Soon after this period the commerce of Rome in one particular direction, and that a most important one, received a severe blow. The Goths, who had emigrated from the north of Germany to the banks of the Euxine, were allured to the "soft and wealthy provinces of Asia Minor, which produced all that could attract, and nothing that could resist a barbarian conqueror." It is on the occasion of this enterprise, that we first became acquainted with the maritime usages and practices of the Goths; a branch of whom, under the name of Scandinavians, we shall afterwards find contributed so much to the extension of geography and commerce. In order to transport their armies across the Euxine, they employed "slight flat-bottomed barks, framed of timber only, without the least mixture of iron, and occasionally covered with a shelving roof on the appearance of a tempest." Their first object of importance was the reduction of Pityus, which was provided with a commodious harbour, and was situated at the utmost limits of the Roman provinces. After the reduction of this place, they sailed round the eastern extremity of the Euxine, a distance of nearly three hundred miles, to the important commercial city of Trebizond. This they also reduced; and in it they found an immense booty, with which they filled a great fleet of ships, that were lying in the port at the time of the capture. Their success encouraged and stimulated them to further enterprises against such of the commercial cities or rich coasts of the Roman empire, as lay within their grasp. In their second expedition, having increased their fleet by the capture of a number of fishing vessels, near the mouths of the Borysthenes, the Niester, and the Danube, they plundered the cities of Bithynia. And in a third expedition, in which their force consisted of five hundred sail of ships, each of which might contain from twenty-five to thirty men, they passed the Bosphorus and the Hellespont, and ravaged Greece, and threatened Italy itself.