654 ON THE PRICE OF FOREIGN PRODUCE. 



to have blocked every passage but one, that which passed 

 along the coast of Asia to Aden up the Red Sea, and by a 

 short caravan journey overland to the Nile, whence at Alex- 

 andria produce was distributed to Venice, Genoa, and other 

 trading towns in Italy. The Soldan of Egypt levied heavy 

 tolls on this traffic, not indeed, we may conclude, heavy 

 enough to destroy a lucrative branch of revenue, but enough 

 to make the cost of that, which in its place of origin was 

 worth little more than the labour of collection, very consider- 

 able to the Western consumer. 



The distribution of this produce in Europe was, it appears, 

 generally effected by carriage over the Alpine passes to the free 

 cities of Southern Germany and of the Rhine. In the fifteenth 

 century, such towns as Nuremberg and Ratisbon, Mayence and 

 Cologne were at the height of their opulence. The water-way 

 of the Rhine bears ineffaceable traces of the wealth which was 

 carried down it, in the numerous castles of the robber barons, 

 the extirpation of whom became the first object to which the 

 resources of civilisation were directed. The trade of the East 

 enriched the burghers of the Low Countries, till after a long 

 and tedious transit, the abundant spices of the East, increased 

 in price a hundredfold by the tolls which rapacity enacted, and 

 the profits which merchants imposed, were sold in small parcels 

 by the grocer or apothecary, or purchased in larger quantities 

 by wealthy consumers at the great fair of Stourbridge, or in 

 the perpetual market of London. 



At the middle of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, 

 Selim I (1512-20), the Sultan of Turkey, conquered Mesopo- 

 tamia, got possession of the holy towns of Arabia, and finally 

 annexed Egypt to his empire. The result of this conquest was 

 to block the only remaining road by which Eastern produce 

 had hitherto been conveyed to Europe. The Turk in those 

 days, as the Turk in ours, turned what were once thriving and 

 opulent regions into deserts, and Selim was the incarnation 

 of all Turkish vice, and of every Turkish energy. Had these 

 people been like other savages, they would either have been 



