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With the start of the
Crusades
to recapture the Holy Land from the Muslims in 1095, interest
in travel to the East and demand for Eastern goods increased.
In 1204, the Fourth Crusade embarked for Palestine from Venice.
To pay the great debt they owed Venice for their ships and
other services, the Crusaders plundered the Byzantine city
of Constantinople and established a Latin Empire. Venice became
master of "a quarter and a half of a quarter" of the Byzantine
Empire, including islands in the Mediterranean that they used
as bases for trading ships bound for Constantinople, Antioch,
and Alexandria.
For the next 300 years, Venice continued to expand its sea
empire to bring to European marketplaces spices, textiles,
and other luxuries. Even the pigments used by Italian painters
were imported from the East. Painters used the secretions
from an Asian insect to prepare red lake pigment. The wood
from various trees in Southeast Asia was also used to produce
red. But the most precious and sought-after was ultramarine,
a blue mineral extracted from the semiprecious stone, lapis
lazuli. Ultramarine (literally, "overseas") was very expensive,
more so than pure gold. Before the 19th century, the only
known source of lapis lazuli were the quarries of Badakhshan
(northeastern Afghanistan), a site visited and described by
Marco Polo. Ultramarine was so costly that it was used mostly
for religious paintings, such as in the blue gown of the Virgin
Mary (ultramarine darkens over time, so this blue now looks
black).
While other city-states
of north and central Italy were under the control of the Germanic
Lombards and the papacy, Venice maintained close political,
cultural, and commercial ties with the Byzantine Empire of
the East. Their communication with the East increased through
trade with expanding Muslim and Mongol empires. Marco Polo
and his family were part of the intrepid Venetian mercantile
tradition that not only brought the city considerable wealth
and prestige, but also transmitted Eastern knowledge and ideas
to the West.
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