PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 563 
perceiving that their great power derived its nourishment from the commerce with 
the Indies, based on that observation the projects which he urged on Christendom 
for the overthrow of that power. It is further significant that a sea way to 
India should have been sought by Genoese as early as 1291,! and even more 
significant that a century later Venice should have found it worth while to main- 
tain a consul in Siam. 
But the clearest evidence of the supreme importance of the Indian trade to 
the Italian cities is to be found in the results of the discovery which finally 
diverted from Venice and the Mediterranean the great bulk of the Indian trade 
until that trade had lost all the special significance which it had retained for 
thousands of years. It need hardly be said that I refer to the discovery of the 
sea way to India by the Portuguese in 1497-9. Of the feeling aroused in Venice 
by this discovery Romanin has reproduced,’ from the ‘ Diarii’ of Priuli, an inter- 
esting contemporary record, written with reference to a despatch to the Doge 
probably from Pietro Pasqualigo, a Venetian envoy at Lisbon at the time of the 
return of the second Portuguese voyage to India under Cabral. The letter is 
stated to have reached Venice on July 24, 1501. After giving the letter, in 
which we are told, among other things, how the Portuguese had charged 
their ships at Cochin with spices at a price which the writer feared to mention, 
Priuli adds: ‘On the arrival of this news at Venice all the city was deeply 
moved and remained stupefied, and the wisest held it for the worst news that 
could reach them. For, it being recognised that Venice had risen to so high a 
degree of renown and wealth solely by the commerce of the sea and by 
navigation, by means of which every year a great quantity of spices was brought 
thither, which foreigners then flocked together to acquire, and that by their 
presence and the traftic they obtained immense advantages, now by this new 
voyage the spices would be brought from the Indies to Lisbon, where Hungarians, 
Germans, Flemings, and French‘ would seek to acquire them, being able to 
get them there cheaply; and that because the spices that came to Venice passed 
through the whole of Syria and the countries of the Soldan, paying in every 
place exorbitant duties, so that at their arrival at Venice they were so weighted 
that what at first was of the value of a single ducat was raised in the end 
to sixty and even a hundred ducats; from which vexations, the voyage by sea 
being exempt, it resulted that Portugal could give them at a much lower price.’ 
So said the wisest, but it is interesting also to note what was said by the less 
wise. Priuli goes on: ‘And while the wisest saw that, others refused to believe 
the story [these, I presume, were the least wise], and others again said that the King 
of Portugal would not be able to continue this navigation to Calicut, since of 
thirteen caravels only six had returned safe, the loss would be greater than the 
advantage, and that it would not be so easy to find men who would consent to risk 
their lives in so long and perilous a navigation ; that the Sultan of Alexandria, 
seeing the loss of so fine a profit as that obtained by the passage of the spices 
through his lands, would see to that.’ 
But in this case it happened that the wisest were right. The effects of this 
discovery were not long in making themselves felt in the notable diminution in 
the sales of spices at Venice. Under the date February 1504 Priuli enters in 
his diary, ‘The galleys of Alexandria have entered into harbour empty: a thing 
never before seen.’ In the following month the same thing happened in the case 
of the galleys from Beirut.> Under August 1506 it is stated that the Germans 
at the fair of the preceding month had bought very little. Various remedies 
! See the account of this attempt and its results so far as they are known in 
G. H. Pertz, Der dilteste Versuch zur Entdeckung des Seeneges nach Ostindien. 
Berlin, 1859. 
? Romanin, as above, vol. iii. p. 335, note (5). 
3 As above, vol. iv. p. 461. 
‘ We must recognise with due humility that the English are of little account in 
Venetian eyes in 1501. 
° G. Coen, Le Grandi Strade del Commercio Internazionale proposte fino dal 
Sec. XVI, (Leghorn, 1888), p. 71, 
002 
