Needless to say, glass production was not the only manufacturing industry that flourished in Venice. From an early time there were brass or iron foundries, or both, in operation there; but much more important forms of manufacture than these were the making of cloth-of-gold and of purple dye. These with glass-making were the most ancient, the most extensive, and the most celebrated of Venetian industries.[a]
Knocker from the Palazzo Crimani
The trade in cloths-of-gold in the form of mantles or pallii, for either sex, was prodigious; and the profit arising to the Venetians from this source alone was incalculably large; the courts of France and Germany, and more particularly the former, were among the best customers of the republic. Charlemagne himself was seldom seen without a robe of Venetian pattern and texture; and the constant intercourse which the patriarch Fortunato maintained with the son of Pepin, had at least the good effect of spreading the knowledge and appreciation of the manufactures of his country to the banks of the Seine and the Loire. It was a point of policy which the republic steadily observed from the beginning, to make every extension of territory, every treaty of peace, beneficial to her interests as a mercantile power.[e]
The activity of all this industry increased the population, and this led to increased consumption of every kind, this again leading to new speculations and returns. The Venetians were no longer satisfied to go and buy raw materials of the foreigner, but sought to make the country produce them. Troops of sheep were reared in Polesine, and were sent into the mountains of eastern Istria. The hill-sides of Friuli were covered with mulberry trees. An attempt was made to naturalise the sugar-cane in the isles of the Levant.[g]
THE SLAVE TRADE
But after all it was as a commercial rather than as a manufacturing city that Venice was really great, and nature intended her for the former, not for the latter. It was in transporting or bartering with the produce of other peoples that her chief interest lay. In general, no more worthy passport to fame could be desired by a people than comes through such commercial enterprises. There was one phase of commerce, however, which forms an ugly blot on the otherwise pleasant picture. This is the slave trade. In carrying out this nefarious business the Genoese and Venetian merchants found, at one time, an important source of revenue. The chief market was Egypt.[a]
It appears that the mameluke sultans who governed Egypt from the middle of the thirteenth century, finding only insufficient resources for recruiting their armies in a native population little fitted for the profession of arms, had recourse to another quarter: the purchase of slaves, natives of the countries of the north. On the other hand, in order to fill their harems and those of the great men of the court, female slaves were brought in and were frequently renewed. They therefore sent agents in search of slaves of either sex wherever they could obtain them, even from Christian countries—Armenia Minor, for instance. The religion to which they had belonged was of little consequence; if they were Christians their new masters soon made converts of them. However, the Egyptian agents by preference visited the countries where Islam was the dominant religion, and vice versa the merchants from Mussulman countries brought troops of slaves to Egypt to sell them. So it was especially the ports of Adalia and Candelore, situated in that part of Asia Minor which had been subjugated by the Seleucidæ, which sent young boys and young girls into Egypt. When Hadrianopolis and Gallipoli had fallen into the power of the Osmanlis, it was from these two towns that Greek or Christian vessels started, carrying slaves by hundreds to Damietta or Alexandria.
But this trade attained its most flourishing condition in the countries bordering the Black Sea. The development of the power of the mameluke sultans in Egypt and the propagation of Islam in the great Mongol Empire of Kiptchak by the khan Bereke had occurred almost simultaneously, and these events were the occasion of an active exchange of correspondence and embassies between the masters of the two countries. From this time, the agents charged with the purchase of slaves for the sultans directed their search especially towards the northern shores of the Black Sea, and Sultan Bibars by embassies and presents succeeded in obtaining from Michael Palæologus, who, it appears, was not aware of the importance of the concession which he was asked to make, permission to send Egyptian trading vessels through the Bosporus. Permission was granted only for one vessel which was to make, once a year, the voyage to the Black Sea, there and back; but instead of only one there were often two, and their cargo on the return voyage consisted of slaves destined to reinforce the sultan’s troops. It must be observed that the condition in which this region then was could not have been more favourable to the development of this kind of trade. Although the Tatars were solidly settled in their empire of Kiptchak, there were still some unsubdued tribes, and between them the normal state was one of war—skirmishing war in which Circassians, Russians, Magyars, and Alajans carried off, each in their turn, Tatar children whom they sold as slaves. Moreover the Tatars reserved the same fate for the prisoners whom they brought back from their raids in the Caucasus. And furthermore, among these savage tribes, when provisions were too dear or taxes too heavy, nothing was more common than to see parents selling their own children, especially their daughters. Naturally, it was only the strong, healthy, and well-formed who were put up for sale. But along the whole of the coast neither the Tatars nor the tribes whom they had subdued possessed large trading ports. Kaffa, Tana, etc., were in the hands of the Italians, and so it happened that the slave trade was concentrated in the Italian marts, and especially at Kaffa. This latter town was the habitual resort of the agents charged with the purchase of slaves for the sultans of Egypt; a certain number of them even lived there permanently.
The Genoese were obliged to permit the embarkation of slaves for Egypt to take place in their port of Kaffa; if they had placed difficulties in the way of the sultan’s agents, they would have risked compromising their own commercial relations with Egypt to the greatest extent, and even the existence of their colonies. Besides, this trade was severely controlled by the colonial authorities. Every slave passing through underwent examination; he was asked if he were Mussulman or Christian. If he was of the Christian faith or if he expressed a wish to be converted, the consul of Kaffa ransomed him and kept him in his possession; he allowed only Mussulmans to leave. Slaves who wished to become Christians also found a refuge in the bishop’s house, respected by the civil authorities. Moreover, the government watched with the greatest care that no inhabitant of Kaffa was carried away into slavery. Finally, there was a tax upon the slave trade, and the republic of Genoa enforced it energetically in 1431, in spite of the complaint of Sultan Barsabay, who, in retaliation, imposed a tax of 16,000 ducats on the Genoese merchants settled in Egypt.