The Italian peninsula had been
settled by Rome at a very early date. There had been more
roads and more towns and more schools than anywhere else
in Europe.
The barbarians had burned as lustily in Italy as elsewhere,
but there had been so much to destroy that more had been able
to survive. In the second place, the Pope lived in Italy and
as the head of a vast political machine, which owned land and
serfs and buildings and forests and rivers and conducted courts
of law, he was in constant receipt of a great deal of money.
The Papal authorities had to be paid in gold and silver as did
the merchants and ship-owners of Venice and Genoa. The
cows and the eggs and the horses and all the other agricultural
products of the north and the west must be changed into actual
cash before the debt could be paid in the distant city of Rome.
This made Italy the one country where there was a comparative
abundance of gold and silver. Finally, during the Crusades,
the Italian cities had become the point of embarkation
for the Crusaders and had profiteered to an almost unbelievable
extent.
And after the Crusades had come to an end, these same
Italian cities remained the distributing centres for those Oriental
goods upon which the people of Europe had come to depend
during the time they had spent in the near east.
Of these towns, few were as famous as Venice.
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