craftsmen, yielding us yearly bread and meat, wine and oil, vegetables and cheese, hay and wood, to the value of 900,000 ducats in cash, as you Venetians and Genoese, Chians and Rhodians, who come to buy them, know well enough. We have two trades greater than four of yours in Venice put together—wool and silk. Witness the Roman court and that of the king of Naples, the Marches and Sicily, Constantinople and Pera, Broussa and Adrianople, Salonika and Gallipoli, Chios and Rhodes, where to your envy and disgust there are Florentine consuls and merchants, churches and houses, banks and offices, and whither go more Florentine wares of all kinds, especially silken stuffs and gold and silver brocades, than from Venice, Genoa and Lucca put together. Ask your own merchants who visit Marseilles, Avignon, Lyons, and the whole of Provence, Bruges, Antwerp, London, and other cities, where there are great banks and royal warehouses, fine dwellings, and stately churches; ask them who should know, as they go to the fairs every year, whether they have seen the banks of the Medici, the Pazzi, the Capponi, the Buondelmonti, the Corsini, the Falconieri, the Portinari, and the Ghini, the bank of the Medici and their partners at Milan, and a hundred others which I will not name, because to do so I should need at least a ream of paper. You say we are bankrupt since Cosimo’s death. If we have had losses, it is owing to your dishonesty and the wickedness of your Levant merchants, who have made us lose hundreds of thousands—people with well-known names who have filled Constantinople and Pera with failures, whereof our great houses could tell many a tale. But though Cosimo is dead and buried, he did not take his gold florins and the rest of his money and bonds with him into the other world; nor his banks and store-houses, nor his woollen and silken cloths, nor his plate and jewellery; but he left them all to his worthy sons and grandsons, who take pains to keep them and to add to them, to the vexation of the Venetians and other envious foes, whose tongues are more malicious and slanderous than if they were Sienese.’ Such was the Florentine’s retort to the attacks of the Venetians, whom he bitterly attacked in his turn, when in 1479 they concluded the disadvantageous treaty by which they ceded Negroponte and other of their Levantine possessions to the Turks.