Page:Madras in the olden time Volume 1.djvu/29

Ante 1640.] had been carried up the Red Sea to the Courts of Solomon, of Ahasuerus, and of the Czesars; and during the Middle Ages, many of her choicest productions were conveyed by the Venetian merchants from the ports of Egypt to the Courts of the European kings. But the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw a vast revolution in commercial enterprise. Spain had discovered and conquered Mexico and Peru. Portugal had discovered the route round the Cape, and opened the trade with India. For nearly a century, that is from about 1500 to 1600, the Portuguese enjoyed the monopoly of the Indian seas, and possessed rich and extensive settlements on both sides of the Indian peninsula. Indeed, not content with being merchants, they claimed to be kings ; but instead of conciliating the natives, they rendered themselves hated by their haughtiness, their arrogance, their religious intolerance, and their dissolute lives. But still they continued to monopolize the trade, and all merchants from other Kuropean countries, and even shipwrecked mariners, were treated with the utmost severity, if not with cruel barbarity.

In Europe the great merchants were the Dutch. In other words they had become the great carriers of Europe, and their country had become the emporium of trade. In a former century they had obtained the products of India from the Italians ; but now the rich traders of Amsterdam, proceeded every year to Lisbon to purchase spices from the Portuguese. In 1580 the Dutch threw off the yoke of Spain and formed themselves into the United