Venice rose to the occasion, for it was not merely a matter of business to provide the shipping, but a matter of religion. The Holy Sepulchre was in the hands of the infidels: that in itself was a sufficient inspiration. And so about Pentecost in the year 1202 we can see the hordes of pilgrims pouring down through the various passes of the Alps to Venice. It was a huge business, and action in those days was slow and, to our modern minds, dilatory. But the Venetians had got the ships ready for the knights and squires and men and horses, though it was autumn before they put to sea. Some of the cloth and provisions had arrived in Venice in French ships via the Straits of Gibraltar, and eventually, on October 9, the galleys and horseboats set forth from the Adriatic port, and a month later appeared before Zara. During the Middle Ages the three great maritime powers were Venice, Genoa and Pisa, and between them there was the greatest rivalry, so that scarcely ever did two of the parties meet than there was conflict. But Venice, being the pre-eminent, incurred the greatest amount of jealousy. The part which Venice and Genoa played in maritime history is not confined to what they did in any particular century, but lies rather in the fact that they kept alive and developed the seaman’s art; until, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Venetians made a crude map which put into form the ideas that inspired the first Italian voyages in the Atlantic, and Genoa in the next century produced Columbus, who, after being wrecked in a sea-fight with some Venetian galleys off the Portuguese coast, settled down in Lisbon and eventually set forth on his historic voyage to the West. Ever since the second Punic War Genoa had been a big and important seaport. Becoming a free city in 958, she had suffered much from the Saracen raids, but when these infidel corsairs seemed likely to establish themselves in Sardinia at the beginning of the eleventh century, the Genoese and Pisan seamen united together against a common foe, fitted out an expedition and hurled the Arab chief back to Africa. In 1087 the Genoese and Pisans were sent by the Pope to dislodge one Temim, a pirate chief who lived south of Tunis. The result was important to the shipping industry; for, having beaten him and captured his stronghold, the two cities stipulated for the free admission of their merchant ships to trade with the Tunisian coast. Thus, in clearing the seas of corsairs for a time, they also directly stimulated their own commerce.