Byzantium was an ancient Greek city-state founded around 600 BC. The people settled there because of a thin strip of water that connected _______ to _______ and the Black Sea to the _____________. This strip of water is called the __________. Today the word byzantine means old or devious, but during its eleven-hundred-year history, the Byzantine Empire saved the western world’s heritage of literature and put ___________ on the fast track. This happened under a single Roman Emperor named Constantine.