Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/69

 THE DOMINATION OF THE TURKS 33 ceding century, the command of the old Indo-Euro- pean highways had passed to the Turkish hordes. While a great necessity thus arose among the Chris- tian nations to search out new trade-routes to India, we must not exaggerate the extent to which the old ones were closed. Alike in the Euphrates valley, in Syria, and in Egypt the Ottomans ousted Semitic dy- nasties of a comparatively civilized type. For a time, also, they trampled down the refinements in which those dynasties delighted. But the rude despoilers grew themselves into luxurious potentates, and although their Mongol nature was incapable of the higher Semitic culture, it took on a veneer. The period of avalanche passed; the need of the Indian trade-routes for exits toward Europe remained as insistent as before. Nor were the Turks indifferent to the taxes and transit duties that could be squeezed from the traffick- ers whom they despised. The Asiatic commerce, whether by Syria or by Egypt, often interrupted and at times blocked, was never altogether destroyed. Genoa and Venice still distributed their Eastern wares, in an impeded flow, to the European nations. After the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, and the partial blockade of the Nile by the growing Ottoman navy, Famagusta in Cyprus became the Venetian headquar- ters of the trade in succession to Alexandria after 1475. It did business with Egypt under the Mamluk Sultans until 1516, and resumed its intercourse when the Nile valley settled down, after that year, beneath Ottoman rule. For nearly a century Famagusta re-