the pirates of Dalmatia, and the Greeks now recognized their rule all over
Dalmatia, thus securing to the Republic every port on the eastern shores
of the Adriatic. Then, as they aided the Greeks to repel the aggressions
of the Saracens and Normans, their commerce was declared free in all the
ports of the empire, and they were allowed to trade without restriction in
all the cities, and to build warehouses and depots throughout the
dominions of the Greeks, wherever they chose. The harvest they reaped from
the vast field thus opened to their enterprise, must have more than
compensated them for their losses in the barbarization of the Italian
continent by the incessant civil wars which followed the disruption of the
Lombard League, when trade and industry languished throughout Italy. When
the Crusaders had taken the Holy Land, the king of Jerusalem bestowed upon
the Venetians, in return for important services against the infidel, the
same privileges conceded them by the Greek Emperor; and when, finally,
Constantinople fell into the hands of the Crusaders, (whom they had
skillfully diverted from the reconquest of Palestine to the siege of the
Greek metropolis,) nearly all the Greek islands fell to the share of
Venice; and the Latin emperors, who succeeded the Greeks in dominion, gave
her such privileges as made her complete mistress of the commerce of the
Levant.

From this opulent traffic the insatiable enterprise of the Republic
turned, without relinquishing the old, to new gains in the farthest
Orient. Against her trade the exasperated infidel had closed the Egyptian
ports, but she did not scruple to coax the barbarous prince of the
Scythian Tartars, newly descended upon the shores of the Black Sea; and
having secured his friendship, she proceeded, without imparting her design
to her Latin allies at Constantinople, to plant a commercial colony at the
mouth of the Don, where the city of Azof stands. Through this entrepot,
thenceforward, Venetian energy, with Tartar favor, directed the entire