The main articles of its import were cloth from the Netherlands, England, and Scotland; linen from Scotland; salt from France, Germany, England, and the Netherlands; horses from southern Sweden, Finland, and the islands of Oeland, Gottland, and Bornholm; iron from Sweden; and wines, beer, and hops, fish, and southern fruits and vegetables from the South of Europe.[365] The principal articles of its export were agricultural and forest products, wheat, rye, barley, leguminous vegetables, lumber, ashes, pitch, and tar. The chief producer of its exports as well as the chief consumer of its imports was Poland.[366] Toward the close of the fifteenth and throughout the sixteenth century that country was the granary of Southern and Western Europe. Its grain was in great demand in cities of Italy, Portugal, and Spain as well as in the markets of Holland, Scandinavia, France, and Scotland. In 1527 the Senate of Venice voted a premium on grain imported from Poland, and later in the second half of the sixteenth century a number of Italian rulers and the Pope himself addressed urgent requests to the city of Danzig for grain shipments.[367] Its lumber and forest products were used by Holland, England, and Scotland for ship-building purposes.[368] The annexation of West Prussia with the city of Danzig by the Treaty of Thorn, was, therefore, a very significant and happy event as regards the commercial and economic development of Poland. The place she had lost in the commerce of the East as a result of the fall of Constantinople into the hands of the Turks she now regained on the Baltic. This event enabled her to participate in the new world commerce by opening up to her a new unobstructed way to new and greater world markets. The change wrought was not only in the direction, but also in the nature and the volume of her commerce. The old eastern commerce was mainly transit commerce; its principal beneficiaries were the townspeople of the Polish cities. The new commerce assumed the form of export and import commerce; and its chief beneficiaries turned out to be the Polish nobles as the producers of export commodities.[369] This change in commercial routes and in the nature and volume of the new commerce exerted a profound influence on Poland’s economic and social conditions. The great demand for grain in Western Europe and Poland’s new and easy access to world markets led to a revival of Polish agriculture, resulting in a more intensive cultivation of the soil, increasing exports of agricultural products, growing prosperity, and in new deepening interest on the part of the Polish nobility in agriculture rather than in war. Thus, while Western Europe was rapidly passing from an agricultural to an industrial stage of economic development, Poland after the middle of the fifteenth century became transformed into an intensely agricultural country, growing and exporting grain by way of the Vistula and the Baltic to meet the demand of western markets.[370]