The Venetian Republic reached its zenith in the dramatic takeover of “a quarter and a half a quarter” of the Byzantine Empire in the Fourth Crusade. It acquired a network of port cities – the Stato da Mar – that enabled its control over trade routes between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Called the “hinge” of Europe by one historian, Venice spearheaded an economic leap forward on the continent through a mastery of long-distance navigation. This was Italy’s second great urban age, as cities saw resurgences from the dramatic declines into feudalism in late antiquity. Venice was the prototypical world city of the time, competing with Genoa for control of seaborne trade routes. Indeed, the activities in Italian city-states are critical to the scholarly understanding of the European economic revivals in the ninth and eleventh centuries. The city figures centrally in major works by Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Michael McCormick, Henri Pirenne, and Fernand Braudel for fostering seminal forms of intercity relations at crucial times. Its relations with Constantinople, for example, were of equal importance with those of its Italian neighbors.

Wagner’s relation to Italy and Italian culture has been explored numerous times in relation to his criticisms of Italian opera, where potential reinterpretations of this starkly negative assessment sit alongside analytical readings of Italianate style in certain works. This chapter moves past that tradition, situating biographical and familial contexts for Wagner’s stated dislike of Rossinian opera alongside his deep attachment to Venice, and the progressive importance his works acquired within Italy, evidenced by commercial interests that paired locomotive travel with tours of Lohengrin, Rienzi, and the Ring and the Wagnerian characters that formed advertising emblems for the Liebig meat company.

Fearing shortage of culturally significant fish, medieval societies reacted in several ways. In a culture of markets, scarce supply motivates sellers to demand and/or buyers to offer more for the commodity: anecdotes from the twelfth century and serial prices from the thirteenth indicate fish prices rising even past 1350. Ownership of the productive resource itself could capture some of those sellers’ gains, not to mention the prestige and power medieval society associated with landownership: elite acquisition of fishing rights had begun with early creation of private lordships, but by and after the twelfth century it also promised income from direct exploitation or from leasing operations to artisans (depriving local subsistence fishers). In contrast, relict and then emergent claimants to public authority could gain by regulating resource exploitation ‘for the public good’. From the 1200s onwards kings, territorial princes, and self-governing communes asserted control over fishing rights and activities, first on acknowledged public waters (large rivers, coastal waters) and eventually over practices and uses of private natural waters. The chapter explores grounds for regulating fisheries as a ‘public’ resource to allocate their value, settle disputes, ensure consumer safety, and occasionally to encourage what might now be called ‘sustainable’ uses within recognizable limits. Like the artisanal fisheries toward which they were directed, these cultural measures retained close ties between local natural ecosystems and consumers of fish.

Artisan fishers broke the early medieval pattern of subsistence fishing. Participants in Europe’s medieval ‘Commercial Revolution’, artisans made their living by catching fish to sell on a local market. Evidence of such people appears around 1000 CE in commercially precocious northern Italy but also in England, France, the Rhineland, and elsewhere. Commonly they arose at or near emerging towns, where skilled subsistence fishers might offer a surplus catch to other non-agricultural specialists. The chapter examines the social position of these household-based fishers, their traditional small-scale technologies, and the collective organizations (guilds) used to manage their human and environmental relations. It then turns to the urban markets where these men and their wives provided fresh fish from nearby waters. In larger towns professional fishmongers consolidated catches from various regional habitats, while communal concern for a safe and abundant supply caused municipal authorities to regulate market dealings. By the late twelfth century the interplay of seasonal demand (Lent) and supply (runs of migratory fish) coupled with cultural criteria of taste and quality shaped fish prices. Whether in great cities like Venice or Paris or small towns on the Castilian plateau or English coast, local markets offered consumers the regional fish they ate.

Commemorations brought authors and their works to wide public attention, partly through reports in the newspaper and magazine press, and, when such occasions were marked by the erection of public statues, by a continuing visible presence. They were unavoidable reminders of a particular and selected past. There were, however, further remains and archival strata that invited investigation. In these archival survivals lay the explanation, rationale and often the justification for modern religious, political and other aspects of social organisation.

The Sultanate's political economy evolved continuously. Since the regime presided over an imperial union of territories that differed in their topography and ecology, the process of evolution in these regions exhibited contrasting patterns of change. Agriculture in the Nile Valley manifested procedures unlike crop raising or animal husbandry along the Syrian coast, upland valleys or semi-arid outback of the Syrian Sahel. Commodities imported from South or East Asia transited from ports in Yemen or Western Arabia through entrepôts on the Upper Nile to Alexandria, where they were transferred to European carriers that conveyed them to destinations on the Mediterranean north shore and beyond. Agents in each of these stages answered to differing sponsors, aligned their conduct of business with local politics and extracted revenues at levels fluctuating within the mechanisms that governed inter-regional trade throughout this period. Domestic commerce in both urban and rural settings dealt in the exchange of commodities produced locally in a workshop milieu. Control over (and profiteering from) marketing of lucrative staples that funneled revenues to the regime, such as spices, textiles or sugar, became a principal objective of governmental authority, with results that enhanced the Sultanate’s fisc in the short term but compromised its competitive position in the longue durée. These issues are considered from the perspective of agriculture or animal husbandry in Egypt and Syria, the varying extent of control exercised over them by the bureaucracy, interregional trade and its manipulation by the Sultanate over time, the domestic commercial economy, and finally the overt expropriation or clandestine extraction on which the regime relied as licit sources of revenuediminished in the Sultanate’s final century.

The Sultanate was a global state that interacted with regimes in North, West and East Africa, Mediterranean Europe, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula and Southwest Asia. Its ideology of diplomacy focused on maintenance of the balance of power extant during the formative stage of its founding: control over the Syrian Littoral and Red Sea nautical routes to South and East Asia. Senior officers appointed from Cairo ruled Syrian provincial capitals as viceroys, tying them directly to the imperial center. On the Red Sea coast of Arabia (Hijaz), the Hasanid Sharifs of Mecca exercised local political authority, but from Baybars’ reign were compelled to comply with the Sultanate’s commercial and fiduciary policies over the spice trade. Tensions in Southeastern Asia Minor heightened when objectives of territorial stasis advocated by the Mamluks clashed with aims of territorial conquest asserted by the Ottomans. Regional principalities pursued their own goals of autonomy with varying degrees of success. The international system of commerce, centered on Venetian and Mamluk exploitation of trade routes to Asia through the Red Sea, was decisively altered by the Portuguese entry to the Indian Ocean. When the Ottomans defeated the Cairo Sultanate, its centrality in the global environment was already diminished.

Italian instances of adjudication rarely exceeded annual totals in the single digits. The few plaintiffs who did approach ecclesiastical officials were usually well-prepared from a legal standpoint. They encountered decent prospects of winning by avoiding the launch of suits without written and witness testimony. Regular supervision of the English kind was completely unknown. Although episcopal visitations brought domestic partnerships to the attention of prelates, they were undertaken too intermittently to sustain regular inquiries. Disinterest may have been tied to the fact that judgement did not imply secondary judicial benefits. Damage claims on account of sex out of wedlock were normally reserved to secular justice. As a result, public notaries assumed overriding importance when the conclusion of marital contracts was celebrated. The exact value and delivery of bridal dowries and counter-gifts had to be authenticated for future reference in endowment disputes reserved to civil and not ecclesiastical judges. Also attesting to the principal concern of elders and relatives with asset control was the recourse to papal authority for dispensation from impediments to the union. The process could skip church verification altogether in favor of automatic settlement and registration at the hands of laymen.

The Black Sea, Russia, and eastern Europe exported slaves throughout the medieval period. Most had been born free but were enslaved through capture or occasionally through sale by relatives. During the eighth through tenth centuries, slaves were traded from eastern Europe and the Baltic to elite households in Byzantium and the Islamic world via the Dniepr and Volga river systems, the Carolingian empire, and Venice. In the thirteenth century, the structure of this slave trade changed as a result of the Mongol invasion of eastern Europe, Italian colonization of the Black Sea, the success of the Mamluk state, and the crusading activities of the Teutonic Knights in the Baltic. People enslaved in the Baltic now tended to be traded westward rather than eastward; people enslaved in eastern Europe and the Caucasus tended to pass through the Black Sea into Italian, Mamluk, or Ottoman hands; and people enslaved in the Balkans were trafficked primarily by Venetians or Ottomans. Many aspects of this trade deserve further study, however, such as political marginality and decentralization as factors that enabled slaving; violations of the principle that slaves should come from a different religious background than their owners; and the logistics of local slave trades.

This chapter outlines a "feudal transformation" in medieval Europe, in which originality and creativity became activities to be protected and encouraged through grants of legal privileges. A Venetian statute that many have seen as Europe's first patent law is here placed in the context of legal and religious reforms overseen by Carolingian bishops and rulers. The trajectory of these reforms is traced through the development of medieval universities and legal education, which are linked, in turn, to an idealizing social vision of law as a morally binding force, drawing people together into communities through legal promises and oaths. With the birth of the European legal profession, Roman and Biblical legal traditions are synthesized into the legal foundation for medieval city-states, guilds, and universities, together with the prebend system that provides material support for clerics of various kinds. In the medieval city-state of Venice, these legal traditions become the basis for a transformation in legal privileges, emphasizing the value of novelty and creativity for legal communities and providing early precursors for later patent and copyright law.

This article looks at the rise of Venice and the expansion of its economic, political and military power in the Adriatic from the early ninth until the fourteenth centuries. It assesses how local, interconnecting commercial networks transformed into more elaborate, intensive and long-distance connections that came about as a result of wider patterns of change not only in the Adriatic, but in the Mediterranean, Europe and beyond during this period. The article examines the relationship between Venice and the coastal towns of Dalmatia and Italy and charts how patterns of co-operation and mutual interest gave way to domination through a deliberate and coherent series of policies adopted by Venice’s leaders. The participation of an increasing number of elements of Venetian society in the commercial and political success of the city played an important role in providing domestic stability on the one hand and in shaping a civic identity on the other, that was also to prove important during the time of the crusades where new markets and opportunities opened up for the city. Financial structures that allowed for – and even prompted – inclusivity played a key role too in eliding the interests of the elites with those of Venice’s citizens.

In recent years research on the early medieval north-eastern Italy has made important advances in the study of archaeological finds from the entire Adriatic area but also in the field of critical analysis of the early Venetian duchy’s relations with the Lombard (and later Italian) kingdom and Byzantine Italy. This study focuses on the second subject, starting from the arrival of the Lombards in 569, which established the conditions for the birth of Venice. From the sixth to the ninth century, Venice was a Byzantine duchy embedded in a dense network of political, social and economic relations which extended across the whole northern Adriatic. The formation of Venetian society and the city itself, its institutions and political identity were profoundly influenced by social and institutional developments on the Italian mainland. Simultaneously Byzantine, Adriatic and Italian in character, Venice developed in delicate equilibrium with all these different social components.

This study discusses transformations of settlement in the northern Adriatic arch between Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages. In particular, it takes into consideration the situation in Roman cities which were deserted and those where there was continuity of life. Above all, attention is focused on a phenomenon specific for this area: the newly founded cities. Among these, the author focuses on Venice and Equilo. These two settlements were founded in similar environmental contexts but their outcomes turned out to be very different. The history of these two settlements is discussed in a general framework – that of the Venetian lagoon – with the passage from a scattered settlement (Late Antiquity) to a series of centralised settlements (Early Middle Ages). By using an archaeological approach, this study highlights their subsequent development with regard to the competition between the local aristocracies.