Mercantilism became the dominant school of economic thought in Europe throughout the late Renaissance and the early-modern period (from the 15th to the 18th centuries). Evidence of mercantilistic practices appeared in early-modern Venice, Genoa, and Pisa regarding control of the Mediterranean trade in bullion. However, the empiricism of the Renaissance, which first began to quantify large-scale trade accurately, marked mercantilism's birth as a codified school of economic theories. The Italian economist and mercantilist Antonio Serra is considered to have written one of the first treatises on political economy with his 1613 work, "A Short Treatise on the Wealth and Poverty of Nations".