A small state on a barren shore, yet the holder of the balance between East and West by means of its wide-spread commerce, such was Amalfi during the tenth and eleventh centuries. In some respects this Republic of the Middle Ages appears as the prototype of the Venice of the Renaissance, for there is not a little in common between the city that was built upon the marshy islets of the Adriatic lagoons, and the city that was erected at the base of the treacherous cliffs of the Tyrrhene Sea. Solely by means of commerce both foundations rose from nothingness to splendour and power: both held the gorgeous East in fee; and both fell lamentably from their high estate. The chief point of difference in this comparison of their careers is obvious; Amalfi collapsed suddenly and utterly, whilst the Queen of the Adriatic has sunk gradually to decay until she has become the interesting monument of a vanished magnificence which we admire to-day. It was the rising naval power of Pisa that finally crushed the greatness of Amalfi, although the Republic had already entered into its days of decline when Robert Guiscard at the time of the First Crusade had temporarily annexed its dominions to his new principality. Some thirty years later King Roger of Naples forcibly seized the whole of the Costiera d’Amalfi, allowing the citizens to retain their own form of government. Four years after this, the Pisan fleet, coming to aid the people of Naples against King Roger, utterly destroyed the once vaunted navy of Amalfi, and sacked both the city itself and the two hill-set towns of Scala and Ravello. Its political liberty had already been crushed by the Normans, and now its ships and its wealth were dissipated by the Pisans; it was a double measure of ignominy and disaster from which Amalfi never recovered. Amidst its humiliations and sorrows, the stricken city had also to mourn the loss of its greatest treasure, its secular _palladium_, that most precious copy of the Pandects of Justinian, which the Pisan marauders seized and carried back with them to their city on the Arno. Here in Pisa the famous volume remained in safe keeping for some three hundred years, and then, as Time’s round brought its inevitable vengeance on the plunderers of Amalfi, it was removed by the victorious Florentines to their own city. So intense a veneration for the book itself now manifested itself amongst the scholars and students of Florence, that at one period offerings of incense were often made to the inscribed wisdom of past ages as to a most holy relic of some Saint, and the clerk or jurist about to peruse its faded characters was wont, first of all, to breathe a prayer of genuine gratitude on his knees for the preservation of this ancient book. Amalfi, Pisa, Florence, each in its turn has owned the guardianship of this most famous literary jewel, which is to-day jealously guarded as the chief treasure of the world-renowned Laurentian Library.