Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/70

34 THE CLOSING OF THE OLD TRADE PATHS mained a leading emporium of the Levant, until itself taken by the Turks in 1570 - 1571. The Ottoman seizure or obstruction of the Indian trade-routes brought disaster not alone to the Mediter- ranean republics. The blow fell first on Genoa and Venice, but it sent a shock through the whole system of European commerce. The chief channel by which the products of Asia reached the central and northern nations of Christendom was the Hanseatic League. This Hanse, or " Association " of towns and merchant colonies for mutual defence, had developed in the thir- teenth and fourteenth centuries into the great trade organization of northern and central Europe. At the beginning of the fifteenth, its settlements stretched from Eussia to the Thames; appeals from distant Nov- gorod were heard by its chief tribunal at Liibeck; Augs- burg became the central depot of Europe, and her banker-weavers, the Fuggers and Velsers, rivalled the merchant-princes of Venice and Genoa. Bruges, the northwestern depot of the Hanseatic trade, had at one time representatives of twenty foreign courts in the warehouse mansions which lined her canals. " There are hundreds of women here," the wife of Philip the Fair of France is said to have exclaimed when she vis- ited Bruges at the beginning of the fourteenth century, " who have more the air of queens than myself." The Indian trade formed an important contributory to this Hanseatic commerce. When the Eastern traffic began to dry up, its European emporiums declined; when, as we shall see, the Cape route was substituted,