Venice's Shady History: From Babylonian Bankers to the Fourth Crusade
Book: Financial Vipers of Venice
Author: Joseph P. Farrell
ISBN: 978-1-93623-974-0
Chapter 3 shifts from metaphysics to swamp politics. Farrell leans heavily on Webster Tarpley, and he admits the picture is wild: a fifteen-century oligarchy, Babylonian banking practices, stolen relics, a crusade that sacks Constantinople instead of Jerusalem, and Bruno possibly sitting in Venetian strategy salons before they burn him. Even if you take half of it with salt, the documented history is rough enough on its own.
The Euphrates Flowed Into the Tiber
Farrell retells Johns Hopkins historian Tenney Frank’s work on Roman inscriptions. Between 300 BC and 300 AD, Frank argued Italy’s population was “not Roman or Latin at all, but Babylonian.” Juvenal said the Syrian Orontes had flowed into the Tiber.
Eastern captives came west as slaves, were manumitted, and became the economic backbone of the empire. They brought Babylonian banking habits north when Attila drove families toward the lagoon. Venice’s winged lion echoes Assyrian imagery. St. Mark’s relics were smuggled from Alexandria. The eastward orientation is not just symbolism.
Born in a Swamp, Built on Trade Fear
Refugees settled the lagoon during barbarian invasions. Tradition says Venice was founded March 25, 411, after Alaric sacked Rome. No farmland, no resources, only a defensible swamp. Trade was survival from day one.
Roger Crowley calls it the first “virtual economy”: bullion, slaves, spices, fragile trade routes. Sever the routes and the whole structure collapses. Venice traded with anyone, including selling war materials and slaves to Cairo while Byzantium fought the Fatimids. Amoral commerce was policy.
The Byzantine look of Venice is not accidental. Justinian’s reconquest tied the lagoon to Constantinople. Venice got protection and unique eastern trading rights. It stayed quasi-autonomous, feudalism largely bypassed, and stole St. Mark to become an apostolic see that could defy Rome.
The Golden Bull and the Fourth Crusade
The Golden Bull of 1082, after Venice helped defend Constantinople against Normans, granted tax-free trade across the empire. Venice got a colony by the Golden Horn with quays, church, bakery, warehouses. Genoa, Pisa, and Amalfi were pushed aside. Monopoly, in the sweetest Greek sense.
By 1204 that relationship curdled into betrayal. Doge Enrico Dandolo, over ninety and “blind” (maybe not), contracted to ferry the Fourth Crusade. The phrase “wherever that may take us” was a loophole. While knights thought Egypt was the target, Venetian envoys assured Cairo Venice would not attack. Venice also secretly dealt with the French. Knights borrowed Venetian bank money on the Rialto to pay for the fleet.
The army showed up undersized. Dandolo deferred payment in exchange for conquests, starting with Christian Zara, earning papal excommunication. Then Alexius Angelus offered to restore Byzantine rule, reunite the churches, pay 200,000 marks, and help in Egypt. The crusade went to Constantinople instead. Dandolo led the assault. Venice locked out Genoa and Pisa and restored its monopoly.
Farrell speculates Venice also wanted Constantinople’s archives: maps and manuscripts, not just gold. A prior doge had ordered eastern antiquities for St. Mark’s. World-spanning cartography would threaten Venice’s eastern trade monopoly if rivals got it.
Reformation, Bruno, and Playing Both Sides
When Constantinople fell in 1453, Greek scholars and books flooded west, feeding the Renaissance. Venice became Christendom’s front line against the Ottomans and slowly lost eastern colonies.
Venice’s cosmology, per Tarpley, was Aristotelian materialism. Bruno’s Hermetic topology was the enemy. Cardinal Gasparo Contarini wrote like Luther about Christ canceling a debt humans could never pay, echoing Anselm’s atonement-as-ledger theology. Contarini later embraced Lutheran positions, chaired a mostly Venetian papal reform commission, and helped birth the Jesuits while Venetian presses printed tens of thousands of Protestant tracts.
Why both sides? New World routes and Atlantic trade were killing Venice’s eastern monopoly. Tarpley argues Venice deliberately stoked religious war to move oligarchic capital north under cover of chaos, toward France, England, and the Netherlands.
Bruno’s European travels and fatal return get a conspiratorial reading. The Giovani salon at Ridotto Morosini reportedly included Sarpi, Galileo, and sometimes Bruno. Venice may have used him abroad, then eliminated him when he planned a secret Hermetic society and knew too much.
By 1600, the year of Bruno’s execution, Venice held about 14 million ducats in coin, had paid off all public debt, and was liquid. Capital was moving through Genoa’s fairs, into Stuart England, the Amsterdam Bank, the Dutch East India Company, and Geneva. The lagoon was becoming a shell.
League of Cambrai and Napoleon’s Empty Victory
In 1508 Pope Julius II built the League of Cambrai with France, Spain, and Austria to dismember Venice. The treaty preamble calls Venice’s “insatiable rapacity” a fire to extinguish. France crushed Venetian forces at Agnadello. Venice nearly allied with the Ottoman Sultan, then submitted to brutal papal terms.
The lesson for oligarchs: move headquarters. After the New World opened, that urgency grew. The War of the League of Cambrai and Columbus’s voyage made the swamp expendable.
Napoleon finished the republic in 1797, demanding democracy and state guarantees for the mint and national bank. The oligarchy had to abdicate politically and financially. But the money had left two centuries earlier. Like a Nazi flight-capital plan, the structure dissolved after the assets were gone.
Farrell ends Chapter 3 on a cliffhanger: who were the oligarchs, and what was the secret of their longevity? That is the next post’s territory.