for a third, there were now certain practical difficulties in doing business. The great medieval trading states of the Mediterranean were in formidable shape in the mid-fifteenth century. Yet they did not enjoy perfectly harmonious relations with the Ottomans: Venice was at outright war with the Turks for a decade and a half, and lost to them its critical trading post at Negroponte. Genoa was stripped of its most important Black Sea port, Caffa. Certain specific sectors—such as the lucrative trade in transporting Turkic people captured and enslaved around the Black Sea to Mamluk Egypt—were
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