38 THE QUEST FOR INDIA BY SEA Syria and Egypt. Yet the list of such European trav- ellers during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, including the remarkable journey of the Russian Niki- tin (1468 - 1474), bears witness to the persistence which they brought to the task. Two of the great land- travellers overlap the discovery of the Cape route. One of the last of them, Ludovico di Varthema, found the Portuguese struggling for a settlement in India, was present at their sea-fight with the Zamorin in 1506, and took service under Portugal as a factor in Cochin on the coast of Malabar. The achievement that rescued the Indian trade from the thrall of the Infidel, more effectively than combined Christendom had ever delivered the sacred places of Palestine, was the work of a nation which even then ranked among the small ones of Europe. But, with the exception of the imposing figurehead of the Holy Roman Empire, the contrast between the leading and the lesser States at the beginning of the fifteenth cen- tury was by no means so marked as it is now. The modern first-class Powers, France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Italy, Great Britain, were not yet built up. Spain was still divided between Castile, Aragon, and the Moors. Europe remained a continent of principal- ities, duchies, counties, little oligarchies, and little re- publics. The Mediterranean States that had engrossed the Indian trade during the Middle Ages were cities rather than countries. The new Power destined to supersede them was essentially a nation, a nation still aflame with the patriotism that had won its independ-
