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Rh and to augment very greatly the supply of gold and silver for exchange against Asiatic products. The exploration of the globe, eastward and westward, produced navigation on a grand scale; and the superior skill, audacity, and capital of Europeans have ever since secured them a monopoly of the carrying trade on all the high seas.

The contest among the nations of Europe for superiority in this new field of enterprise soon began in earnest. When Pope Alexander Borgia issued his Bull dividing the whole undiscovered non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal, he awarded India to the latter power, so that the Portuguese, who had been pushing their dominion southward along the West African coast throughout the fifteenth century, at once took a much wider flight. They proceeded with ruthless energy to establish their fortified settlements on the Indian coast, to seize points of vantage in the Indian Ocean, and to beat off all attempts of the Mohammedan sovereigns at Alexandria and Constantinople to resist European predominance in those waters.

It is doubtless fortunate that even Solyman the Magnificent, in the height of his glory, failed in his efforts to expel the Portuguese from the Indian Ocean; for his success might have been disastrous to Eastern Christendom. If the Turkish Sultan, who at the opening of the sixteenth century was supreme in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and whose fleets swept the Mediterranean, could have kept the Indian trade to its ancient and direct course through Egypt and Syria,