Kral

(İng. king)

Göndermeler

Diğer

The issue was not destined to be settled by economic factors alone, with victory going to the competitor who could supply Europe with spices at the lowest price. Portugal went east as crusader and trader, determined to get a monopoly of the westward flow of goods and also to wage the holy war on new battlefields. To establish the monopoly she must gain control of the producing regions and exporting harbors, close the entrances to the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, and wipe out any Arab or Egyptian ships that came in sight. For the crusade she must provide a considerable army and navy for combined operations and draw on Abyssinia for material and men. For about two decades she acted with vigor. In 1502 Vasco da Gama broke up Arab-Egyptian shipping so thoroughly that in 1504 scarcely any spices reached the Levantine ports or Mediterranean Europe. From 1506 to 1516 Albuquerque, commander of the fleet and after 1509 governor general of the Portuguese Indies, was untiring, aggressive, and triumphant. He captured Ormuz in 1507, thus blockading the Persian Gulf. He strung a chain of outposts from East Africa to China. He laid plans to capture Aden, establish a base inside the Red Sea, burn the Egyptian navy in harbor, and destroy the Moslem holy city of Mecca. He even suggested that engineers be brought from Europe to divert the upper Nile from its course, thus turning Egypt into a desert. Though Albuquerque died before he could seal up the Red Sea, he did reduce and render fitful the traffic from India and points east to Alexandria and Aleppo. Portugal became for a time the leading, and in some years the only, recipient of East Indian produce. Her ships, laden with some European goods and well stocked with gold from Africa, went out regularly, returning to Lisbon with cargoes that were sent on to Antwerp to be sold. The king claimed a royal monopoly of the trade in pepper, his factors and agents tried to keep the price as high as possible, and he seemed to be richly rewarded for the enterprise of his ancestors. It is probable, however, that much of the royal profit was swallowed up in the cost of sustaining the forces needed in the Orient to suppress rivals. It is certain that those rivals were not permanently or completely suppressed. The Turks, who had gone on from capturing Constantinople in 1453 to conquer Syria in 1516 and Egypt in 1517, were eager to revive the old trade routes because of the revenue to be collected from them. Their eagerness was shared by the Venetians, by the French, who were competing more and more with the Italians in the Levant, and by the Arabs. After about 1520 the Portuguese blockade grew weaker, the administration became incompetent or corrupt, the Red Sea could not be closed tight, and Arab bribes brought freedom from restraint. By 1540 at latest, goods were flowing once more in considerable volume through Aleppo and Alexandria to Venice, Ragusa, Marseilles, and other ports. Professor Lane estimates that by 1560 Venice was receiving more pepper than she had done before the trade was interrupted; that shipments through the Red Sea equaled and sometimes exceeded the Lisbon imports; and that the European consumption of pepper increased greatly —perhaps even doubled- between 1500 and 1560. It has been suggested that Portugal's appropriation of the African gold supply had reduced the Italians' ability to pay for what they wanted in the Levant. If that diversion of precious metal was a serious blow, the damage was repaired by the mounting supplies of silver coming from mid-European mines and then by the influx from America.

At first it was the temple that was the focus of whatever high culture there was. At the temples in ancient Sumeria, where urban life began in the fourth millennium BC, the work of controlling the local flooding and providing for the drought of the Mesopotamian alluvial plain was carried on under the learned priests, who in turn disposed of the surplus. It was they who sent out traders to bring in exotic goods necessary to the developing exploitation of the plain, fertile but lacking in minerals and even stone. When disputes arose with rival towns, perhaps over control of the trade, they organized the fighting men. But then as warfare became more elaborate -each town trying to outdo the others- military affairs and the general control of the town fell into the hands of non-priestly specialists: kings and their dependents. The royal court became a second focus of high culture alongside the temple, and was based like it upon agricultural production. Its revenue, in whatever form it took it, may be called taxes, which came chiefly from the land. Much more gradually, at last, the traders too became independent merchants, doing business on their own account and gaining enough profit to share, if more modestly and indirectly than temple or court, in the revenue of the land. When this happened, rich merchants too became patrons of the arts and the market became a third focus of high culture.

In many Near Eastern cultures, kingship was considered to be the very basis of civilisation. According to such beliefs, it was only the uncivilised which lived without a king to provide them with security, freedom, peace, prosperity and justice.

Comparisons between the political activities of Phoenician kings and those undertaken by their Near Eastern counterparts reveal little difference in the patterns of thought and behaviour and thus there can be little doubt that Phoenician royal ideologies were inspired and influenced by Mesopotamian and Canaanite traditions.

In the ancient Near East, kings who were remembered as great warriors were also remembered as great hunters

Viewed holistically, the evidence from Tyre shows that as the profits from inter-regional exchange increased, the power of the king became progressively more constrained by the city’s wealthy mercantile families who were keen to influence public affairs.