He commissioned two men, Anthemius of Tralles and the Elder Isidore of Miletus to build a third church at the same location which would be greater than its previous predecessors. Anthemius and Isidore were not referred as architects, but they were called “mechanikoi” which means the masters of the science of the mechanics.
The Hagia Sophia has a long and complex political, cultural, and religious story. Originally built as a way for Emperor Justinian to centralize political and religious power, the magnificent cathedral did just that.
The resultant Hagia Sophia was built in the remarkably short time of about six years, being completed in 537 ce. Unusual for the period in which it was built, the names of the building's architects—Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus—are well known, as is their familiarity with mechanics and mathematics.
Byzantine emperor Justinian the GreatOriginally a church, later a mosque, the 6th-century Hagia Sophia (532–537) by Byzantine emperor Justinian the Great was the largest cathedral in the world for nearly a thousand years, until the completion of the Seville Cathedral (1507) in Spain. The Church of Justinian I today.
Hagia Sophia, the finest architectural product of Emperor Justinian's reign, was an engineering marvel at the time of its completion in A.D. 537. Not until the 15th century would another building be erected that was capable of housing as much area under one roof.
Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan added structural supports to the building (including buttresses) and built two additional minarets, a sultan's lodge, and a mausoleum for Selim II.
10,000 workersUnder the rule of Justinian the Emperor, and with a force of 10,000 workers, the dome atop the church of Hagia Sophia was built in record time: it took just five years, ten months, and four days to complete.
AshlarRoman brickHagia Sophia/Materials
Hagia Sophia, which means "Holy Wisdom," is the great church built in Constantinople (modern day Istanbul, Turkey) by Emperor Justinian in 537. It was later used as an ideal model for other mosques, and today it is a museum.
It is apparent from the brief description already given that the design of the Hagia Sophia has a geometry that is more complex than that of a closed cylinder. Its dome rests on four large arches and the pendentives between them. Two of the arches open into half domes to form the long interior space of the church.
Emperor ConstantiusThe church of Hagia Sophia (literally “Holy Wisdom”) in Constantinople, now Istanbul, was first dedicated in 360 by Emperor Constantius, son of the city's founder, Emperor Constantine. Hagia Sophia served as the cathedra, or bishop's seat, of the city.
Count Baldwin of Flanders was crowned emperor in Hagia Sophia in 1204. An even more drastic change came in 1453 when the Ottoman Turks under Sultan Mehmet II took Constantinople by storm.
The dome is the crowning achievement of Hagia Sophia, and in its ambitious scale, it recalls the engineering brilliance of the . . . "suspended from heaven." Procopius, the biographer of the the Emperor Justinian, described the dome of Hagia Sophia as looking as though it was . . .