Rogue Sword, CHAPTER I.
After losing Acre and the rest of the "Holy Land," the Hospitallers, like the Templars, had found refuge with the Frankish King of Cyprus.
Lucas, arriving in Constantinople from Trebizond but bound for Negroponte, engages a place on one of the many galleys that are filling the Golden Horn in order to avoid the war on the Sea of Marmora between Byzantium and a company of mercenaries holding Gallipoli.
Hugh has met Marco Polo. (So did the Doctor in Doctor Who but Marco did not write about time travel because no one would have believed it.) Lucas heard of Marco:
"'...at the court of the Kha Khan in Cambaluc...'" (p. 29)
We begin to recognize and remember some of the geography as we proceed through Poul Anderson's historical novels.
2 comments:
The Mongol conquests made singleton journeys from Europe to the Far East practicable (for a while), because it gave political unity to the steppe zone for a while, until the various branches of Genghis' family fell out.
There was always trade from one end of it to the other, at least from Han times on, but it was usually hand-to-hand, a bunch of relatively short passages ending in an entrepot where one set of merchants handed off to another, to minimize the political dangers of travel.
This was also the reason stuff from the Far East was so excruciatingly expensive; it was going not just through the hands of monopolists, but through a -series- of monopolists. The seaborne voyage (via Muslim traders from Canton, then to SE Asia and to Ceylon and on to the Red Sea and the Gulf) was usually a bit cheaper but not much.
Which is why the economic effects of Vasco da Gama's discovery of the route around the Cape of Good Hope were so drastic. Even while the Portuguese had a monopoly, they were only one set of monopolists -- with a direct voyage they could undersell the other ends of the traditional routes and still make a killing themselves.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Iow, the Portuguese cut out a lot of these monopolistic middlemen who made trade between Europe and the Far East so costly. Even before the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, the Portuguese had been exploring down the west coast of Africa with precisely that idea in mind.
Ad astra! Sean
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