by Dante, actually ceased for a considerable time to be regarded as worthy of the attention of a scholar, we may perhaps conclude that as much of the learning of antiquity has been preserved, as could be instrumental to the improvement of modern nations. Nor can it be said that the learning thus lost was useless to the general progress, since it was only in such an abundance of the mind that the valuable products which have reached us could have been prepared. The copiousness of the intellect resembles the wild exuberance of material nature, and a large allowance is made for the perishing of its fruits. (m) The manufacture of silk in particular was at this time transferred from Greece to Sicily and Italy. In the year 1148 it was carried to Palermo, from which it was received by Lucca; and when the latter was pillaged in the year 1314, its workmen carried their industry to Florence, Milan, Bologna, and other cities. Into Venice it had already found its way, but that city then received an addi tional supply of manufacturers. No city derived so much prosperity from it as Florence, Sugar also was a gift of these expeditions, for the crusaders became acquainted with this production in the first crusade, when they arrived in the neighbourhood of Tripoli in Syria; and the cultivation of it was introduced into Sicily in the same year with the manufacture of silk. From Sicily the cultivation of sugar was carried first to Madeira, and from that island to the Archipelago of America. Ibid. p. 394-397. Paulus Egineta, one of the last of the Greek compilers of medical history, is the first who expressly mentions sugar; this was about the year 625. It was at first called mel arundinaceum or reed-honey; and came from China, by India and Arabia to Europe. Douglas's Summary of the British Settlements in North America, vol. 1. p. 115. Lond. 1760. According to Salmasius it had been produced in Arabia 900 years before that time: and according to Wooton, in his Remarks upon Ancient and Modern Learning, ch. 22. it grows naturally in Arabia and India. Anderson, vol. 1. p. 198. In estimating the importance of these acquisitions we should not consider them merely as multiplying the gratifications, or even as exercising the industry of the western nations. To the silk-manufacture of Florence, as has been well observed by the author whom I have last quoted, we are indebted for the brilliant age of the Medici: and who can appreciate the future reaction of the black colonies of the sugar-islands on the interests of their native continent, with all its relations to the general system of the world? (n) The Greek dynasty was re-established in the year 1261, and Constantinople was taken by the Turks in the year 1453. (0) These formed their principal station for the trade of the Black sea at Caffa in the Crimea, by which they commanded at once the corn-trade of the Ukraine and the sturgeon fishery of the Don: an Indian commerce was also, though precariously, maintained by the Oxus, the Caspian sea, the Volga, and the Don, which was met by the Italian vessels in the harbours of the Crimea. Decline and Fall, &c. vol. 6. p. 282, 283. (p) The word Mameluke, which in the Arabian language signifies slave in general, has been particularly applied to those slaves, chiefly Circassians, which were bought by the sultans of Egypt from the Tartars, to be trained to the exercise of arms. Herbelot, art. Mamlouk. (9) One might find, says the author of the Esprit des Croisades, tome 3. p. 455, Agamemnon in Godfrey, Achilles in Hugh the Great or in Tancred, Ulysses in Bohemond, Diomede in the duke of Normandy, Ajax in the count of Toulouse, Calchas in Adhemar, and Thersites perhaps in Peter the Hermit. But the enthusiasm of Peter should have saved him from so humiliating a comparison. (r) Tous les jours a la cour un sot de qualite Peut juger de travers avec impunite, A Malherbe, a Racan preferer Theophile, Muratori has laboured to prove, that the French satirist did not mean to insinuate, that the work of Tasso was only tinsel; but merely to condemn the false taste of those, who would prefer that which was tinsel in the poem of Tasso to that which was gold in the poem of Virgil; and in this argument he has been followed by Ginguene, in his recent history of Italian literature. The analysis of the latter writer however sufficiently shows that the tinsel. of Tasso is in considerable quantity, though he ranks the Gerusalemme Liberata next after the Eneid, excluding the Paradise Lost from the class of epic poems, while he acknowledges the superior sublimity of Milton. Hist. Litt. d'Italie, part. 2. ch. 15, 16. LECTURE XXV. Of the history of Commerce from the suppression of the western empire in the year 476 to the commencement of the fourteenth century, THE formation of the modern system of Eu rope has been so powerfully influenced by commerce, that a consideration of the encrease and diffusion of commercial industry in the several periods of its history is indispensably necessary to a due knowledge of its nature. Many of the facts indeed, which relate to the history of commerce in the period preceding the fourteenth century, have been already noticed; but it will be useful that all should be brought together in a single view, to enable the mind to comprehend the whole of the combinations, which have given so much of a commercial character to the governments of Europe. The ascendancy of the Roman power had * crushed the commerce of the ancient world. * Anderson's Hist. of Commerce, vol. 1. introd. p. 1. Lond. |