Note 525 — Chapter VIII · —Coast Peoples

Sometimes the decline in historical importance is due to physical modifications in the coast itself, especially when, the mud transported by a great river to the sea is constantly pushing forward the outer shoreline. The control of the Adriatic passed in turn from Spina to Adria, Ravenna, Aquileia, Venice, and Trieste, owing to a steady silting up of the coast.525 Strabo records that Spina, originally a port, was in his time 90 stadia, or 10 miles, from the sea.526 Bruges, once the great entrepôt of the Hanseatic League, was originally on an arm of the sea, with which it was later connected by canal, and which has been silted up since 1432, so that its commerce, disturbed too by local wars, was transferred to Antwerp on the Scheldt.527 Many early English ports on the coast of Kent and on the old solid rim of the Fenland marshes now lie miles inland from the Channel and the Wash.