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The rise of Venice to become the great emporium for the West’s trade with the East was closely connected with the Byzantine recovery; culturally, Venice was really an outpost of the great metropolis at Constantinople – as its architecture revealed.
John Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000
By 1400 a new Europe had been made: a loose confederacy of Christian states, with a common high culture, broadly similar social and political institutions, and a developed inter-regional economy.
John Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000
It was the astonishing recovery of the Byzantine Empire in the ninth century, and the gradual consolidation of a feudal order in Western Europe in the eleventh, that marked the beginnings of Europe’s emergence as a viable, separate world civilization.
John Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000
For these empire-builders, the vast grassy steppe that stretched across Eurasia from Manchuria to Hungary was an open road to commercial wealth and almost limitless power. The trading cities of the Near and Middle East were a natural target.
John Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000


Peter the Great understood that the survival of his regime depended upon membership of the European states system and the diplomatic leverage it could be used to secure – like his useful alliance with Denmark against Sweden. To be driven out of ‘political Europe’ by Poland or Sweden would have been a catastrophe.
John Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000
Russia was – perhaps after 1700, certainly after 1762 – always one of the five or six great powers of Europe who made up the quarrelsome management committee of the continent’s affairs. It became, after Britain, the second greatest imperial power in Asia, and a colossal colonialist.
John Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000
