ABSTRACT
‘What news on the Rialto?’ This well-known phrase from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice evokes both Venice’s centrality as a marketplace of goods and information and the prominent role merchants played in the city’s political and economic life. Medieval critics often pointed to Venetians’ commercial interests when characterizing them as greedy, self-interested or untrustworthy; scholars in the twentieth century often saw Venetians as entrepreneurial protagonists of an emerging capitalist spirit. The merchant elite that dominated international commerce also claimed exclusive political power from the late thirteenth century. From the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, Venetian political and merchant networks were tightly intertwined. From the sixteenth century on, large-scale structural factors as well as local changes in politics and economic life loosened the connective tissue between Venetian politicians and merchants. There were not only new patterns of economic exchange, but the ‘merchants of Venice’ took on a much more diverse social profile. Recent scholarship has looked beyond patrician networks and focused on the brokers, agents, citizens and subjects who participated in Venetian trade networks. While there is no doubt Venetian participation in international maritime exchange was an important part of its economy, recent scholarship has emphasized the manufacturing and industrial dimensions of medieval Venetian economic life. This overview places Venice’s well-known dominance of the luxury trade in spices and silks into the broader context of commerce in raw materials that fed Venetian manufacturing, and also suggests that medieval Venice gained institutional strength from the overlapping commercial and political interests of the patrician elite.
