Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. II.djvu/521

495 SPANISH COLONIAL POLICY. 495 to legislate for them on more generous principles, chapter IX as an integral portion of the monarchy. '■ — Some of the measures, even, of a less liberal tenor, may be excused, as sufficiently accommodat- ed to existing circumstances. No regulation, for example, was found eventually more mischievous in its operation than that which confined the colonial trade to the single port of Seville, instead of permitting it to find a free vent in the thousand avenues naturally opened in every part of the king- dom ; to say nothing of the grievous monopolies and exactions, for which this concentration of a mighty traffic on so small a point was found, in later times, to afford unbounded facility. But the colo- nial trade was too limited in its extent, under Fer- dinand and Isabella, to involve such consequences. It was chiefly confined to a few wealthy seaports of Andalusia, from the vicinity of which the first adventurers had sallied forth on their career of dis- covery. It was no inconvenience to them to have a common port of entry, so central and accessible as Seville, which, moreover, by this arrangement be- came a great mart for European trade, thus afford- ing a convenient market to the country for effecting its commercial exchanges with every quarter of Christendom.^* It was only when laws, adapted to the incipient stages of commerce, were perpetu- ated to a period when that commerce had swelled 14 The historian of Seville men- course had been opened by the in- tions, that it was the resort especial- termarriages of the royal family ly of the merchants of Flanders, with the house of Burgundy. See with whom a more intimate inter- Zuiiiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 415.