--ODORIC OF PORDENONE

Let us go back in mind--as would that we could go back in body--to the
year 1268. It is a year which makes no great stir in the history books,
but it will serve us well. In those days, as in our own, Venice lay upon
her lagoons, a city (as Cassiodurus long ago saw her[B]) like a
sea-bird's nest afloat on the shallow waves, a city like a ship, moored
to the land but only at home upon the seas, the proudest city in all the
Western world. For only consider her position. Lying at the head of the
Adriatic, half-way between East and West, on the one great sea
thoroughfare of medieval commerce, a Mediterranean seaport, yet set so
far north that she was almost in the heart of Europe, Venice gathered
into her harbour all the trade routes overland and overseas, on which
pack-horses could travel or ships sail. Merchants bringing silk and
spices, camphor and ivory, pearls and scents and carpets from the Levant
and from the hot lands beyond it, all came to port in Venice. For
whether they came by way of Egypt sailing between the low banks of the
Nile and jolting on camels to Alexandria, or whether they came through
the rich and pleasant land of Persia and the Syrian desert to Antioch
and Tyre, or whether they slowly pushed their way in a long, thin
caravan across the highlands of Central Asia, and south of the Caspian
Sea to Trebizond, and so sailed through the Black Sea and the
Dardanelles, Venice was their natural focus. Only Constantinople might
have rivalled her, and Constantinople she conquered. To Venice,
therefore, as if drawn by a magnet, came the spoils of the East, and
from Venice they went by horse across the Alps by the Brenner and St
Gothard passes to Germany and France, or in galleys by way of the
Straits of Gibraltar to England and Flanders;[1] and the galleys and
pack-horses came back again to Venice, laden with the metals of Germany,