EAN A BUSY CENTRE OF
TRADE AND HOW THE CITIES OF THE ITALIAN PENINSULA BECAME THE GREAT
DISTRIBUTING CENTRE FOR THE COMMERCE WITH ASIA AND AFRICA

THERE were three good reasons why the Italian cities should have been
the first to regain a position of great importance during the late
Middle Ages. The Italian peninsula had been settled by Rome at a very
early date. There had been more roads and more towns and more schools
than anywhere else in Europe.

The barbarians had burned as lustily in Italy as elsewhere, but there
had been so much to destroy that more had been able to survive. In
the second place, the Pope lived in Italy and as the head of a vast
political machine, which owned land and serfs and buildings and forests
and rivers and conducted courts of law, he was in constant receipt of
a great deal of money. The Papal authorities had to be paid in gold and
silver as did the merchants and ship-owners of Venice and Genoa. The
cows and the eggs and the horses and all the other agricultural products
of the north and the west must be changed into actual cash before the
debt could be paid in the distant city of Rome.

This made Italy the one country where there was a comparative abundance
of gold and silver. Finally, during the Crusades, the Italian cities had
become the point of embarkation for the Crusaders and had profiteered to
an almost unbelievable extent.

And after the Crusades had come to an end, these same Italian cities
remained the distributing centres for those Oriental goods upon which
the people of Europe had come to depend during the time they had spent
in the near east.

Of these towns, few were as famous as Venice. Venice was a republic
built upon a mud bank. Thither people from the mainland had fled during
the invasions of the barbarians in the fourth century. Surrounded on all
sides by the sea they had engaged in the business of salt-making. Salt
had been very scarce during the Middle Ages, and the price had been
high. For hundreds of years Venice had enjoyed a monopoly of this
indispensable table commodity (I say indispensable, because people, like
sheep, fall ill unless they get a certain amount of salt in their food).
The people had used this monopoly to increase the power of their city.
At times they had even dared to defy the power of the Popes. The town
had grown rich and had begun to build ships, which engaged in trade
with the Orient. During the Crusades, these ships were used to carry