Page:Great Britain and the Suez Canal.djvu/14

 as Nuremberg and Ratisbon, Mayence and Cologne, were at the height of their opulence. The waterway of the Rhine bears ineffaceable traces of the wealth which was carried down it in the numerous castles of the robber barons, the extirpation of whom became the first object to which the resources of civilisation were directed. The trade of the East enriched the burghers of the Low Countries, till, after a long and tedious transit, the abundant spices of the East, increased in price a hundredfold by the tolls which rapacity exacted and the profits which merchants imposed, were sold in small parcels by the grocer or apothecary, or purchased in larger quantities by wealthy consumers, at the great fair of Stourbridge or in the perpetual market of London" (Vol. iv., p. 654).

Then came a memorable revolution. Western Asia was repeatedy ravaged by the Turkish and Tartar hordes. In many rich, fertile, and famous countries the cultivated lands returned to their primitive desolation; great cities shrank into miserable country towns, and the people sank into an incurable and hopeless lethargy. The Christian merchant found it more and more dangerous, less and less profitable, to penetrate into the interior of Asia. At length the Turkish conquerors reached the Bosphorus and the Hellespont. The Greek Emperors gave place to the Ottoman Sultans, and under their new masters the Euxine and Asia Minor were closed to Christian commerce. From Constantinople the Ottomans spread their conquests to the Danube on the one side, and the Euphrates on the other. Finally Selim I. subdued Mesopotamia, the holy cities of Arabia, and Egypt, and stopped the last overland route a few years after Vasco de Gama had discovered the passage round the Cape of Good Hope. Professor Thorold Rogers has shown with great fulness how Selim's conquest of Egypt raised the price of almost every Oriental commodity imported into Europe. The same conquest struck a fatal blow at the greatness of many an Italian and German city. From this epoch we may date the decline of Venice, and Venice scarcely suffered more than Ratisbon, Augsburg, and Nuremberg. There, for generations, many an untenanted palace, many a silent street, reminded the traveller of that great change in the line of Eastern commerce.

Then Portugal first, and afterwards England and Holland, seized on the sea route to India, and on the traffic of the East. England, who added to that rich monopoly the Empire of India and of the seas, was to Europe all that Venice and Genoa, Augsburg and