OTHER MANUFACTURES
Needless to say, glass production was not the only manufacturing industry that flourished in Venice. From an early time there were brass or iron foundries, or both, in operation there; but much more important forms of manufacture than these were the making of cloth-of-gold and of purple dye. These with glass-making were the most ancient, the most extensive, and the most celebrated of Venetian industries.[a]
Knocker from the Palazzo Crimani
The trade in cloths-of-gold in the form of mantles or pallii, for either sex, was prodigious; and the profit arising to the Venetians from this source alone was incalculably large; the courts of France and Germany, and more particularly the former, were among the best customers of the republic. Charlemagne himself was seldom seen without a robe of Venetian pattern and texture; and the constant intercourse which the patriarch Fortunato maintained with the son of Pepin, had at least the good effect of spreading the knowledge and appreciation of the manufactures of his country to the banks of the Seine and the Loire. It was a point of policy which the republic steadily observed from the beginning, to make every extension of territory, every treaty of peace, beneficial to her interests as a mercantile power.[e]
The activity of all this industry increased the population, and this led to increased consumption of every kind, this again leading to new speculations and returns. The Venetians were no longer satisfied to go and buy raw materials of the foreigner, but sought to make the country produce them. Troops of sheep were reared in Polesine, and were sent into the mountains of eastern Istria. The hill-sides of Friuli were covered with mulberry trees. An attempt was made to naturalise the sugar-cane in the isles of the Levant.[g]