CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS.

A.D. 1446-1506.

MARITIME DISCOVERIES.


About thirteen hundred years ago, when Attila the Hun, called "the
scourge of God," was overrunning the falling empire of the Romans,
some of the noblest citizens of the small cities of the Adriatic
fled, with their families and effects, to the inaccessible marshes
and islands at the extremity of that sea, and formed a permanent
settlement. They became fishermen and small traders. In process
of time they united their islands together by bridges, and laid the
foundation of a mercantile state. Thither resorted the merchants
of Mediaeval Europe to make exchanges. Thus Venice became rich and
powerful, and in the twelfth century it was one of the prosperous
states of Europe, ruled by an oligarchy of the leading merchants.

Contemporaneous with Dante, one of the most distinguished citizens
of this mercantile mart, Marco Polo, impelled by the curiosity
which reviving commerce excited and the restless adventure of a
crusading age, visited the court of the Great Khan of Tartary,
whose empire was the largest in the world. After a residence of
seventeen years, during which he was loaded with honors, he
returned to his native country, not by the ordinary route, but by
coasting the eastern shores of Asia, through the Indian Ocean, up
the Persian Gulf, and thence through Bagdad and Constantinople,