City of Fortune Quotes
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Across the barriers of holy war, the crusades had given Europeans a taste for oriental refinement. Spices were the first manifestation of a world trade and its ideal commodity. They were lightweight, high in value, low in bulk, and almost imperishable; they could be readily transported over long distances by boat or camel, rebagged into smaller lots.
It was as if Venice had stolen not only the marble, icons and pillars of Constantinople, but its imperial imagery, its love of ceremonial, its soul. In the submarine gloom of the mother church, Easter was celebrated with words that linked sacred and profane, the risen Christ and the Venetian Stato da Mar: ‘Christ conquers!’ went up the cry.
‘Christ reigns! Christ rules! To our lord Renier Zeno, illustrious doge of Venice, Dalmatia and Croatia, and lord of a quarter and half a quarter of the empire of Romania, salvation, honour, life and victory! O, St Mark, lend him aid!’
When Andrea Giustinian was sent to Tana in 1396, he was staggered to discover nothing there – no people, no standing buildings – just the charred remains of habitations and the eerie crying of birds over the River Don. The whole settlement had gone down in fire and blood before an assault by Tamburlaine, the Mongol warlord, the previous year. In 1397 Giustinian appealed to the local Tatar lords for permission to build a new, fortified settlement. Venice simply started again. Tana was that important.
Mehmet was famously secretive. When asked about a future campaign he was reported to have replied, ‘Be certain that if I knew that one of the hairs of my beard had learned my secret, I would pull it out and consign it to the flames.’
On paper the Venetians were granted all of western Greece, Corfu and the Ionian islands, a scattering of bases and islands in the Aegean Sea, critical control of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles , and most precious of all, three eighths of Constantinople, including its docks and arsenal, the cornerstone of their mercantile wealth.
The Venetians had come to the negotiating table with an unrivalled knowledge of the eastern Mediterranean. They had been trading in the Byzantine Empire for hundreds of years and they knew exactly what they wanted. While the feudal lords of France and Italy went to construct petty fiefdoms on the poor soil of continental Greece, the Venetians demanded ports, trading stations and naval bases with strategic control of seaways.
Between 1456 and 1479 the Council of Ten authorised fourteen attempts to poison Mehmet, via a string of unlikely operatives, including a Dalmatian seaman, a Florentine nobleman, an Albanian barber, a Pole from Cracow. Most promising of all was Mehmet’s Jewish physician Giacomo. These murder projects, apparently unsuccessful (though the actual circumstances of Mehmet’s death remain murky), were never abandoned.