Venetian Renaissance Quiz Day 5



The Venetians got a corner on the European sugar market long before anyone else, and guarded their production and trade secrets jealously and violently. Sugar was an extreme luxury in the Middle Ages and a massive source of profit. 

Today's Question: What Mediterranean island did the Venetians subjugate for a century to force them to grow sugar for Venice? (They didn't even allow the locals to grow their own food gardens for a long period, which forced the locals to rely on their Venetian overlords.) What queen was reigning at the time this island helplessly fell into Venetian hands?


Bonus question: 
Another heroine of mine comes from a wealthy family in Enlightenment-era (1790s) Edinburgh. She objects to eating sugar on philosophical grounds (she thinks people should stick to honey and good old-fashioned Scotch whiskey). Why might she be opposed to her peers' consumption of sugar?


Some sweet resources to whet your appetite:
www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/...
www.visitcyprus.com/files/cultural_routes/...
www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/...
www.sucrose.com/lhist.html
www.fergusmurraysculpture.com/cyprus/...

A note on resources and research: a tricky thing about researching the history of Venice and other European histories in English, can be that British and American scholars have often just lumped all continental achievements, including Venetian ones, in as "European" (particularly in anything written down by the British aristocracy, who liked to maintain the myth of British supremacy in all things, and so didn't like to applaud others' achievements too loudly, even while they admired them). So you may have learned more about Venetian achievements during your past studies, than you previously realized.
Another tricky thing is that people might not like to admit the past -- such as locals not wanting to remember the century they were enslaved. As we see in one of the resources above, the period of enslavement is glossed over, and the sugar business is presented as a benign trade arrangement, if you don't know how to read between the lines.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lesson 5: Beyond Dusty Books: Researching Characters and Plots through Crafting

A real boon of researching by doing hand work   is that you find a rhythm when you're using your hands, and that can spin out nicely for    pacing a scene.  For example, you can have some grandmothers sewing a quilt of family events and discussing various family members, maybe relating personality characteristics or events to colours on the quilt. Or you could have a heroine weaving a blanket and thinking about all the threads in her life, the warp and weft of people and events and places. Or you can have a man making barrels in the back yard and have the heroine admiring his hands and the ease with which he shapes his barrels, and maybe think about how he has molded and shaped his children into beautiful works of art, too.  You get the idea. I would love if some other people pitched in with some ideas on this! As I mentioned at the beginning of this course, I spent a few years farm volunteering around Europe, and I've done this a little in Canada too. I know t
Read more

Living and Writing with Less Money and More Passion in Europe

Image
Rocket yourself back into the past: Go WWOOFing to research your next historical novel! Table of contents:  Out-of-the-Box Solution   1             How It Works   2              Other sample experiences   5 Writing schedule:   14                     But . . .   14                      Other Organizations   15 by Christa Bedwin I have been  writer and editor for twenty years. (I now write time-travel magical realism adventures with my characters exploring various cool time periods and places in the past, mostly but not completely placed in Europe.) Even ten years ago I realized a big problem with the writing/editing career – too much time with the bum in the chair just isn’t healthy. An editing colleague died of an aneurysm at her desk, working on a late deadline, and I vowed to make my health a priority. (Sometimes I do better, sometimes I do worse, but the intention is always there!) As a single mom, though, budget matters. I pulled years of working all night on editi
Read more

My Writing Companion

Image
My writing companion is an 18-year-old black cat. She's our philosopher cat (we also have a military cat who defends us and keeps us in order, but that's my son's cat -- another story). I never meant to have a black cat, but about when I finally accepted that I seemed to be a sad and lonely spinster and that I might as well get a cat, I decided I should go to the humane society. But I procrastinated. Instead of going to the humane society that day, I walked up a hill in the town where I lived at the time and down the hill were coming Ashley, Leanna, and Ashley, and they were carrying this wee black kitten, the last of her litter, and they sorrowfully told me if they couldn't give this little cat named Zipper away, their parents were going to force them to take her to the humane society. So then I had a cat. No collar or litter or cat knowledge or anything but I took her home and the first thing she ever napped on was a stack of manuscript
Read more