The first among the problems which the Ottoman Empire faced as a naval power were the constraints of geography. Territorially, as a land empire stretching across large parts of three continents, the Ottoman state at its apogee in the 16th century had controlled(at least in theory) some of the major maritime “pinch points” of the Old World: the Black Sea Straits(the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles); the exits into the Black Sea of the Don and Dnestr rivers; the Bâb al-Mandab; the Straits of Hormuz. But the whole was a sum much less than that which its disparate parts might suggest: the Ottomans, even at their height, were a naval power predominating mainly in the Black Sea and the eastern half of the Mediterranean basin which, until the construction of the Suez Canal, was a maritime cul-de-sac. The Ottoman galley fleet of the 16th/early 17th centuries had never been able to get beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, and was rarely strong enough to penetrate even beyond the Tunis-Sicily narrows. Nor did matters change very much after the Ottomans' tardy adoption(tardy, that is, in contrast with their North African corsair allies and confrères) of the three-masted, saildriven man-of-war.