Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/71

 TEMPORARY DECLINE OF ORIENTAL COMMERCE 35 they withered away. " Grass grew," says Motley, " in the fair and pleasant streets of Bruges, and seaweed clustered about the marble halls of Venice." Augs- burg, which had financed the commerce of central Eu- rope, dwindled into a provincial town. Novgorod suf- fered in addition to mercantile decay the abolition of its charters by Ivan III in 1475, and the carrying into captivity of a thousand of its richest families. Its later sack by Ivan the Terrible has left little besides a fortress and cathedral, rich in relics, to bear witness to its ancient greatness. The Mediterranean marts of Eastern commerce, from Lisbon looking out on the Atlantic, to Venice once mistress of the Adriatic and the Levant, shared in varying degrees the common fate. In the first years of the sixteenth century the Indo- European trade of the Middle Ages lay strangled in the grip of the Turks.