wealthy merchants of the city, like Venice and Florence in medieval Italy, yet it was none the less autonomous, which is quite an exceptional case in the whole course of the history of our country. The golden age of the city of Sakai dates from the year 1476 or thereabouts, when a squadron trading with China first sailed out from the harbour. Until that time all the vessels plying between this country and China used to set out from Hakata or from Hyogo, which is nearly the same thing as Kobe. Although the adventurous merchants of Sakai carried their trade before this time as far as the islands of Loo-choo, and often participated in the Chinese trade also, yet no vessel had ever started from there for China till then. That Sakai became at this date a chief trading port dealing with China might presumably have been owing to the intercession of its hereditary lord Hosokawa, but the determining cause of this assumption of such an honourable position among the commercial cities of Japan must have been the indisputable superiority of the material strength of the city. Many of the higher vassals of the Shogunate borrowed money from the merchants of Sakai in order to equip their soldiers. Nay, even the Shogunate itself had often to mortgage its landed estates to the merchants of the city in order to save its treasury from running short. The wealth of the citizens enabled them to fortify their city very strongly, by surrounding it with a deep moat, and to enlist into their service a great number of knights-errant, who abounded in Japan at that time. These, together with the consciousness of indispensable assistance rendered to the Shogunate, to various great feudatories and condottieri, emboldened the citizens to defy the otherwise formidable military powers, and those warriors, on the other hand, who owed much to the pecuniary aid of the Sakai merchants, could but treat the latter with great consideration, which was unwonted at that time. Although the citizens of Sakai were not entirely free from the sufferings of the war, for they had often to quarter soldiers in their houses, yet no battle was allowed to be fought within the city, notwithstanding that a most sanguinary war was raging all around in the empire.