The Fabric More Durable

I did a puzzle when I was home for Christmas.  We all participated doing a large, complicated representation of the globe.  It’s good to spend some time now then with a finite project that you can progress against and then actually finish.   History is obviously a puzzle.  One will never be done, but each piece considered in place next to the others makes the overall picture that much clearer, the fabric more durable.   

“City of Fortune” by Roger Crowley helped to properly place a number of pieces today, stitching a thread between two spaces that otherwise had no straight linkage.  Continuing on in weekend binge-reading, I finished it off this morning and my head is spinning.  Trips I’ve taken and historical verities long known have a new bookend.  Of course I knew Venice and Genoa competed, but I’d never traced the battle.  Yes, the Portuguese spearhead of trade around Africa challenged the overland trade through the Near East.  But precisely how did such a simple change render Venice obsolete?

A few years back when on Crete I learned that Chania and Rethymno were actually built out by the Venetians.  Really?  What were they doing down here, I wondered at the time.  Is that right?  The city had an empire?  Oh, the Roman horses that should be here in the Istanbul Hippodrome were looted in the thirteenth century by the . . . Venetians?  They’re in St. Marks now?  Right.   I’d never really considered Venice the city as a force beyond its civic definition.  They managed a large part of the medieval Mediterranean and the shrinking Greek civilization.

Now I should like to consider it all from the Genoese perspective.  I should put proper time in with Mehmet and his extraordinary rise.  A big project for some other time in my life will be to finally connect these pieces to China through the heart of Persia.  What a remarkable pivot they held between the two sides of Eurasia.  There’s hardly a single piece there in that corner of the puzzle.

Sunday, 03/12/17