EARLY INDIA

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~——throughout the world, and its enduring effect in shaping
the early beginnings of modern civilisation has yet to be
written.
Previously to the capture of Constantinople by the
Turks in 1453 the eastern trade by the Black Sea route
(which had formed the chief wealth of the Byzantine
Empire) had been largely developed by Venetian merchants
 who settled at Constantinople after its capture
by the Crusaders in 1204. For fifty years Venice retained
possession of the Black Sea trade, and was queen of the
Mediterranean Sea. The Genoese supplanted the Venetians
 about the middle of the thirteenth century, and held
their own until the advent of the Turk; but both Venetian
and Genoese influence is still perceptible in the Persian
and Makran coast districts (Venetian gold coins were the
only recognised gold currency of Makran until quite
recently), and it certainly appears probable that the
Perso-Makran route was at least as important in its time
as that of the Black Sea or any of the more northern
highways. For a time the truculent Turk only barely
held his own against the Arab navigator, and both were
still sea powers to be reckoned with, when the discovery
of the Cape route to India by Vasco da Gama in 1497
opened an entirely new chapter in the history of Indian
commercial geography.
The subsequent story of Portuguese ascendency, the
marvellous rapidity of its development until it culmihated
 in the absolute command of oriental trade from
Japan to the Cape of Good Hope, lasting through the
whole of the sixteenth century ; and its equally rapid
decline and final disappearance before the persistent
advance of the Dutch, belongs to the pages of history
rather than of geography, and is only of purely geographical
 interest by reason of the glimpses which it
affords us of the distribution of political power in India
whilst it lasted.
When the Portuguese first arrived in India, Delhi and
the whole of Bengal were under the sway of the Afghan,
The Deccan was divided into the five Muhammadan king-