Meanwhile, the campaigns of Alexander had carried Greek influence and authority over all western Asia, reaching even to India itself, and had led to a widely increased intercourse. Although he died at the age of thirty-two, Alexander the Great did more than any single individual in the world’s history to bring the nations of the Eastern and the Western worlds into contact with each other, and it is certainly due to this circumstance that we find much greater evidences of the use of pearls in the western countries after his time. Besides this, the founding of Alexandria provided a mart, in whose bazaars the traders of India, Persia, and Arabia bartered their treasured gems, just as their descendants do in the same place at the present day. It was not, however, until the establishment of the Roman empire that this commercial intercourse reached its highest development. The Romans, with their marvelous capacity for organization, were the first to build a great system of permanent and well-kept roads to facilitate land travel and land traffic. These great roads, starting from the Forum, reached out in every direction, even to the limits of the empire; and, as a result of increased commercial activity, more gems were engraved, mounted, and set during the five hundred years of Rome’s commercial supremacy than during any other early epoch of the world’s history. In Rome, the trade in pearls was so important that there was a corporation of “margaritarii.” The _officinæ margaritariorum_ were installed in the Forum, in the neighborhood of the _tabernae argentariæ_; some were also on the Via Sacra.[376] However, the name _margaritarius_ did not only apply to the jewelers, merchants, and setters of pearls, but also to those who fished for them and to the guardians of the gems and jewels wherein pearls were used. With the fall of the Western empire, the Dark Ages settled down like a cloud over Europe for five hundred years. Only among the Saracens and at Byzantium did the culture of the old civilization survive, and eventually the light of knowledge and of progress was rekindled from these sources. The Crusades were the chief factors in this new development; they gave a mighty stimulus, by means of which Europe was aroused from her lethargy and once more brought into contact with the Orient. Venice and Genoa now became the great carriers, and from this time, and to this source, may be traced many of the oriental gems in Europe. The Venetian fleet of three hundred merchant ships brought the products of the East and distributed them over Europe, by way of the German cities of Augsburg and Nuremberg, where the great jewelers and silversmiths made world-famed ornaments. [Illustration: PECTORAL CROSS OF CONSTANTINE IX. MONOMACHUS (1000–1054 A.D.) Containing some wood attributed to the true cross. ]