Note i — Chapter IX · [a] (continued 2)

Richard III., in 1485, appointed a Florentine merchant to be English consul at Pisa, on the ground that some of his subjects intended to trade to Italy. Macpherson, p. 705, from Rymer. Perhaps we cannot positively prove the existence of a Mediterranean trade at an earlier time; and even this instrument is not conclusive. But a considerable presumption arises from two documents in Rymer, of the year 1412, which inform us of a great shipment of wool and other goods made by some merchants of London for the Mediterranean, under supercargoes, whom, it being a new undertaking, the king expressly recommended to the Genoese republic. But that people, impelled probably by commercial jealousy, seized the vessels and their cargoes; which induced the king to grant the owners letters of reprisal against all Genoese property. Rymer, t. viii. p. 717, 773. Though it is not perhaps evident that the vessels were English, the circumstances render it highly probable. The bad success, however, of this attempt, might prevent its imitation. A Greek author about the beginning of the fifteenth century reckons the Ιγγληνοι among the nations who traded to a port in the Archipelago. Gibbon, vol. xii. p. 52. But these enumerations are generally swelled by vanity or the love of exaggeration; and a few English sailors on board a foreign vessel would justify the assertion. Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish traveller, pretends that the port of Alexandria, about 1160, contained vessels not only from England, but from Russia, and even Cracow. Harris's Voyages, vol. i. p. 554.