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Rh and stronger, they put their commercial cities, such as Calcutta and Shanghai, near the entry of great river-ways into productive and populous market-lands. The seamen of Europe, owing to their greater mobility, have thus had superiority for some four centuries over the landsmen of Africa and Asia.

The passing of the imminent danger to Christendom, because of the relative weakening of Islam, was, no doubt, one of the reasons for the break-up of Mediæval Europe at the close of the Middle Ages; already in 1493 the Pope had to draw his famous line through the ocean, from Pole to Pole, in order to prevent Spanish and Portuguese seamen from quarrelling. As a result of this break-up, there arose five competing oceanic powers—Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and English—in the place of the one power which would, no doubt, have been the ideal of the Crusaders.

Thus the outcome of a thousand years of transition, from the ancient to the modern conditions of sea-power, is such as to prompt a comparison between the Greek and Latin Peninsulas, each with its off-set island. Peninsular Greece and insular Crete anticipated in their relations the Latin Peninsula and the island of Britain. Under the Dorians the