on the waves, and they played the game very roughly, for victory could bring more than simple neighborly bragging rights or plunder. The Venetians, Genoese, and Pisans were competing to become the leading mercantile power in the west. At the turn of the fourteenth century, this was no small prize. World trade was booming. Commodities and luxury goods were flying halfway around the globe at a pace seldom seen before in the whole of human history. Commercial dominance in this age was worth fighting—and dying—for.
