Page images
PDF
EPUB
[graphic][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][ocr errors][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][ocr errors][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][ocr errors][merged small]

mountain ranges already noted, the northern dike, and the lower barrier of the Taurus. Into this funnel poured the Hittite, and across it still wander the low tents of the Kizil-Bash, kin of scattered Asian hordes.

From the very opening of history Asia Minor has always been, as to its interior, Asian, and as to its coasts, European. When Greek history opens, Greece rims Asia Minor, but its interior is full of strange tongues, faiths, and gods. Somewhere at its mid-point along the Halys the two tides of migration, one from Europe and the other from Asia, early met, for through all the historic period, as Mr. W. M. Ramsay has pointed out," east of the Halys the Semitic horror of the pig prevails, while west it is an esteemed purificatory sacrifice. In some relation with this great rift valley, the trade of the East has always flowed. Wherever it impinges on Europe, economic expansion

11 W. M. Ramsay: The Historical Geography of Asia Minor, 1890, p. 32.

comes. This was as true when it poured through Venice in the fourteenth century after Christ as when it poured through Ephesus in the fourth century before. When the Suez Canal turned this profit-giving stream onto Salonica and Trieste, instantly the Hungarian plains awoke from their economic lethargy and made in the last thirty years a material advance such as outstrips that of most of our own western cities.

In its early stages this trade, as we have pointed out, passed from Babylon to Tyre and Sidon. There instantly followed the expansion of Phoenicia, which brought on a long struggle between Greece and Persia. This, in the phase to which Marathon, Thermopylæ, and Platea direct attention, was a struggle for the conquest of Greece. In its wider and more enduring battle, it was in a truer sense a wrestle for the trade of the Mediterranean. The shock of conflict was decisive, not on land but at

Themistocles and Aristides, Gelon and Theron are the real heroes, and the

bays of Salamis and Himera the real scenes, of Greek triumph. Early a few Sidonian colonies had been scattered along the northern shore of the Mediterranean. Wherever these seamen landed they left some mark of the worship of Astarte and of the strange vice of a seafaring coast to corrupt for all the future the space wide-scattered from Corinth to Massalia, a moral stain which not the flow of thirty centuries has wholly effaced. But after the battles in which the Phoenician, rather than the Persian, fleet and their Carthaginian ally had been defeated, Phoenician colonies were confined to the southern edge of the Mediterranean. Neither were exclu

sive. The earliest of Greek colonies was to the south, at Cyrene." In like manner the earliest of Phoenician colonies were to the north. But the drift

of both was along opposite banks of the Mediterranean. It is only at some point like Sicily, where at Girgenti the Temple of Theron, and at Monreale the Saracenic cloisters of Frederick, remind us that these eddying tides of Semitic and Aryan strife have left their early and late beach-marks side by side.

The fashion in which not only commerce but the arts spread along these routes of trade is best illustrated by the diffusion of some simple article like the majolica of Chaldea; its early examples have just been recovered by the German excavator at Hillah; its later glories are seen in the Persian archer which M. Dieulafoy brought to the Louvre from Susa. When Chosroes in the last expansion of the Sassanidæ held Rhodes, he planted there a colony of Persian potters. From them came Rhodian ware; their glaze spread through the Mediterranean; their patterns still live in the potters of Brusa. Of their cer

12 Establissements et Commerce des Pheniciens. Lenormant Francois Atlas D'Histoire Ancienne De L'Orient. Planche XX. Greek Colonies. Gibbin's History of Commerce in Europe.

By

amic lineage has sprung the majolica of Faenza and the Mauresque pottery of Spain. Over the Mediterranean basin they displaced the wares and the glaze of the Greek and Roman potter. the hands of the Huguenot Palissy they passed from southern France to northern Europe. Of their family is the entire field of modern glazed wares, distributed along lines of trade from Susa to Staffordshire.

When the Persian archer was pictured in them he held Asia Minor and conquered Egypt; he closed to Greece and opened to Phoenicia the route of the Red Sea. The legendary peace of Cimon represents the commercial fact that no Phonician vessel passed in to the Ægean, and no Greek vessel could safely go south of Crete. Towns like Ephesus grew and flourished and carved the great sculptured drums which stand in the Louvre and in the British Museum, under the stimulus of a trade which could only reach Greece by the Persian land routes and dubious relations. The Greek trader left these routes, and again, as ten centuries later under Justinian, Greek trade sought a route above the Black Sea, and the Greek colonies of Euxine had their brief period of bloom prior to Alexander.

When the expansion of Greece came under Alexander, the linked area which we are considering had been for nearly two centuries under the control of the Persian Empire. The organized rule which had established itself early in the Nile and still more in the Euphrates Valley, as important for trade routes as they were for the fertility and security which they offered for agriculture and the basis they furnished for the development of trade, had in both cases been expanded beyond its original area. the case of the eastern valley it had been replaced first by successive waves of invasion from the plains to the south, from the days of Hammurabi certainly and probably earlier, and next by the

In

Assyrian rule, with its steady commercial policy, its continuous extension along trade routes which stretch to the westward, the more northern toward Antioch and the gates of Syria, the more southern to the Phoenician citiesalways extending along these lines by annexation and by treaties manifestly intended to control trade. All these early areas had been engulfed by the Persian realm, which, as was later to be repeated under the Abasside Caliphate, held all the channels of trade, the southern by sea and land on either side of the Arabian Peninsula, the great mountain routes which descend from Balkh or from Cabul, and the lesser lines of travel which reach the Persian plateau. Open to trade and travel as these were, the Phoenician exclusion had turned the steady stream of Greek traders toward the Bactrian routes and those which reached the Indus across the higher passes of Asia. The direct routes were impeded. The commerce which in the second and the first half of the first millennium before Christ had made Naucratis and the other Greek settlements in Egypt centers of a trade which fed the obsidian works of Delos and enriched the buildings of the Peloponnesus with the work of Egypt and Phoenicia was closed. The Greek trader was present only by sufferance on the caravan routes of Mesopotamia. Nothing so proves the extent to which this trade was diverted to another channel as the wealth of gold ornaments which the spade is perpetually turning up, all made within a comparatively narrow period, in the brief existence of Greek colonies in the Tauric Chersonese and the adjacent mainland. When in his easternmost campaign Alexander was moving with the skill and certainty of a man maneuvering and marching in an accustomed region, it was undoubtedly because his army was thick scattered with Greeks who in trading expeditions had threaded all the defiles which enter Bactria to

the north or debouch upon the valley of the Indus.

He

His campaigns throughout are marked by that intelligent and instinctive knowledge of physiographic conditions which marks the great commander and sets him apart from the mere winner of individual battles or the mere leader of a charge. It was because Alexander added this power to those other two, both of which he had as only a few men have ever possessed them, that he stands alone in all the surge of conquest which has ebbed and flowed over the narrow region which joins the east to the west. He began by winning at the Granicus, the entrance to eastern Asia Minor, wasting no time upon its internal conquest, an error from which Cæsar later was not wholly free, or his work would not have been so soon undone. struck straight for the heads of the great trade routes, passed around Asia Minor, fought his great battle at the very point where, as has already been indicated, the great rift of the south meets the rounding curve of the outwork of the great system of mountains which divide into two great channels the course of Eurasian history north and south, halted only for two great sieges-one of Tyre, where he redressed the long exclusion of generations from the trade of the Levant, and the other of Gaza, which owed all its importance, its garrison, and doubtless the selection of a commander of the ability of Batis to its position at the head of the trade routes through the passes of Arabia Petra. Holding the ends of the land. routes, he turned aside, and founding Alexandria, established the supremacy of the Greek trader for nearly five centuries over the Red Sea. Alone of all men who have struggled for this region, Alexander seems to have divined that his work could not be complete until he had pushed his boundaries to the emtreme limit of the physiographic territory which we are considering. His

eastward march, the Aryan at last on the bridge, carried for the first and only time in history the supremacy of European ideas and organization over the entire space which constitutes the inevitable link between the three groups of population which, from the nature of things, constitute the three great hives of the human race in the Eastern World. The far-flung line of Greek cities which he left starred the whole region with spots and dots of enlightenment, free colonies extending to the Indus and the Oxus. So completely has this perished and left no trace that it is not easy for us to realize that for over a century and a half Greek coins were being struck in Bactria, that Buddhist sculpture received a form and comeliness which has never left it and which places it alone among the bizarre modeling of the East. It is as difficult for us to understand that for three centuries a great Greek city like Seleucia, with its own assembly and council, its agora, and its Boulé, maintained itself on the Tigris. There is something invincibly pathetic in the disappearance of these cities one by one like guttering candles. Their glory,

Like the shooting star, Fell to base earth from the firmament.

These Greek cities had no land or rural cultivators about them. In the ancient city the death rate was steadily higher than the birth rate. As fresh supplies of Greeks ceased, it was a mere question of brief generations when the Greek lines were extinct and the effort to hold this tract for civilization faded and was lost first in the Arabian and then the Tatar migration.

ROME AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE

The successor of Greece, Rome, was a sea power. Its first treaty was a commercial compact with Carthage. Its conflict with that maritime power was really a struggle for the basin of the

Mediterranean. In its zenith the Roman Empire was a rim of land about the Mediterranean, with an outlying region like South Britain, but limited always in the full exercise of its power by its command of the great sea. When Augustus fixed the policy of the Roman State he adopted a new practice in regard to these great trade routes, which were the arteries or connecting ligaments between the East and the West. They were no longer left wholly in Asiatic hands; neither was the effort made to hold them from end to end. An expedition of Augustus seized Aden, but left it. The police of the Red Sea was maintained, but the effort was not carried farther, so as to hold its entrance, and trade from south Arabia to Zanzibar was allowed

to grow. The Persian frontier was expanded so as to grip Palmyra because it was the end of one caravan route. Its great colonnades in the desert marked the wealth of this outpost. The carved Roman fronts of Arabia Petræa, a tract always held by a strong imperial garrison, was the head of another route. Later Dara was the fortified fort and outpost which protected the heads of the divergent caravan roads which came up the Mesopotamian plain and then separated. Here, as along the line of the Rhine and Danube or the southern edge of north Africa, strategic points were held, but no effort was made to expand beyond them until the period between Trajan and Heraclius.

When this advance came the Arab

expansion was near. It had been preceded by causes which prepared the way. Augustus' policy of holding the heads. of the trade routes, instead, as under Alexander's far-sighted plan, of garrisoning the routes themselves with a long line of Greek cities and settlements, divided the springs and sources of control over a region whose free transit was indispensable to the health of each member of the human race whose trade it carried. The Roman fringe from Tra

pezus, Erzerum (Arx Romana) to Alexandria, through Antioch and Palmyra to the carved cañons of Petræa, grew in splendor and in wealth. As long as the Parthian policy left Seleucia and her sister Greek cities in touch, the trade around the Arabian peninsula was unvexed by the Arabic dhow. The Greek trader was in all the waters about Arabia. These conditions disappeared under the more rigorous administration of the Sassanidæ, and the Greek cities withered. The Arab expansion into Abyssinia, possible under the policy of Augustus, an expansion which so narrowly transferred the birth of Islam from Mecca to this mountain plateau, was accompanied by the spread of Arabian commerce around Asia. A century later the Chinese junk was a frequent visitor in the Euphrates, and the hongs of Arabian merchants at Canton preceded by 1,000 years the like and later establishments of north Europe. The trade of the Red Sea was replaced, as it had been preceded, by cargoes debarked at Aden and following the northern routes which passed through Mecca, and whose farther journey Mohammed more than once shared.

Whenever from any cause the Red Sea became closed, or when, early, the vessel of the day was incapable of the long trip around the Arabian peninsula, then always as in Himaryitic and earlier days, southern Arabia becomes an organized monarchy because enjoying the revenue of this trade. The line of sparse settlements which follows the extinct volcanic heights of the great Rift along the eastern shore of the Red Sea springs into an activity which in the seventh century burst forth in the explosion of Islam. The outlines of this outburst are familiar. Under it this entire region, with the exception of Asia Minor, was in the hands of a rule centered on the Tigris, as ten centuries before at Nineveh or Babylon; but since the Mediterranean outposts were no

longer, as for ten centuries past, under alien hands, Greek or Roman, the Caliphate exceeded in power and in splendor the two Asiatic rules which, without this aid and vantage, had preceded it in the same valley.

One fatal change, however, came. This inroad from the southern plain swept across the dividing line of mountains in north Persia and pushed what, remembering its results, may fairly be called a sluice into Tatary. The prov

ince which stretched down the Oxus, Ma-wara-1-nahr, made the first open communication between the great plain to the north and the valleys and plateau to the south. Under the Samanids it felt Persian civilization, Arab learning, and Moslem faith. There begun that steady migration, first of Turkish slaves to the court of Baghdad and later of the Tatar horde, until there burst forth all

The black Tatar tents which stood Clustering like beehives on the low, flat strand Of Oxus, where the summer floods o'erflow When the sun melts the snow in high Pamir.

The results of these successive invasions, Seljuk, Turk, Tatar, or Mongol, in all its hideous forms, spread terror, desolation, and lasting death and decay from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. It broke all the channels of trade, interrupted the connected development between the East and the West, which had been slowly developing through nearly four millennia, and played no small share in causing the arrest of the Mediterranean basin, which had for nearly seven centuries but the fitful light of a dying civilization in which a new faith was making its way, ducente deo, flammam inter et hostes.

Its growth led to an attempt in the crusades to stay the joint progress of Arab and Seljuk, for the men of the flatlands south and north had both overspread the region between. Meanwhile the currents of trade were moving again to the north of the Black Sea, southern

« PreviousContinue »