Venice

By the late fifteenth century Venice had established itself as a major Mediterranean intermediary between Europe and the East. The Venetian ducat had become common coinage in Eastern markets. Venice imported primarily spices and silk and exported metals and manufactures. The port city retained its status despite a conservative commercial and economist monopolistic policy that continued through the sixteenth century. The public banks, created for the first time in 1587, also practiced the traditional conservatism in means of exchange that nevertheless proved effective.

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century Venice faced two challenges. One was the expansion of Turkish power in the eastern Mediterranean and Turkey's monopoly on agriculture products. The other was the discovery by the Portuguese of new oceanic trade routes round the Cape of Good Hope to India and the Far East; this discovery threatened to destroy the Mediterranean's position as the great channel of intercontinental trade and to replace Venice and Genoa as the supreme Mediterranean international entrepôts. Nevertheless, retaining good relations with the Ottomans enabled the Venetians to import spices through the Red Sea and Syria after the Ottoman conquest of Eygpt and the Levant in 1517. Eventually, due to the effective control of the Spice Islands that the Dutch gained at the early seventeenth century, they cut off the flow through the Red Sea and ended the old spice trade through the Levan.

In the late sixteenth century and during the seventeenth, Venice faced other crises—the decline of its shipbuilding and the wars against the Ottomans on Cyrpus and Crete. Consequently, the English and Dutch, Venice's competitors in the Mediterranean, consolidated with the French their commercial position in the Ottoman ports at the expense of the Venetians, striking a fatal blow to the Venetian monopoly on Levantine trade. The northerners shifted their activity to the free port of Long-horn, and Venice became a regional port exporting industrial products to the Ottoman Empire. A century later the city lost this role to the English and Dutch. Western trade was by then decidedly larger than Levantine trade. Venice imported manufactured goods on a large scale from England, France, and Holland, and exported agricultural and primary products or partially worked goods.

In the seventeenth century Venetian commoners performed manufacturing, and the nobility increased its landholdings in the mainland in order to diversify and preserve their capital as a hedge against commercial risks. Trade was conducted mostly by foreigners, including Jews. During Venice's wars against the Turks in the late sixteenth and seventeeth centuries restrictions on foreigners were relaxed, and they became Venetian citizens.

Beginning in the 1730s, both Venetian trade and shipbuilding were comprehensively reformed. The city's ships provided transit safe from Mediterranean pirates, and "neutral shipping" along the sea routes to the West, to London and the Americas during the American and French Revolutions, and to the Levant during the wars of the Turks against the Russians in the Eastern Mediterranean. Until Venice's fleet and merchant marine were destroyed in the Napoleonic Wars, Venice was the leading port and the busiest center of shipbuilding and shipping in the Adriatic. Assigned to Austria in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, Venice was granted by the Austrians free-port status, and was valued more for strategic and military reasons than as a major commercial outlet for the Habsburg Empire, a role played by Trieste. A new class of rich Venetians emerged—the middle class, or borghesia.

Since 1866, when Venice was released from Austrian dominion and united with Italy, the development of Venice's industry shifted the city's urban center and the expanded its port. With the early-twentieth-century shift of industry from Venice to the hinterland, an extensive industrial zone with port facilities for large containers was developed at Marghera, next to Mestre at the end of the causeway that had brought the railway to Venice. Marghera and Mestre and the Lido were combined with the city of Venice into one unit of urban government. Venice became again a great port, second only to Genoa among the ports of modern Italy, with tourism and industry leading its international trade.

SEE ALSO Agriculture;Black Sea; Cabot Family; Canals; Cargoes, Freight; Cargoes, Passenger; Chambers of Commerce; Containerization; Egypt; Ethnic Groups, Armenians; Free Ports; Genoa; Harbors; Italy;Mediterranean;Millets and Capitulations;Port Cities;Spices and the Spice Trade.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Faroqhi, Suraiya. "The Venetian Presence in the Ottoman Empire, 1600–30." In The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy, ed. Huri Islamoglu-Inan. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

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Pullan, Brian., ed. Crisis and Change in the Venetian Economy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. London: 1968.

Rapp, Richard T. Industry and Economic Decline in Seventeeth-Century Venice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976.

Ruthy Gertwagen