n the estate
where they pursued their several crafts.

The position of Rome as the ecclesiastical metropolis of the world caused
both a general and periodical recourse of embassies, deputations,
pilgrims, and travellers to the Italian peninsula, yet we cannot discover
that any especial conveniences were provided for the wayfarers. Even in
the great and solemn years of the Jubilee the roads were merely patched
up, and the bridges temporarily repaired by the Roman government, and
only in such places as had become actually impassable. The floating
capital of the more commercial of the Italian Republics was employed
rather upon their docks and arsenals than upon their roads and causeways.
Venice indeed, which for central vigour was the most genuine offspring of
Imperial Rome, paved its continental possessions with broad
thoroughfares. But neither Padua, Ravenna, nor Florence followed the
example of the Adriatic Queen. On the contrary, Dante, when in his
descent to Hell he meets with any peculiarly difficult or precipitous
track, frequently compares it to some road well known to his countrymen,
which fallen rocks had blocked up, or a wintry flood had rendered
impermeable. Spain presented, as it presents at this day, to the
engineer, almost insurmountable difficulties. The Moorish provinces of
the south alone possessed any tolerable roads; nor were the ways of
Arragon or Castile mended after the wealth of Mexico and Peru had been
poured into the Spanish exchequer. Portugal owed its first good roads in
modern times to its good king Emmanuel; and the Dutch and Flemings, the
most commercial people of Europe from the thirteenth to the eighteenth
centuries, found in their rivers and canals an easier transit than roads
would have afforded them, for the wares which they brought from Archangel
on the one hand and from the Spice Islands on the other. The military
restlessness of France indeed led to the earlier formation of great
roads. Yet France was a land long divided in itself; and the Duchies of
Burgundy and Bretagne had little in common with the enterprising spirit
of Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles. Upon the whole the roads of England,
bad as they were, were at least upon a par with those of the Continent.

In this retrospect, hasty and imperfect as it is, we must not pass over
the roads of Asia. And here ancient history affords us at least glimpses
of definite knowledge. In that portion of the Asiatic continent which