160 RENAISSANCES

worlds, he was Fortune's favoured child among a goodly company of his
Genoese fellow countrymen who had been lending their expert profes-
sional services to the Iberian Christian kingdoms since A.D. ^ly.1

When individual Genoese and Venetian maritime adventurers were so
keenly alive to Western Christendom's possible future on the Ocean, and
were so effectively active in helping to translate this possibility into
accomplished fact, how came it that the Genoese and Venetian com-
monwealths let slip, with such fatal consequences for themselves, their
own opportunity of playing in this immense new field of Western mari-
time enterprise the leading part that was theirs for the taking, in virtue
of their then still unchallenged supremacy over all other maritime
Western Christian states in skill, experience, and wealth ? Their geo-
graphical location within the basin of an inland sea is not, in itself,
enough to account for their failure to compete in the new Oceanic race;
for a Mediterranean Sea that was landlocked over against the Indian
Ocean had an egress into the Atlantic, and at least a modest share in an
Early Modern Western World's oceanic activities was afterwards taken
by the Grand Duchy of Courland,2 whose locution within the basin of
the Baltic was quite as serious a geographical handicap in the oceanic
race as any to which Genoa and Venice were subject, The underlying
explanation of the two Italian maritime commonwealths' failure to
respond to the challenge of the Ocean was not a Mediterranean geo-
graphical location but was a Levantine commercial, political, and military
commitment which was the modern legacy of their medieval success, At
the critical moment at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
Venice and Genoa were still being held fast in an Atlantean stance by the
baneful incubus of a Medieval Western Christian reversion to Western
Christendom's Levantine past out of which these successful Italians had
never been shaken by disasters such as had opportunely overtaken their
French and Catalan fellow adventurers in that unpromising quarter.

This Atlantean doom was thus Genoa's and Venice's exceptional fate
in the sequel to a failure of the Crusades in which the reat of Western
Christendom had been saved, in its own despite, by a timely defeat. When
however, a nascent Iranic Muslim Society was dragged at the heels of
Timur Lenk's war-horse into turning its face away from lands of promise
round the shores of the Great Eurasian Steppe towards the cradle of a
dead antecedent Syriac Civilization,3 the whole of the aberrant society
paid the Atlantean penalty for its demonically wayward war-lord's com-
mission of a sin that had once been the undoing of loot's wife.4 When
Timur's conquests in the interior of the Iranic and Arabic Muslim
worlds had proved to be as ephemeral as they had been devastating, the
Iranic Muslim Society stood as stiff as any pillar of salt while the Mongol
and Calmuck pagan Nomads were being converted to the Tibetan Tan*
trie form of Mahayanian Buddhism instead of being converted to the
Sunni form of Islam, and while the political dominion over the shores of
the Eurasian Steppe was being partitioned between Emitted Manchus
and Orthodox Christian Muscovites, This gran rifiuto, through which

* See Prestage, op. cit, pp. 4-5. » See IX, viii, xao>

3 See IV. iv. 493-5. 4 G«n, xisc. a6.