The last country of "European Europe" is Sobieski's own country, but only the last because, like England, it led nowhere. If omitted from a tour it was omitted with regret and consciousness of loss, being the largest monarchy in Christendom, 600 miles by 800, with a frontier reaching to within 150 miles of Moscow and 100 of the Black Sea; always on the verge of war, moreover, and a paradise of aristocracy, three good reasons for claiming the Average Tourist's attention, especially as among this aristocracy was always to be found a welcome and as high an average of attainments and qualities as anywhere north of the Alps. The statement, too, that it was not a thoroughfare must not be taken as absolute. Negotiations between the Tsars and the Papacy were frequent and these of course implied journeys through Poland by the friars whom the Papacy was wont to use as emissaries for long distances, as being more accustomed to endure privation and fatigue than bishops. Besides, from southeast to northwest stretched the high road from the Black Sea through Kamienietz to Danzig, which one of these travellers assures us was the most thickly-populated highroad in Europe.[51] Danzig itself was one of the great centres of world-commerce; so great that its citizens were well justified in one detail of their daily life that Moryson records, that of taking off their hats as they passed the town hall. The commerce was very varied, but its main export seems to have been grain and its main import, Scotchmen. Of these latter there were certainly thousands;[52] in fact, from some date in the reign of Stephen Bathory (1575-86) till 1697, perhaps later, a "brotherhood" of Scots existed, recognised officially; and boys of fifteen to seventeen came over in such quantities and so often with such disastrous results, that in 1625 an edict was issued in Scotland prohibiting skippers taking over any who had not been sent for or had not 500 marks. But these can hardly be reckoned as tourists, travelling, as they did, Scot-fashion, on the "ubi panis, ibi patria" principle, with the object of sharing the retail-trade with Jews, so successfully that there has long lingered in Eastern Prussia the proverb, "Warte bis der Schotte kommt," alluding to the annual visits of these pedlars. Many, too, can be traced as becoming burgesses of Danzig, or of Posen. Of visitors of the type with which this chapter is more specially concerned, the reign of the Henry who afterwards became Henry III of France marks a starting-point, judging partly from the evidence available before and after that date, partly from the statement in the report of the first resident Venetian ambassador there, Girolamo Lippomano, who came in that reign, that Poland was at that time an unknown land to Venetians.