Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/55

 ITALIAN CONTROL OF THE TRADE-ROUTES 19 extremity of the Black Sea, had grown into the ter- minus 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 ren- dered a continuous coalition impossible for the Medi- terranean Christian powers. Each aimed at engross- ing 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 Bos- phorus, 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 strong- holds 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-Eu- ropean trade. The third, or southern maritime, route to Egypt claimed perhaps a less ancient origin; it was destined to survive the other two in mediaeval times, and again to become the highway of Eastern commerce in our own day. Herodotus narrates the naval expe-