positive necessaries of life.  When order was a little restored, and society and the minds of people became more composed, we see commerce recovering its position; and France was, perhaps, the first country in Europe in which this happy change took place.  Those famous cities of Gaul, which ancient authors describe to us as so rich and so industrious, quickly recovered their former prosperity, and the friendly relations which were established between the kings of the Franks and the Eastern Empire encouraged the Gallic cities in cultivating a commerce, which was at that time the most important and most extensive in the world.

Marseilles, the ancient Phoenician colony, once the rival and then the successor to Carthage, was undoubtedly at the head of the commercial cities of France.  Next to her came Arles, which supplied ship-builders and seamen to the fleet of Provence; and Narbonne, which admitted into its harbour ships from Spain, Sicily, and Africa, until, in consequence of the Aude having changed its course, it was obliged to relinquish the greater part of its maritime commerce in favour of Montpellier.

[Illustration:  Fig. 189.—­View of Alexandria in Egypt, in the Sixteenth Century.—­Fac-simile of a Woodcut in the Travels of P. Belon, “Observations de Plusieurs Singularitez,” &c.:  4to (Paris, 1588).]

Commerce maintained frequent communications with the East; it sought its supplies on the coast of Syria, and especially at Alexandria, in Egypt, which was a kind of depot for goods obtained from the rich countries lying beyond the Red Sea (Figs. 189 and 190).  The Frank navigators imported from these countries, groceries, linen, Egyptian paper, pearls, perfumes, and a thousand other rare and choice articles.  In exchange they offered chiefly the precious metals in bars rather than coined, and it is probable that at this period they also exported iron, wines, oil, and wax.  The agricultural produce and manufactures of Gaul had not sufficiently developed to provide anything more than what was required for the producers themselves.  Industry was as yet, if not purely domestic, confined to monasteries and to the houses of the nobility; and even the kings employed women or serf workmen to manufacture the coarse stuffs with which they clothed themselves and their households.  We may add, that the bad state of the roads, the little security they offered to travellers, the extortions of all kinds to which foreign merchants were subjected, and above all the iniquitous System of fines and tolls which each landowner thought right to exact, before letting merchandise pass through his domains, all created insuperable obstacles to the development of commerce.

[Illustration:  Fig. 190.—­Transport of Merchandise on the Backs of Camels.—­Fac-simile of a Woodcut in the “Cosmographie Universelle,” of Thevet:  folio, 1575.]