The effects of wealth were not less formidable to the Romans themselves, than they had been to those nations they had enabled that brave and warlike people to conquer; so that the mistress of the world, in her turn, fell before nations that were rude and barbarous, but uncorrupted by wealth and luxury.
The conquerors of Rome were too rude, and too many in number, to become themselves enervated by wealth, which disappeared under their rapacious grasp, and which they neither had the art nor inclination to preserve.
This invasion of the fertile and rich provinces by men rude and ignorant, but who came from northern climates, established a new order of things; and only a small remnant of former wealth and greatness was preserved in Egypt and at Constantinople.
For several centuries of war and confusion commerce and the arts appear to have been undervalued and neglected; but still the taste [end of page #71] for oriental luxuries was not entirely banished, and, at the first interval of peace and safety, sprung up again. It was then that Alexandria, Venice, Genoa, and Constantinople, became the channels through which the people of Europe procured the luxuries of Asia. Babylon, Memphis, Palmyra, and all the other great cities of antiquity, were no more; even Greece had lost its arts and splendour; Alexandria and Constantinople were repeatedly assailed, taken, and conquered, by the barbarians, who envied their wealth, but who still found an interest in continuing them as channels for procuring to European nations the refinements of the East. Though Venice and Genoa were wealthy, they were but small, and of little importance; and all the nations who might have crushed them at a blow, only considering them as sea-ports of convenience and utility, allowed them to remain independent.
As an intercourse had been established between the northern and southern parts, a taste for the luxuries of Asia had extended to the shores of the Baltic, soon after the victorious arms of Charlemagne had carried there some degree of civilization, and the Christian religion.
Then it was that a new and more widely-extended system of commerce, but something like what had formerly existed in Tyre and Carthage, began in all the maritime towns of Europe, when Italy and Flanders became the most wealthy parts of Europe. A spirit of chivalry, and a desire of conquest, not founded on the same principles with the conquests of ancient nations, or of Rome, to obtain wealth, pervaded all Europe, and the greatest confusion prevailed. In the history of wealth and power, as connected together, this is a chasm. Those who had power despised wealth, and were seeking after what they esteemed more -- military glory; and wealth was confined to a number of insulated spots, and possessed by men who were merchants, without any share of power or authority.
This extraordinary and unprecedented state of things gave rise to the Hanseatic League, which rose at last to such importance that those who had been so long seeking after glory, without finding it, began to see the importance which was derived from wealth. They began to see that, even in the pursuit of their favourite object, wealth was an ex- [end of page #72] cellent assistant, and the friendship of merchants begun =sic= to be solicited by princes, as in the days of Tyre and Sidon.
This progress was greatly facilitated and accelerated by the crusades, which, at the same time that they beggared half the nobility of Europe, gave them a taste for the refinements of the East, and taught them to set some value on the means by which such refinements could be procured.
In this manner were things proceeding, when three great discoveries changed the situation of mankind. {66}
The mariners compass, gunpowder, and the art of printing, were all discovered nearly about the same time; and, independent of their great and permanent effects, they were wonderfully calculated to alter the situation of nations at that period.