Between 1255 and 1262 the Hanseatic League or Trade Guild of the Baltic maritime cities was formed, and within a century it numbered in its membership a hundred ports and inland towns. The league organized merchants for common defence against pirates, the settlement of disputes by arbitration, and the acquisition of commercial favors in distant parts of the world. Maritime laws were codified during the thirteenth century, under the title of “Il Consolato del Mare,” and were generally enforced along the Mediterranean. According to a tradition, the code called “The Laws of Oleron” was compiled by Richard I. during his expedition to Palestine, but with more probability it may be ascribed to the reign of Louis IX. of France. Bills of exchange were in vogue as early as 1255.

Commerce brought wealth in place of the sordid poverty which had marked castle and cottage in the eleventh century. Trade introduced new articles of food and adornment, at first to gratify the palate and eye of the rich, but soon to elevate the scale of living everywhere. Such is the power of habit that luxuries easily acquired quickly become necessities. People learned no longer to look upon “man’s life as cheap as beast’s.” Industries sprang up for the home manufacture of what had originally been brought from abroad. Invention was stimulated, and the domestic arts took their place in the foremost line of the new civilization. The Dark Ages had given way, and at least the gray light of the dawn of a better era illumined the horizon.

We may note in conclusion the influence of the crusades in staying the progress of that gigantic power which for two centuries had contested with Christendom the possession of western Asia. So rapid had been the rise and spread of the new Mohammedan tide of Turkish invasion that, but for the barrier presented by the crusaders, it would have quickly submerged the Balkan peninsula, as it had already done the plains of Asia Minor; and possibly it would have poured its desolation into central Europe at a time when Europe was not prepared to resist, as it did four hundred years later when the Turks besieged Vienna. The appeal of the Greek emperors for the help of their Western Christian brethren in the eleventh century was warranted by the seriousness of the menace. The empire was then too demoralized to withstand alone the onset of these daring hordes, who possessed superior powers of physical endurance, great mental activity quickened by the enterprises they planned for their swords, and courage as yet undaunted by defeat. What they might have speedily accomplished but for their enforced halt of two hundred years on the eastern shores of the Marmora is suggested by what they did almost immediately after the crusaders withdrew their wall of swords. The same decade that witnessed the fall of Acre saw the founding of the present dynasty of Ottoman Turks in Nicomedia (1299). In 1355 they crossed the sea and planted their first European stronghold at Gallipoli. In the next century (1452) Mohammed II. was enthroned as sultan in Constantinople, where his successors have for four hundred years repelled the arms, and still baffle the diplomacy, of Europe.

INDEX.