In the end, Tomé Pires, the Portuguese apothecary, adventurer, and author we met in Chapter 4, had not quite gotten it right when he famously said, “Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice.” In order to strangle it, one needed to be lord not only of Malacca, but also of Sunda, the Cape of Good Hope, and the Spice Islands. The Portuguese had not quite been up to it, but by the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch had finally cornered the spice market and throttled Venice.
