Embargo: the Origins of an Idea and the Implications of a Policy in Europe and the Mediterranean, ca. 1100 - ca. 1500.

Abstract

My dissertation borrows from both cultural and economic analysis to offer the first comprehensive study of the employment of embargoes in a pre-modern period as well as the first attempt to analyze embargoes not only as economic tools of foreign policy, but also as cultural phenomena. In Part I, “Spiritual Rationality: Papal Embargo as Cultural Practice,” I contend that the papal embargo, used against a plethora of targets within and outside Latin Christendom, served less as a means of achieving immediate political goals than as a way of drawing a boundary between the Christian faithful and a constructed Other. The main object of papal sanctions was not the achievement of foreign policy objectives, but the maximization of papal control over Christian souls. Hence the papal embargoes are best understood as targeted in the first instance at the Christians themselves, not at the “others” they helped to construct. In Part II, “Devedo: The Venetian Response to the Conqueror” I turn to an embargo imposed by Venice against the Ottoman Empire (1462-1479). The papacy may have used embargoes primarily to maximize its grip over its own “spiritual flock,” but for Venice the embargo was above all an economic tool for the attainment of foreign policy goals. Carefully tailored to the economic and political realities of the time, Venice’s embargo, which centered on preventing Ottoman access to large ships and on curtailing the sultan’s tax revenues, was Venice’s chief foreign policy tool against Sultan Mehmed II. I finally turn to the way in which different political entities across Europe and the Mediterranean employed trade restrictions in general and embargoes in particular to show that in result of the “Commercial Revolution,” the embargo became a well-conceptualized and widely used policy tool by the early 1300s. In sum, I use abundant archival and printed material to show that embargoes had a rich and nuanced history in pre-modern Europe and the broader Mediterranean and to argue for a conceptualization of embargo and hence economic sanctions that transcends the ambit of foreign policy.