The Florentines had originally no seaboard, and were obliged to charter ships wherever they could. In 1362, having taken into the service of the republic Pierin Grimaldi of Genoa, with two galleys, and hired two more vessels, their little fleet took the island of Giglio from the Pisans, and the following year, having broken into the port of Pisa itself, they took away the chains that protected it and hung them as trophies on the porphyry columns of their Baptistery. The foreign commerce for which the maritime cities of Italy, and particularly Genoa and Venice, so savagely disputed, to the scandal of the Christian name among the infidels, as the old English traveller Sir John de Mandeville shows, was certainly very considerable, and a source of almost fabulous profit to those engaged in it who were fortunate in their ventures. Commerce was the foundation of Italy’s prosperity, which was greater than that of any other European country from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. The Italian merchants got cottons, silken goods, brocades, Cashmere shawls, spices, rhubarb and other medicines, amber, indigo, pearls, and diamonds from India and Central Asia. From Persia there came silks, carpets, skins, and manufactured articles used by the great for clothing or for the comfort of their homes. Tartary and Russia furnished hemp, canvas, ship-timber, tar, wax, caviare, raw-hides, and peltries. From the ports of Syria and Asia Minor, and particularly from Smyrna, were shipped to Italy hare-skins, leather, camel’s hair, valonia, cotton stuffs, damasks, dried fruits, beeswax, drugs and electuaries, arms, armor, and cutlery; and many articles of Asiatic luxury and magnificence found their way thence through Italian merchants to the courts and castles of England, Scotland, France, Germany, and other northern nations. Greece sent fine wines, raisins, currants, filbert-nuts, silk, and alum. A large quantity of grain was brought into Italy from Egypt and the Barbary States; but the supply to the colonies in the Levant came mostly from the Black Sea. Wool, wax, sheep-skins, and morocco came from the Moorish provinces of Africa. These were the principal imports, and were exchanged for the products and manufactures of Italy and the countries to the north, for which the Italians acted as agents. The Genoese exported immense quantities of woven fabrics from the looms of Lombardy and Florence, fine linens from Bologna, and cloths of a coarser make from France, for which a ready market was found in the East and among the Italians settled in the Archipelago and Levant. The oils of Provence and the Riviera of Genoa, soaps, saffron, and coral, were also largely exported. Quicksilver was a valuable article in the hands of the Venetians, who got it from Istria and sold it in Spain and the Levant; they also extracted a great amount of salt from Istria and Dalmatia, which was sold at a good profit in Lombardy and other parts of Italy. Sardinia,