Venetian Merchant Networks

The political dimensions of Venetian merchant networks, 1418-1443

This seminar will examine samples of fifteenth-century Venetian merchant letters with specific respect to their function as a medium of political communication. The analysis is based on the commercial letters of a Venetian family coalition that comprised – by means of consanguineous and marital bonds – members of the Dolfin, Bragadin and Morosini families. Julius will show that the transmission of political information in non-official Venetian elite correspondence differed between types of correspondents that will be defined. In addition, the significance of the patrician family as a long-term business arrangement and thus as a principal pillar of political communication networks will be shown. It will be suggested that the emergence of a news market – in the form of the avviso and other means of impersonal news exchange – arose in the Venetian context from structures that had previously been carved by family-based mercantile coalitions and their inherent systems of information exchange.

Julius Morche is a research associate at the Institute for Area Studies at Universiteit Leiden, working with the Communication and Empire research group. His current research focuses on methods of comparative history with particular emphasis on urban elites in late medieval and early modern Europe. He gained his doctorate from Universität Heidelberg, where he contributed to the DFG project “Trading Diasporas in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1250-1450”.