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About Google Book Search Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web at |http: //books .google .com/I I aM.RorfefliU, Ihe 01ft of Oourtland Hoppln froB th« llbraty of Illllu WooilTlll« Book illl ll'^-'^iMAK^: aa*.-?»!.l| b THE NEW EMPIRE THE NEW EMPIRE BY BROOKS ADAMS AUTHOR OF " THB LAW OF CIVILIZATION AND DECAY "AMERICA'S ECONOMIC SUPREMACY/' ETC. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Lro. 1902 AH fighU rttfrvtd /i j/t2 f. .— — ■-■ o lo so iql Longitude EastgjTfroin GrMnwtchajS* THE NEW EMPIRE CHAPTER I Two propositions seem indisputable: First, that self-preservation is the most imperious of instincts; Second, that in his efforts to prolong his life, man has followed the paths of least resistance. Without food or the means of defence, death is inevitable, and as few communities have succeeded in entirely feeding and arming themselves from their own resources, they have supplied their deficiencies from abroad. No man will knowingly use interior weapons in war, but the apprehension of want is al- most as drastic as the fear of defeat ; even savages try to improve their tools. For example, the Stone- Age inhabitants of central Europe imported jade axes from the confines of the desert of Gobi because jade takes a better edge than flint. Yet the cost of conveying jade across the Pamirs from Khotan to Germany would now be excessive, and then must have represented a prodigious sacrifice. From the beginning, therefore, men have obtained wares from strangers. They have done so both by force and by purchase; but as battle is uncertain they have inclined toward trade, and to trade, buyer and seller must meet. Usually they have met at the junction of the paths leading to the sources of sup- 2 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. ply. Here houses have multiplied, a wall to protect the houses has been built, and within the wall the neighboring population has gathered on certain days, or at certain seasons, and thus has germinated the market or fair. Fairs have always been frequented in proportion to their consequence, the more noted having been thronged by foreigners. Nevertheless, no fair can thrive unless accessible, and none can be accessible with approaches closed either by defects or robbers ; hence, some system of road-building and police must precede centralized trade. Nor can busi- ness be transacted without a tribunal to decide dis- putes. Accordingly, an administrative mechanism must have always existed at market towns, and the growth of this mechanism at the more important has created capital cities. Thus, it may be inferred that the structure we call civil society is an outgrowth of trade. Finally, as one army and one administrative corps are cheaper than several, the tendency has been toward amalgamation; the lesser market sink- ing into insignificance, and the petty state into a prov- ince. Many independent kingdoms once flourished together in Mesopotamia, but, when consecutive his- tory begins, all had been welded into a single organ- ism with Babylon for a heart. As communications improve and markets broaden, roads stretch out across continents and join oceans ; then the empires traversed by such highways cohere in economic systems, since they have a common inter- est to resist the diversion of their traffic. Sooner or later, however, parallel routes between the same termini are opened, competition between the systems acquires intensity, and economic competition in its I. THE NEW EMPIRE 3 intensest form is war. Hence, from the beginning of history, rival systems have fought with and de- stroyed each other. If one system conquer, con- solidation may follow, and an equilibrium may be obtained which may endure indefinitely, as did the Roman Empire; but if neither can win a decisive advantage, the war may end by forcing commerce into other channels, and both combatants may perish. Such was substantially the fate of the Greek states. Among the inventions which have stimulated movement and consequently centralization, none has equalled the smelting of the metals. Smiths have made from metal superior weapons and tools, and races using these implements have, in the end, en- slaved or exterminated neighbors adhering to wood and stone, wherefore a supply of metal early became essential to existence in the more active quarters of the globe. To procure ore men have wandered far and wide, and thus while the introduction of metal induced a more rapid concentration at the heart of the civilized mass, it caused a proportionate expan- sion at the circumference. Yet no empire and no system can expand equally in all directions, for the resistance to expansion is variable, consequently growth is irregular ; and as the shape of the organism changes, the arteries connecting its extremities must alter their course to correspond. But an alteration of the course of the circulation presupposes a dis- placement of the heart, and for this reason society tends toward instability of equilibrium. Evidently, approached from this standpoint, min- eralogy and geography elucidate history, for the one helps to explain the forces which have moved the V y 4 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. seat of empire, the other the obstacles which have fixed its course by determining the path of least re- sistance. Furthermore, civilization may be examined scientifically. The cause may be deduced from the effect, until the origin of the phenomena of the twen- tieth century may be traced back to the murky past which preceded the pyramid of Cheops, and human development may be presented as a mechanical whole. For present purposes it suffices to begin with the smelting of the metals. We know not when Chaldea and Egypt may have emerged from the Stone Age, but nothing indicates that prior to 4000 B.C. either community had achieved opulence. On the contrary, the evidence indicates that both empires rose to fortune through a success- ful speculation made by the Egyptians in Arabian copper, at the beginning of the fourth dynasty. The richest mines then known lay in the valley of Mag- hara in the peninsula of Sinai, and though the Egyptian kings appear to have previously invaded the valley, a permanent occupation seems only to have been achieved by Sneferu, about 4000 B.C. At the mouth of one of these mines Sneferu com- memorated his victory by causing his portrait to be cut in the rock, slaying a captive, and, near by, an inscription to be carved relating his triumph. That victory, by making Egypt the chief producer of metals, made her the western terminus of commerce, and the market whose tastes had to be consulted by all who needed the minerals she had to sell. Between Asia, east of the Tigris, and Egypt, lay Mesopotamia ; all trade routes converged there, accordingly Meso- potamia became the central market where the most I. THE NEW EMPIRE 5 important exchanges were effected, and thus was founded the Babylonian economic system. This mighty system, which, in its prime, comprised all the nations bordering the highways connecting the Oxus and the Indus with the Guadalquivir, flourished for nearly three thousand years. Culminating about the siege of Troy, for some centuries it struggled with the Greek system afterward established along the cheaper waterways of the north, and finally sank into ruin under the onset of Alexander the Great. The evidence that Egypt achieved affluence through her mines, especially her Arabian copper mines, is pretty convincing. The Egyptians were good metal- lurgists and certainly worked gold, iron, copper, and bronze before the fourth dynasty. The gold and iron came originally from Nubia. According to Diodorus the Nubian gold mines, under Rameses II. or in the fourteenth century B.C., yielded annually bullion to the value of $65o,(XK),ooo.^ Possibly, also, the Nubi- ans discovered the smelting of iron, and the Egyptians may in early times have drawn their supply of steel, especially as a finished product, from the south. Afterward they mined iron in the valley of Maghara, near their copper. Yet conceding that iron was used in Egypt under Cheops, it cost high, and held a secondary place in the arts. Copper served as the useful metal.* Except the systematic working of the Maghara mines, nothing is known to have occurred in Egypt about the beginning of the fourth dynasty which ^ Die GesehUhte des Eisens^ Beck, I., 71. * See Die Geschichie des Eisens, Ludwig Beck, I., 77, 96. Also ffistoire de PArt^ Perrot & Chipiez, I., 650, 831. 6 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. could have caused a social revolution. The relations of the country with Nubia underwent no especial change before the campaigns of Una, five hundred years later ; the methods of industry, transportation, and agriculture remained unaltered, and yet, im- mediately after Sneferu's conquest, Egypt entered her golden age. This fact is established by her architecture. Egyptian emotion found its strongest expression in the tomb. As tomb builders the Egyptians have had no equal. The pyramid stands alone as an everlasting abode for the dead. Also the era of colossal art opens with Sneferu. Sneferu reigned for twenty-nine years, between 3998 B.C. and 3969. As he first regularly mined the Sinai copper, so he first built a pyramid. He even built two, one of which survives. Cheops succeeded Sneferu, and Cheops's tomb is still a wonder of the world. Nor, in the expenditure lavished on details of workmanship, have the builders of the pyramids of Gizeh ever been surpassed. The fourth dynasty lasted for 284 years, during which period construction continued on a scale thus described by Flinders Petrie : " The simplicity, the vastness, the perfection, and the beauty of the earliest works place them on a different level to all works of art and man's devices in later ages. They are unique in their splendid power, which no self-conscious civilization has ever rivalled, or can hope to rival ; and in their enduring greatness they may last till all feebler works of man have perished." ^ Egypt must have amassed wealth rapidly to have ^ History ofEgypt^ I., 67. L THE NEW EMPIRE J borne this burden through near three centuries with- out exhaustion, and the magnitude of her foreign trade is proved by the rise of Mesopotamia where her commercial exchanges centred. The glory of North Mesopotamia opened with the renowned Sar- gon, who reigned about 3850 B.C., whose empire is supposed to have extended to Cyprus, if not to Mag- hara itself, and who stands as the first of that long line of potentates which ended with the Darius who perished in his flight from Alexander. Centuries before Sargon, Ur of the Chaldeans held the first place in the valley of the Euphrates. Ur stood at the junction of the coast road from India with the camel track leading to Sinai, accordingly the reasonable inference would seem to be that, originally, the chief traffic passed straight from the mouth of the Indus to the mines on the Red Sea, and that the highways converging at Babylon acquired conse- quence later. Ample explanation of such a growth is to be found in the geography of central Asia. The combined continents of Asia and Europe have proved impossible to develop as a unit, not only because their different shapes demand irreconcilable systems of transportation, but because of the deserts and mountains in their midst. Still commerce be- tween the East and West has always been a neces- sity, because the two regions supplement each other. While India, China, and Turkestan have been re- nowned for agriculture, manufactures, and the pro- duction of luxuries and gems, they have failed to compete in the metals; whereas Europe, though dependent on Asia for spices and the like, has sur- passed her in mining. 8 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. But before there could be commercial exchanges between East and West, avenues of communication had to be opened, and the cheapest of these long pre- sented insuperable difficulties. For ages the voyage from China to India, and from India to Egypt, defied nautical skill. Although primitive savages use boats, the sail is a later invention, and the art of working to windward modem. Dangerous coasts affright the navigators of frail ships and the open sea appalls them, yet the voy- age to Aden, or even the Euphrates, lay over a waste of waters, or along a barbarous and desolate shore. Even as late as 325 B.C., when Nearchus returned from India with Aleicander's army, the Greek gen- eral nearly perished. From Pattala, at the mouth of the Indus, it took Nearchus nearly three months to reach the Persian Gulf. There he met Alexander, but so changed by hardship that the emperor did not know him. Although, of course, provided with the best craft, pilots, and stores which were to be obtained, Nearchus lost several ships by wreck, had to abandon others, narrowly escaped death from hun- ger and thirst, and was assailed by the natives when he landed. If Nearchus fared so ill upon the short voyage from the Indus to the Tigris, the lot of the lonely merchantman bound for Egypt may be imagined. Direct communication between India and Egypt only opened after the Christian era. Therefore merchandise crossed central Asia by caravan, and in an- cient times by one of three routes, for the northern plain now traversed by the Siberian railway led to no market before civilization spread to the Baltic. Until the Mid- dle Ages the Mediterranean afforded the only vent. I. THE NEW EMPIRE 9 The heart of Asia from Lake Baikal to India is occupied by the desert of Gobi and the ranges of the Altai, the Pamirs, the Hindu Kush, and the Himalaya, forming together a tremendous barrier. When, after crossing the Gobi, the traveller reached Kashgar or Yarkand at the base of the mountains, he might turn to the south toward the Indus, keep on due east toward the Oxus, or journey north into the valley of the Syr-Daria. If he chose the southern road, he followed the paths described by Wood and Young- husband along the tributaries of the Oxus until he found a pass in the Hindu Kush, leading to India.^ Once on the banks of the Indus he descended the river to the delta, and, at Pattala, took the southern highway to Babylon, along which Alexander marched. The objections to this route were manifold. It was long, toilsome, and dangerous. Secondly, merchants utilized the valley of the Syr- Daria. After the fall of Troy caravans passed along the northern coast of the Caspian, to the Sea of Azov, by way of the Volga and the Don ; and since the Middle Ages they have sought Moscow, by Tash- kend, Turkestan, and Orenburg. Before the opening of the Hellespont to commerce, these northern outlets were closed, and traffic had to pass by Maracanda, the modem Samarkand. But as gaining the Syr-Daria from Kashgar involved making the Terek pass 12,700 feet high, and closed in summer by melting snow, a more northern track through Siberia, and south of Lake Balkash, seems to have been preferred. It is noteworthy that Maracanda never attained the con- 1 See the route of Benedict Goes given on Yule's map in Cathay andOu Way Thithery VoL 2, Hakluyt Soc. Publications. 10 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. sequence of Bactra, the inference being that, before the Middle Ages, the highway on which the town stood remained a subsidiary avenue. In 12 18, at the open- ing of his campaign against Trans-Oxania, Jenghiz Khan marched through this region on Otrar. Doubt- less he followed what was then the beaten track. Will- iam of Rubruck was carried over the same road in 1253,^ and in the time of Tamerlane the northern route seems to have superseded all others. Friar William also started from the Sea of Azov, an outlet much used by the Greeks and also by the Genoese. Neverthe- less, in antiquity, speaking broadly, the bulk of traffic probably took the path afterward selected by Marco Polo, who kept as straight as might be across the Pamirs into the valley of the Oxus, and thence to Bactra, which we know as the wretched hamlet of Balkh.2 From an economic standpoint Bactra pre- sents phenomena of surpassing interest. The city was created by the junction of the main thoroughfare to China with that which led to northern India by Bamian, Kabul, and the Khyber. While the sea pre- sented the terrors encountered by Nearchus, the mer- chants of Kashmir and the Punjab had the alternative of descending the Indus and then journeying by land to Babylon, or of crossing the mountains and seeking Bactra. Apparently they preferred the latter, for the ruins of Bamian still fill the pass, while the re- mains of Bactra cover a circuit of twenty miles, after six hundred years of abandonment. 1 See map prepared by Hon. W. W. Rockhill in his edition of 7^ Journey of WiUiam of Rubruck^ Publications of Hakluyt Soc, Second Ser., No. IV. ^ For Polo's route, see Yule's edition of Marco Polo. I. THE NEW EMPIRE II When Nineveh and Babylon were born, Bactra, the mother of cities, was akeady hoary. The legend has it that when Ninus, the founder of Babylon, was besieging Bactra, the ineffable Semiramis joined his camp, and by her intelligence, carried the walls. Ninus, captivated by her wit, her courage, and her beauty, drove her husband to suicide and married her. At all events Bactra long remained the me- tropolis for the trade of China, the Punjab, Kashmir, and Turkestan ; and from Bactra many roads diverged to the sea. Of these roads, according to the legend, Semiramis built the first across the Zagros Mountains to Babylon, a road still used by the traveller from Bagdad to Teheran. A second avenue unites Balkh with Teheran, Mosul, and Alexandretta, and for- merly connected the famous cities of Bactra, Ragae, Gaugamela, Nisabis, Haran, and Aradus. From any Syrian port such as Aradus, Tyre, or Sidon, the mari- ner steered due west to Cyprus, Crete, Carthage, and Cadiz. Thus, before the opening of the Dardanelles, the lands beyond the Oxus and the Indus were connected with the Mediterranean by three main thorough- fares : — First, that which leaving Pattala skirted the Ara- bian Sea and the Persian Gulf, reaching the Nile by Ur. Second, that built by Semiramis across the Zagros Mountains between Bactra, Babylon, and the coast. Third, that which joined Bactra, Nineveh, Haran, and Aradus. Upon each of these thoroughfares a great market was begotten, and if the chronological order in which 12 THE NEW EMPIRE chap, these markets grew be examined, it will be found to indicate a movement northward of the seat of empire continued through thousands of years, and gaining constantly in velocity. The rise of Ur, the most southern of the three capitals, is lost in the past, but Ur must have been extremely ancient, since she had culminated when Sargon reigned in 3850 B.C. In Sargon's time the centre of exchanges seems to have been in transit, for Sargon's chief city was, probably, Nippur, about two-thirds of the way from Ur to Babylon; notwithstanding which, Babylon only achieved supremacy fifteen hundred years later, under Hammurabi, toward 2250 b.c. Compared with such sluggishness the advance from Babylon to Nineveh was rapid, for Salmanassar established the prepon- derance of Assyria in Mesopotamia about 1300 B.c. Salmanassar chose for the site of his capital the angle made by the confluence of the Tigris and the Great Zab, where are now the mounds of Nimrud. His successors moved to Nineveh, eighteen miles up the Tigris, but the new city was only an extension of Calach. Meanwhile, movement had been acceler- ated, for Nineveh lived fast, even judged by modem standards. Bom in 1300, she perished in 607 b.c, just as Athens and Syracuse blossomed. An impulsion so persistent must have been the effect of an equally persistent cause. Such a cause might have been the expansion of the economic mass occasioned by the opening to commerce of the basins of the Mediterranean and Euxine. It can be demon- strated in support of this view that these regions were developed during this interval. I. THE NEW EMPIRE 1 3 Certainly the assumption is justified that prior to 4CXX) B.C. Europe was barbarous and poor, and the purchasing power, even of Egypt, limited. The Nile, therefore, formed the terminus of the eastern trade, and offered the single market of consequence west of the Euphrates. Under such conditions only small articles of pure necessity, such as jade axe-heads, could have been transported from China to Europe over the long and costly route by Bactra. Bulky merchandise would have followed the shortest road to Egypt. That road lay through Ur and Arabia straight to Sinai, where copper might be obtained for goods. The conquest of Maghara worked a social revolu- tion in the west by enlarging its purchasing power, and creating capitalistic accumulations in Chaldea which stimulated expansion. This appears from the annexation of C}rprus by Sargon, and the transfer- ence of mining activity from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. The Phoenicians led in enterprise, and the discovery and development of Cyprian cop- per was the first of their many industrial triumphs. Another thousand years elapsed before Babylon achieved supremacy, for Babylon's rise was the effect of the extension of exchanges westward until they, probably, reached the Atlantic. That such an exten- sion occurred is proved by the recent excavations in Crete, which show that in 2400 B.C., or before Ham- murabi, Crete had become a civilized and opulent kingdom, and a foremost maritime power. Crete could only have prospered because she lay in the track of a lucrative commerce flowing west, and that commerce must have been the Bactra trade which 14 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. reached Babylon over the highway of Semiramis as soon as Babylon offered a market for costly wares. These wares passed from Babylon to a Phoenician port, such as Tyre or Sidon, and thence were shipped wherever they could be exchanged for metal or slaves. Who the Phoenicians were, and whence they came, is immaterial. Archaeologists incline to the opinion that they migrated from India to the head of the Persian Gulf and thence passed on into Syria, proba- bly always in the wake of the commerce which they loved so well. Nor did their migrations stop at Syria ; a few hundred years later they had wandered to Spain by way of Utica, and founded Cadiz. The Phoenicians were the greatest explorers and metallur- gists of antiquity. They penetrated every inlet and prospected in every land. They developed the re- sources of southern Europe and northern Africa west of Egypt, and as the sphere of Phoenician enterprise expanded, the lines of commimication changed to correspond. Therefore the route across Arabia to Sinai yielded to those leading to Aradus, Tyre, and Sidon. A glance at the map will explain the situa- tion. Nobody knows where the ancients obtained the tin with which they made bronze in the early times, for tin is not supposed to have been found in any region accessible to them. Primitive workings are, indeed, said to exist near Bamian, but the cost of transporting ore from Bamian to Egypt by caravan must have been prohibitive. A plausible theory is that before the Phoenicians reached Cornwall by sea, they dealt with the natives for tin at the mouths of such rivers as the Rhone, where it had come from England by passing from hand to hand; that they I. THE NEW EMPIRE 1 5 slowly traced the supply to its source, and so dis- covered the mines.^ But wherever they found their ore, the Phoenicians certainly waxed rich by their dealings in metals, and, as capital increased, ships multiplied, energy aug- mented, and exploration went on faster. The next step was the development of the countries bordering the Euxine, and probably expansion in this direction received its first stimulus from the discovery of gold in Lydia. When the Lydian gold first permeated the inter- national market can never be ascertained, but, judg- ing by the legends, it must have been during the Babylonian supremacy. According to the myth, cer- tain peasants having found Silenus drunk in a garden belonging to Midas, bound him with garlands of flowers and brought him to the king. Midas enter- tained him for some days, and then restored him to Dionysus, who in his gratitude granted Midas a wish. Midas wished to turn all he touched into gold. But in eating he turned his food into gold, so that, on the brink of starvation, Midas prayed to be saved from himself. The god ordered him to bathe at the source of the Pactolus, whose sands forthwith became gold. From this sand Croesus afterward drew his wealth. Lydian gold opened a new market and drew trade north. Doubtless this trade first passed by Nineveh to Tarsus, and then through the Cilician Gates to Sardis by way of Philadelphia, a route which Taver- nier mentioned as much used in his time ; or else it may have gone up the valley of the Tigris, and over what later became the Royal Persian Road. In ^ See Die Geschickte des Eisens, Beck, I., 1S4 ef seq. 1 6 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. either case the journey through Nineveh necessitated a long detour, the direct line to Sardis and Smyrna from Teheran passing to the north of Lake Van, through the modem Tabriz and Erzeroum. But all Armenia is mountainous and difficult, and it was the difficulty of Armenia which ruined the Assyrian em- pire. The Caucasus and Urals are rich in minerals, and once abounded in gold. Georgia has always been famous for its slaves. And as travel drew northward toward the shortest lines of communica- tion, these regions began to be explored not only overland, but through such ports as Trebizond and Sinope. How rich this region must have been for the early adventurers is proved by every discovery of modem times. Not to speak of the gold ornaments of Panticapaeum, found by the Russians, and which belong to a later age, Schliemann's treasure would set doubt at rest A generation ago, in searching for Troy, Schliemann fell upon the lowest of six super- imposed cities, the last of which was Ilium. The town Schliemann unearthed belonged to the Stone Age, so far as useful metals were concerned, and must have been extremely ancient, yet in this small and barbarous community he found the hoard which made him famous. Beside the metals, the slaves of Georgia and southern Russia have always been of value. When Chardin visited Persia in 1664, he sailed in a slaver. If these geographical conditions be borne in mind the career of Nineveh is comprehensible. Nineveh prospered during the relatively short period when she served as the centre of the trade passing east and west, between Bactra, the northern ports of Syria, I. THE NEW EMHRE 1 7 Lydia, and the basin of the Black Sea. When that commerce sought cheaper routes, she fell ; but while she lived, she lived only on the condition that she could hold and police the avenues running west and north. Accordingly her story is one of perpetual war. Her emperor lived in the field. The campaigns of Tiglat-Pileser I. about 1 100 b.c, one of the greatest of her captains, and who achieved a suzerainty over Babylon, are typical of what happened during every reign. Tiglat-Pileser I. passed his life in warfare along the highways diverging from Nineveh toward Syria and Armenia. The fiercest fighting occurred in Armenia, in the same country where Mithradates, centuries afterward, resisted Rome. The seasons resembled each other, but, according to Winckler, he achieved one of his most brilliant successes in the second year of his reign, when he conquered the Kummuchs, a nomadic and predatory tribe which inhabited the hills between Haran and Amida, and robbed on the road to Antioch. In the fifth year he marched through north Meso- potamia to Aradus, and celebrated his triumph by sailing upon the open sea.^ Nevertheless his most important victory was probably achieved in Armenia, — a victory commemorated by a column which still stands. The road from Trebizond to Nineveh skirts the base of the huge extinct volcano called Nimrud, which forms the core of the mountainous region about Lake Van, and Betlis to the south of Nimrud com- mands the pass leading to the plateau above. For ages the princes of Betlis maintained their indepen- dence; the last fell in 1849. Tavernier, who left 1 Geschichte Babyloniem und Assyriens^ Hugo Winckler, 175. c 1 8 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. Paris for Persia in November, 1663, thus described their fortress : — " Betlis is the principal town of a bey or prince of the country, the most powerful apd the most con- siderable of all; because he recognizes neither the Sultan of Turkey nor the King of Persia, while the others all owe allegiance to one or the other. Both powers are interested in standing well with him, because on whichever side he might range himself, it would be easy for him to close the road to those who wish to take this route from Aleppo to Tabriz, or from Tabriz to Aleppo. For there are no moun- tain passes to be seen in the world easier to guard, and ten men will defend them against a thousand. In approaching Betlis when one comes from Aleppo, one marches an entire day between high and steep mountains which continue for two leagues beyond. And one has always on one side the torrent and on the other the mountains, the path being cut in the rock in many places, so that the camels and the mules have to walk cautiously to prevent falling into the water." The castle stood perched on a sugar-loaf hill, so steep that it could only be reached by a zigzag, and was defended by three moats. " The prince who commands in this place, beside being redoubtable because of this pass which cannot be forced, can put in the field twenty or twenty-five thousand horse, and a quantity of excellent infantry composed of the shepherds of the country, who are always ready at the first command." ^ "^Les Six Voyages de Jean BapHste Tavemiery Edition of 1712. Livre 3, p. 375, 6. I. THE NEW EMPIRE 1 9 To place Nineveh's commercial interests on any- thing approaching a solid basis, she should have con- quered and held Armenia, but more especially the country round Lake Van, where the roads leading west from Tabriz and north from Nineveh crossed. The Ass)n:ians failed ; and they paid the penalty of failure. Among the many commanders who essayed the task, perhaps Tiglat-Pileser fared best, for he not only forced the pass of Betlis, but he met the enemy on the plain of Melazkert above, and routed them at the point where the roads to Trebizond and Kars fork. There he erected the pillar which commemorates his victory. Had the Assyrian race possessed the energy to con- tinue the movement northward, to conquer Armenia, to extend their power along the coast to the Darda- nelles, and to overrun Lydia, as the Persians did subsequently, possibly the life of the Babylonian system might have been prolonged for centuries, and the rise of Greece proportionately postponed. The fate of Asia was not so much decided at Salamis as centuries before at Van. Assyria produced no greater warrior than Tiglat-Pileser III., and under him she made the supreme effort In 735 b.c. he advanced on Van, took the town, and laid siege to the citadel. He suffered a repulse, and retreated. Then Assyria began to decline, and during the season of her decay the Greeks gained strength to resist the Persian onset when the storm broke three hundred years later.^ ^ For an account of the Van conntiy, see Armenia^ by H. F. 6. Lynch, 2,s^efse^, 20 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. As long as the Dardanelles remained closed, and the Greeks were excluded from the Euxine, they lay too far to the north to participate in the Bactra trade, or to seriously compete with the Phoenicians. The question of unchallenged Asiatic supremacy turned upon command of the straits, and this both sides seem to have understood. Even hampered as they were by their inability to hold the roads to the northwest, the Assyrians appear to have done their best to pro- tect their interests. Diodorus has stated that Troy received help from Nineveh during the siege; and apart from Diodorus, the legend of the Argonauts proves the danger which attended an attempt to enter the Propontis, and leads to the inference that Troy must have been an outwork of the Assyrian- Phoenician combination. On their side the Greeks showed a patience in attack perhaps unequalled in their history. Though wonderfully gifted in many directions, the Greeks usually lacked cohesion. Sel- dom, even when invaded, could they unite against an enemy. Yet Agamemnon formed a coalition for an aggressive campaign, and won a decisive victory. Nor were they less successful in improving their ad- vantage than in gaining it All the world has heard of the deeds of the heroes before the walls of Troy; but very few have reflected on the genius which raised the children of these heroes from insignificance to supremacy in the Orient. The Greeks excelled not only as soldiers, as artists, as orators, and as poets, but as colonizers and finan- ciers. Long study alone breeds an appreciation of their marvellous aptitudes. Advancing steadily for centuries, they wrought out a system for controlling I. THE NEW EMPIRE 21 the roads converging on Bactra, at once comprehen- sive and economical. Their scanty numbers precluded extended conquests, their poverty the maintenance of great armies; they therefore limited themselves to seizing and holding the points which commanded trade. But the Greek system deserves to be followed from the beginning. The Greeks, though intelligent and brave, were scattered and poor. Their sterile hills yielded but a precarious subsistence, their mines were undeveloped, and they eked out a slender livelihood by slaving and piracy. These conditions are reflected in their myths, which teem with their revolt against oppression and their yearning for that wealth which poured past their threshold. The exquisite tale of Theseus, who volun- teered to take his place among the victims sent to Crete, that he might fight and slay the Minotaur and deliver his country from the yoke of Minos ; of his victory, of his return with the black sail which was to signify his death, and of his father's agony and suicide at the sight, is the tradition of the upris- ing against Cretan slaving. On the other hand, we have the Argo penetrating the Euxine, and Jason bringing back the golden fleece from Colchis, where the Greeks afterward planted Phasis, the door to the Caspian ; and last and greatest of all, Hercules, who sought, in the garden of the Hesperides, those golden apples which were to be plucked in Spain. Stretching east from Sunium, the islands lie so close together that the longest interval of open water between Attica and Ionia is the twenty-five miles separating Myconos from Icaria. At the end of this chain of islands lies Miletus, and it was along 22 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. this causeway that Neleus, the son of Codrus, must have passed when he founded the mother of the Greek colonies in Asia. Perhaps, indeed, Neleus may have come rather as the leader of a reenforce- ment than as the actual founder of Miletus. Codrus lived in 1050 B.C., which is relatively late, and the Greek tradition seldom went back to the original settlement, but rather chronicled the events which dwelt in the popular imagination as the beginning of the Golden Age. Nevertheless, the precise date is immaterial ; the essential fact is that no sooner had the Greeks planted themselves firmly on the coast than they spread along the shore, colonizing the more important points, until at Lampsacus, at Chalcedon, and at Byzantium they obtained control of the straits. Probably they had previously explored the Euxine, for they appear very early to have seized upon all the avenues converging on the sea, by which trade could find vent. They built Tyras, near where Odessa now stands, and Olbia at the entrance to the chain of watercourses, by following which, traffic through- out the Middle Ages reached Scandinavia by the Dnieper, the Lovat, and Lake Ladoga. Farther east, in the Crimea, they settled at Panticapaeum, the mod- em Kertch, where recent excavations have yielded the gold ornaments which are the gem of the Her- mitage in St. Petersburg. From Panticapaeum mer- chants travelled to the Caspian by ascending the Don, crossing the neck between the rivers, and descending the Volga. Poti is the terminus of the Caucasian railway, whence the line leads direct to Tiflis and Baku; but Poti occupies the site of the ancient Phasis, as Trebizond, the port of Teheran, I. THE NEW EMPIRE 23 does of Trapezus. Lastly came Sinope, where the roads met which led southeast to Nineveh, or Mosul, and southwest to Sardis, the capital of the kingdom of Croesus. Yet this was but the half of what the Greeks conceived and executed. To have established connections with the East alone would not have suf- ficed; a market had to be secured in the West Accordingly while Athens, Megara, and Miletus girdled the Black Sea, Corinth and Achaia stretched out to Sicily and Italy, and contemporaneously cre- ated Syracuse, Sybaris, Croton, and Tarentum — the immortal Magna Graecia. Before the Greeks navigated the Black Sea, mer- chandise must have reached Sardis by caravan, prob- ably over the road which crossed the Maeander near Hierapolis, a route described by Xenophon, and after- ward by Tavemier. Miletus lay below, at the mouth of the river, and flourished not only on the trade which flowed directly to it, but also as one of the ports of Sardis. The Greeks inhabiting Miletus grew rich fast, and as they prospered pushed for- ward by sea toward the sources of supply, always seeking cheaper avenues of communication. In their explorations they could not have met with much opposition, for the Euxine had an infamous reputa- tion, and the inhabitants of Asia Minor were timid sailors. Of course no caravan from Teheran can now compete with steamers on the Black Sea, but they did better when ships were frailer, and, even in the seventeenth century, Persians and Frenchmen pre- ferred the sixty days of horseback to facing the perils of the voyage to Trebizond, which is still the port of Teheran. 24 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. The best early account of the journey east by sea is given by Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, an ambassador sent by Henry HI. of Castile to Tamer- lane at Samarkand. Samarkand lies in nearly the same longitude as Bactra, only farther north, on the other side of the Oxus, so that the journey thither was substantially the same as that to Balkh. On Tuesday, the 22d of May, 1403, the embassy embarked at Cadiz, but they did not finally leave Spain until the 29th, when they sailed from Malaga. Although Clavijo travelled in state, he made use of ordinary merchantmen, so that he underwent the delays incident to commerce, and his voyage to Trebi- zond may be taken as typical. From Trebizond he rode so hard, by the command of Tamerlane, that several of his suite died of fatigue. No caravan could have done the like. Nevertheless he only reached Samarkand a year from the 30th of the fol- lowing August. Clavijo found both the Mediterra- nean and the Black seas dangerous, the Black hardly more so than the Mediterranean, considering that he traversed the Mediterranean in summer, and only reached the Euxine in the middle of November. He consumed five months in gaining Constantinople, and more than once gave himself up for lost. For ex- ample, on July 29th, his ship drifted so near a rock that "the captain, and some merchants and sailors, stripped off their clothes ; and, when they stood off the shore, they understood that God had shown great mercy." At Constantinople the ambassador waited until November 13th for "a vessel to take them to Trebizond ; and, as the winter was approaching and I. THE NEW EMPIRE 2$ the sea very dangerous . . . they took a galliot to prevent further delay." On the second day out, in the middle of the night, "the wind rose and the sea got up." They were lying within sight of a Genoese carrack and tried to reach her, but it blew so hard that they could not. Then they let go two anchors, but " the gale increased in a frightful way, and every person commended him- self to God our Lord, for they thought they would never escape." Meanwhile the carrack " was like to run foul of the galliot ; but it pleased our Lord God to succour her, and she passed without touching ; and they let go the anchors of the said carrack, but they would not hold, and she drifted on shore. Before day, she had gone to pieces, so that nothing was left of her." The galliot lived through the night, and with dawn the wind changed, " and became fair for the land of Turkey." "There were few to assist in working the s^jail, as the greater part of the crew were more dead than alive, so that if death had really come, they would not have cared much." Finally they reached shore, but the galliot went aground and " the sea swept into her, and at intervals the swell caused by the tempest broke over her ; and in the lulls the men carried the things to the land, and thus all the king's property was saved. In a very short time, however, the galliot was broken up, and her cargo was piled up in a heap." So Clavijo returned to Pera, where they remained all winter, reaching Trebizond the nth of April, nearly eleven months after leaving Spain.^ Even "^Narration of the Embassy of Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo to ih€ Court of Timour^ 53, Publications of the Hakluyt Society. 26 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. within this century, Curzon has estimated that half the Turkish ships navigating the Black Sea were lost annually. Chardin, who visited Persia in 1664, did not like Black Sea ships. " I pointed out to him that we had neither provisions nor supplies, that the vessel was old, that it was filled daily with slaves of both sexes and all ages, so that one could no longer move on her. That since morning there had arrived a large number of Abcas and Migrahans who swarmed with vermin, and brought an infection which would en- gender the pest, that the vessel would only sail for Kaffa in two months, that this would be the season of tempests, and the time when the Black Sea, that sea so stormy and dangerous, is the most disturbed by hurricanes."^ Tavemier shared these views : " Embarking from Constantinople, one can arrive there [Trebizond] with a favorable wind in four or five days. In this way one can make in ten or twelve days, at slight expense, the journey from Constantinople to Erze- roum. Some have tried this route, but they have not found it satisfactory, and have not wished to return. It is a very dangerous voyage, and rarely made, be- cause this sea is full of fogs, and subject to tempests." Each race followed its instincts, the more hardy and adventurous gaining the advantage. Chardin and Tavemier represented the French; and the French, on the whole, fell steadily behind in the Levant, where during the crusades they stood fore- most. The Venetians, the Genoese, and afterward ^ Voyages de M. U Chevalier Chardin^ Edition of Amsterdam, 1711,2, II, I. THE NEW EMPIRE 27 the English, followed the sea, and ousted their rivals who adhered to caravans. When Clavijo returned to Pera after his wreck, he found " six Venetian galleys at the great city ... to meet the ships which were com- ing from Tana." And the Genoese were more active than the Venetians. The Persians always shunned the water. Tavemier mentioned that a caravan left Constantinople every two months for Persia, and the one he joined at Sm3n:na for Ispahan numbered twelve hundred horses and camels. The Greeks in 700 B.C. held the same advantage as the Italians of the Middle Ages, only in a greater degree. The most intelligent and enterprising of all the ancient races, they faced the danger of the voyage to Trebizond in order to benefit by its economy ; and they earned their reward. In those early days central Asia was more flourishing than it ever has been since, for then none of its commerce had been diverted. When Clavijo lived, the routes were being abandoned, and yet he visited a land which, although it had been invaded, devastated, and superseded as a thorough- fare, still impressed him as opulent. For instance, the Spaniard described Nishapoor as " very large, and well supplied with all things. . . . the neighborhood is very populous and fertile "... where one of his suite named Gomez was lodged in a good house, and attended by the best doctors ; " but it pleased God that the said Gomez should end his days at this place." Nishapoor is now a ruinous village with a population estimated at eight thousand. Tabriz, though decayed, still remains one of the most prosperous cities of Persia. " The city of Tabriz is very large and rich, owing to the quantity of merchandise that passes 28 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. through it every day. They say that in former days it was more populous ; but even now there are more than two hundred thousand inhabited houses. There are also many market-places, in which they sell very clean and well-dressed meat, cooked in a variety of ways, and plenty of fruit. ... In this city there are many very rich and beautiful mosques, and the finest baths that, I believe, can be seen in the whole world." ^ Two hundred thousand inhabited houses indicated a population approximating a million ; but about 1680, though Chardin spoke of Tabriz with enthusiasm " as a really great and powerful city, whose commerce extended through Persia, Muscovy, Tartary, India, and the Black Sea," he computed that she possessed no more than fifteen thousand dwellings, or, in other words, that the population had shrunk to less than one hundred thousand. At present the buildings of Tabriz are mean, the only remains of former grandeur being the ruins of the Blue Mosque and the citadel. The movement northward of the current of travel to the road leading across Siberia to Moscow on the one hand, and the discovery of the ocean voyage round the Cape of Good Hope to India and China on the other, killed this ancient civilization. In the fif- teenth century, though the revolution was in progress, it had not been completed. A remnant of the Indian trade still survived. At Sultanieh, Clavijo found that each year " very large caravans of camels arrived, with great quantities of merchandise. . . . Every year many merchants come here from India, with spices, such as cloves, nut- megs, cinnamon, . . . and other precious articles ^ Embassy to Timour, 90, I. THE NEW EMPIRE 29 which do not go to Alexandria." ^ When the eastern trade split, and, to avoid the Pamirs, either passed by sea to Europe or else went north by Siberia, the civilization of central Asia died. Therefore, to judge of Bactra in her prime, our only resource is to recall what remained at Samarkand, just as the age of splendor closed. Thus Clavijo described a lesser palace of Tamerlane. " In the centre of the garden there was a very beautiful house, built in the shape of a cross, and very richly adorned with orna- ments. In the middle of it there were three chambers, for placing beds and carpets in, and the walls were covered with glazed tiles. Opposite the entrance, in the largest of the chambers, there was a silver gilt table, as high as a man, and three arms broad, on the top of which there was a bed of silk cloths, embroid- ered with gold . . . and here the lord was seated. The walls were hung with rose-colored silk cloths, orna- mented with plates of silver gilt, set with emeralds, pearls, and other precious stones, tastefully arranged. ... In the centre of the house, opposite the door, there were two gold tables, each standing on four legs, and the table and legs were all in one. They were each five palmos long, and three broad ; and seven golden phials stood upon them, two of which were set with large pearls, emeralds, and turquoises, and each one had a ruby near the mouth. There were also six round golden cups, one of which was set with large round clear pearls, inside, and in the centre of it there was a ruby, two fingers broad, and of a brilliant color. The ambassadors were invited to this feast by the lord." ^ Thus the prize for which so much blood was to be 1 Embassy to Timour^ 93. * Udd,^ 136. 30 THE NEW EMPIRE CHAP. spilled, and the paths along which that prize had to be sought, become visible. Twelve hundred years before Christ, Asiatics and Europeans began their struggle for the control of the avenues of the eastern trade which radiated from Bactra. The Assyrians met defeat in Armenia and perished. The Greeks forced the Dardanelles and opened the Euxine. The gold of Lydia drew commerce overland toward the Maeander, at whose mouth, near where the caravans halted, the Greeks made their first lodgment pn the continent. From Miletus, spreading north and east- ward, always reaching out toward the sources of supply, the Greeks girdled the basin of the Black Sea until they held every outlet in their hands, the whole system of traffic converging on the isthmus of Corinth. Toward the end of the seventh century before Christ the work appears to have been completed, and when the complex yet elastic mechanism oper- ated, its shock proved resistless. Forthwith Nineveh and Babylon, being undersold, languished, and by 650 the prophet Nahum pronounced his diatribe: "Woe to the bloody city! Nineveh is laid waste; who will bemoan her ? ** In 606 Nineveh fell, never to rise again; and when, two hundred years later, Xenophon passed her crumbling walls, her very name had been forgotten. Babylon fared little better. In 538 Belshazzar, when feasting, read the handwriting on the wall; that same night he died; and thence- forward the Persians ruled in Chaldea. Thus the vitality of Mesopotamia ebbed, for the life-blood no longer ran through the arteries which centred at her heart. But as the same life-blood which had once I. THE NEW EMPIRE 31 invigorated Asia permeated Greece, she blossomed like the rose, and as no doom has ever quite had the terror of the doom of Nineveh, so no bloom has ever equalled the flowering of Hellas. Almost within a generation the peninsula stood transfigured. During the Mycenaean Age, Greece, like other predatory communities, had been subject to a military caste, whose castles dominated the towns, — grim strong* holds like Tiryns, the lairs of the pirate and the slaver. With the opening of the trade routes east and west, the aspect of civilization changed. Tra- dition has preserved the memory of the so-called Doric invasion ; but this invasion may not improba- bly have been the democratic revolution, which, be- ginning in the north, swept gradually through the Peloponnesus. Certainly a social upheaval followed upon the rise of a trading class; and as this class waxed rich and powerful, the palace vanished from the acropolis, and in its stead appeared the temple, that exquisite civic decoration, which transformed the warriors* donjon into the public pleasure-ground. As usual, in Greece as elsewhere, architecture, for him who will read the language of the stones, tells the tale of civilization more eloquently than any writ- ten book. When thus read, among all the stones of Greece, none speak more movingly than those noble columns which still stand upon the shore of the Gulf of Corinth. On either side of the isthmus, iEgina and Corinth were the two ports where ships dis- charged their freight, and these two towns were accordingly the first in Hellas to feel the exhilaration of success. Therefore, at iEgina and Corinth the oldest temples still stand to reveal to us the secret 32 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. of their birth. Long before Athens dreamed of su- premacy at sea, Corinth had achieved maritime great- ness, and the Corinthians furnished the Athenians with the ships to destroy their enemy JEgina,, an enemy whom Corinth afterward would gladly have resuscitated. Originally, doubtless, like Mycenae, Corinth had a king who lived in a castle perched upon the mountain which overhangs the bay. Cer- tainly a castle stood there for ages after classic Corinth died, and probably ruins of the archaic fortress would be found embedded amidst the walls of the mediaeval keep, could the Acro-Corinth be excavated. Were those remains found, what must now be presented as an historical theory would be demonstrated as a fact The first effect of the democratic revolution at Corinth must have been to bring down the popula- tion from the mountain to the shore, then the castle crumbled, and in its stead arose those monolithic columns, which remain one of the most impressive memorials in the world. For, from the building of that temple we must date the birth of the civilization we now behold about us, and with the building of that temple opened the struggle for survival of Babylon, Tyre, and Carthage, with Greece and Rome, which only ended with the victory of Alexander over Darius, and of Scipio over Hannibal. When the temple of Corinth arose, Mesopotamia was already sinking, and Darius, when he succeeded Belshazzar, could no more withstand his destiny than a log can withstand the torrent of the Mississippi. When two economic systems compete, they are apt either to consolidate or to fight ; and between Greece and Asia commercial rivalry had reached an inten- I. THE NEW EMPIRE 33 sity which engenders war. The convulsion which was to last two centuries began, in 546, B.C. with the attack of Cyrus on Lydia and the defeat of Croesus. The Persians succeeded where the Assyrians failed, and absorbed Asia Minor. Then Darius invaded Russia, an expedition only to be accounted for on the theory that he intended to cut off the Greek cities on the northern coast of the Euxine from the interior. To accomplish this, he perhaps attempted to occupy the narrow neck of land between the Volga and the Don,^ for by ascending the Volga and descending the Don, commerce passed from the Cas- pian to the Sea of Azov. From this source Pantica- paeum, the chief of these northern cities, drew her wealth. Defeated in Scythia, Darius invaded Greece. In 505 B.C. he overran Imbros and Lemnos, captured Chalcedon, and occupied both shores of the Bos- phorus. Then the Ionian cities revolted, and Mile- tus was sacked. In 490 b.c. Darius pushed forward a reconnaissance to Marathon, and met with a re- verse. Appreciating the gravity of the crisis, he with- drew, and began those preparations which recall the effort of Philip II. to fit out the Armada. In the midst of his labor he died. His death, however, altered nothing. Herodotus ascribed to Xerxes only the conviction of his contemporaries, when he made him answer in these words the remonstrance of Artabanus against the prosecution of his father's enterprise : — " It is not possible for either party to retreat, but ^See the maps and comments in The Geographical System of Herodotus, James Rennell, i, 133 ^/ seq, D 34 THE NEW EMPIRE CHAP. the alternative lies before us to do or to suffer ; so that all these dominions must fall under the power of the Grecians, or all theirs under that of the Persians ; for there is no medium in this enmity." ^ In 485 B.C., when Xerxes came to the throne, the Babylonian economic system formed, as it were, a segment of the periphery of a vast ellipse, of which the Greek markets at the isthmus of Corinth and at Syracuse were the foci. Along the periphery of this ellipse were ranged many peoples inhabiting the region stretching from the Oxus to Gibraltar, and including Bactra, the Punjab, Persia, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Egypt, North Africa, and part of Spain ; practically the Saracenic dominions of the Middle Ages, only more extended toward the east. This vast mass, though politically unconsolidated, was sufficiently stimulated by a common danger to cast itself, at a given moment, on its foe. The Persians invaded Greece Proper, the Carthaginians attacked Sicily, and the battles of Salamis and Himera are said to have been fought upon the same day. Cer- tainly they formed parts of a single campaign, and the defeat of Xerxes by Themistocles, and of Hamil- car by Gelon, pierced the centre of the coalition. Then the wings fell asunder, and the work of destroy- ing the vanquished in detail began. As between the two wings, the Babylonian and Carthaginian, the latter showed more vitality, for Carthage drew her nutriment from the mines of Spain, while Mesopota- mia existed solely as a centre of exchanges. How rapidly Asia sank may be measured by her loss of military energy. The Greeks thought their success 1 Herod, vii. 11, L THE NEW EMPIRE 35 at Plataea in 479 extraordinary, although they ad- mitted putting in the field upward of i io,ocx> men, of whom 39,cxx) were hoplites, against the 300,ocx) light- armed troops led by Mardonius, and the Greeks did not underestimate their prowess. Likewise, the Per- sians were exhausted by a painful journey, and a winter in an inhospitable land. Only eighty years later Xenophon marched with io,ocx) mercenaries from Sardis to Babylon, and from Babylon to Trapezus. During this period of eighty years the fortunes of Hellas culminated. Greece failed to consolidate at this juncture, and expand vigorously westward, partly, no doubt, because of the Greek inaptitude for politi- cal administration, but chiefly because of her physical conformation. The lines of trade crossed her diago- nally and not longitudinally, so that her provinces had few or no common material interests. Further- more, while her commercial centre lay at the isthmus of Corinth, which was the cheapest point in the basin of the iEgaeum for the distribution of cargoes bound west, her industrial centre was situated at the silver mines of Laurium, near Cape Sunium. Accordingly, the interests of Athens and Corinth were antagonistic, as the Athenian commerce lay to the east and the Corinthian to the west, and formed two distinct and competing commercial systems. Moreover, Athens could not conquer Corinth, not only because Corinth occupied a strong position on the other side of the isthmus, almost unassailable by Athens either by land or water, but because Corinth served as a rampart to Sparta ; and Sparta could not let her be destroyed for fear of disaster to 36 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. herself. Therefore, two irreconcilable economic sys- tems overthrew each other. Athens impinged on Corinth ; and Corinth, retaliating, allied herself with Sparta. The Peloponnesian War ensued as a logical effect, and the expedition against Syracuse formed an episode of the Peloponnesian War. The loss of the army of Nicias in 413, and the defeat of iEgospotamus in 405 B.C., together with the gradual failure of the silver of Laurium, exhausted the Athenian vitality, and with the decline of Athens the dream of Greek expansion toward the west ended. But although the vitality of ancient Hellas flickered low after the Peloponnesian War, Macedon retained her vigor, largely because she possessed richer mines than Attica. In 356 Philip annexed Thrace up to the Nestus, founding the city of Philippi in the heart of the region about Mount Pangeus, where lay the gold. This gold Philip worked so successfully that he obtained a yearly revenue of 1,000 talents, or ten- fold the return of Laurium to Athens at the time of Salamis ; and before the death of Alexander the total yield had exceeded 30,000 talents. Fortified with this treasure, Alexander invaded Asia. Alexander is, perhaps, the highest specimen of the Greek intellect, astonishing alike in its strength and weakness. Un- rivalled as an economic conception, his empire failed as an administrative mechanism. In approaching his task he showed a profound knowledge and apprecia- tion of the geographical conditions which governed the relations between Asia and Europe, but in execu- tion his structure, like all efforts of classic Greeks at centralization, lacked cohesion. Of the five avenues in use at Alexander's birth, 1 THE NEW EMPIRE 37 between central Asia and the Mediterranean, Persia controlled all but the Euxine, for the ocean voyage to Egypt had not been attempted. All of these Alexander undertook to concentrate in a single system, and, besides, to open direct communication between India and the Nile by sea. Starting from his base upon the Hellespont Alexander's first task was to isolate Persia by crushing Phoenicia, the ancient maritime rival of Greece, who had made Persia formidable at Salamis by furnishing her with ships. This he accomplished, after defeating Darius at Issus, by the siege and capture of Tyre, possibly the most extraordinary feat in his extraordinary career. After subjugating Phoenicia he proceeded to the Nile, examined the delta, and selected Alexandria as the best outlet for the southern water-route which he contem- plated. The experience of two thousand years has justified his judgment. This done, he turned toward the interior. His problem was to consolidate the avenues of communication ; to do so he marched en- tirely round the vast triangle in central Asia whose base is formed by a line drawn from Bactra to Pattala and whose apex lies at Babylon. Crossing the Euphrates at Thapsacus, he moved on Nineveh by Haran, over the ground which had been disputed for centuries by the Assyrians; and having defeated Darius at Arbela, he advanced south as far as Persepolis. Thence turning north, he marched by Ecbatana on Ragae, finally reaching Samarkand. He passed the winter of 328 at Bactra, and, in the spring, ventured to invade India by the series of passes which begin with Bamian and end with the 38 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. Khyber, following the road by Kabul, even yet imperfectly known to Europeans. Incredible as it seems, he gained the Indus with small loss, and, having vanquished Porus on the Hydaspes, pacified the Punjab, and in 326 B.C. descended the river to the delta. There dividing his force, he sent Nearchus to explore the Arabian Sea, while he proceeded to Babylon by way of Susa. He established police by building cities at strategic points along the roads, sometimes but a day's journey from each other. Nothing can be more fatuous than to regard the cam- paigns of soldiers like Alexander, Caesar, or Jenghiz Khan as the result of ambition or caprice; for the soldier is a natural force, like the flood or the whirlwind. He breaks down obstructions otherwise insuperable. Alexander's battles were but an incident in a process which only ended with Actium. His function was to centralize; and that he understood his destiny is clear from his answer to the embassy sent him by Darius during the siege of Tyre : " As it would be impossible for order to reign in the world with two suns, so it is impossible for the earth to be at peace with two masters. " Alexander dealt with converging economic systems which, because they converged, could be consolidated. As usual under such circumstances, social amalgama- tion preceded political unification, and a fusion of commercial interests laid the basis of the Roman Empire. This is proved by the voluntary reform of the coinage under Alexander, as well as by the spread of the Greek language throughout the Levant. Among the many debts which civilization owes the Greeks, none is deeper than that due for the 1. THE NEW EMPIRE 39 invention of the coinage ; for whether money was first struck in Lydia or iEgina, the conception of a currency is Greek and not Asiatic. Indeed, the Asiatic races never accepted the coinage kindly, for the Asiatics have always been slow ; and perhaps the introduction of a currency accelerated social move- ment more powerfully than any innovation during the historic period of antiquity. By a currency com- mercial transfers are made cheap and rapid, and inter- national banking on a large scale becomes possible. To work well, however, the currency should be uni- form, as the fluctuations of various standards entail loss in exchange. Under the archaic system each city struck its own money, — the disadvantage whereof the Greeks soon perceived ; and one of the greatest triumphs of the Greek mind was the adoption of a common standard of value imder Alexander ; an achievement to be attributed to voluntary and in- telligent cooperation, and not to physical force. Throughout Alexander's nominal dominions, many of the most opulent cities retained their privileges, the coinage among the rest; especially in Thrace, Asia Minor, and Phoenicia. These cities struck the imperial tetradrachma, by their own authority, and for their own convenience, and maintained the standard long after Alexander's death.^ Modern Europe has not yet done as much. Under the conditions which prevailed in ancient times, expansion ended with the establishment of the Roman Empire, and with the termination of expansion an equilibrium between the East and West could not be long maintained. The reason is obvious. The ^ Numismatiquc d* Alexandre le Grand^ L. Muller, 91. 40 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. Romans, though great soldiers and administrators, were uninventive. They never learned to manufacture any article which commanded the Oriental market and served as a means of balancing their purchases. Neither did they explore, or improve their ships. Therefore the Mediterranean remained always, for them, a closed ellipse, not rich enough in metal to sustain a prolonged drain, especially under the waste- ful Roman methods. This ellipse, divided into three basins by the peninsulas of Greece and Italy, varied in resources, the central basin being poor. Develop- ment, accordingly, began at the extreme east, probably first in Cyprus and afterward in Lydia, and for many centuries remained in the hands of Asiatics. At length the Greeks began to compete, and, settling at the mouth of the Maeander, they gradually con- centrated transportation in their hands. If a line be drawn north and south through Miletus, it bisects the ancient civilization according to its apti- tudes. To the east of that line lay the lands which led in agriculture and industries; to the west, those producing minerals and soldiers. Egypt, for example, grew grain at a profit, at prices which ex- terminated the Italian farmers; Egypt, Phoenicia, India, and China readily undersold Europe in manu- factures ; while spices, gems, and perfumes were a natural monopoly of Arabia, India, and Ceylon. These commodities were coveted by Greeks and Romans ; but Greeks and Romans could offer nothing in exchange which Orientals would accept, save met- als, and consequently metals flowed eastward ; a fact proved by the abundance of Athenian coins found in Asia, as well as by the statements of Pliny. I. THE NEW EMPIRE 41 Under such conditions the basin of the iEgaeum became the seat of empire, because it not only afforded, for several centuries, the most convenient market for merchandise consigned westward, but it furnished metals for exchange and soldiers for police. Copper came from Cyprus, close at hand; iron from the Euxine, from Bithynia, Pontus, and the Caucasus. The Urals, then as now, were rich in minerals, and every Greek city east of the Azov sent caravans into the interior to buy.^ Herodotus stated that for such an expedition ten interpreters were needed. More important still, the whole coast of the iEgaeum teemed with gold and silver. Lydia yielded gold and electrum, Attica silver, and Macedon gold. Therefore, commerce tended to discharge through the Dardanelles in a stream which, passing over the isthmus of Corinth, flowed west by Sicily toward north Italy, Gaul, and Spain. These conditions lasted until the demand on the resources of the country became too great to be sup- plied by the mines of so limited a region, and recourse was had to Spain. Then, as mineral production moved westward, the central market moved to correspond. Conceivably, it might have grown up at almost any point in the middle basin ; at Carthage, at Syracuse, or at Rome. Rome probably prevailed, not only because of the superior military quality of her people, but because of the relatively large territory tributary to her ; ' a territory which even then may have extended to the North Sea. The bronzes found along the roads in- dicate an extensive trade. Yet wherever the central 1 Die Geschickte des Eisens^ Beck, I., 275, 6. 42 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. market might have been, there could have been but one, for the lines of transportation converged at a single point in Spain, and Spain could not have remained under a divided ownership. The cost would have been too great. One rival or the other must have perished. Even the burden of one empire proved too heavy to be borne. It had hardly come into being before decay began. A single administrative system, with a machinery complex enough to police roads, administer justice, and unify the coinage, is an economy provided the revenue to be administered is commensurate with the charges of administration. But the expense of cen- tralized administration, always great, in ancient times was crushing because of the narrowness of commercial exchanges. The resources of the East were exhaust- less, those of the West limited because of industrial incapacity and the failure to expand beyond the Rhine in search of metal. Had rivalry in Spain necessitated a double political organization, the decay of the West would have been almost immediate, possibly as rapid as the collapse of Alexander's em- pire. In fact, the Romans expelled the Carthaginians from the Iberian peninsula in 207 b.c, and thence- forward hardly met with serious resistance, because they alone had the means of organizing a competent army. Then Rome gradually culminated. She ap- pears to have reached her meridian before she had spent all the plunder brought from Gaul by Caesar, or near the opening of the Christian era. The precise date is immaterial, for the period of equilibrium was short, and the decline, once begun, rapid. In the I. THE NEW EMPIRE 43 year 9, after the defeat of Varus, Augustus could not replace the army the Germans had destroyed; and under Trajan, toward 100, an agricultural crisis pre- vailed, which lasted until the end. A century later silver had grown so scarce that the currency could not be sustained, and toward 220 a.d. the government of Elagabalus repudiated. In 284 a.d. Diocletian withdrew the capital to the shore of the Propontis, and Rome ceased to be a general market. The dominant market receded, precisely as it had advanced, in the wake of commercial exchanges; and commercial exchanges ceased to be possible, on a large scale, in the Mediterranean countries after the mines had failed. When no income remained to be administered, the machinery of administration passed out of existence. There was no barbarian conquest. There was a resolution of an economic consolidation into its elements. Lastly, as the cohesive energy waned and the prov- inces fell asunder, the archaic conditions revived. Competition reopened, and three empires once more appeared upon the three main highways leading from east to west. One rose on the Tigris, one on the Bosphorus, and one on the Nile, and amidst the wars between the Persians, the Byzantines, and the Sara- cens the Middle Ages dawned. CHAPTER II The Western Empire died because the predomi- nant race in the basin of the Mediterranean failed, after the opening of the Christian era, to develop the qualities necessary for survival under the conditions which then prevailed. The struggle for supremacy, among the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the Romans, had lasted for upward of one thousand years. The Phoenicians had succumbed rather early in the con- flict ; the Greeks, though highly gifted in many direc- tions, lacked the administrative energy which alone creates social cohesion; while the Latins, excelling as administrators and soldiers, were intellectually inflexible. This rigidity wrought their destruction. Although, soon after their career of plunder closed, it became evident that nothing but expansion and industries could save them from annihilation, the Latins made no serious effort. On the contrary, when their armies met with a decisive check in Germany, they resigned themselves to starvation, without relaxing their contemptuous intolerance of the arts as a means of subsistence for freemen. As explorers they did little more than tread in the footsteps of their prede- cessors; and though they worked the Spanish ores for six hundred years, it is doubtful whether they ever improved the methods bequeathed them by the Carthaginians. 44 [»/« Cmcow CHAP. 11. THE NEW EMPIRE 45 There could have been no reason, save incompe- tence, why England should not have yielded wool as fine under the Caesars as under the Carlovingians ; the Gauls wove good cloths, although no one put them on the eastern market. Pliny, and the men of his generation, knew and lamented the drain of metal to the East, and yet no one could suggest a com- modity wherewith to make exchange. A civilization thus wasteful fell, a race thus incapable perished, and Nature addressed herself to developing a new type. In about six centuries she achieved her task ; but, as the mediaeval mind was moulded by the conditions which created it, a glance at European geography should precede a survey of European history. Throughout the Middle Ages very small streams were used for transportation, because of the cost of land carriage; therefore the flow of the rivers determined the lines of travel and the shape of empires. In reality Europe and Asia form but a single conti- nent, Europe being a long, narrow, and indented peninsula, thrust out from the vast mass of Asia. The almost imperceptible rise of the Urals can hardly be considered a scientific boundary, but, assuming that Europe stretches eastward as far as the modern maps indicate, the core of the continent will be found to be divided into three transverse sec- tions by waterways which do not converge. First, a network of rivers connects the Caspian and Black Seas with the Arctic Ocean and the Baltic. The same rivers, with their lateral branches, may be navigated almost as conveniently east and west, and 46 THE NEW EMHRE CHAP. taken thus they unite the Urals with the Gulf of Finland. This region is Russia. Second, from the mountains which form the back- bone of Europe, four streams flow north into the Baltic and the North Sea; the Oder, the Elbe, the Weser, and the Rhine. As the valleys of these rivers are nearly parallel, the inhabitants during the Middle Ages had no very intimate relations with each other because relatively little commerce passed from valley to valley. Consequently Germany did not centralize before the invention of the locomotive. Lastly, at the end of the peninsula, the Seine, the Rhone and Sadne, and the Loire, emptying into the English Channel, the Gulf of Lyons, and the Atlantic, converge toward their sources. Therefore France early consolidated. Spain and England lay isolated, and, for present purposes, may be ignored. It suffices to observe, that neither Spain, England, nor Italy were so situated that amalgamation was possible, either among them- selves, or with the economic systems of the rest of the continent. Scientifically speaking, with the Vistula begins the isthmus which connects Europe with Asia. This isthmus comprises the region between the rivers which join the Black Sea and the Baltic; that is to say, ,the region between the Danube, south and east of Buda, and the Vistula, or the Dniester and the Vistula, on the west, and the Dnieper, the Lovat, the Volkhoff, Lake Ladoga, and the Neva, on the east. This isthmus, shaped somewhat like a triangle, has its apex on the Black Sea between Odessa and Kher- son, with a base extending from Dantzic to Peters- 11. THE NEW EMPIRE 47 burg. It contained, if the Dniester be taken as the western boundary, Poland, Lithuania, the possessions of the Teutonic knights, and Novgorod, to which must be added Hungary, as far as Pesth, if that boundary be extended to the Danube. To the east of the Dnieper and the Lovat stretched the wastes of Russia, closed to the north, and traversed by the network of rivers which, emptying into the Azov, the Caspian, or the Arctic, may be navigated almost without interruption as far east as Lake Baikal Russia, therefore, between the Volga and the Vistula, but more especially between the Dnieper and the Vistula, may be regarded as a debat- able land sometimes adhering to Europe and some- times to Asia. Men expressly evolved to replace others who have perished through incompetence usually display strength where their predecessors have been weak, and so it proved in the Middle Ages. No modem nation like the Latins has won supremacy purely by arms; modem success has been achieved rather by technical ingenuity, genius for exploration, and mental flexibility. These characteristics appeared at the outset. The mediaeval city grew from the guild, and the first efforts to accumulate capital took the shape of manufactur- ing for export. Long before the discovery of the German mines Flemings wove the English wool, and Flemish cloths sold in Bagdad. Charlemagne adver- tised them throughout central Asia by sending them as gifts to Haroun-al-Rashid. He did nothing for other manufactures. He chose horses and dogs for the remainder of his presents. 48 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. The probability is that most of the revenue which Charlemagne relied on to support his administration came from the woollen trade, and that the industry could not bear the taxation is demonstrated by the collapse of the dmpire. The raw material, grown in England, crossed the Channel to Bruges, and the manufactured product either passed up the Scheldt and through Champagne to the Rhone, or else reached Cologne by land and Mayence by the Rhine. At Mayence the Flemings established their chief sell- ing agency, and sent their goods into Italy, either up the Rhine to Basel and Lausanne, and over the Great St. Bernard to Genoa or Milan; or else by Con- stance, Coire, and the Septimer. Little or nothing went by Ratisbon before the crusades, as the Huns closed the Danube.^ The line of the imperial custom- houses ran through Magdeburg, Erfurt, Hallstadt, Forchheim, Pf reimt, Ratisbon, and Lorch. The heart of the organism lay at Aix-la-Chapelle, about mid- way between the French and the Rhenish waterways. It could hardly have done so had not the Flemish industries been the chief source of wealth, and the Rhine and the Meuse the chief arteries of commerce. The vices of such a consolidation speak for them- selves. In the first place, the length of road to be guarded was out of all proportion to the traffic. In the second, as the lines of communication diverged, centralized defence was impossible. Each province needed its own army, for all were exposed. The Elbe could not be fortified, and yet beyond the Elbe roved the Huns, the Wends, and other ferocious Slavs, while, to the north, Scandinavia poured forth ^ Histoire du Commerce du Levant^ Heyd, French translation, I., 86. n. THE NEW EMPIRE 49 fleets of pirates, who sailed up the rivers, robbing and burning to the gates of Paris. Yet even the Vikings were less alarming than the Saracens, who swarmed in the Mediterranean, and penetrated to the heart of the Alps, where they put all commerce to ransom. Even as late as 970, during the reign of Otho the Great, when a relatively wealthy government labored to suppress marauding, the Moslems attacked strong caravans. In that year Majolus, abbot of the famous convent of Cluny, had travelled to Italy over the Septimer, rather than run the risk of brigands on the western passes. In haste to return, he made the Great St. Bernard, and, in his descent into France, had reached the bridge of Orsiferes, when the Saracens overtook him and carried him and all his suite into captivity. No one understood the situation so well as Char- lemagne, who dealt with it, and the monk of St. Gall has described him weeping, on the coast of the English Channel, at the sight of the Norse ships. He wept at the thought of the woes to fall upon his posterity, for he knew that, with the resources at hand, resistance would be futile. Civilization could only receive an adequate impul- sion from the discovery of minerals, which would balance exchanges and place production upon a firm basis, and no metals could be obtained until the line of the Elbe should be guarded. The core of Ger- many lies between the Rhine and the Elbe, for there have been found the chief of the metals which have made her wealth. Close to the Elbe, and exposed to any sudden raid, stand the Harz Mountains, in whose midst rises the Rammelsberg, long the richest silver- 50 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. bearing region of Europe ; while on the higher Elbe, just where the river forces its way through the Bohe- mian Mountains, are the Erzgebirge, the district of which Freiberg is the capital, and which by the twelfth century had attained its highest relative importance. In the silver and copper mines of the Tyrol, also, thirty thousand miners are said to have found em- ployment at about this period. Nobody knows precisely when the Rammelsberg was opened. According to the legend a huntsman of Otho the Great, who had ridden a restive horse from Harzburg, noticed that the animal had uncovered a vein of ore by his pawing. The emperor, afterward hearing of the discovery, became convinced of its value, and sank the first shaft. He then founded Goslar. The probability is that the industry was older, and that it lent Henry the Fowler the energy to garrison his frontier. For the mediaeval city was at once a factory and a garrison. Every burgher belonged to a guild, and yet every burgher was also, by necessity, an excellent soldier, at least in all that touched the defence of his walls. The Harz formed the heart of Henry's new kingdom. He turned the clump of hills into a citadel. After he had done so, modem civilization dawned. When, in 912, Henry I. succeeded his father as Duke of Saxony, society seemed sinking into chaos. In 924 Henry fortified Quedlinburg, which afterward served as his capital, and fifty years later his son died emperor of Ger- many, the greatest sovereign of his age. Goslar, which lies on the northern slope of the Harz, and which owed its consequence to the Ram- melsberg mines, was certainly one of the oldest free *^ II. THE NEW EMPIRE 5 1 imperial cities of Germany. Possibly it may have been nominally founded by Otho ; but, if no mining existed there earlier, it is difficult to comprehend his father's policy. Henry planted a castle at Goslar, he built a tower at Regenstein in 919, toward the east, and he constructed the stronghold of Nordhausen, on the southwest, guarding the approach to the Rammels- berg along the Zorge ; while directly in the face of the Wends he planted his capital of Quedlinburg, the centre of his military organization, from whence he conducted his campaigns. His policy was to make good the line of the Elbe as far as the Erz- gebirge, and to this end he invaded Bohemia, and re- duced the duke to a tributary. He also defeated the Slavs toward the Oder, and established two for- tresses, one at Meissen and one higher up the river, to overawe southern Saxony. Before the death of his son, a chain of cities from Liineburg to Freiburg com- manded the frontier, the mines were regularly worked, the Elbe could be used as a highway, and the rest was but a matter of time. The sequence of cause and effect is plain. When virgin mines of precious metal began yielding plenti- fully, Europe came into possession of a portable commodity of universal exchangeable value, at a com- paratively low cost. Consequently Europeans could trade at a profit, and, as capital augmented and industry gathered energy, the cost of policing the thorough- fares bore a regularly diminishing ratio to the profit earned by the traffic passing over them. The process was automatic, and can be gauged by the growth of the ports, and the cities at the cross-roads. / \ Otho the Great died in 973, and assuming that the 52 THE NEW EaiPIRE chap. mines of the Rammelsberg came into full operation during his life, the stimulus should have been felt within about a generation, or toward looo. Of course the movement would have been most sensible at Venice, the port of Germany, whence the streams of commerce diverged which passed down both the Elbe and the Rhine. This a priori theory corresponds with the facts. Venice rose to the dignity of a considerable mari- time power under Pietro Orseolo II., in 991. Orseolo not only negotiated commercial treaties with the Saracenic courts at Aleppo, Cairo, Damascus, and Palermo, but he forced the Greek emperor to reduce the tax on vessels passing Abydos. In the year 1000 he defeated the Croatian pirates, and thenceforward Venice held undisputed control of the Adriatic. In the tenth century, also, Augsburg, the converging point of the roads between South Germany and Italy, first built a wall. A low wall, it is true, and without towers, but strong enough to twice bid defiance to the Huns. In 1050 occurs the earliest reference to Nu- remberg, when the Emperor Henry III. held a diet there. Had Nuremberg been wealthy, it would have been famous long before. About the same period Leipsic came into notice, but seems to have grown rather slowly, for it was not until 11 70 that the town obtained her first considerable grant of privileges. According to Beck,^ German weapons were ex- ported to India. Cologne was the base of the trade to the west, as Liibeck was of the trade to the east. The commerce of the Rhine was, of course, always more important than the commerce of the Elbe, in ^ Gesckichte des Eisens, I., 745. n, THE NEW EMPIRE 53 proportion as Flanders and England outweighed Sweden and Russia ; Cologne, accordingly, developed early. By 1000 a.d. she had her guild-hall in Lon- don, which formed the nucleus to which other German cities, especially Regensburg and Bremen, adhered. From this counter as a core grew the German guild- hall, called the Steelyard, in upper Thames Street, near London Bridge, which long continued one of the most powerful of the London corporations.^ The Hanse merchants for several centuries almost monopolized the carrying trade of the kingdom, be- sides being very influential bankers. Before 1016 the emperor's subjects had secured the rights of Englishmen in the courts. About 1040 the English wool trade raised Bruges to the rank of a universal market, and weaving spread over the north of France, St. Quentin acquiring a charter near 1089. Equal activity reigned in the Baltic. Although the Germans did not obtain undisputed control of the lower Elbe until after the founding of Liibeck in 1 143, and possi- bly even of New Hamburg in 1189, commerce flowed through such Slavish ports as Jumne on the Oder and Dantzic on the Vistula. Written records fail, but the quantity of coins found buried in Sweden, and more particularly at Wisby in the Island of Gotland, prove the diflFusion of the new silver. Not less than ten thousand German coins have been found in these regions, belonging to the century and a half which followed the opening of the Rammelsberg mines, those of the reign of Otho III., from 983 to icx)i, predominating.^ 1 Die Geichichte des Eisens, Beck, I., 745, 746. * Die ffensestadte und ICdnigWaldemar von D&nemark^ SchSfer, 39. 54 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. An energetic social movement is usually equivalent to expansion ; and as the Atlantic barred migration westward, Europeans invaded Asia, both by way of the Mediterranean and the Baltic. The age being one of faith, the movement took a religious shape, begin- ning with the Council of Clermont in 1095, and last- ing upward of two centuries. As a civilizing agent, the importance of the crusades cannot be overesti- mated ; since, though the Franks finally met with de- feat, the war proved a powerful intellectual stimulant, and also exceedingly profitable. The Saracens had advanced farther in the arts than the Latin Christians, and served as schoolmas- ters, besides learning to be excellent customers. The wealth of Egypt threw upon her the chief burden of the Prankish wars, but Egypt produced neither iron, nor timber for ships, nor a martial population, and she had to buy all this material from her enemies. The caliphs lowered their tariffs, making special rates for Christians; and, though the avarice which tempted the Venetians and the Genoese to succor their enemies roused the scorn of Moslems, they nev- ertheless recruited their Mamelukes with Christian slaves, armed them with swords forged by Italians and Germans, and built their navies with Dalmatian timber. Germany served as Egypt's base of supplies. At Venice the Germans established their southern counting-house, corresponding to the Steelyard in London, and called the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. In the magazines of the Fondaco the merchants of Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm, Constance, and Vienna stored their wares, consisting largely of iron, copper, II. THE NEW EMPIRE 55 and woollens for export; and spices, silks, carpets, and the like for import. In the courts were loaded caravans for the Brenner or the St. Gotthard. The industries of southern Germany and Italy flourished. The fame of Nuremberg as a manufacturing town spread far and wide. Her smiths had no superiors north of the Alps. They forged not only weapons but peaceful implements, and through the technical skill of her metal workers Nuremberg made her chief contribution to civilization. Yet Nu- remberg yielded to Milan in industries, and, during the first crusade, no soldier thought himself perfectly equipped without a Milanese sword and armor. Although this estimate of the effects which followed the working of the Harz and Saxon mines may seem exaggerated, the evidence is overwhelming that, down to the close of the Middle Ages, minerals lay not only at the base of the German industrial system, but at the root of German wealth. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century the capitalists of southern Ger- many outranked even the Italian, and in Augsburg and Nuremberg all men of enterprise speculated in mines. The famous patrician house of Welser owned shares in the silver works at Schneeberg, near the Bo- hemian frontier; the Nuremberg families of Fiihrer and Schliisselfelder carried on the copper works of Eisle- ben, between Halle and Nordhausen, and, in conjunc- tion with these, a refining establishment near Arn- stedt in Thuringia ; Peter Rummel held silver mines in Tyrol, Lucas Semler, smelters in Silesia. In 1482 George Holzschuher and Ulrich Erkel of Nuremberg obtained the monopoly of supplying Bern with the silver for coinage, while Holzschuher managed the 56 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. mint* The list might be prolonged, but to little pur- pose, for these names, though once noted, have been forgotten. One family of Augsburg bankers is, how- ever, still remembered ; and, to prove the part played by metals in finance down to the Reformation, it is only needful to tell the story of the Fuggers. To do them justice requires a review of above two hundred years. Old Hans Fugger, the first known of the race, being a journeyman weaver, left his vil- lage of Graben, in 1367, to seek his fortune in Augsburg. By thrift and diligence he advanced in the world, and died, in 1409, worth 3000 florins. None of his sons particularly distinguished them- selves. Andrew, at one time the most prosperous, left descendants who became bankrupt. The founder of the renowned house was Jacob Fugger II., the grandson of Hans, and it was probably through the maternal grandfather of Jacob the yoimger, who settled in the Tyrolese mining district, that the oppor- tunity came which led to fortune. Jacob II. went into business in 1473, when foxuteen years old, and learned his trade in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice. For some time he and his brothers dealt in the old way, in silks and woollens and spices, but presently Jacob entered on the "more profitable business of exchange and mining.*** Mines were then mostly crown property, and the best security which the sovereigns had to pledge; therefore a great money-lender became, almost of course, a mine owner. For example, in 1487, as security for a loan of 23,627 florins made to the Arch- ^ Das ZeiieUter der Fugger^ Ehrenberg, I., 1S9. « Ibid., I., 89. II. THE NEW EMPIRE 57 duke Siegmund, Jacob received the silver mines of Schwarz. The next year, for 150,000 florins, the Fugger brothers obtained the grant of the entire yield of the Schwarz mines until repayment of the debt, — a good bargain in the opinion of the business community. In 1495, as part of an extensive invest- ment in copper, the Fuggers secured the copper works in Neusohl, eighty miles north of Budapest in Hungary. To maintain the price of copper they organized, in 1498 and 1499, with other Augsburg firms, a syndicate for cornering the Venetian market. To effect this purpose they shipped their Hungarian copper to Antwerp by Cracow, the Vistula, and Dantzic.^ To pursue the subject further would be tedious, but the statement made by the firm, in 1527, shows how mining property and minerals predom- inated among the assets.^ In mines and mining shares they had invested . . . 270,000 firs. In real estate in Augsburg, Antwerp, and elsewhere 150,000 firs. Merchandise 380,000 firs. Loans 1,650,000 firs. Cash 50,000 firs. The merchandise consisted mainly of metal. The copper in Antwerp alone was valued at above 2(X),ooo florins, besides silver and brass. They held Uttle cloth, damask, or other wares. The loans were large, often secured by pledges of mines. In this gen- eration the Fuggers touched their zenith, when in the words of the old chronicle of Augsburg, "the names of Jacob Fugger and his nephews were known in all kingdoms and lands, even in heathendom. 1 Ibid,, I., 89, 90. a JHd.f I., 122. 58 THE NEW EMPIRE CHAP. Emperors, kings, princes, and nobles have sent em- bassies to him, the Pope has saluted and embraced him as his beloved son, cardinals have stood before him. All the merchants of the world have called him an enlightened man, and the heathen have wondered at him. He has been the jewel of Ger- many."^ With the Fuggers, Germany also culmi- nated, and German cities attained to a size in the fifteenth century which they did not surpass until the middle of the nineteenth. Many, like Lubeck, actually declined, while Cologne occupied an area which sufficed her until the introduction of railways revolutionized the valley of the Rhine. This prosper- ity came in the main, probably, from the scientific development of minerals, but it also depended in great degree on commerce. During the Middle Ages, the path of commerce lay across Germany, and it was the gradual abandonment of the thoroughfares over the Alps, for the voyage to Flanders, that wrought havoc with such cities as Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Lubeck. With the founding of Liibeck, in 1143, German commerce may be taken to have passed through its tentative period, and to have determined on the lines which offered least resistance in passing overland from the Mediterranean to the northern seas. Speaking generally, Venice proved to be the cheapest base, and the Rhine or the Elbe the best avenue. Leaving Venice, one route followed the Semmering to Vienna and Prague, gaining Lubeck and Hamburg by the Elbe ; the Brenner, likewise, fed the Elbe by way of Nuremberg and Leipsic. The bulk of the travel over the Brenner, however, flowed to the ^ Doi ZHtaUer der Fugger, I., 11 6. n. THE NEW EMPIRE 59 Rhine, descending the Main, and building up Wiirz- burg, Frankfort, Mayence, and Cologne. Less com- monly merchants crossed Lorabardy to the Septimer, and so north by Coire and Ulm to Speyer ; or they may even have preferred the St. Gotthard and Basel ; but whichever route the Germans chose, the great highways finally ended in well-established termini, both to the east and west, where Hanseatic count- ing-houses of capital importance flourished. The thoroughfare of the Rhine led through Cologne to Bruges and London ; that of the Elbe through Lubeck to Novgorod, which was reached by the Gulf of Fin- land, the Neva, and the Volkhoff. As Schaffer has remarked, " He who follows with watchful eyes the bloom of these mediaeval communi- ties will recall the drama of those world cities which, in our own days, have suddenly from nothing sprung into being on a newly cultivated soil." ^ Lubeck only became a German town in 1143, and Vienna a capital in 1 1 56, yet both were famous at the close of the century. No story is better known than that of Coeur de Lion, who chose the Vienna route to London, on his return from Palestine in 1192, and was arrested at Erdberg between Vienna and Prague. He excited suspicion by sending his servant with his ring to the capital to buy food, while he remained at the village disguised. Lubeck owed her consequence to the development of the whole basin of the Baltic, but particularly of northern Russia. For centuries Novgorod had been a considerable market. From its foundation Con- stantinople had imported grain, — at first from Egypt, ^ Die Hansesmatet 50. 6o THE NEW EMPIRE chap. but after the advent of the Saracens, from the Euxine. Amru occupied Alexandria in 640, and from the cessation of the distribution of African wheat by Heraclius, the demand was transferred to the valleys of the Danube and the Dnieper. The Eastern Empire had two periods of grandeur, one under Justinian, about the beginning of the sixth century; the other toward the close of the tenth. The Byzantine Empire, which, after the reign of Justinian, had languished, fell to the lowest depth of indigence under Heraclius; but from the beginning of the eighth century a steady recovery set in, which brought Constantinople to high prosperity about 950. As the wealth of the Greeks grew their expenditure increased, and the Jew, Benjamin of Tudela, was lost in admiration at the magnificence of their garments. Such a population not only bought food on a vast scale, but the more costly furs, and the region from which they drew their supplies flourished proportionately. The Bulgarian kingdom, bordering the Danube, rose from barbarism to affluence and refinement, and the waterway which led through Russia from the Black Sea to the Baltic became studded with flourishing cities. The chief of these were Kieff and Smolensk on the Dnieper, and Nov- gorod on the Volkhoff. Novgorod the Great, l)ring at the point where the Volkhoff enters Lake Ilmen, having connection with the Gulf of Finland by Lake Ladoga and the Neva, and being the point where traffic, ascending the Volga and the Dnieper, and seeking an outlet on the Baltic, converged, was an emporium open alike to the north, south, east, and west. As it flourished when it supplied the Byzan- n. THE NEW EMPIRE 6l tines and the Asiatics with sables and ermines, so it flourished when the market moved northwestward and established itself near Paris. The prosperity of the Fairs of Champagne is, per- haps, the capital phenomenon of mediaeval history, for it indicated the transfer of the focus of wealth and energy from the borders of Asia to a spot adjacent to the Atlantic, a greater economic rev- olution than had ever happened previously. The rise of Champagne and the fall of Constantinople were precisely contemporaneous. The earliest men- tion of the fairs is in a deed by Hugh, Count of Troyes, dated in 1114. The plundering of Con- stantinople by Alexius Comnenus took place in 1081, and may be accepted as the beginning of the end. About 1200 the Fairs of Champagne reached their prime, and the wealth which poured into the adjacent provinces is attested by the unparalleled splendor of the architecture of the period. No monuments so superb as the French cathedrals of the early thir- teenth century have ever been constructed in Europe. At this precise moment, in the year 1204, Constan- tinople fell before the arms of the crusaders, and her people were plunged in ruin. This migration of the dominant market from the Bosphorus to the Atlantic altered the whole social and political complexion of Russia. Her customers lived no longer in the south, to be reached only by the high- way of the Dnieper, but to the west, through the Baltic and the North seas. The Baltic is a dangerous and stormy sea, and the cost of its navigation was increased by the risk and delay of passing through the sound, and also by the toll there collected from shipping. 62 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. It SO happens, however, that on either side of the isthmus, where the promontory of Denmark joins the mainland, two rivers have their outlet, — the Trave entering the Baltic, and the Elbe the German Ocean. The portage between these rivers is short, and accord- ingly two of the most famous cities of mediaeval Germany grew up side by side, forming for many pur- poses a single corporation. These cities were Liibeck and Hamburg, and they flourished exceedingly, since they served as the distributing point, not only of the merchandise which descended the Elbe from Venice, but of the coasting trade between Russia and the ports of Flanders. That trade was considerable in volume and of high value. All mediaeval society luxuriated in fur, " as I believe for our damnation," said Adam of Bremen, ** since, per fas etnefasy we strive for a garment of martin, as though for our eternal salva- tion." Nor could the fashion have been otherwise, since furs in northern Europe were not only essential to comfort but to health itself. The climate was cold and damp, the streets of the towns narrow and dark, and the houses built without means of warming. Therefore furs played a part in indoor life foreign to all modem ideas. Suzdal, a province of central Russia, the predeces- sor of modern Moscow, was long overshadowed by Kiefl. To the Suzdalian, KiefiF represented all that was sacred and splendid, and the highest ambition of the Suzdalian prince, George Dolgoruki, was to ascend its throne. This ambition he finally gratified in 1 1 55. The rapidity of the movement of the age is shown by the divergence of view between two generations. What excited the father's reverence only roused the II. THE NEW EMPIRE 63 son's cupidity. When Andrew succeeded George, far from wishing to abandon the Volga for the Dnieper, his instinct was to plunder his father's sanctuary and carry the spoil home. Accordingly, in 1 169, Andrew attacked Kieil, and after a short siege carried the walls by storm. Then he gave the city up to sack, plundering not only private houses, but convents, churches, and even Saint Sophia itself. KiefiF never recovered, and Andrew, returning to Suzdal, estab- lished his administration at Vladimir on the Klyasma, midway between where Moscow and Nijni-Novgorod now stand. Vladimir remained the capital of the Grand Duchy until 1328, when Moscow gradually superseded her. In 1220 Nijni-Novgorod came into being, at the confluence of the Oka and the Volga, at the heart of the river system of which the Volga forms the trunk. Nothing could mark more pointedly the automatic processes of nature than the conversion of the ancient Greek Russia of the Dnieper into the modern Asiatic Russia of the Volga. In the year icxx), Constantinople being the dominant market, the regions tributary to that market were organized to correspond. Merchandise from Russia moved southward, and to avoid the navigation of the stormy Euxine, men used, when possible, the Dnieper instead of the Don. Novgorod served as the port of entry for the furs and amber of the Baltic, and also as the depot for furs from the valley of the Petchora, which reached the Volkhoff by the Volga and Rybinsk, the thorough- fare still in use. The wares collected at Novgorod were conveyed by the Lovat and the Dnieper to KiefF, where Greek merchants congregated to buy grain, 64 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. and thus Kieil became the leading local market. But leading local markets are the natural seats of administrative systems. So it came to pass that Russia in the tenth century was administered from Kiefl; and the causes which made Kiefl a capital, kept it a capital until the direction of trade changed. Between looo and 1200 a.d. the development of German minerals, and the consequent industrial pros- perity of all northwestern Europe, propelled the seat of commercial exchanges toward the English Channel ; and when the market thus shifted, all civilization readjusted itself to conform to the change. As the purchasing power of Constantinople waned, and that of the Hanse towns waxed, the core of Russia, re- volving on Novgorod as on a pivot, passed through the segment of a circle, abandoning the thorough- fare of the Dnieper, which led north and south, and travelling to the valley of the Volga, which, with its branches, the Mologa and the Kama, forms an almost complete system of waterways from the Ural on the east, and the Petchora, which empties into the Arctic on the north, to the VolkhoflF on the west At Nov- gorod, on the Volkhoff, the Germans fixed their counting-house. As a consequence Kieff decayed, and with it the Greek civilization; while Moscow, Vladimir, Nijni, and Kazan rose, and with them came the Tartars. Meanwhile, German replaced Greek as the commercial language, German enterprise penetrated the recesses of Russia wherever trade promised a profit, and by I2C» the Novgorod merchants had extended their stations throughout the valley of the Petchora, and perhaps also the valley of the Obi. This was n. THE NEW EMPIRE 65 commercial expansion, and, as often happens, war fol- lowed. Christianity had previously been preached to < le heathen Slavs, but until the German merchants per- ceived the value of the basin of the Baltic, the Church had not been awakened to the necessity of armed conversion. Religious enthusiasm for conquest grew with the prosperity of Lubeck and Hamburg, and in 1 198 Innocent III. proclaimed a crusade against northern Russia. Bishop Albert of Buxhoewden led his flock in twenty-three ships, and, entering the Diina, soon baptized the multitude and settled Riga, which quickly developed commercial importance and became the capital of Livonia. During the thirteenth cen- tury, two military crusading organizations, which were afterward fused under the name of the Knights of the Teutonic Order, conquered East Prussia and the region now known as the Baltic Provinces of Russia. They founded many towns, among others, Revel, Venden, once the residence of the Grand- Masters, Volmar, Marienburg, where the celebrated castle still stands, Konigsberg, and Thorn. In 13 10 they acquired Dantzic. The Hanse held sway in Novgorod. When, during the eleventh century, trade, surmount- ing the Alps, flowed down the Rhine and the Elbe and across the northern seas, pirates on the water, and robbers in foreign lands, threatened the life of every traveller. To protect their citizens, some of the German ports early coalesced; and though this coalition did not earn the name of the Hanseatic League until a comparatively late date, the corpora- tion existed, probably, from the beginning. Had the F 66 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. German trade routes converged, so as to give all Germany a community of interest, such a league could hardly have been evolved, for the purposes for which it was established could have been more cheaply accomplished by a centralized government, as in France or England. As German commerce flowed in two great streams to the Baltic and the North Sea, being split in twain by the peninsula of Denmark, the interests of the cities lying along these trade routes diverged, and in consequence the methods of administration remained rudimentary. The imperial government developed little energy, and the allied cities only acted together within a restricted sphere. They agreed to pursue pirates, to police the rivers as far as possible, and to support the rights of their citizens abroad, but for aggression they were helpless. To resist a powerful enemy, a separate treaty had to be made which might include other towns than those of the Hanse. Such a treaty, negotiated in 1367, organized the Cologne confederation which overthrew Waldemar of Den- mark, and it was after this war that the league reached its maturity. Imperfect as it was, the Hanse proved the most effective instrument Germany employed to extend her influence ; and it was through the energy and adroitness of her merchants, rather than through the arms of the crusaders, that mediaeval Germans colonized Russia. The League intrenched itself at Novgorod, and when all allowance has been made for hyperbole, Novgorod if semi-barbarous must have been both pop- ulous and wealthy. Gilbert of Lannoy, who visited Novgorod in 141 3, described it as a prodigious town, n. THE NEW EMPIRE 67 surrounded by forests, lying low and subject to inundations, and fortified with mean clay walls and stone towers. The merchants lived the lives of a garrison amidst savages. The guild brethren occupied large buildings, with separate rooms set apart for the use of the master, the servants, and the members. Saint Peter's church served as the main warehouse, goods being stored in its vaults. They also stacked wine casks about the altar, only on the altar itself nothing could be placed. Part of the duty of the guild members was to guard the church, day and night, particularly against fire. When supper ended, visitors left, the doors were locked, and all went to bed. At night the houses lay like fortresses, within strong wooden palings, to climb which was criminal ; while, to insure discipline, warders regularly made the rounds and fierce dogs roved in the yard. For such privations the merchants sought indemnity from the Russians. Russians were excluded from the company, and Russian commerce, therefore, vanished from the Baltic. To sustain prices in Russia, the Novgorod counter restricted imports ; and all Europe paid tribute to the Hanse for furs, and the wax from which the Church made her candles. Under such conditions Liibeck and Hamburg, serving as the outlet of the commerce both of the Elbe and of the Baltic, should seemingly have risen to be a chief international market ; and that they did not do so must be attributed to the physical confor- mation of Germany, which set her at a disadvantage. No error can be greater than to regard the barons. 68 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. who held the castles on the roads, as public enemies, or even as the enemies of commerce. Without police, roads would be closed by robbers, and, in an age of decentralization, local castles protected travellers. The great work of the early Saxon emperors lay in the erection of strongholds along the line of the Elbe, to keep the Slavs in check. In fine, a guard must always be maintained and paid ; the only question is one of price, and the trouble with Germany was that her castles were too small and too numerous, and the tolls needed to support the garrisons too high. Thomas Wikes,in 1269, complained that "the mad Germans," perched on their inaccessible rocks above the Rhine, and restrained neither by fear, nor respect for the king, exacted intolerable dues from all passing vessels, by reason of which merchants were ruined. In the first fifteen miles above Hamburg on the Elbe there were no less than nine of these tolls. The total number between Hamburg and Vienna may be estimated. To reach Champagne, on the other hand, after leaving Switzerland, only the government of Burgundy had to be dealt with, which collected six toUs.^ Therefore, the route by Genoa and the St. Bernard, or by Marseilles and Lyons, to Paris, came cheaper than the Semmering or the Brenner and the Elbe to Hamburg, and accordingly the Fairs of Champagne undersold Liibeck. The sea, how- ever, cost less than any land journey, once the difficulties of navigation had been overcome, and by the middle of the twelfth century sailors had learned much. In 1 147 a fleet of two hundred Flemish ships ^ On this subject see Etudes sur Us Foires de Champagne^ Felix Bourquelot, 320. II. THE NEW EMPIRE 69 reached Venice, which was perhaps the first time that a Flemish vessel had been seen in the Adriatic.^ Thenceforward the Italians always preferred the ocean when practicable. But, for ships bound from Venice, or Genoa, to the north of Europe, Hamburg and Liibeck were inac- cessible. In those days vessels were slow, and it would have been impossible to reach the Elbe and return the same year. Therefore, the Italian fleets stopped in Flanders. The Germans and Italians met in Bruges or Antwerp, and the Germans sent their purchases farther east, either in coasters or else by land, to Cologne, and so up the Rhine and the Main. As sea freights gained on land freights, the con- stant tendency was for the thoroughfares through the Alps to lose importance, and had it not been for mining, south Germany would have sunk into com- parative poverty at a relatively early period. Such facts seem to show that the inventive and industrial faculty which first brought German metals on the international market, and afterward threw central Europe into excentricity by substituting water for land transportation, kept western civilization in fer- ment from the opening of the crusades to the Reformation. Nevertheless, on the whole, Europe prospered. A catastrophe, induced by the same causes, fell on central Asia, under which it sank, never to revive. The ancient trade from China and India had converged at Balkh, and from thence had reached 1 Lei Relations commerciales des Beiges avec le Nord de Plialie et parHculterement avec les Veneliens, debuts le XII jusqu^au XVI SiecUt Alexandre Pinchart, 11 etseq. 70 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. the Mediterranean by Babylon, or by Tabriz and Trebizond. Consequently, commercial activity had centred in Persia and Mesopotamia, and these coun- tries had been the richest, the most populous, and the most polished in the world. No such cities could be found elsewhere as Samarkand, Bokhara, Merv, Herat, Bamian, Tabriz, Hamadan, Mosul, and Bagdad. When Haroun-al-Rashid lived, about 800, Bagdad was indisputably the first capital, and her caliph the chief monarch, of the earth. The change came with the introduction of the mag- net in navigation. From about the third century the Chinese appear to have sailed as far as the Persian Gulf, but the dangers of the Red Sea long protected Bagdad. Already in the age of Haroun this bulwark was failing. Those interested in the early voyages will find the authorities collected by Heyd in his work on the Commerce of the Levant^ but for ordinary readers the story of Sindbad the Sailor is equally convincing and more amusing. The tales of Sindbad are accurate descriptions of travel, with only enough exaggeration for popular consumption. To the east, Sindbad reached Malacca, to the south, probably, Madagascar. He made his last voyage to Ceylon, by the command of the caliph, as ambas- sador to the king of the island, and the noteworthy part of the tale is the small importance Haroun attached to the mission. In his sixth voyage Sindbad had been wrecked, and escaped by a subterranean river, carrying with him many jewels. On awakening on his raft he found himself in Ceylon, whose king sent him home with a letter and presents for the caliph* After his fatigues Sindbad proposed to remain in II. THE NEW EMPIRE 71 Bagdad for the rest of his life, but one day he received a message that the caliph wished to speak with him. On reaching the palace, Haroun announced his inten- tion of sending him to Ceylon with an answer to the king, and a return of presents. When Sindbad re- monstrated he observed: "It's only a question of going to Ceylon to acquit yourself of my commission. After that you can return.'* The difference between Haroun's standpoint and Alexander's explains all that followed. In ancient times, although navigation improved sufficiently to admit of voyages from India to Egypt, and Alexandria, accordingly, gained upon Babylon, ships never became powerful enough, and ocean freights cheap enough, to supersede the caravans of central Asia. The revolution came with the intro- duction of the magnetic needle, probably about the time of Sindbad, or a little later, and then events moved very rapidly. When a voyage to Ceylon from Bagdad counted for no more than it did in the mind of Haroun-al-Rashid, it evidently would no longer pay to make the Persian Gulf a stopping-point on the way to Egypt. Nor when Chinese junks could sail direct from Nanking or Canton to Aden, would it be profitable to send merchandise by camels across the Pamirs to Bactra, far less from Delhi or Lahore into the valley of the Oxus, as an avenue to a Medi- terranean market. Consequently the caravan, for through traffic, fell into disuse, and central Asia lapsed into excentricity. The inevitable result fol- lowed. Energy declined, and the Saracenic empire dissolved. According to Gibbon, the caliph El Rahdi, the 72 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. twentieth of the Abbassides, "was the last who de- served the title of commander of the faithful. . . . After him the lords of the eastern world were reduced to the most abject misery, and exposed to the blows and insults of a servile condition." ^ Conversely, Egypt rose to almost incredible splendor and power, and became at once the centre of wealth, of refine- ment, and of learning. Her progress is marked in many ways. El Rahdi reigned from 934 to 940. Nicephorus Phocas, emperor of the East, came to the throne in 963 ; and Phocas and his successor, John Zimisces, taking advantage of the weakness of the Moslems, devastated the valley of the Orontes, and closed Syria as a thoroughfare. In 969 the first Fatimite caliph of Egypt laid the foundations of Cairo, in 11 76 Cairo was walled, and "from the year 1 1 76 to our days Cairo has had no notable increase, if it be not the prolongation of the quarter El- Hasanyeh. In two centuries it acquired its actual limits.** * Moreover, Cairo's architectural splendor belongs to the interval between the decline of Bag- dad, which began in the ninth century, and the dis- covery of the sea route to India, in 1497. One of the earliest and most beautiful of her mosques, Tey- loun, " a model of elegance and grandeur," dates from 876 A.D.,* sixty years before the final wreck in Mesopotamia after El Rahdi. Her noblest gate, the Bab-el-Nasr, is a work of the eleventh century. The Gama-el-Azhar, destined to be the greatest of universities, and finished in 972, is said, in its prime, to have sheltered twelve thousand students who daily ^ Decline and Fall, Chap. LII. * VArt Arabet Prisse d'Avennes, 74. * IHd.^ 94. II. THE NEW EMPIRE 73 received instruction in medicine, theology, philos- ophy, mathematics, geography, and history. In 1359 the Sultan Hassan completed his famous mosque, costing $3,cxx),cxx), equivalent to more than ten times that sum in our money, and which ranks among the masterpieces of the world. The Egyptian court was most gorgeous, the Egyp- tian empire largest, and Egypt's fame highest under Saladin, who defeated Philip Augustus and Coeur de Lion in Palestine, and who will always remain an heroic figure in history. From these facts the in- ference is justified that, toward the year 1200, the old economic system, which had been based on the caravan routes across central Asia, had been super- seded by the modem system, which is based upon the sea. The track commerce followed was sim- plified. Starting from the Chinese and Indian ports and the spice islands, cargoes were often con- signed to Aden, where they changed hands, and, crossing the Red Sea and Egypt to the Nile, were floated to Cairo and Alexandria, where they were sold to Europeans. At the mouth of the Nile the stream branched to Venice, Genoa, and Marseilles, the Venetian section being, probably, the most con- siderable. The Venetian traffic also was, in the main, that which emerged at the mouths of the Elbe and the Rhine. In the North Sea and the Baltic another maritime system prevailed, controlled by the Hanseatic League. This system struck its roots into Russia at Novgorod, and stretched out to Sweden on the north, the Urals and the Arctic on the east, and to London on the west, its base being Liibeck, Hamburg, Co- logne, and Bruges. Thus it would appear that the 74 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. old and new economic systems were divided from each other by a sharp line of demarkation. The ancient system comprised the interior of China, the whole of central Asia and northern India, Syria, and most of Europe east of the Adriatic; the new, all of Africa and Europe west of a line drawn from Aden to Suez, and thence to Venice through the Adriatic. From Venice the frontier followed the trade route north to Vienna, Prague, and the Elbe, until it reached East Prussia, where, turning east, it ended with Nov- gorod. In fine, as far as the Western Empire ex- tended, this division almost coincided with its boun- dary save in regard to Eg^pt ; and the cause which produced the division led to the Mongol invasion. Wherever commercial exchanges centre, movement is rapid, because men's minds are highly stimulated ; when a region falls into excentricity, the stimulant is reduced, and proportionate languor supervenes. This law seems to be universal. Therefore commu- nities which have been abandoned by their trade routes, though often retaining wealth for long periods if undisturbed, lose their energy, and offer temp- tations to pillage. Such was the case with Rome, and such was the fate of this unfortunate region which had been discarded between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. Constantinople fell first. In 1 198 Innocent III. preached a crusade against the Saracens, and the Byzantine Empire had then been languishing for upwards of a century. If the fortification of the Harz by Henry the Fowler be taken as the point of departure, all these events fall into a regular sequence. In 924 Henry built his first tower at Quedlinburg. In another generation the fl. THE NEW EMPlRfi ^5 mines had come into operation, and before the close of the century western Europe had responded to the impetus. The effect had been the diversion of trade from the Bosphorus to the Adriatic, and Venice had prospered while Constantinople had declined. In the Byzantine Empire all went ill. Disorder prevailed, and in 1 08 1 Alexius Comnenus, having bribed a body of Germans to open a gate, entered the capital with a body of ruffians, and pillaged as though in a hostile land. Proclaimed emperor, he dared not fight Robert Guiscard with his own navy, but abandoned the defence of Durazzo to the Venetians. Thencefor- ward the administration degenerated apace, trade fell off, the coinage deteriorated, and, when Innocent's crusaders met at Venice, in 1202, to take ship for the Holy Land, Constantinople offered the fairest prize to the spoiler that had been known since Alaric took Rome. Henry Dandolo, the greatest of Venetian statesmen, saw his opportunity. He held the crusaders in his power, for they owed the Republic for transpor- tation sums they could not pay. Dandolo proposed to them to aid him to sack Constantinople, to divide the proceeds, and thus meet their obligations, suggesting that afterward enough would remain to enrich them aU. The event proved Dandolo's sagacity. On April 12, 1204, the soldiers of Christ carried the tremen- dous battlements of Byzantium, which had been deemed impregnable, and slaughtered, almost without loss, a garrison outnumbering them about five to one. The sack which followed has lived in human memory, even amid the multitude of such awful tales. Neither age nor sex escaped Nothing was so sacred as to 76 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. command immunity, and the ecclesiastics who accom- panied the army found an incalculable treasure in the relics with which the convents and churches were filled. The prices these fetched in the mediaeval market may be estimated by the sum paid for the Crown of Thorns by Saint Louis, which could not have been far from a million of our money. Mark that Constantinople stood just to the east of the line which separated the old from the new eco- nomic systems, and consider the success of Dandolo; then turn to Cairo, which lay as far to the west, and ponder the fate of those who attempted a similar raid. In 1249, forty-five years later, Saint Louis, at the head of the finest force ever organized in Europe, landed in Egypt and advanced to Mansurah; there, meeting a decisive defeat, on April 5, 1250, he and his army surrendered. Instead of bringing home in- finite wealth, he exhausted France in furnishing a ransom. Doubtless, Europeans won sporadic successes during the crusades ; but, notwithstanding these, they never, like the Greeks under Alexander, penetrated the recesses of Asia. The destruction of the ancient civilization of the interior was reserved for hordes of nomadic barbarians. The Mongols had been deemed by their civilized neighbors to be "among the most wretched of mankind, wandering in an elevated region of Tartary, and under an inclement sky, and so poor that Rashid tells us only their chiefs had iron stir- rups." ^ There is nothing to show that thirteenth cen- tury Mongols differed materially from their ancestors. True, they produced a great soldier, but the greatest ^ History of the Mongols^ Howorth, I., io8. n. THE NEW EMPIRE 'j'j of soldiers is naught without an opportunity ; and the opportunity of Jenghiz Khan came to him, not from his own strength, but from the weakness of his victim. The fact seems established that the Mongols seldom or never prevailed against a united and determined foe; their successes were won against organisms resembling the Byzantine Empire, and their victories recall the sack of Constantinople. Probably in the year 1162, on the banks of the river Onon, which rises to the east of Lake Baikal, and which finally merges in the Amur, a certain Mongol chief had born to him a boy whom he named Temudjin, after a Tartar khan, whom he had defeated. Temudjin was but thirteen when his father died, and that he survived is evidence of his adaptation to his surroundings. At one time he sank to the depth of misery, was captured, tortured, escaped, was recap- tured, and only saved from death by the pity of his pursuer, who hid him in his house. For many years Temudjin waged war upon his neighbors, nor was it until the year 1206, that, having destroyed his rivals, he assumed the title of Jenghiz Khan, or "Very Mighty Khan." At this time China was divided into two empires, a southern with a capital at Hangchow, and a north- em, ruled by the Kin emperors, who resided near Pe- king. In 1209 the Ban emperor sent to Jenghiz Khan to collect the regular tribute, but Jenghiz, relying on rumors of disaffection which came to him through refugees, scornfully told the envoy that the "Son of Heaven" was an imbecile, and, mounting his horse, rode off. War followed, and Jenghiz obtained his first success through the treachery of the garrison of 78 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. the great wall, who deserted. At a favorable point the Kin generals awaited him with a vast army, but Jenghiz learned their plans from the cx)mmander of their advance guard, who went over to him, and found means to crush one of their divisions. Then the Chinese fell back, the fortress which covered the capital was abandoned in panic, and the Mongols took the town. In August, 12 12, Jenghiz besieged Tai- ton-f u, but meeting with a stout resistance he retired into the desert. In these campaigns the Mongols could have accom- plished little without the aid of the Chinese them- selves, for the Mongols were not engineers, and reUed on deserters to conduct their siege operations. But China was rotten to the core. In 121 3 the Kin dynasty collapsed. A certain general named Hushaku conspired against the emperor, murdered him, and raised a creature of his own to the throne. He then defeated the Mongols, but, being wounded, a rival cut off his head and sent it as a present to the new potentate, who rewarded the mutineer by making him commander-in-chief. Yet China, broken as it was, fought valiantly compared to central Asia. In 12 1 7 Jenghiz reached Kashgar, his dominions then becoming coterminous with those of Mohammed the Khuarezm Shah, whose empire stretched from the Pamirs to Mesopotamia, and from the Indus to the Aral. Soon a quarrel broke out. Certain agents of Jenghiz, nominally employed in purchasing for him, were arrested and executed as spies at Otrar. Receiving no satisfaction, Jenghiz, in 1218, marched from Karakorum in two columns. The southern, moving by the Terek Pass and Usch, encoun- II. THE NEW EMPIRE 79 tered Mohammed's forces, ill disciplined and disorgan- ized. Mohammed himself, a debauched poltroon, fled to Samarkand. The northern column, following the valley of the Irtysh and Lake Balkash, attacked Otrar. In April, 1 2 19, the garrison, being somewhat pressed, deserted. Otrar taken, Jenghiz overran the valley of the Syr-Daria and marched on Bokhara, one of the magnificent and cultivated cities of Asia. Garrisoned by 20,000 men, it was surrounded by two walls, one about four miles in circumference, the other nearly fifty, the interval be- tween the two being filled with palaces, parks, and gardens, and traversed by the river Sogd. In a few days the troops in Bokhara fled, but were cut to pieces, and then the chief men surrendered. Jenghiz ad- dressed the people, saying : " I am the scourge of God. If you were not great criminals, God would not have per- mitted me to have thus punished you." The inhabit- ants were then driven from the gates, that the pillage might be the easier, and the Mongols burned the town. "It was a fearful day. One only heard the sobs and weeping of men, women, and children, who were separated forever ; women were ravished while many men died rather than survive the dishonor of their wives and daughters.*' ^ Von Hammer has compared the accounts of the sack of Bokhara given by the Moslems, with those given by the Greeks of the sack of Constantinople. Samarkand fell next. Samarkand was not only the capital of Trans-Oxania, but an opulent market. Its garrison consisted of 110,000 Turkomans and Persians. The Turks at once deserted. Then the town surrendered. Besides 1 History of the Mongols^ I., 78. 80 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. plundering the place, 60,000 citizens were reduced to slavery. The troops were massacred. Next the Mongols fell upon Khorasan, the garden of Asia. Merv, the " king of the world," and extremely- ancient, was rich and populous. The governor, after a couple of sorties, decided to surrender. Tempted by promises, he visited the Mongol camp with his relations and friends, when all were massacred. The Mongols entered the gates, and the inhabit- ants were made to march out with their treasures. The procession lasted four days. The Mongol prince, raised on a golden throne in the midst of the plain, caused the chiefs to be decapitated as«a spectacle. Then a general massacre ensued. It is said that " Seyid Yzz-ud-din, a man renowned for his virtues and piety, assisted by many people, was thirteen days in counting the corpses, which numbered 1,300,000." ^ The ferocity of the invaders can be judged by their slaughter of 5000 victims who had hidden in holes and comers and afterward came out for food. Nishapur fell in April, 1221, two months after the death of Sultan Mohammed. In two days the walls were breached. The carnage lasted four days. To prevent the living hiding beneath the dead, Tului, the Mongol general, ordered all the heads to be cut off, and separate heaps made of those of the men, women, and children. Only 400 artisans escaped, who were trans- ported into the north. Years afterward the Sultan Jel41-ud-dtn farmed out the right to seek for treasure in the ruins of Nishapur for 30,000 dinars a year. Sometimes as much was found in a single day. Herat surrendered, afterward rebelled, and was 1 History of the Mongols^ I., 87. n. THE NEW EMPIRE 8 1 captured because of dissensions among its garrison. For a whole week the Mongols ceased not to kill and burn, and i,6oo,ocx) people are said to have perished; the place was depopulated and made desert. The Mongols then retired. Soon after they returned to destroy any of the inhabitants who yet lived. They slaughtered over 2,000. When the scourge ended, "forty persons assembled in the great mosque — the miserable remnants of its once teeming population." ^ Balkh, Bamian, every town of importance in cen- tral Asia, shared in the ruin. All men knew the fate awaiting the conquered, and yet all historians have remarked on " the miserable decrepitude of the oppo- nents of the Mongols," and have cited astonishing examples. "A Mongol entered a populous village, and proceeded to kill the inhabitants one after another, without any one raising a hand. Another, wishing to kill a man, and having no weapon by him, told him to lie down while he went for a sword; with this he returned and killed the man, who in the meantime had not moved. An officer with twenty-seven men met a Mongol, who was insolent, he ordered them to kill him; they said they were too few, and he actually had to kill him himself ; having done which all immediately fled." ^ Inertia invariably accompanies a slackening in the velocity of social movement. This inertia was con- spicuous throughout the whole zone of the Mongol conquests, which comprised the entire ancient eco- nomic system. It is true that Jenghiz himself did not erect a principality in the valley of the Indus, but Tamerlane some generations later laid, at Delhi, the 1 History of the Mongols, I., 91. ^ Md^ I., 131, 132. G 82 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. foundations of the empire of the Great Mogul Jen- ghiz and his immediate successors expended their energy in the north. In Asia Minor they swept through the Van country; in Syria they pillaged Antioch, and occupied Damascus; in Mesopotamia they slew, according to report, 800,000 people in Bagdad alone. In 1237 the Mongols assailed Russia. At Ryazan the prisoners were impaled, or shot with arrows for sport, or flayed alive. Priests were roasted, "and nuns and maidens ravished in the churches before their relatives." Invading Suzdal, they immolated Moscow and Vladimir and many other cities. At ICieff the fugitives collected in the cathedral, where numbers ascended to the roof, carrying with them their wealth. The roof, being flat, gave way, when the Mongols, rushing in among the ruins, slaughtered without mercy; "the very bones were torn from the tombs and trampled under the horses' hoofs.** ^ Advancing into Poland, the Mongols crossed the Oder, and, on April 9, 1241, fought a famous battle at Liegnitz, about one-third of the way be- tween Breslau and Dresden. Outnumbering the Christians nearly five to one, they defeated them, but at such a cost that they turned south and en- tered Hungary. Several noble Silesian and Moravian families still bear the Mongol cap as a memento of their ancestors' prowess in this action. In Hun- gary the Mongols met with slight opposition, as "the Hungarian nation was disintegrated and dis- satisfied." ^ Therefore Batu forced the line of the Vistula and the Danube, as he had forced the line 1 History of the Mongols^ Howorth, I., 141. * Jbid,^ I., 147. n. THE NEW EMPIRE 83 of the Dnieper and the Lovat. The story of the invasion is like the story of the conquest of China and of Persia. Cracow had been previously burned, and Batu marched direct from Russia on Buda. The enemies met on the heath of Mohi, near Tokay. Batu attacked at night the Hungarian army, which would no longer obey its leaders. The Templars, indeed, fought as beseemed their order and their fame, but the Huns, as a body, first refused to leave their camp, and then fled. Their pursuers strewed with their corpses a space of two days* journey. Sixty-five thousand men are believed to have fallen. On December 25, 1241, Batu crossed the Danube on the ice, to storm the rich city of Gran. He en- countered little resistance from the inhabitants, many of whom he roasted to discover hidden treasure. He then tried the citadel, but the citadel was held, not by a Hun, but by a sturdy Spaniard, and Batu suffered a defeat. Nor did the Duke of Austria fail to raise an army with which he made good Vienna. As usual, when they encountered a serious obstacle, the Mongols moved in a direction where the resistance would be less, and turning south from Austria, they marched along the eastern coast of the Adriatic to Scutari. There they stopped. Thus the limits of the barbarian inroads are well defined. Starting from near Pekin, they followed the caravan routes to Kashgar, and thence across the Terek Pass to Uschj Khokam, Samarkand, and Bactra. There, still following the highways, they branched. One division crossed the Hindu Kush by the Pass of Bamian, and erected the empire of Delhi ; another, marching along the highway of Semiramis, sacked 84 THE NEW EMHRE CHAP. Bagdad; still another, using the thoroughfare by Tabriz and Lake Van, attacked Mosul, Aleppo, and Damascus. Advancing into Russia they ascended the Volga to Vladimir, and descended the Dnieper to Kieff. They devastated Poland and Hungary, and swept bare the valleys of the Vistula and the lower Danube ; but when they overstepped the boun- dary between the old economic system and the new, their triumphs ended. Egypt defied them. Ger- many, both north and south, repulsed them, and they recoiled from before the walls of Novgorod. The cleavage was the same as that which, eight hundred years earlier, split the domain of Rome into an East- em and a Western empire, and for the same reason. Nature is consistent The fit survive, the dis- carded perish. As the destruction of Rome, in one age, supervened because a martial race could not de- velop into mechanics and explorers, so, in another age, the annihilation of what had been the eastern supplement to Rome followed upon the propagation of more versatile competitors in the west, who revo- lutionized exchanges and altered the paths of trade. Rome decayed and fell, because she could neither provide other commodities than metal to barter with the East, nor improve her metallurgy and discover fresh mines. The men of the Middle Ages, bred to fit the emergency, not only supplied what the Latins lacked, but cheapened navigation, until ships sup- planted the caravan, and central Asia lost the inter- national eastern traffic. Then the eastern half of the ancient economic system sickened and died of in- anition, even as the western half had already died ; and sorry bands of barbarians wandered through the 11. THE NEW EMPIRE 8$ Persian gardens, as the Goths and Vandals had wan- dered through Italy and Gaul. Caesar's legions would have scattered the rabble of Genseric like chaff, had Caesar's legions lived in the fifth century; and the hordes of Jenghiz would have fared hardly on the plains of Mesopotamia, had they met there warriors such as Saladin. Yet none can avert their fate; Egyptian splendor and Egyptian prowess survived not the discovery of Vasco da Gama. In 15 17 the Turks stormed Cairo, and Egypt degenerated into an Ottoman province. CHAPTER III Prosperity has always borne within itself the seeds of its own decay. Piloti remarked that the master of Cairo was master both of Christendom and India, because Cairo commanded the road from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. The French understood the situation in the thirteenth century, and Saint Louis led the crusade of 1248, not only with the view of recovering Jerusalem, but also in the hope, by conquering the Sultan of Egypt, of obtain- ing the key to the Orient. His defeat left the West helpless, and the Arabs profited by their advantage. They taxed the traffic crossing to Alexandria, up to the limit at which spices could be delivered at Con- stantinople or Beyrout by caravan from Samarkand or Bagdad. Rapacity produced its inevitable eflFect. The most ingenious and enterprising race which had ever been developed was stimulated to elude the enemy whom they could not vanquish. The result was the discovery of America by Columbus, in 1492, and of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope by Vasco da Gama, in 1497. Thereafter in a single decade a disturbance of the social equilibrium oc- curred, greater, probably, than had ever before taken place in many centuries. From time immemorial eastern merchandise had entered the Mediterranean by the Levant, and from thence had percolated through Europe, enriching the S6 CHAP. in. THE NEW EMPIRE 8/ cities on the avenues leading toward the Atlantic. In one age it had been Corinth and Syracuse; in another, Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome ; in a third, Venice, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Lubeck; or Genoa, Lyons, and Paris; but at the beginning of the fifteenth century this order abruptly closed, and commerce, avoiding the Mediterranean altogether, passed directly toward the North Sea through the ocean. On the northwest and southwest the British Islands and Spain jut out into the Atlantic from the conti- nent like two promontories. When the eastern trade moved to the Atlantic, the effect was to transfer the competition, which theretofore had gone on between river systems, into a struggle between Spain, Eng- land, and France, who alone had ports which could be utilized as centres of exchanges for ocean traffic. The intensity of the struggle for supremacy was heightened during the sixteenth century by a finan- cial crisis of the first magnitude. Europe's vulner- able point has always been her metals. Rome fell because the Spanish mines proved inadequate to meet the demands upon them, and at the time of the dis- covery of America a similar catastrophe threatened the civilization of the Middle Ages. Though popula- tion, industry, and trade had all increased since the reign of Saint Louis, the yield of the precious metals had, probably, not augmented, even if it remained constant; therefore, relatively to commodities, the value of money rose, and debtors suffered corre- spondingly. Long ago Thorold Rogers pointed out " the signifi- cant decline in prices " which took place in England 88 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. between 146 1 and 1540.^ In reality the decline began earlier, and extended throughout Europe. The French manufacturing towns which, at the close of the twelfth century, built cathedrals such as Chartres, Amiens, and Rheims, toward the year 1260 fell into insolvency.^ Louis IX. had coined the mark of silver into 2 pounds, 15 sous, and 6 pence. Under Philip the Fair, in 1306, the same weight sufficed for 8 pounds, 10 sous. In England, at the close of the thirteenth century, the penny weighed 22J grains of standard silver; in 1546, the penny contained but 10 grains of metal, two-thirds of which were base. And yet values, if anything, tended downward. Thorold Rogers marvelled. He could not explain why, with such a debasement, the bushel of grain should have cost as much during the first forty years of the sixteenth century as during the last fourteen of the thirteenth.^ Silver bought more because scarcer, and this scarc- ity may be attributed both to an increased demand for money without a proportionate supply of bullion, and also to a larger export of gold and silver to the East. As long as the caravan trade nourished central Asia, the Persians and other neighboring commu- nities bought liberally of woollens, because of the severity of the winter climate. After the devasta- tions of the Mongols the people being poorer bought less. Jenkinson, in 1559, could barter no English cloth of any kind in Bokhara.* Egypt purchaised 1 Agriculture and Prices, IV., 454. ^ Les Communes Fran^aises, Luchaire, 200, 201. ■ Agriculture and Prices, IV., 200, 292. * Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia, by Anthony Jenkinson, Publications of Hakluyt Soc, I., 88. in. THE NEW EMPIRE 89 iron, copper, and tin, besides timber and slaves, but India and China took few commodities from the West, and, on the whole, Europe had to face a heavy ad- verse trade balance, which she settled with cash. Heyd has estimated the annual export of the precious metals, in 1497, at 300,000 ducats. The Venetian ducat contained 3.559 grammes of gold, or about the weight of <>2.i3; the equivalent of 300,000 such ducats to-day might be ,ooo ducats from the confiscations which were to accompany the executions. . . . Every man, whether innocent or guilty, whether Papist or Protestant, felt his head shaking on his shoulders. If he were wealthy, there seemed no remedy but flight." ^ Such severity provoked an emigration to England, which ended in transferring thither many of the most lucrative trades of the continent. As early as July, 1567, Clough noted the movement, and wished to encourage it. He wrote : " They that were wont 1 The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Gresham, II., 209. ^ Rise of the Dutch Republic, II., 152. I06 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. to live by making of powdyr, are now undone : wish- ing that and if they would come into Englande they might have a place appointed to make powdyr . . . Which if they had, I wolde not doubt but they wolde go into Englande; and where they go, the great quantity of salpeter and brymstone wyll follow."^ The same year the Bishop of London took a census of the strangers in the capital, and found, of 4851 foreigners, 3838 to be Dutch. This occurred before the creation of the Council of Blood. The publica- tion of the British State Papers^ leaves little room for doubt that Alva represented tolerably exactly the views of Spanish society, and Alva's mental processes were those of such a race as that which produced Jenghiz Khan. On returning to Madrid he boasted that he had executed 18,600 persons, and confiscated their property ; and, on relinquishing his government, he recommended the burning of all Dutch cities save such as might be needed for barracks. Men of this type can hardly administer successfully a commercial or industrial community, but they often make good soldiers, and the Spanish would have found little difficulty in subduing Holland, could they have guarded their communications. The resistance they met in the field was contemptible. All the evidence shows that Brabant and Flanders bred but sorry material for armies. In the maritime provinces alone, where a hardy seafaring population throve, was there any fighting worthy of the name. Spain's vulnerable point lay in her decentraliza- tion. Like Charlemagne's empire, pirates could cut ^Lift and Times of Sir Thomas Gresham, Burgon, 2, 241. ■Sec Calendar of State Papers, Foreign, 1575-1577, No. 1165. m. THE NEW EMPIRE 10/ her asunder. Conducting a war upon the German Ocean, Philip had to transport his supplies by sea from Cadiz to Antwerp, and his treasure from Mexico to the Scheldt. He had not the funds to maintain both an adequate army and navy, and in making the attempt to do so each suffered. The English pro- portionately prospered, for the English worked their factories with fugitive Dutch labor, and laid the foundation of their opulence with American silver won by buccaneering. The sequence of dates is suggestive ; when Eliza- beth came to the throne in 1558, England possessed only about 50,000 tons of shipping, while Spain and Portugal held a substantial monopoly of the trade both to India and America. Alva reached Brussels in August, 1567, just at the moment when the export of Peruvian silver was assuming large proportions, and offering a correspondingly strong temptation to pirates. During Alva's residence in Flanders, com- petition at sea steadily gathered intensity, until, at its close in 1573, it had reached the ferocity of war. Drake's expeditions were distinctly naval campaigns. This competition caused the mutiny of the Spanish army. The mutiny forced Philip to protect his lines of communication by attacking his enemy's base, and Philip's attack took the form of the Armada, which was destroyed in 1588. Spain eliminated from the trade-routes, her rivals occupied them. The British organized their East India Company on December 3i» i599> with a capital of ;£8o,ooo; the Dutch theirs in 1602 with a capital of 6,600,000 florins, or about j^3 16,000; and these sums, probably, pretty nearly represented the relative resources of London and Amsterdam. I08 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. The Spanish ships were large and slow, high out of water, and incapable of beating to windward. They were therefore easy to attack and unable to re- taliate. They were laden with goods, bullion, and men. A mixed fleet of privateers, sailing under commissions issued by the Prince of Orange, used Dover as a base, and there, on certain market days, these Dutch, French, and English rovers sold Spanish gentlemen at auction for their ransom. They brought about ;£ioo a head. Alva passed six years in Brabant, from August, 1567, to December, 1573, and during his regency the losses must have been enormous. The Spanish mer- chants set their damages at upwards of 3,000,000 ducats, and finally declined to contract to supply the army, but, aside from this, tons of bullion fell into Eng- lish hands. In 1 568 Philip's credit was bad ; never- theless, he succeeded in obtaining 450,000 ducats in Genoa, which he despatched to Alva to pay his troops. French privateers chased the ships bearing the treasure into south of England ports, where Eliz- abeth appropriated it. Sir Thomas Gresham coined it for domestic use, " and so with the said monney, her Majestie maie paie her debtes both here and in Flaunders, ... to the great honour and credit of her Majestie throughout all Christendom." Shortly after- ward Gresham announced to Cecil, "I left order with my servant. Hew Clowghe, to deliver at his comyng, V sackes of new Spannyshe Ryalls; . . . at the Towre ... in good secreat order," willing his man " to saye . . . that the more expedyssone he did use in the coinage, the more profytable servyze he shuld doo to the Queene's Majestie." ^ "^Life and Tinus of Sir Thomas Gresham^ Burgon, II., 305-306. ra. THE NEW EMPIRE lOQ As the American silver trade grew in value, the onslaught waxed hotter. In 1 572 Drake sailed on his famous voyage to Panama, where he surprised, on the isthmus, a mule train loaded with silver. The silver he buried, as of inferior value, but freighted his ships with gold and jewels. What he realized no one ever knew. And Drake was only one of scores who sucked the Spaniard's blood. After six years of service Philip recalled Alva, not because he objected to Alva's methods, but because Alva failed to make the provinces pay. In spite of confiscations and sacks, the budget, instead of showing a surplus, showed a chronic deficit. When Alva left Brussels the arrears due to the troops amounted to 6,Soo,0(X) ducats, the payment of one-half of which would have maintained discipline. Probably Spain lost annually at least 3,ocx),ooo ducats by piracy. In Holland, not only private soldiers but officers high in rank were straitened. Alva himself kept his bed during the last weeks of his government to escape his creditors. The arteries being cut, the organism bled to death. Therefore, " after the arrival of a fleet at Seville the American silver flowed through the land like water, not fertilizing, but, on the contrary, wasting it, and leaving even sharper dearth behind." ^ At last the blow fell suddenly. Toward the begin- ning of August, 1576, news reached Madrid that affairs in the north had reached a crisis. A mutiny had broken out. The soldiers threatened to sack the whole country. Philip felt the supreme moment had come, and appealed to the Fuggers to save him. The Contador, Gamica, demanded of Thomas 1 Das ZeitaUer der Fugger, II., 150. no THE NEW EMPIRE chap. Miiller, the Fuggers' agent, that he should send 200,000 crowns to the Netherlands; ''the Fuggers must not abandon the king in his need." If the troops were not satisfied, the provinces would be lost, and the Fuggers would be responsible. As soon as the soldiers saw the Fuggers' bills, Gamica de- clared, they would wait with patience until the ducats came. An answer must be given in the morning* Nevertheless, he sent again the same night to say that the Fuggers must pay, else Miiller knew what would happen to them. When Miiller replied that the Fuggers had truly served the king, and that he knew not what could befall them, Gamica pulled out a cross, kissed it, and said, "I swear by the holy cross if Flanders is lost for want of money it will be their fault." The factor then visited President Hopper, and asked his advice ; but Hopper took the part of Gamica, and adjured Miiller for the love of God to prove what true servants of the king the Fuggers were. By so doing, they would put not only Philip, but the whole Netherlands, under an eternal debt of gratitude.^ That same night the king wrote to the factor, and declared in council, that no one but the Fuggers could help him in this pinch, and that this should be the last service he would ask of them. Miiller was harassed ; for, though feeling no confidence in Spain, he feared to alienate Philip, lest he should include the Fuggers' loans in a second declaration of insol- vency which he had issued in 1575. These loans exceeded 5,000,000 ducats. Therefore, in order not to " spill the broth altogether," he agreed to send the 1 Dm ZeUalter der Fugger^ I., 180. in. THE NEW EMPIRE m 200,000 crowns. Philip, overjoyed, thought the dan- ger past, and expressed his gratitude ; but the loan came too late. On November 4, 1576, the garrison of Antwerp sacked the town. That they succeeded, and succeeded almost without loss, displays the mili- tary inaptitude of the population. The citizens had full notice of the plans of the mutineers, they had the support of the government, abundant funds, arms, and competent officers. They even undertook to reduce the citadel where the -troops were quartered. Yet at the first onset of their enemy they fled in such disgraceful rout that, during the whole day, but two hundred Spaniards fell, while more Flemings were slaughtered in the streets than were Huguenots in the streets of Paris in the massacre of Saint Barthol- omew. All told, the mutineers numbered less than 6000 men. Antwerp itself was partially burned and altogether ruined. Capital fled, arid the town ceased to be a dominant market. The experience of the Fuggers shows how business suffered, and explains what Garnica meant when he urged them to befriend the king lest worse should befall them. During the sack the Fuggers' factor was taken and had to pay 1 1,000 crowns as ransom ; furthermore the firm lost ;£2000 which it had placed on deposit, and lastly one Colonel Fugger, a relative of the family, who had gone to Flanders to serve under Alva, in command of an Augsburg regiment, presented himself and de- manded 50,000 crowns as the price of his protection. As the officials in Madrid had foreseen, the mutiny proved decisive. A brilliant campaign had just ended in Zealand. The town of Zierickzee, in the heart of 112 THE NEW EMPIRE CHAP. Protestant Holland, had fallen after a long siege, but when the troops deserted, the Prince of Orange quickly recovered all that had been lost. For the Fuggers, too, the end had well nigh come. Although they escaped being included in the decree of Septem- ber I, 1575, suspending payments to creditors, they were too deeply involved to extricate themselves. And now all men saw that either Spain or Eng- land must succumb. The mutiny illuminated the future even to Spanish eyes. If Spain were to remain the heart of an organism of which Mexico and the Netherlands were the members, she must protect the arteries through which her life-blood flowed. England had cut those arteries, and hence a convul- sion which portended dissolution. Philip, like Xerxes, comprehended at last that, for his country to live, his rival must be destroyed; but, like all Spaniards, he thought too slowly. Already capital had migrated, and long before 1588 the Brit- ish owned the means at home to repel attack. The nation had ceased to be dependent upon foreign loans for funds to maintain an armament. Until the overthrow of credit upon the continent, the English government had borrowed abroad, latterly in Flan- ders, and Sir Thomas Gresham had managed their negotiations with skill; but, as the resources of Antwerp sank, Gresham observed that those of Lon- don rose, until he became convinced that domestic accumulations had reached the desired point. Ac- cordingly he advised Cecil to apply to the "Mer- chant-Adventurers." " Assuring you, Sir, I do know for certain, that the Duke de Alva is more trowblid with the Queene's Majestie's gret credit, and with the m. THE NEW EMPIRE II3 vent of her highness' commodities at Hamborough, than he is with anny thing else, and quakes for f care : whiche is one of the chifest things that is the let that the said Duke cannot com by the tenth penny that he now demaundeth for the sale of all goods, anny kind of waye, in the Low Country (which, Sir, I beleve will be his utter undoing.) Therefore, Sir, to conclude, I would wishe that the Queene's Maj- estie in this time shuld not use anny strangers, but her own subjects ; wherbie he, and all other princes, male see what a Prince of power she ys." ^ It would be needless here to repeat the story of the Armada, which is known to every child. It suffices to say that with Drake's victory off Calais, on August 9, 1588, a readjustment of the social equilib- rium began, which gpradually moulded that mighty economic system whose heart, for more than two hundred years, lay upon the Thames. On that day, also, the organism which had centred at Venice and in Flanders, which had given birth to the Augsburg bankers and the Hanseatic League, received its death wound, and the long strife opened between Holland, England, and France for the command of the oceanic eastern trade. These facts seem to justify the conclusion that the centre of energy was forced from the continent of Europe into England because of the physical struc- ture of the peninsula, which precluded consolidation, and therefore encouraged war. War is economic competition in its sharpest aspect ; but parallel eco- nomic systems connecting common termini must consolidate or compete. The continent of Europe, '^Life and Tim^s 0/ Sir Thomas GresAam, II., 540. I 114 T^^ ^^^ EMPIRE CHAP. cut into transverse sections by trade-routes which did not converge, could not consolidate, and therefore has been subject to such catastrophes as the sack of Antwerp. I have elsewhere attempted to describe the rise of the English Empire,^ and accordingly need here only indicate the form which that empire has assumed. It is an economic system connecting Asia and Amer- ica by way of the Red Sea and the Cape of Good Hope. In other words, England accomplished on a great scale, by means of water communications, what Alexander failed in doing on a small, because of the cost of overland routes. From Hindustan the Eng- lish system stretches, by way of Egypt and South Africa, the two stopping-places on its two lines of travel, to the British Islands, which have served not only as a centre of exchanges, but as a focus of industry, because of their minerals. Thence it spread over North America, which afforded an ex- panding market. The United States was politically severed from this system by the Revolution of 1776, but continued economically to appertain to it until of late it has begun to assume the aspect of the heart of a new organism. It is also worth observing that the success of the American Revolution, like the success of the Dutch, hinged on European rivabries. Had not England and France been competing for the same trade between the same termini, and had the colonies been unaided by French money, troops, and ships, England might probably have suppressed the rebellion. The loss of the American colonies accentuates the ^ See TAe Law of Civilization and Decay* ni. THE NEW EMPIRE II5 fact that England rose slowly to supremacy, and that until she developed her minerals she did not reach maturity. It may well be doubted whether she would have prevailed against imperial France had she relied solely upon commerce as the source of wealth, or even upon such manufactures as she could conduct without fully utilizing her iron and coaL Her high fortune came with the " industrial revolution," which began in 1760, and which, by 1800, enabled her to undersell Sweden and France in iron and steel, and India in cotton. It was this combination of advan- tages which gave England the energy to conquer and retain under a single administration that system of trade-routes, of bases of supply and markets, which encircled two-thirds of the globe, and which raised her, during the nineteenth century, to an emi- nence unequalled since the disintegration of Rome. Yet, in spite of all the advantages attending ocean transportation, land traffic between Asia and Europe never wholly ceased. It probably fell lowest during the Mongol domination, but with the migration of energy to the shores of the North Sea it received a stimulus which, slowly gathering strength, has cre- ated another vast empire based on the continental thoroughfares which connect China, Turkestan, and Persia with the Atlantic. In fine, the growth of Rus- sia was supplementary to the growth of England, and obeyed similar laws. CHAPTER IV Speaking broadly, the modem Russian Empire is formed by the consolidation of a series of river val- leys running north and south, but connected through their branches in such a manner as to make an almost unbroken waterway from St. Petersburg to Lake Bai- kal. From Baikal the Amur completes the system to the Pacific. Centring at Moscow, these natural trade- routes radiate like the spokes of a wheel. To the north, by way of the Volga and Vologda, the Dwina» Archangel and the Arctic are reached; while from Vologda the Suchona and Witchegda lead to the Pet- chora and the fur-bearing region of the Samoieds. To the south the Oka and the Don stretch to the Sea of Azov. To the southwest the Oka and the Volga flow to the Caspian; while directly eastward the Volga communicates with the Kama, and the Kama by an easy portage with the rivers of Siberia. Under such geographical conditions commerce flows as readily to a northern as to a southern mar- ket, and, since the opening of the Middle Ages, the social system of the empire has adjusted itself to both. Until about 1150 a.d., when the countries bordering upon the North Sea acquired a certain opulence, the Euxine and the Bosphorus afforded the only out- let for exchanges. Accordingly, Kieff, upon the Dnieper, became the seat of administration, and merchants journeyed to Constantinople along the 116 s Pern J ^ama khftiT CHAP. IV. THE NEW EMPIRE 1 17 avenues which offered the least resistance. These avenues were the three rivers flowing south, the Volga, the Don, and the Dnieper, the Volga being utilized through the short portage at Zaritzin which connects it with the Don, and by which the Sea of Azov is easily reached. The chronology thenceforward tells the story with absolute clearness. The first dated document relating to the Fairs of Champagne, which became the north- em centre of exchanges, is of 1 1 14 a.d. Liibeck was founded in 1143. Therefore, by 1150, the thorough- fare through the Baltic was established. According to Gibbon, Constantinople reached her zenith dur- ing the third quarter of the tenth century, under Nicephorus Phocas and John Zimisces. Zimisces died in 976. Contemporaneously, Kiev's great era opened with Saint Vladimir in 972, and ended with laroslaf the Great, who reigned imtil 1054. After iicx), or with the rise of the Fairs of Champagne, Kieff's decline set in, and in 11 69, twenty-six years subsequent to the foundation of Liibeck, the town was sacked by the Prince of Suzdalia, the predecessor of the Czars of Moscow. This proves that the north- em routes had then acquired an importance equal to the southern. Nevertheless, they did not decisively preponderate, for Venice and Genoa were as good customers as Liibeck and Bruges. Therefore a period as it were of slack-water intervened, when, in the words of Rambaud, ** Russia ceased to have a centre about which she gravitated as a mass."^ Not having a central administration, Russian society dis- integrated, and the Mongol domination ensued. The ^ Histoire de la J^ussie, 90. Il8 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. battle of the Kalka was fought in 1224, toward 1285 the Golden Horde permanently established them- selves in the south, and Batu built Sarai. The Mongols controlled the southern route from Lake Baikal to the Black Sea by Samarkand and Trebizond, as well as the one which leads by the Syr- Daria to Sarai and the Azov. From the earliest times these roads had thus debouched, and the traffic upon them had made the fortune of the Greek cities of the Euxine of the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ. The Mongols adhered to the ancient paths. Friar John of Pian de Carpine, who in 1246 carried to the Grand Khan a letter from the Pope, went close to the head of the Sea of Azov, then passed near Sarai, then, skirting the Aral and follow- ing the Syr-Daria, he rode almost due east to Kara- korum. William of Rubruck was taken over much of the same ground, only he crossed the Don higher up, and left the Volga not very far from Zaritza.^ The books of travel all show that the Mongol trans- portation was good, and that they moved rapidly. Timour's posting service was famous, and Gonzalez de Clavijo, in 1404, found the road from Trebizond to Samarkand better equipped than Russian high- ways have usually been up to the introduction of steam. Russian society remained in this fluid condition until it received an impulse toward centralization through the rise to supremacy of the markets on the German Ocean. The movement in this direction began after '^Journey of Friar William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253-1255. Edited by Hon. W. W. Rockhill, Hakluyt Soc. Publication, Second Series, No. IV. IV. THE NEW EMPIRE 1 19 mariners had overcome their fear of the ocean voyage beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. In 1 3 17 a regular packet service was established between Flanders and Venice, and the following table of receipts of the fairs of Saint John of Troyes shows the diminution of revenue, through a series of years. In 127s the fair yielded 1300 livres. In 1296 the fair yielded 1375 livres. In 1297 Philip invaded Flanders. In 13 17 packet service established. In 1320 the fair yielded 250 livres. In 1340 the fair yielded 180 livres. About 1322 the merchants of Champagne sub- mitted to the government a series of propositions for legislation, " to prevent the ruin of the fairs " ; and in 1433 Henry VI. of England, who was then in pos- session of Paris, granted the town of Provins an ex- emption from taxes because her cloth works could no longer maintain her craftsmen, who were obliged to labor in the fields. The extinction of the Fairs of Champagne represented a fundamental alteration in the social equilibrium. The trade-routes having abandoned France, the French connection lost im- portance to the Netherlands, and the Flemish cities, Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres, which had prospered be- cause of their convenience to Champagne, sank in relative consequence.^ Energy migrated to Brabant, for the trend of exchanges thenceforward for a century was toward Germany, and Brussels and Ant- werp had the advantage. Antwerp especially, not 1 Le Sticle des ArUvelde, Vander kinder e, Chapter VI. I20 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. only surpassed Bruges in its harbor, but afforded landlocked navigation to the Rhine. The revolution, nevertheless, moved at first slowly. During the Hundred Years' War the Netherlands were paralyzed. Misery prevailed, for communica- tions were cut both by land and sea; on land by marauding, and on the sea by piracy. Nothing pros- pered until toward the return of peace. The turning- point seems to have been the recapture of Paris by the French in 1436. In 1443 Charles VII. officially admitted the collapse of the Fairs of Champagne by establishing other fairs at Lyons.^ The year previous the same cause had produced a movement eastward in the Low Countries. In 1442 a great migration to Antwerp occurred of the foreign merchants domiciled at Bruges. Merchants sought the Scheldt, for nearly the whole of the business which had been transacted in Champagne was transferred to Antwerp, and in less than sixty years the favored town received an even stronger stimulus. By the discovery of the sea passage to India the eastern trade was drawn from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and the fortune of Genoa and Venice followed in the track of the fortune of Champagne. The exchanges of the whole world were, for a season, centralized in Brabant, and the vibration of this accretion of energy penetrated the recesses of Asia. Thenceforward the development of Russia followed step by step the development of Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London. Antwerp dated the advent of her high fortune from the migration of 1442, and within a generation the ^ On the decline of the Fairs of Champagne see Etudes sur les Foires de Champagne^ F61ix Bourquelot, Deuxi^me Partie, 301 et seq. IV. THE NEW EMPIRE 121 impulsion had been felt upon the Volga and the Kama. In 1462 Ivan III., who first took the title of Auto- crat of all Russia, ascended the Muscovite throne. He refused to pay tribute to the Tartars, and when, in 1480, Akhmat Khan attacked him, he held the enemy on the river Urga until winter destroyed them. That repulse ended the Mongol domination. In 1499 Vasco da Gama returned from his first voyage, and in 1 502 Venice was already losing trade in favor of Lisbon and the North Sea. In 1505 Ivan III. died, having extended the Muscovite influ- ence over the system of trade-routes which debouch on the Baltic, from the Urals to Novgorod. By 1533 Antwerp enjoyed an uncontested supremacy, and in that year Ivan the Terrible succeeded his father. All authorities agree that the organization of the modern Russian Empire dates from the reign of Ivan IV. In the year 1688 the revolution broke out which exiled the Stuarts, led to the English coalition with the Dutch against the French, and laid the founda- tion of British ascendency. Parliament incorporated the Bank of England in 1694, and in 1703 Peter the Great laid the comer stoiie of the citadel of St. Petersburg. Ivan the Terrible came to the throne in 1533, when three years old. In 1554 he took Astrakhan, and consolidated the valley of the Volga to the Caspian ; also at this juncture the Russians first opened direct relations with the English, through the White Sea. In 1553 Richard Chancellor, who had been sent with Hugh Willoughby by the merchants of London to seek for a northeast passage to Cathay, came " to 122 THE NEW EMPIRE crap. the place where he found no night at all, but a con- tinuall light and brightnesse of the Sunne shining clearly vpon the huge and mighty Sea." Finally, he entered the port of Nenoksa, at the mouth of the Dwina, journeyed to Moscow, was welcomed by the Czar, and returned home with the promise of liberty to trade. In consequence Mary granted a charter to the Russia Company in 1555, and sent Chancellor back to establish relations in Moscow, and also ''to learne how men may passe from Russia either by land or by sea to Cathaia." ^ Chancellor discharged his mission and sailed for England with furs worth ^£20,000 and a Rus- sian ambassador. After a voyage of four months, his ships split on the rocks of Pitsligo Bay, and Chancellor perished. Undiscouraged, the Company appointed Anthony Jenkinson to the command of four vessels freighted with cloth, cottons, sugar, and the like, together with artisans to set up a rope- walk. Jenkinson unloaded his cargo in the Dwina, and then, following the road which is still travelled, he ascended the river to Vologda, and thence crossed by land to Moscow. On April 23, 1558, Jenkinson left Moscow for Persia with the hope of ultimately penetrating to China. Descending the Moskva to the Oka, he passed into the Volga and waited at Nijni-Novgorod for a military convoy of five hundred boats bound for Astrakhan. On the 29th day of his journey he came to Kazan, which he described as " a fayre towne, . . . with a strong castle, . . . and was walled round 1 Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia^ by Anthony Jenkinson, Hakluyt Soc. Publications. Introduction, Vol. I., ii, iii. IV. THE NEW EMPIRE 1 23 about with timber and earth, but now the Emperour of Russia hath giuen order to plucke downe the olde walles and to build them againe of free stone." ^ On July 6 he reached Perevolog, or the neck of land between the Volga and the Don, eight miles across, and now traversed by a railway, but then "a dan- gerous place for theeues and robbers, but now it is not so euill as it hath beene, by reason of the Empe- rour of Russia his conquests." Astrakhan he found but a sorry abode,. having "such abundance of flyes . . . as the like was neuer seene in any land;" the buildings "most base and simple" and the town walled with earth. There was a plague raging and also a famine, and the Tartars " dyed a great number of them for hunger, which lay all the llande through in heapes dead, and like to beastes, unburyed, very pittif uU to beholde ; many of them were also solde by • the Russes." " There is a certaine trade of merchan- dize there vsed, but as yet so small and beggerly, that it is not woorth the making mention, and yet there come merchantes thither from diuers places." ^ From Astrakhan Jenkinson sailed along the coast of the Caspian to Koshak Bay, the voyage taking nearly a month, and on September 14 started with a caravan of a thousand camels for Bokhara. On this journey Jenkinson met with treatment which explains why these caravan roads could no longer be profit- ably used. Police had ceased to exist, the deserts swarmed with robbers, and the governments of the communities through which they passed connived at 1 Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia^ by Anthony Jenkinson, Hakluyt Soc. Publications, I., 49. * Ilnd, 55, 57, 58. 124 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. plunder. For example, the " Soltan of Ka)rte " pro- vided the caravan with an escort of eighty men, who travelled with them two days and ate " much of our victuals." The morning of the third day "hauing ranged the wildernes for the space of foure houres, they mette vs coming towardes vs, as fast as their horse could runne," declaring that they had found tracks of the enemy, " and asked us what we would giue them to conduct vs further, or els they would retume. To whome we offered as we thought good, but they refused our offer, and would haue more, . . . and went backe to their Soltane, who (as wee coniec- tured) was priuie to the conspiracie." After which they were set upon, fought till morning, and en- camped upon a hill cut off from water " to our great discomfort, because neither we nor our camels had drunke in 2 days before." Finally the merchants paid a ransom and marched on, but being again attacked in their camp in the middle of the night, " we immediately laded our camels " and fled to the Oxus. At length, on December 22, Jenkinson arrived at Bokhara, just eight months after his departure from Moscow.^ Jenkinson had little opinion of the Tartars as cus- tomers, or of central Asia as a market. " There is yeerely great resort of Marchants to this Citie of Boghar, which trauaile in great Carauans from the Countries thereabout adioyning, as India, Persia, Balke, Russia, with diuers others, and in times past from Cathay, when there was passage, but these Marchants are so beggerly and poore, and bring so 1 Early Voyages and Travels to Rtissia and Persia, by Anthony Jenkinson, Hakluyt Soc. Publications, Vol., I. 76, 78. IV. THE NEW EMPIRE 125 little quantities of wares, lying two or 3 yeeres to sell the same, that there is no hope of any good trade there to be had worthy the following." Worst of all Jenkinson found no demand for his cloths. The Indians brought muslins, "but gold, siluer, pretious stones and spices they bring none. I enquired and perceiued that all such .trade passeth to the Ocean Sea." " I offered to barter " with them, " but they would not barter for such commoditie as cloth." As for the king, "he shewed himselfe a very Tartar," for he left for the wars without paying the English- man his debts, and Jenkinson had to compromise and take part payment in goods, "but of a begger, better paiment I could not haue, and glad I was so to be paide and dispatched." ^ On his return Jenkinson took back ambassadors with him, but embassies were also sent from central Asia to Moscow to negotiate commercial treaties in IS57> 1558, 1563, 1566, and 1583. That commerce was flowing strongly northward during the reign of Ivan the Terrible is therefore manifest, yet the move- ment must have been new, for Jenkinson stated em- phatically that, in his time, Bokharans knew nothing of Russia. On the whole, Jenkinson lost no money ; for "although our iourney hath bene so miserable, dangerous and chargeable with losses, charges and expenses, as my penne is not able to expresse the same; yet shall wee bee able ... to answere the principall with profite."^ During the next twenty years the Russia Company regularly prosecuted its business, establishing count- ing-houses wherever trade justified the investment, 1 IHd, , 86-88. « Ibid., I., 108. 126 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. and soon it had factories at Cholmogory, Vologda, YaraslaVy Novgorod, and Moscow, beside agencies at Kazan and Astrakhan. If the situation of these towns be examined, it will be found that the English followed the thoroughfares along which the Czar had extended his jurisdiction* The movements were identical, both being effects of an identical cause. The weak point of the Russian Empire has been that the travel on its interminable highways has never paid for their maintenance and protection, and therefore the community as a whole has not prospered. Perhaps the Russians were relatively wealthier under Ivan the Terrible than they are now. Giles Fletcher, who was sent to Moscow as ambas- sador by Elizabeth in 1588, wrote a description of Russia, which certainly was not flattered, as, when he returned, he sent for his friend Mr. Wayland, preb- endary of Saint Paul's, "with whom he hastily expressed his thankfulnesse to God for his safe return from so great a danger." Ulysses was not " more glad to be come out of the den of Polyphemus than he was to be rid out of the power of such a barbarous Prince ; who, counting himself by a proud and voluntary mistake Emperor of all nations^ cared not for the law of all nations ; and who was so habited in blood, that, had he cut off this ambassador's head, he and his friends might have sought their own amends, but the question is, where he would have found it," The book was published in 1591, but suppressed upon the remonstrance of the Russia Com- pany, who feared its freedom might injure business. Fletcher, notwithstanding his prejudice, found Mos- cow a very considerable place. "The number of IV. THE NEW EMPIRE 12/ houses (as I have heard) through the whole citie (being reckoned by the emperour a little before it was fired by the Crim) was 41,500 in all. Since the Tartar besieged and fired the town (which was in the yeare 1571) there lieth waste of it a great breadth of ground, which before was well set and planted with buildings, specially that part on the south side of Moskua. So that now the citie of Mosko ... is not much bigger than the citie of London." Fletcher thought that even under Ivan the people had begun to suffer. He remarked, after speaking of Novgorod, Kazan, and one or two cities beside, that " the other townes have nothing that is greatly memorable, save many ruins within their walles. Which sheweth the decrease of the Russe people under this government." Still even Fletcher admitted that "three brethren marchants of late, that traded together with one stocke in common, . . . were found to bee worth 300,000 rubbels in money, besides landes, cattels and other commodities;" one item being "5000 bondslaves at the least." And these men lived by the Urals.^ As for Ivan himself he was reputed to be enormously wealthy. Michael Lock, in a letter to the Company in 1572, observed " that he is the moste rytche prynce of treasour that lyvethe this day on earthe, except the Turk." Having occasion to move part of his property at the time of the Tartar invasion, " he did layde fouer thowsande greate carts with treasur of Jewells, gold, silver and silk, and yet left the same two castles still f urnyshid with his ordenary howsolde stufife." a '^Russia at ike Close of the Sixteenth Century^ Hakluyt Soc. Publica- tions, edited by £. A. Bond, 17, 62. ^IHd,, Introduction, xi, xiL 128 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. Perhaps the history of Russia illustrates more strikingly than any other the inexorable exigencies of competition. The shifting of the market to the north stimulated movement along the Russian rivers. Growing commerce led to police, and the extension of the imperial administration; but when the semi- barbarous Slavs came in contact with Europeans they had no alternative but to be conquered or to accept western standards. From the reign of Ivan III. all the Czars strove to import foreign inventions, artisans, engineers, and officers, with the effect of increasing the expenditure disproportionately, be- cause of the social inertia arising from slow and costly transportation.^ Nevertheless, although the result might be obtained at a prodigious sacrifice, Russia could become formid- able as a military power, and this the Swedes and Poles soon perceived. In 1556 Gustavus of Sweden sent a special embassy to remonstrate with Queen Mary against the trade carried on by Englishmen at the port of St. Nicholas, and in 1569, when Ivan had occupied Narva, King Sigismund of Poland flatly told Elizabeth, when she protested against certain seizures of ships, that by reason of "our admonition divers princes already content themselves, and abstaine from the Narve. The others that will not abstaine from the said voyage shall be impeached by our navie, and incurre the danger of losse of life, liberty, wife and children." He explained to Elizabeth that Eng- lish commerce with Muscovy in munitions of war ^ For a criticism of Russian finance during the last century, see an exhaustive article by W. C. Ford in the Political Science Quarterly^ March, 1902, ''The Economy of Russia." IV. THE NEW EMPIRE 129 was " full of danger, not onely to our parts, but also to the open destruction of all Christians and liberall nations." Isolated, Ivan could not obtain the arms, the engineers, and the material to be highly formi- dable, but by commerce he organized an effective force. " We know and f eele of a surety the Musco- vite . , . dayly to grow mightie by the increase of such things as be brought to the Narve, while not onely warres but also weapons heretofore unknowen to him, and artificers and arts be brought unto him ; by meane whereof he maketh himself strong to van- quish all others. . . . We seemed hitherto to van- quish him onely in this, that he was rude of arts and ignorant of policies. If so be that this navigation of the Narve continue, what shall be unknowen to him.?"i To make inventions profitable, however, they must be had early and used intelligently, else they are superseded where they originated, and competitors maintain their relative advantage. Early in the sixteenth century Sigismund von Herberstein no- ticed that the Russians lacked the mechanical genius to keep abreast of the age, even when given improved implements: "The prince [Vassili IV., 1505-1533] has now German and Italian cannon-founders, who cast cannon and other pieces of ordnance, and iron cannon balls such as our own princes use ; and yet these people, who consider that everything depends upon rapidity, cannot understand the use of them, nor can they ever employ them in an engagement. I omitted also to state, that they seem not to compre- 1 The Treatise of the Rmse Commonwealthy by Giles Fletcher, Hakluyt Soc. Pablications, Introduction, xvii I30 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. hend the different kinds of artillery, or rather I should say, what use to make of them. I mean to say, that they do not know when they ought to use the larger kind of cannon which are intended for de- stroying walls, or the smaller for breaking the force of an enemy's attack." ^ Thus, whether they would or no, the instinct of self-preservation forced the Russians during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries into the vortex of competition. The market had migrated from the south to the north, therefore the ancient avenues which had sufficed them when Byzantium held supremacy, sufficed no longer, and a new network of waterways came into use by the beginning of the eighteenth century, which consolidated into the exist- ing trans-Siberian economic system. When at Bokhara, Jenkinson had found the road to Cathay closed by a war between the Kirghiz and the cities of Tashkend and Kashgar. For three years no caravans had reached the S3rr-Daria, but merchants whom he met gave him information, which he appended to his report in the form of an itinerary of routes. He described three roads, two by Kash- gar, and a third, mentioned by an inhabitant of Perm, through the north of Siberia, and, seemingly, south by the Lena. Jenkinson wrote of the year 1559, and not impossibly the growing anarchy in central Asia may have hastened the opening of the outlet to Pe- king across the Siberian plain. During the fifteenth century the Russians reached the Urals, and in 1499 they even sent a force into the valley of the ObL ^ Notes upon Russia^ by the Baron Sigismund von Herberstein, Hak- luyt Soc. Publications, 98. IV. THE NEW EMPIRE 131 Among the early settlers at Perm were the Strog- anofls, probably wealthy Tartars, who enjoyed large privileges and in return kept order. They guarded the passes of the Ural at their own expense, built block- houses, bought guns, and hired men. About 1573 the Stroganoff s decided to conquer the rich fur country of the Obi, and to this end they employed a certain Cossack pirate of the Volga named Yermak. Yermak, with a mixed band of 800 adventurers, armed and equipped by the Stroganoffs, started to cross the Urals on September i, 1581. The story of the conquest of Siberia deserves to be read in detail because of its bearing on the opening of new trade-routes.^ Here only a summary is possible. Yermak followed the rivers, ascending the Tchussa- waya and the Serebrianka as far as the boats would float, when an easy portage brought him to the Jara- vli, an affluent of the Taghil, which, through the Tura and the Tobol, enters the Irtish at Tobolsk; the whole system forming part of the valley of the Obi. Near Tobolsk lay the Tartar capital Sibir, from whence the name Siberia. Yermak attacked and defeated the Tartars and occupied Sibir. He then sent one of his robber comrades, who had been condemned to death by Ivan the Terrible, to Moscow with sables and the news of his victory. Ivan is said to have created Yermak a prince. He certainly made him the first governor of Siberia, and sent him his own mantle. Sibir became shortly a famous market, merchants flocking thither from far and near, but on Yermak's death in action the Tartars regained ^ A very good account of Yermak and his successors is to be found in Jiussia on the Pacific and the Siberian Raihoay^ Vladimir. 132 THE NEW EMPIRE CHAP. the town. The Russians thereupon removed to Tobolsk, about twelve miles distant, and Sibir slowly disappeared. The Russians were few in number, and the con- quest of Siberia amounted to little more than guard- ing the more exposed portions of the streams with blockhouses. Between the Ket and its tributaries, which belong to the system of the Obi, and the Kas and its tributaries, which belong to that of the Yeni- sei, there is only an interval of five miles.^ Near the junction stood Yeniseisk, which is supposed to have been founded in 1618. It probably consisted of a palisaded enclosure of a hundred yards or so square, with a church, magazine, and storehouse. Like To- bolsk, Yeniseisk became a centre of the fur trade, and from thence men wandered farther into the inte- rior, seeking always the path of least resistance east- ward. In this case that path proved to be the portage from the valley of the Yenisei to the valley of the Lena, by the neck of land between the two rivers across which the road from Ilimsk to Mukskaya now runs. This portage, defended by blockhouses, gave the Russians control of the upper waters of these streams, and with them the approaches to Lake Baikal. Hitherto their progress had been rapid, but in the neighborhood of the lake itself they met with stubborn resistance, nor was it before 165 1 that they succeeded in establishing a permanent settlement at Irkutsk. The Russians crossed Lake Baikal, ex- plored the Amur, and wandering eastward about five hundred miles, in 1654, fortified Nertchinsk, at the junction of the Nercha and the Shilka. At Nert- 1 See itinerary given in full in Russia on Ae Pacific^ 72. IV. THE NEW EMPIRE 133 chinsk the road from Peking debouched, and they accordingly held the place tenaciously. They after- ward settled at Albazin ; but here the Chinese onset proved too cogent. In 1689, by the treaty of Nert- chinsky they abandoned Albazi and the whole valley of the Amur. The result was logical. Trade to China passed by Nertchinsk, but the Pacific offered no outlet. Hence the Muscovite economic system followed the trade route until resistance stopped progress at Nertchinsk. Having stopped, Russia lay passive until it received another impulsion toward Cathay. That impulsion came from the United States. In 1854 Perry signed his convention with the Mikado, which was followed by a full treaty of commerce in 1858. In the sum- mer of 1859 Moravieff explored the coast south of the Amur as far as Wei-hai-wei, visited Japan, and finally selected Vladivostok as the site of a pro- visional Russian capital upon the Pacific. When, in 1689, Peter the Great began his reign, the two great economic systems of the modern world, though yet inchoate, were rapidly consolidating. The revolution of 1688 in Great Britain indicated that the concentration of commercial exchanges at Lon- don had already made the mercantile class the domi- nant influence in the kingdom, while the incorporation of the Bank of England in 1694 may be regarded as the first step taken by the nation in its career as a financial power of magnitude. In 1757 Clive con- quered at Plassey, giving to the British the control of India and the plunder of Bengal. In 1 759 Wolfe captured Quebec, and the "Industrial Revolution," which, by 1801, had won for the United Kingdom 134 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. the monopoly of western manufacturing, opened with the invention of the flying shuttle in 1760, and the gradual substitution of coal for wood in smelting. Thus the ocean routes between China, India, and America converged at the British Islands, which also, as a manufacturing centre, sold commodities east and west. No position could be stronger, provided the EngUsh could defend their connections and their bases, and provided they were not undersold by the transcontinental highways. A similar concentration took place in Russia. During Peter's reign the thor- oughfares from Moscow to Peking, Samarkand, and Teheran were established. Peter policed the Volga, visited the Caspian, and entered into regular diplo- matic correspondence with Peking, sending his embas- sies thither along the roads which have been followed ever since. A good account of Siberia at this period has been given by one of his ambassadors. In 1692 Peter despatched Evert Ysbrand Ides, a Danish mer- chant, with " a splendid embassy on some important affairs, to the Great Bogdaichan, or Sovereign of the famous Kingdom of Katai,'' and on March 14 Ides . started from Moscow on a sled. He followed the course of the rivers, making a long detour northward to Vologda, then by the Suchona to the Kama, and so into Asia. The travelling was slow, but the expe- dition seems to have encountered few hardships, and it arrived safely at Irkutsk, which Ides thus described: " The suburbs are very large ; all sorts of grain, salt, flesh, and fish are very cheap here ; . . . beside great numbers of Russians have settled here, and taken up some hundreds of villages, all which with great in- dustry'and success promote agriculture." He reached IV. THE NEW EMPIRE 1 35 Lake Baikal on March 10, just a year after leaving Moscow.^ Ides travelled to Peking by the Nertchinsk road. The country seems to have been safe. To the south and west of Moscow, as the resistance was greater, the parts of the system united more slowly. The Baltic was closed by the Swedes and the Poles, while Turks and Tartars intervened between the states grouped along the Volga and the Kama and the Black Sea. Passing by, for the moment, Peter's great cam- paigns against the Swedes, and the foundation of St Petersburg, the absorption of the Kirghiz opened the roads to Samarkand and India. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Kirghiz, divided amongst themselves and attacked by the Kalmucks and the Cossacks, asked to become Russian subjects. Peter declined, feeling, probably, too weak to extend his lines of communication with such powerful enemies on his western frontier. After the victory of Pultowa the Khan Abul-Khair again appealed to the Czar, who agreed to recognize his title to sovereignty provided he would protect Russian caravans travelling along the Syr-Daria and would respect the Russian territory. Following this treaty came the foundation of Orenburg in 1735, and thence- forward the Russians steadily absorbed under their administration the territory tributary to the main trade-routes of central Asia, until now their system approaches both Kashgar and Herat. Nevertheless the fundamental difficulty remains. The traffic has never paid the cost of maintenance of these extended highways, for the bulk of the more 1 Three Year Travels from Moscow Overland to China, written by his Excellency Evert Ysbrants Ides, I^ndon, 1705, page 35. 136 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. valuable merchandise passes now from the East to the West by sea, as it did in the days of Dandolo or of Elizabeth. Still, consolidation continued, for con- solidation was equivalent to economy. As early as 1654 the Cossacks of the southern steppes coalesced with the administration at Moscow, but a long period of war intervened before the predatory popu- lation of the Crimea could be subdued. At last the Crimea became no better than an abode of bandits. The Russian colonization spread steadily down the highway of the Don, and in 1783 Catherine II. annexed the peninsula, the Turks being too weak to interfere. Meanwhile, the partition of Poland had begun ; but the fall of Sweden and Poland are bound up with some of the most momentous incidents of modern European history ; amongst others with the rise of the German Empire. Perhaps, relatively to the civilization in which it flourished, the Hanseatic League was the most power- ful and pervasive monopoly which ever existed ; nor, so long as commerce followed the Elbe and the Rhine from Venice, could its position be shaken. The cor- poration, based on the guilds of the different towns, was an association of capitalists spreading over Germany, and controlling transportation between domestic markets and foreign ports. Therefore out- lying countries drawing their supplies from the North Sea and the Baltic were at the mercy of the Hanse, which acquired a power over them always considerable, and sometimes absolute. In London during some centuries the Merchants of the Steel- yard were influential; at Novgorod the Germans were autocratic, and in Sweden they may be said to IV. THE NEW EMPIRE 137 have formed the ruling class. Half the burgomasters and the counsellors of the Swedish towns were nomi- nated by the League. Nothing escaped them ; they dealt in all commodities, and speculated in most industries. In Russia they bought fur and wax, and sold spices and wines. In Sweden they sold every- thing which conduces to luxury and civilization, and took in exchange dried fish and iron. Under such conditions the Swedes could accumulate little. The Hanse merchants, as creditors, kept manufacturing to themselves. For example, the Germans bought the Swedish pig, took it to Dantzic, manufactured it, carried it back to Stockholm or Bergen, and sold it at their own price. It is impossible to conjecture how long the League would have retained its monopoly had trade followed its old routes. It fell, like Venice, with the discovery of the ocean passage to India. When undersold by the shipping of the west, it lost vitality, and one after another its vassals liberated themselves. Gus- tavus Vasa emancipated Sweden. Gustavus gained the throne partly through the aid of Liibeck, therefore he did not begin reforms before he knew that he could safely discard his ally. Of much ability, Gustavus saw the advantage his country would reap by the overthrow of the Hanse, and by degrees projected measures of relief. The Hanse resisted, by plotting treason ; the king retali- ated, hostilities ensued, Gustavus prevailed, and the treaty of Hamburg, in 1533, reduced the corporation to impotence. Once free, Sweden soon earned wealth and glory. Gustavus, needing skilled labor to develop the iron, prohibited the export of pig to Dantzic, thus 138 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. throwing the workmen, whom the Hanse had there collected, out of employment. Many of these emi- grated to Scandinavia, and by 1611, when Gustavus Adolphus succeeded his father Charles IX., Sweden had gone far. Under Gustavus Adolphus the peninsula reached its full development Gustavus followed the policy of his predecessors, and his khigdom became a leading industrial community.^ The effect was immediate and unmistakable. Drawing energy from her minerals, the nation fought the Thirty Years' War, and won for Gustavus Adolphus his victories. These victories shattered mediaeval Germany, but no campaigns, however brill- iant, would have built up the kingdom of Prussia, had the world in 1650 been centralized as in 1200. The founding of Irkutsk was contemporaneous with the expansion of Brandenburg under the treaty of Westphalia, because it was through the opening up of Russia and Siberia that the region tributary to Berlin received the impulsion which caused it to consolidate. It was this core which in a little over two centuries developed into the modem German Empire. The surplus production of eastern Europe and Asia, from Lake Baikal on the east to the Oxus on the south, sought more and more eagerly the paths of least resistance to Amsterdam and London. Some passed thither by Trebizond, and some by the ports of Livonia, but perhaps the more valuable portion went by river and by road to the German markets in the valley of the Elbe, and from thence to Hamburg. Like all processes of nature, the construction of "^Die GeschichU des Eisens, Beck, II., 900, 1 291. IV. THE NEW EMPIRE 139 modern Russia and Germany has been in accordance with fixed laws. When the dominant market sought the North Sea, and, in consequence, the lines of communication in central Russia began to consoli- date, the cost of administration increased, and it became a question of life and death to the Muscovite organism to obtain direct relations with its customers. At Novgorod the Hanse occupied somewhat such a position as the Arabs held at Cairo ; having a monopoly, they raised the price of all their sales, and depressed the price of all their purchases. Russia was poor and suffered intensely. It tried war. On Novem- ber 5, 1494, Ivan III. seized the warehouses at Nov- gorod, threw the merchants into prison, and carried away their goods. But this did not end the difficulty. Somewhat later the Baltic ports, but especially Reval, Dorpat, and Narva, resorted to trade combinations to enhance prices. As a result the Russians sent their more valuable products direct to Poland, and from Poland to Leipsic. The chief of these products was fur. In 1549 the representative of Riga at Liibeck stated that Novgorod's fur trade had been diverted to Leipsic, and that it passed thither by way of Littau, Cracow, and Posen.^ Another important export of Russia was leather, made in the Ukraine. This leather, shipped by way of Breslau, was exchanged for Unen and manufactures, 1 " In dieser Beziehung machten die Vertreter Rigas — 1549> 1554 — geltend, der einstmals zu Nowgorod bltthende Handel mit Pelzwerk gehe jetzt durch die Hande der Littauer, Krakauer, Posener und an- derer hauptsachlich auf Leipzig und werde schwerlich wieder nach dem Contor gelenkt werden konnen," — Berichte und Akten der Hans- ischen Gesandtschaft nach Moskau im Jahre i6oj. Otto Blamcke, IV. I40 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. the whole trade centring in Germany. So large and so lucrative was the business that Russian leather, in Peter the Great's time, cost less in Breslau than in St. Petersburg. It was this commerce which made the fortune of Leipsic. Ivan sacked Novgorod in 1494, and in 1497 and 1507 the Emperor Maximilian confirmed the charters which gave Leipsic her most important privileges, the town becoming forthwith the chief market of the world for furs. Both Leipsic and Ber- lin belong to the Elbe system of waterways, and thus enjoy cheap access to the sea. The roads from Moscow, Warsaw, St. Petersburg, and Breslau all con- verge at Berlin, where they unite in a single line to Hamburg. But Hamburg has always been an advan- tageous port for Russia, because, in the Middle Ages, by trans-shipping at Liibeck and Hamburg, merchants avoided the tolls as well as the dangers of the Sound ; and, in later times, because by travelling overland to Berlin they escaped the exactions of the Livonian cities, and often the custom-houses. Smuggling on the Berlin route was practised on a large scale. In 1707, when Charles XII. was meditating an invasion of Rus- sia, a panic seized on Moscow and the ** great foreign merchants and capitalists hastened to go to Hamburg with their families and property, while the mechanics and artisans went into their service." ^ Such persons would certainly have travelled by the safest and best- established route. Therefore Leipsic and Berlin prospered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, because they became centres for the overland trade flowing from 1 Peier the Greaty Eugene Schuyler, 2, 76. IV. THE NEW EMPIRE 14 1 the East toward Amsterdam and London, and during the last century Berlin has been even more power- fully stimulated by the development of the Polish and Silesian minerals. Prussia and Russia grew simultaneously, as parts of a single whole, and the Seven Years' War, in which Frederick extended his dominions south to the borders of Galicia, along the frontier of Poland, was only the supplement to the campaigns of Peter, in which he dismembered Sweden. At the close of the Thirty Years' War Sweden not only held most of the eastern coast of the Baltic, but Pomerania and other German provinces. Sweden then enjoyed preeminence. The Swedish soldiers were the most renowned, the Swedish statesmen the most respected, the Swedish industries the most active. Russia, on the contrary, still wallowed in barbarism. Yet the Swedes instinctively felt insecure and tried to destroy their enemy. Most nations have obeyed these intui- tions and have fought their bloodiest battles on some apparently trifling pretext, yet, as men have after- ward perceived, in anticipation of an approaching catastrophe. Few have resigned themselves to sink without a blow. The mind of Charles XII. of Sweden is now usu- ally deemed to have been unbalanced, but his con- temporaries thought differently. Johnson said that at his name Europe grew pale. France and England both sought his alliance, but Charles cared not for them. His whole soul was fixed upon the east ; his one idea to strike at Moscow. And men believed he would succeed. He himself, in 1707, expected within a year to dictate peace from the Kremlin. Nor did 142 THE NEW EMPIRE CHAP. his calculations seem unreasonable. According to Napoleon, he commanded 80,000 superb troops, and in his first campaign in 1708 he defeated the Russians on the Beresina and at Smolensk. Master of Poland and Riga, and only ten days' march from Moscow, Peter lost courage, and sent Charles propositions of peace. Charles rejected the overture, but, instead of advanc- ing at once on Moscow, turned toward the south with the expectation of forming a junction with the Cos- sacks under Mazeppa, and wintered in the Ukraine. Napoleon has condemned his tactics, and on such a matter Napoleon's opinion must be final, but prob- ably nothing could have availed him. In these great movements the genius of a general can seldom afFect the final result. The forces at work are too cogent. In this war, as in 18 12, the longer hostilities lasted, the more the defence gained upon the attack. The inference is obvious. When Charles took the field in the spring of 1709, he commanded only about 24,000 men, and with these he invested Pultowa. Peter, on the other hand, concentrated some 60,000 for the relief of the place, and it is noteworthy that while the Swedes lost in effectiveness as well as in number, because of the hardships they endured, the Russians gained in both. Charles, notwithstanding the disparity of force, attacked. He met a repulse, and when the enemy took the oflfensive his army broke, and was either captured or destroyed. In his joy Peter ex- claimed, likening Charles to Phaethon, "The son of the morning has fallen from heaven; the founda- tions of St. Petersburg now stand firm." Pultowa was decisive. Thereafter Germany and IV. THE NEW EMPIRE 143 Rusfiia divided the heritage of Sweden. It is impos- sible to follow the policy of Peter in detail, but his main conception has been well summed up by Rambaud in his History of Russia: "Peter always dreamed of making Russia the centre of communications between Asia and Europe. He had conquered the shores of the Baltic, but he had, to indemnify himself for the loss of the Azov, to open at least one of the east- em seas. Persia, mistress of the Caspian, was then a prey to anarchy, under an incapable prince whom rebels assailed on all sides. Some Russian mer- chants had been plundered. Peter seized the pre- text to occupy Derbent, and took command himself of an expedition which descended the Volga from Nijni to Astrakhan. After his departure operations continued, the Russians took Bakou.'' ^ So, consist- ently, Peter's first work at St. Petersburg was to connect the Neva with the Volga, by the canal of Ladoga, and he planned also to unite the White Sea with the Gulf of Finland, and the Black with the Caspian by a canal between the Volga and the Don. As an effect of more rapid communications Rus- sian society received an energetic impulsion. Suc- cess in competition depends on rapidity and economy of movement, and all barbaric civilization is costly because of defective administration, which engenders waste. Peter's reforms tended to suppress waste and to augment speed. His improvement of trade- routes illustrates the latter proposition; one or two examples will illustrate the former. Every barbarous country pays its civil servants by fees charged to the individual who requires a service, 1 HUtaire de la RussU^ Rambaud, 411. 144 '^^^ ^^^ EMPIRE CHAP. as elsewhere lawyers and doctors are paid. The conception of general taxation for fixed salaries is very advanced. Yet the exaction of fees by officials occasions loss and delay. The ancient Czars pro- nounced this formula when making an appointment, " Live oflF your place and satisfy yourself/* Peter was stern toward peculation. He tortured and killed many officials who had peculated, banished others, beheaded several governors, and one great dignitary he compelled to produce his books, and convicted him, by his own accounts, of being robbed by his intendant and of himself robbing the state. Peter flogged him with his own hands, and sent him "to settle his own reckoning with his intendant." The military administration was wasteful, among other reasons, because the officers starved the recruits and stole the money allowed for food. The consequence was a large mortality. Peter offered the estate of any official convicted of such practices to whoever would give proof of guilt. He was soon over- whelmed with anonymous letters making all kinds of unsubstantiated charges, and this plan had to be abandoned. On the whole he accomplished little or nothing, for the salaries paid the civil servants were inadequate to their support. Peter also pursued the policy of his predecessors and encouraged the immi- gration of skilled labor, whether industrial or agri- cultural. The newcomers indeed could not mix with the natives, yet they may have increased intellectual flexibility in some degree. Thus although in the eighteenth century the move- ment of Russia lagged behind the movement of the West, it had become rapid compared with the stag- IV. THE NEW EMPIRE 145 nation which prevailed when Jenkinson lived, and its eflfect may be measured on the steady lengthening out of Brandenburg, which was the continuation of its main trade-route. At the accession of Ivan the Terrible Brandenburg was, what it had been since the thirteenth century, a somewhat compact block of territory lying across the Oder and the Elbe. When Ivan came to the throne in 1533, the overland trade, for the more costly goods, from Moscow to the Elbe was established, and it went on increasing and stimulating the region through which it passed. Ivan died in 1584, and already the old era approached its end. The Thirty Years' War which established a new equilibrium was at hand. The war broke out in 161 8, and in 1620 Frederick William, the Great Elector, was born. This man laid the foundation of Prussian ascendency, and he did so logically by stretching out along his trade- routes toward Moscow on the one side, and toward the metals of the Rhine on the other. By the treaty of Westphalia, which closed the Thirty Years' War in 1648, Frederick obtained Lower Pomerania, which carried his territory nearly to the Vistula. Subse- quently he conquered Upper Pomerania from the Swedes, but was forced to surrender it. Most note- worthy of all, in 1666, he obtained in the Rhine country the Duchy of Cleves and the counties of Mark and Ravensburg. Mark was then the very heart of the Rhenish iron industry, the three chief manufacturing towns being Liidenscheid, Altena, and Iserlohn.^ Peter the Great's victory over Charles led to an 1 Die Gesckichte des Eisens^ Beck, II., 1 174. 146 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. expansion of Russia toward the west, and this expan- sion was followed by the Seven Years' War, in which Frederick seized Silesia, causing a corresponding Prussian expansion toward the east A generation later the two great systems, steadily gravitating toward each other, divided Poland, and their frontiers met. In the attack on the overland system by Napo- leon, Prussia, when conquered by France, freed her- self through the defeat of Bonaparte in Russia. Since then the same process has continued. A glance at a modem railway map will show the base on which the German Empire now rests. It is the old Brandenburg and Elbe system continued to the minerals of Westphalia. The lines of traffic rim east and west from the Rhine to Moscow. They centre in Berlin, and have their outlet at Hamburg. The chief of these lines are those from Frankfort and Cologne to Berlin, and from Berlin to St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Breslau. South Germany has never yet been thoroughly amalgamated with Prussia, be- cause their trade-routes do not exactly converge. Now, as in the Middle Ages, the lines north and south naturally pass through Leipsic and Cologne rather than Berlin, with the exception of that to the Erzgebirge, which is in the Elbe valley. After the wars of Peter and of Frederick the Great, Poland lay like a wedge between the two great wings of the overland system. Poland had been created by the same conditions which had created the Hanseatic League, and as long as commerce flowed from south to north, both organisms retained their vitality. In the Middle Ages, much of the Hungarian traffic passed from the Danube at Buda to the upper IV. THE NEW EMPIRE 147 Vistula at Cracow, and thence floated down to Dant- zic and the Baltic. Thus the Fuggers sent their copper to Antwerp. Accordingly Cracow developed into the chief local market, and as such became the capital of Poland. In 1320 Ladislaus made it the royal residence, in 1364 Casimir III. founded its famous university, and during the sixteenth century the city reached its highest prosperity contempo- raneously with the prosperity of Augsburg and the Fuggers. In the seventeenth century the decline began, just at the dawn of Berlin's fortune. In 1609 the court moved down the Vistula to Warsaw, which lies at the point where the river approaches Moscow nearest, on the line between Moscow, Smo- lensk, Berlin, and Leipsic. Cracow then decayed fast, and in 1734 had fallen so low that it had ceased to be used even as the royal burial-place. The migration of the capital of a country is demon- stration of a displacement of trade-routes and of energy. Therefore the evidence shows that, by the time of the death of Peter the Great, the direction of the circulation of eastern and central Europe had changed from the north and south arteries, to the east and west, and with this change the cause which had cre- ated Poland vanished. Accordingly the kingdom dissolved, a portion of it gravitating toward the sys- tem of the Danube, and the remainder dividing between the two powerful organisms which admin- istered the transcontinental highways. The first partition of Poland occurred in 1775, the last in 1795. Such an unification of interests by cheapen- ing communications^ sharpened competition at the 148 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. nr. termini, and one of its effects was to make the posi- tion of France untenable. During the third quarter of the eighteenth century France fell into isolation. Ejected from Canada and India, she could play no part in the maritime ex- changes which centred in London ; while she lay beyond the zone of the Russian thoroughfares, which converged at Berlin and ended at Hamburg. From the close of the administration of Colbert France de- clined apace. Under her antique organization she competed at a loss, until a chronic deficit became insol- vency. Then, nerving herself for a supreme effort, she simplified her methods of administration, and struck at her rivals. CHAPTER V When the explorations of Vasco da Gama caused the migration of the dominant market from Italy to the Atlantic coast of Europe, a struggle began, be- tween Spain, France, Holland, and England, for the control of the ocean routes to India. Spain suc- cumbed early, Holland had not the bulk to contend successfully, and France and England were thus left, toward the close of the eighteenth century, to fight out the battle alone. The disadvantages under which France labored from her position at the extremity of a long peninsula, isolated from her neighbors because of her converg- ing waterways, and yet exposed to their attack, has been described ; but certain peculiarities of the Gallic temperament also operated strongly against her. Most of the modem Latin races seem to have inher- ited, in more or less degree, the rigidity of the Roman mind. The Spaniards have always been tenacious of their traditions, and the French have found social innovation so difficult, that they have preferred to try to crush competitors by arms, rather than to undersell them by economics which would necessi- tate changes in local customs. The Romans dis- played the same instinct throughout their history. Beck, in his History of Iron, has given an interesting example of how injuriously conservatism affected 149 150 THE NEW EMHRE chap. manufacturing: "This patriotic dogfmatism, which is peculiar to the French, seriously influenced the development of their iron industry in the eighteenth century. ... It stood in the way of a progressive development, since the hostility to England prevented the French from recognizing without prejudice the superiority of the English in the domain of forging, so that the greatest improvements, especially in the use of coal, gained entrance into France much more slowly than into Germany." ^ When Spain sank, England did not rise very rapidly. Holland profited more immediately by the sack of Antwerp. From the opening of the seven- teenth century the maritime provinces fattened upon the war with Spain; they captured the Moluccas, robbed American galleons, and even blockaded Lis- bon and Cadiz. At length Spain could endure the drain no longer, and in 1609 Philip III. recognized the independence of the Dutch. Forthwith Amster- dam became the leading port of Europe, and the Bank of Amsterdam the most powerful financial corporation in the world. From 16 10 onward Amsterdam throve, while France almost contempo- raneously, under Richelieu, entered upon a period of centralization, which ended in 1653 with the collapse of the Fronde. Mazarin died in 1661. Louis XIV. then began his active life, and France soon saw her gpreatest epoch. Never before or since has France so nearly succeeded in establishing a supremacy over Europe, as in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. Louis XIV. was the first potentate of his age ; his army the largest and the best organized, his ^ Die GeschUhU des Eisens, Ludwig Beck, III., 997, 99S. V. THE NEW EMPIRE 151 generals the most renowned; his navy, though not perhaps the most numerous, yielded to none in qual- ity; his court was the most magnificent, and his capital the most materially and intellectually brilliant. All the world admired and imitated Paris. On the one hand, Moli^re, Racine, La Fontaine, Bossuet, F6nelon, and many others raised letters and science to an unrivalled eminence; on the other, Versailles ruled absolutely in fashion. As Macaulay has ob- served, the authority of France " was supreme in all matters of good breeding, from a duel to a minuet She determined how a gentleman's coat must be cut, how long his peruke must be; whether his heels must be high or low, and whether the lace on his hat must be broad or narrow. In literature she gave law to the world. The fame of her great writers filled Europe." Nevertheless, brilliant as had been her success elsewhere, in one department France betrayed weak- ness. The French people were innately conservative. While centuries of war, accentuated by foreign con- quest, had finally consolidated the nation in a military mass which could be marshalled by a single will, in habits of life and methods of business the ancient provinces remained nearly as foreign to each other as they had been during the Middle Ages. They declined to amalgamate, and though the king occasion- ally exercised an arbitrary power in matters of police, in financial administration he was nearly helpless. The inferiority of France, relatively to her neighbors, lay chiefly in the cost of domestic communication, which, because of converging rivers, should have been cheap. Colbert proposed to abolish all internal 152 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. tariflFs. Pierre Clement, Colbert's biographer, has thus described the obstructions which then prevailed : — "The provinces called the 'five great farms' as- sented. Others who refused, because of their per- sistence in isolating themselves, were designated under the name of 'foreign provinces.' Lastly, they gave the name of 'provinces reputed foreign' to a final category. The districts comprised in this category were, in reality, completely assimilated to foreign countries, with which they traded freely with- out paying any duties. For the same reason, the merchandise they sent into other portions of the kingdom was considered as coming from abroad, and that which they bought paid, on entering their territory, the same duty as if brought from abroad." ^ Trade languished, for the tariff of Languedoc had no more relation to that of Provence than either had to that of Spain ; and even the provincial tariffs were trifling beside the rates and tolls of towns and bar- onies. Thirty dues were collected between Lyons and Aries, and manufacturers of Lyons complained bitterly of the rigor of the taxes of Valence. A bale of silk, they said, paid three times before it could be used. Merchants protested that the city closed the river. Nevertheless, in spite of conservatism, no people has ever better loved lucre than the French, and this yearning for wealth became incarnate in the great minister of finance of Louis XIV. Jean Baptiste Colbert, the son of a draper of Rheims, was born in 1619, in humble circumstances. Little is known of his youth, but at twenty he took service as a clerk in the War Department, and in ^ Histoire de Colbert^ Qement, I., 291, 292. V. THE NEW EMPIRE 153 1651 he passed into the employment of Mazarin. There he prospered, and in 1659 had risen high enough to dream of destroying Fouquet. The farming of the direct taxes formed, perhaps, the most noxious part of a decapng system, and it was in the collection and disbursement of taxes that Fouquet ran riot Louis himself afterward averred that the " way in which receipts and expenses were handled passed belief." Subject to little or no supervision, Fouquet appropriated vast sums. His famous palace of Vaux, Voltaire asserted, cost 18,000,000 livres, and all agreed that it outshone St.- Germain or Fontainebleau. France dreamed of becoming the centre of European industries, and Colbert conceived his mission to be the realization of this dream. To attain his end, he proposed to build up manufactures by bounties and grants of privi- leges; but he also comprehended that to make industries profitable he must reduce waste. Under Louis XIV. Fouquet embodied the principle of waste ; therefore Colbert attacked Fouquet, and rose upon his ruin. When, however, Colbert had attained to power, he paused. He improved methods of account- ing, but, raised to an eminence, he saw that existing customs went to the root of contemporary life, and that the reorganization of the administration meant the reorganization of society, or, in other words, a revolution. Yet he could not stand still and maintain himself. International competition cannot be permanently sustained on a great scale by bounties ; for bounties mean producing at a loss. Bounties may be useful as a weapon of attack, but they cannot, in the long 154 THE NEW EMPIRE chap, run, bring in money from abroad ; for they simply transfer the property of one citizen to another by means of a tax. One nation can gain from another only by cheaper production. If a certain process is dearer than another, the assumption of a portion of the cost by the state cannot make the transaction profitable to the community at large, though it may to the recipient of the grant. The Continental sugar bounties, for example, have doubtless been successful in enfeebling England by ruining her colonies, and they have also enriched the makers of beet sugar; but they have never, probably, been lucrative to France or Germany. Like any other corporation, a nation can live beyond its means as long as its own savings last, or as long as it can borrow the savings of others ; and now accumulations are so large that a country, like Russia, can maintain itself long on credit. In the seventeenth century accumulations were compara- tively slender, and Colbert came quickly to the parting of the ways. He understood that to simplify the internal organization of the kingdom sufficiently to put it upon a footing of competitive equality with Holland or England would involve the reconstruction of society ; yet to continue manufacturing on the ex- isting basis, which entailed a loss, could only be made possible by means of loans, for the people were sinking under taxation. Colbert judged that he could not borrow safely upon the necessary scale ; and thus the minister, very early in his career, found himself forced to make the choice which, under such conditions, must always, sooner or later, be made, between insolvency, revolution, and war. If left V. THE NEW EMPIRE 155 undisturbed, the mechanism which operates cheapest will in the end supplant all others ; and this funda- mental truth Colbert learned. In three years after he had entered upon his task he had broken down. In 1664 he formulated a scheme, part of which was a liberal tariff, and part the simplification of internal fiscal usages. He dared not press his reform, and, as waste continued, his whole policy fell, and with it fell his industrial system. The cost of production remained higher in France than in Holland, therefore commercial exchanges went against the kingdom; and in 1667, to correct exchanges and prevent a drain of specie, Colbert resorted to a prohibitive tariflf, or, in the words of his biographer, tried the experiment of " selling without bu)dng." This course struck at the fountain of Dutch life. Holland being the distributing centre of Europe, her prosperity depended on keeping open the avenues of trade. If she allowed foreign countries to be closed against her, while her market remained free, she might be suffocated by the bounty-fed exports of France. Germany has recently suffocated the West Indies by identical methods. The Dutch understood the situation perfectly, and Van Beuningen, the ambassador of the Provinces in Paris, thus explained his views in a letter to John de Witt, "Since the French exclude all the manufactures of the United Provinces, means must be found, as complaints are useless, to prevent them from filling the country with theirs, and thus draw from us our quick capital." As a financier Colbert constitutionally disliked war, more especially as war was not his trade, and, if 156 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. successful, would redound more to his rival, Louvois's, glory than to his own. Without any question Colbert would have kept peace could he have done so and sustained the industrial system, with which his for- tunes were bound up. For these reasons some of Colbert's partisans have maintained that he always deprecated the Dutch campaign. He certainly pondered the crisis long and anxiously, for it involved his tenure of office, as well as the destiny of France ; but a perusal of his correspondence can leave no open mind in doubt in which direction he found the path of least resistance. The published documents abundantly justify Pierre Clement's conclusion, that " this time, at least, the only one perhaps, [Colbert and Louvois] worked with an equal ardor to attain a common end."^ Colbert discussed the situation in all its bearings, and dilated upon his disappointments and mortifications. In 1669 he lamented the stagna- tion of French commerce. He estimated that, out of the 20,000 ships doing the traffic of the world, the Dutch owned 15,000 or 16,000, and the French 500 or 600 at most. The final blow, which is said to have almost broken his heart, fell in 1670, when, just as the French East India Company admitted itself to be practically insolvent, the Dutch Company divided forty per cent. From that moment Colbert recog- nized peaceful competition as impossible, and nerved himself for war. In May, 1672, Turenne crossed the frontier at the head of a great army, and the cam- paign opened which is the point of departure for all subsequent European history down to Waterloo. Nor was the action of Colbert exceptional. On the '^HiUoire de Colbert^ a^ment, I., 303. V. THE NEW EMPIRE 1 57 contrary, he obeyed a natural law. Every animal, when cornered, will fight, and every nation always has fought and always will fight when war oflFers the path of least resistance. Competition is a choice of weapons. The French chose arms, and in this case they were justified by the apparent probabilities of a conflict. Considered as a means of competition, war must be regarded as a speculation ; a hazardous one, it is true, but one to be tried, where the chance of gain outweighs the risk of loss. To Colbert it seemed, in 1672, that he risked little, and might win much. His deadliest enemy lay before him, rich and defenceless. There could be no doubt as to the value of the spoil, should Louis prevail. Amsterdam was opulent As late as the time of Adam Smith, the Bank of Amsterdam held the position occupied by the Bank of England during the last century, while the commerce of the country exceeded that of all the other nations combined. Furthermore, if Holland was rich, she was peaceful. The navy still retained some degree of energy, but the army was both small and of poor quality. The urban popula- tion of the Provinces had not won credit in battle, even during the revolt against Spain, and in the years which had intervened since Alva's victories it was believed to have deteriorated. Lastly, the Dutch were divided ; the Orange and De Witt factions hat- ing each other as bitterly as they hated Louis. Conversely, France stood as a military unit. The king's will met with no opposition. Louvois's ad- ministration far surpassed anything then existing. Throughout the army the officers were excellent, and 158 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. Turenne and Cond^ had no rivals as leaders in the field. The whole force of the community could be utilized, for the peasants could be drafted into the ranks, and the nobles served from choice. The odds were very great, and Colbert counted them as a man of business. Colbert understood perfectly that he was playing for high stakes, but he thought the dice were loaded, and, under the circumstances, felt justi- fied in taking the risk. The country was in a dilemma. Much money had been invested in commerce and industry. These were undersold by the Dutch, and as matters stood the investment would be lost. Could Holland be crushed, competition would cease, and not only would the capital already embarked be safe, but it would be advantageous to employ more. Social reform had been tried and failed. Against these manifold advantages was to be reck- oned the outlay for hostilities ; for Colbert, probably, never contemplated the possibility of ultimate defeat The expense promised to be light. The soldiers all thought that a few weeks, or at most months, would put Holland in the hands of the French. At first, indeed, it seemed that no serious resistance would be attempted. The Dutch troops fled or sur- rendered; the towns opened their gates. In June the French threatened Amsterdam. Scandal even asserted that nothing saved the city but Louvois's jealousy, who feared that an immediate peace might exalt Colbert too far. Colbert, on his side, felt the victory won, and in those days of triumph laid bare the recesses of his heart. In a memorandum sub- mitted to the king he explained the use to be made of victory. The paper may be read in Colberts V. THE NEW EMPIRE 159 Letters and Memoirs}- Its ferocity is convincing. In substance he proposed to confiscate the best of the Dutch commerce, and to exclude the Dutch from the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, France was van- quished. In July William of Orange became stadt- holder, opened the dikes, and laid the country under water. Six years later Colbert purchased peace, not only by the surrender of the tariff on which he had staked his hopes, but by accepting a provision in the treaty of Nimwegen, stipulating that in future fre^ dom of commerce between the two countries should not be abridged. Thus Colbert failed in his speculation, and hav- ing failed, like any unsuccessful speculator, he fell. Louvois succeeded him, as he had succeeded Fouquet ; but the preponderance of Louvois meant the triumph of conservatism, and the postponement of social changes in favor of war. In 1672 France lacked the flexibility to shed an obsolete system, and suffered accordingly. She succumbed because of administra- tive waste. Had she been able in 1672 to effect some portion of the simplification which occurred between 1793 and 179s, London might not have become the imperial . market during the nineteenth century. Under Louis XIV. France broke down through waste. With cheap administration she might not have needed war to enable her to compete ; but if war had come, her economic endurance would have exceeded the endurance of Holland. Holland ab- sorbed, resistance by the rest of Europe would have been diflScult. No Dutch stadtholder could have been crowned in England, and no coalition would ^ LeUres et Memoir es de Colbert^ Qement, II., 658. l6o THE NEW EMPIRE chap. have been formed such as that afterward cemented by William of Orange. William's league survived him, and lasted for twenty-five years. It proved profitable. It crushed France and humbled Louis, who, old and broken, sued for peace after the disas- ters of Blenheim and Malplaquet Two years sub- sequent to the treaty of Utrecht Louis died, and under his successor the kingdom plunged onward toward its doom. At last the monarchy fell, not because it was cruel or oppressive, but because it represented, in the main, a mass of mediaeval usages which had hardened into a shell, incompatible with the exigencies of modem life. Under it, a social movement of equal velocity to that which prevailed elsewhere could not be maintained. What French- men craved in 1789 was not an ideal called "lib- erty," consisting of certain political conventions, but an administrative system which would put them on an economic equality with their neighbors. De Tocqueville perceived this forty-five years ago: "Something worthy of remark is that, among all the ideas and sentiments which have prepared the Revolution, the idea and the taste for public liberty, properly so called, presented themselves the last, as they were the first to disappear." ^ One hundred and forty-three years separated the Dutch War from Waterloo, nearly half of which were filled with desperate fighting. On the whole, France steadily lost ground; her defective administration weighed too heavily. Evicted from Canada and India, she tended more and more toward commercial eccen- tricity, while England, by the development of her ^ VAncien Regime ei la Revolution^ yth ed., p. 333. V. THE NEW EMPIRE l6l minerals, distanced her industrially. So far as peace- ful competition went, France stood relatively less advantageously toward the United Kingdom, after the readjustment which ended in the empire, than she had toward Holland in 1667, even under the inequalities of the old monarchy. Napoleon judged the situation much like Colbert, only, being a soldier, he felt no repugnance to the remedy. He proposed to displace the seat of international exchanges by making London costly as a market, very much as Philip had made Antwerp costly in the sixteenth century. To accomplish this end, three methods of procedure lay open to him. They were of varying degrees of complexity; he tried them in order, the simplest first. Napoleon saw that, if he could destroy the British navy, he might invade the islands directly, or isolate them by cutting thdir communications with America or India, or both. Failing in a naval battle, he might close the Continent to English trade, and by stopping sales cause insolvency. After insolvency he counted on surrender. Lastly, he nourished the idea of marching on India overland and conquering the British base. As a sea victory would be the most ef- fective and cheapest, he risked Trafalgar. His defeat fell on October 21, 1805, and instantly he addressed himself to maturing new combinations. Perhaps no great captain ever conceived plans at once so stupen- dous, so logical, and so chimerical. Yet he acted with incomparable energy and fixity of purpose. As he wrote to Joseph, "I have 150,000 men in Germany. I can with that subdue Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg." On September 26, 1806, the emperor set M 1 62 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. forth on the Jena campaign. On October 14 he fought Jena, on October 27 his army entered Berlin, and on November 21 he issued the celebrated Berlin decree. By this decree he declared the British islands under blockade, prohibited intercourse with them, con- demned, as prize of war, merchandise coming from them, and excluded neutral shipping, cleared from the United Kingdom or her colonies, from the ports of his dominions. Napoleon issued this decree in anticipa- tion of the Friedland campaign, for he understood that, with Russia independent, it must be inoperative. Merchandise landed on the coast of the Baltic would always leak across the border into Germany by land. Therefore Russia must be dominated. On February 8, 1807, he fought the bloody battle of Eylau, and failed, but on June 14 he triumphed at Friedland, and Alexander capitulated. By the secret treaty signed at Tilsit, the Czar promised to " make common cause with France " against England, should England, after a specified time, decline Napoleon's terms of peace. Looking back at this great struggle for supremacy from the distance of a century, it appears to have proceeded from premise to conclusion with the pre- cision of a mathematical demonstration. Placed at the extremity of the European peninsula, and prac- tically isolated, France and England fought for the ocean trade-routes east and west, because the ocean routes were the cheapest. England being in posses- sion, and after Trafalgar and Copenhagen unassailable by sea, Napoleon had to control the rival system, or the overland routes to India, in order to cut the communications of his rival. He had no alternative. V. THE NEW EMPIRE 163 To succeed, he could either occupy Moscow himself, or reduce the Czar to a point where he would serve as his agent. Nor was this all. Napoleon considered the problem in all its bearings, and worked it out in its minutest details. India was his objective point, but he perceived that it would make no diflference to Russia whether France or England held the peninsula ; competition between the land and water routes would continue, and Russia would be inimical to the victor. In fine, he foresaw the inevitable jealousy which afterward disturbed the relations of Great Britain and Russia. The emperor judged that cordial relations could not long continue between himself and Alexander, even should he confine his advance on Hindustan to the sea ; but he knew full well that if the French should occupy central Asia, they would stab Russian society in its vitals. This measure Napoleon seri- ously contemplated. In 1807 he sent General Gar- dane to Persia on a topographical mission to report on the military routes, and he even made a treaty with the Shah of Persia in which this paragraph occurred, " If his Majesty the Emperor of the French should decide to send an army by land to attack the EngUsh possessions in India, his Majesty the Em- peror of Persia, as a good and faithful ally, will allow him passage through his territory." ^ For these reasons Napoleon refused all material concessions to Russia, whether such concessions touched the partition of Turkey or the fate of the ^ Mission du Gineral Gardane en Perse sous le premier empire^ Alfred de Gardane; and see also, on this whole subject, Napoleon et Alexandre /., Vandal, I., Chap. VI. 1 64 "THE NEW EMnRE chap. Duchy of Warsaw. At the same time he vigorously urged Alexander to renounce communication, direct or indirect, with Great Britain. No one knew better than Bonaparte the strain to which he exposed the Russian organism, nor did it displease him that it should be intense. If bankruptcy supervened and disintegration followed, France would be the gamer, for Napoleon assumed a rupture with Petersburg to be inevitable should England hold out, and the Mus- covite empire retain its vitality. In either event, a wasting of the Russian energy would make his task easier, supposing him pushed to the last ex- tremity; and he calculated on being ready to meet the emergency at the end of the two years which he allowed for the pacification of Spain. The ordinarily patient Slavs, goaded beyond en- durance, broke out into fierce denunciation of the Czar. The conversation in the society of St. Peters- burg was regularly reported at Paris, and General Savary wrote bluntly what he thought: "The em- peror and his minister, the Count Roumanzoff, are the only true friends of France in Russia ; this is a truth which it would be dangerous to conceal. The nation would be ready to take up arms, and make new sacrifices for a war against us." In 1810 the break came. Alexander professed willingness to fulfil the letter of his agreement at Tilsit, and ex- clude British ships, but he declined to exclude American. The English, however, could sell to Americans, and Americans to Russians, and if ex- changes could thus be effected between Great Britain and the continent, through the medium of neutrals, the attack on the maritime system collapsed. As V. THE NEW EMPIRE 165 Napoleon said, in that war "there could be no neutrals." In September Champagny wrote to Cau- laincourt that ships of all nationalities, chiefly Amer- ican, sailed over the Baltic by hundreds and by thousands, " like the debris of a routed army." This great fleet Bonaparte commanded Alexander to con- fiscate, being resolved, in case of disobedience, to use force. He wrote : " My Brother : . . . Six hun- dred English ships wandering in the Baltic, and which have been excluded from Mecklenburg in Prus- sia, are bound for your Majesty's dominions. ... It depends on your Majesty to have peace, or to pro- long the war. Peace is and ought to be your desire. Your Majesty is certain that we shall obtain it if you confiscate these six hundred ships and their cargoes. Whatever papers they have . . . your Majesty may be sure that they are English." The result is thus described by Henry Adams in his History of the United States : — "The Czar, pressed beyond endurance, at last turned upon Napoleon with an act of defiance that startled and delighted Russia. December i [1810], Roumanzoff communicated to Caulaincourt the Czar's refusal to seize, confiscate, or shut his ports against colonial produce. At about the same time the mer- chants of St. Petersburg framed a memorial to the imperial council, asking for a general prohibition of French luxuries as the only means of preventing the drain of specie and the further depreciation of the paper currency. On this memorial a hot debate occurred in the imperial council. Roumanzoff op- posed the measure as tending to a quarrel with France ; and when overruled, he insisted on entering 1 66 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. his formal protest on the journal. The Czar acqui- esced in the majority's decision, and December 19, the imperial ukase appeared, admitting American produce on terms remarkably liberal, but striking a violent blow at the industries of France." Napoleon replied, " Your Majesty is wholly disposed, as soon as circumstances permit it, to make an arrangement with England, which is the same thing as to kindle a war between the two empires." ^ In 18 12 Napoleon, driven onward by the inexorable logic of competition, marched on Moscow to seize the converging point of the roads between the interior and the Baltic ; and in his campaign met destruction. It could not have been otherwise, because of the geographical position of France. France, being isolated and belonging to neither the maritime nor the overland system, in order to obtain for herself the wealth which falls to the dominant market, attacked Great Britain. To prevail France had to cut her adversaries' communications, and, failing to do so on the sea, she attempted the task on land. This in- volved war with Russia and the whole overland interest, and thus, with the world allied against her, France fell. Alexander the Great had no such difficulty to face. His problem admitted of solution. In Alexander's time the avenues east and west converged within the narrow space between the Bosphorus and Suez. Alexander held the Bosphorus. He had therefore only to march to Suez to cut all connections. After one decisive action, in which he forced the passes into Cilicia, Alexander drove the enemy before him, and 1 History of the United States of America^ Henry Adams, V., 41S. V. THE NEW EMPIRE 167 SO superior was his force that his operations amounted to little more than clearing and garrisoning the roads. He had no anxiety for his rear, and the war paid for itself, as the traffic on the thoroughfares he seized was the most valuable in the world. Lastly, as trade- routes converged) they could be consolidated under one administration, at a reasonable cost, and a stable equilibrium thus attained. The Roman Empire was the natural successor of the Alexandrine, and under Rome peace prevailed for several centuries, substan- tially unbroken. Napoleon failed because he at- tempted to consolidate various diverging systems. On Napoleon's fall Great Britain was left in a com- manding position. Without a rival on the sea, she decisively undersold her overland competitor, while her minerals gave her an effective monopoly of manufacturing. For upward of a half a century she enjoyed these unparalleled advantages, and it was during this period that she amassed the wealth which made her the banker of the world. Instead of being drained of her bullion, as ancient Italy had been, England sold cottons to India, and instead of having to buy grain from Sicily and Egypt, like Rome, her own agriculture, down to 1845, nearly sufficed for her wants. No such favorable conditions had perhaps ever existed, and an eqtulibrium so stable would have apparently defied attack, had not the EngKsh them- selves invented the locomotive. Given effective land transportation, the continent of North America seems devised by nature to be the converging point of the cheapest routes between Asia and Europe. Lying midway between the two conti- nents, which are divided from each other either by l68 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. vast expanses of water, or by almost impassable deserts and mountains, the United States stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is penetrated by navigable rivers and lakes, and is not broken by dif- ficult mountain ranges. Even better, it possesses almost all the more important minerals. Nevertheless, until the railway had been perfected these advantages were neutralized by the cost of carriage, and the United States could never have competed with Great Britain had waterways retained the preeminence they held prior to 1850. Even a generation ago competition remained much upon the basis of the eighteenth century. Although tending to shrink, the margin of profit stayed broad enough to spare the individual trader, and distance afforded Europe a defence against the attack of more favored communities. America did not harass France or Germany. On the contrary, America offered them the best market for their surplus, the United States buying manufactures with bullion, raw materials, or food, and freight acting as a protective tariff in favor of European farmers. The case of the United King- dom will illustrate an universal condition. As late as i860 a marked disparity existed between England and the United States. While England's exports of manufactures then reached <^ 13,000,000, those of the Union only slightly exceeded ^^40,000,000 ; and while in i860 Great Britain had substantially completed her railroad system, that of the United States lay in embryo. Thirty thousand miles of road were then in operation; 200,000 are now in use, and even in 1900, 3500 more were added. The United Kingdom, in 1899, possessed altogether 21,700 V. THE NEW EMPIRE 169 miles, and building has long gone on at the rate of a hundred miles or so a year. The burden of construc- tion on the two communities can be measured. In i860, with the facilities then existing, neither iron, nor coal, nor grain, nor meat could be exported from America in competition with the product of British mines or farms ; while, on her side, Great Britain could sell her manufactures in the United States almost at her own price. Thirty years ago, land rates of transportation did not approximate sea rates; therefore, iron, for instance, could not be brought from the interior to the ports. England had in com- parison no land carriage. Her resources lay on the coast. Furthermore, a chief source of British prosper- ity was agriculture. The manufacturing population grew apace; eating much, yet producing no food. Nevertheless they paid for food liberally, because the revenue from America provided ample wages. Thus passing from hand to hand, the landlords finally pocketed the larger share of American remittances, in the shape of rent. The gentry consequently throve, habitually saved a part of their incomes, and invested what they saved either in business paper or in foreign securities. Agriculture thus formed the comer-stone of the economic system of Europe dur- ing the decades which ended with the Franco-German War. Bagehot wrote Lombard Street between 1870 and 1873, and in the introduction to that interesting essay he inserted a passage which has made luminous many subsequent phenomena. Commenting on the loan- able funds always lying on deposit in London, Bagehot observed: — I/O THE NEW EMPIRE chap. " There are whole districts in England which can- not and do not employ their own money. No purely agricultural county does so. The savings of a county with good land but no manufactures and no trade much exceed what can be safely lent in the county. These savings are . . . sent to London. . . . The money thus sent up from the accumulating districts is employed in discounting the bills of the industrial districts. Deposits are made with the bankers . . . in Lombard Street by the bankers of such counties as Somersetshire and Hampshire, and those . . . bank- ers employ them in the discount of bills from York- shire and Lancashire." ^ Almost as Bagehot wrote these words the economic equilibrium of the world began to shift. The move- ment started in central Europe. The consolidation of Germany between 1866 and 1870 overthrew France, and transferred to Berlin a large treasure, in the shape of a war indemnity. Besides entering on a period of mining and industrial expansion, the Ger- man Empire, by means of this treasure, restricted its coinage to gold. Silver, being discarded, depreciated until, in 1873, France also curtailed her silver coinage, and thus very soon silver bullion cut a poor figure as an asset. But to appreciate the catastrophe which followed it is necessary to go back to 1848, when the United States first succeeded in putting any consid- erable value of metal upon the international market, and observe the creation of her foreign debt Prior to 1848, not only had the United States been a poor country, but she had not prospered extraor- dinarily. She had contended with overwhelming "^ Lombard Street^ y^, 12. V. THE NEW EMPIRE 1 71 difficulties. Her mass outweighed her energy and her capital. Confronted with immense distances, and hindered from comprehensive methods of trans- portation by poverty, she could not compete with a narrow and indented peninsula like Europe. The change wrought in these conditions by the influx of gold was magical. In the three years 1 800-1 802 the imports averaged, $93,000,000 In the three years 1 848-1 850 the imports averaged, 154,000,000 In the three years 1 858-1 860 the imports averaged, 316,000,000 That is to say, there was an increase of 66 per cent in half a century, and of over 100 per cent in a decade. Exports during 1 800-1 802 averaged .... $78,000,000 Exports during 1848-18 50 averaged .... 140,000,000 Exports during 1858-1860 averaged .... 299,000,000 A ratio of growth of 80 per cent in fifty years, as against upwards of 100 per cent in ten. Iron was equally remarkable. In 1847 ^^^ exports of iron and steel stood at $929,000; in 1858 they had quintupled, reaching 1(^4,884,000; while the authori- ties hold that the modem era of iron-making opened in 1855. But, perhaps, the most impressive of these phenomena was the accumulation of capital. In 1848 the total deposits in the savings banks amounted to $33,087,488, an average per capita of |! 1.5 2. In i860 they reached $149,277,504, an average per capita of $4.75. This corresponds pretty well with the growth in purchasing power consequent on the yield of the mines. Between 1792 and 1847, the an- nual production of gold and silver had been less than 172 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. J500,cxx); in 1848 it passed jio,o(X),ooo, and in 1850 $50,000,000. As America was organized in 1848, all bulky com- modities lying in the interior, away from navigable waterways, were iipavailable, but gold and silver, being portable, could be shipped abroad and sold. They were sold, and from their sale came both cap- ital and credit. A satisfactory railroad system was thereafter attainable. The United States real- ized her opportunity and strained her means to the uttermost. The debt contracted between i860 and 1893 cannot be computed, but its magnitude may be conceived from the fact that 35,000 miles of railway having been built up to 1865, 142,000 miles more were added between 1865 and 1893, that during the decade preceding 1893 construction had exceeded 6000 miles annually, and that in 1894 the total lia- bilities of the roads reached j 11,000,000,000. And this huge debt constituted only a portion of the mort- gage on the future, which the nation had contracted to obtain internal improvements and to defray the waste of war. Such figures convey little impression to the mind. Perhaps it may aid the imagination to say that Mr. Giffen estimated the cost to France of the war of 1870, including the indemnity and Alsace and Lorraine, at less than $3,500,000,060. When America's creditors rejected her silver, in 1873, she had to settle in such commodities as they would take, and the chief of these were farm prod- ucts. A general fall of prices set in, as marked in freight rates as in commodities. This shrinkage affected values abroad, and the worse the position of the creditor class became, the more peremptory grew their demands for payment. y. THE NEW EMPIRE 173 The structure of society had not been simplified in Great Britain, during the French Revolution, as it had on the continent. Consequently, in 1870, much of the complexity of the Middle Ages survived, espe- cially in regard to the tenure of land. In England land was expected to earn two profits, one for the cultivator, the other for the landlord; and though this had been possible when freights were high, it became impossible as they fell, accompanied as the fall in freights was by a decrease in the value of the crops themselves. In 1873 it cost, on the average, about J!o.2i to con- vey a bushel of wheat from New York to Liverpool, in 1880 only about $0,115; or, estimating the value of the bushel of wheat in London between 1870 and 1874 at $1.60, and allowing for the reduction in rail- way as well as in ocean rates, the farmer lost some- thing at least equivalent to a protective tariff of 10 per cent. This difference seems toward 1880 to have about offset the rent. At a later date matters grew worse and farms went out of cultivation. Then a very curious phenomenon occurred. In earlier days the manufactures of Great Britain had been sold in America; the proceeds had been re- mitted to Lancashire or Yorkshire, had for the most part been spent in wages, and by the wage-earner had been expended for food; the sale of food had paid the gentry's rent, and the gentry's accumulations had either returned to Lancashire as loans, or had been invested in American stocks. Such was the con- dition when Bagehot wrote Lombard Street, What happened in the next two decades a few figures will explain better than much argument. For example. 1/4 '^^^ I^W EMHRE CHAP. the acreage under wheat in England, Scotland, and Wales fell from 3,49o,ocx) acres in 1873 to 1,897,000 in 1893, while imports of wheat rose from 43,863,000 hundredweight in 1873 to 65,461,000 in 1893. Mean- while, the population of the United Kingdom had only grown from 32,000,000 to 38,000,000. In other words, the imports of wheat had increased 50 per cent, the population 20 per cent ; and this leaves out purchases of flour, which had swelled from 6,000,000 to 20,000,000 hundredweight The course of trade is obvious enough. The profits made on sales of merchandise abroad, and paid out in wages, no longer remained with English farmers as the price of food, thus forming a basis for English credit. After 1879, as soon as earned, these profits flowed back again whence they came, with the effect of gradually converting the landholding class from lenders into borrowers. The landed class became borrowers largely because of the extravagant system of family settlements. The eldest son took the property, but he took it encum- bered with settlements for the widow, the brothers and sisters. These settlements constituted a fixed charge on rent ; and when rents disappeared, the owner had to make good the settlements, or pay the interest on his mortgages, which amounted to the same thing, out of sales of personal property. Hence, liquidation on a large scale became imperative ; and frequently it proved impracticable to save the land. Neverthe- less, though undersold in agriculture, Great Britain, with economy and an improved administration, might have prospered, if she could have maintained her advantage in transportation; but in this emergency British society proved inflexible. V. THE NEW EMPIRE 1 75 Meanwhile America tottered on the brink of ruin. Deprived at once of her silver, which then represented a cash asset of upward of ]^35,ocx),ooo annually, and of much of the value of her other merchandise, the United States had to meet the deficiency with gold. In the single year 1893, the Union exported, on balance, J>87,ooo,cxx), a sum probably larger than any community has been forced to part with under similar conditions. Such a pressure could not con- tinue. The crisis had to end in either insolvency or relief, and relief came through an exertion of energy and adaptability, perhaps without a parallel. The United States escaped disaster because of intellectual flexibility. In three years America reorganized her whole social system by a process of consolidation, the result of which has been the so-called trust. But the trust, in reality, is the highest type of administrative effi- ciency, and therefore of economy, which has, as yet, been attained. By means of this consolidation the American people were enabled to utilize their mines to the full ; the centres of mineral production and of exchanges were forced westward, and the well-known symptoms supervened. The peculiarity of the pres- ent movement is its rapidity and intensity, and this appears to be due to the amount of energy developed in the United States, in proportion to the energy developed elsewhere. The shock of the impact of the new power seems overwhelming. From the age of Augustus downward Europe's vulnerable point has been her minerals; but all experience has demonstrated that the centre of mineral production is likely, also, to be the seat of 176 THE NEW EMPIRE chap. v. empire. At all events, no region can long retain an ascendency without an adequate supply of the useful metals and coal. Also, in international com- petition, to be undersold is equivalent to being with- out mines, for unprofitable mines close, or else are protected by a tariflf which raises the cost of life above the international standard. The condition of the United Kingdom may, perhaps be taken as a gauge of the condition of the chief industrial nations of the continent. As early as 1882, the iron mines of the United Kingdom yielded their maximum, in round numbers, i8,ooo,ocx) tons of ore; in 1900, only i4,ooo,cxx). In 1868, 9817 tons of copper were produced; in 1899, 637 tons. Two years later the turn came in lead, the output in 1870 having reached 73,420 tons, as against 23,552 in 1899; while tin, which stood at io,9Cx:) tons in 1871, had dwindled to 4013 in the same year. The quantity of coal raised, indeed, increases, but prices have shown a tendency to advance as the mines sink deeper, so that any con- siderable industrial expansion is likely to occasion a rise in the cost of fuel. The end seems only a question of time. England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Austria, the core of Europe, are, apparently, doomed not only to buy their raw mate- rial abroad, but to pay the cost of transport CHAPTER VI In March, 1897, America completed her reor- ganization, for in that month the consolidation at Pittsburg undersold the world in steel, and forthwith the signs of distress multiplied. The Spanish Em- pire disintegrated, and Great Britain betrayed a lassitude which has attracted the attention of the entire world. One symptom has been the financial weakness discovered during the petty Boer War. To maintain their credit and their bank balance, the Statist computed that London financiers regularly employed, during the summer of 1901, 8o,ooo,cxx) pounds sterling of French capital, and Lombard Street freely admitted that French bankers held the money market in their grasp. A notable feature of modem English civilization is the apparently meagre accumulation of popular savings. The loans needed for the Boer War were not excessive, yet they were negotiated with the utmost timidity, the government relying upon the aid of foreign bankers. In France, in the midst of defeat and revolution, the peasants sent carloads of five-franc pieces to Paris to pay the indemnity in 1870. In the United States a loan of ji,0(X),cxx),ooo would, probably, be taken readily by popular subscription, and would hardly cause a very material fluctuation in the price of bonds if the opera- tions were not hurried. Between 1900 and 1902 the mere rumor of a new issue of consols, however small N 177 1/8 THE NEW EMPIRE CHAP. the amount, regularly created weakness. The actual depreciation approximated twenty per cent. Meanwhile, the current of exchanges has run more and more heavily against the Kingdom, who, having for some years settled her balances in American securities, now apparently has recourse to the sale of such assets as her shipping to discharge upon the United States the burden of her floating debt. Also, with the loss of her vessels a considerable income will probably vanish, although the earnings of her merchant marine have, perhaps, not been so great as supposed, at least from foreign nations. British steamers habitually obtain outward cargoes of coal, and homeward cargoes of provisions or ore. The Economist has calculated that thirty per cent of the coal nominally exported goes to coaling stations and is sold to English seamen. Its price, therefore, becomes an item of freight to be defrayed by the purchaser of the goods transported, and if these happen to be ore or provisions, the English must meet it, and reckon it as dead loss. The British iron mines are failing, the copper mines have failed, therefore ores have to be imported; the British railways, through conservatism, have been unable to reduce rates, so that the farmer of Devonshire cannot compete with the farmer of Ontario or Nebraska; therefore the British have to rely on Americans, Australians, Russians, and Germans for food, and have to pay for the transportation of what they buy. Meanwhile the English spend on the basis of their old profits now that their profits are gone, and hence comes that enormous and ever growing adverse trade balance, which seems already to have devoured VI. THE NEW EMHRE 1 79 the savings which once represented gigantic invest- ments, not only in the United States, but on the continent of Europe. In the six months ending July I, 1902, the excess of net imports over net exports reached ;£94,545,ooo, as against ;£89,7S3,ooo in the first half of last year, and jENDIX 225 A.D. Thereupon^ Holland and England seized the ocean trade-routes east and west; and modem development began with the germination of the British economic sys- tem. The first phenomenon was the incorporation of the English and Dutch East India Companies. Birth of Charles V., Emperor of Germany . . . 1500 Wealth and power of south Germany at its maximum consequent on successful mining .... 1500-15 50 Charles became King of Spain 15 16 Contest begun with France for Possession op the Dominant Market Fuggers bought imperial crown for Charies V. . 15 17-15 19 Culmination of the wealth and power of the south German bankers, especially of the Fuggers . . 1 525-1 560 Continuous wars between Charles V. and Francis I. The first sign of revolt in the Netherlands was the out- break in Ghent, consequent on overtaxation . . 1 539-1 540 Uneasiness of Fuggers and German bankers at the growth of debt and at Spanish methods of finance 1 550-1 553 Desperate condition ai the Spanish and German finances and abdication of Charles . . . . 1555 First Spanish insolvency ...... 1557 Discontent in Netherlands at pressure of debt • . 1559 SECTION III Outbreak of the beggars in Brabant .... 1566 Alva governor at Brussels. Sent to extort a revenue, 1 567-1 573 Devastation of the Low Countries to raise a revenue by confiscations. Migration of centre of economic system consequent thereon. Q 226 APPENDIX A.D. English Hostility to SpiUN Elizabeth seized Spanish treasure .... 1568 English piratical warfare on Spanish trade-routes was waged for a generation 1 560-1 588 Drake^s Panama expedition 1572 Mutiny of the Spanish army in the Netherlands because of the lack of pay ; poverty of the government caused by the cutting of communications by the Dutch and English. Antwerp sacked 1576 Spain, on the brink of disintegration, attacked Eng- land. Defeat of the Armada 1588 Rise of HoUand and England following the conquest of the trade-routes from the Spanish. English East India Company founded . . . 1599 Dutch East India Company founded . . . 1595-1602 CHAPTER IV SECTION I Russia became organized along the east and west trade- routes of the Kama and the Volga contemporaneously with the supremacy of Antwerp. Charles VII. regained Paris toward dose of One Hun- dred Years' War 1436 Migration of merchants from Bruges to Antwerp . . 1442 Collapse of Fairs of Champagne ..... 1443 Return of Vasco da Gama from India . . . 1499 Great fall in price of spice at Lisbon and rise at Venice 1 502-1 503 Supremacy of Antwerp and corresponding depression of Venice subsequent to League of Cambrai . . . 1508 Eastern trade of Venice ruined by occupation by the Portuguese of island of Sokotra in the Gulf of Aden 1 506-1509 APPENDIX 227 A.D. Rise of Moscow Ivan III. took title of Autocrat of Russia . . . 1462 Ivan III. threw off Tartar yoke 1480 Ivan III. seized the Novgorod counting-house and ejected Hanse merchants 1494 Ivan III. died, having extended Muscovite influence to Perm 1505 Organization of modem Russia under Ivan the Ter- rible 1533-1584 Ivan the Terrible took Astrakhan . . . .1554 Opened relations with England through Chancellor 15 53-1 5 54 Russia Company chartered 1555 Jenkinson^s voyages and growth of English-Russian trade 1557-1572 Russian overland trade to Leipsic and Berlin acquired importance 1494-1550 Siberian Trade-route First Russian attack upon the valley of the Obi . . 1499 Yermak began his invasion of Siberia . t Sept. i, 1581 Tobolsk founded 1587 Irkutsk founded . 1651 Nertchinsk founded 1654 At Nertchinsk the road turned south to Peking through Chinese territory, which could not be conquered. The Pacific being closed until the opening of Japan by the United States, Nertchinsk formed the natural terminus of the overland Russian route. Therefore, by the treaty of Nertchinsk, signed Aug. 27, 1689 Russia abandoned the valley of the Amur, and stopped her expansion eastward for nearly two hundred years. Meanwhile the Moscow-Peking trade probably was as valuable an asset as Russia possessed. Route, Moscow, Perm, Tobolsk, Irkutsk, Nertchinsk. In Peter the Great's time return caravans from Moscow were "worth from 300,000 to 400,000 roubles, and in spite of the great dis- tance the freight did not amount to more than five per cent, of the whole capital.'' ^ 1 Filer the Greats Schuyler, II., 380, 228 APPENDIX A.D. SECTION 11 Contemporaneous Reorganization of Germany The migration of the main trade-route from the Medi- terranean to the Atlantic toward 1500 caused the domi- nant market to seat itself on the shore of the North Sea, and also caused a rise in energy of the movement on the east and west lines of transit in central and eastern Europe and a proportionate decline in the north and south. The Hanseatic League, which controlled the north and south lines of Germany and Poland and governed Sweden, lost power. Sweden correspondingly gained. Gustavus Vasa came to the throne .... 1523 Defeated Hanseatic League and emancipated Sweden by treaty of Hamburg 1533 Strong development of Swedish iron industry from treaty of Hamburg to death of Gustavus Adolphus 1 533-1633 This rise in energy of Sweden decided the result of the Thirty Years' War, which ended with the consolidation of the nucleus of the modem kingdom of Prussia. Thirty Years' War began 1618 Gustavus Adolphus invaded Germany .... 1630 Victory of Lutzen, death of Gustavus .... 1632 Torstenson, Swedish general, defeated Austrians and occupied Bohemia 1644 Peace of Westphalia, by which Frederick William, the Great Elector of Brandenburg, gained Farther Pomerania and other advantages, laying foundations of Prussia . 1648 Frederick William acquired Duchy of Cleves and County of Mark in the iron region of Westphalia . . 1666 Prussia became a kingdom 1701 Seven Years' War and conquest of Silesia by Frederick the Great 1763 Simultaneous Expansion West of Russia Peter the Great conquered the Neva from Sweden and founded St. Petersburg 1703 APPENDIX 229 A.D. Gained victory of Pultowa and conquered the Baltic Provinces 1709 SECTION III Therefore from the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War in 1 61 8 to the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763 a steady consolidation of Russia and Prussia had gone on^ by which Poland had been hemmed in between the east and west divisions of the overland economic system. Poland Poland originally developed along the trade-route north from the valley of the Danube to the Baltic. The early road to Constantinople from the west lay through Vienna, Gran, Bdgrad, and Adrianople. This was the crusading route until the thirteenth century. Trade crossing north from the Danube to the valley of the Vistula, and so to the Baltic, centred at Cracow, on the upper Vistula, as the local market, and accordingly Cracow became a capital. The kings of Poland were buried in Cracow Cathedral from 1 163-1733 Cracow flourished under Casimir III. . . . 1333-1370 University established 1364 Member of Hanseatic League 1430 Highest prosperity and fame reached under Sigis- mund 1 1506-1548 Copernicus buried at Cracow 1543 This period of prosperity is coincident with the highest prosperity of Augsburg and the Fuggers. The Fuggers reached their prime with Anthony Fugger I 525-1 560 The development of the Hungarian and Bohemian minerals caused both phenomena. The Fuggers acquired large copper properties in Neusohl near Gran ; in connec- tion with powerful Hungarian families, they formed a syn- dicate for controlling the market, and shipped copper by Cracow and the Vistula to Dantzic and Antwerp, instead 230 APPENDIX A.D. of, as before, to Venice. Cracow and Antwerp became great metal markets from . . . . . . 1494 Change of the Axis of European Movement IN Sixteenth Century The change in the axis of European movement from north and south to east and west during the sixteenth century is clearly indicated by the following series of events : — Destruction of the Hanseatic House at Novgorod . 1494 Rise of Leipsic Fairs indicated by grants of privileges by Maximilian 1497-1507 Defeat of Hanse by Sweden and treaty of Hamburg . 1533 Diversion of fiir trade to Leipsic admitted by Hanse 1 549-1 5 54 Abdication of Charles V 1555 Abdication of Charles immediately followed by Spanish bankruptcy, and by the first shock to Fuggers^ credit 1 557-1562 The power of the current east and west is shown by the union of Lithuania and Poland and establishment of joint diets at Warsaw 1569 Thenceforward south Germany rapidly declined. The Nuremberg Welsers left business about . • 1566 The Augsberg Welsers were sinking by . . . 1590 The capital of Poland moved north from Cracow to Warsaw in 1609 The Fuggers weakened steadily under the burden of the debt of upwards of 5,000,000 ducats owing them by Spain after 1610 Correspondingly London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Warsaw, and St. Petersburg rose. SECTION IV Disintegration of Poland Incorporation of Lithuania with Poland. Process b^an by accession to the throne of Poland of Alexander, Duke of Lithuania, in 1501 Consolidation completed and diets of Poland and Lithuania held at Warsaw 1569 APPENDIX 23 1 A.D. Sig^smund moved the royal residence to Warsaw . 1609 This movement was coincident with Thirty Years' War and the consolidation of North Germany. Thirty Years' War begun by Count von Thum in Bohemia 1618 Continued consolidation of North Germany produced the Seven Years' War 1756-1763 Efforts of France, Russia, and Austria having failed to check the consolidation of North Germany in the Seven Years' War, the process continued by the absorption of Poland. Partitions ^77S-^79S As finally settled in 18 15, the upper Vistula, with Cracow, adhered to the Danubian system ; the central Vistula, with Warsaw, to the Russian ; the lower Vistula, with Dantzic, to the German. Complete economic isolation of France, caused by the junction of Prussia and Russia and the dismemberment of Poland. Outbreak of Revolution .... 1789 Period of destruction of mediaeval social system . 1 789-1 795 Bonaparte First Consul 1799 Napoleonic wars began with Marengo . . June 14, 1800 CHAPTER V SECTION I France from her geographical position is isolated. She forms no part of the overland system, and her long wars with Holland and England, from 1672 to 1815, were all caused by her attempt to conquer the ocean trade-routes between China, India, and America. After the sack of Antwerp Amsterdam became the chief market of northern Europe, about . . . .1610 The profits of her trade may be computed by the profits of the Dutch East India Company. The average dividends of the Dutch East India Com- pany were 25 to 30 per cent between . . . 1 606-1661 Par value of shares was 3000 florins ; market value, 18,000 florins. 232 APPENDIX A.D. The Dutch East India Company owned 150 merchant ships, 40 to 50 war-ships, had an army of 10,000 men, and divided 40 percent in 1670 Contemporaneously in 1671 the French company showed a deficit of 6,000,000 livres. On the death of Mazarin, Colbert became minister of finance and addressed himself to building up French industries 1661 Colbert attempted economic reforms in . . . 1664 And £uled 1664-1667 Abandoning his attempt to reform internal tariff, he resorted to a prohibitive tariff against Holland . 1667 This proved ineffective, while the great prosperity of Dutch shipping and the wealth of the Dutch East India Company inclined Colbert to war 167 1 According to Colbert at this time, ^'of 20,000 ships doing the commerce of the world, the Dutch owned 15,000 or 16,000, the French 500 or 600 at most.^* Colbert had the alternative presented to him of abandoning his industrial system, and with it his office, or of crushing the Dutch. He chose war. Dutch war 1672-1678 Defeat of France and treaty of Nimwegen . . . 1678 Revolution in England 1688 Coalition against France formed by William III., which lasted substantially till treaty of Utrecht . . . 1689-17 13 SECTION II The French wars proving unsuccessful, competition continued unchecked, and, being undersold, the French industries fell into decline. The period of splendor of the reign of Louis XIV. ended with the Revolution of 1688 in England. Complete industrial prostration in France from . 1700-1715 After a short industrial revival during the middle of the eighteenth century, the introduction of coal in smelting in England, which gave England the supremacy in steel, put France at a further disadvantage after . . . 1770 APPENDIX 233 A.D. The progress of France toward insolvency ended in the Revolution in 1789 The Terror 1793 Bonaparte pacified the sections at Saint Roch . Oct. 5, 1795 Napoleon Consul 1799 Peace of Amiens 1802 But the equilibrium proved to be unstable. The impossibility of successful competition by France led to attack on English trade-routes. War renewed . 1803 As a means to victory the French made their army absolute. Napoleon Emperor May 18, 1804 SECTION III Wars for Control op Ocean Tradb- ■ROUTES Trafdgar Oct. 21, 1805 Jena . . . Oct. 14, 1806 Berlin Decree' Nov. 21, 1806 Eylau Feb. 8, 1807 Filedland June 14, 1807 Russia capitulated to Napoleon — convention of Tilsit signed July 7, 1807 Napoleon began the encouragement of the beet sugar industry as a war measure to destroy the English colonies ^ 1808 Intolerable distress of Russia from loss of outlets of trade 1808-1810 Ukase admitting American ships into Russian ports, Dec. 19, 1810 Napoleon adopted policy of state encouragement for sugar . 1811 War with Russia Napoleon crossed the Niemen Retreat from Moscow began Waterloo .... English economic supremacy June 22, 18 12 June 24, 1812 Oct. 18, 1812 June 18, 1 81 5 . 1815-1873 ^The sugar question is not treated in this volume. For its history see Americans Economic Supremacy ^ 54 ei seq. 234 APPENDIX A.D. Poverty of the United States until . . ^ . 1848 Discovery of gold in California 1847 Rapid development of the United States after the dis- covery of gold 1848-1860 Huge indebtedness of the United States, contracted for internal improvements 1 865-1 894 Continuous attack of the Continent on the West Indian sugar ; control of the English market obtained by Conti- nental sugar in 1871 Fall in the price of sugar ruined the West Indies 1868- 1893 First insurrection in Cuba began .... 1868 Demonetization of silver by Germany . . . 1873 Fall in prices from 1873 ^ ^^9^ English farming land began to lose its value from . 1879 Panic of 1893 Unprecedented exportation of gold from the United States 1893 Fall of 30 per cent in the price of sugar . . 1 893-1 895 Second Cuban insurrection. Signs of exhaustion in English minerals became pro- nounced toward 1890 Readjustment of American social system toward Euro- pean competition, by oxganization of so-called trusts, 1 893-1 897 CHAPTER VI SECTION I Rise of Japan Japan closed to foreigners 1623 Gold discovered in California 1847 California ceded by Mexico to United States . . 1848 Perry sailed from Norfolk for Japan . . Nov. 24, 1852 Perry reached Yeddo July 8, 1853 Perry signed first convention with Mikado . Mch. 31, 1854 Reorganization of Japan began with American com- mercial treaty 1858 -.^f. APPENDIX 235 A.D. Stimulated by the opening of Japan, Russia expanded along the trade-route of the Amur. MuraviofF negotiated the treaty with China which made the left bank of the Amur the Russian boundary, and opened the river to Russian ships to its mouth .... May 16, 1858 Muravioff founded Vladivostok on the Pacific . . i860 Fall of the Shogun 1868 War between Japan and China .... 1894- 1895 Interference of France, Germany, and Russia with terms of peace; Japanese forced to give up Port Arthur 1895 SECTION II American Supremacy American supremacy in steel .... Mar., 1897 Germans seized Kaiochau Nov., 1897 Russia occupied Port Arthur .... Dec, 1897 Hostilities between Spain and Cuba continued without definite result, Spanish opinion becoming steadily in- flamed against the United States, until the destruction of the Maine in Havana harbor . . . Feb. 15, 1898 The destruction of the Maine was thus a direct effect of the attack by the Overland Economic System on the English Economic System through the sugar bounties which mined the West Indies and caused the Cuban insurrection. 1 The sugar bounties were a continuance of Napoleon's Continental policy. The catastrophe of the Maine made war between Spain and the United States inevitable. The disintegration of the Spanish Empire followed. Battle of Manila . . . May i, 1898 Meanwhile the British acquired Wei-hai-wei . April, 1898 In consequence of the aggressions of Germany and Russia insurrection broke out in China in . . June, 1900 Baron von Ketteler killed and legations attacked, June 20, 1900 Circular note of the State Department . . July 3, 1900 1 See Americans Economic Supremacy y chapter IIL 236 APPENDIX A.D. The European commanders in a council of war decided that 80,000 men would be needed before an advance could be made on Peking. Despatch to this effect sent to Washington by Admiral Kempff .... July 8, 1900 Tientsin captured by the energy of the Japanese, who blew open the south gate. Allies entered the dty July 14, 1900 General Chaffee reached Tientsin . July 30, 1900 Conference of generals held on General Chaffee^s arrival decided on an immediate advance . . . Aug. i, 1900 Advance begun, the column about 19,000 strong, Aug. 4, 1900 Peking occupied Aug. 14, 1900 Field Marshal von Waldersee, in command of the German contingent, reached Peking . . Oct. 17, 1900 INDEX Aden : 71. Alexander: campaigns of, 37, 38; money of, 39 ; empire of, 166, 167. Alva : sent to Brussels, 104 ; govern- ment of Netherlands, 105 ; ferocity of, 106; remittance to, confiscated by Elizabeth, 108 ; recalled, 109. America : trade-routes of, 167 ; com- parison with England before i860, 168; gold discovered, 171; impul- sion received from, 171; railroad system of, 172; panic of 1893, 175 ; trusts of, 175; effect of competi- tion of, 177 et seq. ; expands into Asia, 192; Chinese policy, 193, 194; superiority of engineers of, 901; supremacy of, 208; empire of, 209. Amsterdam : prosperity of, 15a Antwerp: prosperity of, 91; threat- ened by mutiny, no; Fuggers' advances to protect, no; sack of, in; migration of merchants to, 120 ; culmination of, 120, Armada: 113. Asia, central: cities of, 70; part of old economic system, 74; wealth of, 74; decay of, 74; destruction of, by Mongols, 79 et seq,; see ly ode-routes. Athens: colonizes Miletus, 21, 22; hostility to Corinth, 35; decay of, 36; mines of Laurium, see Min- erals, Augsburg: south Germany trade- routes converge at, 52; walled, 52; a mining centre, 55 ; home of the Fuggers, 56; copper interests of, 57 ; financial capital of south Ger- many, 98. B Babylon: economic system of, 5; trade-routes of, 11 ; taken by Per^ sians, 30. Bactra: 10; routes converging at, II. See Balkh. Bagdad: decline of caliphs of, 71; taken by Jenghiz Khan, 82. Balkh : taken by Jenghiz Khan, 81 ; trade of, 124. See Badra, Bamian: taken by Jenghiz Khan, 81. Bank of England: founded, 133. Bapaume : custom-house, 95, Note, Berlin: trade-routes of, 140, 146; rise of, 140, 147. Betlis : description of, 18. Bokhara: taken by Jenghiz Khan, 79 ; visited by Jenkinson, 88, 124. Brandenburg: see Prussia* Brenner: 58. Bruges : rise of, 53 ; base of Hanse, 73 ; importance of, 93 ; decline of, 119. Byzantine Empire : prosperity o^ 60 ; decay of, 61. Cairo: founded, 72; walled, 72; architecture of, 72 ; capture of, by Turks, 85 ; importance of, 86. Canals: Oise-Scheldt, 94; Russian, 143. Caravan routes : Ur, 7 ; from Kash- gar and Yarkand to India, 9 ; through Syr-Daria valley, 9 ; from Bactra to Mediterranean, 11 ; India to Egypt, II ; fix)m Trebizond to Samarkand, 24, 27 et seq. See lyade-rouies. 337 238 INDEX Carthaginians: invade Sicfly, 34; expelled from Spain, 4a. Central Asia : see Asia, Ceylon : voyage to, 71. Champagne : Fairs of, 61 ; tolls, 68 ; towns where held, 94; decline of Fairs of, 96; yield of Fairs, 119; extinction of Fairs of^ 119. Chancellor, Richard: voyages, 121, 132. Charlemagne : empire of, 47, 48. Charles V, : description of, 92 ; buys election, 98; revenues of. 99; paci- fies Ghent, 100; abdication of, loi ; debts left by, 103. Charles XII, : see Sweden, Cheops : p3rramid of, 6. China: minerals o^ 189; war with Japan, 190, 191; revolt in, 192 et seq. davifOt Ruy Gonzalez de : embassy of, 34 ; journey of, 37, 38, 39. Chnght Richard : describes Antwerp, IPS' Colbert: sketch of, 153; industrial policy of. 154 ; £ulure of policy of, 155; hostile to Dutch, 156, 157; makes war on Holland, 158; fall of, 159. Cologne: trade of, 53; Guild Hall in London, 53 ; base of Hanse, 73. Commercial exchanges: see EX" changes. Compass: mariner's. 71. Constantinople: splendor of, 60; d^ cay of, 61 ; sack of, 75. Copper : see Minerals, Corea : see Korea, Corinth : colonized Magna Graecia, 33 ; routes converging at, 31 ; tem- ple of, 31; rise of, 33; hostility to Athens, 36. Courtrai : battle of, 96. Cracow : taken by Mongols. 83 ; trade-routes of, 147 ; decay of, 147. Crete: excavations in, 13; opulence of, 13. Crimea : annexation of, 136W Crown of Thorns : bought by Saint Louis, 76. Dampierre, Guy of : 95, 96. Dandolo, Henry: sacks Constanti- nople, 75. Dantxic : acquired by Teutonic Or- der, 65. Darius : «rars of, 33. Denmarh : position of, 63 ; trade- route across, 63; war with Hanse, 66. Dijon : river system of, 94. Dnieper : trade-route of, 60 ; change of route to Volga, 63. See TV-ade^ routes, Drahe, Sir Francis: expeditions of, 107; victory off Calais, 113. See Piracy, Ducats: value of, 89. Eastern Question: 194. Economic systems: Babylonian, 5; Ur, 7; Greek, 34; German, 46, X46 ; French, 46, 94 ; old and new, 74; Flemish, 94; British, 114; for- mation of modem, 133; Russian and German, 146, 147; Colbert's attack on oceanic, 155; Napole- on's attack on English, 162; Na- poleon's attack on overland, 163; Germany's attack on oceanic, 170 ; America's attack on overland, 175 ; American-Japanese attack on over- land, 189. See Trade^outes, Egypt : gold and copper of, 5 ; archi- tecture of, 6; trade with Chris- tians, 54 ; splendor under Saladin, 73. Elbe : defence of, 53 ; trade-route of, 59 ; tolls on, 68. England: prospers by Dutch War, 107; industrial revolution, 115; su- premacy of, 115; trade-routes of, 134; Napoleonic wars, i6a; great- ness of, after Waterloo, 167; su- perior water transportation, 168; wealth of, 169 ; fall in value of land, in, 173 ; freights between Liverpool and New York, 173 ; loss of agricul- ture, Z74 ; exhaustion of mines of, INDEX 239 176 ; weakness of, during Boer War, 177; adverse exchanges of, 178, 179 ; seizes Wei-hai-Wei, 192 ; in 1850, 202 ; lassitude of, 206, 207. En^gebirge : 50. See Minerals, Europe : geography of, 45, 46 ; pov- erty of in miner^s, 87. Exchanges : East and West, 7 ; Sar- gon, Assyrian, Babylonian, 12; ancient, between East and West, 40; Roman, 42; American ad- verse, 175: English adverse, 174, X79. F Fairs of Champagne: see Cham- pagne, Flanders : ocean trade to Venice, 69 ; rivers of, 93 ; commercial interests of, 94 ; fief of France, 95 ; attacked by France, 96; effect of war in, 97; mutiny of troops in, 107, 109; packet service to Venice, 119; de- cline of, 119. Fletcher^ Giles : Russian experiences, 126, 127, 180, 183. Fondaco dei Tedeschi : 54. Fouquet: 153. France: rivers of, 94; centralization of> 95 ; war with Flanders, 96 ; intel- lectual rigidity of, 149 ; splendor of, imder Louis XIV., 150 ; economic weakness of, 151; internal tariffs of, 152 ; competition with Holland, 156; defeated by Holland, 159; Revolution, 160 ; war with England and Russia, 162 et seq, ; decline of, Z16, 202. Freights: road and river, 95, note; sea to England, 173. Puggers : Hans, $6 ; Jacob H., 56 ; his- tory of, 56 et seq,; copper mines of* 57 ; assets of, in 1527, 57 ; loans to Charles for election, 99 ; Anthony hates Erasso, loi; advances to Philip in 1556, 103; in 1575, no; losses at sack of Antwerp, in; dealings with Philip about Antwerp, 109, in; decay of, 112. Fkr : see Leipsic^ and Novgorod^ and Champagne, G Germany: geography of, 46; silver mines of, 49, 50; manufactures of, 54 ; police of roads in, 68 ; bankers of. 97. 98 ; readjustment of, in 17th century, 138, 145; depression in, 179 ; seizes Kaiochau, 191 ; designs of, on Shansi, 192 ; critical position of, 201. See Minerals and Trade- routes. Ghent: importance of, 93; revolt of, 100. Gold: see Minerals, Goslar: 50. Gran : capture of, 83. Great Britain : see England, Greece : rise of, 31 ; Mycenean Age, 31; diverging trade-routes of, 35; currency of, 39. Greeks : attack Troy, 20 ; legends of, 21 ; colonization of Euxine by, 22 ; of Magna Graecia, 23. Gresham, Sir Thomas : coins Spanish silver, 108; advises borrowing in England, 113. Gustavus Adolpkus : 137, 138. Gustavus Vasa: 137. H Hamburg : relation with Lilbeck, 62 ; base of Hanse, 73 ; port for Russia, 140. See Trade-routes, Hammurabi: 12. Hanseatic League: 53; foundation of, 65 ; scope of, 66 ; war with Den- mark, 66 ; counter of, at Novgorod, 67; monopoly of, in Russia, 67; trade-routes of, 66, 73 ; power of, 136; in Sweden, 137; defeat of, by Gustavus Vasa, 137, Haroun-al-Rashid : 70. Harx : 49, 50, 51. Henry the Fowler : 50. Herat : taken by Jenghiz Khan, 80. Himera: 34. History : scientific, 195 et seq, Holland: independence of, 150; war with France, 157, 158, 159. Hungarians: defeated by Mongols, 83. 240 INDEX Ides, Evert Isbrand: mission of, 134. Innocent IIL: crusade against Li- vonia, 65. Iron: seeAfmerals, Ivan IIL: 121; threw off Tartar yoke, 121 ; took title of aatocrat, 121; conquests of, 121; imported foreigners, 128 ; Novgorod, 139. Ivan the Terrible : reign begins, 121 ; opened communication vdth Eng- land, 122; cruelty of, 126; con- quered Siberia, 131. Jade Axes : imported into Europe, x. yq^an : opening of, 186, 187, 188 ; war with China, 190, 191 ; antago- nism to Russia, 195; energy of, 202.205. yenghtM Khan : birth of, 77 ; invades China. 78; takes Kashgar, 78; spies arrested at Otrar, 78; takes Otrar, 79; takes Bokhara, 79; takes Samarkand, 79 ; takes Merv, 80; Nishapur, 80; Herat, 80; Balkh, 81; Bamian, 81; Bagdad. 82. yenhinson : sold no cloth in Bokhara, 88 ; voyages of, iaat-i2S, K Kashgar: trade-routes of, 9; taken by Jenghiz Khan, 78. Kieff: splendor of, 60, 62, 117; de- cay of, 63; capital of Russia, 64; captured by Mongols, 82. Korea: invaded by Japanese, 190; strategic importance of, 195. Laurium: mines of, 35; exhaustion of, 36. Leipsic : gains fiir trade, 139 ; trade- route, Russia and Leipsic, 139; fidrs of, 140. Liegnitz : battle of, 82. Lisbon : prosperity of, 9a Uvonia: conquered, 6$; cities o( lose fiir trade, 139; conquered by Peter the Great, 142. Louis IX, : buys Crown of Thorns, 76 ; invades Egypt, 76 ; surrenders, 76 ; crusade of, 86. IMeck: founding o^ 58; trade of, 59; relation with Hamburg, 69; base of Hanse, 73. Lydia : gold of, 15. M Macedon : gold mines of, 36. Maghara: conquest of, by Sneieru, 4 ; copper mines in, 5. Magna Greecia : colonization of, 23. Maine : destruction of, 192. Marco Polo: route of, la Marienburg: 65. Maximilian: poverty of, 98; re- proves Charles, 98. Merv : taken by Jenghiz Khan, 8a Metals : see Minerals. Miletus: founding of, 22; colonies founded by, 22 ; port of Sardis, 23. Minerals: importance of, 3; E^;yp- tian, 4, s; Maghara copper, 4, 5; Nubian gold and iron, 5 ; Cornish tin, 14; supply of in antiquity, 14; Lydian gold, 15; Athenian silver, 35 ; influence of on Greek civiliza- tion, 35 ; Macedonian, 36; Roman, 40; ^gean, 41; German silver, 49 ; silver and copper of Bohemia and Harz, 50; &zgebirge, 51; copper exported from Venice, 54; base of German mediaeval wealth, 55; South German investment in, 551 Fuggers' speculation in, 57; Hungarian copper, 57; effect of, on mediaeval exchange, 64; pov- erty of Europe in precious, 87; Mexican, 92;. Potosi, 92; Hungari- an, Bohemian, and Tyrolese mines in 1500, 97; Drake's robberies of Spanish, 107; Swedish iron, 137, 138; Rhenish iron, 145 ; England's monopoly of, in coal and iron, 167 ; American gold and silver, 170, 171 ; decline of English, 176; Califor- INDEX 241 nian gold, 187; Chinese, 189; effect of, on Eastern Question, 191 ; American supremacy in steel, 191 ; South African, 207. Mines : see Minerals, Money : see NumismaHcs. Mongols : rise of, 77 ; invade Russia, 82 ; capture KiefT, 82 ; Cracow, 83 ; defeat Hungarians, 83 ; reach Scu- tari, 83 ; limits of invasion of, 83, 84 ; trade-routes of, 118. Moravieff: foimds Vladivostok, 133, Moscow: size in 1590, 127. See Trade^otUes, N Napoleon: competes with England, 161; Jena campaign, 162; conti- nental policy of, 163; treaty with Persia, 163; intention to attack India, 163; attacks Russia, 164, 165 ; Moscow campaign, 166. Nearchus : voyage of, 8. Nertchinsk: fortification of, 132; road to Peking, 133; treaty of, 133. Netherlands: Philip inherits, loi; religion of, loi; emigration from, 105. Nineveh : founded, 12; perished, 12; economic system of, 16, 17 ; trade- routes of, 17, 18 ; fall of, 3a Nishapur : taJcen by Jenghiz Khan, 80. Novgorod: 59; position of, 60 ; mer- chants of, in valley of Petchora and Obi, 64 ; counter of Hanseatic League at, 67; Ivan III. takes, 139 ; loses fur trade, 139. Numismatics: Greek, 39; German coins found in Wisby, 53 ; depre- ciation of French and English coin- age, 88 ; ducat, value of, 89. Nuremberg: rise of, 52; manu&o- turers of, 55 ; famous bankers of, 55 ; financial capital, 98. Oise: trade-route, 94; see footnote, 94. Orange ^ William of: league against France formed by, i6a Orenburg : founded, 135. Otho I, : 50, 51. Olho III, : coinage of, 53. Otrar : capture of, 79. PanHcapattm : founded, 22; gold ornaments of, 22. Paris : river system of, 94. Pattala : trade-route to Egypt from, 8. Peking: Russian route to, 133; oc- cupied by allies, 194. Peloponnesian War: 36. Perry ^ Commodore: visits Japan, 187, Persians : decrepitude of, 81. Peter the Great : accedes, 133 ; con- ditions at accession of, 133; an- nexes Syr-Daria, 135; Pultowa, 142; founds St Petersburg, 143; canals, 143; visits Caspian, Z43; reforms of, 143, 144. Philip of Spain : accession of, loi ; insolvency of, 103. PhUippi : mines of, 36. Philip the Pair: accession of, 95; war in Flanders, 96; defeat at Courtrai, 96 ; effect of war, 97. Phocas, Nicephorus : 72. Phasnicians: rise of, 14; discover tin, 14. Piracy : English, against Spain, 108. Plataa: battle of, 35. Poland: geography of, 47; partition of, 146, 147 ; change of trade-routes of, 147- Potosi : mines of, 92. Prussia : rise of, 138 ; trade-routes of, 138, 139; gains Pomerania, 145; foundation of, 145; gains Cleves and Mark, 145; Silesia, 146; East and West trade-routes of, 146. Pultowa: 142. QuedUnburg: 50,51. 242 INDEX RammeUherg: 49, 5a Rhine : trade-route o^ 59; tolls on, 68. Riga : founded, 65. Romans: incapacity of, 40; defeat of, in Germany, 43; mental inflezi> bility of, 44. Russia : geography of, 47 ; Constan- tinople dominant market of, 63; Kieff and Vladimir capitals of, 64: Hanse holds monopoly in, 67 ; Mongols invade, 82 ; rivers of, 116 ; disintegration of, in 13th century, Z17; Ivan occupied Narva, ia8; trside-routes under Peter, 133, 134; consolidation of, under Peter, 135 ; Swedish war, 142; administration of, under Peter, 144; breach with France, 165 ; poverty of, 180, 181 ; bad administration in, 181 etseq,; suffering in, 183; civil service of, 183; Siberian Railroad, 184; hos- tility to Japan, 186; interferes in Chinese war, 191; seizes Port Arthur, 193; designs on Shansi, 193; weakness of, 193; antago- nism to Japan, 195; culmination of, 199. See TVade^ouUs, Russia Company : laa ; counting- houses of, 135, 126. Russians : backwardness of, Z28 ; not mechanical, 129. S Saladin: 73. Salamis : 34. Samarkand : description of, 39 ; taken by Jenghiz Khan, 79; see TV-ade^outes. Sarai : built, 118. Sardis : routes to, 15. Sargon : empire of, 7 ; capital of, is. Scheldt: trade-route, 94; and note. Scutari : Mongols reach, 83. Sepiimer Pass : 59. Shansi : mines of, 189. Siberia : conquest of, 131-133 ; trade- routes of, 131, 133; rivers of, 133; Siberian Railroad, 184, 185. Silver: increase in value o^ 87; yield of American, 93; demoneti- zation of, 170; see Minerals, Sinai : see Maghara. Sindbad : voyages of, 70. Sneferu : 4 ; pyramid of, 6. Sokoira : Portuguese occupy, 91. Spain: mines of, 41; rise of, 90; poverty of, 99 ; character of people of, 104; decentralization of, 106, 107 ; losses by piracy, 108 ; recog- nizes independence of Holland, 150; war of United States with, 193. SUefyard: 53, 54. St, Petersburg : founded, 143. St, Quentin : position of, 94. Suzdal: 63. Sweden : war with Hanse, 137 ; iron industry of, 137, 138; energy of, 138; greatness of, 141; war with Russia, 141, Z43. Tabris: 37,28. Teutonic Order: foundation of, 65; acquires Dantdc, 65. Tiglat-Pileser /., ///. ; campaigns of, 17, 19. Tin : see Minerals, Trade-routes : basis of states, 2, 3; competitive, 2 ; the Ur, 7 ; Pat^a, 8; Lake Balkash, 9; Samarkand, 9; Terek Pass, 9; Syr-Daria, 9; Kashgar, 9; Bactra, 10; northern Indian, 10; three leading ancient, 11; Tyre and Sidon, 11; Crete, Carthage, Cadiz, 11; Phoenician, 14; Lydian, 15; Lake Van, 17; Betiis, 17; Tabriz, 18; Greek, 22, 23; Black Sea, 26; Athens and Corinth, 35 ; mediaeval European, 45, 46, 47 ; converge at Augsburg, 52; Semmering and Brenner, 58; Rhine and Elbe, 59; Kieff-Nov- gorod, 60 ; LUbeck and Hamburg, 62; northern movement of, in Russia, 63 ; Volga, 64 ; Hanseatic, 66; to Champagne, 68; sea, to Venice and Flanders, 69 ; ocean, to INDEX 243 China, 71 ; Eastern after 1200, 73 ; eastern branch at Nile, 73 ; North Sea, 73; Da Gama's, 90, 91; Scheldt and Seine, 93, 94 ; closing of, to Champagne, 96 ; superseded, 97; English, 115; Russian, 116; Mongol, 118 ; Samarkand, 118 ; extension of Russian, under Ivan III., 121; by White Sea, lai, 122, Moscow to Persia, 122, 125; de- scribed by Jenkinson, 130; Sibe- rian, 131, 133; Nertchinsk, 133; English, 134 ; Moscow-Peking, 134 ; Moscow-Samarkand, 135; Mos- cow, Berlin, Hamburg, 140, 147; Peter opens route to Caspian, 143 ; Polish, Warsaw, 146, 147 ; Cracow, Vistula, 147 ; Napoleon's attack on English, 161; problem of Napo- leon and Alexander concerning, 166; American, 167; America and Japan, 187 ; Korea flanks Russian, 195- Thave: 62. Troy : siege of, oo, T^oyes : 94. 7)^e : siege of, 37, 38. U United States : see America, Ur:j\ economic system of, la. Van: Lake, z6; description of, 17, 19. Van Artevelde : 97. Vasco da Gama : effects of discovery of, 86 ; lucrative voyage of, in 1503, 91. Venice r rise of, 52 ; port of Germany on Mediterranean, 54 ; trade-routes of, 58; ocean trade to Flanders, 69; decline of, after 1500, 90; in- jured by closing of Red Sea, 91. l^adimir: 64. Vladivostok: founded, 133; troops sent to, by sea, 185. W Warsaw: 147. William o/Rubruck : 10. Wisfy : importance of, 53. Xerxes : wars of, 34. Yarkand: 9. Yermak: conquers Siberia, Z3X. THE LAW OF CIVILIZATION AND DECAY AN ESSAY ON HISTORY By BROOKS ADAMS 8yo. Cloth. Price $a.oo ''A work of great dignity and erudition, showing rare £iniill- arity with the data of history, theology, and economics." — Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, ''The argument is interesting and stimulating. . . . 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