Page:Lamb - History of the city of New York - Volume 1.djvu/31

Rh bristled from one end to the other with horrid forms and figures, and represented the Occident as the home of demons. A mighty impulse had already been given to navigation by means of the magnetic needle, and the newly printed ancient stories about Carthaginian sailors who had "voyaged through the Pillars of Hercules, and found a strange country supposed to be Asia," and of adventurous Greeks and Persians, who had coasted Africa, filled the very air with speculative romance.

India beyond the Ganges was the mythical land of promise. Its treasures came from hand to hand through caravans and middle men and agents to Constantinople, with which city the Italian States were in constant commercial communication. But some of the shrewdest of the Venetian and Genoese merchants thought to remedy the evils of the painfully long and perilous overland route, and projected enterprises by way of the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean and Red Seas. They succeeded, but were obliged to pay a heavy tribute in Egypt, and no Christian was at any time allowed to pass through the Egyptian or Mohammedan countries. Thus the producer and the consumer were effectually kept asunder.



Constantinople fell in 1453, and from that time the business monopoly of the Indies centred with the Venetians. Venice became the great Western emporium, and attained such marvellous riches and rose to such a height of power and grandeur as never were equalled either before or since. The costliness of her magnificent buildings, the elegance of furniture and decorations, and the style of life among her citizens, was quite beyond description. The learned Christians of Constantinople, who had fled before the Turks into Italy, became her schoolmasters, and mathematics,