Inde Thomis dictus locus hic, quia fertur in illo
Membra soror fratris consecuisse sui.[31]
From the most remote antiquity the Euxine has been noted for the fury of its tempests and for the reputed terrors of its navigation, as well as for the savage character of the inhabitants on its coast. For this reason the ancients called it Pontus Axenus—the inhospitable sea. Subsequently, as if to placate its fury, by an euphemism, it was called the Euxine—the hospitable sea—a name which it has since borne.
But the first name given to this extended body of water was simply Pontos—the Greek word for sea—as if it were the sea par excellence. The noted traveler, Giovanni da Piano Carpini, a Franciscan friar, and Ricoldo da Monte di Croce, a Dominican missionary in the Orient, called it Mare Magnum—the great sea. In the Itinerarium, however, of Blessed Oderic of Pordenone it bears the name Mare Majus—the greater sea—as it does also in I Viaggi of Marco Polo who calls it Mare Maggiore. But this is not all. Friar Jordanus speaks of it as the Black Sea—Mare Nigrum, as likewise does Sir John Mandeville who gives it the name Mare Maurum—Mauros, in Byzantine, as in Modern Greek, signifying black. But there was, probably, no better reason for calling this sea black than there was for giving to certain other well-known seas the epithets of red, white, and yellow. From all this it appears that what we now know as the Euxine or Black Sea has been rich in names as well as in myths and legends.[32]
The Euxine, however, is famed not only for legendary associations but for having been for centuries a section of the great highway between the Occident and the Orient. It was by this route that Fra Oderic of Pordenone, that celebrated missionary of the fourteenth century, made his wonderful journey from Venice to China and other parts of the Far East. It was by the same route that Marco Polo—the most famous traveler of the Middle Ages—returned from his long peregrinations in eastern Asia to his home in the Queen City of the Adriatic. And it was by way of the Euxine that Marco Polo’s father and uncle had preceded him to far-off Cathay where they were most cordially received by the famous Kublai Khan.
It was also for ages an important link in one of the world’s great commercial highways. From time immemorial there were three great trade routes which connected India and China with Europe. One was the Persian Gulf route which ran from the mouth of the Indus to the Euphrates and along this latter river to Zeugma, or Thapsacus, whence it proceeded to Antioch and other ports of the eastern Mediterranean. The second was the sea route which went from India along the Persian and Arabian coasts to Aden, thence by the Red Sea to Alexandria and Tyre and Sidon. The third was the great overland route which started from Bactra—long, like Babylon, a market-place for the races of the world and a great emporium for Indian and Chinese commerce—and reached the West by two roads. One was the caravan route which crossed Parthia and Mesopotamia and ended in Antioch. The other passed down the river Oxus to the Caspian Sea and thence to the Euxine. This is the trade route that has the greatest interest for us at present—a route that served as one of the world’s chief commercial highways for more than two thousand years.
Long before Alexander made Bactra his base for the invasion of India, long before the Greek Skylax of Karyanda made his famous voyage from the mouth of the Indus to Arsinoe on the Red Sea, and many centuries before Hippalus made his epoch-making discovery of the existence of the moonstones of the Indian Ocean, which immensely augmented the ocean-bound traffic between India and Egypt, a very large volume of the luxuries of the Far East found their way to the Occident by the great Oxus-Caspian-Euxine trade route. And while the ships of Tarshish and
Quinquiremes of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With cargoes of ivory and apes and peacocks,