The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Peter Frankopan

The rest of Europe now had to adjust to the rising fortunes of Spain and Portugal. News of da Gama’s return home in 1499 was received with a mixture of shock, gloom and hysteria in Venice: one loud voice told all who would listen that the discovery of a sea route to India via southern Africa meant nothing less than the end for the city.18 It was inevitable, said Girolamo Priuli, that Lisbon would take Venice’s crown as the commercial centre of Europe: ‘there is no doubt’, he wrote, ‘that the Hungarians, the Germans, the Flemish and the French, and all the people from across the mountains who used to come to Venice to buy spices with their money, will now turn to Lisbon’. For Priuli, the reasons were obvious. Everyone knew, he stated in his diary, that goods reaching Venice overland went through endless checkpoints where taxes and duties had to be paid; by transporting goods by sea, the Portuguese would be able to offer goods at prices Venice could not hope to compete with. The numbers told the story: Venice was doomed.