Italian city-states like Venice and Genoa were located on the trade routes that linked the rest of western Europe with the East. Both these city-states became bustling trading centers. Trading ships brought goods to England, Scandinavia, and present-day Russia. It was the East-West trade that brought wealth to Venetian merchants: from the East, spices, silk, cotton, sugar, dyestuffs, and the alum needed to set colors; from West, wool and cloth. The area of Venetian business was enormous, from England and Flanders to the heart of Asia, which the thirteenth-century Venetian Marco Polo (1254-1324) crossed to reach China.