pots of the
Black Sea. Then there were more than two hundred other cities, some
large and some small, each a perfect commercial unit, all of them
fighting their neighbours and rivals with the undying hatred of
neighbours who are depriving each other of their profits.

Once the products of the Orient and Africa had been brought to these
distributing centres, they must be prepared for the voyage to the west
and the north.

Genoa carried her goods by water to Marseilles, from where they were
reshipped to the cities along the Rhone, which in turn served as the
market places of northern and western France.

Venice used the land route to northern Europe. This ancient road led
across the Brenner pass, the old gateway for the barbarians who had
invaded Italy. Past Innsbruck, the merchandise was carried to Basel.
From there it drifted down the Rhine to the North Sea and England, or it
was taken to Augsburg where the Fugger family (who were both bankers
and manufacturers and who prospered greatly by "shaving" the coins with
which they paid their workmen), looked after the further distribution to
Nuremberg and Leipzig and the cities of the Baltic and to Wisby (on the
Island of Gotland) which looked after the needs of the Northern Baltic
and dealt directly with the Republic of Novgorod, the old commercial
centre of Russia which was destroyed by Ivan the Terrible in the middle
of the sixteenth century.

The little cities on the coast of north-western Europe had an
interesting story of their own. The mediaeval world ate a great deal of
fish. There were many fast days and then people were not permitted to
eat meat. For those who lived away from the coast and from the rivers,
this meant a diet of eggs or nothing at all. But early in the thirteenth
century a Dutch fisherman had discovered a way of curing herring, so
that it could be transported to distant points. The herring fisheries of
the North Sea then became of great importance. But some time during the
thirteenth century, this useful little fish (for reasons of its own)
moved from the North Sea to the Baltic and the cities of that inland
sea began to make money. All the world now sailed to the Baltic to catch
herring and as that fish could only be caught during a few months
each year (the rest of the time it spends in deep water, raising large
families of little herrings) the ships would have been idle during the
rest of the time unless they had found another occupation. They