If anyone looked out from Mount Taygetus over the surrounding country and saw “so many delights, so many cities scattered throughout the Peloponnese”—so many delightful, splendidly built cities, created at such cost and with such exquisite skill, so beautifully arranged across the Peloponnese—he would now find them ruined and overthrown, burnt, wasted, desolate, and levelled to the ground. “Incredible to tell,” and so on.

And, as he laments, “Who, in telling such things, could restrain his tears? Who is so hard, so made of iron”—so he continues—who can adequately mourn and pity these ruins? Where are those 4,000 cities of Egypt, those 100 cities of Crete? Have they now dwindled to two?

What do Pliny and Aelian say about ancient Italy? In former ages it had 1,166 cities. Biondo and Machiavelli both allow that it is now nowhere near as populous, or as full of good towns, as it was under Augustus—for now Leandro Alberti can find no more than 300. And if we may trust Livy, even then it was not as strong and powerful as formerly: “They mustered 70 legions in earlier times, a number the known world would now scarcely supply.”

Alexander, for his part, built 70 cities in a short time; the sultans and Turks of our day demolish twice as many and leave everything desolate. Many insist that our island of Great Britain is more populous now than ever. Yet let them read Bede, Leland, and others: they will find that it flourished most under the Saxon Heptarchy and was much more densely inhabited in the Conqueror’s time than now. Look at Domesday Book and show me those thousands of parishes now decayed, those ruined cities and depopulated villages.

The smaller the territory, generally the richer it is: “a small but well-cultivated field.” The Greek commonwealths of Athens, Sparta, Arcadia, Elis, Sicyon, Messenia, and the rest give ample proof. So do Germany’s imperial cities and free states; the cantons of the Swiss, Rhaetians, Grisons, and Walloons; the territories of Tuscany, Lucca, and Siena in former times; Piedmont, Mantua, and Venice in Italy; Ragusa, and others.

Therefore, as Botero advises, a prince who wants a wealthy country and fine cities should secure good trades, privileges, hardworking inhabitants, and skilled craftspeople. He should allow no unworked raw material—tin, iron, wool, lead, and so on—to be exported from his country. This has been seriously attempted here in part, but not carried through.

Because human industry and abundant trade do so much to adorn and enrich a kingdom, the ancient people of Massilia would admit no one into their city who had no trade. Selim I, the Turkish emperor, had a thousand skilled craftspeople brought from Tabriz to Constantinople.

The Poles made a contract with Henry, duke of Anjou, their newly elected king, requiring him to bring a hundred families of craftspeople into Poland. James I of Scotland, as Buchanan writes, sent for the best craftspeople he could find in Europe and gave them generous rewards to teach his subjects their various trades. Edward III, our most renowned king—may his memory endure for ever—first brought cloth manufacture to this island by bringing over some families of craftspeople from Ghent.

How many splendid cities I could name that thrive entirely through trade, where thousands of inhabitants make an excellent living by the work of their fingers: Florence in Italy by making cloth of gold; great Milan by silk and all kinds of fine craftsmanship; Arras in Artois by its beautiful tapestries. Many cities in Spain, France, and Germany have no other livelihood, especially those inland.

Mecca in Arabia Petraea stands among rocks in a most barren country that lacks water, as Varthema describes it; yet it is a beautiful and pleasant city because of trade between East and West. Hormuz in Persia is a celebrated trading town: nothing but its conveniently placed harbour makes it flourish.

Corinth, a noble city—Cicero calls it “the light of Greece,” the eye of Greece—drew all that traffic of the Ionian and Aegean seas to itself through its excellent ports, Cenchreae and Lechaeum. Yet the surrounding country was “uneven and beetling,” as Strabo describes it, rugged and harsh. We may say the same of Athens, Actium, Thebes, Sparta, and most Greek towns.

Nuremberg in Germany stands on very barren soil, yet it is a noble imperial city. Through the industry of its craftspeople and their skilled trades alone, its people draw the wealth of most countries to themselves. They are so expert in manufacture that, as Sallust said long ago of others like them, “the seat of their soul is in their fingertips”: their soul, or “active intellect,” was lodged in the ends of their fingers. We may say the same of Basel, Speyer, Cambrai, Frankfurt, and others.

What some writers report of Mexico and its neighbouring cities is almost incredible: at the time of their first discovery, no place in the world was more populous. Matteo Ricci the Jesuit and others describe the industry of the Chinese in their densely populated country: not a beggar or an idle person to be seen, and how, by these means, they prosper and flourish.

We have the same resources: able bodies, adaptable minds, and materials of every kind—wool, flax, iron, tin, lead, timber, and so on—plenty of excellent things to work on. Only industry is lacking. We send our best commodities overseas, where people put them to good use for their needs, set to work on them, and improve each in its own way, then send them back to us at high prices. Or they make toys and trinkets from the scraps and sell these back to us for as much as they paid for the whole.

In most of our cities, with a few exceptions, we live entirely by drinking inns and alehouses, like Spanish idlers. Malt-making is their most profitable “plough”; their chief trade is selling ale.

Meteren and others reproach us for being nowhere near as industrious as the Dutch. “The more intricate or laborious manual trades,” he says, “are practised entirely by foreigners. They live in a sea full of fish, yet are so idle that they will not catch enough for their own needs, but buy it from their neighbours.” Bah, “the free sea”! They fish under our noses, then sell us the catch at their own prices.

“It shames us that these reproaches could be made And could not be refuted.” I am ashamed to hear foreigners bring this charge against us, and I do not know how to answer it.