The country, fertilized by its countless canals and sluices, exhibited everywhere that minute and patient cultivation which distinguishes it at the present day, but which in the middle of the sixteenth century had no parallel but in the lands tilled by the Moorish inhabitants of the south of Spain. The ingenious spirit of the people was shown in their dexterity in the mechanical arts, and in the talent for invention which seems to be characteristic of a people accustomed from infancy to the unfettered exercise of their faculties. The processes for simplifying labor were carried so far, that children, as we are assured, began, at four or five years of age, to earn a livelihood.[374] Each of the principal cities became noted for its excellence in some branch or other of manufacture. Lille was known for its woollen cloths, Brussels for its tapestry and carpets, Valenciennes for its camlets, while the towns of Holland and Zealand furnished a simpler staple in the form of cheese, butter, and salted fish.[375] These various commodities were exhibited at the great fairs held twice a year, for the space of twenty days each, at Antwerp, which were thronged by foreigners as well as natives.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Flemings imported great quantities of wool from England, to be manufactured into cloth at home. But Flemish emigrants had carried that manufacture to England; and in the time of Philip the Second the cloths themselves were imported from the latter country to the amount of above five millions of crowns annually, and exchanged for the domestic products of the Netherlands.[376] This single item of trade with one of their neighbors may suggest some notion of the extent of the commerce of the Low Countries at this period.
But in truth the commerce of the country stretched to the remotest corners of the globe. The inhabitants of the Netherlands, trained from early youth to battle with the waves, found their true element on the ocean. "As much as Nature," says an enthusiastic writer, "restricted their domain on the land, so much the more did they extend their empire on the deep."[377] Their fleets were to be found on every sea. In the Euxine and in the Mediterranean they were rivals of the Venetian and the Genoese, and they contended with the English, and even with the Spaniards, for superiority on the "narrow seas" and the great ocean.