The trade between Constantinople, and India and China.
Indeed the fabulous prices obtained for silk and various other articles of Indian produce enabled the trader to overcome any difficulty. Starting from the banks of the Indus, he found his way by one of the early routes, already described, to the river Oxus, or directly to the Caspian, and thence to Constantinople, which became, even more than it had hitherto been, the great centre of European commerce. The intercourse between Constantinople and China was much more difficult and dangerous; as in this case the trader had to proceed to the western provinces of the Chinese empire, and, having purchased his silk, to convey it by caravans, for an average of ninety days, to the banks of the Oxus, and along that stream to the Caspian; thence he followed the course of the river Cyrus, as far it was navigable, and, after a five days’ march overland, found his way to the Euxine, by the river Phasis.[284]
Such were the different means of conducting the commercial intercourse between Europe and the East in ancient times, and such they practically continued, amid various minor changes and through many wars and vicissitudes, up to the period when Vasco de Gama discovered the new and better way to India by doubling the Cape of Good Hope. We shall hereafter glance at the maritime commerce of India from the ninth century up to the time when the Portuguese landed on its shores, with some notices of the celebrated travels of Marco Polo, of the expulsion of the Arabians from its trade, and of the decline of the vast influence so long exercised by the Moors; but in the meantime we must endeavour to trace the maritime commerce of Rome, and especially of the Italian Republics, which afterwards exercised more influence in commercial affairs than the “mistress of the world” had done during her most prosperous days.
FOOTNOTES:
[245] The earliest dated MS. (a Syriac one, now in the British Museum) is dated in the first decade of the fifth century of our era. The Alexandrian codex may be a few years earlier. The oldest Egyptian inscriptions may ascend to B.C. 2000: that on the Moabite stone, perhaps, to B.C. 890.
[246] Robertson’s “Hist. Disquis. on India,” note i. p. 179 (ed. 1791).
[247] It may be added, that while Herodotus alludes to other portions of the history of Sesostris, he omits the tale of his Indian conquests; that Strabo rejects it altogether (xv. p. 85); while Arrian equally doubts it.
[248] Heeren, vol. ii. p. 227, in his “Asiatic Researches,” believes this city to have been founded from 2,000 to 1,500 years before the Christian era.
[249] Herod. iv. 42-44; iii. 84.
[250] Pliny, who calls this city Bactrum, points out the peculiarity of its double-humped camel, yet seen on the Bactrian coins (vii. 87).