Carthage is possibly the most famous sacked city of history; one of the greatest empires of the ancient world reduced to rubble and the earth salted beneath it. While the earth wasn’t actually salted, the Romans clearly didn’t intend to allow Carthage to restart itself. So how did this city get rebuilt as a Roman colony?

To begin, the actual process of sacking Carthage was as complete as possible, and it took a long time to begin a serious attempt at reconstruction. The Gracchus brothers were the first to attempt to resettle Carthage, under the name Colonia Junonia Carthago a quarter century (123 BCE) after the sack of Carthage, but their attempt failed (1). This attempt included Italian merchants and 6000 people, who wanted to take advantage of the local opportunities. While the Romans knew that the land was valuable, they had no interest in consolidating it yet, as conservative elements in the Senate still hated the idea of rebuilding Carthage (2). It was not until Julius Caesar that a serious attempt was made to resettle Carthage, but that was put on hold by Caesar’s assassination. Allegedly, Caesar had a dream that he saw an army weeping, and announced that Carthage must be resettled (3). It was not until his adopted heir Augustus put a plan into motion that Carthage was resettled. According to Appian, Augustus sent 3000 colonists, a small number, and the rest of the inhabitants came from the local population. This new colony would be called Colonia Iulia Concordia Carthago.

The first order of business was to make Carthage a truly Roman colony, which involved completely remodeling the city from the ground up. Carthage was made in a more Hellenistic, natural development originally, like Rome. Instead of a neatly ordered grid like Roman colonies at Timgad, Carthage had developed over time and merged into the natural landscape. To solve this problem, the Romans completely destroyed the legendary hillside of Byrsa, the alleged site where Dido first established the city of Carthage. The entire hill was torn down by hand, and the entire area was covered up. http://imgur.com/a/r5KLt This picture shows the levels of Carthage after the Romans. They literally buried the past of Carthage, and constructed a Roman forum on top. The Romans approached other problems of Carthage methodically and with a military mindset. They began to add classic Roman amenities, like aqueducts (see La Malga Cisterns) and roads (the 200 mile Tacapae-Amaedara road). Eventually, having put in all of this work, people began to repopulate the city, lured by the possibility of jobs and urban life. While Augustus may have started with a small number of initial settlers, he didn’t need that many true Romans- his soldiers were there for a time, and other Romans would come. The city was repopulated by native people. (4)

1. This comes from the dissertation of James Rives, who is an okay author, and apparently an excellent student.
2. Carthage Must be Destroyed by Richard Miles
3. Appian The Punic Wars 8.136. Found here: http://www.livius.org/sources/content/appian/appian-the-punic-wars/?
4. Rome in Africa by Susan Raven

One of the most famous example of a sacked city being rebuilt to and beyond its former grandeur would be the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, and its reconstruction under Mehmed the Conqueror. The city itself had already been thoroughly sacked during the events of the Fourth Crusade, something to the tune of 900,000 marks or 3.6 million hyperpyra (1). By the time of the conquest of Mehmed in 1453 the city of Constantinople was a shadow of its former self with the majority of the city being abandoned, so much so that the city of Constantinople was closer to Thirteen villages behind a massive wall, from a population of over 1 million in the twelfth century the population had declined to somewhere around one hundred thousand (2). The state of the city itself, not necessarily the people, before the conquest was miserable. After the siege of the city the Muslim army took the customary 3 days of looting. This only happened to cities that resisted conquest. The Sultan took care to make sure that the city was not unduly damaged during the looting, and the looting itself only lasted for two of the three days, but, “At first they could not believe the defense of finished. They slew everyone they met in the streets, men, women and children without discrimination. The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets from the heights of Pera towards the Golden Horn.” (3) While this is undoubtedly literary exaggeration the death toll on the populace was great and those that weren’t killed were taken into slavery. Suffice to say the Sultan had to rebuild the city from what was essentially a smoking crater the Sultan himself said “What a city we have given over to plunder and destruction”. (4)

One of the first measures the Sultan took in the re-population of the city was to establish the ethnic Greeks into self-governing communities called millets and settled them in certain quarters of the city so as to better control the remains of Christianity in the city. This was normal and at this point in time conquered Christian cities expected this. For true re-population he invited Turks from all over his empire to settle in Constantinople, one of the enticements was government assistance in the construction of shops and houses within the city (5). The remaining Greeks were encouraged to stay through similar rebuilding programs and promised security. Families were also forcibly brought to Constantinople; these were 5 thousand family brought from the city of Trebizond after its conquest, particularly masons were brought to aid in the reconstruction of the city. The Sultan also encouraged Jewish and Armenian settlement in the city in hopes of revitalizing the city’s finances (6). Before the Sultans death in 1481 the city was restored to its former glory and beyond.

1. Comes from A History of the Byzantine State and society

2-6 Come from Runciman's 1453: the Fall of Constantinople which details the reconstruction of the city