After 1502, then, the carrying of spices from India to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf was interfered with by the Portuguese. Nevertheless, besides the diminished amount of spices which was taken by the Venetians and others from Aleppo and Alexandria for European consumption, goods of the same class required in Arabia, Persia, Turkey, and North Africa continued to travel by the old routes. In fact this trade appears never to have ceased.[40] The Turkish conquest of Egypt, far from creating a revolution in the Levant trade, caused only a temporary disturbance of it, not unlike that caused previously by the death of one Mameluke sultan and the accession of another.[41] The real revolution was already accomplished. The beginning of the economic decay of the Levant and of the decline of Venice and the Mediterranean trading cities dates, not from the Turkish conquest of Egypt in 1517, but, if its causes be not traced even earlier, from the doubling of the Cape of Good Hope by the Portuguese in 1498. In 1528 Francis I opened negotiations with Suleiman, and French ships began to compete with those of Venice and Barcelona for spices at Alexandria.[42] The 10 per cent duty which had been exacted by the Mamelukes was presently reduced to 5, and later to 3 per cent.[43] While the Turks despised the Venetians, as men who would endure indignities rather than lose money, they respected the French, and these rapidly gained on the Venetians and in time surpassed them in amount of trade.[44]