Ten minutes from now, I'm hoping you'll understand how one mutually beneficial relationship, between the Venetians and the Ottomans, led to two really big deals: the European Renaissance and Christopher Columbus.
Not like his birth, I mean he wasn't like a half-Ottoman, half-Venetian baby, his travels!
So Venice is a city made up of hundreds of islands at the northern tip of the Adriatic Sea, but walking around it, you can't help but feel that the city is essentially a collection of floating buildings tied together by some canals.
If ever there was a place where geography was destiny, it was Venice. Venice was literally built for ocean-going trade.
As you can imagine, Venice didn't have a lot of natural resources -- except for fish and mustaches -- so if they wanted to grow, they had to rely on trade. Let's go to the Thought Bubble.
First, Venetians became experts in shipbuilding.
Remember that when the crusaders needed ships for their crazy Fourth Crusade, they headed to Venice, because the Venetians were famous for their ships, including merchant ships like the galley and the cog.
Not only could they build ships; they could also sail them to pleasant locales like Constantinople and the Levant, so the Venetians formed trade treaties, sometimes called concessions, with the Byzantines, And then when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans and became Istanbul, the Venetians were quick to make trade treaties with their new neighbors, famously saying that while Istanbul had been Constantinople, the matter of Constantinople getting the works was nobody's business but the Turks.
But even before the Ottomans, Venice had experience trading with the Islamic world: It initially established itself as the biggest European power in the Mediterranean thanks to its trade with Egypt's sultan in the outlandishly lucrative pepper business.
Can't blame the Europeans, really, that stuff is delicious. Oh, you mean like actual pepper?
