk) 12:36, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose, per my comment above and per Chauhauasacha and Necrothesp. Imposing a modern usage on an historic - pivotally historic - capital is not valid.Skookum1 (talk) 17:43, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. I can't remember the last time I saw a historical work (whether recently published or older) that referred to the city as "Istanbul", except for works talking about the city post-World War I. Virtually nobody writing in English uses "Istanbul" when talking about 1509. Nyttend (talk) 18:40, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. Constantinople is by far the common name when referring to the city in this time period, including in modern works. Knight of Truth (talk) 19:23, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose My initial reaction was that it may seem surprising to see "Istanbul" used as far back as this, presumably it became officially known as Istanbul at the Turkish conquest in 1453. However looking into this further at Names of Istanbul it is not nearly so simple. Constantinople v. Istanbul is by no means a straight choice of Western v. Turkish name. The Turks continued to refer to the city officially as Kostantiyye for most purposes for some time after 1453. Istanbul ultimately derives from the Greek for "the city", it was sometimes called this colloquially even before 1453, the name was used increasingly in colloquial contexts and even some official contexts, but it was only definitely adopted as the official name in 1923 when Turkey became a republic, and it came into general use among westerners in the 1930s. So I suggest we treat 1923 as the cut-off point when Constantinople became Istanbul for Wikipedia naming purposes. Although, would it now also seem incongruous to refer to Constantinople as recently as the First World War? PatGallacher (talk) 21:49, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Re your final question — I don't think so. Some time back, I went through all volumes (eleven? twelve? Can't now remember) of the series that includes this book, and I know that its account of the Gallipoli Campaign always used "Constantinople". Nyttend (talk) 00:09, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

- - Comment That applied even later in English until later in the 20th Century; I'm pretty sure in literary works such as The Alexandria Quartet when the city is mentioned "Constantinople" is used, maybe in Murder on the Orient Express and the like, also, and in D.H. Lawrence. And definitely in AJP Taylor's diplomatic history The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: 1848-1918. I remember maps in school that had both on them, usually with Constinople larger and Istanbul in brackets below, sometimes the other way, all 20th Century. As for the books cited below, they are all 21st Century and apparently obeying modern conventions, but given the time period of this quake and my other observation about "seems to be" or whatever the wording used to summarize/analyze/interpret Names of Istanbul and my familiarity with many historical and literary works before the last 13 years, including Philip Mansel's "Constantinople: City of the World's Desire but not only that, and your observations about Gallipolli (also in Taylor's Illustrated History of the Great War and his other works..........I see no reason to rename this.Skookum1 (talk) 11:14, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Support. I assume we want to use a consistent nomenclature for the Ottoman period. Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire (2009), A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (2010), The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent (2000), The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922 (2005), and Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire (2007) all use "Istanbul." Kauffner (talk) 02:04, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I had a look at articles on the Gallipoli Campaign in various Wikipedias, the English, French and Spanish all refer to Constantinople, the Turkish and German refer to Istanbul. PatGallacher (talk) 11:49, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Disputed

The Ambraseys article that serves as the primary reference for this article makes it clear that casualty numbers are totally unknown ("Reliable statistics simply do not exist"), the number of mosques damaged is unknown ("The number of mescids ruined is put at 109. However, we found no evidence that such a large number of small mosques were destroyed or seriously damaged"), and the nickname "The Lesser Judgment Day" is also clearly a fabrication ("Also, the appellation of the 1509 earthquake, the Little Apocalypse, the Day of Judgment ... , a term adopted to describe the event even by some modern sources ... is not justifiable"). So this article needs some serious work. —howcheng {chat} 02:38, 10 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I've reworded the lead section, getting rid of the "Lesser Judgement Day" name, removing claims about the number of mosques destroyed and quoting the full range of estimated casualties. Mikenorton (talk) 13:10, 15 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Single source

A "single source" tag was recently added to the article, stating that 80% of the content was based on Ambraseys 2001. It's true that the Ambraseys 2001 paper is the main source for large parts of the article, but it is the most authoritative account of the earthquake and there have been no more recent publications that I'm aware of, apart from a paper by Kazuaki Sawai from 2017, which looks like it will be a useful additional source regarding some of the details about the effects of the earthquake and should also allow a "Reconstruction" section to be added to the article. If @Bumbubookworm: can point out any sources that I've missed, I would be grateful. Mikenorton (talk) 11:03, 7 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]