Quotation from: Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period

Written by: Paul Lacroix


It was easy to foretell, from the very first, that the military occupation
of the Holy Land would not be permanent. In consequence of this,
therefore, the nearer the loss of this fine conquest seemed to be, the
greater were the efforts made by the maritime towns of the West to
re-establish, on a more solid and lasting basis, a commercial alliance
with Egypt, the country which they selected to replace Palestine, in a
mercantile point of view. Marseilles was the greatest supporter of this
intercourse with Egypt; and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries she
reached a very high position, which she owed to her shipowners and
traders. In the fourteenth century, however, the princes of the house of
Anjou ruined her like the rest of Provence, in the great and fruitless
efforts which they made to recover the kingdom of Naples; and it was not
until the reign of Louis XI. that the old Phoenician city recovered its
maritime and commercial prosperity (Fig. 193).

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