setting northward, the cities of the League persecuted the foreigners who
would have traded in their ports. On the west, Barcelona began to dispute
the preeminence of Venice in the Mediterranean, and Spanish salt was
brought to Italy itself and sold by the enterprising Catalonians. Their
corsairs vexed Venetian commerce everywhere; and in that day, as in our
own, private English enterprise was employed in piratical depredations on
the traffic of a friendly power.

The Portuguese also began to extend their commerce, once so important, and
catching the rage for discovery then prevalent, infested every sea in
search of unknown land. One of their navigators, sailing by a chart which
a monk named Fra Mauro, in his convent on the island of San Michele, had
put together from the stories of travelers, and his own guesses at
geography, discovered the Cape of Good Hope, and the trade of India with
Europe was turned in that direction, and the old over-land traffic
perished. The Venetian monopoly of this traffic had long been gone; had
its recovery been possible, it would now have been useless to the
declining prosperity of the Republic.

It remained for Christopher Columbus, born of that Genoese nation which
had hated the Venetians so long and so bitterly, to make the discovery of
America, and thus to give the death-blow to the supremacy of Venice. While
all these discoveries were taking place, the old queen of the seas had
been weighed down with many and unequal wars. Her naval power had been
everywhere crippled; her revenues had been reduced; her possessions, one
after one, had been lopped away; and at the time Columbus was on his way
to America half Europe, united in the League of Cambray, was attempting to
crush the Republic of Venice.

The whole world was now changed. Commerce sought new channels; fortune