Read The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova for Free Online Page A

the Arsenale was visited by Dante Alighieri, who was so struck by what he saw that he incorporated it into a scene in his Inferno:
    As in the Arsenale at Venice
    They boil in winter bubbling pitch …
    One man hammers at the prow, another at the stern,
    This one shaves oars, that one rigging twists,
    Still others make the mainsail and the mizzen …
    Fire … thick boiling pitch with great bubbles black as ink,
    Rising and bursting in a seething tide …
    Working in the heat of the forges, and assembling the galleys beneath the burning sun, proved thirsty work for the industrious Arsenalotti , and a free wine fountain was provided for them to slake their thirst. At the height of the Arsenale’s productivity this fountain accounted for more than 13,000 gallons of wine in a year, with individual workers consuming as much as a gallon a day. Even though the wine would certainly have been watered down, this nonetheless marked a prodigious consumption. The Arsenalotti were a proud breed, who were recruited exclusively from the three neighbouring parishes of the Castello district. They regarded themselves as superior to other workers of the city, and certain privileged employment was restricted to their number. Only Arsenalotti were permitted to form thebodyguard of the doge, or make up the force of rowers required for the doge’s barge, the large golden ceremonial Bucintoro (from bucio in oro , or ‘barque in gold’). Likewise, only Arsenalotti were considered sufficiently skilled and trusted to be employed in the city’s Mint, or to be retained by the corps of city fire-fighters.
    The setting of the Arsenale at the eastern end of Venice overlooking the lagoon is both formidable and spectacular. Its high pink-brick walls look down over open water and surrounding inland canals, which combine to give it the appearance and defensive strength of a vast moated castle. Its architecture includes ancient and modern in characteristic Venetian fashion: the magnificent landside gateway to the Arsenale was one of the first examples in Venice of Renaissance architecture, whilst two of the nearby stone lions represent spoils of war dating from earlier centuries. One was seized from amongst the sacred sixth-century BC ruins on the island of Delos, while the other, captured from Piraeus (the port of Athens) is marked with graffiti of runes carved by eleventh-century Viking mercenaries employed by the Byzantine emperor.
    In the aftermath of the plague all Europe suffered from a huge depletion in manpower. Household servants, manual labour in the fields and the cities – all were in short supply. Venice found itself ideally placed to remedy the gap in the market. From as early as the eleventh century the Venetians and the Genoese had shipped slaves from the Black Sea to the markets of the Levant and Egypt, with a number ending up back in Europe. Now they were able to utilise these trading contacts to purchase larger numbers for transport to Europe. Although several papal edicts had been issued against slavery over the centuries, these were ignored during the post-plague years. Venice soon led the lucrative trade in importing Slav, Caucasian, Armenian and Georgian slaves, purchased from Tartar merchants at outposts on the Black Sea, such as Sinope and Trebizond, as well as Nubians purchased from Egyptian caravaners in Alexandria (although these black slaves seldom reached Europe, as they were mostly sold for work in the sugar plantations of Cyprus and Crete). This pitiful trade had originally relied upon a regular supply from Tartar merchants buying up young men and girls sold by their impoverished families in mountain villages of the Caucasus and other remoteeastern regions. Now, such was the demand for slaves in depleted Italy that the young men, women and children on the market often represented the entire able-bodied population of mountain villages, who had simply been rounded up by the Tartars. This trade proved hugely profitable for the