The work of the manuscript-dealers in Florence was carried on not only for the citizens and sojourners in the city itself, but for the benefit of other Italian cities in which there was no adequate machinery for the manifolding of manuscripts. Bartholomæus Facius, writing from Naples in 1448, speaks of the serious inadequacy of the scribes in that city. There were but few men engaged in the business, and these were poorly educated and badly equipped.[340] Facius was, therefore, asking a correspondent in Florence to have certain work done for him which could not be completed in Naples. Poggio writes from Rome about the same date to Niccolo in Florence to somewhat similar effect. He speaks with envy of the larger literary facilities possessed by his Florentine friends.[341] Next to Florence, the most important centre for the manuscript trade of North Italy was Milan. As early as the middle of the fourteenth century, there is record of no less than forty professional scribes being at work in the city. Such literary work as was required by Genoa and other Italian towns within reach of the Lombardy capital came to Milan. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, when the population of the city was about 200,000, there had been in the city but two registered copyists. More important, however, than that of either Florence or Milan, was the manuscript trade of Venice, the position of which city gave it exceptional advantages as well for the collection of codices from the East as for securing the services of skilled scribes from Athens or from Constantinople. One of the more noteworthy of the Venetian importers of manuscripts was Johannes Galeotti, a Genoese by birth, who made various journeys to Constantinople, and whose special trade is referred to in an inscription on a manuscript dating from 1450 and containing the speeches of Demosthenes.[342] Reference has already been made to Aurispa, who appears to have been the most important manuscript-dealer of his time, not only in Venice, but possibly in the world. Aurispa sent various agents to Greece and to the farther East to collect manuscripts and kept scribes busied in his work-shop in Venice in preparing authentic copies of these texts. One of his travellers was Plantinerus, who was sent to the Peloponnesus in 1415, and who succeeded in securing there some valuable codices.[343] Plantinerus found, in executing his commissions, that he had to come into competition with a traveller sent out by Cosimo de’ Medici on a similar errand.