ABSTRACT
Editor's Ifitrodztction By the late fifteenth century, Venice had built up a unique position as intermediary between Western and Central Europe and the Middle and Far East. She dealt in oriental goods - spices, cotton, silk, drugs, and jewels, together with fruit, wine, and other produce of her own colonies - and exported European metals and manufactures eastwards in exchange. Venice was the half-way house between East and West, when the Mediterranean was the lynchpin of intercontinental trade. Her status as an entrepbt had always depended on the enjoyment of privileges in the LevantineBalkan Empire of Byzantium, in the crusader states of the Middle East, and in the Mameluke and Ottoman empires which succeeded them. Indeed, with the dismemberment of the Byzantine empire at the Fourth Crusade in 1204, Venice had gained a string of islands and strategic outposts of her own stretching round the Balkan peninsula into the Eastern Mediterranean. These outposts provided stepping-stones to the Middle East, and gave access to the termini in Egypt and Syria of the intercontinental trade routes on which Venice relied for consignments of Eastern goods. In the West, Venice policed and controlled the Adriatic, and from its head commanded overland routes into Germany, Switzerland and France, through which goods could eventually be conveyed to Northern Europe. She was well placed to supply Eastern raw materials to European industries, and to export to the East the metals, from the Central European mines, on which the functioning of oriental trade depended. From the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Venice had established regular contact by sea with Southern France, the Barbary coast, the Iberian peninsula, and, in the north-west, with Flanders and England.
