THE BEGINNING OF TRADE 



The Power of Venice. 



One of the leading sea powers of the Mediterranean in the Middle 

 Ages was Venice, founded by refugees before the Goths and the Vandals 

 who felt that in the collection of low-lying islands among the lagoons 

 they were safe and who found a precarious livelihood in the fisheries 

 round about. Thus they came to be seamen from the very beginning 

 and gradually to venture further afield, exchanging their fish for corn 

 and the necessities of life. Then they began to go into the carrying 

 trade until by the twelfth century they were a power and by the thir- 

 teenth one to be reckoned with. The people were much like the 

 Phoenicians in many respects, and when they were reproached for gross 

 profiteering in the transport of the Crusaders they cynically maintained 

 that they were Venetians first and Christians afterwards. The piratical 

 attacks of the Dalmatians on their merchant ships caused them to found 

 a fighting Navy and soon they came to be the bullies of the Mediter- 

 ranean. They must be given full credit for commercial enterprise and 

 gallantry but at the same time their method of exterminating rivals was 

 medieval, as shown in the war with Genoa in 1379 and 1380. It was 

 when Venice began to be ambitious and wished to be a land as well as a 

 sea power that the decline set in and her ruin finally came with Vasco 

 da Gama's discovery that the safest way to the East was by way of 

 the Cape. 



Marseilles. 



Although it could not aspire to the power of Venice the port of 

 Marseilles was one of the principal harbours of the world, having been 

 founded by the Greeks about six hundred years before Christ as 

 Massalia, probably replacing an earlier Phoenician settlement. Under 

 the Romans it achieved considerable importance and suffered for resist- 

 ing Ctesar in the Civil War. It was ravaged more than once when the 

 Barbarians overran Europe but early in the thirteenth century it was 

 able to protect itself and was established as an independent republic. 

 When Provence was added to the Kingdom of France in 1481 the town 

 remained a separate administration, handled directly by the Crown, but 

 throughout its history commerce was its principal interest. 



The Hanse Towns. 



No account of medieval trade would be complete without some 

 description of the Hanseatic League, a curious federation of trading 

 cities in North Germany which began some time in the thirteenth 

 century. In 1241 Liibeck and Hamburg were working together in the 

 interests of trade and fifteen years later it is very certain that the League 

 was in a very flourishing condition. A little later their history became 

 somewhat obscure because the League was expressly forbidden by a 

 Papal Bull for the protection of the Empire. In the earliest days, the 

 League, in which Liibeck was always the moving spirit, was principally 

 interested in the herring fisheries and it was when the fish suddenly 

 decided to leave the Baltic that the interests of the merchants began to 

 wander. It must not be thought, however, that they were not trading 



226 



