There is, however, a great difference between the two cities. Jerusalem is a city of sacred monuments and holy memories while Aleppo is noted as Syria’s busiest interior mart. At present its population is about one hundred and thirty thousand but in the heyday of its prosperity it counted no fewer than three hundred thousand souls. It was then the great _entrepôt_ of trade between the Orient and the Occident. Then great caravans brought silks from China, carpets and tapestry from Persia, spices, drugs, pearls, and precious stones from India and the Spice Islands of the Malay Archipelago. It was then headquarters for a large colony of Venetian, Dutch, French, and English merchants who here exchanged the products of the West for the prized merchandise of the East. Pietro della Valle, the distinguished Roman traveler who visited Aleppo in 616, was immensely impressed by the magnitude of its commercial transactions. So great was the amount of money involved that, he says, it was never counted but always weighed in boxes. And no one, he assures us, ever spoke of sales or purchases that did not amount to sums which ranged, at the lowest, from forty to a hundred thousand scudi.[269] For a long time Aleppo was one of the chief trade centers in the East of the Levant and East India companies. During the period of their greatest prosperity the amount of business transacted here was enormous. For, in addition to these two great organizations, the British Factory here counted no fewer than eighty firms, besides which all the leading countries of Europe had here their factories or organizations of factors or agents for the purpose of securing their share of the great trade of the Orient. At that time a great part of the commerce of the Far East came to Aleppo by way of Basra and Bagdad. Then the population of Basra exceeded two hundred thousand whereas it does not now count more than one-fourth of that number. The number of Bagdad’s inhabitants has diminished in proportion. The great decrease in the commercial importance of these two cities was partly due to war and pestilence. But the great discovery by Vasco da Gama of an all-sea route between the West and the East and the opening of the Suez Canal reduced the overland traffic between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf to a small fraction of what it was in the palmy days of the great European factories of Aleppo, Basra, and Bagdad. According to the plans of its projectors, the Bagdad Railway is to restore this overland trade to its former magnitude and even greatly add to its amount and value.