If it issued south through the Propontis and the Hellespont, a few days would carry its armies to the teeming shores of Bithynia, or to the rich coasts and islands of the Aegean Sea, or to Greece, or to any point on the western or the southern coast of Asia Minor. And a few days more would bring its fleets to the coast of Syria, or of Egypt, or to Italy, Spain, Africa, and the Western Mediterranean. Thus, the largest army could be safely transported in a few days, so as to descend at will upon the vast plains of Southern Russia, or into the heart of Central Asia, within a short march of the head waters of the Euphrates — or they might descend southwards to the gates of Syria, near Issus, or else to the mouths of the Nile, or to the islands and bays of Greece or Italy.
And these wide alternatives in objective point could be kept for ultimate decision unknown to an enemy up to the last moment. When the great Heraclius, in 622, opened his memorable war with Chosroes, which ended in the ruin of the Persian dynasty, no man in either host knew till the hour of his sailing whether the Byzantine hero intended to descend upon Armenia by the Euxine, or upon Syria by the Gulf of Issus. And until they issued from the Hellespont into the Aegean, the Emperor’s army and fleet were absolutely protected not only from molestation, but even from observation local ephesus tour guides. To a power which commanded the sea and had ample supplies of troopships, Constantinople combined the maximum power of defence with the maximum range of attack. And this extraordinary combination she will retain in the future in competent hands.
That wonderfully rapid and mobile force, which an eminent American expert has named the ‘ Sea Power,’ the power discovered by Cromwell and Blake, of which England is still the great example and mistress, was placed by the founders of Byzantium in that spot of earth which, at any rate in its anciently-peopled districts, combined the greatest resources.
Persian and the Peloponnesian wars
Byzantium, from the days of the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars, had always been a prize to be coveted by a naval power. From the time of Constantine down to the Crusades, or for nearly eight centuries, the rulers of Constantinople could usually command large and well-manned fleets. And this was enough to account for her imperial place in history. As an imperial city she must rise, decline, or fall, by her naval strength. She fell before the Crusaders in a naval attack; and she was crippled to a great extent by the naval attack of Mohammed the Conqueror. During the zenith of the Moslem Conquest, she was great by sea. Her decline in this century has been far greater on sea than on land. When her fleet was shattered at Sinope, in 1853, the end was not far off. And when to-day we see in the Golden Horn the hulls of her ironclads moored motionless, and they say, unable to move, men know that Stamboul is no longer the queen of the Levant.
As a maritime city, also, Constantinople presents this striking problem. For fifteen centuries, with moderate intervals, this city of the Bosphorus and the Propontis has held imperial rule. No other seaport city, either in the ancient or in the modern world, has ever maintained an empire for a period approaching to this in length. Tyre, Carthage, Athens, Alexandria, Venice, Genoa, Amsterdam, have held proud dependencies by their fleets for a space, but for rarely more than a few generations or centuries. The supremacy of the seas, of which Englishmen boast, can hardly be said to have had more than two centuries of trial.
Turkish Culture in Istanbul 