ll its commerce. What a stroke for State and
Church if Europe, uniting with the Ilkhans of Persia, could establish
direct connections with the Orient, eliminate the infidel middlemen, and
divide with Mongol allies the fruits of Indian exploitation!

Such projects, drifting from court to court in the early fourteenth
century, form the aftermath of the great Crusades. In 1307 Marino
Sanuto, Venetian statesman and geographer, presented to Clement V an
elaborate plan for the revival of the old conflict with Islam. But
Sanuto contemplated something more than the recovery of the Holy Land.
Sketching with sure hand the trade routes from India to the Levant, he
demonstrated that the Arabs were enriched at the expense of Christian
Europe. Yet beyond the narrow confines of Syria were the Mongols, well
disposed toward Christians, but enemies of Mohammedan Arab and Turk.
First weaken the Moslem powers, said Sanuto, by an embargo on all
exports of provisions and munitions of war to Syria and Egypt, and then
overthrow them by a combined attack of Christian and Mongol armies. The
great end would thus be attained: a Christian fleet on the Indian Ocean,
subjugating all the coast and island ports from India to Hormos and
Aden, would act as convoy for Italian merchants trading directly with
the Eastern markets by way of Alexandria and the Red Sea, or down the
Tigris River to the Persian Gulf.

The project of Sanuto, anticipating the achievements of England in our
own day, was doubtless as vain as it was splendid. For the times, in
fourteenth-century Europe, were out of joint. Clement V and his
successors at Avignon, scarcely able to hold the Papal States, were
little inclined to attempt the conquest of Syria. The Empire had lost
its commanding position. Italian cities, released from imperial control,
warred perpetually for existence or supremacy. England and France were
preparing for the desolating struggle that exhausted their resources for
a hundred years. "All Christendom is sore decayed and feeblished,
whereby the Empire of Constantinople leeseth, and is like to lese," for
lack of the "Knights and Squires who were wont to adventure themselves,"
but who adventure themselves no more.

In 1386, when this naive plaint was addressed to Richard II by the
dispossessed King of Armenia, conditions in Asia, even more than those
in Europe, were such as to make the plans of Sanuto forever impossible.
Johan Schiltberger, journeying to the Orient