1300 or 1350, under the leadership of Augsburg, Ulm, and Nürnberg, and was in close political and commercial relations both with Venice and Genoa. For many years these two great Confederacies, of the Rhine and of the Swabian towns, maintained the security of commerce, held their own against feudal aggressions, and flourished exceedingly; till, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, the more general use of the sea routes, both from the Mediterranean to the north and from India and the East via Portugal to England and Flanders, caused their comparative decline. But these two southern Confederacies together with the mighty northern union of the Hansa must be remembered as among the chief features of European commercial history in the Middle Ages.

In

73. Routes from the East.-If now we turn from trade routes in Europe itself to those which led to Europe from the East, we find that at the time of which we are now speaking there were three main streams of commerce. the twelfth century the caravan trade in Central Asia had passed along several different paths; but after the Crusades, and the decline of the Eastern empire by the capture of Constantinople (1204), the various tribes of Central Asia, rendered more fanatical and warlike than ever by these military and religious events, caused caravan trading to become very unsafe. The first of the three routes which now remained in the thirteenth century was from India and the western coasts of Asia, past Basra on the Persian Gulf to Bagdad by water. From Bagdad merchants went, still by water, along the Tigris to the point on that river nearest to Seleucia and Antioch, and so to the Orontes, and then to the coast of the Levant.

The second route followed the same course as the first till the point of leaving the Tigris, and then proceeded over the Highlands of Asia Minor and Armenia to the port of Trebizond on the Black Sea, where Venetian vessels used to meet Asiatic traders. For both these routes Bagdad formed a very important centre. Hither came all the products of Persia, Arabia, India, Egypt, and Central Asia, some by land and some, as stated, by water via the harbour and

port of Basra. (Bagdad had also important manufactures of cotton, silk, and linen fabrics, embroideries, gold and silver work, and leather. Thus, by its commercial position and home industries, it became a most rich and flourishing city under the rule of the Kaliphs, a prosperous and splendid capital rivalling Babylon of old in its wealth and magnificence.)

The third route from the far East was from India by sea to Aden, then by land across the desert to Chus on the Nile, which took nine days, and then again by water down the Nile to Cairo, a journey of thirteen days. From Cairo there was a canal, 200 miles long, to Alexandria, where again Venetian and Genoese merchants were ready to receive the rich spices, sugar, perfumes, precious stones, gum, oil, cotton, and silk brought from the East.

A good deal of the trade from Syria, Arabia, and Persia went also through Damascus, a favourite halting-place for caravans and an important manufacturing town. It manufactured saddlery and harness, weapons of various kinds, especially fine and keen swords, also velvet and silk fabrics, and perfumes; and merchants could easily get from. there to one of the sea-ports on the coast of Palestine—Beirut, Tyre, Sidon, or Joppa.

74. Interruption of Eastern Land Trade.-But in the fifteenth century events happened which caused some of these routes to be almost abandoned, and all of them to lose much of their importance. These events were the coming of the Turks and the discovery by the Portuguese of the sea-route round Africa to India and China. The Ottoman Turks of whom we are now speaking were first heard of by Europeans about 1240. They gradually gained all the old provinces of the eastern empire in Asia; in 1361 they captured Hadrianople in Turkey and made it their capital, and settled in Servia and Bulgaria. Their progress in Europe was checked by their struggles with the Moguls under Timour in the latter half of the fourteenth century. Timour, however, died in 1405, and the Turks again pressed into Europe, taking Constantinople in 1453, which then became and has since remained the Turkish

capital. The Turkish invasions utterly annihilated Venetian commerce in the Black Sea, and blocked up the two first routes mentioned above. After a time the third route, through Egypt, was also blocked by the Turkish conquest of Egypt under Selim I. between 1512 and 1520. Just before this event Vasco da Gama had discovered the sea route round the Cape, and commerce under the combined influence of Portuguese discoveries and Turkish invasions took an entirely new departure. The result was the decay of the Italian cities and the towns on the Rhine. We shall have more to say about the Portuguese and other discoveries in a later chapter (§ 93).

For

75. The Place of Fairs in Commerce.-Whilst we are upon the subject of trade routes, we ought to mention a very special feature in the life of the medieval merchant who travelled over them. This feature was the visit to the great fairs held in every part of Europe, and visited by buyers and sellers from every country. These fairs were generally held annually, and often lasted many days. various reasons they were a very important and necessary element in the commercial life of those times in Europe, just as they are still important and necessary even to-day to every other part of the world where adequate facilities for the transport and interchange of commodities do not exist. In medieval Europe they were necessary because there was only a very limited shop-keeping class, sometimes none at all, in any but the larger towns; and even in the towns shopkeepers and merchants did not keep such a variety and quantity of goods in stock as they do at present. The population of the Middle Ages, it must be remembered, lived mostly in villages, or in small towns which we should not think much more than villages;1 and in these places a trader could hardly exist or find sufficient customers for his business. The inhabitants of the towns and villages, for the same reason, required a wider market

1 In England, for example, only ten towns contained more than 5000 inhabitants at the time of the Domesday Book and for long afterwards (cf. the author's Industrial History of England, and the map there opposite p. 36).

for their goods than they had near at hand. As the transit of goods also was, compared with the ease of modern times, slow and difficult, and as ordinary people disliked travelling frequently or far outside the bounds of their own district, it became absolutely imperative to hold a great central market in each district at least once a year. Fairs, in fact, were a necessity, and remained so till rapid or easy methods of transit, such as by railways, steamers, or canals, made travelling and transportation safer and less difficult.

The place of holding a fair was often determined by religious considerations, such as the position of some shrine or holy place to which large numbers of pilgrims came. To this day the annual pilgrimages to Mecca give occasion for the holding of a great fair and for doing an enormous trade. But besides religious considerations, especially in fairs of later origin, the special facilities of a central locality would determine the holding of the fair. Certainly, from whatever cause it originated, every important district in England and on the Continent had its fair in the Middle Ages. The fair was attended by merchants from all parts of the country and by foreigners who came to sell their goods; by the resident population anxious to lay in the year's store of necessaries, or to sell the produce of their industry. Thus at Leeds there was a fair which for several centuries served as a commercial centre where the wool-growers of Yorkshire and Lancashire met English and Flemish merchants and sold them the raw material that was afterwards to be worked up in the looms of Norfolk or Flanders.

76. English Fairs. Some of these fairs were of great magnitude. Such was that of Winchester, first set up in the days of William the Norman, who granted the Bishop of Winchester leave to hold a fair upon St. Giles's Hill, for one day in the year. Afterwards Henry II. allowed the time of the fair to be lengthened to sixteen days. During the whole of this period the great common was covered with booths and tents and divided into streets called after the name of the wares sold therein, such as "The Drapery," "The Pottery," "The Spicery," and so