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344 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE doge was no longer elected by the people, if indeed he eve really had been, but was nominated by a committee ap- pointed by the assembly of four hundred and eighty, and then was merely presented to the people for formal con- firmation. The artisans of Venice, however, were now improving their condition through their gilds. Some of them still had Progress of to work for a certain length of time in the court- the gilds y arc j Q f the doge, just as the peasant on the manor had to perform his three days a week of service on the demesne of the lord. But from this servitude they now tried to free themselves. Already another important change had taken place. The gastaldo, or director of each gild, who had formerly been an agent and appointee of the doge, and sometimes had not himself been a worker in the craft at all but an outsider, now was elected by the gild from among its own members. He therefore became its representative and ceased to be the doge's agent. Among the chief manufac- tures of the Venetian artisans were glass, cloth, silk, leather, paper, and soap. Venice was, however, preeminently a city of great merchants rather than of small artisans and as such its government naturally became and remained oligarchical in character. By the thirteenth century at least Venetian traders were found well-nigh all over the known world. They made corn- Venetian mercial treaties with the sultans of Iconium and commerce AleppQ and with the Christian rulers of Little Armenia and Trebizond. In 1255 a traveler found at Ico- nium a Venetian and a Genoese in partnership; they had obtained from the sultan a monopoly of the alum trade and had more than tripled the price in consequence. Such enter- prising traders were found from Damascus to Kiev and from the Crimea to the Caucasus. The Polo brothers even visited China. Venetians, however, not merely spread over the world in search of trade; so far as they could they forced trade to flow through Venice, which thus took a profit from goods both coming and going. Venice had early monopo- lized the distribution of salt in her immediate neighborhood,