"City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas"

An interlude:

• The Genoese-Venetian wars repeatedly stalled papal plans to scotch the growing Ottoman threat.
• The Genoese wars, plague, Cretan rebellion, and papal trade bans had made the fourteenth century a testing time.
• the opportunist Catalans, who had been a scourge of the eastern sea, were starting to withdraw.
• Patras applied seven times. On each occasion the senators listened gravely and shook their heads. When it came to outright purchase, they waited for the stock to fall.
• Its principles were continuous oversight and collective responsibility. No officer was to act alone. It required three keys, each held by a different treasurer, to open the Candia countinghouse.
• Everyone was accountable. Everything was written down. By the time of the death of the Venetian state, its archives ran to forty-five miles of shelving.
• The provveditori are authorized to turn up wherever they think useful; their freedom of movement is limitless. Nevertheless, [a typical Venetian caveat] they must endeavor to limit their travel costs.
• The Venetians were lawyers to their fingertips, who operated their system with a fierce logic. In cases of murder there were fine gradations. Homicide was distinguished between simple (manslaughter) and deliberate, and divided into eight subcategories, from self-defense and accidental, through deliberate, ambush, betrayal, and assassination;
• In matters of money, the oppressive presence of the Dominante was inescapable.
• 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.
• rich.’ ” The natural right to gain was the Venetian foundation myth.
• The merchant galleys, built in the arsenal, were property of the state, chartered out by auction each year to bidders.
• rhythms far beyond the confines of Europe. The metronomic cycle of monsoon winds over the Indian Subcontinent set in motion a series of interconnecting trading cycles, like the meshing cogs in an enormous mechanism, which moved goods and gold all the way from China to the North Sea.
• The departure and arrival of the long-distance Flanders galleys would also be synchronized to interlock with this exchange and with the sturgeon season and the silk caravans at Tana.
• The ship was driven along so fast by the strength of a fair wind that, within the space of three hours, we … had only the sky and the waters before our eyes.
• Frankincense powder might be adulterated with marble dust; nutmegs should be “big and firm … you want to pierce the shell with a needle, and if it yields water, it is good; and any other way is not worth anything.
• They paid into a common insurance fund, the cottimo, by which the costs of extortion by Mamluk officials or fiscal penalties imposed on the colony as a whole were shared among its members.
• The bobbin of each hemp spinner was marked so that the work could be individually identified; every rope that emerged from the ropewalk was tagged with a colored label, indicating the use to which it could reliably be put.
• and a load line was marked on its side, a forerunner of the Plimsoll mark.
• The state appointed its own official on merchant galleys, the capitano, the nautical and military leader of the fleet, tasked with protecting the Republic’s property and the lives of its citizens.
• the sailors dubbed the heaviest anchor the “anchor of hope”: It was the last resort.

The downfall:

• The irony of this situation probably escaped them; 250 years after Venice had worked to sack the imperial city, its citizens stood shoulder to shoulder with Greeks to man the walls, guard the chain across the Golden Horn, and repel a besieging army coming for conquest—whose advance the Crusade of 1204 had done so much to
• As soon as the furor had died down, the city of merchants, pragmatic as ever, sent ambassadors back to Mehmet, congratulated him on his victory, and got a renewal of their trading privileges on reasonable terms.
• Beneath the polite surface of diplomatic discourse there was a shadow war in play, which would become a hallmark of Venetian-Ottoman relations down the centuries: Coded messages, spies, and bribery; the collection of information and its mirror image, the dissemination of disinformation; torture, assassination, acts of sabotage—such methods all played their part in state policy.
• The disaster at Negroponte could be put down to a poor appointment or the inadequacy of a single commander; the debacle at Zonchio was systemic. It revealed fault lines in the whole structure.
• It was an example of the mutability of human fortune that one could see “this general pass from such fame and fortune to shame, disgrace, and infamy … and that everything could change in a flash.
• During this tense time, Leonardo da Vinci arrived in the city to offer his services as a military engineer. He came with a head full of extraordinary schemes for the city’s defense—a diving suit of pig’s leather with bamboo pipes for air tubes, sketches for submarines.
• However, both Mehmet and Bayezit had grasped an essential principle of warfare in the closed sea: There was no need for dominion over the waves; it was the land that counted.
• Beyond the gates of Gibraltar, it would be first the Portuguese, then the Spanish, the English, and the Dutch whose wind-powered galleons, packed with heavy cannon, would construct world empires unimaginable in the landlocked sea.
• In a visionary flash, Priuli foresaw, and much of Venice with him, the end of a whole system, a paradigm shift: not just Venice, but a whole network of long-distance commerce doomed to decline. All the old trade routes and their burgeoning cities that had flourished since antiquity were suddenly glimpsed as backwaters—Cairo, the Black Sea, Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad, Smyrna, the ports of the Red Sea, and the great cities of the Levant, Constantinople itself—all these threatened to be cut out from the cycles of world trade by oceangoing galleons. The Mediterranean would be bypassed; the Adriatic would no longer be the route to anywhere;... Nor, from the eastern Mediterranean, was sending their own ships to India readily practical. The whole business model of the Venetian state appeared, at a stroke, obsolete.
• In 1511, the Portuguese conquered Malacca on the Malay Peninsula, the market for the produce of the Spice Islands. “Whoever is lord of Malacca,” he wrote, “has his hand on the throat of Venice.
• the tough, energetic realities of the Stato da Mar into something ornamental. They perhaps reflected structural changes within Venetian society.
• Venice seemed self-generated. The only Italian city not in existence in Roman times, its inhabitants had created their own antiquity out of theft and borrowings; they manufactured their foundation myths and stole their saints from the Greek world. It was, in a sense, the first virtual city—an offshore bonded warehouse with no visible means of support—almost shockingly modern.
• It replaced the chivalrous medieval knight with a new type of hero: the man of business. All these qualities were expressed in the emblem of Saint Mark.
• Over centuries, many of the industries that had made the Levant so wealthy—the manufacture of soap, glass, silk, and paper, the production of sugar—were either usurped by the Republic or undermined by its transport systems. Venetian merchants moved from buying Syrian glass to importing the key raw material—soda ash from the Syrian desert—until the superior glass of Murano was being re-exported to Mamluk palaces.
• when Napoleon finally marched into Saint Mark’s Square, burned the Bucintoro, and trundled the bronze horses off to Paris in wheeled carts,
• There was always something provisional about the Stato da Mar. Like Venice itself, it lived with the idea of impermanence;
• The lintel of more than one collapsed Venetian house on Crete bears the Latin motto “The world is nothing but smoke and shadows.
• The idea of return was potent—the ship at last passing through the lidi again, feeling a different motion to the sea and the familiar skyline rising pale and insubstantial in the shifting light.