The fact that Venice _did_ maintain great artists after the artistic arrest of Tuscany and Lombardy, is part of the proof that, as above contended (p. 221), it was papal and Spanish misrule rather than the change in the channels of trade that impoverished Italy in the sixteenth century. Venice could still prosper by her manufactures when her commerce was partly checked, because the volume of European trade went on increasing. As Hallam notes: "We are apt to fall into a vulgar error in supposing that Venice was crushed, or even materially affected [phrase slightly modified in footnote], as a commercial city, by the discoveries of the Portuguese. She was in fact _more opulent_, as her buildings themselves may prove, in the sixteenth century than in any preceding age. The French trade from Marseilles to the Levant, which began later to flourish, was what impoverished Venice rather than that of Portugal with the East Indies." As the treatise of Antonio Serra shows (1613), Venice was rich when Spanish Naples was poor (_Introduction to the Literature of Europe_, ed. 1872, iii, 165, 166). (_b_) As regards Genoa, the explanation is similar. That republic resembled Venice in that it was from the beginning a city apart from the rest of Italy, devoted to foreign commerce, and absorbed in the management of distant possessions or trade colonies. When we compare the intellectual history of two such States with that of Florence, which was not less but more republican in its government, it becomes clear that it was not republicanism that limited culture in the maritime cities. Rather we must recognise that their development is analogous with that of England in the eighteenth century, when the growth of commerce, of foreign possessions, and of naval power seems to have turned the general energies, hitherto in large proportion intellectually employed, predominantly towards practical and administrative employment.[591] The case of Florence is the test for the whole problem. Its pre-eminence in art and letters alike is to be explained through (1) its being in constant touch with all the elements of Italian and other European culture; and (2) its having no direct maritime interests and no foreign possessions.[592]