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Rh him refuse all pecuniary assistance to the adventurers, who were all apparently as ill able as projectors usually are to prosecute their ingenious schemes from their own resources. This very wary king was not to be induced to spend his money even in taking possession of a new country when it was discovered for him; no attempt seems to have been made to turn to account the discovery of North America by the Cabots; and, as for the other adventurers he afterwards sent forth, none of them is recorded to have ever caught a glimpse of anything new in the shape of either continent or isle.

The more easy intercourse opened with India, by the discovery of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope, produced almost immediately considerable changes in the current of European commerce. The Venetians, bringing home the spices and other productions of the East by land carriage, soon found themselves unable to compete with their rivals, the Portuguese, now enjoying the advantage of the much cheaper conveyance by sea; and Lisbon became what Venice had been—the great source of the supply of these commodities, and the resort of traders from every part of Europe. The Lisbon merchants also carried the productions of India in so much larger quantities than had ever before been known to the great intermediate mart of Antwerp, that the wealth and grandeur of the latter city also may be said to have commenced with this date. The reduction of price so prodigiously extended the consumption of these commodities all over Europe, that they now formed one of the chief branches of the Antwerp trade. The Italian historian of the Low Countries, Ludovico Guicciardini, writing not long after the middle of the sixteenth century, calculates that the value of the spices alone brought to Antwerp from Lisbon exceeded a million of crowns yearly. Tempted by the new trade, many German and other foreign merchants came to settle at Antwerp, and to contribute to its rising fortunes the aid of their resources and enterprise.

Marked effects, also, were not long in beginning to flow from the discovery of America and the West Indies. Herrera, the historian of the Spanish Indies, relates that,