THE GATES TO THE BLACK SEA 



457 



Buxinos, friendly to strangers, by a eu- 

 phemistic interpretation of its real char- 

 acter. The country of the Golden Fleece 

 lay in the romantic glens of the Caucasus, 

 where also the Greek imagination set its 

 greatest myth of Prometheus. And the 

 littoral of the Black Sea was dotted with 

 Greek colonies, whose ruins or whose 

 modern successors exist today. 



Like the ]\Iarmora, the Black Sea also 

 had its post-Alexandrine and its Roman 

 periods, when the Kingdom of Pontus 

 flourished in the south and in the north 

 Emperor Trajan founded his colony of 

 Dacia (now known as Rumania). The 

 Roman imprint still persists in the lan- 

 guage and the faces of the Rumanian 

 coast, where the poet Ovid died in exile. 

 The Byzantine Empire left an even 

 stronger mark, giving letters and a re- 

 ligion to the people of the Black Sea. 

 Into those waters also penetrated the 

 Genoese, planting along the south shore 

 a chain of factories whose towers and 

 escutcheons may still be seen in more 

 than one sleepy Turkish town. 



Then came the Turks, a century or so 

 after they reached the Marmora. The 

 fantastic little empire of Trebizond, 

 erected by the Comneni after the capture 

 of Constantinople by the Franks, sur- 

 vived the capture of Constantinople by 

 the Turks. It was from the mountains 

 behind that ancient Greek city that Xeno- 

 phon and his returning ten thousand 

 caught their historic first glimpse of the 

 sea. 



Trebizond owed to its position at the 

 terminus of the time-honored caravan 

 route from northern Persia and central 

 Asia a prosperity taken from it only in 

 our day by Batoum and the trans-Cau- 

 casian Railroad ; but, like the neighboring 

 Seljukian principalities and the Khanate 

 of the Crimea, it fell at last into the 

 hands of Mohammed II. And at the 

 height of the Ottoman power — that is, 

 during the lasc part of the fifteenth, the 

 whole of the sixteenth, and the greater 

 part of the seventeenth century — there 

 was no coast of the Black Sea which the 

 Turks did not airectly or indirectly domi- 

 nate. It became, like the Alarmora, a 

 Turkish lake. 



Unlike the ]\Iarmora, however, it has 



not remained a Turkish lake. Its history 

 has undergone an evolution of such na- 

 ture that in this century we are more in- 

 clined to think of the Black Sea as a 

 Russian lake ; yet so recently as 200 years 

 ago the Turks denied the right of the 

 Czar to call himself an emperor ! 



Although the Black Sea now washes 

 the shores of four nations instead of one, 

 it has retained much of the character of 

 a lake, and a Turkish one, from the fact 

 that the Turks still control its outlet. We 

 have seen how Greeks, Romans, Byzan- 

 tines, Genoese, and Turks, one after an- 

 other, have throughout the centuries ex- 

 ercised that right of control simply by 

 virtue of a geographical accident. 



Until 1774 Turkey was able to bar the 

 Russian flag from the Black Sea, just as 

 Russia bars the Persian flag today from 

 the Caspian. The Treaty of Akkerman 

 renewed and enlarged in 1826 the right 

 of navigation of the Russians, and in 

 1833 the Treaty of Hunkyar Iskelesi 

 bound Turkey to close the Dardanelles to 

 foreign ships of war. This principle the 

 Powers agreed in 1841 to respect, though 

 that did not prevent their fleets from en- 

 tering the straits to participate in the 

 Crimean War. 



The Treaty of Paris which followed 

 that war declared the Black Sea neutral 

 and closed to warships of any nation, in- 

 cluding Russia ; it also made free and put 

 under an international commission the 

 navigation of the Danube. 



Russia, however, took advantage of the 

 Franco-Prussian War to repudiate the 

 clause of the Treaty of Paris relating to 

 her own warships in the Black Sea ; and 

 her successful war against the Turks 

 brought her, a few years later, within 

 sight of the realization of her old dream 

 of a free path to the ocean. But the 

 British fleet took that occasion to enter 

 the Marmora and to anchor off the 

 Princes Isles, while the Russians camped 

 at San Stefano ; and the subsequent 

 Treaty of Berlin further dashed the Rus- 

 sian hopes. 



Since that time the case has remained 

 more or less at a standstill, except that in 

 1891 the Russians obtained for their so- 

 called volunteer fleet, which in reality are 

 transports and auxiliary cruisers, the 



