The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova Read Online Free PDF Page A

the fields of exploration and of finance. Yet this success could only have been built upon the solid base of the city’s stable and reliable institutions, which normally sought to efface such individuality. Here we see the creative tension that drove La Serenissima .

    * A small city north of Venice.
    † It has recently been claimed that the Great Wall was not yet built at this time, and it is true that the final version we know today was only completed during the Ming Dynasty, which lasted from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. However, previous similar constructions, sections of which were incorporated into the present structure, date from as far back as the Qm Dynasty in the third century BC. As some of these early walls were more than 1,000 miles long, they would have proved a spectacular sight, which Polo would surely have remembered, or at least heard about.
    * Many scholars now dispute this story about the Zeno brothers. Yet there is no denying that as early as 1291 a Venetian translation was made of the legendary voyage by the sixth-century Irish monk St Brendan the Navigator, who was said to have sailed west from Ireland until he reached the ‘Isle of Promise and Saints’. This was almost certainly a legend. Even so, it is known that Columbus read of St Brendan with great interest, as well as possessing a well-annotated copy of Polo’s Travels . Before setting out he is said to have declared that he was going in search of the ‘Island of St Brendan’.
    † Sanuto’s maps, if not their intention, were for the most part grounded in reality and contained a revolutionary innovation. His detailed map of Palestine was the first to use a network of straight lines similar to longitude and latitude, intended to delineate relative distances and territorial area with greater accuracy than hitherto. It has been argued that had he extended this technique to a map of China, his geography of the world might have persuaded Columbus that his landfall in 1492 could not have been China, as he believed. However, this is unlikely, as Columbus ignored the correct Ancient Greek calculations of the circumference of the Earth, convinced by the writings of the thirteenth-century English Franciscan monk and pioneer scientist Roger Bacon that the distance west from Spain to China was much less than had previously been supposed.
    * Though as with Columbus in America, here too the Genoese had been preceded some 500 years earlier by the Vikings, whose far-flung expeditions had by this time passed into the mists of myth and oblivion.
    * An indication of the primitive state into which trade had lapsed since the classical era can be seen in the fact that this was the first gold com minted in Europe since Roman times.
    * There was then, just as there is now, no necessary and indissoluble link between the value of all-but-useless precious metals and the value of the functional commodities they purchase. Economists define such a contingent link as fiduciary – that is, dependent entirely upon confidence. The accelerating fluctuations caused by Venice in the value of coinage and precious metals (against each other, as well as against commodities) could easily, in inexperienced hands, have caused such inflation that faith in gold and silver prices simply collapsed. This would have precipitated a flight from precious metals and coinage into more tangible and evidently useful land and commodities. These valuables may have been unwieldy, and thus may have destroyed the efficiency of international trading, but their very unwieldiness and solidity were what inspired confidence. Such loss of faith in investable currency would occasionally be precipitated, in one form or another, with catastrophic effects over the coming centuries. Indeed, more ‘experienced’ hands than those of that unknown fourteenth-century Venetian financial genius continue to this day more or less deftly to undermine the very system they seek to