so that the mistress of the world,
in her turn, fell before nations that were rude and barbarous, but
uncorrupted by wealth and luxury.

The conquerors of Rome were too rude, and too many in number, to
become themselves enervated by wealth, which disappeared under
their rapacious grasp, and which they neither had the art nor
inclination to preserve.

This invasion of the fertile and rich provinces by men rude and
ignorant, but who came from northern climates, established a new
order of things; and only a small remnant of former wealth and
greatness was preserved in Egypt and at Constantinople.

For several centuries of war and confusion commerce and the arts
appear to have been undervalued and neglected; but still the taste [end
of page #71] for oriental luxuries was not entirely banished, and, at the
first interval of peace and safety, sprung up again. It was then that
Alexandria, Venice, Genoa, and Constantinople, became the channels
through which the people of Europe procured the luxuries of Asia.
Babylon, Memphis, Palmyra, and all the other great cities of antiquity,
were no more; even Greece had lost its arts and splendour; Alexandria
and Constantinople were repeatedly assailed, taken, and conquered, by
the barbarians, who envied their wealth, but who still found an interest
in continuing them as channels for procuring to European nations the
refinements of the East. Though Venice and Genoa were wealthy, they
were but small, and of little importance; and all the nations who might
have crushed them at a blow, only considering them as sea-ports of
convenience and utility, allowed them to remain independent.

As an intercourse had been established between the northern and
southern parts, a taste for the luxuries of Asia had extended to the
shores of the Baltic, soon after the victorious arms of Charlemagne
had carried there some degree of civilization, and the Christian
religion.

Then it was that a new and more widely-extended system of
commerce, but something like what had formerly existed in Tyre and
Carthage, began in all the maritime towns of Europe, when Italy and
Flanders became the most wealthy parts of Europe. A spirit of
chivalry, and a desire of conquest, not founded on the same principles
with the conquests of ancient nations, or of Rome, to obtain wealth,
pervaded all Europe, and the greatest confusion prevailed. In the
history of wealth and power, as connected together, this is a chasm.
Those who