562 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 
and in consequence of that the growth of population; and when war, with 
its attendant scourges, led to a diminution both of industry and population, 
this commerce could not fail to assist in bringing about a speedy recovery. It 
has already been hinted that in manufactures both Milan and Florence took a 
prominent place in the time of Mocenigo. In truth, manufactures in both cities 
are of much older date, and it may be interesting to mention here that even in 
the thirteenth century English wool was a commodity sufficiently valuable to bear 
the cost of transport to Florence. A letter has come down to us,' dated London, 
January 6, 1284, from the representative of a Florentine house, giving par- 
ticulars as to purchases that he had made, in many cases for several years in 
advance, of all or a portion of the wool of many English monasteries from 
Netley and Titchfield, in Hants, and Robertsbridge, in Sussex, to Grimsby, in 
Lincolnshire, and Sawley, on the Ribble, in the county of York (one of these 
monasteries, you may be interested to learn, as near Leicester as Monks Kirby, 
about midway between Rugby and Nuneaton), and from the work in which this 
letter is published we also get particulars” as to the cost of conveying wool from 
London by way of Libourne to the Mediterranean port of Aigues Mortes in the 
same or the following century. Florence, indeed, depended on England, Spain, 
and Portugal for wools of fine quality, its own and other wools of Italy being 
of very inferior value, so that when four bales of English wool were worth in 
Florence 240 gold florins the same quantity of wool of Garfagna dell’ Aquila was 
worth only 40 florins.’ The author of this work adds that he has found no 
indication of the prices of the wools of Spain and Portugal in Florence. Besides 
manufacturing cloths from the raw material ‘ Florence carried on a large trade in 
dressing and finishing woollens manufactured in Flanders and Brabant, and brought 
to Florence either by way of Paris and the Saéne-Rhone valley or by way of 
Germany and across the Alps. In the time of Mocenigo many of these pro- 
ducts of Florentine industry came to Venice for export. In the address already 
referred to Florence is said to have sent to Venice every year 16,000 pieces of 
cloth, which were sold to Aquila, Sicily, Syria, Candia, the Morea, and Istria. 
It will be noticed that in the address above quoted Mocenigo lays no special stress 
on the spice trade, but there is not the slightest doubt that spices were amongst 
the most important commodities with which the Venetians provided a large part of 
the western world. Just as nowadays the large trade of Britain in bulky goods 
makes of this country a great entrepét for the more valuable and less bulky, so 
in Venetian times the exceptionally large population behind Venice receiving 
and supplying the bulky goods thus fed the shipping which brought to Venice a 
much larger proportion of the more valuable goods of the East than was brought 
to other ports. But there is plenty of direct evidence of the importance of Indian 
trade to Italy in the Middle Ages. It is to be remembered that of necessity this 
trade enriched other countries before it reached Venice, and in proof of its 
importance in the Mediterranean generally one may call attention to the inves- 
tigations of the Venetian Marin Sanuto Torcello about the end of the thirteenth 
century, who, we are told, saw with indignation that the defeats of the Christians 
in Palestine were specially due to the power of the Soldans of Egypt, and 
1 Published (1765) in a work having no author's name, but stated in the British 
Museum Catalogue to be by G. F, Pagnini della Ventura, and bearing the title Della 
Decima e delle altre Gravezze della Moneta, e della Mercatura de’ Fiorentini fino al 
secolo XVI, the third volume of which contains Za Pratica della Mercatura of 
Balducci Pegolotti (ascribed to the first half of the fourteenth century), under whose 
name the work is entered in the British Museum Catalogue. The date of the letter 
is given on p. 94 of vol.ii., and the letter itself on pp. 324-7 of the same volume. 
For the identification of the names of monasteries in their much disguised Italian 
forms and spelling I am indebted to my friend Mr. A. B. Hinds, M.A., editor of the 
last issued volume of the Calendar of State Papers (Venice). Most of them, how- 
ever, are entered and identified in the list given from Pegolotti on pp. 629-41 of 
Cunningham’s Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Early und Middle Ages, 
4th edition (1905), 
? Tbid., vol. iii. pp. 261-3. * Tbid., vol. ii. p. 95. 
