The silk manufacture, brought into Sicily from the islands of the Archipelago by Roger II in 1147, and carried north from Sicily in the reign of Frederick III, seems to have existed in Florence at the beginning of the thirteenth century, but to have flourished at first on a larger scale at Lucca, whence, on the sack of the town by Uguccioni della Faggiola in 1315, most of the Lucchese manufacturers fled to Florence, taking their trade with them. (Pignotti, iii, 273-74; Villari, _Two First Centuries_, p. 323.) Many had fled to Venice from the power of Castruccio Castracani, five years earlier. (Below, p. 243.) Being much more profitable than any other, by reason of the high prices, it seems to have speedily ranked as more aristocratic than the wool trade; and when that declined, the silk trade restored Florentine prosperity. (Villari, as cited.) The business of banking, again, must have been much developed before the Bardi and the Peruzzi could lend 1,500,000 florins to Edward III of England (G. Villani, xi, 88; xii, 54, 56; Gibbins, _History of Commerce_, 1891, pp. 47, 48; Hallam, _Middle Ages_, iii, 340. Pignotti, iii, 279, Eng. tr., estimates the sum lent as = £3,000,000 of modern money). This function, in turn, arose on the basis of commerce, and the _cambisti_ are subjects of legal regulation in Florence as early as 1299. (Pignotti, iii, 276.) On this line capitalism must have been developed greatly, till it became the preponderant power in the State. Even as the kings and tyrants were enabled, by borrowing from the bankers, to wage wars which otherwise might have been impossible to them, the republican statesman who could command the moneyed interest was destined to supersede the merely military tyrant. In Genoa the bankers coalesced in a corporation called the Bank of St. George, which controlled politics, traded, and even made conquests, thus giving a historic lead to the Bank of Amsterdam. (Cp. Hallam, _Middle Ages_, iii, 341; J.T. Bent, _Genoa_, 1881, ch. ii.)