“Venice and the Mongols: The Eurasian Exchange That Transformed the Medieval World” by Nicola Di Cosmo and Lorenzo Pubblici
Those hoping that a book called Venice and the Mongols would be a deep-dive into everything Marco Polo will be disappointed, for that most celebrated of Venetians warrants only a single chapter. Authors Nicola Di Cosmo and Lorenzo Pubblici focus rather more on Venice’s forays—commercial and territorial—into the Black Sea, where they ran up against the Mongols in Crimea. After the Fourth Crusade and the Mongol’s westward conquests, “The Pontic area,” write the authors, “became a common space, a nexus between Asia and Europe” at what was respectively the western- and eastern-most expansion of each.
Neither presence lasted very long (“a century and a half”), and each side spent as least as much effort on internal battles as on developing trade with with the other side: Venice was often in competition (if not war) with Genoa, who had reached the region first, while the various parts of the Mongol empire—the Ilkhanate and the the Ulus Jochi (what became the “Golden Horde”)—were by that time often at each other’s throats as well.
The authors are of the view that these connections were fundamental, that “the story of Venice and the Mongols unfolds on the eve of a far more globalized world, which in many ways it anticipates.”
The Mongol conquest can be seen as the catalyst that reshaped Eurasian trade, offering European merchants unprecedented opportunities to establish cities, build fondaci (warehouses), and turn these into key hubs in foreign territories, allowing access to previously unreachable markets. For European merchants, new horizons opened—both real and imagined—motivating them to invest, explore, and seek common ground with populations and rulers who were no longer considered threatening hordes but reliable intermediaries, business partners, local administrators, and political counterparts.
At the time, no one paid much practical attention to Marco Polo and his accounts.
Pace the rather good overviews of the rise of the Mongol empire, and background on to-and-froing between Venice, Genoa, Constantinople and others in the Aegean and elsewhere, this is a book written for specialists; there is a lot of granular political history and trade data here. And the story in some ways rather banal; while there some silk and spice did come via the Black Sea route, as did slaves,
The Venetian expansion into the Black Sea did not originate from the daring initiative of merchants seeking to discover new shores but rather from the state’s pressing need to secure vital supplies of wheat.
The authors are at pains to distinguish between the merchants and state; for one thing, the merchants themselves were more daring and outgoing:
While the Venetian state halted its expansion at the ports of the Black Sea—such as Tana, Trebizond, and as far as Tabriz—individual merchants ventured beyond these limits. These merchants gained new financial knowledge and learned new languages, developing a linguistic and commercial lingua franca that facilitated trade.
One of these, of course, was Marco Polo. Authors Di Cosmo and Pubblici are somewhat dismissive, not of man himself, but of his impact back home. Unlike some others, they take Polo pretty much at his word, at least when it comes to trade and finance:
Today we know that Marco Polo’s memoirs are more accurate in their descriptions of material life and the economic and financial conditions than in his descriptions of political, social and cultural information.
Yet at the time, no one paid much practical attention:
however much Il Milione represents a major contribution to a knowledge of Asia, its influence on the general context of relations between Venice and the Mongols was close to non-existent.
Venice itself never followed up but stuck to Black Sea.
And then it was over:
By the mid-fifteenth century, particularly after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the Venetian presence on the Black Sea and the Aegean seemed on the brink of vanishing. Despite diplomatic efforts and military resistance, there was a widespread awareness that their days were numbered. Those with property and invested capital sought to sell what they could and return home with whatever they managed to salvage. This marked the final chapter in a story that should not be considered a capitulation, but rather as the inevitable result of political developments far beyond Venice’s ability to control. While the Mongol conquest had opened the doors to the Black Sea, the Ottoman conquest had firmly closed them.
Venice and the Mongols is that rare non-fiction title, to say nothing of academic history, comes to English readers in translation; the original Italian has been fluently rendered here by Sylvia Notini.
