(A history of Venice focused on the Fourth Crusade.)
p11 Without land there could be no feudal system, no clear division between knight and serf. Without agriculture, money was its barter. Their nobles would be merchant princes who could command a fleet and calculate profit to the nearest grosso. The difficulties of life bound all its people together in an act of patriotic solidarity that required self-discipline and a measure of equality – like the crew of a ship all subject to the perils of the deep.
p12 The tenor of their relations with the wider world was set early. The city wished to trade wherever profit was to be made without favour or fear. This was their rationale and their creed and they pleaded it as a special case. It earned them widespread distrust.
p22 Differing attitudes to commerce marked a sharp dividing line. From early on the amoral trading mentality of the Venetians – the assumed right to buy and sell anything to anyone – shocked the pious Byzantines. Around 820 the emperor complained bitterly about Venetian cargoes of war materials – timber, metal and slaves – to his enemy, the sultan in Cairo. But in the last quarter of the eleventh century the Byzantine Empire, such a durable presence in the Mediterranean basin, started to decline, and the balance of power began tilting in Venice’s favour. In the 1080s the Venetians defended the empire in the Adriatic against powerful Norman war bands, intent on taking Constantinople itself. Their reward was sumptuous. With all the imperial pomp of Byzantine ritual, the emperor affixed his golden seal (the bulla) to a document that would change the sea for ever. He granted the city’s merchants the rights to trade freely, exempt from tax, throughout his realms.
p27 The immediate Venetian response was startling. They sent their own legates back to Rome to request, as a preliminary, the lifting of the papal ban on trading with the Islamic world, specifically Egypt.
p173 By the end of 1350, as a by-product of the Black Sea trade, probably half of Europe’s population had died. The figure in the Mediterranean basin was perhaps as high as seventy-five per cent in places. The Black Death jolted a whole continent into new ways of thinking and acting, wrenching it away from a communal medieval past. Venice, whose materialistic drive had affronted Petrarch, was the harbinger of multiple new worlds, identities and mindsets. Afterwards the mercantile mood of Italy would itself darken.
p183 Padua was a hostile city and the defection of craftsmen with specialised military or industrial skills was taken extremely seriously in Venice – salt- or glass-workers risked having their right hands cut off or their lips and noses (in the case of women), or being hunted down and assassinated.
p252 The Stato da Mar was the city’s unique creation. If it drew on Byzantine tax structures, in all other respects its management was the reflection of Venice itself. The empire represented Europe’s first full-blown colonial experiment. Held together by sea power, largely uninterested in the well-being of its subjects, centrifugal in nature and economically exploitative, it foreshadowed what was to come.
p255 By the Middle Ages, the mercantile republics of Italy had unshackled themselves from any lingering theological stigma attached to trade. Christ, rather than turning the money-changers out of the temple, could now be seen as a trader; piracy not usury was the Venetian idea of commercial sin. Profit was a virtue.
p255 Doges traded, so did artisans, women, servants, priests – anyone with a little cash in hand could loan it on a merchant venture; the oarsmen and sailors who worked the ships carried small quantities of merchandise stashed beneath their benches to hawk in foreign ports.
p258 The galleys travelled set routes, like a timetabled service, the details of which, set down in the early 1300s, were to last for two hundred years. At the end of the fourteenth century there were four: those to Alexandria, Beirut, Constantinople and the Black Sea, and the long-range Atlantic haul, an arduous five-month round trip to London and Bruges. A century later this had expanded to seven, visiting all the major ports of the Mediterranean.
p258 Venice’s genius was to grasp the laws of supply and demand, based on centuries of mercantile activity, and to obey them with unmatched efficiency. The secret lay in regularity.
p262 For all Venetians – novices or old hands – the final destinations, be they Beirut or Tana, Alexandria or Bruges, were territories which they did not control. They traded on the erratic sufferance of foreign powers.
p265 The Venetians kept their distance from armed aggression but paid the price by association. In 1434 they were all expelled from Syria and Egypt at a loss of a massive 235,000 ducats. Their strategy was patience and endless diplomacy. When their merchants were imprisoned they despatched their long-suffering consul to Cairo; when goods were purloined they made a claim; when the spices began to be unacceptably cut with rubbish they used sieves; when the tension became unbearable they prepared to evacuate the whole community. For short periods they suspended the galley service altogether.