Place · maritime republic & home port · Italy
Venice
Also known as Venice, Venezia, Serenissima
The republic that held the Levant end of the spice route, and the home port of the two Europeans in this repository who reached India before the Portuguese did: Marco Polo, who came back by sea in 1295, and Niccolò de' Conti, who came back overland in 1444. Everything Indian that reached Europe before 1500 was priced here.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 45.441, 12.316
Worth knowing
Tomé Pires wrote that whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice, and he was right: the Cape route broke the republic's monopoly within a generation of 1498. Polo's account was dictated in a Genoese prison after Venice lost a battle, and Conti's to a papal secretary in Florence as penance for a forced conversion.
Connections (4)
- Trade routeHormuz
Venice held the Levant end and Hormuz the Gulf end of the route Polo came home by, and between them the spice trade was priced twice before it reached Europe. His book is the fullest account of what lay between the two, and the Cape route that broke the arrangement opened two hundred years after he got home — with a Venetian's description of the Indies on board.
- Traveller routeHampi / Vijayanagara
Conti in the 1420s and ʿAbd al-Razzāq in 1443 are the two eyewitnesses to Vijayanagara before the Portuguese, one a Venetian merchant travelling as a Muslim and the other a Timurid ambassador. They give the city different circuits and the same impression, and between them they are the reason Domingo Paes's account eighty years later can be checked against anything at all.
- Trade routeDamascus
Damascus and Venice are the two ends of the Levant leg, and between them lay the whole spice trade of the fifteenth century: cargo landed at Hormuz or Jeddah, carried overland, and sold to Venetian buyers at Damascus, Aleppo or Alexandria. Conti learned his Arabic on that road, and the Cape route destroyed the arrangement within sixty years of his return.
- Alternative toLondon
Venice priced the Indies for four centuries by holding the Levant end of the overland route; London chartered a joint-stock company in 1600 to go round the Cape and buy at source. Roe's embassy is the early, unimpressive stage of the second arrangement, and within a century it had made the first irrelevant.
On these journeys
- Marco Polo — the Indian Ocean homeward (c. 1292–95)
- Niccolò de' Conti — twenty-five years east (1419–44)
Sources
Wikipedia, “Venice”. Marco Polo, Il Milione; Niccolò de' Conti in Poggio Bracciolini, De varietate fortunae, book IV; Frederic Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (1973).
Open Venice in the repository →