Introduction

Summary

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, it has become commonplace to study early modern Venice through the lens of contemporary ideals of multiculturalism and ‘pacified forms of globalisation’.¹ Scholars often describe Venice as a peaceful republic of merchants and a key agent of cross-cultural exchange, but they rarely attempt to integrate this benevolent view with the city’s colonial practices in the Mediterranean and armed conflict with the Ottomans. They invariably agree with Frederic Lane’s view from his classic Venice: A Maritime Republic that the conquest of Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204 ‘made Venice an imperial power’ but uncritically reiterate his sweeping generalisation that the Venetians were ‘predisposed more toward peace than war’. For Lane, the Republic’s history was supposedly marked by a ‘contrast between Venice of the twelfth and thirteen centuries on the one hand and Venice of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the other’.