Volume 49, Number 17 · November 7, 2002
Islamic Venice?
By Hugh Honour
Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture, 1100–1500
by Deborah Howard
Yale University Press, 283 pp., $60.00
Wordsworth got it wrong. Venice never held 'the gorgeous East in fee' as he declared in his sonnet 'On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic,' published in 1807. Although Venetians grew rich from import-export business with the Levant and ruled part of the former Byzantine Empire for half a century after leading the sack of Constantinople in 1204, they obtained no more than concessions for trading posts on Islamic territory.
Review, 4054 words
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