About A.D. 500. princes, who were highly civilized compared with even the best of the marauders who had overrun the Roman provinces, having devoted themselves to agricultural and other industrial pursuits, and having thus paved the way for the revival of maritime commerce. As the barbarians had divided what Rome had united, and Europe was broken up into innumerable communities with no interest in common, navigation could not be otherwise than dangerous in seas infested by pirates, while strangers could not count on friendly reception at ports occupied by semi-civilized nations: the French princes, however, by the suppression of the Visigoths, obtained possession of Marseilles, then, with the exception of Constantinople, the most important commercial city in Europe, and thus caused their civilizing influence to be felt along the shores of the Levant.
But Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa, and Venice, at this period slowly succeeded in rivalling, if not in superseding, the great maritime city of the French. The practice of piracy, however, unfortunately continued long after civilization had again dawned on the shores of the Levant; nor, indeed, as we have seen, did Amalfi, though the first to do so, become really worthy of note as a commercial entrepôt till the close of the eighth century, and even then its maritime commerce was comparatively insignificant and of little importance, until a more enlightened ruler removed a yet further portion of the dark cloud still hanging over the fairest portions of the continent of Europe.
Charlemagne, A.D. 771-814. The extensive conquests of Charlemagne, unlike those of but too many of more ancient times, tended
