The town, from its birth to the end of the sixteenth century, was familiarly styled “_la ville du pont_,” the city of the bridge. For more than a thousand years it commanded the only point where it was possible to cross the river Isère. It was also designated “the old Roman route town,” for it lay on the natural highroad which linked Italy on the north with the country of France, the valley of the Po with that of the Rhone. The quaint, turreted bridge which spanned the river in mediæval days provided passage to the Alps from French soil, and was the gateway to France for strangers approaching over the mountains. While its strategic position in time of war must be apparent, the site of the city was no less vital to trade and to later industrial development. As early as 1615 Grenoble was known, far and wide, as “the city of glovers.” The earliest records of the consuls of Grenoble, which have been preserved almost intact since 1244, tell us only of “drapers, tailors, apothecaries and shoeing-smiths” in the city; and in 1489 they mention in addition sailors, pastry cooks, carpenters, barbers—but not glovers. Only the weavers, tanners and curriers of wool and hemp presage the industrial future. There seems to be some question of a lone glover in 1328 who gave his services to the dauphin. But probably this workman made numerous things for his fellow-citizens, gloves included, and at the same time was a dealer in furs and perfumes. In the statutes of the glovers of Paris, dating from 1190, they are styled “_marchands-maîtres-gantiers-parfumeurs_,” mastermerchants-of-gloves-and-perfumes, and are accorded the exclusive right to prepare and sell these luxuries. Furs were usually added to their stock in trade. But the solitary glove-maker of 1328 was in no sense a pioneer of the glove guild in Grenoble, else had he apprenticed to himself other workmen, and the town been filled with glovers fully a hundred years earlier than it was. The latter part of the sixteenth century was a period of war and domestic upheaval for Grenoble, during which the city government was tossed back and forth among predatory barons until, in 1590, Lesdiguières, “the King of the Mountains,” took the town by siege in the name of Henry IV. Under Lesdiguières’ remarkably public-spirited governorship, peace returned, commerce was resumed, and natural resources, scarcely recognized before, were drawn upon for the development of new crafts, whose products, now for the first time, were to be exported to all parts of France and even into other countries. Among these new crafts glove-making instantly sprang into prominence.