Annals of the Association of American Geographers Volume V, pp. 27-59 The Barrier Boundary of the Mediter- ranean Basin and Its Northern Breaches as Factors in History By ELLEN CHURCHILL SEMPLE Published by THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHERS ANNALS OF THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHERS Volume V, pp. 27-59 THE BARRIER BOUNDARY OF THE MEDITERRANEAN BASIN AND ITS NORTHERN BREACHES AS FACTORS IN HISTORY ELLEN CHURCHILL SEMPLE CONTENTS Page Introduction 27 The Bosporus-Hellespont Breach 28 The Balkan Barriers and the Morava-Vardar Furrow 29 Passes of the Julian Alps and the Karst 31 The Rhone Valley Breach 46 INTRODUCTION. The Mediterranean occupies the subsidence areas in the broad belt of young, folded mountains which cross Southern Europe and the neighboring parts of Africa and Asia. Moreover, it lies on the northern margin of the trade- wind tract. These two features of its geographical location are of immense import. They have given to the Mediterranean Basin the isolating boundaries of mountains and deserts. They have made it in a peculiar sense an inclosed sea. It is inclosed, not only by the land, but by barrier forms of the land. Rarely are the barriers single, more- over. Range succeeds range to a snow-capped climax of the land : beyond mountain system or precipitous escarpment lies semi-arid waste, far- stretching desert, or rugged plateau. These barrier boundaries long exercised a dominant influence upon Mediterranean history. For ages they confined that history within the narrow limits of the basin, except where a few natural openings offered pathways to regions of contrasted climate and production beyond. These breaches in the barrier were varied in their geographical character a river road like the Nile across the desert, a strait like Gibraltar, an isthmus like Suez, a long intermontane trough like the Rhone Valley, or a saddle in the encircling mountains like the Peartree Pass and the low Karst Plateau. But all have focused upon themselves the historical events of wide areas. They have crowded into their narrow channels streams of trade, migration, colonization, and conquest; they have drawn these from remote sources and directed them to equally remote destinations. They have played this role of the guiding hand of Providence from the dawn of history to the World War of 1915. The Mediterranean is inclosed on the north by a mountain rampart, measuring 2,330 miles in a straight line from the folded ranges behind Gibraltar to the massive Taurus System, where it looms above the Bay of Alexandretta. The huge oblong of the Anatolian Plateau, lying at an 27 28 E. C. 8EMPLE MEDITERRANEAN BOUNDARIES IN HISTORY average elevation of 3,000 to 4,000 feet (1,000 to 1,200 meters), bordered north and south by yet higher ranges rising abruptly from the sea, and edged by a rugged, inhospitable coast, lends to the Asia Minor Peninsula the character of a triple barrier confining the Levantine Basin of the Mediterranean on the north for a distance of 560 miles (900 kilometers). Its rigid billows of land, mounting higher and higher from west to east, merge into other highlands extending far into Asia. Any attempt, therefore, to round them on the east involves a toilsome journey over the ranges of Armenia, whose valley floors to be traversed lie nearly 6,000 feet (1,800 meters) above sea-level. THE BOSPORUS-HELLESPONT BREACH. On the west, this barrier peninsula sinks beneath the ^Egean Sea; but its folded ranges, lifting their peaks above the waves as rocky islands, soon emerge again in the broad, corrugated highlands of the Balkan Peninsula. The blunt north- west corner of Asia Minor dips so slightly that the Bosporus and Hellespont make only a wet scratch across its surface. But that scratch is enough. It forms a clear breach in the inclosing mountain wall. Through it the Mediterranean penetrates into the Euxine Basin, but only to face other mountain obstructions encircling this great marine alcove on all but its northwest coast. The extensive subsidence between the lower Danube plain and the Crimea breaks the continuity of the folded barrier between the Balkans and the Caucasus System. The Caucasus, also, is nipped in two by the Kertch Strait, which severs the Yaila Mountains of the Crimea from the parent range, and admits the Euxine waters into the Sea of Azof. This local depression is a companion piece to the Gulf of Odessa. Only in these two inlets of shallow water does the Mediterranean pene- trate beyond its normal mountain boundaries into the low, accessible plains of Eastern Europe. Where the north wall opens its gates at the Bosporus and Hellespont, the Mediterranean reached out and drew these coastal plains of Russia into its field of history from the seventh century before Christ till the control of the Straits passed to the intruding Turks in 1453. The ele- ments of this history were in general peaceful : commerce and colonization. Greek trading-stations and colonies at an early date began to line the Pontic shores, 1 and to send out lumber from the well-forested Caucasus, summer wheat from the Crimean plains, hides from steppe pastures, and fish from the tunny spawning-grounds. 2 Ancient Athens, poor in plow- land, came to depend chiefly upon Pontic wheat to supply her market, 8 and the Scythian tribes of the Dnieper grassland came equally to depend upon Greek wine as the luxury of their meager fare. These are the chief >Bury, J. B.: History of Greece (New York, 1909), 90-93. * Strabo xi. 2, 4. Herodotus iv. 17; vii. 147. Demosthenes De Corona par. 73, 87. Wiskermann, H.: Die Antike Landwirtschaft Preischrift (Leipzig, 1859), 14-20. Xenophon Hellenes v. 4. 61. Diodorus Siculus xv. 34. Bury, J. B.: op. cit., 196, 379, 615, 616. Curtius, Ernst: History of Greece (tr. by A. W. Ward, New York, 1899), V, Book VII, 137. THE BALKAN BARRIERS AND THE MORAVA-VARDAR FURROW 29 exchanges today between the two localities. With every threat of inter- ruption to communication through the Bosporus and Hellespont the price of wheat went up in Attica and Miletus, till finally Athens drew all the coastal fringe of Pontic cities and the Straits themselves into her maritime empire, and guaranteed the security of her grain trade by an unrivaled navy. 1 By reason of this marine breach in the mountain barrier the Greeks were able to weave a border of Hellenic blood and culture upon those northern Euxine shores. Owing to the successive streams of nomad hordes from Western Asia which flooded the adjoining plains, however, Mediterranean civilization left there no permanent impress. Nevertheless, Russian traders and marauders from northern Slav principalities like Kiev, Smolensk, and commercial Novgorod, took the Dnieper River route to the Black Sea and Constantinople in the ninth and tenth centuries, and carried away the elements of Byzantine art and religion to the untutored north. THE BALKAN BARRIERS AND THE MORAVA-VARDAR FURROW. West of the Bosporus and Hellespont the border barriers of the Mediterranean reappear, faintly at first, as the worn-down hill country of eastern Thrace. This affords an easy land road through the Maritza Valley between the ^Egean and the Black Sea, and thus reinforces the marine communication through the near-by straits. The Thracian hills, however, soon rise and merge into the broad, compound barrier formed by the steep Balkan folds and the ancient crystalline mass of the Thraco-Macedonian Highlands. This old dissected mountain region, rising to heights of 9,000 feet or more in the Rhodope and Perim ranges, but sinking elsewhere to broad, undulat- ing uplands and deep river valleys, serves to cement the young Balkan System to the multiple ranges of the Dinaric Alps. These run north and south through the western part of the Peninsula, from the head of the Adriatic to the rocky headlands of the Peloponnesus, in a forbidding suc- cession of bold limestone ridges, which rise to jagged crests 6,500 feet (2,000 meters) above the sea. Communication between the Adriatic coast and the interior is excessively difficult. No thoroughfare is offered by the rivers Narenta and Drin, which break through the ranges in wild, impass- able gorges. Travel across the country is a succession of ups and downs over gray, stony ridges and gray, barren valleys, for rarely does a saddle nick the high sky-line of the chains. Width, height, and lack of passes make the Dinaric System maintain in a pre-eminent degree the barrier nature of mountains. 2 In all the 700-mile stretch of mountains between the Maritza Valley and the Gulf of Trieste there is no real breach, but only a few passes which are approached by long, often devious, routes across the highlands. The Morava and Vardar rivers, the one flowing north and the other south 1 Bury, J. B.: op. cit., 365, 380-81. 2 Based upon personal observation during a motor trip through Dalmatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Montenegro in 1912. 30 E. C. SEMPLE MEDITERRANEAN BOUNDARIES IN HISTORY from a low watershed (460 meters or 1,508 feet) in the heart of the Penin- sula, together cut a valley furrow of gentle slopes across the mountains from the Danube near Belgrade to the northwest corner of the ^Egean Sea. This furrow has from ancient times determined the north-and-south line of communication. The land route which it opens is easy but long, because it crosses a mountain mass over 300 miles wide. Moreover, travel on it is not assisted by river transportation. The Vardar, choked by sand in its passage across its swampy, deltaic plain to the Gulf of Salonica, and broken by rapids in its upper course, affords no water-way to the interior, while the Morava is navigable for only seventy miles from the Danube. 1 The mountains about the head of the Vardar, inhabited by robber tribes from remote times, served to discourage Macedonia's expansion northward, even under Philip and Alexander the Great. Roman dominion did not overstep this barrier till 29 B.C., or a hundred and fifteen years after the conquest of Macedonia, when the Morava Valley, under the title of Upper Moesia, was embodied in the Empire. Even then the mountain watershed remained the provincial boundary, and was never crossed by a Roman road between the two valleys. The great Roman highway of the Peninsula ran between the capital at Constantinople and the middle Danubian frontier between the military center and the exposed border. It left the Morava Valley at Naissus (modern Nish) and followed a diagonal furrow across the high valleys between the Balkan and Anti-Balkan mountains through Serdica (Sofia), and then by the Trajan Pass (843 meters, or 2,765 feet) reached the upper Maritza Valley. Thence it led past Philippopolis and Adrianople to Constantinople. This route took a long and devious course to avoid the great highland mass of the Peninsula, and thereby became the historic highway from Central Europe to the Byzantine bridge and Asia Minor; it was essentially a land route from west to east, rather than a transit route across the mountains from north to south. This r61e fell to the Morava- Vardar groove, and was a later develop- ment so far as historical record goes; but doubtless it played its part in the prehistoric drift of the Greek peoples from the northwest southward into Macedonia, Thessaly, and Hellas. This was the route traversed by the Ostrogoths in 473 A.D. in their invasion of Northern Greece. 2 It was the line of expansion of the Servian kingdom under the great Stephan Dusan (1336-56), whose inland domain needed an outlet on the . Hogarth, D. G.: The Nearer East (London, 1905), 23, 24, 238. Hodgkin, Thomas: Italy and Her Invaders (Oxford, 1880), III, Book IV, note, p. 31 and map, p. 32. Miller, William: The Balkans (New York, 1907), 273. PASSES OF THE JULIAN ALPS AND THE KARST 31 Servia's location in the Morava Basin has made it custodian of these main routes south and east across the Balkan Peninsula. It blocks the path between east and west. For this reason the Turkish sultans of the fifteenth century saw that they must first occupy Servia, if they were to realize their purpose of conquering the rich fields of Hungary; and Hungary rushed to the support of Servia when the Turkish onslaught came, in order to guard the avenue leading to its own frontier. The Turks secured the control of Servia. They found its thoroughfare so necessary to them in their long wars with Hungary, that they kept a tighter grip upon Servia than upon Moldavia and Wallachia, and immediately upon its conquest in 1459 made it an integral part of their empire. 1 From the early eighteenth century, when the Turks began their slow recessional in the Balkan Peninsula and the Austrian power its advance, the country holding the Morava highway was again the bone of contention. Between 1718 and 1739 Austria drove a wedge of occupation up the Morava Basin nearly to Nish. From the tune of Emperor Joseph II (d. 1790) the domination of Servia has been a fundamental principle of Austrian statesmanship. The object has been twofold: to guard this open highway which gives access to the middle Danube from two directions; and to gain for the vast inland empire of Austro-Hungary an outlet to the ^Egean and to the Bosporus, the sea breach in the mountain barrier which commands both the Black Sea trade and the land route through Asia Minor to the east. Russia, also, since it secured its first Black Sea littoral in 1783, has made the Bosporus the objective of its expansion. It needs an outlet to the Mediterranean that cannot be jeopardized. During the closure of the Dardanelles against Italian aggression in the spring of 1912, Greek, Norwegian, and British grain ships were penned up in the harbor of Odessa, while European cities clamored for Russian wheat. More ominous for the fate of Russia in the present conflict is the exclusion of munitions from the Black Sea ports, and her inability to market the wheat which would re-establish her national credit. Her present necessity furnishes the strongest argument for final perseverance in her aim. PASSES OF THE JULIAN ALPS AND THE KARST. Austria's need for a southern outlet is not so urgent. She commands another breach in the barrier boundary of the Mediterranean. Near her Italian frontier at the head of the Adriatic, the broad and corrugated highlands bordering the western side of the Balkan Peninsula contract and dip as they merge into the Karst Plateau and the Julian Alps. Farther north again towers the mighty system of the Alps, rising range beyond range, up to the high, white levels of eternal snow. The Julian Alps are a slender southeastern offshoot of the main system. They attain in the north an altitude of 9,394 feet (2,864 meters) in the three-cornered peak of Terglon, but from this they shelve off southward into a rugged limestone platform of low altitude. > Miller, William: The Balkans, 293. 32 E. C. SEMPLE MEDITERRANEAN BOUNDARIES IN HISTORY Presenting toward the west a steep and forbidding escarpment, crossed by narrow ridges, pock-marked by numerous funnel-shaped cavities, and guiltless of visible drainage streams, this Karst Plateau extends along the base of the Istrian Peninsula as far as the Gulf of Fiume and the eastward- flowing Kulpa River. It merges beyond into the high, folded ranges of the Great Capella Mountains, which effectively cut off their hinterland from the sea. Northeast of the Adriatic, therefore, for a stretch of 46 miles (75 kilometers), the mountain barrier of the Mediterranean Basin is partially breached. At one point it narrows to the width of 30 miles (50 kilo- meters) between the low Venetian plains and the deep re-entrant valley of erosion cut back into the highland mass by the upper Save River and its headstreams. Moreover, at this narrowest point the barrier sinks to the level of 2,897 feet in a limestone plateau known to the ancients as the Mons Ocra, and to moderns as the Peartree Range. Two rivers, the Frigidus or Wipbach on the western slope, and the Laibach on the eastern, issue from limestone caverns, after the manner of streams in the Karst country, and carve out paths down the opposite sides from the low plateau above to the plains below. Here, therefore, the Alpine barrier et largius patentem et planissimum habet ingressum, says the historian Paulus (720- 800 A.D.), who from his boyhood had known this broad and easy entrance, and had seen a barbarian horde burst through it as through an open door. 1 There were other routes across the mountain saddle, as we shall see, but this was the best, and from very ancient times it became a well- trodden path. Here concentrated the traffic of a far-reaching hinterland. The geographical reasons are plain enough. The Peartree Pass afforded the shortest and lowest transit route to the interior in the whole 1,300-mile stretch of mountains between the Bosporus and the Rhone Valley breach. It lay between two natural thoroughfares, the level plains of Northern Italy and the wide plain of the Danube, which cannot be separated geo- graphically or historically from the nomad-breeding steppes of Southern Russia. The Drave and Save rivers, tributaries of the Danube, drain the longitudinal valleys of the eastern Alps and open avenues of easy grade far up the eastern slope of the dividing range. Moreover, this dip in the mountain wall was located between the head of the Adriatic, an old sea-lane of maritime enterprise, and the head of navigation on the Laibach-Save- Danube System. For the little Laibach can carry a barge soon after it issues from its cavern. It springs full grown from the mountain's womb, such strength has it gathered in its underground life, fed by a whole arterial system of hidden rivers. The historical importance of passes increases with their facility of transit; with their command of valley thoroughfares and water approaches, either navigable rivers or seas; and with the contrast between the regions of productions, both in point of climate and of industrial development, ' Quoted in T. Hodgkin, op. tit., V, Book VI, note, p. 160. HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF PEARTREE PASS 33 which such passes serve to unite and whose trade they forward. 1 All four of these advantages were possessed by the Peartree Pass in a high degree. Its claim to the first two has been indicated. Through all ancient and mediaeval times it connected the civilized and industrial Mediterranean lands with a vast hinterland of barbarism, with shifting tribes of nomadic herdsmen and semi-nomadic agriculturalists. It facilitated the exchange of artistic manufactured products in bronze, pottery, linen and woolen fabric for the crudest raw materials from forest, pasture, and mine. The contrast in climate is almost as marked. The Julian Alps and Karst Plateau are a heat divide. On their slopes the warm, temperate climate of the Mediterranean Basin meets the cold temperate climate of Central Europe. The January isotherm of degree C. (32 degrees F.), which marks the dividing line, nowhere else approaches so near to the Mediterranean proper as here. It runs through Bremen, Munich, along the watershed of the Karst, then turns southeast into the heart of the Balkan Peninsula. A similar contrast of winter temperatures in an equally short space appears on the opposite side of the Caucasus windshield, along the Black Sea littoral. The Peartree Pass, which is located approximately on the forty-sixth parallel of latitude, looks down upon the olive trees and rice fields of the warm Venetian plains. Here Italy revealed her fatal gift of beauty to the barbarian hordes who pushed up the Danube highroad to the half-open gate of the Hesperian Garden. The ancient Mons Ocra route left the Adriatic at Aquileia, a Roman river port located four miles up the navigable Aquilo, accessible to the sea but somewhat protected from the chronic piracy of the Adriatic. Turning eastward, the road crossed the Sontius (modern Isonzo) and led up the fertile valley of the Frigidus (Wipbach) to the summit of the Mons Ocra plateau. There the easiest path across must have run past a wild pear tree, whose white blossoms made a conspicuous landmark against the green of the surrounding forest when spring reopened traffic on the road. At any rate, the Roman roadmakers called the station at the summit Ad Pirum. This name survives in the Peartree Pass and the Birnbaumer Wald, the German name of the old Mons Ocra plateau. From the summit (2,897 feet) the road dropped down to Nauportus (modern Ober-Laibach, at 970 feet) on the Laibach River, where navigation began on the Save- Danube System. Strabo states that the distance between Aquileia and Nauportus was variously estimated from 350 to 500 stadia, or 40 to 57 miles. 2 The Romans knew of another track over the Mons Ocra Range, leading up from Tergeste (Trieste) to Lacus Lugeum (Lake Zirknitz), and thence to Nauportus. 3 This route had marked disadvantages. It ascended the iSemple, E. C.: Influences of Geographic Environment (New York, 1911), 546, 549. 1 Strabo iv. 6. 10; vii. 5. 2. For the modern road in detail, see Krohn, Walter: Beitr&gezur Verkehrs-geographie von Krain (Konigsberg, 1911), 61-62. 'Mommsen: History of Rome (New York, 1873), III, 215. For the modern road, see ibid., 63. Canstein, P. von: Die oestlichen Alpen (Berlin, 1837), 235-58. 34 E. C. SEMPLE MEDITERRANEAN BOUNDARIES IN HISTORY plateau by no long valley of approach like that of the Frigidus, but mounted the steep escarpment overhanging the Gulf of Trieste. Though it may have found a lower gap than the Peartree Pass, it had to traverse the pla- teau at its greatest width and therefore to cross the successive hill ranges that corrugate its surface. Moreover, the plateau is almost devoid of water, which everywhere seeps through the porous limestone to some impervious stratum of clay or sandstone. None remains on the surface to carve out a river valley of easy travel for the wayfarer. Therefore this route seems early to have been abandoned in favor of the Peartree Pass. Centuries later it was partially revived when Aquileia and the other ports along the low Venetian coast were silted up by the deposits of muddy Alpine torrents, and were therefore superseded by the deep mountain- rimmed harbor of Trieste. This harbor was the geographical determinant which made the modern railroad follow the plateau route and grapple with the problem of mounting its bold escarpment. This second Mons Ocra route lacked early historical importance also because it did not debouch upon the fertile Venetian plains. It was therefore generally neglected by invading hordes from the Danube, whose objective was the rich cities of Cisalpine Gaul. The barbarians preferred as alternatives two routes to the north of the Julian Alps. These were approached by the valley highways of the upper Drave and Save rivers, and crossed the mountains by a high saddle between the Julian and Carnic Alps. The eastern starting-point for both was the ancient Santi- cum (modern Villach), located at an altitude of 1,665 feet, in a broad and lake-strewn basin at the head of navigation on the Drave. It had a situa- tion similar to that of Nauportus. From this point one track led south over the Col di Tarvis and the difficult Predil Pass, called the " Thermopylae of Carinthia" (3,810 feet or 1,162 meters), to the head of the Sontius Valley (Isonzo), which opened a way down to the coast near Aquileia. 1 The Predil Pass was too difficult to attract a military road in ancient times, though it was the route of the invading Lombards in 568 A.D. A few miles to the west of it, through the Pontebba or Pontafel Pass (2,615 feet or 797 meters), ran the other route from the Col di Tarvis, which connected on the Italian slope with a headstream of the Tiliaventus River (Taglia- mento). In the days of the Empire a Roman military road followed this route over the Alps, and connected Aquileia with the navigable course of the Drave, 2 but for the trader it involved a long detour from his market. The ancient amber route from the Baltic, one of the earliest trade routes of Europe, doubtless reached the Mediterranean by all these passes, especially in its primitive stages, when it was trying all the paths to find the easiest. This is the evolutionary history of all the pioneer roads. The amber route started from the famous amber fields of the southeastern 'For modern road, see Baedeker: The Eastern Alps (Leipzig, 1888), 441-42. Krebe, Norbert: L&nderkunde der oesterreichischen Alpen (Stuttgart, 1913), 401, 409. Shepherd, W. R.: Historical Atltu (New York, 1911), map, p. 27. THE ANCIENT TRADE IN AMBER 35 Baltic, especially those of the Samland, and led up the Vistula or Oder River to the Moravian Gate, a broad geological gap between the Car- pathian and Sudetes mountains, which was once a passage of the Eocene Sea. The route led thence down the March River to the Danube, thence across the spreading spurs of the eastern Alps to the Save Valley, the shrunken barrier of the Julian Alps, and the Mons Ocra Pass. 1 According to Pliny, amber was brought by the Germans to Pannonia (Carinthia and Carniola), and purchased from them by the Veneti living on the north Adriatic coast. He mentions the amber necklaces worn by the women of this region, not only as an ornament, but as a protection against sore throat. 2 So regularly did the Baltic amber emerge here upon the horizon of Mediterranean commerce that the myth of Phaeton's sisters, transformed into poplar trees and weeping tears that turned into amber, associated the precious commodity with the mouth of the Po River, 3 showing that the trade must have reached back into exceedingly ancient times. Herod- otus reports its supposed origin at the mouth of a stream flowing into the northern sea, 4 the Eridanus, a name which later came to be identified with the Po. He also clearly indicates a route of communication from the far northern land of the Hyperboreans, which emerged at the head of the Adriatic and passed down this sea to Epirus. 5 The offerings to Apollo's shrine at Delos which he describes as taking this long journey were probably forwarded down the Adriatic by the trading ships of Corcyra and Epidamnus, which nearly three centuries before had been colonized by Corinth for the purpose of exploiting the commerce of this basin. The inland trade from the head of the Adriatic was appropriated at an early date by the Etruscans, and pushed with an assiduity which suggests that besides amber, other valuable northern products, like gold and tin from mines in the Archean rocks of the Bohemian massif, may have reached the Mediterranean by the Peartree route. According to a tradition reported by Pliny, the Argonauts sailed up the Danube and Save to the head of navigation on the Laibach, and there built a settlement which they called Nauportus, because from there they carried their ship "Argo" across the mountains on men's shoulders to the Adriatic. 6 The feat is not impossible, in view of the elevation of Nauportus (970 feet), only 2,000 feet below the pass; the probable presence here of stalwart mountain packers, such as are found in all pass regions of the world; the desire of such poverty-stricken mountain tribes to make money by this service and by levying tolls on the traffic over their mountain trails; and especially in view of the small vessels of this legendary period. 1 Mommsen: op. cit., I, Book I, 177, 196, 266. 2 Pliny Historia Naturalis xxxvi. 2. 11. ' Diodorus Siculus v. 22 (Paris, 1855). Pliny op. tit. Hi. 30. 4 Herodotus iii. 15. 5 Herodotus iv. 33. Pliny op. til. iii. 22. 36 E. C. 8EMPLE MEDITERRANEAN BOUNDARIES IN HISTORY The Homeric Greeks had boats of only twenty oars. The large pente- conter of fifty oars hardly came into use before the eighth century B.C., and it appears in the later Homeric poems as a masterpiece of sea-craft. 1 When one considers that the Bolivian Indian carries 150 pounds of rubber over the Andean watershed, 2 and that the tea-packer of Western China shoulders a burden of 300 pounds for the arduous ascent of the Central Asiatic Plateau, 8 a twenty-oared boat carried on "the shoulders of men" across the Peartree Pass seems an easy undertaking for a group of mountain porters. It may be the first historical mention of the watershed " portage " or "carry," which is a regular feature of primitive inland navigation the world over. The portage is a commonplace of the Indian canoe routes in the Western Hemisphere, in the pioneer exploration and fur trade of Canada, the United States, Russia, and Siberia. Isthmian portages were familiar to the Greeks from very ancient times on the Isthmus of Corinth, in Eastern Crete, and probably on the narrow Dalmatian islands. 4 In the case of Pliny's story, what probably happened was that some enterprising Greek inland traders may have found their way up the Danube to the Laibach, made their "carry" to the Isonzo River and Adriatic, and after long years their bold exploit was embodied into the tradition of the Argonautic expedition. Such was the process of accretion by which the Odyssey grew. The use of this portage path for boats may have given rise to the persistent impression among the ancients that there was river connection between the head of the Adriatic and the Danube. 5 Strabo emphasizes the value of the Mons Ocra route for forwarding military supplies to the Roman armies engaged in war with the Dacians on the lower Danube. But this was only part of the traffic. Merchandise in large quantities was carried by wagon from Aquileia to Nauportus, and thence by boat to Segestica (Sisek), an important distributing point at the confluence of the Save and Kulpa rivers. There was an active trade between Italy and the barbarians of the upper Danube. The exchanges were the usual ones between two regions of different climates and con- trasted economic development. The barbarians sent over the pass cattle, hides, slaves captured in their incessant border wars, gold from the Alpine mines, resin, pitch, and other forest products. They received in return the oil and wine of Italy, fine fabrics of Mediterranean make, glass, and pot- tery. 6 The flourishing emporium for all this trade was the fortified town of Aquileia, at the head of the Adriatic. Bury, J. B.: op. cit., 109. Church, Col. George E.: "The Acre Territory and the Caoutchouic Region of South- western Amazonia," Geogr. Journ., XXIII, 596-613. Hue, M.: Journey through the Chinese Empire (New York, 1871), 39-40. Rudolphi, Dr. H.: " Trageplaetxe und Schleppwege oder Portagen," Deutsche Rund- schau fur Geographic, XXXIV, 66. Pliny op. cit. iii. 22. Apoloniua Rh. iv. 283. Strabo iv. 4. 9. Aristotle Historia Animalia viii. 13. Supported also by Hipparchus and Theopompus. Strabo iv. 6. 9. 12; v. 1. 8; vii. 5. 2. THE JULIAN ALPS IN ROMAN STRATEGY 37 The location of Aquileia was not altogether a fortunate one, however. Here on the eastern land frontier of Cisalpine Gaul lay the weak spot in the Alpine frontier of Italy. Here, therefore, at the eastern extremity of the big province lay the local capital, Aquileia, in a position of opportunity, but also of danger. The city was founded in 181 B.C., soon after the Roman conquest of the region, as a fortress against intrusive Celtic peoples, who were already beginning to threaten this vulnerable frontier. Their first detachment came in 186 B.C., quietly enough, though they could muster 12.000 fighting men, Livy tells us. 1 They were bent upon peaceable settlement, so they arrived with "all their property which they had brought with them or driven before them." The road which they took across the forested mountains was previously unknown to the Romans, but it lay at the very head of the Adriatic. 2 They emerged from this unknown pass upon the Venetian plain, and set to work building their villages in the vicinity of the later Aquileia. But they were ordered out by the Roman proconsul, and had to obey. The Senate, finding the Alps in this region not the "almost impassable barrier" that they had supposed them to be, established Aquileia as a Latin colony to protect the border. The new settlement was a peculiarly remote outpost of the military frontier. The nearest Roman colonies, which marked the line of continuous settlement and of assured civil government in the young province of Cisalpine Gaul, were Bononia, Mutina, Parma, and Placentia. All were located at the northern foot of the Apennines along the new Via ^Emilia, and all had been built within the four previous decades. Then only two years after the founding of Mutina, Aquileia was established over a hundred and fifty miles away, an ethnic island, dropped down in a sea of Veneti allies. A sudden protrusion of the frontier like this means that the expansion is necessitated by danger or suggested by opportunity. The situation evidently required peculiar inducements, for the 3,000 militia colonists who were assigned to Aquileia received extraordinary allotments of land, 50 jugera, or 32 acres, to every foot soldier and 150 jugera, or 96 acres, to every horseman. 3 This was eight or ten times the usual allowance. The border cantonment was established none too soon. In 179 B.C. came another Gallic band of 3,000, pushing across the Alps and asking for land. More serious seemed the threat of Philip of Macedon to lead a horde of his mountain barbarians into Italy by this convenient northeast frontier. So the Romans, preparing for all emergencies, conquered the Peninsula of Istria in 177 B.C. to extend their scientific mountain boundary, to secure their sea communication with Aquileia, and to suppress Illyrian piracy in the upper Adriatic. 4 The appearance of the migrating Cimbri 1 Livy Historia xxxix. 22. 45. 2 Mommsen: op. cit., II, 232-33. Livy op. cit. xxxix. 34. Freeman, E. A.: op. cit., 140. LaviMe: Hialoire de France (Paris, 1901), II, Part II, 4. MARSEILLES, ENTREPOT OF THE RHONE VALLEY 59 System penetrating every part of its area, like a great artery, to unify its national life; with the control of the Burgundian Gate, the northern passes, and the Alpine coast road to Italy, to give it weight in the political councils of Western Europe. Its strategic location tended to compensate for its lack of area. It stood in the center of the balance and could throw its weight on one side or the other. Through this power it was able to main- tain its independence till 1032, when it became a fief of the German Empire. Then the whole stretch of the Rhone-Rhine groove was politically united. The influence of the through commerce is indicated by the rise here of numerous free cities, Besangon, Lyons, Orange, Aries, and Marseilles, which controlled all the foci of trade till the fourteenth century, and maintained the importance of this vassal state of Burgundy. Until 1365 ths mediaeval German kaiser went to Aries to be crowned king of Burgundy as he went to Rome to be crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. The later history of Burgundy recites the gradual absorption of this "middle kingdom," as the old chronicles called it, by the modern king- dom of France. Early in the fourteenth century its voracious western neighbor began to gnaw at its western frontier, taking a bite here and there, till by 1378 it had swallowed up the southern Rhone Valley from the Mediterranean to Lyons. The northern part of Burgundy, which was more closely linked with Germany through the Burgundian Gate and the Lorraine passes, was able longer to resist French expansion. Nevertheless, in another hundred years, by 1477, it had shrunk to the free county of Burgundy or the Franche Comte, a small territory comprising the valleys of the upper Saone and Doubs, which passed to France in the conquest of Louis XIV. 1 The Rhone Valley breach opened a path of conquest for the military Franks from the north to the coast provinces of Languedoc and Provence, just as later it facilitated the expansion of the French kingdom to the Mediterranean coast and enabled it to round out its territory to its natural frontier. The breach has given to this stretch of coast a unique impor- tance as the only littoral in the western Mediterranean that commands easy connection with a continental hinterland, and as the southern outlet of a great plexus of northern land routes. Marseilles, which has long overshadowed its mediaeval rival Aries, is the only seaport of the Rhone Valley. It has therefore concentrated upon itself all the exports of Northwestern Europe which seek the market of Africa, the Levant, Eastern Asia, and Australia; it gathers in return the wheat of Russia, the oil seeds of India and Africa, the wines and dried fruits of the Mediterranean, the teas and spices of the Far East. 2 The variety of products from distant sources which pass through the harbor of Marseilles is symbolic of the peoples, tongues, and civilizations that have moved along the Rhone Valley thoroughfare since the dawn of history. i Freeman, E. A.: op. cit., 141, 148, 150, 194; map plates, XVIII-XXV. * Chisholm, George G.: Compendium of the Geography of Europe (London, 1899), I, 429.