In the sixteenth century the wars of Italy rather changed matters, and we find royal and important concessions increasing in favour of Castilians and other Spaniards, whom the people maliciously called negroes, and who had emigrated in order to engage in commerce and manufactures in Saintonge, Normandy, Burgundy, Agenois, and Languedoc.

About the time of Louis XI., the French, becoming more alive to their true interests, began to manage their own affairs, following the suggestions and advice of the King, whose democratic instincts prompted him to encourage and favour the bourgeois. This result was also attributable to the state of peace and security which then began to exist in the kingdom, impoverished and distracted as it had been by a hundred years of domestic and foreign warfare.

From 1365 to 1382 factories and warehouses were founded by Norman navigators on the western coast of Africa, in Senegal and Guinea. Numerous fleets of merchantmen, of great size for those days, were employed in transporting cloth, grain of all kinds, knives, brandy, salt, and other merchandise, which were bartered for leather, ivory, gum, amber, and gold dust. Considerable profits were realised by the shipowners and merchants, who, like Jacques Coeur, employed ships for the purpose of carrying on these large and lucrative commercial operations. These facts sufficiently testify the condition of France at this period, and prove that this, like other branches of human industry, was arrested in its expansion by the political troubles which followed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Fortunately these social troubles were not universal, and it was just at the period when France was struggling and had become exhausted and impoverished that the Portuguese extended their discoveries on the same coast of Africa, and soon after succeeded in rounding the Cape of Good Hope, and opening a new maritime road to India, a country which was always attractive from the commercial advantages which it offered.

Some years after, Christopher Columbus, the Genoese, more daring and more fortunate still, guided by the compass and impelled by his own genius, discovered a new continent, the fourth continent of the world ([Fig. 199]). This unexpected event, the greatest and most remarkable of the age, necessarily enlarged the field for produce as well as for consumption to an enormous extent, and naturally added, not only to the variety and quantity of exchangeable wares, but also to the production of the precious metals, and brought about a complete revolution in the laws of the whole civilised world.

Maritime commerce immediately acquired an extraordinary development, and merchants, forsaking the harbours of the Mediterranean, and even those of the Levant, which then seemed to them scarcely worthy of notice, sent their vessels by thousands upon the ocean in pursuit of the wonderful riches of the New World. The day of caravans and coasting had passed; Venice had lost its splendour; the sway of the Mediterranean was over; the commerce of the world was suddenly transferred from the active and industrious towns of that sea, which had so long monopolized it, to the Western nations, to the Portuguese and Spaniards first, and then to the Dutch and English.

France, absorbed in, and almost ruined by civil war, and above all by religious dissensions, only played a subordinate part in this commercial and pacific revolution, although it has been said that the sailors of Dieppe and Honfleur really discovered America before Columbus. Nevertheless the kings of France, Louis XII., Francis I., and Henry II., tried to establish and encourage transatlantic voyages, and to create, in the interest of French commerce, colonies on the coasts of the New World, from Florida and Virginia to Canada.

But these colonies had but a precarious and transitory existence; fisheries alone succeeded, and French commerce continued insignificant, circumscribed, and domestic, notwithstanding the increasing requirements of luxury at court. This luxury contented itself with the use of the merchandise which arrived from the Low Countries, Spain, and Italy. National industry did all in its power to surmount this ignominious condition; she specially turned her attention to the manufacture of silks and of stuffs tissued with gold and silver. The only practical attempt of the government in the sixteenth century to protect commerce and manufactures was to forbid the import of foreign merchandise, and to endeavour to oppose the progress of luxury by rigid enactments.

Certainly the government of that time little understood the advantages which a country derived from commerce when it forbade the higher classes from engaging in mercantile pursuits under penalty of having their privileges of nobility withdrawn from them. In the face of the examples of Italy, Genoa, Venice, and especially of Florence, where the nobles were all traders or sons of traders, the kings of the line of Valois thought proper to make this enactment. The desire seemed to be to make the merchant class a separate class, stationary, and consisting exclusively of bourgeois, shut up in their counting-houses, and prevented in every way from participating in public life. The merchants became indignant at this banishment, and, in order to employ their leisure, they plunged with all their energy into the sanguinary struggles of Reform and of the League.

[Fig. 200.]--Medal to commemorate the Association of the Merchants of the City of Rouen.