projections in the sides of the tower remain as traces of the gangway that connected it with the barbican.
Of the towers, the first one, at the outlet of Hospital Street to the east, is perhaps the richest and most graceful. It belonged to the lace-makers' guild. It is a semicircular structure on a foursquare basis of quarry-stones; the surface is ornamented with glazed bricks, stone fragments, and indented friezes; there are several moucharabies. The wall adjoining this bastion had few loopholes and a narrow, covered gangway with some few fissures; access to this gangway was gained by a door from the tower. The wall on the other side of St. Florian's Gate, towards the Joiners' Gate, was built on a different system, having an open gangway on the inside with numerous loopholes and pinnacles, which were all walled up in later times.
The leisure hours of the citizens were not all given to military exercise; they also indulged in various games. Christmas, Shrovetide, and Easter pageants are mentioned in the records of the guilds. But few of these have been preserved down to our times, and most of them are known by name only. The so-called "horse of Zwierzyniec" is a merry pageant, performed on the octave of Corpus Christi Day by the guild of the raftsmen: a man in the quaint disguise of a Tartar, carrying a wooden figure of a horse in trappings tied to his waist, and thus clumsily imitating a horseman, stalks about among the crowd, dealing out blows more jocular than painful with a mace ending in a cloth knob. This may be a fragmentary remnant of the popular religious drama of the Middle Ages; others interpret it as commemorating the Mongolian invasion of 1241.
The source of Cracow's prosperous development in the Middle Ages was its transit-trade. By its geographical position, the town became a crossing-point of commercial routes to all parts of the world. Checked as its progress was by the legislature of the country, it could not quite rise to the position of a world emporium; still, it attained high importance, and was able, for a long time, to occupy a leading place in Polish commerce. From the south, the commercial road from Hungary led across the
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