Pod Insights Gone Medieval The Republic of Venice About this episode Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by historian Roger Crowley to unravel the captivating history of Venice, the Queen of the Adriatic. How did this city, born from a lagoon, ride the changing tides of trade in the 15th century to evolve into a formidable maritime empire? From its unique social structures to its role in the Fourth Crusade, Eleanor and Roger take an in-depth look at Venice's unparalleled success and its challenges.
Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. It was edited by Rob Weinberg, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.
Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.
More:
The Holy Roman Empire > https://open.spotify.com/episode/38NEUcYPXLYJ74f62cwF25
The Silk Road: Where Cultures Collided > https://open.spotify.com/episode/38NEUcYPXLYJ74f62cwF25
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1:56 Eleanor Janega? Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here.
2:35 Eleanor Janega? On the northeast coast of what is now Italy floats a city conjured from a lagoon on stilts. She, the Serenissima, the Queen of the Adriatic, is a maze of canals and palazzos and churches.
2:55 Eleanor Janega? She may now be known as a jewel in Italy's crown, but for almost a millennium, she was her own republic. And for the majority of the medieval period, she was not just a city, but the center of a sprawling maritime empire. She is, of course, Venice, to this day a wonder of the world and as romantic a city as any could claim to be.
3:23 Eleanor Janega? But behind Venice's enduring charm is a story of medieval ingenuity and what happens when the landless come together to create new modes of collective cooperation and welcome contact and commerce with the wider world.
3:40 Eleanor Janega? Today, I'm joined by historian Roger Crowley, author of City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire, to discuss one of the greatest success stories that medieval Europe and the world as a whole has ever seen.
4:00 Eleanor Janega? Roger, welcome to God Medieval.
4:02 Speaker 06 Thank you very much, Eleanor. I'm delighted to be with you.
4:05 Eleanor Janega? We love this. It is a beautiful day to talk about one of the world's foremost Adriatic empires, Mediterranean empires. And I think that when people think about Venice now, we kind of relate to it as a specific city, a specific tourist destination. And it is one of those places that I think looms large in the imagination of almost everyone. And, you know, I think that getting to the lagoon someday is something that is on a lot of people's bucket list. But that lagoon itself really helped to shape the history and culture of Venice. You know, how does the city's placement on the way to the Adriatic help
4:50 Eleanor Janega? it become such an important cultural center?
4:54 Speaker 06 I think there's two things here, really. One is that if you go back to the Bronze Age, the Adriatic has been a commercial route, particularly the eastern side of the Adriatic, where there are harboring islands, to transport goods into Europe. And there were predecessors for Venice. One was Adria, which gave Adriatic its name, at the mouth of the Po, which silted up. And then later, there was a Roman city called Aquilea, performed the same function, which was destroyed by Attila the Hun in 425. So it looks like a dead end, but actually it's an important commercial route. The second thing, really, which stands out is
5:38 Speaker 06 that Venice came about probably in the aftermath of the instability and collapse of the Roman Empire. People retreated into the lagoon, and they started effectively to build islands by hammering stakes in the ground and creating these little settlements. And really, ecology is everything about Venice, because what is Venice is really just a collection of really rather insecure little islets in a lagoon. It has no farmable land, it has no resources, and therefore it's really quite weird. It's the only town that didn't exist in Italy at the time of the Romans. So it was self-created.
6:24 Speaker 06 Have a little refuge, if you like. And so the people who live in this island, what are their skills? Their skills are producing salt and it's going to be the ability to sail and to trade. And really that ecological reason for the existence and the limitations and the opportunities that it provided, I think, critical to understanding what Venice is.
6:48 Eleanor Janega? Yeah, absolutely, because I think that it is so different from a lot of places in the medieval period because the way that a lot of economies function is specifically agrarian, but Venice doesn't have that possibility at all. It's a totally marine environment. So yeah, you can make salt and you can fish. Those are two fantastic things to do, but this also really does help to encourage it to become a centre for commerce. You know, I'm someone who works a lot on Central Europe. And so the Adriatic is incredibly important to all of these Central European kingdoms because that's how you get down to any kind of maritime trade. And the Adriatic that Venice really dominates is more of a consideration than, I don't
7:33 Eleanor Janega? know, the Mediterranean writ large, if that makes sense.
7:36 Speaker 06 Yeah, absolutely. Of course, one of the consequences of having no agrarian opportunity is that you don't get a feudal system because you do not have a ruling class who have got a peasantry. And because of the ecological vulnerability of Venice, it could be overwhelmed at any moment by a surge in the tide. Everybody is in the same boat. Obviously, you do get a wealthy group of people, but everybody has to cooperate on this project. And therefore you get a unique eye in into the Venetian project, which makes it completely different to anybody else.
8:18 Speaker 06 Nobody else can really understand its social structure, the way that it organizes itself. And the exceptionalism is there from the start, that it is not like anywhere else in Europe. How has this come about? How do these people operate? Everybody has to sail a boat because the only thing that you can do effectively, or only a skill apart from fish trapping and all that, is going to be transport. And so this kind of unified collective will of the Venetians is a unique thing.
8:52 Eleanor Janega? And it's intrinsic also to their sense of community as well, isn't it? Because they have, of course, their own foundational myth, as all medieval people love to have one. And theirs is that, well, they were in, I think it's Padua, and Padua was insufficiently egalitarian, and so they moved to the lagoon in order specifically to start this more equitable society, which is very sweet of them to say, I doubt it. But it is very interesting, because there are so few places in medieval Europe that are attempting to tell a story about a group dynamic as opposed to being dependent upon the minorial model of producing money and food and things of this nature.
9:36 Speaker 06 Yeah, and that really puts them outside a lot of the religious prohibitions or controls of continental Italy or lots of other places. The nations say, we're Venetians first, then Christians. And there is an ongoing contest with the papacy, really, about things that they do, particularly trading with the Islamic world. And they say, look, we have to do this, otherwise we cannot survive. And yah boo to you, really. And they're regularly excommunicated for this kind of thing, and also for usury and all kinds of commercial strategies, which they adopted.
10:18 Speaker 06 They were really sticking their tongue out of the papacy in that respect, and really refused to bow to a lot of the edicts that were imposed by the papacy on Christian Europe.
10:30 Eleanor Janega? Now, I find that really interesting as well, because one of the things we also see is you've got Rome on the one hand, and the papacy trying to put a lot of control on the Venetians. But they also get rather a lot of pressure from Constantinople as well. They're in very many ways in the middle of these two imperial systems. Would you say that that is true?
10:53 Speaker 06 Yes, I think that is true. I think that they were initially within the Byzantine Empire. And they slowly detach themselves from it because they are themselves. And we can see this happening repeatedly, I think, that they slither out any claim upon them. I mean, I think when you look at Venice, a lot of it reminds us visually and in terms of architecture of Byzantium. There's certainly a lot of bric-a-brac from Byzantium for reasons that will become obvious. But really, they escape from anybody else's category or control over a period of time.
11:37 Speaker 06 What the Venetians have to do above all else is they have to control the Adriatic. Because if they're going to be traders, they are going to have free entry into the Mediterranean. And therefore, a battle to control the Adriatic, or at least to minimize the threats to anybody who might bottle them up in that sea is very, very important. There was a great deal of piracy on the Croats in the 10th centuries. And the Venetians spent a great deal of time dealing with the pirate thing. As far as Venice was concerned, piracy was the very worst crime of all.
12:18 Speaker 06 Tricky moments, their near-death experiences occur when they are confined within the Adriatic and hemmed in by somebody else. At that point, they've got nothing, because if they can't trade, they can't do anything. And they're then really at death's door.
12:35 Eleanor Janega? And this trading, this is really the lifeblood of Venice. What are they trading? You know, what's coming in and out of Venice?
12:43 Speaker 06 What is coming in and out in Venice over a period of time? Firstly, what is coming in is food. They also get food from the mainland, but they are bringing into the Adriatic. Once they escape into the Mediterranean, all kinds of produce. But really, where they're going to get wealthy above all else is going to be In the eastern Mediterranean, apart from health, it provides shipping for people. And this is particularly important during the Crusades. The Crusaders have no ships and therefore transportation of people is going to be a very important thing. But in the process of this and developing footholds, if you like, within the Crusader kingdoms,
13:25 Speaker 06 they start to trade in a whole lot of other stuff, particularly all those desirable products of the east, which are going to be silk and spices and valuable materials, all kinds of the desirable things that Europe wants. And as much as anywhere, it is going to be the links with Byzantium, with Mamluk Egypt, and with various other places beyond that, and indeed up into the Black Sea, which is going to provide them with all kinds of desirable produce. Venetians will sell anything for which they think there is a market.
14:06 Speaker 06 If you think that drowned up bodies of mummies from the valleys of the kings are a medicinal cure, the Venetians will supply it for you. In a way, Venice operates, I think, like a European version of a Middle Eastern souk, really. And there's nothing they won't sell if they think there is a market for it, if they can make a market for it.
14:29 Eleanor Janega? And I mean, would it be fair to say that one of the reasons they're so happy to sell whatever it is that they're selling is that this is how you make your way up the chain in Venetian society? Like, your status in society is about how much money you've got, how much trading you're doing? Or is that overly simplistic?
14:47 Speaker 06 Yes, I think that is the case, actually. This is a plutocratic society, really, in which wealth counts. And you certainly can work your way up in the food chain to indeed become ennobled and to become part of the Senate. But I don't think we should overdo the social inequalities really that are involved. Anybody in Venice could have a stake in trades. Women could put a little bit of money into trading ventures. The the large merchant galleys, which were owned by the state and were hired out to consortia. There's actually no private shipping effectively in Venice. It's all owned by the state and everybody can have a stake in this and everybody can be a trader.
15:31 Speaker 06 Even if you've got a little bit of money, you can have a go. It's like, you know, putting your money on the horses, but hopefully in a slightly better return. So structurally, I think it's really quite a flat society. If you are enormously wealthy, yes, you can have a pilato on the grand camel. But beyond that, you can't really oppress people very much because you're dependent upon them. These people are going to be involved in constructing the ships which are going to take you there. All these people have value within the Venetian system.
16:01 Eleanor Janega? And I think that that is one of the things that makes it so incredibly interesting because we get to hear a lot more about ordinary people. And now granted, I'm saying that they're very wealthy because they're Venetians and they're they're doing quite nicely for themselves. Thank you very much. But if you look in Venetian documents, we get to hear much more about people who are not just a lord or something like that. Having said that, Venice does have some incredibly powerful people who are the Doges. Can you tell us a little bit about them and why it is that Venice chose to have something like a Doge in the first place?
16:36 Speaker 06 I think they realized that you had to have, Doges is a doct effectively in Latin, a leader, that you had to have somebody who sat at the top of the pile. At the same time, they are very wary of tyranny. And the extraordinary thing about the Doge, who in many respects, he symbolizes the Republic and his function is almost as much ceremonial as it is political.
17:06 Speaker 06 They hedge the Doge in with all kinds of restraints on what he can do. There was one, just one case of a Doge who goes off message and gets executed. But on the whole, they're very wary of tyranny. So a Doge is constrained in all kinds of ways. He cannot receive any gift from a foreign power larger than a pot of herbs. The whole mechanism of collecting a Doge is enormously complicated. I think it's difficult to explain, but 11 people elect 12 people. 12 people then elect 24 other people, who then elect nine people, who elect six people.
17:48 Speaker 06 And the aim of this is to prevent factionalization, really. So in many ways, it's a very flat society. But some Doges are more important in the whole system than others. Their ceremonial function is enormous and they represent for the Venetian people the incarnation of their stage, if you like. The huge sort of professional role that he has. The Ascension Day ceremonial marrying of the sea, when the Doge would step into the golden barge, go out into the Pacific, throw a ring into the sea and say, I married the sea. These kinds of roles, which were reassurance for the Venetian people. He's almost a symbolic figure as much as he is a political figure, I think.
18:29 Speaker 06 Although obviously he carried weight in all kinds of discussions all being held within the Venetian Senate as to what to do. And usually these are men of great experience. They will have been merchants and sell. They will have made boites. They will understand how the mercantile system worked. And they will be deeply embedded in the whole cultural and financial environment which constituted Venice.
18:55 Eleanor Janega? And I think that this is such an interesting role because I think now we have a tendency to equate ceremonial things as somehow fripperies. They're fundamentally unserious. But when you have a system wherein a Doge is essentially elected by quite a, almost Byzantine process, I suppose we could say, it is very...
19:21 Eleanor Janega? Easy to forget that this is something that really symbolizes what is special about Venice to the Venetians. It makes them feel as though they are connected to this individual. And that is so different to, you know, having just a king thrust upon you, you know. So yes, even if this is just a silly little ceremony, it is embodying the way that Venetians think about themselves.
19:44 Speaker 06 Yeah, and this is just unique, really, in that kind of way. He's one of us, effectively. Doges do go on expeditions and campaigns, notably Enrico Dandolo, who goes on the Fourth Crusade. They seem to prize longevity and old age in their doges. Enrico Dandolo, I think, was blind and he was about 90 by the time he set off on the Fourth Crusade. But yes, he is an embodiment and identification of what Venice is, and I think they feel very close to that. I mean, if you think about the three elements of the Venetian state, you've got the Doges Palace, which is the central political life. You've got the arsenale, which is the
20:25 Speaker 06 shipbuilding component, and then you've got the rialto, which is the commercial hub. And these places are really only about 300 yards apart, and that all the people who constituted the top of the power structure in Venice and the Senate, they were merchants, they probably almost all been to sea. And these three functions of the Venetian state are very much welded together in this tiny place. And that those people at the top of the chain understood exactly what was going on in commercial way, and they understood shipbuilding. So it's a very unified political, social structure.
21:06 Speaker 06 I was amazed to discover that in the 1970s, there were some women living in one of the areas of Venice who had never been to St. Mark's.
21:14 Eleanor Janega? I love that. I love that hyper-localism. That's fantastic to me. But as opposed to those women who've stayed in this one neighborhood their whole lives, you know, Venice, you've already spoken about this, really had this need to expand out into the Adriatic in order to secure its position. When it does this, what are the first steps that it has to do? You know, clearly, we can't just hang out in this lagoon and hope for the best in terms of salt and fishes. So what do you do in order to build a marine empire?
21:45 Speaker 06 The first thing they had to do was to deal with the problem of the address, which I've mentioned to you, and really get control of it. And the 10th, 11th centuries was really about that. Secondly, you start looking for business. And a lot of the business, which they certainly got to begin with, as I said, was transportation for the Crusades, which takes them out into the Mediterranean. What you need to build an empire, if you need ports and bases and stop in places. And the development of that sort of comes about over a period of time. The key moment, really, is going to be the Fourth Crusade.
22:27 Speaker 06 Out of which they get a great deal of valuable maritime property. On the south coast of Paloponnes, they get islands in the Mediterranean. They get Crete. They had an early foothold or the links with Constantinople of trading rights within Constantinople. So they're building up a kind of flexible network of support replenishment. This is a model for British maritime sea power. You don't control very much territory, but you think of Gibraltar, Malta, Sichri, those kinds of places that the British Empire had. They need to be doing the same thing. They weren't terribly interested in territory
23:11 Speaker 06 because they simply didn't have the manpower. To occupy places. Really, the only imperial project that they ever had of any size, they did have Cyprus in the end, was Crete. And Crete actually turned out to be an enormous problem for the Venetians over a long period of time. But generally, they wanted ports, they wanted bases. And these were to provide trading opportunities rather than to control land.
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25:47 Eleanor Janega? I think it's very difficult sometimes to understand just how many ports they had as well. So for example, you know, I think one of the first ones, there's lots of land taken over in Croatia, in Dalmatia. So you know, you have like Zadar and places like that are very specifically Venetian really early on. And now we don't think about that at all, I don't think. And there are these opportunities that they get because of their links with Constantinople that allow them to kind of make these inroads and ports. And I think also at the same time, at this point Constantinople doesn't really realize what a threat that is because they're saying, oh, well, they don't control the land. They just have a port there. That's fine. And we do want to trade and that's fantastic.
26:31 Eleanor Janega? You know, it's not as though they're taking away our taxation base. But then you kind of get to the 12th century and it seems like Byzantium is sort of like, what's happened here, you know?
26:41 Speaker 06 Yes, I think that happens in Constantinople where they, Byzantine effectively give up on having a navy. They only slowly realize that the parasite is eating away at their wealth base. And ditto, the Crusaders find themselves completely dependent upon Venetians and of course the Genoese who are side part of the story. You let these people in, they're youthful, they do things for you, but there is a price to pay in the long run. And certainly in the case of Constantinople, that price is going to be a very high one. Certainly, they do control almost all of the Dalmatian coast, really apart from Raduza Dubrovna, which could somehow slip through the net. They riddle their way into situations and
27:26 Speaker 06 then become indispensable and the parasites start to eat the body politic.
27:33 Eleanor Janega? I think that's an incredibly good way of putting it, actually. I suppose we should talk about the elephant in the room, which we've mentioned a few times before. But you have to talk about the Fourth Crusade, I think, when you're talking about Venice. Can you give us a slight pressy on what happens during the Fourth Crusade from a Venetian standpoint?
27:52 Speaker 06 It's this, this is about transporting armies to the Holy Land. The Fourth Crusade is gathering new papal waves. Some crusading nobles come to Venice as being the best transportational hub. And they do a deal to transport 35,000 men and something like four and a half thousand horses to the Holy Land. This is a large sum of money and it's the largest, probably the largest contract in medieval history. Dandolo is the one who said, yeah, we'll go for this. All other commercial activity is suspended for a whole year while they build up the ships they need to carry this huge army to the Holy Land.
28:37 Speaker 06 Unfortunately, the barons who cut the deal hadn't actually realized that it didn't necessarily mean that all the people who were going to go on the crusade were actually going to come to Venice to do it. Some of them were going to leave from other places. And when it comes down to it, the percentage of people who turn up is far short of what they contracted for. So they are then 93,000 marks short of money. This is potential bankruptcy for Venice. And out of this enrolls a really complicated story of mission creep, step by step,
29:16 Speaker 06 where going down the Adriatic, Venice is, oh, look, we just need to pop in and beat up Zara, Zada, who are Christians, and it goes on from there, really. And it's difficult to see exactly how the decision was taken. But it ends up where they get a pretender for the imperial throne of Byzantium. And by an extraordinary act of mission creep, effectively Venice is bankrupt. If it doesn't get this money back, it's in deep trouble, it has no money. So it ends up with an attack on Constantinople, storming the city. And Venetians knew how to do it, actually, sacking the city, winning the eternal deprivation of the Pope.
30:00 Speaker 06 Like dogs returning to their own vomit, I think, was the Pope's view of what the Venetians were up to. And the deeply weird deviation of the mission, you could say. It has to be said that actually, you could say that the red apple, which was what the Turks called Visantium, was also avariciously attractive to the Crusaders. Everybody had this vision of Constantinople as being the place where the money was, this incredibly wealthy. So they weren't averse to going down this road of trying to install a pretender onto the throne of Constantinople. But the long-term consequences of it had to be quite bad for Christian Europe. After
30:41 Speaker 06 this comes this extraordinary situation where we get a sort of a Western kingdom of Visantium with its own ruler and an avaricious carve-up of its kingdom. Now, the Crusading barons, they think land and they want parts of Greece and they want parts of this. Venice doesn't want any land, it wants bases. So it said, "Thank you very much. We'll have Madone and Corone, and Madone and Corone, two little ports. We'll have Crete, we'll have Cyprus, we'll have the island in the Cyclades." This is a network of connecting points. They were
31:21 Speaker 06 wise people, they knew that they couldn't control land. But this really fast-forwards them into constructing maritime empire of all the key points in the Eastern Mediterranean, a footstep into trading in the Black Sea, trading with Egypt, trading with all kinds of eastern potentates. And really, this is a break moment of opportunity to Venice. These bases are likely inhabited by the Venetians, with the exception of Crete and later Cyprus. Crete was the one case where they did go in for full-scale colonial occupation and it
32:02 Speaker 06 remained a continuous problem over several hundred years. The Cretans were proud and independent people. But this provides them with all kinds of stopping places on their routes, of places they want to go to, going to Alexandria, going to ports on the Eastern Mediterranean, going into the Black Sea. And this web of trade is of enormous value to them. Meanwhile, the rest of the Crusaders struggled along trying to control these pieces of land that had really no economic value at all.
32:33 Eleanor Janega? I think it's difficult to overstate how incredibly important this is to Venice. You know, they made this commercial decision to go all in on transporting soldiers. And when that doesn't work out, they make a commercial decision to just sack Constantinople. And you know, this has real knock on effects for how the city considers itself because, you know, to this day, the quadriga that is on top of Saint Mark's, that was stolen from Constantinople and it's still there, you know, it's still up there. And this does launch them to mega levels of power and trading opportunity. But it also means that a lot of people now really hate them, you know, Constantinople notwithstanding.
33:17 Eleanor Janega? And suddenly we start to see the rise of other challengers by the time we get into the 13th century. And in particular here, I'm thinking of Genoa. Can you tell us a little bit about how and when Genoa becomes a threat to Venice as a commercial empire?
33:37 Speaker 06 Genoa had been involved in the Crusader transportation business and they had been involved in rival disputes, even on the coast of the Holy Land in Aka, where they both had little communities and they used to bombard each other. So the animosity is there, it's deep from the off. And the Genoese really do not take kindly to this grab of opportunity that the Venetians have taken. So we start to see a sort of 200 year contest between Venice and Genoa that stretches all the way up to the Black Sea. Genoa is in some ways similar to Venice and in many ways different. Genoa is backed by high mountains, it's cut off from the rest of the world, so it also
34:22 Speaker 06 has to trade, but it's very different. In many ways, they were more innovative and quite a lot of the maritime inventions and commercial inventions were invented by the Genoese really before the Venetians, maritime flocks, the stern rudder, all kinds of ways of organizing finance, banking, but they're very individualistic and they don't have the same, what the difference really is that in many ways, Genoa is very politically unstable.
34:54 Speaker 06 But the Genoese were also extremely good sailors. And these contests break out everywhere. They break out in Cyprus. They break out, as I said, in the Holy Land. They break out in Constantinople. They will break out in the Black Sea. And this is a running fight that will effectively come down to a major war in the 14th century. Towards the end of the 14th century, when a Genoa decides to really penguin Venice into a corner. And in towards the end of the 14th century, the Genoese really managed to bottle the Venetians up in their own lagoon in the War of Kyodja.
35:36 Speaker 06 And really, this is very close to the death of Venice. Because once the Genoese managed to set up in Kyodja, which is a little port just south of Venice, and they managed to barricade the Venetians in. And this is the one point, really, where Venetian solidarity starts to wobble, really. Because the Genoese get quite a lot of help from other people up the Dalmatia also. And there's a near-death experience for Venice, because the Hungarians also get involved on the side of the Genoese and make it impossible for Venice to get supplies from mainland Italy. It's a very close thing, and only by a feat
36:21 Speaker 06 of extraordinary ingenuity. But you can see, actually, at that point, that the solidarity within Venice is starting to crumble. And people are very close to that solidarity. A ransom mark starts to waver and people are saying, look, let's get out. This is not good. And there's one guy, Pizzani, who actually saves the day by turning the tables on the Genoese and counter-blockades them within Kyodja. But it was a very close thing. And Venice could have disappeared. Venice could have vanished. If the Genoese had got into the Venetian lagoon, sacked the city, we would not know Venice as it was now. This is, it was an extremely close run thing.
37:06 Speaker 06 It was as close as it ever got to the extinction of Venice. And we wouldn't know Venice as it is now. I don't know how we would know it. But it would have been shattered, I think, by the Genoese. But this decisive fight, really, they disengage after this point. And there's peaks between the two. And then they kind of work it out a bit more in terms of some kind of respect for each other from about 1380 on.
37:35 Eleanor Janega? Difficult thing to do, two very proud cities, you know, who are essentially fighting for control within the same area.
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39:19 Eleanor Janega? In many ways, I think the 14th century is a bit... Apogee is probably too much, but there's a real high point for Venice because by the time we hit the 15th century, circumstances really begin to change in Europe. You know, you've got, for example, the Ottomans creeping in from the east, which substantially changes how trade is done in the eastern Mediterranean. And you also have people like the Portuguese, who similarly are pretty hemmed in. There's only one way to go, which is to sort of get on boats and go have a look. You know, they're finding these new trade routes and they've got interesting new spices that they can bring in and things like coffee, all these
39:59 Eleanor Janega? incredible things are coming in from the opposite direction. And so how does Venice kind of pivot to deal with these changes? I mean, do they have to adapt in any major way as a result of the Ottomans coming in in the east?
40:14 Speaker 06 Yes, both those forces, you mentioned both the Ottomans and the Portuguese, this doesn't really kick in, I think, until the middle of the 15th century. The Ottomans don't really have any maritime power, really, until the second half of the 15th century. Diplomats at their fingertips play the game quite well for quite a long time. Of course, they want to trade with the Ottomans because Ottomans want things that they've got. And they micromanage this. They have a language school to teach Venetians Ottoman Turkish
40:54 Speaker 06 so that they can schmooze with Zomans. And it works okay for a while, but they realize as time goes on that somebody described it as that it was becoming more and more difficult. Venetians actually, colony in Constantinople was there and they fought on the walls at the fall of Constantinople in fourteen fifty three and this is a wake up moment for them. They then put in a huge amount of effort trying to deal with the unpredictable nature of the Ottomans. They said it was like a juggling a glass ball, you don't want to drop it. And the Ottomans are also actually quite quick learners. What they do is that they
41:35 Speaker 06 accumulate from their subject peoples, all kinds of skills they need to take parts of Greece, they get a navy and they start shipbuilding, they start to become a problem. And alongside this though, actually during the first half of the fifteenth century, Venetians are also doing extraordinarily well in trade, in Alexandria particularly, with the Mamluks. The Mamluks in Karo were very difficult to deal with and they kept changing the rules and Genoese got very upset and then they carried out some raid. The Venetians never did that, they kept going back, they kept going back, they gave them presents, they schmoozed them. They're very difficult to deal with. They might change the rate for
42:18 Speaker 06 the price of spices this year, next year, but they kept going back. And of course, they also provided the Mamluks the things they needed and they did very well out of the Middle East really. Silk, spices, sugar, but they were very good at actually adapting to this. They buy sugar from Palestine, but they work out how to grow it and they grow it in Cyprus. They buy glass from the Middle East, they work out how to make it and then in Murano they start making glass and they end up exporting lanterns back into the mosques of the Middle East. So they do very well and the wealth flows in really and it's really
42:58 Speaker 06 only towards the end of the fifteenth century that they start to get the grass or what is coming for them really. And the one by one, as the Ottomans gather strength, that they're going to find that their bases are under pressure. The first they go is Negroponte in Evia, the east coast of Greece. They're dealing with Mehmed, the conqueror, with really hard work. And from then on, they're still trying to trade, they still want to do business with them and they're watching with with extreme interest how to manage these people, but it's going to become increasingly difficult as time goes on. The other thing that is going to happen, of course, they are doing fantastically well out of the spice trade.
43:41 Speaker 06 So effectively, the great trade fairs on the Rialto were based upon very sound commercial principles. The first is stable currency. The Venetian Gucca, three and a half grands of pure gold, was the dollar of its day, effectively. Execution for clipping Venetian coinage or trying to forge it. Taken as a valuable currency all the way to India. Secondly, to provide goods on time. Their merchant fleets went on timed expeditions to the various ports around the Mediterranean and were back in time for the regular trade there. Third thing, don't rip people off. Tax rate three to five percent. So merchants would come from all over Europe to the Rialto and know that the stuff was
44:26 Speaker 06 there. And they were doing extraordinarily well out of this. They provided places for the German merchants to stay. And it was mind blowing, the wealth that was there. People just couldn't believe anything you wanted. You could buy a monkey, you could buy a carpet, you could buy spices, you could buy sugar, you could buy almost anything that the world wanted. It was like a fantastic Middle Eastern bazaar. But what starts to knock the thing sideways, you mentioned the Portuguese. When Vasco de Gama, they thought it was Columbus actually who'd got to India. When Vasco de Gama gets to India and word comes back to Venice, there are bank crashes in Venice because they will realise, if the Venetians could, across the Indian Ocean,
45:10 Speaker 06 up the Nile, being sold in Alexandria, if the Portuguese could load up, hold shiploads of spices and deliver them to Lisbon, that part of their business model is in trouble. And it is a moment really, in which they start to feel the pressure really from an expanding world. And at the same time, the Ottomans start to floor back territory. They will take Cyprus, they will take Madonna and Corun. They will work their way out the west coast of Greece and the Panto, effectively. And for the first time, they're starting to lose naval battles to the Ottoman.
45:51 Speaker 06 And it's a sort of fall of Singapore moment, really, when these places go down and...
45:58 Speaker 06 This is a moment really at which the line of Venice, you could say, starts to put its paws on land because slowly, in all sorts of ways, they are being outgunned. They probably remained in a galley-based maritime environment for too long and you start to get high levels of piracy within the Mediterranean and they're starting to lose that control. You could say that the Venice up to 1500 is going to be different to the Venice after 1500, if you want to just choose a simple moment really at which they're starting to see what they were under threat. In the 16th century, they survived the longest siege in world history, when the Ottoman will
46:43 Speaker 06 finally take Crete back from them. So there is a moment, I think it's two things. One is expansion of the Ottoman world. The second is exploration of the world beyond the Mediterranean, really, which is going to change the game in all sorts of ways.
46:57 Eleanor Janega? I mean, I think you are completely correct here in that what the Venetians managed to do was really come out on top of medieval Europe. They had this amazing code that works very well specifically for this series of circumstances. And then when that changes, it's very difficult to pivot. When you're all in on this very specific maritime empire, when the way that you're making your money is because you control this particular area of trade, the minute that changes, that changes your position in society as well.
47:33 Speaker 06 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think though, it's interesting just to say a little bit about their attention to detail was fantastic. They knew what they needed. If we look at the arsenale, like the sort of prototype model for conveyor belt production, they micro-managed this. They knew that their ships had to be absolutely perfect. They quality tested their ropes. They had skilled workmen in every single area. They managed their forests on mainland down to the level of the individual tree. This was an extraordinary, a very skilled workforce, each of which had their own specialisms. And their ability to put ships together quickly was quite extraordinary.
48:15 Speaker 06 They were well ahead of their time in a jolly to Venice at a banquet. The Arsene Lotti put a galley together in front of him from the component parts, doing the course of the meal. So this kind of manufacturing skill, they managed everything down. There was a report once a month to the Doge as to what the food supplies were in the city. Because if you didn't have enough food, then people get restless. So the purity of their system was, okay, it will fray, but up to that point, it is quite remarkable. In many ways, what is the modern version of Venice? I think it's Singapore.
48:58 Speaker 06 Small country, living off its wits, really. And I had a conversation actually with some people in the Singapore government about this, who wanted to know the secret because they saw Venice as being both how you do this and the warnings that there are and what could they learn from this? Venice was like a bonded warehouse, effectively. You educate your population, that's what people of Singapore are doing. But one can only marvel at the skill and the detail with which the nations went about managing their economy, their city. There were no riots, apart from a small moment in the Keurigia. The people bought in.
49:43 Speaker 06 There was no social division going on here. There was always food, there was always work, and it was a remarkable achievement.
49:54 Eleanor Janega? Well, you know, fundamentally, this is a story of medieval excellence. And it's a society that was so powerful and so successful that I think it is part of the international imagination to this day as a city.
50:09 Eleanor Janega? And I think you can't say fairer than that. We're still talking about them. We're all still obsessed with Venice, aren't we? And actually, it really does my heart proud to hear that there are governments that are still interested in looking at medieval history in order to unlock potential, which is great news for all of us, I think. But Roger, thank you so much for coming on to speak to me about this. This has been an unmitigated delight.
50:33 Speaker 06 Thank you very much for the opportunity to talk to you.
50:36 Eleanor Janega? Thank you once again to Roger Crowley for joining me, and thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you're interested in medieval empires, and who could blame you, why not check out our past episode on the Holy Roman Empire? Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my recent film, The Medieval Apocalypse, released weekly, and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com/subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts. And tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.
51:33 Speaker 03 Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasia pro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.
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