6 EARLY COMPETITION FOR INDIAN COMMERCE

the wealth that he might thus have secured must have added prodigiously to the force of his arms by sea and land. A colossal military empire upon the Bosphorus, commanding the avenues of Asiatic trade, might even in our own days overawe half Europe, and would have been irresistible three hundred years ago. Yet Venice foresaw so clearly that the diversion of trade to the ocean route would be her death-blow, that she vigorously supported the Turkish Sultan, though in vain. When Benbo, the Venetian envoy at Lisbon, wrote that he had seen vessels return to that port from Asia loaded with Indian goods, his govern- ment became aware that the most important branch of their commerce was in danger of being cut off. By the end of the sixteenth century that inestimable priv- ilege, the chief control of Eastern commerce in Euro- pean waters, had passed for ever out of the hands of the Italian cities, whose gradual commercial decay from that epoch showed plainly where lay the mainspring of their prosperity and political expansion. From the shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, from Alexandria and Constantinople, from Venice and Genoa, the rich trade of India with Europe was now transferred to the ocean-going peoples of Western Europe. It was cut off in the Indian seas and almost monopolized for a time by Portugal, whose sovereigns improved their opportunity with remarkable activity, sending out fleets to range over the whole coast of South Asia from the Persian Gulf to Ceylon. Never- theless their period of triumphant prosperity was short,