AI-powered
podcast player
Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features
The Venetian Political Elite
The Venetian political system is fascinating because it comes into being over very long periods of development that are punctuated by these moments of absolute fucking crisis, right? So they shift their investment as it becomes more difficult to trade in the Eastern Mediterranean. And so Venice's elite manages to just kind of pivot from thing to thing throughout these periods of really deep structural change. Eventually they just turn Venice into a tourist destination and they remain rich from that. They're gonna get rich off running high-end like running operations of high-end courtesans.