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Wood and ivory mosaic in the Golden Temple at Amritsar

Chapter 1 – The Closing of the Old Trade Paths

To 1516 A.D.

On the establishment of the Ottoman Empire the medieval commerce between Europe and India was for a time blocked. That commerce started from the marts of Eastern Asia and reached the Mediterranean by three main routes. The northern tracks, by way of the Oxus and Caspian, converged on the Black Sea. The middle route lay through Syria to the Levant. The southern brought the products of India by sea to Egypt, whence they passed to Europe from the mouths of the Nile.

The struggle for these trade-routes forms a key to the policy and wars of many nations. When the Turks threw themselves across the ancient paths in the fifteenth century A.D., a great necessity arose in Christendom

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for searching out new lines of approach to India. From that quest the history of modern commerce dates. The prize for which the European Powers contended during the next three hundred years was a magnificent one. It had been grasped at by the monarchies of antiquity and by the republics of the Middle Ages. As they in turn secured it they had risen to their highest point of prosperity; as they in turn lost it their prosperity declined. The command of the Asiatic trade-routes was sometimes, indeed, the expression rather than the cause of the aggrandizement of a nation. But to the princes who fitted forth Columbus to seek for India in the West, and sent out Vasco da Gama to find it in the East, one thing seemed clear. The possession of the Asiatic trade had in memorable examples marked high-water in the history of empire; its loss had marked the ebb of the tide.

The most ancient of the three routes was the middle one through Syria. Ships from India crept along the Asiatic shore to the Persian Gulf and sold their costly freights in the marts of Chaldea or the lower Euphrates. The main caravan passed thence northward through Mesopotamia, edged round the wastes of Arabia Petraea, and struck west through the lesser desert to the oasis where, amid the Solitudo Palmyrena, the city of Tadmor eventually arose. Plunging again into the sands, the train of camels emerged at Damascus. There the Syrian trade-route parted into two main lines. The northern branched west to the ancient Tyre and Sidon and the medieval Acre and Ascalon. The

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other diverged southward by Rabbah, or Rabbath Ammon of the Old Testament, the Rabbatamana of Polybius, which is still locally known as Amman, and skirting the eastern frontier of Palestine passed through the land of Edom toward Egypt and the shores of the Red Sea. Its halting-places can still be traced. Thousands of Mussulmans travel yearly down the Barb-al-Hajj, or pilgrim way, by almost, although not exactly, the same route as that followed by the Indo-Syrian trade thirty centuries ago – no made road, but a track beaten hollow at places by the camels’ tread.

The dawn of history discloses the Syrian trade-routes in the hands of Semitic races. The Chaldean or Babylonian merchants who bought up the Indian cargoes on the Persian Gulf, the half-nomad tribes who led the caravan from oasis to oasis around the margin of the central desert to Tyre or to the Nile, the Phoenician mariners who distributed the precious freights to the Mediterranean cities, were all of the Semitic type of mankind. The civilization of ancient Egypt created the first great demand for the embalming spices, dyes, and fine products of the East. But as early as the fall of Troy (1184? B.C.), if we may still connect a date with the Aeolic saga, Phoenician seamen had conveyed them northwards to Asia Minor and the Aegean Sea. Homer does not mention the name of India, but he was acquainted with the art-wares of Sidon, a Mediterranean outport of the Eastern trade. It was, however, in Egypt that the products of the Syrian caravan routes, and the possibly still earlier

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merchandise of Somaliland and the African littoral, found their chief market.

An emporium, perhaps originally a convict settlement from the Nile, sprang up at Rhinoculora, where the coast-line of Palestine adjoins Egypt. It probably received the traffic seawards from Tyre and by more than one land route through Palestine, and passed on the reunited volume of the Eastern trade to the neighbouring Nile valley. The Phoenician mariners of the Levant carried their alphabet, apparently derived from Egypt, to Greece and the countries around the Mediterranean Sea; the Sabwans of the Persian Gulf gave a cognate form of the same alphabet to India and the nations bordering on the Indian Ocean.

As the Phoenicians held the northern outports of the Syrian trade-route toward Europe, so the Edomites commanded its southern outlet toward Egypt. The Hebrews, also a Semitic race, occupied the country between the two, and the earliest traditions, not less than the verified history, of Israel, are intimately connected with Eastern commerce. The geography of Genesis is the geography of the Syrian trade-route; one of its most picturesque episodes, the sale of Joseph by his brethren, is an incident of the caravan journey. Abraham starts from the Chaldean, or Euphrates, end of the route near the Persian Gulf, and in four generations his descendants are settled at its south-western terminus on the Nile. The intermediate regions thus traversed formed the heritage promised to his seed, “from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the

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river Euphrates.” This covenant is renewed in more precise terms in Deuteronomy, and grants to the Israelites the whole countries of the caravan route from the Euphrates on the east to the Mediterranean on the west, with Lebanon in Phoenicia as their northern, and the desert as their southern, boundary. The emporiums on the main branches of the Syrian route find mention in the Pentateuch, from Tyre, Sidon, and Damascus, down through Rabbah, Bozrah, and Edom toward the Egyptian and Red Sea end.

The political achievement of the Hebrew monarchy was to convert this promise, for a time, into a fact. The seventy-three years assigned to the reigns of David and Solomon saw both the process of conquest and its full commercial development. When David made Jerusalem his capital (about 1049 B.C., according to the generally accepted Biblical date), he found himself able from that stronghold to seize the positions which commanded the caravan route. On the north he occupied Damascus, the outlet of the desert track, and the key to the two branches of the Syrian trade westward to Tyre and southward to Egypt and the Red Sea. The King of Tyre sought friendly relations with him. David garrisoned Damascus together with the surrounding country, through which the spice caravans passed west to the Levant, and captured the great halting-place of Rabbah, about half-way down the eastern frontier route. His general, according to correct oasis strategy, had first secured the water-supply on which the town depended. David also completed the conquests begun

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by Saul among the Moabites and Edomites, who held the southern sections of the caravan track toward Egypt and the Red Sea. Before the close of his reign he made himself master of the entire trade-route from Damascus to Edom, controlled the country at both ends, seized the chief halting-place in the middle, and “cut off every male in Edom” toward the Red Sea and Egyptian outlets.

It was reserved for Solomon during his long rule of forty years, 1016–976 B.C., to put his father’s con-quests to their mercantile uses. He strengthened his hold on the northern outlets of the trade by advancing into the desert and occupying the oasis of Palmyra. There he built or enlarged Tadmor in the wilderness, and thus gained command of the caravan track at a central point between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean. Tyre depended for her prosperity on obtaining a regular share of the Eastern trade by way of Palmyra and Damascus. The friendly intercourse of its king with David was therefore consolidated into a regular commercial treaty with Solomon; the Phoenician monarch supplying gold and the timber of the Lebanon hills in return for certain towns near the Tynan frontier, and for stated quantities of the agricultural produce of the Jordan valley. According to the Hebrew record, Solomon’s sovereignty or overlordship extended to the Euphrates itself. Generally accepted maps show only the narrow strip between the Lebanon ranges and the Mediterranean. as belonging to Tyre, while the Jewish hinterland stretches in a solid

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An Old Picture of Aden on the Gulf Of Suez

block northeast to Mesopotamia. The promise to Abraham thus found its geographical fulfilment.

Having secured the northern outlet of the caravan trade toward Phoenicia, Solomon sought fresh developments for the Eastern trade at the southern extremity of the route. The Red Sea ends in two prongs, the Gulf of Suez on the Egyptian side, and the Gulf of Akaba on the Arabian, with the desert peninsula of Sinai jutting out between.

David’s conquest of Edom not only secured the land-track into Egypt, but brought him to the Gulf of Akaba. Solomon occupied two harbours on its shores and launched vessels on its waters. Hiram, King of Tyre, supplied the materials and artisans for the construction of the ships, together with Phoenician sailors to navigate them, and built a fleet of his own on the same gulf. The two merchant navies sailed and traded in company, and poured the wealth of Ophir and the East into the new southern seaboard of Palestine.

This complete capture of the Syrian route forms the

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mercantile epic of Israel. The record of the rare and costly products with which it adorned Jerusalem, and of the transit duties which it yielded to the king, reads like a psalm rather than a trade catalogue. To some of those products, although bought up in the intermediate marts of the Euphrates valley, an Indian origin is plausibly ascribed – the ivory of which Solomon “made a great throne,” his “precious stones,” and “three hundred shields of beaten gold,” the “traffic of the spice-merchants,” the “apes and peacocks “of his pleasure gardens, and, probably, the sandalwood pillars “for the House of the Lord.” From the Egyptian side the Hebrew king received linen yarn, horses, and a royal bride. The Song of Solomon, supposed by some commentators to celebrate his nuptials with Pharaoh’s daughter, breathes the poetry of the caravan route, with its advancing clouds of dust, and its guards posted at night, every man “with his sword upon his thigh.”

“Who is this that cometh out of the wilderness,

Like pillars of smoke?

Perfumed with myrrh and frankincense,

With all powders of the merchant.”

The recollections of the Egypto-Syrian trade, its spices, pigments, and precious stones, survived in the Hebrew memory long after the possession of the route had passed from the nation. “Who is this that cometh from Edom with dyed garments from Bozrah?” wrote Isaiah in a dark period of his race. If the theocratic thesis of Jewish history sometimes obscures its political

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aspects, the national hatred against the cities which regained the Eastern trade after Jerusalem lost it, stands clearly out. Tyre is to be engulfed, or Made, in the words of Ezekiel, “a place for the spreading of nets in the midst of the sea.” “The riches of Damascus” “shall be taken away”; “it shall be a ruinous heap.” Rabbah, the ancient halting-place half-way down the southern caravan route, shall be “a stable for camels,” “a desolate heap, and her daughters shall be burned with fire.” “Bozrah shall become a desolation,” a fire shall devour her palaces, and the heart of her mighty men shall be “as the heart of a woman in her pangs.” The old rival Edom, toward the Egyptian terminus, forms the subject of a whole literature of denunciation.

Solomon’s command of the Indo-Syrian route proved as evanescent as it had been brilliant. After his death (976 B.C.) his monarchy broke up. But the Twelve Tribes, even if they had held together, were a nation on too small a scale to maintain their independence against the mighty Powers which, during the next nine centuries, made Syria and Asia Minor their battle-field. Egypt from the south; Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia from the east; Macedonia from the north; Rome from the west – each sought to secure the countries that formed the outlets of the caravan routes. Whichever in turn was successful, the intermediate nationalities were crushed: the Jews among them. The reign of Solomon formed the climax alike of the territorial and of the mercantile ascendency of his race. I have dwelt

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on it for a moment, as it enables us to realize what the command of the Syrian caravan route meant to an ancient people.

It was a prosperity dangerous to the possessor. The coveted Syrian seaboard formed an Asiatic Palatinate forever shaking under the tramp of armies. In the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., Babylon was the entrepôt of the eastern routes, “the greatest commercial mart in the world.” The Persian chastisements for her rebellions led to the transfer of her trade to Gerrha on the Arabian coast, and afterwards to Seleucia. In the time of Strabo, Babylon had dwindled to a village and an ancient name. By the conquest of Phoenicia and the Ionian colonies, Persia became a Mediterranean power, threatened the sea-commerce of Athens, and brought on the struggle between Greece and Asia fought out at Marathon, Salamis, and Platma. It was a Phoenician settlement, Carthage, that led to the great conflict between the rising maritime power of Italy and North Africa, represented by the Punic wars. The seizure of the countries along the Asiatic trade-routes by Pompey supplied the luxuries and splendours of Imperial Rome.

How complete was the Roman command of the regions through which that route passed is attested by ruins surviving to this day. Palmyra in the desert, respected by the earlier Roman emperors as an independent city, reached the height of prosperity under its prince Odenathus, who received from Gallienus the title of Augustus, and was acknowledged as a colleague

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Ruins of the Temple of Neptune at Palmyra

in the Empire. Bostra in the Bashan country, four days’ journey south of Damascus, became under Trajan the beautified capital of the Roman province of Arabia, and the headquarters of the Third Legion. As a trade emporium before its capture by the Arabs it had won the title of “the market-place of Syria, Irak, and Hejaz.” The spacious Roman amphitheatre at Rabbah, midway down the south-eastern trade-route, may still be traced.

Photographs shown to me by a recent traveller along the track disclose at many places the enduring work of Rome, from the straight road whose solid pavement slabs emerge above the sand, to fluted columns, sculptured temples, and public buildings half-buried beneath it.

The Saracen Arabs who, under the conquering impulse of Islam, next seized the countries of the Indo-Syrian route (632–651 A.D.), soon realized its value. They were a trading not less than a fighting race, and Bassorah and Baghdad under the caliphs became the

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opulent headquarters of the Indian trade. An Arabic manuscript in the British Museum narrates an embassy of a Byzantine emperor in the tenth century A.D. to Baghdad, which recalls the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon in the tenth century before Christ. The same splendid profusion was displayed by the Caliph as by Solomon to his guest; the products and art-work of India were alike conspicuous at the Arab and the Hebrew capital. The Caliph’s curtains were of brocade with elephants and lions embroidered in gold. Four elephants caparisoned in peacock silk stood at the palace gate, “and on the back of each were eight men of Sind.” If Baghdad was, from the commercial point of view, the more spacious Jerusalem of the caliphate, Bassorah was its Alexandria on the Persian Gulf, which received from the East, and passed on to the West, “the wealth of Ormus and of Ind.”

The Crusades blocked for a time the Syrian route. But the Crusades, although impelled forward by the religious fervour of northern Europe, were speedily organized for trade purposes by the Mediterranean Republics. The fleets of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa victualled the armies of the Cross, accompanied their progress along the Syrian coast, and divided their spoils. Under the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1291) the Syrian caravan route revived. It exchanged the products of the tropical East and of the North for the hard cash of the Crusaders, and a regular fur market existed in Jerusalem for the sale of ermine, marten, beaver, and other Siberian or Russian skins. In 1204

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the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders, with the Earl of Flanders raised’ to the Imperial dignity, promised to medieval Italy a restoration of the affluence which had flowed from the East to ancient Rome.

But new forces were upheaving in further Asia, destined to overthrow Saracen. culture and Christian trade with a common ruin. About 1038 A.D. the Seljuk Turks had burst upon Persia. Two centuries later the gathered strength of the Mongols poured over Asia under Chingiz Iaan (1206), ravaged through Poland under his son, and under his grandson wrested back Russia to barbarism. In 1258 Baghdad went down before the Mongol hordes, and the Saracenic caliphate was shattered. The tidal wave of devastation spread over the countries of the Syrian caravan track, at times leaping forward in irresistible masses, then pausing to gather volume for the next onrush. In 1403 Timur drove the Knights Hospitallers forth from Smyrna to their island stronghold at Rhodes. By that time the Mongols and Turks had partially blocked the middle trade-route from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, and were preparing to seize the northern trade-route by way of the Black Sea.

The main northern route started from the Indus valley and crossed the western offshoots of the Himalayas and the Afghan ranges to the Oxus. On that great river of Central Asia the products of India were joined by the silks of China, conveyed from the western province of the Celestial Empire by a caravan journey of eighty to a hundred days. The united volume of

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The River Kuta at Tiflis

traffic struggled onward to the Black Sea, due west by the Caspian, southward by Trebizond, northward by the Volga and the Don, as shown on my map. A route referred to somewhat obscurely by Strabo, but with a new interest in our days, seems to have crossed the southern basin of the Caspian. The galleys proceeded up the twelve-mouthed Cyrus River, the modern Kura, as far as its channel allowed.

Their cargoes were then transported by a four or five days’ land journey over the water-parting which separates the Caspian from the Black Sea, until they reached the point where the river Phasis became navigable. Its stream carried the precious freights down to the emporium of the same name at its mouth on the Black Sea: a Milesian settlement whence the pheasant is said to have been brought to Europe by the Argonauts – the legendary pioneers of that branch of Eastern trade. The Russian railway from Baku on the Caspian to Batum on the Black Sea,

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A Caravan Near Merv in Central Asia.

with Tiflis as the meeting mart midway, corresponds to this ancient route up the river valleys and across the watershed.

Besides the Oxus routes ending on the Black Sea, other roads led from the Indus valley to the west.

After crossing the Hindu Kush the southern tracks touched the capitals of Bactria, Parthia, and Media, eventually reaching Baghdad, Palmyra, Tyre, and Antioch. The spoil found by the soldiers of Heraclius in the palace of King Khosru Parviz shows how the products of India had entered into the courtly life of Persia in the seventh century A.D.

The difficulties of the Central Asia routes to the Black Sea, with their deadly camel journey of alternate

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snows and torrid wastes, rendered them available only for articles of small bulk. They never attained the importance to India which the two southern trade-routes, by the Syrian caravan track and by the sea-passage to Egypt, acquired. They formed, however, ancient paths between Europe and China, and received prominence from the blocking of the Syrian route in mediaeval times.

From the Black Sea the products of the East went chiefly to Constantinople, but they also penetrated into Europe by the Danube and other channels. The trade appears to have helped toward the early civilization of the Crimea and the Danubian provinces. The emporium of Theodosia on the Crimean coast was, like Phasis, originally a trading colony of the Milesians. It survived, although in decay, to the time of Arrian, and reappears in a variant of its modern name, Kaffa, under the Greek emperor who sent the embassy to Baghdad in 917 A.D.

The Eastern trade by the Black Sea long formed a source of wealth to the Byzantine empire. Conflicts between Christian and Saracen in Syria enhanced its importance, and the Venetian merchants who settled at Constantinople when captured by the Crusaders in 1204, further developed the route. During the fifty-eight years of the Latin empire at Constantinople (1204–1261) the Venetians engrossed the Eastern commerce by way of the Black Sea. Venice stretched her armed trading stations, practically in unbroken succession, from the Adriatic to the Bosphorus, and stood

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Bridge of Boats over the Tigris at Baghdad

forth before the world as the acknowledged Queen of the Mediterranean.

On the re-establishment of the Byzantine empire (1261), the Genoese, whose mercantile jealousy of Venice overcame their orthodox faith and led them to assist the Greek emperor in the expulsion of their Catholic trade-rivals, took the place of the Venetians at Constantinople.

They received the Pera quarter, commanded the harbour, planted fortified factories – or trading-posts under the superintendence of a factor as head – along the European and Asiatic coasts of the Euxine, occupied part of the Crimea, and made its old emporium at Kaffa the headquarters of the Eastern trade by the Black Sea route. About 1263 they rebuilt the ruined city of Kaffa. Its spacious harbour, with deep water and firm anchorage for a hundred ships, played a leading part in the Genoese monopoly of the Euxine.

Of scarcely less importance was Soldaia, also on the southeast coast of the Crimea. Its Greek settlers had long acted as middlemen between the Asiatic and Russian traders, and, strengthened by a Venetian factory, they grew rich on the Indian commerce by the Black Sea route during the thirteenth century. Marco Polo the elder owned a house at Soldaia which he bequeathed

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The Great Temple, Tanjore

in 1280 to the Franciscan friars of that port. In 1323 Pope John XXII complained that the Christians had been driven forth by the Mongols from Soldaia, and “their churches turned into mosques.” Yet Ibn Batuta (1304–1377) still reckoned it as one of the five great ports of the world. In 1365 Soldaia became a fortified factory of the Genoese, who traded there till the downfall of the Byzantine empire, and whose defensive works survive to this day.

These ports on the Crimea formed the inlets of the Eastern trade to the Russian emporium of Novgorod. The position of Novgorod gave it access by the Dnieper to the Black Sea on the south, and by the Neva to the Hanse towns of the Baltic. In its marts the spices and fabrics of the East were exchanged for the furs of the North, and distributed to Western Europe. “As far back as the eleventh century,” writes Consul Perry, “Gothland’s commerce with the East by way of Novgorod was already of much importance.” The marshes and lake region around Novgorod defended it for a time against the Mongol hordes. Its merchants carried not only the art-work but also the currency of Asia to Scandinavia; and twenty thousand Cufic coins minted in about seventy towns of the Abbasid caliphs are said to have been at one time preserved in Stockholm.

The tide of wealth which thus set toward Venice and Genoa from the Black Sea procured for them a period of splendour scarcely less striking than that of the Saracen, or of the briefer Jewish, ascendency over the Indo-Syrian route. Trebizond, at the south-eastern

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extremity of the Black Sea, had grown into the terminus and emporium of a great Asiatic trade-route by way of Erzeroum. But the Turks pressed ever closer on the outskirts of the Byzantine empire. The bitter trade hatreds of the Genoese and the Venetians rendered a continuous coalition impossible for the Mediterranean Christian powers. Each aimed at engrossing the Eastern commerce, and each would gladly have seen its rival ruined.

For a time indeed it appeared as if the lands and riches of the Byzantine emperors were to be divided by an unholy connivance among Serbians, Albanians, Genoese, and Turks. In 1444, Genoese vessels ferried an army of forty thousand Ottomans across the Bosphorus, at a ducat a head, to do battle against the champions of Christendom. Nine years later, in 1453, the Turks finally took Constantinople. In 1475 Kaffa fell to their all-devouring armies. The Genoese colony with its warehouse palaces at Pera, its trading strongholds along the narrow seas, and its two factories in the Crimea, went down in the wreck of the Byzantine empire.

By the middle of the fifteenth century, therefore, the Mongol and the Ottoman hordes had blocked both the Black Sea and the Syrian routes of the Indo-European trade. The third, or southern maritime, route to Egypt claimed perhaps a less ancient origin; it was destined to survive the other two in medieval times, and again to become the highway of Eastern commerce in our own day. Herodotus narrates the naval expedition

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of Sesostris, the Egyptian monarch of the fourteenth (?) century B.C., from the Red Sea along the Asiatic coast, and his conquest of the intervening countries between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. This would suffice, apart from any legendary invasion of India proper, to give to Egypt for a time the command of the Syrian caravan route. The Father of History mentions that he had himself seen the sculptured memorials of the conqueror in Syria and Asia Minor – a statement seemingly verified by their modern discovery on the roads to Smyrna and to Beirut. Nor is it needful to examine too closely the evidence for the Sesostris Canal from the Nile to the Gulf of Suez, or its identity with the similar works on which later Egyptian kings, Necho, Darius son of Hystaspes, and Ptolemy Philadelphus, laboured.

The northerly winds that blow down the Egyptian side of the Red Sea during most of the year rendered the navigation up its western shores difficult for vessels of the Old World. Indeed, the perils of the coasting trade from the emporiums of Indian commerce on the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea seem to be commemorated by names along its route – by the Cape of the Indian’s Grave on the southeast of Arabia, and by the Straits of Bab-al-Mandab, or Gate of Tears, at its south-western extremity. The author of the “Periplus” (about 80 A.D. 7) gives a chapter to the “dreadful coast” of Arabia, without harbours, and peopled by tribes who had no mercy for shipwrecked crews.

Under the enterprising Egyptian King Psammetichus,

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however (671–617 B.C.), Carian and Ionian settlements at the mouth of the Nile had opened out the Mediterranean to the Indo-Egyptian trade – a trade which that monarch further secured by Syrian and Phoenician wars, if we may judge from Herodotus. Alexander the Great perceived the capabilities of the Nile delta as the natural entrepôt for the East and West. Alexandria, which he ordered to be built on the neck of land between Lake Mareotis and the Mediterranean, grew into the emporium of the Eastern traffic for the Greek and Roman world, eclipsed the ancient glories of Tyre, and, on its modern site, again became one of the strategic positions of the globe as the half-way house of Indo-European commerce.

From the founding of Alexandria (332 B.C.) its Asiatic trade grew with the improvements in the sea-passage. At a very early period the Arab navigators tried to avoid the northerly winds which sweep down the Egyptian coast, by unlading their cargoes near the modern Kosair, and transporting them overland to Thebes, the capital of the Nile Valley – the fame of whose twenty thousand war-chariots and hundred gates had reached the ears of Homer. Ptolemy Philadelphus did much during his long reign (285–247 B.C.) to concentrate the Eastern trade at Alexandria, the new capital of Lower Egypt. He reopened the ancient cutting from Bubastis to the Bitter Lakes, and was only stayed from completing his canal to the Gulf of Suez by fears lest the Red Sea would flow in and submerge the delta.

To escape the difficult navigation of the Suez Gulf,

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Ptolemy Philadelphus founded, on the headland near its mouth, Myos Hormos (274 B.C.), whence the Indian wares were carried across the desert to the Nile Valley. To avoid still further the northerly head winds on the passage up the African coast, Ptolemy created the emporium of Berenice at the southern extremity of Egypt on the Red Sea, and honoured it by his mother’s name, Berenice, which this trading centre is said to have transmitted through the Italian form verenice to modern commerce in the word varnish. A caravan journey of 285 Roman miles conveyed the eastern freights through wastes and mountains to Coptos on the Nile, with regular halting stations along the track. Some of these still dot the desert, and the proposed Assuan–Berenice railway, for which a survey has been made, would revive the old trade path from Ptolemy’s harbour to the Nile Valley by a shorter cut. Railway communication seems destined, indeed, to reopen the ancient paths of Indo-European commerce. The Russian line to Bokhara represents, not too exactly, an old route from China by way of the Oxus; the long-projected Euphrates Valley Railway would be the modern counterpart of the Syrian caravan track.

The final development of the Indo-Egyptian route did not take place until three centuries after Ptolemy Philadelphus, when the pilot Hippalus discovered the monsoons, or more strictly speaking, worked out the regular passage by means of them (circ. 47 A.D.). These periodical winds blow from Africa to India for about six months, and from India to Africa during the

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other six. While, moreover, the Egyptian coast-passage is impeded by northerly winds during most of the year in the upper part of the Red Sea, the navigation at its southern end is aided by regular variations in the air currents, southerly winds predominating from October to June, and northerly winds from June to October. The establishment of the emporium at Berenice in the third century B.C. thus paved the way for a vast expansion of the Eastern trade as soon as the monsoons were put to their mercantile uses.

Egyptian merchant fleets sailed from Berenice or Myos Hormos in July, rounded the modern Aden with a halt at Kane in August, and were blown rudely across the Arabian Sea to Malabar by the middle of September – a voyage of sixty or seventy days from the Egyptian to the Indian coast. Having sold their western freights and bartered their bullion for eastern cargoes, they started from India at the end of December, and were wafted more gently back by the winter monsoon to their Red Sea harbours about the beginning of March.

This monsoon route became the chief channel for the bulkier produce, as well as for the precious gems and wares, of India; enriched the ports along its line; and made Alexandria the commercial metropolis of the Roman Empire. Pliny lamented the vast shipments of gold and silver sent from Europe to pay for the products of Asia. “In no year,” he says, “does India drain our Empire of less than fifty-five millions of sesterces (£458,000), giving back her own wares in exchange, which are sold at one hundred times their prime cost,”

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Of this great commerce, while Egypt still remained a Roman prefecture, two accounts by actual traders exist. “The Circumnavigation of the Indian Ocean” describes it within a hundred years after the discovery of the monsoon winds by the pilot Hippalus. Written probably by a Greek merchant who had settled at the southern Red Sea emporium of Berenice and voyaged to the East, its composition is assigned to a date between 80 and 161 A.D. It gives the seaports on the route, specifies as many as ninety-five of the chief articles of traffic, and forms a wonderfully complete presentment of the state of Indo-Egyptian trade in the first century of our era.

“The Christian Topography of the Universe,” by Cosmas Indicopleustes (circ. 535–547 A.D.), takes up the story about four hundred years later. Its author, a merchant and apparently also a navigator, had become a monk of Alexandria in later life, and wrote out in his cell the recollections of his voyage. To these he adds much cosmical speculation, “not built on his own opinions or conjectures,” he assures us, “but drawn from Holy Scripture and from the mouth of that divine man and great master, Patricius.” Apart from such mystical physics, he gives an account of the trade of Malabar and the Eastern Archipelago, with topographical details and notices of Indian products, in some respects fuller and more exact than can be found in the Arab geographers of the next seven centuries. In his time Ceylon had become famous as the meeting-place of the merchants of the East and West;

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A Shop on the Kandy road, Ceylon.

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of the galleys from Egypt and the Persian Gulf, with the heavier junks of China. Cosmas not only mentions China for the first time by name as Tzinista (cf. Chinistan), a designation which admits of no dispute, but he had also a fair idea of its position, lying to the northeast of Ceylon as the Euphrates delta lies to the northwest, and with the same circumambient ocean as the highway to both.

Prom this time, China plays a distinctive part in the Indo-European trade. Three ancient land routes have been traced from India to China; Indian colonies settled on the Malacca coast and in the Eastern Archipelago; Indian missionaries spread their Buddhist faith from Central Asia to Burma, Ceylon, and Cathay. At the Red Sea, or western extremity of the route, Indian sailors seem to have given a Sanskrit name (apparently Dwipa-Sukhadhara, or Island Abode of Bliss) to the island of Socotra, as they did to Sumatra (presumably a variant of Sanskrit Samudra, Ocean) half-way along the ocean course. At the eastern extremity the very ancient Tao coinage, or “Knife-Cash” of China, has been ascribed to sea traders from the Indian Ocean, who before 670 B.C. marked their bronze knives with distinctive symbols so as to convert them into a returnable currency.

It must be remembered that during ten centuries (250 B.C. to about 700 A. D) Buddhism was the dominant political religion in India, and that it was a religion of enterprise both mercantile and missionary by land and by sea. We are told that Indian ‘merchants were

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found in Alexandria, although the supposed statue of the river deity Indus in that city was probably the gift of a Greek. A Chinese book of botany, ascribed to a prefect of Canton in the fourth century A.D., mentions plants then growing in Canton, which seem to have been brought by traders from Arabia or the Roman provinces. The trading colony of Arabs at Canton, dating from the times when they still followed Sabean rites, included at the beginning of the seventh century A.D. an uncle of Mohammed. Hearing of his nephew’s fame as one sent by God, the worthy merchant returned to Arabia only to find the prophet dead. “Has he left any message for me?” he asked. “None,” was the reply. “Then I shall go back to China. If the prophet had other views for me, he would have left me word.” He accordingly sailed again for Canton, where his mausoleum is shown. But the early connection of China with India and the West has hardly yet emerged from the twilight of tradition.

The learned Chinese scholar Edkins has examined the influence of Arabian or Babylonian trade-inter-course on the science and geographical conceptions of ancient China. Of that influence he finds evidence under the Chow dynasty in the history of Chinese astrology, metrology, and astronomical instruments. The pre-Alexandrian astronomy of India also had probably a Chaldean origin. It was a commercial dispute that brought about the first Mussulman conquest of an Indian province. In 711 Mohammad ibn Kasim led a naval expedition against Sind to claim damages

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for the ill-treatment of Arab merchantmen and pilgrims near the mouth of the Indus on their voyage from Ceylon.

During the following centuries the Indian Ocean became an outlying domain of Islam. The Arab geographers mapped the course from the Persian Gulf to China into “seven seas,” each having a name of its own, and with the Arab-Chinese harbour of Gampu on their eastern limit. As the Chinese trade grew in volume, Ceylon had to share her gains as the meeting mart of Europe and Asia with entrepôts still further east. Abulfeda, the princely geographer of the fourteenth century (1273–1331), mentions Malacca as the most important trading-place between Arabia and China, the common resort of Moslems, Persians, Hindus, and Chinese.

While Greek and Roman merchants had enriched themselves by the Indo-Egyptian trade, the actual sea-passage from India to Egypt, like the actual caravan route from the Persian Gulf to the Levant, remained in the hands of Semitic races. Colonies of Arabs and Jews settled in an early century of our era, or perhaps before it, on the southern Bombay coast, where their descendants form distinct communities at the present day. The voyages of Sinbad the Sailor are a popular romance of the Indian trade under the caliphs of Baghdad, probably in the ninth century A.D. Although inserted in the “Thousand and One Nights,” they form a distinct work in Arabic. Sinbad traverses the ocean regions from the Persian Gulf to Malabar, the Maldive

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The city of Baghdad

From an old engraving

Islands, Ceylon, and apparently as far as the Malay Peninsula.

A series of Arabian geographers and travellers bring down the narrative to the fourteenth century. Egypt had passed to the Saracens in 640 A.D.

But under its Fatimite caliphs and later Mamluk sultans, the Indo-Egyptian trade continued to flourish, and probably gained rather than lost by the temporary interruption of the Syrian land route during the Crusades. Ibn Batuta (1304–1377), who travelled for twenty-four years in Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean, declared Cairo to be the greatest city in the world “out of China,” and mentions Alexandria as one of the five chief ports which he had seen. Two other of them were on the Bombay coast, and all the five (namely, Alexandria in Egypt, Soldaia or Sudak in the Crimea, Koulam or Quilon and Calicut in India, and Zaitun

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or Chincheu in China) were fed by the Indian or Chinese trade.

But the same Turkish avalanche that had thrown itself across the Syrian and Black Sea routes was also to descend on Egypt. The Venetians on their expulsion from Constantinople in 1261 transferred their Eastern commerce to Alexandria, and after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, Egypt for a time enjoyed almost a monopoly of the Indian trade. The monsoon passage was in fact the one channel that remained always open from India amid the Mongol and Turkish convulsions along the caravan routes. The growth of the Ottoman navy from 1470 onwards began, however, to imperil the Mediterranean outlets of the Indo-Egyptian trade. It was in vain that Venice in 1454 made an un-Christian peace with the Moslem conquerors of Constantinople, and sought to secure the passage from the Adriatic to Alexandria by fortified stations and island strongholds along the route. Venice had ruined the naval power of Genoa, and the gallant defence of the Knights Hospitallers at Rhodes in 1480 could only delay, not avert, the Ottoman seizure of the Mediterranean highway.

In 1470 the Turks wrested the Negropont from Venice with a fleet of one hundred galleys and two hundred transports. Before ten years passed their squadrons swept the Adriatic and ravaged along the Italian coast. In their work of destruction the Turks were aided by an even more savage sea-force from the West. The rise of the Barbary corsairs is usually treated as

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an episode of medieval piracy. As a political factor, it formed the maritime complement of the Turkish con-quests by land. While the Mussulmans held southern Spain., treaties between the Mohammedan and Christian princes tried to restrain the buccaneering ports for which the inlets on the African coast seemed made by nature. But on the overthrow of the Moorish power in Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, the scourge of African piracy was let loose on the Mediterranean. The reign of terror reached its height under the great corsair admirals after 1504. Yet during a quarter of a century before this final development, the galleys of the African Moors outflanked the Venetian and Genoese fleets in the western Mediterranean, and thus strengthened the Turks in their struggle for the naval supremacy in the Levant.

The same year, 1480, that saw the temporary failure of the Ottomans at Rhodes saw also their capture of Otranto in Italy. In 1499 they crushed the naval force of Venice at Zonchio and Lepanto. By this time the Sea of Marmora and the Black Sea had become Turkish lakes. Turkish fleets and fortresses dominated the Hellespont, the Syrian coast, the Greek harbours, and most of the island trading-stations of the Aegean and the Levant. The rise of the Ottomans as a sea power thus blockaded the Mediterranean outlets of the Indo-Egyptian trade as their rise as a land power had obstructed the Indo-Syrian and Black Sea routes. Their seizure of Egypt in 1516–1517 was merely the finishing stroke of the conquests by which, in the preceding

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century, the command of the old Indo-European highways had passed to the Turkish hordes.

While a great necessity thus arose among the Christian nations to search out new trade-routes to India, we must not exaggerate the extent to which the old ones were closed. Alike in the Euphrates valley, in Syria, and in Egypt the Ottomans ousted Semitic dynasties of a comparatively civilized type. For a time, also, they trampled down the refinements in which those dynasties delighted. But the rude despoilers grew themselves into luxurious potentates, and although their Mongol nature was incapable of the higher Semitic culture, it took on a veneer. The period of avalanche passed; the need of the Indian trade-routes for exits toward Europe remained as insistent as before.

Nor were the Turks indifferent to the taxes and transit duties that could be squeezed from the traffickers whom they despised. The Asiatic commerce, whether by Syria or by Egypt, often interrupted and at times blocked, was never altogether destroyed. Genoa and Venice still distributed their Eastern wares, in an impeded flow, to the European nations. After the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, and the partial blockade of the Nile by the growing Ottoman navy, Famagusta in Cyprus became the Venetian headquarters of the trade in succession to Alexandria after 1475. It did business with Egypt under the Mamluk Sultans until 1516, and resumed its intercourse when the Nile valley settled down, after that year, beneath Ottoman rule. For nearly a century Famagusta remained

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a leading emporium of the Levant, until itself taken by the Turks in 1570–1571.

The Ottoman seizure or obstruction of the Indian trade-routes brought disaster not alone to the Mediterranean republics. The blow fell first on Genoa and Venice, but it sent a shock through the whole system of European commerce. The chief channel by which the products of Asia reached the central and northern nations of Christendom was the Hanseatic League. This Hanse, or “Association” of towns and merchant colonies for mutual defence, had developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries into the great trade organization of northern and central Europe. At the beginning of the fifteenth, its settlements stretched from Russia to the Thames; appeals from distant Novgorod were heard by its chief tribunal at Lübeck; Augsburg became the central depot of Europe, and her banker-weavers, the Fuggers and Velsers, rivalled the merchant-princes of Venice and Genoa. Bruges, the north-western depot of the Hanseatic trade, had at one time representatives of twenty foreign courts in the warehouse mansions which lined her canals. “There are hundreds of women here,” the wife of Philip the Fair of France is said to have exclaimed when she visited Bruges at the beginning of the fourteenth century, “who have more the air of queens than myself.”

The Indian trade formed an important contributory to this Hanseatic commerce. When the Eastern traffic began to dry up, its European emporiums declined; when, as we shall see, the Cape route was substituted,

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they withered away. “Grass grew,” says Motley, “in the fair and pleasant streets of Bruges, and seaweed clustered about the marble halls of Venice.” Augsburg, which had financed the commerce of central Europe, dwindled into a provincial town. Novgorod suffered in addition to mercantile decay the abolition of its charters by Ivan III in 1475, and the carrying into captivity of a thousand of its richest families. Its later sack by Ivan the Terrible has left little besides a fortress and cathedral, rich in relics, to bear witness to its ancient greatness. The Mediterranean marts of Eastern commerce, from Lisbon looking out on the Atlantic, to Venice once mistress of the Adriatic and the Levant, shared in varying degrees the common fate. In the first years of the sixteenth century the Indo-European trade of the Middle Ages lay strangled in the grip of the Turks.

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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