disposal, hostelries, even brothels. To read the administrative documents of such towns--and the documentation too is of unparalleled wealth--is to discover the sophistication of the whole community. Yet such sophistication is not based simply on introspection or self-awareness. At its root is the wealth that enabled urban society to develop these multifarious requirements. Economic precociousness was the foundation for what was achieved; the heyday of communal government coincides with a period in which Italians were at the forefront of international trade. Florentine, Genoese, and Venetian merchants featured regularly at the late thirteenth-century fairs of Champagne, and as these began to be supplanted by other routes and other towns Genoa and Venice established regular maritime Atlantic convoys to Bruges and other ports of northern Europe. Italy pioneered the rise of the more sedentary merchant, in contact with fixed branches in the great northern European cities, and it also pioneered the new commercial techniques--double-entry bookkeeping, credit systems, marine insurance, bills of exchange--which enabled such networks to function. Italians--Florentines, Genoese, Sienese, Lucchese-were also unrivalled suppliers of credit; both the English and the French monarchs borrowed from Italian bankers (and occasionally defaulted, with disastrous consequences).

Urban industry, surprisingly, occupied a secondary position. Most Italian towns were of course local markets for surrounding areas, and many had specialized industries, the most important, although really rather exceptional, being the Florentine cloth industry. Cloth was indeed exported; but apart from that, much of the international trade being handled was through trade in which merchants above all took advantage of Italy's central position in the Mediterranean. In sequence to the Pisan and Genoese 'empires', established in the earlier period in the western and central Mediterranean, came Venetian and Genoese expansion in the eastern Mediterranean, and with that fresh commercial contacts with the Muslim world and, beyond that, the Mongol Empire. Taking advantage of the innovation of navigation by dead reckoning, which made winter sailing practicable, the Venetians had by the end of the thirteenth

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