The Rise and Decline of the Muslim Civilization 53
ports, while the Mongols permitted Marco Polo and his kinsmen
to make their famous journeys to Mongol-dominated China in the
late thirteenth century. In the following century we find mer-
chants of Venice, Genoa, and other European cities trading with the
Mongol capital at Tabriz via the Black Sea; and though the re-
assertion of exclusive Chinese independence under the Ming
dynasty once more closed China to Europeans, Timur Leng and
his successors in the fifteenth century continued to encourage
European trade with their dominions in West-central Asia. Trade
with the Mamluk kingdom in the Levant became a virtual mono-
poly of Venice, who had finally disposed of her rival Genoa in a
ruthless commercial war. Both Venice and the Mamluks extracted
an exorbitant profit from the trade; but in the fifteenth century
Mamluk predatoriness became too much even for the Venetians,
and when the exacting Sultan Bars-bay raised his excise-duty on
pepper to 160 per cent, they successfully brought pressure on him
by threatening to withdraw their merchants from Alexandria.
Meanwhile, the political stability of the Middle East countries
had continued to deteriorate, until only an enforced re-unification,
however roughly and arbitrarily imposed and with whatever
further loss of cultural vitality, could save the whole from ruin.
The raids of Timur Leng c. 1400 had ruined Aleppo, Damascus,
and other Syrian cities; had erected 120 towers of skulls of the in-
habitants of Baghdad alone; and had completed the work begun
by Hulagu in converting Iraq from a land of irrigated agriculture
to a land given over in the main to the nomadic herds of the Tur-
coman and the Bedouin. Mamluk rule likewise deteriorated
sharply after c. 1340. In the next 128 years there were no fewer
than twenty-nine Mamluk sultans, ruling for an average of only
four and a half years apiece. In Egypt, Palestine and Syria alike the
cultivator was oppressed by the Irresponsible Mamluk feudal land-
lords, whose incomes depended on the amount of land-tax they
could extort from their peasantry. Bedouin and Turcoman raiders
pillaged the settled lands, and the former actually sacked Jerusalem
in 1480. The cities of Syria and Palestine were largely ruined by the
continual revolts of local governors, and the public benefactions of
better days, such as schools and hospitals, were extensively con-
verted by the trustees to their personal profit. A contemporary
MusHrn historian estimated that the population of the Mamluk
empire was reduced to one-third of its figure at the beginning of