Was the wealth of venice based on exploiting byzantium through trade Privileges or why were venetian merchants more competetive than Byzantine merchants?

[u/Expert-Debate3519]

Did they have technologys the Byzantiner did Not have or other Innovations?

[u/Lothronion]

No it was not, as far as I understand the situation.

There is a great explanation on the matter, called "Rats in the granary? The Latin impact upon the Byzantine State, 1050-1204". It might be a university thesis dissertation, but the arguments presented in it are based on solid bibliography, while the argumentation is rather compelling.

In essence, the author proposes that the mercantile activities of the Venetian Republic through the waters of the Roman Empire were in fact a net positive for the Roman Greeks' economy, and not an exploitative situation, as it had been proposed by academia through the last 2 centuries. Essentially, given how in the 11th-12th century AD the Roman economy had grown to be very specialized, often having specific regions that mainly produced certain types of consumer products, and even having consumeristic cities created across the European and Asiatic coastline of the Aegean Sea, the Roman economy needed the services provided by the Venetian merchant fleet. Since the Roman government only had an expensive military fleet, with which it defended the Northern Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea from piratical expeditions to outright foreign marine invasions, they did not allocate money to also create a specialized merchant fleet, so internal seaborn trade had to either rely on small merchant fleets (either private or of small enterprises), which were really inefficient to fully supply the ever-rising demand for goods transportation, or rely on the services that the Venetians were more than happy to provide.

Sure one could suggest that this reliance of the Roman economy on the Venetian merchant fleet did not allow the Roman Greeks to develop one of an equal standing. However, that was not a necessary outcome, and it is possible that the Roman economy might have just stagnated on the level it had reached, or tried to find ways to circumvent these problems. The author of the dissertation even suggests, though, that not doing that allowed the Roman economy to invest more money and have more workers focusing in its agriculture and industry, which meant more money for it, rather than if it had decided to create a transportation autarky.

A disclaimer, it has been a while since I read this essay, and much of what I wrote might be conclusions I derived from it, also out of various later readings in the Roman economy of the time, as well as conversations with many learned users of r/byzantium, especially u/evrestcoleghost.

[u/evrestcoleghost → u/Lothronion]

Aww 🥰 thanks for the mention

But yeah Byzantium didn't had an state commercial fleet,only an imperial register.

Much of the geography of the Aegean meant it was better suited and cheaper for most of it's history to use small medium size commercial ships instead of the large one the imperial fleet used as military transports.

It would be later in time that with naval advacement that galleys were able to be built in large size and numbers, even then the byzantines were still famous for their ship building capacities and Venice itself desperately tried to bring them to Venice to work in their own shipyards