Accordingly as early as in late Minoan times and surely in full Mycenean period, some fifteen hundred or two thousand years before our era, we find the Eastern Question already vexing the world. It centers first around Troy, because the city commanded the southwestern outlet of the straits and played the same leading part in the history of its day as Constantinople has played since then. The shifting of the site to the northeastern end of the waterway represents the gradual spread of Hellenic influence in northeastern maritime territory. We can only come to an adequate conception of the rôle of Troy in history by a clear understanding of the value of its site. The city was a toll-station. Its citizens accumulated wealth in the manner in which the burghers of Byzantium laid the foundations of their vast fortunes. Schliemann’s excavations brought to light amazing treasures of precious metals and jewelry. These riches may well be regarded as the price paid for the right of the passage of vessels and their freight through the straits. Nor is it strange to find that coincident with the decline of the Homeric city, the earliest mention of Byzantium, its successor, appears. Consistently with this method of viewing Trojan history it becomes possible to reach a rational understanding of Homer’s classic epic as the account of a secular struggle for the possession of an eminently profitable site.[203] The testimony of history on the number of sieges which Constantinople has undergone is at least precise, although no literary masterpiece sheds lustre on the events. It is impossible to escape from the parallelism in the histories of Byzantium and Troy simply because the geographical background of both sites is similar in every respect. In the case of Troy, it meant convenient access to the Pontine rearland, probably the first El Dorado recorded by history--the land of fabulous treasures, in search of which the Argonautic expeditions were equipped. With Byzantium, it meant access to the luxuries which Asia could supply as far as the Pacific. So much for the antiquity of the Eastern Question. Passing to another phase of Turkey’s world relation we find that the land’s influence has even affected the discovery of America. We now stand on the threshold of modern history and deal with a broad economic problem which affected late medieval commerce and which is an ever recurrent theme in that splendid period of active human enterprise known as the Age of Discovery. The dominant idea of the day was to find means of facilitating east-west trade in the eastern hemisphere.