Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/68

 32 THE CLOSING OF THE OLD TRADE PATHS an episode of mediaeval 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 Chris- tian 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 Gen- oese 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 fail- ure 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 domi- nated the Hellespont, the Syrian coast, the Greek har- bours, and most of the island trading-stations of the ^Egean 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 pre-