INFLUENCE UPON COMMERCE

T1rade with the East, at that time, embraced many more articles of commerce than at the present day. Sugar and several other commodities sought for as luxuries or used as medicine, which now come entirely from the new world, were brought from Egypt or the Indies. Europeans looked to Asia for precious gems, especially emeralds, whose worth equalled that of diamonds, until the discovery of the rich mines in the mountains of America. Pearls were then to be found only on the shores of oriental seas. The Crusades gave the peoples of Europe a taste for delicacies and Asiatic ornaments, which several of them had never before known. Vanity and enervation made precious stones, silks, perfumes, and all the products less useful than pleasant which nature has sown in profusion throughout the Orient, necessary to them.

2Accustomed by their intercourse with the Orientals to the burning savour of spices, soon they were not able to get along without them. They could not prepare famous dishes without plentiful use of spice; wines even were perfumed with them. Romancers of the era of the Crusades sang the praises, on nearly every page, of cinnamon, musk, clove, and ginger. Did these writers praise some exquisite odour, it was with spices they compared it. Did their fertile imagination build some superb palace, the magic home of the most powerful genii, they surrounded it with an odoriferous forest, planted with spice-bearing trees. Several Italian towns, especially the republics of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, got from this, almost entirely, not only the benefits of a commerce which embraced so many sought-for commodities, but the other advantages of a sea-trade abandoned to the Franks, by the Greeks and Arabs.