Beginnings of the American People | Page 8

accompanied by an expansion of the credit system centering in the
banking houses of Florence; while the supply of metals was more than

maintained by the plunder of Asiatic cities, paid over by crusaders in
return for supplies and munitions of war, or brought home by returning
princes and nobles, by priests and merchants, by Knights of St. John or
of the Temple. Between 1252 and 1284, the ducat and the florin and the
famous gold crowns of St. Louis made their appearance,--the sure sign
of an increased gold supply, rising prices, and flourishing trade.
But in 1291 the Kingdom of Jerusalem was overthrown; successful
crusading ceased, and the plunder of Syrian cities was at an end. Yet
the volume of Oriental trade was undiminished; normal exports were
insufficient to pay for imports; and from the end of the thirteenth to the
middle of the fifteenth century the drain of precious metals from
Europe was followed by the inevitable appreciation of gold. Prices fell;
many communes were bankrupt; kings, in desperate straits, debased the
coinage and despoiled the Church. It was in 1291 that Edward I forced
his "loan" from the churches; and Philip IV, in 1296 forbidding the
export of gold and silver from France, set about with unparalleled
cunning and cruelty to destroy the Templars in order to appropriate the
wealth which they had accumulated in the Holy Land.
It was in this very fourteenth century, when gold was appreciating and
prices were falling, that the immense wealth of the Orient was first
fully revealed to Europeans. All the commodities which Arab traders
sold at high prices to Venetian merchants in the Levant were now
known to be of little worth in the markets of India. In that country, all
the reports agreed, "they have every necessity of life very cheap"; and
every luxury as well--forty pounds of "excellent fresh ginger for a
Venice groat"; "three pheasants for an asper of silver"; five grains of
silver buying one of gold; three dishes, "so fine that you could not
imagine better," to be had for less than half a shilling. It was the Arab
middlemen that made the difference: the enemies of Christendom,
intrenched in Jerusalem and Egypt, guarded the easy highways to the
East and took rich toll of all its commerce. What a stroke for State and
Church if Europe, uniting with the Ilkhans of Persia, could establish
direct connections with the Orient, eliminate the infidel middlemen,
and divide with Mongol allies the fruits of Indian exploitation!

Such projects, drifting from court to court in the early fourteenth
century, form the aftermath of the great Crusades. In 1307 Marino
Sanuto, Venetian statesman and geographer, presented to Clement V an
elaborate plan for the revival of the old conflict with Islam. But Sanuto
contemplated something more than the recovery of the Holy Land.
Sketching with sure hand the trade routes from India to the Levant, he
demonstrated that the Arabs were enriched at the expense of Christian
Europe. Yet beyond the narrow confines of Syria were the Mongols,
well disposed toward Christians, but enemies of Mohammedan Arab
and Turk. First weaken the Moslem powers, said Sanuto, by an
embargo on all exports of provisions and munitions of war to Syria and
Egypt, and then overthrow them by a combined attack of Christian and
Mongol armies. The great end would thus be attained: a Christian fleet
on the Indian Ocean, subjugating all the coast and island ports from
India to Hormos and Aden, would act as convoy for Italian merchants
trading directly with the Eastern markets by way of Alexandria and the
Red Sea, or down the Tigris River to the Persian Gulf.
The project of Sanuto, anticipating the achievements of England in our
own day, was doubtless as vain as it was splendid. For the times, in
fourteenth-century Europe, were out of joint. Clement V and his
successors at Avignon, scarcely able to hold the Papal States, were
little inclined to attempt the conquest of Syria. The Empire had lost its
commanding position. Italian cities, released from imperial control,
warred perpetually for existence or supremacy. England and France
were preparing for the desolating struggle that exhausted their
resources for a hundred years. "All Christendom is sore decayed and
feeblished, whereby the Empire of Constantinople leeseth, and is like to
lese," for lack of the "Knights and Squires who were wont to adventure
themselves," but who adventure themselves no more.
In 1386, when this naïve plaint was addressed to Richard II by the
dispossessed King of Armenia, conditions in Asia, even more than
those in Europe, were such as to make the plans of Sanuto forever
impossible. Johan Schiltberger, journeying to the Orient early in the
fifteenth century, encountered dangers and difficulties unknown to
Marco Polo a hundred years earlier. The