The Taste of Conquest by Michael Krondl Read Free Book Online Page B

when Venetians started to go into business overseas.
    That lagoon not only brought piscatory plenitude but also provided the first Venetians with a salable commodity in the form of salt. Needless to say, this naturally occurring chemical was critical to every human economy before the advent of refrigeration. While food might be preserved by other methods, salt was essential to keeping meat and fish from one season to the next. This is hard to appreciate when, on our tables, salted foods like ham, anchovies, and capers are no more than incidental accessories. But for most Europeans, until very recently, fresh meat was a rare luxury. Salted meats, prepared much like the holiday specialty of spiced mutton, used to be the norm. *1 Whereas in northern Europe, salt came from deep mines, in the Mediterranean, the supply came from evaporating seawater. Just about anyone with a suitable spot could produce salt, and trying to control production was a virtual impossibility.
    Nevertheless, the Venetians gave it a try. The fishermen who had settled on the islands around the Rialto had been working local salt pans since at least the sixth century; however, they could never keep up with the region’s main salt producer, which was the town of Comacchio, some fifty miles down the coast. The Venetians’ solution was as simple as it was brutal. In 932, they rowed their galleys up to Comacchio, burned its citadel, massacred the inhabitants, and carried off the survivors. Once in Venice, the Comacchians were forced to swear an oath of loyalty to the doge before they were freed. While differing in the particulars, these harsh methods developed by the racketeers who ran the Venetian salt business became a template for the violent strategies of later spice traders—and not only Italians in the Mediterranean but also their Portuguese and Dutch successors as they rampaged through Asia.
    Venice did eventually give up trying to control salt production, but trade was another matter. Through a combination of business smarts, diplomacy, and murder, the city eventually controlled all the salt that passed through the region. In much the same way as they later set up a government unit to control the spice trade, the Republic’s leaders organized a department to determine how, where, and when salt could be sold. *2
    The men who devised these policies came from a loose cluster of prominent families. They were generally old, experienced businessmen, much like the patricians who sit on American boards of directors, and like those corporate board members, they periodically elected a chief executive officer, the doge, to run the day-to-day operations of Venice Inc. This CEO was expected to fill the role for life; though, when it seemed like the boss was pursuing vainglorious adventures that could jeopardize the bottom line, he could be reined in and, at times, even sacked. (In 1355, when Doge Marin Falier got too high and mighty, the ruling Council of Ten’s idea of a golden parachute was to slice off the chief bureaucrat’s head on his own palace stairs.) Even though the Republic of Saint Mark could never be confused with a democracy, it was also nothing like the usual feudal medieval state. Here, the ruling class was made of merchants intent on making a buck rather than armed knights more interested in hunting one. It was a government of businessmen by businessmen for businessmen. Which is not to say they had much use for free trade. Nevertheless, they did keep an eye on the little guy and set ground rules under which even small-time merchants could prosper. In this business-friendly environment, ambitious young men with no capital could set up partnerships with established financiers and wealthy widows. With a dose of savvy and a little luck, both sides could profit from the arrangement. But it wasn’t just the entrepreneurs who benefited from a government organized to maximize commercial profits. Shipbuilders and sailmakers, sailors and stevedores,