AMALFI. GAETA. NAPLES. PISA. 449 
minded mercantile policy they kept many of their discoveries 
profoundly secret, all knowledge of them perished with their 
ruin. In ancient times, when the defeat of a people too often 
led to its complete destruction, or at least to the extinction of its 
peculiar civilisation, and the difficulties of intercourse rendered 
the diffusion of knowledge extremely difficult and slow, it not 
unfrequently happened that useful discoveries were erased from 
the memory of mankind, a danger which, thanks to the print- 
ing-press and the steam-engine, is now no longer to be feared. 
Thus a darkening or eclipse of intellectual life took place to 
a vast extent when the western Roman Empire succumbed to 
the barbarians of the North, and the bands which for centuries 
had united the cities of the east and west were violently sun- 
dered. Under that fatal blight Civilisation vanished from the 
Jands which had so long been her chosen seat, only to dawn 
again after a long and obscure night. Commercial intercourse 
ceased between the sea-ports of the Mediterranean, all commu- 
nication with distant countries was cut off, and the boundaries 
of the known earth became more and more narrow, as the 
ignorance of a barbarous age increased. 
It is not before the beginning of the ninth century that we 
perceive the first glimpses of a better day in the rising fortunes 
of some Italian sea-ports, where favourable circumstances had 
given birth to liberal institutions. As early as the year 840 
Amalfi possessed a considerable number of trading-vessels, and 
carried on a lucrative commerce with the Levant. The maritime 
code of this little republic regulated the commercial transactions 
of all the Mediterranean sea-ports ; as in a later century the 
law-book of Wisby served as a guide to the merchants of the 
Baltic. A few years after its submission in 1131 to the arms 
of King Roger of Sicily, Amalfi was plundered by the Pisanese 
and almost entirely destroyed. The neglected harbour was 
gradually choked with sand, and the little town, which now 
numbers no more than 3000 inhabitants, has nothing to console 
it for its actual poverty but the remembrance of a glorious 
past, Along with Amalfi, Gaéta, Naples, and Pisa, rose to con- 
siderable eminence in commerce, though far from equalling the 
power and splendour of Genoa and Venice, the great republics 
of northern Italy. 
As far back as the beginning of the sixth century, the city of 
