The control of the Straits was clearly a vital matter for the sea-going Greeks, centered in the Aegean. The interest of Rome in Mediterranean trade lay rather in the south and east, in Egypt and Syria. It collected its toll on the Black Sea trade at Abydos on the Dardanelles; but it was also in control of other more important routes to the Orient. The fundamental point, however, was that, by the time it had reached the Euxine, it had no rivals to exclude. After seagoing Carthage had been destroyed and Pompey had swept the eastern Mediterranean of those free-booting traders whom the Romans viewed as pirates, the maritime as well as the land empire of Rome was universal. For many reasons, too, the gate to the Oriental trade lay through Egypt and Syria rather than by the Black Sea; while the grain of Africa and other more readily accessible parts of the Empire reduced proportionately the importance of that element so vital to Athens. It is therefore evident that there could be no "Question of the Straits" under the Roman Empire.
A new era began, however, with the division of the Empire at the close of the third century A.D. The capital which Diocletian chose for the eastern world was Nicomedia, now Izmit, on the south-eastern gulf of the Sea of Marmara. Already the center of gravity was shifting to the Straits when Constantine the Great in 330 chose the site of old Byzantium for his new capital. The reasons for the founding of Constantinople were primarily political and strategic rather than commercial, since it lay like a fortress at the ferry on the land route between Asia and Europe. In Constantine's day it was these land routes, and not the sea-ways, which held the Roman world together. The naval engineers had no such triumphs to record as those who built the Roman roads. But in the succeeding years, when the barbarians broke through the outlying defenses on the frontiers and cut the line of march from east to west, it was the maritime strategic value of the city that held so well the key to the eastern seas, which kept the name of Rome a symbol of empire in the East until 1453. For Constantinople, planted as a fortress and a political capital, became a port and a commercial city--the only great port which kept alive the traditions of antique culture during the dark ages. This role it owed in part to the strength of its walls, which time and again defied the invader, but also to its fleet, which was able to control the Straits much more successfully than its armies the surrounding provinces.
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