Black Sea

To the archaic Greeks this was Pontos Axeinos, the inhospitable sea, and the name was changed to Euxeinos, hospitable, on the principle that a dangerous thing is best flattered. Colonies were planted around it from the seventh century BCE, and the mythology followed the ships: the Argonauts sailed to Colchis on its eastern shore for the golden fleece, Prometheus was chained in the Caucasus above it, and Iphigenia was carried to the land of the Tauri in the Crimea to serve a goddess whose rites, Greek writers said, consumed shipwrecked strangers.

One of its cults is archaeologically real. On the small island the Greeks called Leuke, off the Danube mouth, stood a shrine of Achilles as lord of the Black Sea, where sailors left dedications; the island is the modern Snake Island, and inscribed offerings have been recovered from it.

The sea has also been drawn into the study of flood traditions. In 1997 the marine geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman proposed that the Mediterranean broke through the Bosphorus around 5600 BCE and flooded a freshwater lake catastrophically, displacing the people around it, and suggested that memory of the event fed the Mesopotamian and biblical flood stories. The refill itself is generally accepted; the catastrophic speed and the connection to the flood narratives are not, and later coring work has argued for a gentler rise.

Christian tradition assigns the apostle Andrew a mission along the sea's southern and northern shores, and that claim became the foundation charter of more than one church: the ecumenical patriarchate of Constantinople traces its see to him, and Georgian and Russian traditions both invoke his journey. Whatever its historical basis, the sea was genuinely Christianised early, with bishoprics at the Greek ports and, in Crimea, at Chersonesus, where Byzantine sources place the baptism of Vladimir of Kiev in 988 before his marriage to the emperor's sister and the conversion of Rus.

Byzantium ruled the sea, then shared it with Genoese and Venetian merchant colonies, and lost it after 1453. The Ottomans closed it to foreign shipping and held it as an internal sea for three centuries, with the Crimean khanate as a vassal on the northern shore. Russian expansion from the eighteenth century turned it into a contested frontier, and the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856, which began in a quarrel over the holy places at Jerusalem, was fought largely to keep Russian power off it.

Charles King's history follows a sea whose ports have been repeatedly emptied and refilled: Greeks from Anatolia, Muslim Tatars from Crimea, Jews from Odesa. Its lower waters carry no oxygen below about two hundred metres, and shipwrecks with masts and rigging intact have been found preserved in that dead layer.