City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire

ROGER CROWLEY

CITY OF FORTUNE

How Venice Won and Lost
a Naval Empire

For Una

‘The people of Venice neither have any foothold on the mainland nor can they cultivate the earth. They are compelled to import everything they need by sea. It’s through trade that they have accumulated such great wealth.’

LAONICUS CHALCONDYLES, fifteenth-century Byzantine historian

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

List of Illustrations

Maps

Place Names in this Book

PROLOGUE
: Departure

PART I
Opportunity: Merchant Crusaders

1 Lords of Dalmatia

2 T he Blind Doge

3 T hirty-four Thousand Marks

4 ‘A Dog Returning to its Vomit’

5 At the Walls

6 Four Emperors

7 ‘The Works of Hell’

PART II
Ascent: Princes of the Sea

8 A Quarter and Half a Quarter

9 Demand and Supply

10 ‘In the Jaws of our Enemies’

11 The Flag of St Titus

12 Bridling St Mark

13 Fight to the Finish

14 Stato da Mar

15 ‘Like Water in a Fountain’

16 City of Neptune

PART III
Eclipse: The Rising Moon

17 The Glass Ball

18 The Shield of Christendom

19 ‘If Negroponte Is Lost’

20 Pyramid of Fire

21 Hands on the Throat of Venice

Epilogue: Return

Sources and Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

Plates

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

List of Illustrations

1 The Basin of St Mark

2 The capture of Constantinople in 1204, by Jacopo Tintoretto

3 Detail from ‘The Meeting of Etherius and Ursula and the Departure of the Pilgrims’, St. Ursula Cycle, 1498, by Vittore Carpaccio

4 Detail from ‘The Ambassadors Return to the English Court’, St Ursula Cycle,
c
.1490–95, by Vittore Carpaccio

5 La Riva degli Schiavoni, the Senza and the departure of the doge in the Bucintoro, by Leandro Bassano (da Ponte)

6 Marco Polo setting out from Venice with his father and uncle for the court of Kublai Khan, from a fifteenth-century manuscript.

7 The gateway of the Arsenal

8 Carpenters building ships in the Venetian arsenal

9 Rovigno (Rovinj) on the Istrian peninsula of Croatia

10 The Venetian fortress of Modon (Methoni), southern Greece

11 The Venetian harbour fortress at Candia (Heraklion), Crete

12 The lion of St Mark, Famagusta, Cyprus

13 The reception of the Venetian ambassador in Damascus, from the School of Gentile Bellini

14 Woodcut of the battle of Zonchio, 1499

Illustrations in the plate section are reproduced by kind permission of the following: Roger Crowley (1, 7 and 12), Palazzo Ducale, Venice, Italy/The Bridgeman Art Library (2), Galleria dell’ Accademia, Venice, Italy/Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/The Bridgeman Art Library (3), akg-Cameraphoto (4), The Art Archive/Academia BB AA S Fernando Madrid/Collection Dagli Orti (5), IAM/akg/World History (6), The Art Archive/Private Collection/Gianni Dagli Orti (8), Igor Karasi/Shutterstock Images (9), Andreas G. Karelias/Shutterstock Images (10), John Copland/Shutterstock Images (11), akg-Erich Lessing (13), The Trustees of the British Museum (14)

Maps

Venice

Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean 1000–1500

Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade 1203–1204