Walker - 1967 - A geography of Italy

PART i: SOME GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY
Egyptian and Black Sea trade. Dtiring the fourth period the trading rivalry with
Genoa became a life and death struggle, from which Venice, after many vicissitudes,
emerged victorious by the end of the fourteenth century.
For five centuries Venice remained aloof from the entanglements o f the mainland,
a city anchored in the Adriatic, trusting in her diplomatic and commercial
skill to obtain the trading concessions and privileges necessary for her prosperity.
In the late fourteenth century the alliance o f Padua and Genoa, which almost
ruined Venice, demonstrated forcibly how dependent her Alpine trade routes and
food supphes were on the goodwill o f the mainland cities. From a modest foothold
on the Piave and the Brenta in 1400, Venice went on to acquire in the course
o f the fifteenth century, most o f the Plain and Alpine foothills from the Adda to
the Isonzo, and thereby became more completely an Italian power, abandoning
an isolation which had served to spare her the factions of Papacy and Empire, had
ensured a measure o f ecclesiastical independence, had opened up distant cultural
horizons, and made possible the development o f her unique pohtical system.
T o a remarkable degree the enterprise o f the individual merchant was made
to conform to the overriding demands o f the state. Shipbuilding became a state
monopoly and was centred on the famous arsenal whose 16,000 workers (1400)
considered themselves the cream o f the Venetian artisans. Rigidly enforced
regulations ensured the soundness o f all equipment which like the ships themselves
was standardized to ensure rapid replacement and similar behaviour in convoy.
The aimual fleets for the main trading areas were composed o f state-built ships
whose cargo space was auctioned to the highest bidder, and the route and programme
o f the fleet were determined by the Senate in the interests o f the city
before departure. By 1400 Venice, whose population approached 200,000, owned
330 large sea-going ships manned by 36,000 sailors and regulated by a strict
mercantile code.
The Italian industrial and commercial revival in the Middle Ages was not
confined to the great maritime cities. In the early foiurteenth century Florence,
Genoa, Naples and Palermo each had populations approaching 100,000; Milan
rivalled Venice for the first place, and the Lombardy Plain supported a dozen
cities o f between 20,000 and 50,000 inhabitants. In many towns an artisan class
had survived since Roman times and was now augmented by recruits from the
countryside attracted by the prospects of wealth and protection in the increasingly
powerful communes. There seems to have been htde feudal inhibition to this
movement; indeed the needy members o f the nobihty joined in themselves.
Traditional methods were improved (e.g. the pedal loom in Lucca in the twelfth
century) and new skills were imported, an outstanding case being the spread of
silk-weaving from Sicily to Tuscany and Lombardy. Roger Guiscard, while
warring in Greece, made a point of raiding Thebes with the object o f deporting
its highly skilled silk workers to Sicily. The Italians, as the most travelled people
o f Europe, had the opportunity o f learning o f new techniques from places as far'
apart as Damascus and Bruges, and received the stimulus to design and quality
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