26 TREATMENT OF THE SUBJECT-MATTER. 
9. While the erudition of southern Italy interested itself in 
the maintenance and extension of the sciences of the Orient, the 
commercial republics of Italy—Venice, Amalfi, Pisa, Florence, 
and Genoa—were enabled through their fleets to obtain from the 
far East and South such commodities as were required in medi- 
cine as well as for the more refined enjoyment of life and the 
improvements in handicraft. Venice, which was by far the 
strongest of these commercial states, began already in the 
eleventh century to develop the elements of its incomparable 
splendor, and to become the central point for the traffic in drugs. 
Up to the end of the sixteenth century there flowed into this 
city, in the greatest abundance, those spices which were sought 
with such extreme eagerness, but the value of which, in our time, 
has become very greatly reduced. The greatest importance was 
attached to pepper, the commercial history of which vividly 
reflects this entire and exceedingly remarkable intercourse of 
nations, as, indeed, in the middle ages, pepper represented the 
symbol of the entire spice trade.* 
The Levant trade of Venice, which for those times was incom- 
parably large, also gave an impulse for the establishment, in that 
city, of chemical industries, such as the manufacture of sal-am- 
moniac, corrosive sublimate, cinnabar, soap, and glass, together 
with the bleaching of wax and the refining of borax (Tinkal, 
from Thibet) and of camphor. 
Through the shrewd participation of the Venetians in the 
crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, their commerce 
and influence attained the highest degree of prosperity. Even 
the continued warlike conflicts of the Occident with the Orient 
must have necessarily also contributed to the knowledge and dis- 
tribution of special medicinal substances in other parts of 
Europe. Many historians of that time, who visited Palestine, 
‘The spice dealers in various countries were known as Piperarii. 
Such a ‘ Gild of Pepperers” existed already in London in the year 1345, 
and the “Society of Apothecaries” still existing there, which received 
its charter from James I., in the year 1617, properly dates back to 
_ those pepper dealers. Compare Pharm, Journ., XV. (1884), p. 367; also 
Flickiger’s “ Pharmakognosie,” p. 867, 
