Cologne, Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp became centres of manufactures and commerce; whilst the origin of the Hanseatic League gave a new impulse in the north to the progress of the useful arts. In the early part of the fourteenth century a system of trading commenced between the north and south of Europe; and the free application to navigation of the discovery of the magnetic needle--a discovery made in Europe about A. D. 1200, and long unapplied--vastly increased commercial intercourse, and, as a necessary consequence, the home manufactures of nations. The Italian towns, especially Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, first raised to importance by the Crusades, took a leading part in the general movement, and became the channels through which the East poured her riches and the knowledge of her arts into Europe. The southern French provinces were not behindhand. Marseilles--where the spirit at commercial enterprise had never wholly died away--Narbonne, Nismes, and Montpellier, were all distinguished for prosperity and growing wealth. The invention of a system of banking, which we find in operation so early as 1400 A. D., deserves to be mentioned, as one of the most influential causes of the rapid growth which followed. England, indebted to her neighbors for the origin of so many of her manufactures, entered the lists late, though destined eventually to outstrip all competitors. During the unsettled periods at which we have been glancing, agriculture was, of course, neglected; but toward the end of the thirteenth century we find that it has shared in the general revival, and that the plains of Lombardy present the appearance of one vast garden. Indeed, the prospect of Italy was then far more pleasing than that which there meets the traveler’s eye in our own times.