Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/46

12 THE CLOSING OF THE OLD TEADE PATHS opulent headquarters of the Indian trade. An Arabic manuscript in the British Museum narrates an embassy of a Byzantine emperor in the tenth century A. D. to Baghdad, which recalls the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon in the tenth century before Christ. The same splendid profusion was displayed by the Caliph as by Solomon to his guest; the products and art-work of India were alike conspicuous at the Arab and the Hebrew capital. The Caliph 's curtains were of bro- cade with elephants and lions embroidered in gold. Four elephants caparisoned in peacock silk stood at the palace gate, " and on the back of each were eight men of Sind." If Baghdad was, from the commercial point of view, the more spacious Jerusalem of the caliphate, Bassorah was its Alexandria on the Persian Gulf, which received from the East, and passed on to the West, " the wealth of Ormus and of Ind." The Crusades blocked for a time the Syrian route. But the Crusades, although impelled forward by the religious fervour of northern Europe, were speedily organized for trade purposes by the Mediterranean Republics. The fleets of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa vict- ualled the armies of the Cross, accompanied their prog- ress along the Syrian coast, and divided their spoils. Under the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem (1099 - 1291) the Syrian caravan route revived. It exchanged the products of the tropical East and of the North for the hard cash of the Crusaders, and a regular fur market existed in Jerusalem for the sale of ermine, marten, beaver, and other Siberian or Russian skins. In 1204