In the dock-yard, 16,000 carpenters were
usually employed. Their trade to Syria and Egypt seems to have been
conducted entirely, or chiefly, by ready money; for 500,000 ducats were
sent into those countries annually: 100,000 ducats were sent to England.
From the Florentines they received annually 16,000 pieces of cloth: these
they exported to different ports of the Mediterranean; they also received
from the Florentines 7000 ducats weekly, which seems to have been the
balance between the cloth they sold to the Venetians, and the French and
Catalan wool, crimson grain, silk, gold and silver thread, wax, sugar,
violins, &c., which they bought at Venice. Their commerce, especially the
oriental branch of it, increased; and by the conquest of Constantinople by
the Turks, the consequence of which was the expulsion of the Genoese, they
were enabled, almost without a rival, to supply the encreasing demand of
Europe for the productions of the East. Their vessels visited every port of
the Mediterranean, and every coast of Europe; and their maritime commerce,
about the end of the fifteenth century, was probably greater than that of
all the rest of Europe. Their manufactures were also a great source of
wealth; the principal were silk, cloth of gold and silver, vessels of gold
and silver, and glass. The discovery of a passage to the East Indies by the
Cape of Good Hope, the powerful league of Cambray, and other circumstances,
weakened and gradually destroyed their commerce and power.
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