18 THE CLOSING OF THE OLD TRADE PATHS in 1280 to the Franciscan friars of that port. In 1323 Pope John XXTT complained that the Christians had been driven forth by the Mongols from Soldaia, and " their churches turned into mosques." Yet Ibn Ba- tuta (1304-1377) still reckoned it as one of the five great ports of the world. In 1365 Soldaia became a fortified factory of the Genoese, who traded there till the downfall of the Byzantine empire, and whose de- fensive works survive to this day. These ports on the Crimea formed the inlets of the Eastern trade to the Russian emporium of Novgorod. The position of Novgorod gave it access by the Dnieper to the Black Sea on the south, and by the Neva to the Hanse towns of the Baltic. In its marts the spices and fabrics of the East were exchanged for the furs of the North, and distributed to Western Europe. " As far back as the eleventh century," writes Consul Perry, " Gothland's commerce with the East by way of Nov- gorod was already of much importance." The marshes and lake region around Novgorod defended it for a time against the Mongol hordes. Its merchants carried not only the art-work but also the currency of Asia to Scandinavia; and twenty thousand Cufic coins minted in about seventy towns of the Abbasid caliphs are said to have been at one time preserved in Stockholm. The tide of wealth which thus set toward Venice and Genoa from the Black Sea procured for them a period of splendour scarcely less striking than that of the Saracen, or of the briefer Jewish, ascendency over the Indo-Syrian route. Trebizond, at the southeastern
