The formation process the Regio quartadecima Constantinopolitana. Relocating Constantine’s walls

The paper addresses the reconstruction of the formation process of the fourteenth region (Regio quartadecima) of Constantinople by using the available documental sources and archaeological data and by processing them by applying the urban morphology analysis methods, such as the cyclical inversion of limits and poles, the orientation analysis and the attraction analysis (Caniggia, 1976) (Strappa, Ieva and Dimatteo, 2003) (Camiz, 2018). Within the buildings mentioned in the Notitia urbis constantinopolitanae, none of which have been localised with certainty yet, we tentatively localised some monuments in reference to the morphology of the territory as described by Dionysius of Byzantium. The form of the site is the only permanent element in a context of continuous changes, demolitions and reconstructions. The Pontem sublicium sive ligneum was part of a street grid system: we localised it following the individuated formation process of the territorial organism, as the starting point for the reconstruction of the topographic mosaic. The analysis of building types, the orientation of urban tissues, and the hierarchy of paths together with the reconstruction of the territorial organism provided the general methodological framework for the placement of the main monuments mentioned in the Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitana within an interoperable GIS which applied predictive models and was able to redefine the position of Constantine’s walls. This paper is part of a wider research project on the topography of Constantinople (Camiz, Özkuvancı and Verdiani, 2019) outlining by comparison the formation process of the Regio tertiadecima (Galata) (Saglam, 2018).