Dan Snow's History Hit - The Rise and Fall of Venice

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

Venice was the impossible city that rose from mudflats to become a medieval superpower. Venice dominated Mediterranean trade through its vast navy, revolutionary shipyards, and strategic position between East and West. From the glass furnaces of Murano to the spice-laden ships crowding its ports, Dan is joined by historian and author Roger Crowley to explore how Venice became the commercial powerhouse of medieval Europe and why this extraordinary city-state was pushed into decline by the Ottomans, before finally falling to Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797.Roger's book is called 'City of Fortune'.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. It's a city. floating on a silver disk. In a world where everything is converging, where skyscrapers, crowds, skylines, you can walk into the same coffee shop on six continents,

this is a place apart. It's a place of magic and beauty. I have sailed a little boat into Venice, and it just doesn't feel right. It feels like it shouldn't be allowed. But in you go. You sail from the Adriatic, just in. Just sail in from the ocean.

through the narrowest of entrances in the thin, low-lying barrier islands, past the Punta Sabione lighthouse, you just keep going, and there it is. There it is, Venice. You can tie up your little boat in the marina by the San Giorgio Maggiore Church, right opposite St. Marks is Square. It's actually the best kept secret. You pay a few pounds, a few bucks, a few euros. You can stay there overnight.

You have the best view in the world. Or you keep cruising a little bit further on. You actually just sail into the grand canal itself. straight on up until you get to the Ponte de la Academia. That's the first bridge across the canal as you come in from the east. And only then you have to turn around. There you are surrounded by glamorous speedboats and Hollywood stars and all sorts of people and you're in your little battered old sailing boat.

You turn around and head out again. It's one of the greatest things I've ever done. You approach Venice as it should be approached, not by some hellish car, some nasty aluminium box driving over some horrible road bridge. No. But with the ticker. of a southeasterly blowing you up the Adriatic and into the city. For this is a city of the sea.

It was the beating heart of one of history's great maritime empires. Ooh, and when it was so, at its height medieval Venice would have been a sight to behold. Buildings springing from the surface of the water. The furnaces on the lagoon island of Murano firing, glassmakers tinkering, colored wares sparkling in front of their shop fronts. The hustle and bustle. The hustle and bustle of the port, the groaning ships laden with spices and goods from all over the world, Venice, the epicenter of Mediterranean trade. It was always a city that shouldn't have been possible. In fact, it's one of the worst places in Europe in which to build a city,

and it's testament to the desperation of those pioneers that they did so. In around 421, Venice was begun. It was built into the mudflats of a shallow lagoon. There was no farmland. no obvious natural resources to sustain them. And yet somehow, this became one of the richest and most powerful places in medieval Europe. And it was different as well. In an age of kings and emperors, Venice took an alternative route.

It built a republic where a doge ruled, but never alone, checked at every turn by councils and law, restricted in his ability to accept gifts from foreigners. And from this unlikely foundation, Venice did something extraordinary. it became the great middleman, it became the trading hub. It sat between east and west, it channeled silks and spices and luxury goods from Asia and the Islamic world into Europe. And all of that depended on a formidable navy, one that was built in a vast state shipyard, capable of turning out vessels on an industrial scale.

This was a modern maritime superpower. For centuries it stood well near the centre of the world. But like all powers, it wanes eventually. Everything fades away, folks. Venice fell into decline. It was eventually strangled to death by Napoleon who threatened to bombard the city with his gunships. Joining me today on Dan Snow's History Hit, tell this incredible story of the rise and fall of Venice. It's the brilliant historian Roger Crowley. I've been a big fan of his books for years. He's the author of City of Fortune, how Venice won and lost a naval empire.

And he's going to help me explore one of the most extraordinary success stories of medieval history, not just on medieval history, in fact, of global history. enjoy. Roger, thanks so much coming on the podcast. Thank you very much, Dan. I'm delighted to be with you. If you were going to build a great, magnificent, powerful world city, would you necessarily think, look at that lagoon and think, oh, that's a great place to do it.

Tell me about the geography of Venice. Well, absolutely. You wouldn't think stuck at the top of the Adriatic with a cul-de-sac. But in fact, it wasn't a cul-de-sac. From the Bronze Age onwards, it's been a corridor, a trade corridor connecting central Europe with the eastern Mediterranean and places beyond. But there were predecessors actually to Venice. There was Adreel, a Greek town, which was a trade hub, gave the Adriatic its name,

but it's now 15 miles up the Po, which has been silted up. It was then followed by a Roman city called Aquilaire, which again had the same function of the transmission of goods to and from the Mediterranean interstate. Central Europe. This is destroyed by Attila the Hun in 421, I think. So there's always been a role for a commercial hub at the top of the Adriatic. And this is the one which Venice is going to inherit. Venice is the only city in Italy that did not exist in Roman times. It's kind of self-invented after the collapse of the Roman Empire. So that's the sort of the regional geography. What about the precise place where Venice is?

Because there are nice fields and orchards around it and places where you can grow food. I mean, tell us where they established, what would become the city of Venice. Well, this was a flight, really, from the collapse and the terror, the end of the Roman Empire and the Huns kind of ravaging through a part of the world. So it was really a desperate safety measure to put yourself in the lagoon offshore where you can't be attacked easily to start building these extraordinary, fragile huts on stilts in the shallow water. And obviously, they've got nothing. You know, they've got no land.

The only result is they've got really a fish and salt. And these are really the beginnings of their trade, selling fish and salt people roundabout. So you could certainly say it's unpromising. But the only way forward for these people, once they had established themselves in one form or another, was going to be through trade. And the trade that they are going to develop over a period of time is going to be that which effectively controls the Adriatic. Obviously, they don't know this in the early stages.

Venice is self-invented. It comes up with its own story about how it was created on March of 25th, the 421 AD at noon. So it not only creates its own economy over a period of time, but it creates its own story, because it has no story, it has no saints. And everything that it constructs is going to be really something that it's either borrowed, begged or stolen

from somebody else over a period of time. So isn't that amazing? So they head out to the marshes, the most marginal piece of land they can find, not even land, really, and they build a settlement of huts on stilts, try and get away from the Hunnish cavalry and various other people.

But it works. Does that geography protect it? Is it rather a clever move? I mean, take me through the first, of decades and centuries and of Venice's rise? Well, obviously they're safe because unless you've got a maritime competitor, nobody can really get at you and nobody really bothers about you. The process of development for the Venetians is actually,

as they expand down the coast of Italy trading, they start to rub up against the eastern shores of the Adriatic, which is sort of Slavic. and if they wish you develop a trade, they're going to have to meddle with these people. There's a big pirate confederacy on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. So developing the ability to, in effect, wage war on a maritime level to control the Adriatic is the essential step for them. And this will develop over a number of centuries.

They come to call the Adriatic our house. and the moments of their existence, which are the most fragile for them, are going to be those times when they are bottled up in the Adriatic, and it does happen. So controlling the Adriatic is critical, absolutely critical, and really reducing it to a kind of neo-colony. And this is really what happens over the first few centuries, and eventually they would have Kofu, which they call the door of our house. but geopolitically controlling that Adriatic is everything to them.

Without the Adriatic, they're literally dead in the water. They are. So, Roger, is it a little bit, we think of some empires, an army spreading across wide open plains and conquering territory and big color on the map? Is Venice a little bit more like the early English empire? It's toeholds. It's sort of little forts and important promontories all the way down the Adriatic coast. It's islands like Corfu.

So perhaps it begins as a warehouse for trade, then you have to provide a security force, then he might as well take over the city or the headland. Is that how this empire starts to expand down through what is now Croatia and into places like Greece? Yes, absolutely. I mean, you could take Venice as a prototype model of small state maritime empires, of which Britain was one and the Dutch or another. They hold very little territory. They're not a large population. they cannot colonize on a large scale. What they need are bases, strategic bases, a network which they expand out into the Mediterranean over a period of time, which will allow them to trade goods with people across the eastern Mediterranean.

There are never very many Venetians in their empire. I mean, Crete is probably the most heavily actually colonized place. but this lightweight maritime network, and obviously it depends upon maritime force, your military and commercial carrying facility, is critical. So attending to the details of the sea, both in terms of the bases that you construct and your supreme ability at shipbuilding and sailing are critical. If you want to say one thing about the Venetians is that the, They're sailors. And that's what we like about them on this podcast. So, Roger, we won't melt

everyone's brains with the political complexion of Europe in the 500 years after the sack of Rome. But we've got Byzantines, we've got Goths, we've got Germans, we've got everyone fighting it out in Italy, we've got Italian players as well. Does Venice just sort of slightly sit back and watch them all hacking each other to death and sit there safe in its lagoon, just growing rich off the trade and eventually establishes its own independence? I think that's a reasonably good account of it. I mean, they can't put boots on the ground, because there aren't very many of them. And it's not until the 16th century that they start to have any territorial presence in Italy.

So they pass this by on the whole. Their competitor are going to be other maritime powers, and particularly Genoa. But the mayhem of Italy and everything that goes on there really is kind of not their business. They really do not want to get involved. And this makes them outlier of what's going on and all kinds of interesting relationships with the biggest power player in Italy, which is the papacy, I suppose.

The Venetians, you know, say, where Venetians first, then Christians kind of thing. And they're in continuous trouble with the papacy for not doing X, Y, and Z. And they will not brook interference from outsiders. therefore they look at the Pope's sort absolute spiritual authority and over Venice. And finishing said, no, look, we're just not having this. So they're routinely communicated for not doing something or other.

And also the other element of it, I tend to think of Venice in a way as being like a sort of corporate body. And your corporate logo is the mark, really, and clustering around, unifying around this figure of St. Mark is really important to the Venetians. They cannot afford to have internal disputes, factional disputes within the city. They haven't got a feudal system, so they have a nobility, but they haven't got a peasant class whom they can control. Everybody is a contributor in a way, and it's only occasionally there was one Doge who tries to do a deal, a sort of coup, with other powers, Marine Fowlero in the 1300s, who was executed, and they construct their political system very carefully to avoid any one person getting control of this city. So the

election for the Doge process, 15 people would elect nine people who would elect seven people, elect 11 people, who would elect the Doge. And the aim of this was to stop any one group filtering into a position where they get control of the lobby which will elect the Doge. So it's a very complicated but very sophisticated process. The Doge is not allowed to accept any gifts from a foreign power, greater than a pot of herbs. So this fear and this one episode with one Doge who went rogue was one of the reasons why they've got incredible political stability which everybody supports.

And stability and continuity, right? So you might have a wonderful king or queen elsewhere, but then they die and their children are completely hopeless and will fight each other. Is this an advert for peaceful transmission of power and a government that is controlled, albeit by an oligarchy, but where there is a, you have to have an element of consent? Yeah, absolutely. It is. It is an advert. You don't get nepotism in the system. Generally, people who in the end will be, elected tend to be people who have done great things in the Venetian Empire. They come with a good track record of being CEO, part of the Venetian Empire, but it certainly prevents any kind of nepotism and it's unruffled really throughout the centuries. Interesting. So they've come up with a fascinating political solution that really suits them. They're invulnerable to even your mighty kings. They can't march a big army across that lagoon. But the question, Roger, is what have they got to trade? Are these building ships that are very good at carrying other people's trade? They haven't

kind of producing them themselves, right? No, I mean, there's absolutely nothing. They've got absolutely nothing which is valued people. There are two elements of this. I think you're right. One is that they fine-tuned the whole business of shipbuilding maritime technology and power with one part of it. The other is that they are essentially middlemen. And they're the middlemen need bases across the Mediterranean from which you operate. So over a period of time, the Venetian Empire, I like the British Empire. If you think of the British Empire, you know, sort of Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, Suez, Bombay, these kind of little points.

And then same with the Portuguese, they couldn't control much territory. But their aim was really to get control of key nodal trading points over the centuries. and these become very important to them. So, Corfu is important. They get a couple of useful little bases on the south coast of the Peloponnese. The big one is going to be Crete. Crete is really their only full-blown colonial experience.

A footholding Constantinople, in the Black Sea, in the Sea of Azov. And these are tiny footprints, but they're controlled, and generally, these are very heavily fortified. These provide the opportunity to move goods across the main. Mediterranean. They study the whole technology, if you like, of buying and selling very

carefully. Their merchants are extremely well informed. And what they do is they understand supply and demand. And supply of demand is if you want people to come and buy from Venice, and this is what they did, they wanted to have very large trade fairs at regular intervals, you have to have just in time delivery. So they would send out galleys on different trading routes. Some would go to North Africa, some would go to Constantinople, the Black Sea. There would even be a Flanders route, which would see Venetian vessels in the Thames. And the aim was that these ships were timed to come back for the annual trade fair. And the annual trade fair brought in people from all over Europe.

And this is where they bought and sold. And they taxed quite lightly. They didn't rip people off. They understood that a three and a half to five percent tax on all goods coming into the country. So they understand these various elements of wealth, just in time delivery, having the goods, stable currency, which was the Venetian ducat, which was the most reliable currency in the whole of the Mediterranean. Gold coins, three and a half grams of pure gold, if you clip this coin, you'd be executed. And this was a dollar of its day, and it was recognized as far away.

way as India as being a currency. The Indians thought that the picture of the doge kneeling before St. Mark was actually some kind of Hindu god, but leaving that one side. So that they've nailed down all the key elements here. Currency, just in time having the goods, treating people reasonably. They have lodging houses for merchants coming from all over Europe for these fairs. And this is kind of like the souk of Europe. And they would tell anything. If they were the market for it, Growned up mummies from the Valley of the Kings sold as a medicinal cure, you know. And I suppose like the British Empire later, like Aden, like in Singapore, Hong Kong, you go there for a merchant because you're not going to get your warehouse nicked by a capricious monarch or his drunken son.

There's the rule of law, there's insurance, there's brokerage, it's a good place to do business. And you think, well, let's just put our trade through Venice. We'll actually chance is I will get our goods on time and we're not. to get ripped off. Absolutely. And they did have a Jewish community who were very important in the fiscal arrangement because they were useful money lenders. But certainly the fidelity of Venice, its deals, its currency was recognized across the whole of Europe. So it's a republic. There's a sharing of power, unlike elsewhere. Did that stretch down to normal citizens, men and women? Are they part of this project? Do they have any say? Do they have any say?

and are they economically empowered? They probably wouldn't have any stay in the electing of the Doge. This would have been probably the wealthier commercial families. But they had a stake and anyone could have a stake, for example, in a commercial enterprise. If a galley is going to go to Alexandria to buy spices, even women could put a little bit of money into this very, venture. So everyone does have a stake here, actually. Obviously, there's a trickle down of wealth as well, but they're not a voiceless minority. Venice also provides a lot of employment, particularly in the Arsenal, which has a very large, very skilled labor force. These are the

aristocrats of the working population, very skilled people, each of them had their own specialisms in various parts of the whole fabrication of ships. Some guys are very good at making walls. Some people cast cannons, you know, blah, blah, blah. And the Arsenalotti, which are about, I think about 2000, they even had pensions at the end of their working lives. Even if they would be on work, they could just totter down there and do nothing. They would still be paid. So everybody generally, they do have a stake. They also control immigration very carefully, Although there's this sort of commonwealth of Slavs and people down the coast of Adri who are quite important for extraction of products, particularly timber, it's very difficult to become a citizen of Venice, you know, if you're not born Venetian. So, you know, this is controlled as well.

But generally, everybody buys into this project and the logo of St. Mark is kind of in everybody's mind, the fidelity to this. and the great festivals of the year, like the Ascension Day Festival, when the Doge gets into the golden barge and goes out into the lagoon, into the Adriatic and drops a ring in the sea to say, we marry the sea. Everybody would have participated in that. And there was a great place of ceremonial, you know, all kinds of stuff going on around some Mark Square. And everybody has a part in this.

So I think we could say there are occasional incidents, but very few incidents at which the, any sign of insurrection within the city. The genius with which they constructed this, really, I thought it was evolutionary rather than somebody saying, right, let's have a little model of what the perfect state looks like, and then we can carry it out. And I think the base of this was, because of the ecological insecurity of Venice, rising tides could wipe out your city, that everybody had to pitch in to barricade this city against the sea as much as anything else. So everybody has a stake in survival on this fragile ship, you could call it.

You listen to Dantz knows history of folks. Talk about Venice, don't go away. You mentioned the Arsenal there. The Arsenal is where they build these ships, as you say, they build oars and cannon and everything. The Arsenal always presents me with a bit of a problem, because when we say the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, and the first factories are in Britain, that us Brits get very excited about that in the 18th century.

The Arsenal looks a lot like an industrial revolution. process, doesn't it, way before that. Tell me a bit more about that and how they build these ships. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, Dan. I mean, it's sort of like a prototype version of Henry Ford Assembly. They worked out all the features of shipbuilding, and they divided them into specialisms. So you have guys who make oars, you have guys who make ropes, you have a rope walk, where they just make ropes, and these are color-coded according to their use. Quality control is everything, because of the Venetians, they fine-tuned this down to the basics, really, that a snap rope can lead to a shipwreck and the loss of a whole shipful of valuable goods.

So what they did was they assembled all the parts of these ships. They have two types of ships, effectively, the war galley, which is kind of fast rowing boat with sales, And then the merchant galley, which had, with a bigger ship, was the bulk carrier of goods, which also had oars for maneuvering, but was basically a sailing ship. That was a ship which actually brought in the goods. The war galleys protect the Venetian fleets. But they've broken this all down into bits. So when it came to war, what they seemed to do was the dry store, all the parts that you needed,

like the hulls, the oars, and so on. And when it came to a war, they were put all these together incredibly quickly. and the party piece when Henry the third, I think, of France, in front of him, the Arsenal L'Ochti constructed a galley in front of him in the course of a meal. And they were driven nuts when they tried to ally with the Spanish during the time of the Ottoman War. The Spanish took forever to get their ships together because they didn't have enough rope or they didn't have the right sort of mass. And they micromanage this down to the level of forestry into individual.

trees. So you need some trees which are ideal for mass. You need other trees which will provide the curved skeleton of the hull. You know, they've really micromanaged this. They evolved over a longish period of time. It was, you know, it just blew people away when they saw it. The one thing they didn't get quite right for a while was that actually making gunpowder in this place wasn't exactly brilliant. And they had a couple of disastrous explosions. And in the end, they decided, Well, I think we better take gunpowder manufacture off into Murano or Burano, one of the little islands in the lagoon. They haven't got it quite right. But in the end, people have never seen anything like this.

It's protected by a huge wall, which was manned day and night by watchmen, because obviously this could be a prime target. The watchman had to give the call to the next watchman, and if they fail to do it, they'd be removed. The Lion of Venice has on it an open book saying, peace to you, Mark. the Venetian arsenal has the Lion of Venice over its gate, but the book is shut. This is we're ready for war. But there's three things really going on here. One is the Rialto where the merchandise is sold. This is the Great Suke.

One is the Doge's Palace, the center of administration, and one is the arsenal. And they're almost within shouting distance to each other, about 300 yards away from each other. So this is a very unified... basis and example of how these bits work together. Tell me about the Fourth Crusades. So 13th century, got one of the many Crusades heading to the Holy Land, as the Europeans described it, to try and revive Christian fortunes there. And Venice gets very, very involved.

Yeah, this is an extraordinary tale of mission creep. Crusaders turn up in Venice because they know this is a place for ships. and they strike a deal to take 35,000 Crusaders to the Holy Land, 85,000 Mark, which is an awful lot of money. Venice agrees to the deal. It involves a year's work and half the male population of Venice in the construction of ships. This actually is kind of a founding moment, actually, in the development of Venetian shipbuilding. The problem is that the guys who came along did the deal assume that 35,

thousand crusaders would all come to Venice. But they don't. They come from other places. And when it comes to departure, they can't pay. They haven't got the 85,000 marks. And so from the beginning, the crusade is in trouble. The Venetians are extremely worried. They've stopped all trade for a year to build these ships. And as they set out down the airdratic, you start to get all kinds a mission crepe goes on. Firstly, we decide that we need to duff out some Christian in a place called Zara on the shoulders of the Adriatic. They go on, and it becomes, it's quite difficult to explain, but I think in the background with this, everybody knows that Constantinople is a red apple, one of those most desirable wealthy places in the world. And they kind of find

a pretender to the throne of the emperor of Constantinople. And, for reasons which are pretty still obscured, I think, to many people, they deviate and decide that there's been an injustice for the pretender, and we need to replace the presence emperor with this emperor. So they end up sacking Constantinople. This is an extraordinary feat of mission creep. The Pope accuses the Venetian probably quite reasonably of being dogs returning to their own vomit. And Constantinople is sacked. I mean, you know, It's not only the Venetians. There are various other factions involved who are kind of interested in this.

But out of this for Venice comes an awful lot of things that they want. Venice doesn't want land. A lot of the Byzantine Empire is divided up into lots of various little baronies in Greece and so on. Venice doesn't want. It wants bases. So what it gets out of it are very useful pieces of strategic harboring on the south coast of Greece, Negroponte, which is a long island, Evia, the islands of the Aegean, and most important of all, Crete. So this provides donations with a complete trading web for trading, like the Genoese.

They also get a foothold in Constantinople. This is valuable, not only for trading in Constantinople, but then they can start trading up the Black Sea and into the Sea of Azov. So they now, on this basis, have that complete little network of small-state marries. maritime hubs, which we talked about earlier. And so from the Venetian point of view, this is a critical turning point in their fortunes. They're now connected everywhere. They can trade with Muslims in Alexandria. They can trade with the people in the Black Sea. They can control the sea in many ways. They can control the eastern Mediterranean. Extraordinary that

Constantinople has held out against Muslims, against quote-unquote barbarian forces coming down from central Europe, and then it falls to this Venetian crusader force in the 13th century. It's an extraordinary moment. And the Venetians don't just get islands. They get a bit of loot as well, don't they? They get some nice statues, which people will be familiar with. Oh, they do. They get the bricabrack that is on the front of St. Marks. There are the four horses which came from the hippodrome. There are various little statues of emperors. There are people on the tops of columns, all sorts of pieces, interesting pieces of marble crop up. icons. Yeah, they took the good stuff. They took the good stuff back to Venice. Amazing.

What about regional rivalries? We've got Genoa, you've mentioned. They go after each other, don't they? The 13th and 14th centuries. And then you get the coming of the Ottomans. The Venetians are often at war, aren't they? They are. Genoa is the main rival in the Mediterranean, the same kind of maritime base. The genuies are very different to the Venetians. They're great individualists, actually. Actually, their political system is a basket case with various noble factions taking over and very unstable. But they're very innovative, actually, the Genoese, things like gold currency, stern rudders,

maritime insurance, public clocks. These are things invented by the Genoese. So they're very interesting. It comes to a head the fighting across the Eastern Mediterranean between the Venetians and the Genoese, particularly in Cyprus, wherever the two meet, somebody summed up the difference between the Venetians and the Genoese, unfavorable to most. It said, the Genoese are like donkeys. When you hit them, they all scatter.

The Venetians are like pigs. When you hit them, they all cluster together, the two. But Venice's near-death experience happens at the end of the 14th century when the Genoese established themselves just down the coast from Venice. and effectively barricade the Venetians into their own lagoon. They're also in league with the Hungarians as well, the War of Kiojia. And it's almost the end of Venice because they're slowly being stalled to death. In the last minute, they managed to turn the tables on the Genoese and Kiyadhia.

But the lesson there is really, if you can't control the Adriatic, you are dead in the water. And this was as close as they got, really, before the end of the Venetian Republic, with Napoleon pitching out a few hundred years later. But these two, the Venetians and the Genoese, I mean, they both traded in Alexandria, but the Genoese, when they were being ripped off, they got very angry and carried out some military enterprise. The Venetians were much more subtle. They used diplomacy. They worked around them.

They found solutions. and so in the long run, they kind of win out over this commercial contest. More Venice coming up after this. Another great rival emerges in the Eastern Mediterranean, particularly, the Ottoman expansion. You get these extraordinary battles taking place between the Ottomans and the Venetians, these Venetians, these Venetian fortresses that have been built on these islands that you've mentioned. Is 1453 the important turning point there? Constantinople falls to the force of Islam, the Turks,

and they keep pushing on from there. It definitely is, Dan, yeah. At this point, the Ottomans who are not a maritime force, but they're very good at co-opting people. And the lands that they conquer, Greece particularly, they develop navies from this point on. And we start to see the Ottomans kind of pushing into the Mediterranean. The Venetians who are fastidious study the Ottomans in enormous detail as to how to deal with this. They're very good at diplomas. see, but it's difficult dealing with the Sultan. Venetians said dealing with the Sultan is like juggling a glass ball. You know, it's easy to drop. But they're diplomats to their fingertips. They trained up people to speak Ottoman, Turkish, to try and soften up the Sultan. They provided gifts, but the Ottomans advance and advance into the Mediterranean.

And we're going to see the Venetian colonies or empire slowly dismantled bit by bit. we're going to see Evia, which is on the east coast of Greece taken. That was an important base. We're going to see them scoop up the islands. The big one comes is going to be Crete. Crete is the only place that the Venetians actually occupied on a colonial basis and where they actually settled. Crete was the hinge of their maritime empire.

It was the base for voyages to Alexandria. And when the Ottomans come for this at the start of the 17th century, this is a critical moment. The siege of Heraclion turned out to be the longest siege, I think, in world history, 21 years. But the Ottomans get it. And at that point, we start to see the collapse of the Manitian's ability to trade. They're being slowly, slowly bottled up. and this is the point really at which, because they have nothing else apart from trade, is becoming more difficult.

And despite their diplomatic juggling game with the Ottomans, they cannot win this. And it does get to the point where Ottomans are on the coast of the Adriatic, are almost within distance of Venice. and this is the sort of the existential moment for Venice really where it's becoming harder and harder for them to manage an empire. At this point, they start to, the quite a famous painting of the Lion of St. Mark, and Sir Mark's Lion, for the first time, has his, although he's got bodies in the sea, his paws are on the land, and at that point, they're starting to expand modestly into territory

in Italy as well. So at this point, we're going to see the start of the long decline of Venice. And I suppose you give a sense that the Ottomans encroaching, the Ottoman Empire becomes so big and indeed starts to occupy lots of bits of Eastern Europe. So trade, if you want to trade with Eastern Europe, you can start to go through that Ottoman Empire, suppose. The Ottomans can start to corner that trade by creating that one vast, reasonably homogenous empire. But it's also the poor old Venetians are getting it from the other direction as well,

some Europeans, because you're obviously a huge expert in the Indian Ocean. Let's quickly just rehearse the fact that one of the boats unholy and fascinating alliances, I think, in history, is the fact that the Portuguese erupt into the Indian Ocean and start bypassing that trade route that traditionally goes across the Indian Ocean into what we now call Middle East, northeast Africa, from Alexandria and then to Europe. The Portuguese can take it all the way around in their own hulls. And so you get the Venetians kind of aligning themselves with Muslim nations trying to get the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. Fascinating. Yeah, I mean, the signal moment was, the spice trade was very important to the Venetians

via the Mamlocks in Egypt, that when the Portuguese get to Malacca, a Portuguese writer said, he who has Malacca has his hands on the throat of Venice. And there's almost a day in Venice when they hear that the Portuguese have gotten to the Indian Ocean. And there are bank crashes, actually, because they realize that this is really an existential threat to the wholesale of the kinds of luxury goods, the silks, the perfumes, the gold, the spices, is now under threat. And indeed, you can start in a way to see the Mediterranean itself becoming almost a backwater for a much larger pan-global game that's going to develop. And certainly, I think the moment when the Portuguese make it in the Indian Ocean is a very, very important turning point.

And as you say, they're looking for support from the Ottomans at this point to do something in the Indian Ocean, which they do make some attempt at. This is a moment, I think, when the decline of Venice is registered. You can almost register it to the day when they got the news that the Portuguese were there. But Venice holds out, and in the end, it's that man who reorders Europe and it's virtually its entirety. It's Napoleon Bonaparte who delivers the final blow. Just quickly take us right the way through to the end. Because Dennis has still been largely invulnerable. So you can take away its trade, but it's still there. No one's conquered it. But then what happens? Well, as I say, it gets involved in the politics of Italy and have land holdings in

Italy. You can see it morphing. I mean, it's still trading within the Mediterranean, but it's become still a commercial and financial hub. And quite quickly, it's becoming a tourist resort, actually, by the 17th century. You know, people want to come here. They want to see it. They want to spend their money here. So it's a long, slow decline. They still hold on to the Adriatic. The Adriatic is somewhere they plunder for all kinds of resources, for shipbuilding, for stone and so on, and trading within that perimeter. And the one place that the Ottomans try several times to take, but never take is Kofu. So they've still got an entrance into the Mediterranean, and they're still trading. But increasingly, it's becoming a cultural phenomenon in

Europe. And obviously, by the time we get to the 18th century, it's the place of the Grand Tour, with the Venetians still doing very well out of people coming. It helps to have as many saints in your city as possible. They're very good at stealing saints from people, having still in St. Mar, They've got a bit of St. Nicholas, and these are very good because the faithful will come to your city to be involved. So it's a long, slow decline into gentility, you could say. And when Napoleon comes and trundles off with the four horses, it is the end. But you could see down the coast in a lot of the places that have been Venetian colonies, great sadness on one of those places. They had great ceremony, and they burned the...

Venetian flag and wept because it had been there forever and was part of their cultural melange of Adriatic cultural life. So it's a long-so collapse. You know, Roger, as you've been talking, there's so much wonderful stuff in this history. There's thought-provoking moments for those of us in the world today. But also, it's a wonderful bit of history because it's the world's most popular tourist destination. Everyone loves Venice. It's extraordinary, isn't it, actually? I mean, I think The only time to go is February. Then it's invented the package tour, actually, of taking people to the Holy Land,

all included on a Venetian ship, dreadful food, awful conditions in the dorm. But they've really only got themselves to blame for developing tourism in all kinds of ways. And they traded on that. We've made lots of modern parallels in this, but it does seem very like a kind of Singapore, Hong Kong today. I mean, Singapore, a better example, I suppose. Very small, but with an enormous economic and commercial clout. I think that's right. I had a conversation with some political people in Singapore

about looking for the parallels between Singapore and Venice, and what were the lessons they could learn from its growth, but also from its decline. Small population, no natural resources, highly educated, but living in a complicated political world. So those small state kinds of entities are places who look to Venice as a model. And I think you're right, Dan. I think it's an absolutely valuable kind of analogy for such places as Singapore.

Thank you so much, Karen, the Vogue. We're talking about mighty land empires with huge armed forces, and it's fun to talk about a different model of empire, a different model of polity. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much, then. It was really interesting. Thank you so much to Roger Crowley for coming on the pod. We're going to have them back in the summer later this year

to actually pick up the story really and look at how the rise of Portugal and Spain, as the next great maritime powers, would help to throw Venice into the shade. The story of how Spain and Portugal's race to get the spicy. islands of Indonesia in the 16th century changed the world. And you know the best way of making sure you don't miss that. And that is hit following your podcast player. Do that right now. And you're also going to want to focus this summer it's all going to pop off on Down Snow's history, as the older millennials say. We're going to be looking at the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. We're talking to Mary Beard. We're going to be explaining everything you know about the Odyssey,

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