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We are reminded of the guilds of labor in ancient Flanders or the fondachi of Venice. The State of Delaware, meanwhile, comes up and looks in at the windows, only half satisfied with the rapid fortunes making by the civic trades. What the Delaware yeomen know is, that they have broad acres of sunny land, on which they are perpetually wanting advances of money.
Examples are to be found in the fondachi of Venice, Genoa, and other Italian, French, and Catalan cities, established in the Greek and Mohammedan districts of the eastern Mediterranean, on the basis of grants given by the rulers of those lands and cities. Peter's Yard" in Novgorod.
These fondachi were buildings, or groups of dwellings and warehouses, often including a market-place, offices, and church, where the merchants of some Italian or Provencal city carried on their business affairs according to their own rules, under permission granted to them by the local ruler.
Here, in the early morning, the women of the neighborhood gathered with their water-jars, but now the court was filled with those who had business in the Ducal Palace red-robed senators and members of the Consiglio talking in knots; a councillor in his violet gown, a group of merchant-princes in black robes, enriched with costly furs and relieved by massive gold chains, absorbed in discussion of some practical details for the better ordering of the Fondachi, those storehouses and marts for foreign trade peculiar to Venice; some grave attorney, more soberly arrayed, making haste toward the gloom of the secretary's corner; a sprinkling of friars on ecclesiastical business, of gondoliers in the varied liveries of the senators waiting their masters' call; here and there a figure less in keeping with the magnificence around him, too full of his trouble to be abashed, going to ask for justice at the Doge's feet the heart of Venice was pulsing in the court, and under the arches came the gleam and shimmer of the sea.
In the greater number of cases the Italian and other European merchants had quarters, or fondachi, granted to them in the Eastern cities by the Saracen emirs of Egypt and Syria, or by the Greek emperor of Asia Minor, Constantinople, and Trebizond.
It is now the hall of a sanatorium which has been erected behind it, thus destroying two of the towers of the palace of the count, and spoiling a very picturesque composition. The "Fondachi" are used for military purposes; other Gothic palaces remain along the side of the piazza.
Both Genoa and Venice had possessions in the Greek Archipelago which formed stepping-stones between the home cities and their fondachi in the cities of the Levant.
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