But in the course of universal history these “territorial states,” whether they arose more or less frequently, did not acquire any such importance as did those maritime cities which devoted their principal energies to commerce and to privateering. Mommsen contrasts in distinct and well chosen sentences the Achæan landed squire with the “royal merchants” of the Greek Colonies in Southern Italy: “In no way did they spurn agriculture or the increase of territory; the Greeks were not satisfied, at least not after they became powerful, to remain within the confined space of a fortified commercial factory in the midst of the country of the barbarians, as the Phœnicians had done. Their cities were founded primarily and exclusively for purposes of trade, and unlike the Achæan colonies, were universally situated at the best harbors and landing places.”[81] We are certain, in the case of the Ionic colonies, and may well assume it for the other cases, that the founders of these cities were not landed squires, but seafaring merchants.
But such maritime states or cities, in the strict sense, came into being not only through warlike conquest, but also through peaceable beginnings, by a more or less mixed _pénétration pacifique_.
Where, however, the Vikings did not meet peaceable peasants, but feudal states in the primitive stage, willing to fight, they offered and accepted terms of peace and settled down as colonies of merchants.