It was then imperative for Europe, unless it was prepared to forego its trade with the East, to discover a new route to the Orient, which would be beyond the interference of Ottoman power. This much desired result was accomplished by two of the most decisive events in the world’s history--“the rounding by Vasco da Gama of the Cape of Good Hope and the discovery of the New World.” By these far-reaching achievements “the center of gravity, commercial, political and intellectual, rapidly shifted from the south-east of Europe to the northwest; from the cities of the Mediterranean littoral to those of the Atlantic. Constantinople, Alexandria, Venice, Genoa, Marseilles were deprived at one fell swoop of the economic and political preëminence which had for centuries belonged to them” ... and the Mediterranean, which for ages had “been the greatest of commercial highways, was reduced almost to the position of a backwater.”[63] Among the many names given to the Ottoman capital by the peoples of the East is that bestowed upon it by the Arabs, namely, El Farruch--the Earth-Divider. In view of what has been said in the preceding pages no epithet could be more expressive of the truth. For, since the fall of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople, together with its two appanages, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, has constituted the chief line of demarcation between the East and the West, between the Cross and the Crescent. One of the most difficult and delicate problems which diplomacy has yet to solve--war has been impotent to bring about a solution--is the future status of the historic city of the Bosphorus and the relations between the powers of Islam and the Christian nations of Europe. As the solution of the problem cannot, apparently, be effected by conquest or by a sordid exploitation of the lands of the East, it seems that the time has now arrived when more unselfish and more Christian methods should be applied than those based on force and international rivalries.