Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/19

 FROM THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE xi early phases of that conflict. After a glance at its commercial meaning to the peoples of antiquity, the scene opens with the Ottoman Power in possession of the Indo-European trade-routes. The first Act discloses the capture of the ocean highways of Asia by Portugal; an exploit which then seemed a mari- time extension of the Crusades, and which turned the flank of Islam in its sixteenth-century grapple with Christendom. The swift audacity of the little hero- nation forms an epic, compared with which our own early labours in India are plain prose. The second Act sets forth the contest of the Prot- estant sea-powers of Northern Europe with the Cath- olic sea-powers of the South for the position which Christendom had thus won in the East. Portugal, forced under the bigot rule of Philip H, was dragged into his wars with England and the Netherlands, and her fleets, which had grown up on the Asiatic trade, went to swell the wreck of the Armada. The task appointed to Elizabethan England stands out as a struggle not of Protestantism against Catholicism alone, but against Catholicism equipped by the wealth of both the West and the East Indies. Before Por- tugal could break loose from her sixty years' cap- tivity to Spain her supremacy in the East had passed to the English and the Dutch. Again the victors fought over the spoils. Those spoils lay chiefly not on the Indian coast, but in the Eastern Archipelago. India was then a half-way house for the richer traffic of the Spice Islands. The