With the Balkan states it was otherwise, whose governments, divided in their counsels, jealous in their rivalries, had been incapable of the union that could alone have saved them, and one by one they were crushed beneath ‘the Conqueror’s’ heel. Greece also came under Moslem domination, and finally the islands of the Aegean Sea that Venice had torn from Constantinople in the interests of her trade were wrested away from her, leaving her faced with the prospect of commercial ruin.
PART II. VOYAGE AND DISCOVERY
Marco Polo
All through the Middle Ages it had been to the cities of the Mediterranean, first of all to Amalfi and Pisa, then to Marseilles, Barcelona, Genoa, and Venice, that Europe had turned as her obvious medium of communication with the East and all its fabulous wonders. In the thirteenth century a Venetian merchant, Marco Polo, setting forth with his father and uncle, had visited the kingdom of Cathay, or China, and brought back twenty years later not only marvellous tales of the court of Khubla Khan in Pekin, but also precious stones, rubies, sapphires, diamonds, and emeralds in such abundance that he was soon nicknamed by his fellow citizens ‘Marco of the Millions’.
Into the delighted ears of the guests he invited to a banquet on his return he poured descriptions of a land where ‘merchants are so numerous and so rich that their wealth can neither be told nor believed. They and their ladies do nothing with their own hands, but live as delicately as if they were kings.’ What seems to have struck his mediaeval mind with most astonishment were the enormous public baths in the ‘City of Heaven’ in southern China, of which there were four thousand, ‘the largest and most beautiful baths in the world.’
The banquets also given by the great Khan excelled any European feasts. They were attended by many thousands of guests, and their host, raised on a dais, had as his servants the chief nobles, who would wind rich towels round their mouths that they might not breathe upon the royal plates. For presents the Khan was accustomed to receive at a time some five thousand camels, or an equal number of elephants, draped in silken cloths worked with silver and gold. His government surpassed in its organization anything Europe had imagined since the fall of the Roman Empire, such, for instance, as the postal system, by means of messengers on foot and horse, that linked up Pekin with lands a hundred days distant, or the beneficent regard of a ruler who in times of bad harvests not only remitted taxation but dispatched grain to the principal districts that had suffered.
Coal was used in China freely, ‘a kind of black stone cut from the mountains in veins,’ as Marco Polo describes it. ‘It maintains the fire’, he added, ‘better than wood, and throughout the whole of Cathay this fuel is used.’
Besides dilating on the wealth and prosperity of China, the Venetian had also much to say of Zipangu, or Japan, of Tibet and Bengal, of Ceylon, ‘the finest island in the world,’ and of Java, supposed then to be ‘above three thousand miles wide’.
Other travellers were to confirm many of his statements, but none told their tale so simply and realistically as Polo, while not a few, like the English Sir John Mandeville in the fourteenth century, supplied fiction in large doses where it seemed to them that truth might bore their readers. The eagerness with which either fact or fiction was swallowed bears witness, at any rate, first to the extraordinary fascination excited in mediaeval minds by such names as ‘Cathay’ or ‘Zipangu’; and next to the general Western belief in the inexhaustible riches of the East and their determination to secure at least a portion.
When the Seljuk Turks, with their fierce animosity towards Christendom, had settled like a curtain between East and West, the dangers and expense of trading and commerce with Arabia and Asia Minor of course increased. Venice and Genoa still brought back shiploads of silks, spices, and perfumes for Western markets, but the price of these goods was increased by the tolls paid to Turkish sultans and emirs for leave to transfer merchandise from camels to trading-sloops. Then came the fall of Constantinople, when Venice, by a treaty with ‘the Conqueror’ in the following year, appeared to secure wonderful trading privileges. Mohammed, however, made such promises only to break them when convenient, and, so soon as he could afford to do so, because he was securely established in Europe, the tolls he demanded became heavier, not lighter, the restrictions he placed upon trade more and more galling to Christian merchants, until the usual purchasers of Venetian goods grew exasperated at prices that doubled and trebled continually.