To understand why Venice became the wealthiest city in medieval Europe, it helps to look at a map — or rather, to imagine the map as it functioned economically in the 12th and 13th centuries. Venice sits at the top of the Adriatic, connected by water to the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Its merchants could sail to Constantinople, to Alexandria, to the Levantine ports where the overland caravan routes from Asia terminated. They could buy silks, spices, dyestuffs, and cotton from the East and sell wool cloth and silver from the West. The city controlled both ends of a trade in goods that European consumers desperately wanted and could not produce locally.
Silk was the most valuable textile in the trade, and Venice maintained its position in the silk market through a combination of political relationships and ruthless commercial practice. The Byzantine Empire had its own silk industry, but Venetian merchants — who had extracted extraordinary trading privileges from Constantinople through a series of treaty negotiations and, eventually, the Crusades — were able to move Byzantine and later Syrian silk into Western Europe at volumes and prices that other merchants could not match. When the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204 (led substantially by Venetian commercial interests, a fact that sits awkwardly in any account of the period), Venice acquired direct control of key trading posts throughout the eastern Mediterranean.
The Fabric of Diplomacy
Venetian merchants were also important agents in the transmission of eastern textile techniques to European weavers. The city itself developed a significant weaving industry, particularly in silk velvets and brocades. Venetian velluto — silk velvet — became one of the most coveted fabrics in 14th and 15th century Europe, its production protected by strict guild regulations and its trade patterns carefully managed. Cut velvet and voided velvet, in which pattern is created by shearing some pile loops while leaving others, were specifically Venetian innovations that spread to other Italian cities and eventually northward into France and Flanders.
The role of textile trade in Venetian diplomacy was explicit and calculated. Valuable fabrics — cloth of gold, silk velvet, fine wool from Flanders — were diplomatic gifts, bribes, tribute, and signals of alliance. When the Doge received a foreign embassy, the setting was the Doge’s Palace, hung with textiles that communicated Venice’s wealth and cosmopolitan reach at a glance. A sultan or a pope would leave the encounter having been shown, among other things, that Venice had access to the finest materials in the world. That access was itself a form of power.
The Ottoman Shift
The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 did not immediately destroy Venetian trade — Venice negotiated trading rights with the Ottomans relatively quickly, and the two powers maintained a complex relationship of war and commerce for the following two centuries. But it changed the terms. Venice was no longer dealing with a weakened Byzantine court; it was dealing with an expanding empire that could set its own conditions. The opening of direct sea routes to Asia by the Portuguese, beginning in the 1490s, gradually undermined the eastern Mediterranean trade that had been Venice’s foundation.
By the late 17th century, Venice was no longer the dominant textile trading city in Europe — Antwerp, then Amsterdam, then London had taken that position. But the city had spent four centuries as the point through which the East’s most valued textiles entered Western Europe, and the traces of that trade remain in the language of cloth itself. ‘Damask’ takes its name from Damascus, through which Venetian merchants traded. ‘Muslin’ derives from Mosul, another trading city. ‘Taffeta’ comes from the Persian tāfta, woven fabric. The vocabulary of European textiles is a map of the old trade routes, with Venice somewhere near the centre.