Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/471

 *scription of serges. Louvain, though somewhat injured by the growth of other places, had employed in the fourteenth century four thousand looms; Mechlin, three thousand four hundred; and Brussels was, even at that early period, renowned for its woollen fabrics.

Middleburgh, in Zealand, had then attracted to its market the merchants of Italy, Spain, and Portugal, who trafficked in its manufactures as well as in the productions generally of the country. Haarlem wove in its looms an extraordinary quantity of fine cloth and velvets much in request by the wealthy and prosperous Italian republics. The Low Countries received in return from Venice, spices, drugs, perfumes, cotton-prints, and silk stuffs. Genoa, Florence, Ancona, and Bologna, despatched also to Holland their silks, cloths of gold and silver, corselets, pearls, cotton, silk twist, alum, oils, and other articles of manufacture and produce. France sent to her ports the fine cloths of Paris and of Rouen, the common velvets of Tours, and the linen yarns of Lyons, besides wines in great abundance.

About this period the merchants of Brabant, Flanders, Zealand, and Holland, obtained from the king of France the privilege of establishing agencies in her chief commercial cities. Spain was likewise then largely engaged in over-sea commerce, and competed with the merchants of France and Italy in importing to the North sugar, cotton, dye-woods, and other articles of foreign growth; but it appears