Istanbul was Constantinople, If you've a date in Constantinople she'll be waiting in Istanbul

How would this deal with Berlin (which, depending on how you look at it, either split into two cities for a time and then reunified, or was one city with two parent locations)?

foxgrrl I think has the ultimate answer, assuming such a database exists:

If you have the coordinates (or close enough) and a date, you should be able to look that up and retrieve either East Berlin, West Berlin or just Berlin.

I don’t know that such a database currently exists (and a cursory Google search was fruitless), but if MusicBrainz were to go in this direction it would be an improvement over the current setup – even if the database was exceedingly incomplete. It could be updated by the community over time, as everything else has.

I do concede that this is well beyond the scope of MusicBrainz, but perhaps … GeoBrainz?

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Wikipedia might have the necessary data…

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Historical_Place

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And Wikidata was also suggested previously as one place data consumers could use to query for more in-depth information:

Wikidata was actually what was originally used to (bot) import Areas into MusicBrainz from, but editors started manipulating Wikidata data to make the bot import Areas to MusicBrainz, which is one of the reasons we put the automation on hold—we didn’t want our approach to be a detriment to a sister project.

Wikidata(/Wikipedia) is one of the two primary sources linked to from new areas together with GeoNames, and while most things are on both, it is not uncommon for something to only be in one of the two systems… and sometimes there are areas that do not exist in either.