Mongols sacked and destroyed Baghdad in 1258, and this revo-
lution in the Orient was followed in 1291 by the Mohammedan
capture of Acre, the last Christian territory which then remained of
the Crusaders' Kingdom of Jerusalem. In northern Europe the Teu-
tonic Knights completed the conquest of Prussia in 1283. In 1295 the
West touched hands with the Far East when Marco Polo returned
from his adventurous travels in Cathay and the distant Orient.

Markets and trade routes were opened or closed by these events.
France and Aragon became competitors with Venice and Genoa in
the Levantine trade. The fall of the Latin Empire of Constantinople
deprived Venice of a monopoly of the Black Sea and Aegean trade
which she had enjoyed since 1204 and established Genoa in her room.
For the revolution of 1261 was engineered by Genoese diplomacy and
financed by Genoese gold. The destruction of Baghdad and the triumph
of Egypt in Palestine wrought a commercial revolution in western
Asia and those countries bordering the eastern Mediterranean basin,
for the Mongol victories were more at the expense of Islam than of
Christendom. The union of all Asia except India by the Mongols,
together with the incorporation of most of Russia within the great
Mongol Empire, brought East and West closer together than ever
before in history, just before Marco Polo returned to reveal to aston-
ished Europe the real nature of the lands and peoples of the Far East.
In northern Europe enterprising German merchants of Lübeck, Stettin
and Danzig were laboring to make the Baltic a German lake and soon
were to extend German trade domination as far as Novgorod, already
a mart of high renown, where goods from China, India, Samarkand
and Tashkent were for sale.

Concurrently with these great events, forces and processes of a less
spectacular nature had been operating ever since the inception of the
Crusades, and by the end of the thirteenth century had reached, or
were approaching, culmination. These were economic and social forces.
A desire to penetrate the marts of the Levant and to capture control
of the rich traffic in Oriental luxuries, such as silk and spices, had
motivated the Italian maritime cities like Amalfi, Venice, Genoa and
Pisa from the very inception of the Crusades, and it was not long
before the Provençal and Spanish port towns like Marseilles, Mont-
pellier, Narbonne, and Barcelona also entered into the game. Even
inland towns like those of Lombardy waxed rich and populous upon
this trade. For the volume and variety of it grew so great that much
of it found its way up the Po, where the cities of the Lombard plain
acted as middlemen for its distribution over the Alpine passes to cen-
tral and northern Europe. All Lombardy profited by this trade, but
Milan and Pavia most of all, owing to their strategic situation with
reference to the passes.

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