The American Nation: A History — Volume 1: European Background of American History, 1300-1600

by Edward Potts Cheyney

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.