ORIENTAL AND OCCIDENTAL TRADE-ROUTES (1200-1500)
In the fifteenth century Eastern goods regularly reached the West by
one of three general routes through Asia. Each of these had, of course,
its ramifications and divergences; they were like three river-systems,
changing their courses from time to time and occasionally running in
divided streams, but never ceasing to follow the general course marked
out for them by great physical features. The southernmost of these
three routes was distinguished by being a sea-route in all except its
very latest stages. Chinese and Japanese junks and Malaysian proas
gathered goods from the coasts of China and Japan and the islands of
the great Malay Archipelago, and bought and sold along the shores of
the China Sea till their westward voyages brought them into the straits
of Malacca and they reached the ancient city of that name. This was one
of the great trading points of the East. Few Chinese traders passed
beyond it, though the more enterprising Malays made that the centre
rather than the western limit of their commerce. Many Arabian traders
also came there from India to sell their goods and to buy the products
of the islands of the archipelago, and the goods which the Chinese
traders had brought from still farther East.
The Indian and Arabian merchants who came to Malacca as buyers were
mostly from Calicut and other ports on the Malabar coast, and to these
home ports they brought back their purchases. To these markets of
southwestern India were also brought the products of Ceylon, of the
eastern coast, and of the shore of farther India. From port to port
along the Malabar coast passed many coasting vessels, whose northern
and western limit was usually the port of Ormuz at the entrance to the
Persian Gulf. A great highway of commerce stretched from this trading
and producing region, and from the Malabar ports directly across the
Arabian Sea to the entrance of the Red Sea. When these waters were
reached, many ports of debarkation from Mecca northward might be used.
But the prevailing north winds made navigation in the Red Sea
difficult, and most of the goods which eventually reached Europe by
this route were landed on the western coast, to be carried by caravan--
to Kus, in Egypt, and then either by caravans or in boats down the line
of the Nile to Cairo.
Cairo was a very great city, its population being occupied largely in
the transmission of goods. A fifteenth-century traveller counted 15,000
boats in the Nile at one time; [Footnote: Piloti, quoted in Heyd,
Geschichte des Levantehandels, II., 43.] and another learned that there
were in all some 36,000 boats belonging in Cairo engaged in traffic up
and down the river. [Footnote: Ibn Batuta, quoted, ibid.] From Cairo a
great part of these goods were taken for sale to Alexandria, which was
in many ways as much a European as an African city. Thus a regular
route stretched along the southern coasts of Asia, allowing goods
produced in all lands of the Orient to be gathered up in the course of
trade and transferred as regular articles of commerce to the
southeastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea.
A second route lay in latitudes to the north of that just described.
From the ports on the west coast of India a considerable proportion of
the goods destined ultimately for Europe made their way northward to
the Persian Gulf. A line of trading cities extending along its shores
from Ormuz near the mouth of the gulf to Bassorah at its head served as
ports of call for the vessels which carried this merchandise. Several
of these coast cities were also termini of caravan routes entering them
from the eastward, forming a net-work which united the various
provinces of Persia and reached through the passes of Afghanistan into
northern India. From the head of the Persian Gulf one branch of this
route went up the line of the Tigris to Bagdad. From this point goods
were taken by caravan through Kurdistan to Tabriz, the great northern
capital of Persia, and thence westward either to the Black Sea or to
Layas on the Mediterranean. Another branch was followed by the trains
of camels which made their way from Bassorah along the tracks through
the desert which spread like a fan to the westward, till they reached
the Syrian cities of Aleppo, Antioch, and Damascus. They finally
reached the Mediterranean coast at Laodicea, Tripoli, Beirut, or Jaffa,
while some goods were carried even as far south as Alexandria.
Far to the north of this complex of lines of trade lay a third route
between the far East and the West, extending from the inland provinces
of China westward across the great desert of Obi, south of the
Celestial mountains to Lake Lop; then passing through a series of
ancient cities, Khotan, Yarkand, Kashgar, Samarcand, and Bokhara, till
it finally reached the region of the Caspian Sea. This main northern
route was joined by others which crossed the passes of the Himalayas
and the Hindoo-Kush, and brought into a united stream the products of
India and China.[Footnote: Hunter, Hist. of British India, I., 31.] A
journey of eighty to a hundred days over desert, mountain, and steppes
lay by this route between the Chinese wall and the Caspian. From still
farther north in China a parallel road to this passed to the north of
the desert and the mountains, and by way of Lake Balkash, to the same
ancient and populous land lying to the east of the Caspian Sea. Here
the caravan routes again divided. Some led to the southwestward, where
they united with the more central routes described above and eventually
reached the Black Sea and the Mediterranean through Asia Minor and
Syria. Others passed by land around the northern coast of the Caspian,
or crossed it, reaching a further stage at Astrakhan. From Astrakhan
the way led on by the Volga and Don rivers, till its terminus was at
last reached on the Black Sea at Tana near the mouth of the Don, or at
Kaffa in the Crimea. [Footnote: Heyd, Geschichte des Levantehandels,
II., 68-254.]
Along these devious and dangerous routes, by junks, by strange Oriental
craft, by river-boats, by caravans of camels, trains of mules, in
wagons, on horses, or on human shoulders, the products of the East were
brought within reach of the merchants of the West. These routes were
insecure, the transportation over them difficult and expensive. They
led over mountains and deserts, through alternate snow and heat. Mongol
conquerors destroyed, from time to time, the cities which lay along the
lines of trade, and ungoverned wild tribes plundered the merchants who
passed through the regions through which they wandered. More regularly
constituted powers laid heavy contributions on merchandise, increasing
many-fold the price at which it must ultimately be sold. The routes by
sea had many of the same dangers, along with others peculiar to
themselves. The storms of the Indian Ocean and its adjacent waters were
destructive to vast numbers of the frail vessels of the East; piracy
vied with storms in its destructiveness; and port dues were still
higher than those of inland marts.
With all these impediments, Eastern products, nevertheless, arrived at
the Mediterranean in considerable quantities. The demands of the
wealthy classes of Europe and the enterprise of European and Asiatic
merchants were vigorous enough to bring about a large and even an
increasing trade; and the three routes along which the products of the
East were brought to those who were able to pay for them were never,
during the Middle Ages, entirely closed. They found their western
termini in a long line of Levantine cities extending along the shores
of the Black Sea and of the eastern Mediterranean from Tana in the
north to Alexandria in the south. In these cities the spices, drugs,
dyes, perfumes, precious stones, silks, rugs, metal goods, and other
fabrics and materials produced in far Eastern lands were always
obtainable by European merchants.
The merchants who bought these goods in the market-places of the Levant
for the purpose of distributing them throughout Europe were for the
most part Italians from Pisa, Venice, or Genoa; Spaniards from
Barcelona and Valencia; or Provencals from Narbonne, Marseilles, and
Montpellier. [Footnote: Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, II., chap.
vi.] They were not merely travelling buyers and sellers, but in many
cases were permanent residents of the eastern Mediterranean lands. In
the first half of the fifteenth century there were settlements of such
merchants in Alexandria in Egypt; in Acre, Beirut, Tripoli, and
Laodicea on the Syrian coast; at Constantinople, and in a group of
cities skirting the Black Sea. Even in the more inland cities of Syria,
such as Damascus, Aleppo, and Antioch, Italians were established.
[Footnote: Heyd, Geschichte des Levantehandels, II., 67.] The position
of European merchants varied in the different cities on this trading
border between the East and the West, from that of mere foreign
traders, living on bare sufferance in the midst of a hostile community,
to that of citizens occupying what was practically an outlying Venetian
or Genoese or Pisan colony.
In the greater number of cases the Italian and other European merchants
had quarters, or fondachi, granted to them in the Eastern cities by the
Saracen emirs of Egypt and Syria, or by the Greek emperor of Asia
Minor, Constantinople, and Trebizond. These fondachi were buildings, or
groups of dwellings and warehouses, often including a market-place,
offices, and church, where the merchants of some Italian or Provencal
city carried on their business affairs according to their own rules,
under permission granted to them by the local ruler. A Genoese or
Venetian fondaco was usually governed by a consul or bailiff, appointed
by the home government, or elected among themselves with the approval
of the senate and doge at home. Two or more advisers were usually
provided by the home government to act with the consul in negotiations
with the local government. In more important matters embassies were
sent directly from the doge to the ruler on whose toleration or self-
interest the whole settlement was dependent.
For whole centuries Italians had made up an appreciable part of the
population of many cities of the Levant; the galleys of Venice, Genoa,
and Pisa lay at their wharves discharging produce of the West and
loading the products of the East; a large part of the income of the
local potentates, or governors, was made up of export and import
duties, harbor charges, and other impositions paid by the Western
merchants. The prosperity of these Greek and Saracen seaboard cities
was as largely dependent on this trade as was that of the merchants who
came there for its sake. [Footnote: Heyd, Geschichte des
Levantehandels, I., 165, 168, 316, 363, 414, 443. etc., II., 430, 435,
etc.]
We have seen how the merchandise of the far East flowed to the Eastern
cities of the Mediterranean, and how it was gathered there into the
hands of European merchants. It remains to follow the routes by which
it was redistributed throughout Europe. Both Genoa and Venice had
possessions in the Greek Archipelago which formed stepping-stones
between the home cities and their fondachi in the cities of the Levant.
Trading from port to port along these lines of connection, or sometimes
carrying cargoes unbroken from their most distant points of trade, the
galleys of the Italian, French, or Spanish traders brought Eastern
goods along with the products of the Mediterranean islands and shores
to the home cities. These cities then became new distributing-points of
Eastern and Mediterranean goods as well as of their own home products.
Venice may fairly be taken as a type of the cities which subsisted on
this trade. Her merchants were the most numerous, widely spread, and
enterprising; her trade the most firmly organized, her hold on the East
the strongest. To her market-places and warehouses a vast quantity of
goods was constantly brought for home consumption and re-export. From
Venice, yearly fleets of galleys went out destined to various points
and carrying various cargoes. One of these fleets, after calling at
successive ports in Illyria, Italy, Sicily, Spain, and Portugal, and
after detaching some galleys for Southampton, Sandwich, or London, in
England, reached, as its ultimate destination, Bruges, in Flanders.
[Footnote: Brown, Cal. of State Pap., Venetian.]
Other goods were taken by Venetian merchants through Italy and across
the mountains by land. Most of the re-export from Venice by land was
done by foreigners. Over the Alps came German merchants from Nuremberg,
Augsburg, Ulm, Regensburg, Constance, and other cities of the valleys
of the Danube and the Rhine. They had a large building in Venice set
apart for their use by the senate, the "Fondaco dei Tedeschi," much
like those settlements which the Venetians themselves possessed in the
cities of the Levant. [Footnote: Simonsfeld, Der Fondaco dei Tedeschi
in Venedig, II,] The goods which they purchased in Venice they carried
in turn all through Germany, to the fairs of France, and to the cities
of the Netherlands. Merchants of the Hanseatic League bought these
goods at Bruges or Antwerp or in the south German cities, and carried
them, along with their own northern products, to England, to the
countries on the Baltic, and even into Poland and Russia, meeting at
Kiev a more direct branch of the Eastern trade which proceeded from
Astrakhan and Tana northward up the Volga and the Don.
Thus the luxuries of the East were distributed through Europe. With
occasional interruptions, frequent changes in detail, and constant
difficulties, the same general routes and methods of transfer and
exchange had been followed for centuries. It was the oldest, the most
extensive, and the most lucrative trade known to Europe. It stretched
over the whole known world, its lines converging from the eastward and
southward to the cities of Syria, Asia Minor, and the Black Sea coast,
and diverging thence to the westward and northward throughout Europe.
With the close of the Middle Ages this ancient and well-established
trade showed evident signs of disorganization and decline. The Levant
was suffering from changes which interrupted its commerce and which
made the old trade-routes that passed through it almost impracticable.
The principal cause for this process of decay and failure was the rise
of the Ottoman Turks as a conquering power. About 1300 a petty group of
Turks, in the heart of Asia Minor, under a chieftain named Osman, began
a career of extension of their dominions by conquering the other
provinces of Turkish or Greek origin and allegiance in their vicinity.
[Footnote: Zinkeisen, Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches in Europa, I.,
65-132.] Little by little the Osmanli pushed their borders out in every
direction till they reached the Mediterranean, the Sea of Marmora, and
the Black Sea. Within a century and a half, by the close of the reign
of Murad II., in 1451, they had built vessels on the Aegean, plundered
the Greek islands and laid them under tribute, crossed the Dardanelles
and made conquests far up in the Balkan Peninsula, pressed close upon
the Christian cities along the south coast of the Black Sea, and
reduced the possessions of the Greek Empire to a narrow strip of land
around Constantinople. [Footnote: Ibid., 184-708.] The Turkish Empire
was admirably organized for military and financial purposes and
governed by a series of able sultans.
Thus a great power arose on the border-line between the Orient and the
Occident, of which the merchant states of Italy and the West evidently
had to take account. But its existence did not at first appear to be
necessarily destructive to their interests. In many cases comparatively
favorable commercial treaties were made with the Turkish sultans, and
the facile Italians modified their trading to meet the new conditions.
[Heyd, Geschichte des Levantehandels, II., 259, 260, 267, 275, 284,
etc.] Nevertheless, with the Turks there could be no such close
connection as that which had existed between the Western traders and
the old-established states in the East, under which they enjoyed
practical independence so long as they paid the money. The Turks were
not only Mohammedans, they were barbarians; they added to the Moslem
contempt for the Christian the warrior's contempt for the mere
merchant. They were without appreciation for culture or even for
refined luxury.
The conquests of the Turks proceeded steadily to their completion. In
1452 Sultan Mohammed II. built the fort of Rumili Hissari, on the
European side of the Bosporus, and gave the commander orders to lay
every trading-vessel that passed the straits under tribute. The next
year saw the final siege, the heroic resistance, and the fall of
Constantinople.
Among its defenders were Venetians, Genoese, Florentines, and Italian
colonists from various settlements, summoned to the help of their
coreligionists against the Mohammedans. On its capture all their goods
were plundered, their leaders beheaded, those of rank held for ransom,
and the common men slaughtered or sold as slaves. [Footnote: Pears, The
Destruction of the Greek Empire.] The neighboring colony of Pera was
left to the Genoese, but humbled to the rank of a Turkish village with
a sadly restricted trade. Trade was allowed to and from Constantinople,
but all the old privileges were abrogated, and the city was now the
capital of a semi-barbarous ruler and race, who placed but small value
on things brought by trade and continually engaged in war.
Especially destructive to trade were the wars between the Turks and the
Italian colonists of the eastern Mediterranean. Such wars were
inevitable. In the progress of their career of conquest the Ottoman
fleets early attacked the island possessions of Venice and Genoa in the
Aegean and their independent or semi-independent settlements on the
shores of the Black Sea. Efforts for the defence of these involved war
between the home governments and the rising Eastern power. From 1463 to
1479 war between the Turkish Empire and Venice raged in Syria and Asia
Minor, in the islands of the eastern Mediterranean, on the main-land of
Greece, and northward to Albania. The Italian republic lost some of its
best territories, including the Greek islands, and only obtained
permission to take its vessels through the Dardanelles and the Bosporus
on payment of a heavy annual sum. [Footnote: Heyd, Geschichte des
Levantehandels, II., 325-332.] The few remaining island possessions of
Genoa were also lost--Lesbos in 1462, Chios in 1466. A brave defence of
their island homes was made by the Italians, but one after another
these succumbed to the terrible attacks of the Turks. [Footnote: Bury,
in Cambridge Modern History, I., 75-81.]
In the mean time the possessions still farther east had the same fate.
Immediately after the downfall of Constantinople the Turks placed a
fleet upon the Black Sea and attacked the colonies on the north coast
at Kaffa, Soldaia, and Tana, and on the south at Trebizond and other
ports. One after another these cities were placed under tribute;
repeated battles destroyed their possessions; their population was
enslaved and their property plundered. In 1461 Trebizond was captured;
in 1500 Kaffa was finally conquered and the whole Christian population,
after many sufferings, carried off to live as a subject race in a
suburb of Constantinople. In 1499 and 1500 Venice lost almost all the
rest of her possessions.
Some of the cities of the West which had never had landed possessions
in the East fared better under the Ottoman than did Venice and Genoa.
Florentines, Ragusans, and men of Ancona, for some decades, took their
galleys from port to port of the Turkish coasts and islands, or passed
as individual traders back along the trade-routes seeking goods for
export. Nevertheless, the flow of Eastern goods along these routes was
becoming less and less; the internal wars of rival Tartar rulers and
those between Tartars and Turks threw the northern routes and parts of
the central route into even more than their usual confusion; and the
lessened demands at the ports of the Black Sea and Asia Minor
discouraged the bringing of goods from the Eastern sources of supply.
The Turkish thirst for conquest brought under the control of that race,
in the half-century between 1450 and 1500, half the western termini of
the trade-routes with the East. It crushed out all semblance of
independence in the settlements of the European merchants in Asia Minor
and on the Black Sea, and left to them a bare foothold for purposes of
trade under the most burdensome restrictions. These conquests were very
destructive to life and property. Mercantile firms failed, old families
died out, the mother-states were exhausted, and the flow of merchandise
was dried up. The system of trade which had been in existence in these
regions for centuries was quite destroyed by this violence.
The central and southern routes for a time remained open; indeed, the
blocking of the more northerly outlets sent a greater proportion of the
trade in Eastern products through Syria and through the Red Sea ports.
The markets at Damascus, Aleppo, Beirut, and Alexandria were better
filled than ever with the products of the East. Even the Genoese, who
had so completely lost their prosperity, still had a fondaco in
Alexandria in 1483; while the Venetians, notwithstanding their losses
in the northeastern Mediterranean and their bitter struggles with the
Turks, continued to make closer and closer trade arrangements with the
Saracen emirs of the Syrian cities and the Mameluke sultans of Egypt.
Under heavy financial burdens and amid constant disputes they still
kept up an active trade. Ten or fifteen galleys came every year from
Italy, France, and Spain to Alexandria, which in the later years of the
fifteenth century was by far the greatest market for spices in the
world. Even Florence, in the later years of the fifteenth century,
opened up a trade with Egypt and Syria. [Footnote: Heyd, Geschichte des
Levantehandels, II., 427-494.]
The southeastern Mediterranean was now destined to be swept by the same
storm as the other parts of the Levant. In the early years of the
sixteenth century the Ottoman army invaded Syria and Egypt. In 1516 the
sultan captured Damascus; in 1517 he entered Cairo as a conqueror.
Syria and Egypt became a part of the Turkish Empire, as Asia Minor, the
Balkan Peninsula, and the coasts of the Black Sea had already done.
Treaties, it is true, were even yet formed by which Venice, at the
price of humiliating conditions, obtained permission from the Ottoman
government to continue a heavily burdened trade in the blighted cities
of Egypt and Syria, as she was already doing in Constantinople. But the
process by which Turkish conquest was attained, and the whole spirit
and policy of that power, were adverse to trade between the East and
West.
The old trade-routes between Asia and Europe were effectually and
permanently blocked by the Turkish conquests. Not only routes of trade,
but methods of exchange, forms of transportation, and, in fact, the
whole system by which Eastern goods had been brought to Europe for
centuries, were interrupted, undermined, and made almost impracticable.
During this period the city republics of Italy, which had been the
chief European intermediaries of this trade, were losing their
prosperity, their wealth, their enterprise, and their vigor. This was
due, as a matter of fact, to a variety of causes, internal and
external, political and economic; but the sufferings in the wars with
the Turks and the adverse conditions of the Levant trade on which their
prosperity primarily rested were far the most important causes of their
decline.
Thus the demand of European markets for Eastern luxuries could no
longer be met satisfactorily by the old methods; yet that demand was no
less than it had been, and the characteristic products of the East were
still sought for in all the market-places of Europe. Indeed, the demand
was increasing. As Europe in the fifteenth century became more wealthy
and more familiar with the products of the whole world, as the nobles
learned to demand more luxuries, and a wealthy merchant class grew up
which was able to gratify the same tastes as the nobles, the demand of
the West upon the East became more insistent than ever. Therefore, the
men, the nation, the government that could find a new way to the East
might claim a trade of indefinite extent and extreme profit.
This is the explanation of that eager search for new routes to the
Indies which lay at the back of so many voyages of discovery of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Southward along the coast of Africa,
in the hope that that continent could be rounded to the southeast;
northward along the coast of Europe in search of a northeast passage;
westward relying on the sphericity of the earth and hoping that the
distance from the west coast of Europe to the east coast of Asia would
prove not to be interminable; after America was reached, again
northward and southward to round and pass beyond that barrier, and thus
reach Asia--such was the progress of geographical exploration for a
century and a half, during which men gradually became familiar with a
great part of the earth's surface. A study of the history of trade-
routes corroborates the fact disclosed by many other lines of study--
that the discovery of America was no isolated phenomenon; it was simply
one step in the development of the world's history. Changes in the
eastern Mediterranean led men to turn their eyes in other directions
looking for other sea routes to the East. When they had done so, along
with much else that was new, America was disclosed to their vision.
To follow out all the remote effects of the upheaval in western Asia
and eastern Europe would lead too far afield: but the diversion of
commercial interest was only a part: the restless energies of the Latin
races of southern Europe turned into a new channel; search for trade
led to discovery, discovery to exploration, exploration to permanent
settlement; and settlement to the creation of a new centre of
commercial and political interest, and eventually to the rise of a new
nation.