We know that when Uguccioni della Faggiola besieged and took Lucca (1314), fugitives from that city brought their improved method of silk-weaving to Lombardy, Venice, and Tuscany, and the art being particularly undeveloped in Florence, many chroniclers gave the Lucchese the credit of having first introduced it there. Nevertheless, for many years afterwards the silk trade was carried on by importing the raw material from the East. But as the wool craft began to decline, Florence gave its whole attention to silk, and the trade speedily began to prosper. In the early years of the fifteenth century, Gino Capponi--he who was commissary to the camp at the siege of Pisa--taught the Florentines the art of spinning the gold thread they had hitherto imported from Cologne or from Cyprus to interweave with their silk. This was the beginning of that delicate manufacture of gold and silver brocades, in which by the combination of technical skill with artistic sense, the Florentines soon surpassed all rival manufacturers. The markets from which their woollen stuffs had been ousted, were speedily reconquered by their silken cloths and brocades. During the latter half of the fifteenth century, in fact, we find Benedetto Dei, a merchant of the Bardi Company, writing a letter to Venice praising the glory and greatness of Florentine commerce and saying: "We have two crafts worthier and greater than any four contained in your city of Venice." And the gist of his subsequent remarks was to this effect: "Our woollen stuffs go to Rome, Naples, Sicily, the Morea, Constantinople, Broussa, Pera, Gallipoli, Schio, Rhodes, and Salonica. Then, as to the silk and gold brocades, we produce more than Venice, Genoa, and Lucca combined, and you see that we have houses, banks, and warehouses at Lyons, Bruges, London, Antwerp, Avignon, Geneva, Marseilles, and in Provence."[348] This long list of cities plainly shows that in Dei's time Florentine woollens, though still prized in the East, had been driven from the principal markets of the West, and replaced by silk stuffs; and thus the two guilds shared commerce between them, one in the East, the other in the West. Also, according to Dei, Florence then possessed eighty-three factories, where various tissues of silk, gold, and silver were produced known by the names of damasks, velvets, satins, taffetas, and _maremmati_, and most of the raw silk used in their fabrication was still imported from the East by Florentine galleys.[349]