City of Fortune traces the five-hundred-year rise and fall of Venice as a dominant maritime power in the Mediterranean. Roger Crowley details how the Venetian Republic leveraged the Fourth Crusade to dismantle the Byzantine Empire, seizing strategic island ports like Crete and Cyprus to secure trade routes. The narrative centers on the state’s relentless pursuit of a spice monopoly and its institutional focus on galley warfare. He illustrates the republic’s eventually violent clashes with the rising Ottoman Empire, which ultimately curtailed Venetian naval supremacy and commercial reach.
Readers interested in maritime logistics, medieval geopolitics, and Mediterranean history will find a granular account of how a city-state built a commercial empire through calculated violence and engineering. The book provides a technical understanding of 15th-century naval combat and the economic structures required to maintain a permanent fleet. A reader finishes the work with a clear view of how Venice functioned as a corporate entity that prioritized maritime security and trade access above territorial conquest or religious ideology.
- Published
- 2011
- Language
- EN
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