In service of trade

A bit before I went to Venice, Italy in 2012 the book City of Fortune, How Venice Ruled the Seas by Roger Crowley was published. I waited for it to be published in paperback, then it sat on my reading shelf for a while. I finished it yesterday. The book is about when Venice was the powerhouse of the Mediterranean.

My niece has said she doesn't like to study history because it is all about the battles. At her age I probably felt the same way. Since then I've read some fascinating books on history that focus on the ideas and everyday life rather than on the battles. For example, there is The History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage. The City of Fortune book discusses both ideas and battles, though I think it spent too much time and detail on those battles.

By 1200 AD Venice had created a Republic. There is an elected leader, the doge, and a tight set of rules and review to keep him from abusing that power. Of course, those who voted for the doge were the aristocracy, not the commoners. A good deal, perhaps all, of the city's efforts was towards commerce. Since the city couldn't grow its own food, trade was a necessity. By this time Venice had a trading network all along the Adriatic Sea, some of it imposed by force.

In 1201 the Pope called for the Fourth Crusade. Venice was contracted to build the ships. Alas, the number of crusaders who showed up were too small for Venice to earn back its investment. So instead of going to Jerusalem or Cairo (the power behind the Muslims in Jerusalem) they went to Constantinople, hoping to earn a bit of money with some quick plundering. It didn't go well and lasted three years. But the city was eventually defeated and sacked – lots of valuable and artistic stuff in homes and churches melted down for the gold and silver. These Crusades (there were a total of nine) taught Christians to settle disputes through war.

As a result of that win Venice became owners of a series of islands around Greece. Some of these were easily dominated, others, like Crete, were rebellious. While Venice may have been a republic in its domestic affairs, it acted like a nasty colonial power elsewhere (and served as a model for the British and Spanish empires that came later).

Venice used its position to dominate trade across the Mediterranean. They traded with the Muslims (even though the Pope said they shouldn't) in Cairo and Beirut bringing spices and other goods across land from Asia and India. They traded across the Black Sea with the Mongols. The list of traded goods is long. The city became rich by supplying Europe with all these exotic goods. During this time the men in charge of these various forts were held to high standards to avoid bribery and conflicts of interest. Everything the city did was in service of trade. During this time every action in the city and each of its ports was exhaustively documented – there were 45 miles of shelves holding these documents.

There were a series of wars with Genoa, also working the trade routes. At one point, in 1379, Genoa and the King of Hungary took that fight to the Venice lagoon. Venice squeaked out of that one and shortly after that the Genoa system collapsed, leaving Venice to dominate, which it did for about another 120 years.

The sacking of Constantinople severely weakened Byzantium, which allowed the Ottoman Turks to move in. So what gave rise to Venice was a major reason for its decline 300 years later. The other big reason was that Portugal established a trade route around Africa to Asia, cutting off the need to trade with both Muslims and Venice. Around 1500 the Venice trade economy collapsed.