City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas

of silver with an adder’s head on top.” They were again defeated by the weather. Barbaro’s men had dug into a rubbish tip. They had missed by a few hundred yards the burial chamber of a Scythian princess, adorned with enough jewelery to ignite all their wildest Venetian dreams of oriental gold. It was not discovered until 1988.

Nothing would have confirmed Petrarch’s view of Venetians’ material obsessions so much as the journey of Giosafat Barbaro, a merchant and diplomat who set out from Tana with 120 laborers to search a Scythian burial mound on the steppes for treasure. In 1447, he traveled by sledge up the frozen rivers, but “found the ground so hard, we were constrai