All along the coast of the Black Sea the Italians plied a profitable trade, and many merchants were settled at Trebizond, from which vantage-ground they had an important communication open with Armenia, whose people, being united by religion to the Latins, granted them very valuable commercial privileges. The Venetians were favored above the rest. They had churches, magazines, and inns, coined money, and in all matters in dispute were tried by judges chosen among their countrymen, or rather their own fellow-citizens. They could introduce their goods without paying duty, freely traverse the kingdom, and monopolize the exportation of camel’s hair, which was an important article of traffic. The Genoese were no less enterprising than their rivals, and restored in the port of Trebizond a mole that had been built by the Roman Emperor Hadrian. Large quantities of India goods, and especially spiceries, were stored by Italian merchants in the warehouses of Trebizond, Damascus, and Alexandria. There were several overland routes by which this merchandise was transported, but none of them was safe, on account of the frequent revolutions in the countries through which they ran. Some of the caravans that brought the commodities of India and China passed through Balkh, the _Baetria_ of the ancients and at one time the commercial centre of eastern Asia, then up to Bokhara, whence they descended the Oxus for a distance, touched at Khiva, and, traversing the Caspian Sea, ascended the river Kour (the _Cyrus_ of Strabo, xi. p. 509) for seventy miles to its junction with the Aras (the _Araxes_ of Herodotus, iv. 40), from which they crossed by a journey of four or five days into the historical Phasis at Sharapan and down to the Euxine. Another beaten track entered Syria by the Tigris and the Euphrates, and diverged towards the several ports of Palestine and Asia Minor. It passed through Bagdad, which was a great commercial emporium during the middle ages and an entrepôt for the commodities of eastern and western Asia. A memorial of those days when Frank merchants, mingling with Persians, Arabs, Turks, Hindoos, Koords, and Armenians, ransacked her splendid bazaars, remains in our language in the word _Baldachin_, because canopies made of costly stuff interwoven with gold thread were manufactured in this city, which was known to the Italians as Baldacca, and in the adjective form Baldacchino. Much trade was also done by way of the Red Sea, Cairo, and Alexandria.