6. The lure of the northern Aegean
BOUNDARY CONDITIONS
The previous chapter began by looking at broad commodityflows
throughout the east Balkan and north Aegean‘super-region’and ended
with the very specific conditions in the commercial bottleneck of the
Bosporus, which enabled Byzantion to change from being one of many
communities along the channel of water between the Aegean and Black
Seas into an extremely powerful regional economic agent in her own
right. In practice, this change took a long time to become apparent,
which explains why reactions from amongst the city’s neighbours also
took time to evolve. We know very little about the physical appearance of
the pre-imperial city of Byzantion. Its remains are buried under its more
illustrious late Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman monuments.
The terms that the Byzantines set for escorting ships entering and
leaving the Black Sea were initially based on the terms determined or
negotiated by the Athenians, whose main purpose had been to exercise a
level of military control in the Hellespontine region. This was, in turn,
driven by security considerations in the wake of the Persian retreat from
Europe. What began as a defensive measure with the operations of the
‘guardians’of the Hellespont, theHellespontophylakes, intended to sep-
arate Persian-dominated territory from those who had emancipated
themselves from Persian control, became a tool of extraordinary eco-
nomic power in the hands of the Byzantines, not just because many
Aegean communities, with the Athenians at the top of the list, had
developed a strong taste for Pontic bread wheat,^1 and many east Balkan
(^1) Sallares 1991, 331–2, 341–68, esp. 331 and n.133 with further refs; 341–54, 369–72,
with Theophr.Hist.Pl.8.4.5; see also Sallares inCEHGRW, 32. Sallares emphasizes the deep
ecological roots of cereal distributions in the Mediterranean, which did not alter simply
because of changing dietary demands, but were the results of gradual natural and human
adaptations.