City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas

Above all, the story of the Stato da Mar is a saga about trade. Alone in all the world, Venice was organized to buy and sell. The Venetians were merchants to their fingertips; they calculated risk, return, and profit with scientific precision.

This was the bazaar of Europe and the historic location of Venice’s founding myth. It was held that Venice was established here on Friday, March 25, 421, at noon precisely, by the site of the Church of San Giacomo di Rialto, the merchants’ church, said to have been built the same year.

Within a year of losing two-thirds of their populations, Genoa and Venice were at war again. In the aftermath, the contest moved back to the Bosporus, the choke point that controlled access to the markets of central Asia.

The Adriatic must provide free passage for Venetian ships, otherwise they would be forever bottled up. The doge ordered that there would be no more tribute and prepared a substantial fleet to command obedience.

Crete was twenty-five sailing days away from the doge’s palace—as far off as Bombay from London to the British Empire of 1900—but in the imagination of the lagoon, distance was telescoped.

By the late 1340s it was clear that the reconstituted Byzantine Empire had never recovered from the trauma of the Fourth Crusade.

Many of the great icons and valued religious talismans of the Byzantine Church were just lost in the rampage—probably smashed to pieces by men intent only on precious metal.

In 1503, Venice accepted the inevitable and signed a humiliating peace with Bayezit that confirmed everything he had won. Soon the Venetians would dip their flags to passing Ottoman ships in implicit recognition of a vassal status they were too proud publicly to acknowledge. From now on, cooperation with their powerful Muslim neighbor would become an axiom of Venetian foreign policy, and the city would turn its attention increasingly to building a land empire.

Before Venice became the wonder of the world, it was a curiosity; its social structure, enigmatic; and its strategies, distrusted. Without land, there could be no feudal system, no clear division between knight and serf. Without agriculture, money was its barter.

The sea was at once their protection, their opportunity, and their fate; secure in their shallow lagoon with its deceptive channels and treacherous mudflats that no invader could penetrate, shielded if not insulated from the surge of the Adriatic, they wrapped the sea around them like a cloak.

Departure. Risk. Profit. Glory. These were the compass points of Venetian life. Voyaging was a repeated experience. For nearly a thousand years the citizens of Venice knew no other. The sea was at once their protection, their opportunity, and their fate;

The sea brought the fragile city, existing like a mirage on its tenuous oak pilings, riches beyond measure and a maritime empire as splendid as any. In the process Venice shaped the world.

This book is the story of the rise of that empire—the Stato da Mar they called it in dialect—and the commercial wealth it created.

the story of the Stato da Mar is a saga about trade. Alone in all the world, Venice was organized to buy and sell. The Venetians were merchants to their fingertips; they calculated risk, return, and profit with scientific precision.

The city’s prosperity rested on nothing tangible—no landholdings, no natural resources, no agricultural production or large population. There was literally no solid ground underfoot. Physical survival depended on a fragile ecological balance. Venice was perhaps the first virtual economy, whose vitality baffled outsiders. It harvested nothing but barren gold and lived in perpetual fear that, if its trade routes were severed, the whole magnificent edifice might simply collapse.

They came up the Adriatic. This was the point where hundreds of arterial routes converged. From Britain and the North Sea, down the river Rhine, along beaten tracks through the Teutonic forests, across Alpine passes, mule trains threaded their way to the top of the gulf, where the merchandise of the East also landed.

Before Venice became the wonder of the world, it was a curiosity; its social structure, enigmatic; and its strategies, distrusted. Without land, there could be no feudal system, no clear division between knight and serf. Without agriculture, money was its barter.

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

Geographical position, livelihood, political institutions, and religious affiliations marked Venice out. It lived between two worlds: the land and the sea, the East and the West, yet belonging to neither.

The Venetians repeatedly defied the pope, who responded by excommunicating the whole city.

clear strategic vision that would form the cornerstone of Venetian policy for all the centuries that the Republic lived. The Adriatic must provide free passage for Venetian ships, otherwise they would be forever bottled up.

Venice’s hold on the material world was fragile; it lived with impermanence.

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 aurea) to a document that would change the sea forever. He granted the city’s merchants the rights to trade freely, exempt from tax, throughout his realms.

The Golden Bull of 1082 was the golden key that opened up the treasure-house of eastern trade for Venice.

It would commit the Venetians to the largest commercial contract in medieval history; it would mean the cessation of all other trading activity during the span of the contract; failure at any point would mean disaster for the city, because all its resources were involved.

The two dimensions were time and money; both had been scrupulously weighed.

It was the gold standard by which Venetian life operated: Its key parameters were quantity, price, and delivery date.

For Venetian merchants the Crusades had proved highly profitable. In the process they deepened their knowledge of how to trade across a cultural divide, which would make them, in time, the interpreters of worlds.

After the mosaics that commemorate the body of Saint Mark sailing to Venice, this is the single most iconic image in Venetian history—the blind doge, standing erect at the prow of his ship with the red and gold lion banner of Saint Mark fluttering in the wind as his ship grounds beneath the menacing city walls; battle rages around him, but the wise old merchant Crusader stands unmoved, urging his fleet on.

Genoa shared the same goals as Venice: to grab market share and create monopolies, but its means were different. From the start, the Genoese maritime empire was largely privatized—the fleet that beat the more cautious Venetians to the First Crusade and gained preferential trading rights in the new Crusader kingdom was got up by individual initiative.

Intrepidness, creativity, risk-taking, innovation—these were hallmarks of the individualistic genius of Genoa.

The Bosporus, the seventeen-mile strait that links the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, is one of the strategic waterways of the world.

From about 1260, a highway opened into the heart of Asia that created new opportunities for transcontinental trade. For the merchants of Europe it dangled the tantalizing possibility of cutting out Arab middlemen and sourcing the luxury goods of the farthest Orient directly.

By the time the plague had burned itself out, possibly two-thirds of the Venetian population had perished; fifty noble families ceased to exist.

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 75 percent in places.

The solidarity, the discipline, the sense of shared life among the citizens was starting to fray, with long-term consequences for Venetian sea power.

The worst day’s work the Genoese ever did themselves, or the rest of Christendom, came in November 1354 when they ferried an Ottoman army across the Dardanelles into Europe.

They were in Europe for good—a fourth snake entwined in the politics of Constantinople and its hinterland.

Venice had outlasted Genoa less through military supremacy than through the durability of her institutions, the social cohesion of her people, and their patriotic adherence to the flag of Saint Mark. After the humiliation of Chioggia, Genoa imploded. Ten successive doges were deposed in five years; in 1394 the city handed itself to the French kings.

The methods it used to annex new possessions were highly flexible: a mixture of patient diplomacy and short, sharp applications of military force.

If its techniques were patient and variable, the Republic’s underlying policy was frighteningly consistent: to obtain, at the lowest cost, desirable forts, ports, and defensive zones for the honor and profit of the city.

Deep down, Venice wished to keep the balance between its subjects: peace and tranquility, honor and profit—the ideals went hand in hand.

Proficium et honorem—profit and honor—are the two persistent accusatives that echo through the record of this colossal and exhaustive enterprise.

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.

The natural right to gain was the Venetian foundation myth.

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.

What Venice had understood was the need for predictable delivery, so that foreign merchants drawn there could be confident that there would be desirable merchandise, worth the long haul over the Brenner Pass in the grip of winter.

Information was as vital as cash

On the shores of the Levant in the Middle Ages, Venice developed the first efficient operation of a world trade.

deployed the consummate diplomatic skills that it had learned from the Byzantines and that would serve it well in all its long, entangled dealings with the Muslim world.

where all the goods floated down the rivers of Italy or packhorsed across the Alpine passes arrived by barge.

Venice controlled an axis of exchange that ran from the Rhine valley to the Levant and influenced trade from Sweden to China, funneling goods across the world system: Indian pepper to England and Flanders, Cotswold wool and Russian furs to the Mamluks of Cairo; Syrian cotton to the burghers of Germany; Chinese silk to the mistresses of Medici bankers, Cyprus sugar for their food; Murano glass for the mosque lamps of Aleppo; Slovakian copper; paper, tin, and dried fish.

The business of the sea was managed as consistently as the Stato da Mar itself—by regulation, continuous oversight, and recourse to law.

Venetians were always ambivalent about the sea; it was both the cornerstone of their existence and their fate.

“The world is nothing but smoke and shadows.”