Inevitable Conflict or Opportunity to Explore?: The Mechanics of Venice’s Embargo Against Mehmed II and the Problem of Western-Ottoman Trade After 1453

The question of how the transformation of the Ottoman enterprise into a veritable heir to the Byzantine empire at the hands of Sultan Mehmed II (1444–46, 1451–81) affected trade between the Latin West and the Ottoman East has long been the subject of scholarly interest.¹ In the late nineteenth century, Wilhelm Heyd’s classic work on trade in the Levant summarized, surpassed, and displaced a century of pioneering studies in Eastern Mediterranean trade, while in turn becoming the cornerstone of subsequent research.² Heyd’s account of the consequences of Mehmed’s conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and his subsequent actions was one of steadily mounting losses for the Latins, expressed not only in territories, but also in extraterritorial rights and custom privileges. Among Mehmed’s various conquests between 1453 and 1481, most notable from this perspective were those of Genoese Old Phocaea in 1455, Genoese Lesbos in 1462, Venetian Negroponte in 1470, and of the Genoese Black Sea territories in 1475.³ As for Venice, the “insatiable ambition of the Osmanlis” was bound to result in a conflict between the Ottomans and the Serenissima.⁴ Heyd’s view received an indirect but substantial boost from an unexpected source, Henri Pirenne’s influential thesis that the Muslim conquest of the southern shores of the Mediterranean in the seventh century had led to a break in the sea’s unity, now split between antagonistic Christian and Muslim blocs.⁵ In other words, if read against the background of Pirenne’s work (which was unquestionably more popular among nonspecialists), Heyd’s would appear as proposing for 1453 a reenactment of the epochal event painted by the Belgian historian, proof that what became known as the Pirenne thesis had a general validity that transcended the period from which it derived. Whether one looked at the seventh or the fifteenth century, the Mediterranean was the arena in which Christian West and Muslim East clashed to the detriment of trade.

This view was superseded by Fernand Braudel, whose masterpiece of histoire totale exposed the ups and downs of major political events as only representing the surface of history and instead awarded center stage to a broad range of human experiences within the limitations of a permanent and immutable geographical structure.⁶ Historians of the Ottoman Empire have since enhanced the Braudelian view. While Ottoman policies may have impinged negatively on Italian trade, Halil Inalick argues, they fostered the commercial activity of the empire’s own subjects. This change of viewpoint, from how events in the East affected the Apennines to how these impinged on the East itself, minimizes the scope of changes that took place in the most visible sphere, the agents and the routes of trade, and emphasizes an essential continuity in the general trends of commercial relations.⁷ The Ottomans hence appear no longer as agents of an inevitable doom, but rather as a powerful and centralized trade-friendly empire. As such, it both fostered foreign trade and sought to control it; something that the late Byzantine emperors could not hope to do. The conclusions of the burgeoning literature on Ottoman-Western relations, commercial and beyond, in the sixteenth century, and especially the chief point that Ottoman history was an integral part of early modern European history, if retrospectively applied, would further undermine Heyd’s cataclysmic view.⁸ This broader point may ring particularly true with regard to Venice, whose trade with the Ottomans flourished in the sixteenth century. Yet this should not obscure the fact that such later prosperity had much to do with some major geopolitical and economic shifts that were at work in the early Cinquecento, but not in Mehmed II’s time, nor gloss over the turbulent years that accompanied the establishment of the Ottomans as an empire.

Yet this has been happening. Using Venice as an example, Jerry Brotton explicitly turns Heyd’s view on its head: “Many European powers saw Mehmed’s rise to power as an opportunity rather than a catastrophe.”⁹ On the...