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Page 4 of 4
The event often thought to have put an end to Venice's supremacy is the discovery of a sea route from Europe to Asia. With the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, Europe needed an alternative to the Asian overland route. Venice was always happy to deal with the highest bidder, but the Ottomans looked set to becoming a serious barrier. In fact, the new rulers of Constantinople turned out to be more commercially minded than expected. They went so far as to model their sultani gold coins to the same weight and fineness as the most internationally acceptable of all currency - the Venetian ducat. Portugal was the pioneer in finding a route that would benefit neither the Venetians nor the Turks. In 1498, Vasco da Gama arrived at the Indian kingdom of Calicut. He returned with the ultimate prize of cloves, ginger, cinnamon and pepper. In the short run, this was unfortunate for Venice and the Muslim rulers who controlled the overland routes. The price of pepper in Venice ended up being several times higher than in Portugal, where huge savings were made on taxes at the cost of innumerable mariners' lives. As the Spanish were also prepared to sacrifice sailors in the cause of cheaper spices, they successfully joined the spice race with Portugal. However, their interests lay more to the West than the East, bringing back previously unknown comestibles such as chocolate and vanilla from the New World, "discovered" by Christopher Columbus in 1492. The findings of Gavin Menzies in his book, 1421: The Year China Discovered America, have aroused strong passions for the suggestion that the Americas were first explored by a Muslim. The 1421 proposal has been abandoned by most scholars, but at least the intrepid Admiral Zheng He is receiving much more attention than he used to for visiting the Malay Peninsula. Even with the overland route bypassed by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English, a considerable portion of the spice trade was still in Muslim hands. Many of the destinations from which these cargoes came were Muslim, including the most important components of the Spice Islands: Ternate and Tidore, These two islands, mentioned in John Milton's Paradise Lost, were at one time the only source the world had for clove and nutmeg. Having taken over the area, the Portuguese created a legacy of bad feeling that was continued by the Dutch in their ruthless harvesting of these crops.
Muslim traders were also busy wherever they could avoid the risk of being blasted out of the water by European ships in bitter competition or exercising their monopolies in Southeast Asia. Most of the spice trade was water-borne, although the land route continued to exist. After the initial euphoria over Portugal's new sea route, complaints about the quality of their cargoes came in. Venice once again prospered, dealing with whichever Muslim rulers were amenable. In the 15th century, there was considerable trade with the Ottomans, including records of the business of Count Giacomo Badoer, who bartered large amounts of Florentine cloth for spices and incense. The Genoese were especially active in importing saffron and sesame from what was then known as "Turchia." More surprisingly, the return journey included soap from Europe - a luxury that was not widely associated with Europeans at that time. |