‘Our beautiful Florence,’ says the same chronicler, ‘contains within the city in this present year 1472, 270 shops belonging to the wool-merchants’ guild, from whence their wares are sent to Rome and the Marches, Naples and Sicily, Constantinople and Pera, Adrianople, Broussa and the whole of Turkey. It contains also eighty-three rich and splendid warehouses of the silk-merchants’ guild, and furnishes gold and silver stuffs, velvet, brocade, damask, taffeta, and satin, to Rome and Naples, Catalonia and the whole of Spain, especially Seville, and to Turkey and Barbary. The principal fairs to which these wares go are those of Genoa, the Marches, Ferrara, Mantua, and the whole of Italy; Lyons, Avignon, Montpelier, Antwerp, and London.’ The number of the great banks amounted to thirty-three, that of the cloth-warehouses, which also retailed woollen cloths of all kinds (_tagliare_), to thirty-two; the shops of the cabinet-makers, whose business was carving and inlaid work (_tarsia_), to eighty-four, and the workshops of the stone-cutters and marble-workers in the city and its immediate neighbourhood to fifty-four. There were forty-four goldsmiths’ and jewellers’ shops, thirty gold-beaters, silver-wire drawers, and wax-figure makers; the last being in those days a productive branch of industry, as it was the custom to consecrate in the churches and chapels wax-figures of all kinds (_voti_), chiefly images. ‘Go through all the cities of the world,’ adds the chronicler, ‘nowhere will you find, nor will you ever be able to find, artists in wax equal to those we have now in Florence, and to whom the figures in the Nunziata (the Servite Church) can bear witness.’ Another flourishing branch of industry was the making of the light and elegant gold and silver wreaths and garlands which were worn by young maidens of high degree, and gave their name to the artist-family of Ghirlandajo. Sixty-six was the number of the apothecaries’ and grocers’ shops; seventy that of the butchers, besides eight large shops in which were sold fowls of all kinds, as well as game, and also the native wines which were considered best with game, particularly the pungent white wine, called Trebbiano, from San Giovanni in the upper Arno valley; it would wake the dead, adds Dei, in its praise. The Florentine had a right to be proud of his ‘beautiful’ city. From 1422, when Gino Capponi, the conqueror of Pisa, introduced the art of gold-spinning (the gold thread hitherto used having been procured from Cöln and from Cyprus),[397] down to the time of Lorenzo, was the most brilliant period of the silk manufacture which brought great wealth to the city. The Emperor Sigismund’s ill-famed consort, Barbara von Cilly, once sent one of her people with 1,200 gold florins and three bars of gold to buy silken stuffs. In 1422 the first armed galley was equipped for the voyage to Alexandria, and when she was launched there was a solemn procession to implore the protection of Heaven.