It is to the Venetian archives that one must turn for information if the attempt be made to trace the early history of the glass industry of that city, and these archives have been explored by a succession of native inquirers.[128] For the earlier periods the negative evidence is of some importance. There is no reference of any kind to the manufacture of glass before the thirteenth century,[129] although by this time a great part of the interior of St. Mark’s had been covered with mosaics. Like the enamels of the Pala D’Oro, we may probably look upon the earlier Venetian mosaics as of Byzantine origin. After the capture of Constantinople in 1204, the Venetians obtained a firmer grip upon the trade of the Eastern Mediterranean. Their factories had long been established on the coast of Syria. ‘When Sidon fell,’ says Mr. Horatio F. Brown, ‘the Venetians received from Baldwin, King of Jerusalem, in return for their assistance, a market-place, a district, and a church. This was in fact the nucleus of a colony living under special treaty capitulations’ (_Cambridge Renaissance_, vol. i.). This happened early in the twelfth century. I shall have something to say later on concerning the relations of the Venetians with the Latin principalities of Northern Syria towards the end of the next century, when the republic engaged to pay the ‘_dhime_’ for the broken glass that they exported. It was during this period, and under such influences, that the manufacture of glass was established in the republic.[130] Early in the thirteenth century there is evidence of the existence of a guild of glass-blowers. In 1224, twenty-nine members of the _Ars Friolaria_ were fined for breaking the rules of the trade. In 1268, the chronicler Martius da Cavale tells us, the _maestri vitrai Muranesi_, on the accession of the Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo, bore in procession ‘_ricche girlande di perle ... e guastade ed oricanni ed altrettali vetrami gentili_’: water-bottles and scent-flasks and other such graceful objects of glass. In 1279 we hear of German pedlars at Venice—_Todeschi qui portant vitra ad dorsum_—but each man was only permitted to carry off ten lire worth of glass at a time.