what they were
losing, and to consider if there were any feasible method of recovering
it.

[Sidenote: The accustomed routes of Oriental trade cut off by the
Ottoman Turks.]

[Sidenote: Necessity for finding an "outside route to the Indies."]

It was not merely the shutting up of China by the first Ming emperor,
in 1368, that checked the intercourse between Europe and Asia. A still
more baleful obstacle to all such intercourse had lately come upon the
scene. In Asia Minor the beastly Turk, whose career had been for two
centuries arrested by the Crusades, now reared his head again. The
Seljukian had been only scotched, not killed; and now he sprang to life
as the Ottoman, with sharper fangs than before. In 1365 the Turks
established themselves in the Balkan peninsula, with Adrianople as their
capital, and began tightening their coils about the doomed city of
Constantine. Each point that they gained meant the strangling of just so
much Oriental trade; for, as we have seen, the alliance of
Constantinople with Genoa since 1261 had secured to the latter city, and
to western Europe, the advantages of the overland routes from Asia,
whether through the Volga country or across Armenia. When at length, in
1453, the Turks took Constantinople, the splendid commercial career of
Genoa was cut with the shears of Atropos. At the same time, as their
power was rapidly extending over Syria and down toward Egypt,
threatening the overthrow of the liberal Mameluke dynasty there, the
commercial prosperity of Venice also was seriously imperilled. Moreover,
as Turkish corsairs began to swarm in the eastern waters of the
Mediterranean, the voyage became more and more unsafe for Christian
vessels. It was thus, while the volume of trade with Asia was, in the
natural course of things, swelling year by year, that its accustomed
routes were being ruthlessly cut off. It was fast becoming necessary to
consider whether there might not be other practicable routes to "the
Indies" than those which had from time immemorial been followed. Could
there be such a thing as an "outside route" to that land of promise? A
more startling question has seldom been propounded; for it involved a
radical departure from the grooves in which the human mind had been
running ever since the days of Solomon. Two generations of men lived and
died while this question was taking shape, and all that time Cathay and
India and the islands of Spices were objects of increasing desi