[Sidenote: State of the Levant.]
Christendom had recovered from the alarm into which it had been
thrown some 18 years before when the Tartar cataclysm had threatened
to engulph it. The Tartars themselves were already becoming an object
of curiosity rather than of fear, and soon became an object of hope,
as a possible help against the old Mahomedan foe. The frail Latin
throne in Constantinople was still standing, but tottering to its fall.
The successors of the Crusaders still held the Coast of Syria from
Antioch to Jaffa, though a deadlier brood of enemies than they had yet
encountered was now coming to maturity in the Dynasty of the Mamelukes,
which had one foot firmly planted in Cairo, the other in Damascus.
The jealousies of the commercial republics of Italy were daily waxing
greater. The position of Genoese trade on the coasts of the Aegean was
greatly depressed, through the predominance which Venice had acquired
there by her part in the expulsion of the Greek Emperors, and which won
for the Doge the lofty style of Lord of Three-Eighths of the Empire
of Romania. But Genoa was biding her time for an early revenge, and
year by year her naval strength and skill were increasing. Both these
republics held possessions and establishments in the ports of Syria,
which were often the scene of sanguinary conflicts between their
citizens. Alexandria was still largely frequented in the intervals of
war as the great emporium of Indian wares, but the facilities afforded
by the Mongol conquerors who now held the whole tract from the Persian
Gulf to the shores of the Caspian and of the Black Sea, or nearly so,
were beginning to give a great advantage to the caravan routes which
debouched at the ports of Cilician Armenia in the Mediterranean and
at Trebizond on the Euxine. Tana (or Azov) had not as yet become the
outlet of a similar traffic; the Venetians had apparently frequented to
some extent the coast of the Crimea for local trade, but their rivals
appear to have been in great measure excluded from this commerce, and
the Genoese establishments which so long flourished on that coast, are
first heard of some years after a Greek dynasty was again in possession
of Constantinople.[1]
[Sidenote: The various Mongol Sovereignties in Asia and Eastern Europe.]