History of India, From the First European Settlements to the Founding of the English East India Company E-Book

William Wilson Hunter

• Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 345

Beschreibung

Pyrrhus Press specializes in bringing books long out of date back to life, allowing today’s readers access to yesterday’s treasures.

Das E-Book History of India, From the First European Settlements to the Founding of the English East India Company wird angeboten von Charles River Editors und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
british; colony; world war; napoleon; indian

Leseprobe

History of India, From the First European Settlements to the Founding of the English East India Company

William Wilson Hunter

About Pyrrhus Press

Pyrrhus Press specializes in bringing books long out of date back to life, allowing today’s readers access to yesterday’s treasures.

William Wilson Hunter’s History of India, From the First European Settlements to the Founding of the English East India Company is an entertaining and educational examination of India during the Age of Discovery, and this comprehensive work traces the events until India is firmly established as a British colony and the heart of the influential East India Company.

Editor Introduction

The story of the preceding volumes was that of Medieval or Mohammedan India, the subject of this and the next volume comprises a new era in India’s history – the opening-up of Hindustan to the West. Alexander the Great had found one of the routes in the early ages, but no Europeans, except the occasional traveller, the persistent trader from Roman days, and the devoted Christian missionary, had traversed this or the other pathways to India from Alexander’s day until the time of the Moghul Empire.

The period of Mohammedan rule in India and the sway of the Ottoman power in the East had opened no new way for Occidental influence to enter Asia and had been prejudicial to any development of intercourse between Europe and India; but with the changes that were ushered in by the sixteenth century, the quest for India by the sea route began, and India was brought within reach of the maritime nations of Europe as a rich prize to strive for. The Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English vied with each other in bitter rivalry to gain control of commerce and to establish a lasting supremacy in the East. The fullest and best account of this struggle will be found in the following pages from the late Sir William Hunter’s pen.

Sir William Hunter’s work, although comprising two bulky volumes in its fuller form, was not complete at his death, but in spite of that fact it will always remain one of the noblest monuments to his name. Through the courtesy of Lady Hunter and Sir William’s original publishers, arrangements have been made to reproduce in this and the following volume of the present series that portion of his work which relates to the first European settlements in India down to the founding of the East India Company in 1600, and also the portion covering the earlier events of the history of British India in the seventeenth century. The permission thus graciously accorded is acknowledged here with appreciation. Sir William’s text has been preserved practically without change, except for the omission of footnotes and for occasional modifications in certain matters of detail to agree with the rest of the series.

A new feature in the volume, however, is the Appendix which I have added, giving some early accounts by Mohammedan historians regarding the presence of Europeans in India during the Moghul Empire. I feel sure that certain of the descriptions and some of the expressions of opinion in this Appendix will be found to be interesting reading.

For particular assistance in illustrating this volume and the next by pictures from out-of-the-way sources I wish to thank Mr. George C. O. Haas, my student and ready helper, and I have had special aid from my friend, Dr. Justin E. Abbott, of Bombay, who has most kindly procured for the Grolier Society a special series of India photographs from which to select pertinent illustrations for the two volumes.

A. V. Williams Jackson

Author Preface

In this book I have endeavoured to complete a task which has occupied a large part of my life. Years ago my attention was drawn to the historical materials in the record rooms of Bengal, and the inquiries then commenced have been continued from the archives of England, Portugal, and Holland. I found that what had passed for Indian history dealt but little with the staple work done by the founders of British rule in the East, or with its effects on the native races. The vision of our Indian Empire as a marvel of destiny, scarcely wrought by human hands, faded away. Nor did the vacuum theory, of the inrush of the British power into an Asiatic void, correspond more closely with the facts.

Yet if we bring down England’s work in India from the regions of wonder and hypothesis to the realm of reality, and if the Jonah’s gourd growth of a night must give place for a time to the story of the Industrious Apprentice, enough of greatness remains. The popular presentment of the East India Company as a sovereign ruler, with vast provinces and tributary kingdoms under its command, obscures the most characteristic achievement of our nation in Asia. That achievement was no sudden triumph, but an indomitable endurance during a century and a half of frustration and defeat. As the English were to wield a power in the East greater than that of any other European people, so was their training for the task to be harder and more prolonged.

We have been too much accustomed to regard our Indian Empire as an isolated fact in the world’s history. This view does injustice to the Continental nations, and in some degree explains the slight esteem in which they hold our narratives of Anglo-Asiatic rule. In one sense, indeed, England is the residuary legatee of an inheritance painfully amassed by Europe in Asia during the past four centuries. In that long labour, now one Christian nation, then another, came to the front. But their progress as a whole was continuous. It formed the sequel to the immemorial conflict between the East and the West, which dyed red the waves of Salamis and brought Zenobia a captive to Rome. During each successive period, the struggle reflected the spirit of the times: military and territorial in the ancient world; military and religious in the Middle Ages; military and mercantile in the new Europe which then awoke; developing into the military, commercial, and political combinations of the complex modern world.

This preliminary volume attempts a survey, rapid, yet so far as may be from primary sources, of the early phases of that conflict. After a glance at its commercial meaning to the peoples of antiquity, the scene opens with the Ottoman Power in possession of the Indo-European trade-routes. The first Act discloses the capture of the ocean highways of Asia by Portugal; an exploit which then seemed a maritime extension of the Crusades, and which turned the flank of Islam in its sixteenth-century grapple with Christendom. The swift audacity of the little hero-nation forms an epic, compared with which our own early labours in India are plain prose.

The second Act sets forth the contest of the Protestant sea-powers of Northern Europe with the Catholic sea-powers of the South for the position which Christendom had thus won in the East. Portugal, forced under the bigot rule of Philip II, was dragged into his wars with England and the Netherlands, and her fleets, which had grown up on the Asiatic trade, went to swell the wreck of the Armada. The task appointed to Elizabethan England stands out as a struggle not of Protestantism against Catholicism alone, but against Catholicism equipped by the wealth of both the West and the East Indies. Before Portugal could break loose from her sixty years’ captivity to Spain her supremacy in the East had passed to the English and the Dutch.

Again the victors fought over the spoils. Those spoils lay chiefly not on the Indian coast, but in the Eastern Archipelago. India was then a half-way house for the richer traffic of the Spice Islands. The third Act unfolds the strife between the two Protestant sea-powers for this prize. The Netherlands had long contained the marts by which the produce of the East, trans-shipped at Lisbon to Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, was distributed to Northern and Central Europe. The capture of the Indian trade seemed to Holland a continuation of her just revolt against Portugal and Spain, a heritage from her hard subjection, and the seal of the independence which she had so dearly won. To England it was but the mercantile development, on an extended scale, of the sea enter-prise of the Elizabethan adventurers.

Holland brought to the struggle a slowly acquired knowledge of the Eastern trade, a vast patriotic subscription from the United Provinces, and a resolve alike of her people and her Government that the Spice Islands should pass to no hands but their own. England cared to risk only a small capital, split up into separate voyages and joint-stocks; for state sup-port she had but the quicksand diplomacy of the first James and Charles. The United Dutch Company was practically a national enterprise; the London Company was a private undertaking; and the fortitude of individual Englishmen in Asia availed little against the combined strength of Holland. The forces were too unequally matched, as will be seen when we come to describe the catastrophe which compelled the English to realize that, if they were to establish themselves in the East, it must be somewhere else than in the Spice Archipelago.

It may seem, perhaps, that I have allotted too much space to this threefold struggle – of Christendom against Islam, of the Protestant North against the Catholic South, and of the two Protestant sea-powers of the Atlantic – for the Asiatic trade. But a different law of proportion applies to Indian history, as I have conceived it, from that which sufficed for a melodrama of British triumphs. We must give up the idea of the rapid greatness of England in the East. In these chapters will be found, in part, the explanation of our unique position in India at the present day. Europe, just emerged from mediaeval-ism, was then making her first experiments in Asiatic rule. Medieval conceptions of conquest imposed themselves on her exploitation of the Eastern world; mediaeval types of commerce were perpetuated in the Indian trade. Portugal, Spain, and Holland established their power in Asia when these conceptions and types held sway. The English ascendency in India came later, and embodied the European ideals of the eighteenth century in place of the European ideals of the sixteenth. It was the product of modern as against semi-medieval Christendom. Yet even England found it difficult to shake off the traditions of the period with which this volume deals, the traditions of monopoly in the Indian trade and of Indian government for the personal profit of the rulers.

Characteristic features of our present Indian polity date from that early time. We shall see, for example, that the scheme of a European dominion in the East, built on native alliances and upheld by drilled native soldiers, was no invention of Dupleix improved upon by Clive. It developed with a slow continuous growth from the first Portuguese garrison in Malabar; through the Dutch system of subjugation by treaty; to the Feudatory States, the Sepoy army, and the Imperial Service Troops of British India. Much that we have accomplished our predecessors attempted, and not in vain.

Nor were their forms of home-control less fruitful of analogy than their experiments in Indian administration. The conquest and commerce of India were in Portugal royal prerogatives, almost a private estate of the Portuguese kings. The Dutch first tried separate voyages, then a United Company which became more and more national in character till it ended in a State Department. The English commerce with the East also started on the basis of royal prerogative – the prerogative of granting monopolies in trade. Under the later Stuarts the East India Company formed a battle-ground between the ancient privileges of the Crown and the growing strength of the nation; with the Revolution, the right of granting its charters passed finally to Parliament. Nor have the varied forms of organization which the Dutch devised for their Indian trade lacked counterparts in England; from the London Company’s initial system of separate voyages, and its regulated or joint-stock associations of the seventeenth century, to the United East India Company and Board of Control in the eighteenth, and a Secretary of State for India at the present day.

But if resemblances between our, work in India and that of our predecessors are apparent, these chapters disclose differences more profound. The achievement of Portugal was the command of the ocean-routes, secured by settlements at strategic points along the shore. The Dutch dominion lay chiefly in the Eastern Archipelago. England’s conquest was India itself. The native powers whom the early Portuguese encountered were petty coast rajas; the native powers whom the Dutch subdued were island chiefs. The English in India, schooled for a hundred years under the rod of the mighty Moghuls, brought a deeper experience and wider conceptions to a harder task. Their empire was to be not a few shore settlements like those of Portugal, nor an island dominion like that of the Dutch, but the Indian Continent. The question of territorial extension as against trade profits and sea-control arose with the first Portuguese viceroy in the East. It divided parties alike in the Dutch and in the English Companies; as, in its modern form of the Forward Policy, it still divides British opinion.

One fact stands clearly out. No European nation has won the supremacy of the East which did not make it a national concern; and no nation has maintained its power in the East which was not ready to defend it with its utmost resources. The prize fell successively to states small in area, but of a great heart – a heart beating with the throbs of independence newly won. We shall see that Vasco da Lama’s voyage was but the last advance in an eighty years’ march of discovery, commenced by the king who had secured the national existence of Portugal, and resolutely carried out by the successors of his house. The Dutch supremacy in the East formed the widest expression of their hard-earned freedom at home. It was the spirit which had hurled back Castile on the field of Aljubarrota that opened the Cape route to Portugal; and it was the spirit which had cut the dikes that gained the Spice Archipelago for Holland.

The question of questions, here and throughout, is not the size of a European nation, but what sacrifices it is willing to make for its position in the East. The united Spain and Portugal which lost the supremacy of the Asiatic routes formed a state on a much larger scale than the little Portugal that had won it. But to united Spain and Portugal, with vast armies to pay, the silver-yielding West Indies seemed a more profitable possession than the silver-absorbing East, and the resources which might have held the Asiatic seas were spent on the Catholic camps of Europe. In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the strength of England was not less than that of Holland. But the English nation was as yet prepared to risk little for the Indian trade; the English sovereigns would risk nothing; the Dutch people and the Dutch Government were ready to risk much. In the middle of the eighteenth century the power of England was not greater than that of France, and France had servants in the East neither less brave, nor less skilful and fortunate, than our own. But the English in India had then their nation at their back; the French had not; and again the supremacy in the East passed to the people who were willing to endure most for it.

The crux in Asia has always been not the validity of rival titles, but which nation could enforce its claim. Nor has any Western nation preserved its ascendency in the East after it has lost its position in Europe.

The English connection with India has grown with the growth of England, till it now forms flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. The Papal partition of the new Southern world between Spain and Portugal in 1493 forced England to try for a passage by the north; and her persistent quest for India and Cathay through the Arctic Circle in the sixteenth century became the starting-point of British exploration. At each stage our Eastern enterprise has taken the popular temper of the times. Garbed in religious phrases when England was Puritan, exuberantly loyal under the Restoration, a great constitutional question at the Revolution, cynical with the cynicism of the eighteenth century, yet quick to feel the philanthropic impulses of its close – those impulses which brought East Indian pro-consuls before the bar of an awakened public opinion, which were to give freedom to West Indian slaves, and to create a fresh field of national activity in Christian missions. A close monopoly as long as England believed in exclusive commerce, India now exhibits the extreme application of the English doctrine of free trade, and it forms the corner-stone of the new imperialism of Greater Britain.

These two volumes recount magnificent deeds done by Englishmen in Asia. Yet history cannot rank the generalship of Clive above that of Albuquerque, or the constructive genius of Warren Hastings above that of Jan Pieterszoon Coen. It is enough for a great man to be the express image of the greatness of his country in his time. The national spirit has been the dominant factor alike in our fortunes and in those of our rivals in the East. As the Cape route was discovered for Portugal before Da Gama hoisted sail in the Tagus, and as the Spice Archipelago would have passed to the Dutch without any tragedy of Amboyna, so Bengal must have become a British province although on some other field than Plassey, and the Mutiny would assuredly have been put down, even had no Lawrence stood in the gap in that great and terrible day of the Lord.

In this volume and the next there is presented a narrative of events in India’s history since the country came into contact with the nations of modern Europe. In such a narrative the internal history of India, and its wondrous diversity of races, religions, and types of intellectual effort, forms not the least instructive chapters.

But the chief aim that has been kept in view is to trace the steps by which the ascendency of England was won in the East; the changes which it has wrought; and the measures by which it is maintained.

Chapter 1 - The Closing of the Old Trade Paths

To 1516 A.D.

On the establishment of the Ottoman Empire the medieval commerce between Europe and India was for a time blocked. That commerce started from the marts of Eastern Asia and reached the Mediterranean by three main routes. The northern tracks, by way of the Oxus and Caspian, converged on the Black Sea. The middle route lay through Syria to the Levant. The southern brought the products of India by sea to Egypt, whence they passed to Europe from the mouths of the Nile.

The struggle for these trade-routes forms a key to the policy and wars of many nations. When the Turks threw themselves across the ancient paths in the fifteenth century A.D., a great necessity arose in Christendom for searching out new lines of approach to India. From that quest the history of modern commerce dates. The prize for which the European Powers contended during the next three hundred years was a magnificent one. It had been grasped at by the monarchies of antiquity and by the republics of the Middle Ages. As they in turn secured it they had risen to their highest point of prosperity; as they in turn lost it their prosperity declined. The command of the Asiatic trade-routes was sometimes, indeed, the expression rather than the cause of the aggrandizement of a nation. But to the princes who fitted forth Columbus to seek for India in the West, and sent out Vasco da Gama to find it in the East, one thing seemed clear. The possession of the Asiatic trade had in memorable examples marked high-water in the history of empire; its loss had marked the ebb of the tide.

The most ancient of the three routes was the middle one through Syria. Ships from India crept along the Asiatic shore to the Persian Gulf and sold their costly freights in the marts of Chaldea or the lower Euphrates. The main caravan passed thence northward through Mesopotamia, edged round the wastes of Arabia Petraea, and struck west through the lesser desert to the oasis where, amid the Solitudo Palmyrena, the city of Tadmor eventually arose. Plunging again into the sands, the train of camels emerged at Damascus. There the Syrian trade-route parted into two main lines. The northern branched west to the ancient Tyre and Sidon and the medieval Acre and Ascalon. The other diverged southward by Rabbah, or Rabbath Ammon of the Old Testament, the Rabbatamana of Polybius, which is still locally known as Amman, and skirting the eastern frontier of Palestine passed through the land of Edom toward Egypt and the shores of the Red Sea. Its halting-places can still be traced. Thousands of Mussulmans travel yearly down the Barb-al-Hajj, or pilgrim way, by almost, although not exactly, the same route as that followed by the Indo-Syrian trade thirty centuries ago – no made road, but a track beaten hollow at places by the camels’ tread.

The dawn of history discloses the Syrian trade-routes in the hands of Semitic races. The Chaldean or Babylonian merchants who bought up the Indian cargoes on the Persian Gulf, the half-nomad tribes who led the caravan from oasis to oasis around the margin of the central desert to Tyre or to the Nile, the Phoenician mariners who distributed the precious freights to the Mediterranean cities, were all of the Semitic type of mankind. The civilization of ancient Egypt created the first great demand for the embalming spices, dyes, and fine products of the East. But as early as the fall of Troy (1184? B.C.), if we may still connect a date with the Aeolic saga, Phoenician seamen had conveyed them northwards to Asia Minor and the Aegean Sea. Homer does not mention the name of India, but he was acquainted with the art-wares of Sidon, a Mediterranean outport of the Eastern trade. It was, however, in Egypt that the products of the Syrian caravan routes, and the possibly still earlier merchandise of Somaliland and the African littoral, found their chief market.

An emporium, perhaps originally a convict settlement from the Nile, sprang up at Rhinoculora, where the coast-line of Palestine adjoins Egypt. It probably received the traffic seawards from Tyre and by more than one land route through Palestine, and passed on the reunited volume of the Eastern trade to the neighbouring Nile valley. The Phoenician mariners of the Levant carried their alphabet, apparently derived from Egypt, to Greece and the countries around the Mediterranean Sea; the Sabwans of the Persian Gulf gave a cognate form of the same alphabet to India and the nations bordering on the Indian Ocean.

As the Phoenicians held the northern outports of the Syrian trade-route toward Europe, so the Edomites commanded its southern outlet toward Egypt. The Hebrews, also a Semitic race, occupied the country between the two, and the earliest traditions, not less than the verified history, of Israel, are intimately connected with Eastern commerce. The geography of Genesis is the geography of the Syrian trade-route; one of its most picturesque episodes, the sale of Joseph by his brethren, is an incident of the caravan journey. Abraham starts from the Chaldean, or Euphrates, end of the route near the Persian Gulf, and in four generations his descendants are settled at its south-western terminus on the Nile. The intermediate regions thus traversed formed the heritage promised to his seed, “from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates.” This covenant is renewed in more precise terms in Deuteronomy, and grants to the Israelites the whole countries of the caravan route from the Euphrates on the east to the Mediterranean on the west, with Lebanon in Phoenicia as their northern, and the desert as their southern, boundary. The emporiums on the main branches of the Syrian route find mention in the Pentateuch, from Tyre, Sidon, and Damascus, down through Rabbah, Bozrah, and Edom toward the Egyptian and Red Sea end.

The political achievement of the Hebrew monarchy was to convert this promise, for a time, into a fact. The seventy-three years assigned to the reigns of David and Solomon saw both the process of conquest and its full commercial development. When David made Jerusalem his capital (about 1049 B.C., according to the generally accepted Biblical date), he found himself able from that stronghold to seize the positions which commanded the caravan route. On the north he occupied Damascus, the outlet of the desert track, and the key to the two branches of the Syrian trade westward to Tyre and southward to Egypt and the Red Sea. The King of Tyre sought friendly relations with him. David garrisoned Damascus together with the surrounding country, through which the spice caravans passed west to the Levant, and captured the great halting-place of Rabbah, about half-way down the eastern frontier route. His general, according to correct oasis strategy, had first secured the water-supply on which the town depended. David also completed the conquests begun by Saul among the Moabites and Edomites, who held the southern sections of the caravan track toward Egypt and the Red Sea. Before the close of his reign he made himself master of the entire trade-route from Damascus to Edom, controlled the country at both ends, seized the chief halting-place in the middle, and “cut off every male in Edom” toward the Red Sea and Egyptian outlets.

It was reserved for Solomon during his long rule of forty years, 1016–976 B.C., to put his father’s con-quests to their mercantile uses. He strengthened his hold on the northern outlets of the trade by advancing into the desert and occupying the oasis of Palmyra. There he built or enlarged Tadmor in the wilderness, and thus gained command of the caravan track at a central point between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean. Tyre depended for her prosperity on obtaining a regular share of the Eastern trade by way of Palmyra and Damascus. The friendly intercourse of its king with David was therefore consolidated into a regular commercial treaty with Solomon; the Phoenician monarch supplying gold and the timber of the Lebanon hills in return for certain towns near the Tynan frontier, and for stated quantities of the agricultural produce of the Jordan valley. According to the Hebrew record, Solomon’s sovereignty or overlordship extended to the Euphrates itself. Generally accepted maps show only the narrow strip between the Lebanon ranges and the Mediterranean. as belonging to Tyre, while the Jewish hinterland stretches in a solid block northeast to Mesopotamia. The promise to Abraham thus found its geographical fulfilment.

Having secured the northern outlet of the caravan trade toward Phoenicia, Solomon sought fresh developments for the Eastern trade at the southern extremity of the route. The Red Sea ends in two prongs, the Gulf of Suez on the Egyptian side, and the Gulf of Akaba on the Arabian, with the desert peninsula of Sinai jutting out between.

David’s conquest of Edom not only secured the land-track into Egypt, but brought him to the Gulf of Akaba. Solomon occupied two harbours on its shores and launched vessels on its waters. Hiram, King of Tyre, supplied the materials and artisans for the construction of the ships, together with Phoenician sailors to navigate them, and built a fleet of his own on the same gulf. The two merchant navies sailed and traded in company, and poured the wealth of Ophir and the East into the new southern seaboard of Palestine.

This complete capture of the Syrian route forms the mercantile epic of Israel. The record of the rare and costly products with which it adorned Jerusalem, and of the transit duties which it yielded to the king, reads like a psalm rather than a trade catalogue. To some of those products, although bought up in the intermediate marts of the Euphrates valley, an Indian origin is plausibly ascribed – the ivory of which Solomon “made a great throne,” his “precious stones,” and “three hundred shields of beaten gold,” the “traffic of the spice-merchants,” the “apes and peacocks “of his pleasure gardens, and, probably, the sandalwood pillars “for the House of the Lord.” From the Egyptian side the Hebrew king received linen yarn, horses, and a royal bride. The Song of Solomon, supposed by some commentators to celebrate his nuptials with Pharaoh’s daughter, breathes the poetry of the caravan route, with its advancing clouds of dust, and its guards posted at night, every man “with his sword upon his thigh.”

“Who is this that cometh out of the wilderness,

Like pillars of smoke?

Perfumed with myrrh and frankincense,

With all powders of the merchant.”

The recollections of the Egypto-Syrian trade, its spices, pigments, and precious stones, survived in the Hebrew memory long after the possession of the route had passed from the nation. “Who is this that cometh from Edom with dyed garments from Bozrah?” wrote Isaiah in a dark period of his race. If the theocratic thesis of Jewish history sometimes obscures its political aspects, the national hatred against the cities which regained the Eastern trade after Jerusalem lost it, stands clearly out. Tyre is to be engulfed, or Made, in the words of Ezekiel, “a place for the spreading of nets in the midst of the sea.” “The riches of Damascus” “shall be taken away”; “it shall be a ruinous heap.” Rabbah, the ancient halting-place half-way down the southern caravan route, shall be “a stable for camels,” “a desolate heap, and her daughters shall be burned with fire.” “Bozrah shall become a desolation,” a fire shall devour her palaces, and the heart of her mighty men shall be “as the heart of a woman in her pangs.” The old rival Edom, toward the Egyptian terminus, forms the subject of a whole literature of denunciation.

Solomon’s command of the Indo-Syrian route proved as evanescent as it had been brilliant. After his death (976 B.C.) his monarchy broke up. But the Twelve Tribes, even if they had held together, were a nation on too small a scale to maintain their independence against the mighty Powers which, during the next nine centuries, made Syria and Asia Minor their battle-field. Egypt from the south; Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia from the east; Macedonia from the north; Rome from the west – each sought to secure the countries that formed the outlets of the caravan routes. Whichever in turn was successful, the intermediate nationalities were crushed: the Jews among them. The reign of Solomon formed the climax alike of the territorial and of the mercantile ascendency of his race. I have dwelt on it for a moment, as it enables us to realize what the command of the Syrian caravan route meant to an ancient people.

It was a prosperity dangerous to the possessor. The coveted Syrian seaboard formed an Asiatic Palatinate forever shaking under the tramp of armies. In the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., Babylon was the entrepôt of the eastern routes, “the greatest commercial mart in the world.” The Persian chastisements for her rebellions led to the transfer of her trade to Gerrha on the Arabian coast, and afterwards to Seleucia. In the time of Strabo, Babylon had dwindled to a village and an ancient name. By the conquest of Phoenicia and the Ionian colonies, Persia became a Mediterranean power, threatened the sea-commerce of Athens, and brought on the struggle between Greece and Asia fought out at Marathon, Salamis, and Platma. It was a Phoenician settlement, Carthage, that led to the great conflict between the rising maritime power of Italy and North Africa, represented by the Punic wars. The seizure of the countries along the Asiatic trade-routes by Pompey supplied the luxuries and splendours of Imperial Rome.

How complete was the Roman command of the regions through which that route passed is attested by ruins surviving to this day. Palmyra in the desert, respected by the earlier Roman emperors as an independent city, reached the height of prosperity under its prince Odenathus, who received from Gallienus the title of Augustus, and was acknowledged as a colleague in the Empire. Bostra in the Bashan country, four days’ journey south of Damascus, became under Trajan the beautified capital of the Roman province of Arabia, and the headquarters of the Third Legion. As a trade emporium before its capture by the Arabs it had won the title of “the market-place of Syria, Irak, and Hejaz.” The spacious Roman amphitheatre at Rabbah, midway down the south-eastern trade-route, may still be traced.

Photographs shown to me by a recent traveller along the track disclose at many places the enduring work of Rome, from the straight road whose solid pavement slabs emerge above the sand, to fluted columns, sculptured temples, and public buildings half-buried beneath it.

The Saracen Arabs who, under the conquering impulse of Islam, next seized the countries of the Indo-Syrian route (632–651 A.D.), soon realized its value. They were a trading not less than a fighting race, and Bassorah and Baghdad under the caliphs became the opulent headquarters of the Indian trade. An Arabic manuscript in the British Museum narrates an embassy of a Byzantine emperor in the tenth century A.D. to Baghdad, which recalls the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon in the tenth century before Christ. The same splendid profusion was displayed by the Caliph as by Solomon to his guest; the products and art-work of India were alike conspicuous at the Arab and the Hebrew capital. The Caliph’s curtains were of brocade with elephants and lions embroidered in gold. Four elephants caparisoned in peacock silk stood at the palace gate, “and on the back of each were eight men of Sind.” If Baghdad was, from the commercial point of view, the more spacious Jerusalem of the caliphate, Bassorah was its Alexandria on the Persian Gulf, which received from the East, and passed on to the West, “the wealth of Ormus and of Ind.”

The Crusades blocked for a time the Syrian route. But the Crusades, although impelled forward by the religious fervour of northern Europe, were speedily organized for trade purposes by the Mediterranean Republics. The fleets of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa victualled the armies of the Cross, accompanied their progress along the Syrian coast, and divided their spoils. Under the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1291) the Syrian caravan route revived. It exchanged the products of the tropical East and of the North for the hard cash of the Crusaders, and a regular fur market existed in Jerusalem for the sale of ermine, marten, beaver, and other Siberian or Russian skins. In 1204 the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders, with the Earl of Flanders raised’ to the Imperial dignity, promised to medieval Italy a restoration of the affluence which had flowed from the East to ancient Rome.

But new forces were upheaving in further Asia, destined to overthrow Saracen. culture and Christian trade with a common ruin. About 1038 A.D. the Seljuk Turks had burst upon Persia. Two centuries later the gathered strength of the Mongols poured over Asia under Chingiz Iaan (1206), ravaged through Poland under his son, and under his grandson wrested back Russia to barbarism. In 1258 Baghdad went down before the Mongol hordes, and the Saracenic caliphate was shattered. The tidal wave of devastation spread over the countries of the Syrian caravan track, at times leaping forward in irresistible masses, then pausing to gather volume for the next onrush. In 1403 Timur drove the Knights Hospitallers forth from Smyrna to their island stronghold at Rhodes. By that time the Mongols and Turks had partially blocked the middle trade-route from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, and were preparing to seize the northern trade-route by way of the Black Sea.

The main northern route started from the Indus valley and crossed the western offshoots of the Himalayas and the Afghan ranges to the Oxus. On that great river of Central Asia the products of India were joined by the silks of China, conveyed from the western province of the Celestial Empire by a caravan journey of eighty to a hundred days. The united volume of traffic struggled onward to the Black Sea, due west by the Caspian, southward by Trebizond, northward by the Volga and the Don, as shown on my map. A route referred to somewhat obscurely by Strabo, but with a new interest in our days, seems to have crossed the southern basin of the Caspian. The galleys proceeded up the twelve-mouthed Cyrus River, the modern Kura, as far as its channel allowed.

Their cargoes were then transported by a four or five days’ land journey over the water-parting which separates the Caspian from the Black Sea, until they reached the point where the river Phasis became navigable. Its stream carried the precious freights down to the emporium of the same name at its mouth on the Black Sea: a Milesian settlement whence the pheasant is said to have been brought to Europe by the Argonauts – the legendary pioneers of that branch of Eastern trade. The Russian railway from Baku on the Caspian to Batum on the Black Sea,with Tiflis as the meeting mart midway, corresponds to this ancient route up the river valleys and across the watershed.

Besides the Oxus routes ending on the Black Sea, other roads led from the Indus valley to the west.

After crossing the Hindu Kush the southern tracks touched the capitals of Bactria, Parthia, and Media, eventually reaching Baghdad, Palmyra, Tyre, and Antioch. The spoil found by the soldiers of Heraclius in the palace of King Khosru Parviz shows how the products of India had entered into the courtly life of Persia in the seventh century A.D.

The difficulties of the Central Asia routes to the Black Sea, with their deadly camel journey of alternate snows and torrid wastes, rendered them available only for articles of small bulk. They never attained the importance to India which the two southern trade-routes, by the Syrian caravan track and by the sea-passage to Egypt, acquired. They formed, however, ancient paths between Europe and China, and received prominence from the blocking of the Syrian route in mediaeval times.

From the Black Sea the products of the East went chiefly to Constantinople, but they also penetrated into Europe by the Danube and other channels. The trade appears to have helped toward the early civilization of the Crimea and the Danubian provinces. The emporium of Theodosia on the Crimean coast was, like Phasis, originally a trading colony of the Milesians. It survived, although in decay, to the time of Arrian, and reappears in a variant of its modern name, Kaffa, under the Greek emperor who sent the embassy to Baghdad in 917 A.D.

The Eastern trade by the Black Sea long formed a source of wealth to the Byzantine empire. Conflicts between Christian and Saracen in Syria enhanced its importance, and the Venetian merchants who settled at Constantinople when captured by the Crusaders in 1204, further developed the route. During the fifty-eight years of the Latin empire at Constantinople (1204–1261) the Venetians engrossed the Eastern commerce by way of the Black Sea. Venice stretched her armed trading stations, practically in unbroken succession, from the Adriatic to the Bosphorus, and stood forth before the world as the acknowledged Queen of the Mediterranean.

On the re-establishment of the Byzantine empire (1261), the Genoese, whose mercantile jealousy of Venice overcame their orthodox faith and led them to assist the Greek emperor in the expulsion of their Catholic trade-rivals, took the place of the Venetians at Constantinople.

They received the Pera quarter, commanded the harbour, planted fortified factories – or trading-posts under the superintendence of a factor as head – along the European and Asiatic coasts of the Euxine, occupied part of the Crimea, and made its old emporium at Kaffa the headquarters of the Eastern trade by the Black Sea route. About 1263 they rebuilt the ruined city of Kaffa. Its spacious harbour, with deep water and firm anchorage for a hundred ships, played a leading part in the Genoese monopoly of the Euxine.

Of scarcely less importance was Soldaia, also on the southeast coast of the Crimea. Its Greek settlers had long acted as middlemen between the Asiatic and Russian traders, and, strengthened by a Venetian factory, they grew rich on the Indian commerce by the Black Sea route during the thirteenth century. Marco Polo the elder owned a house at Soldaia which he bequeathed in 1280 to the Franciscan friars of that port. In 1323 Pope John XXII complained that the Christians had been driven forth by the Mongols from Soldaia, and “their churches turned into mosques.” Yet Ibn Batuta (1304–1377) still reckoned it as one of the five great ports of the world. In 1365 Soldaia became a fortified factory of the Genoese, who traded there till the downfall of the Byzantine empire, and whose defensive works survive to this day.