I was watching a documentary the other day and it said that Venice became so rich by selling salt. They reasoned that because Venice was surrounded by salt water, it was easy to come by. But wouldn’t ANY coastal city be surrounded by salt water? What Venice’s salt so pricey? And why didn;t other countries just make their own salt?
I’m sure that someone will correct me if I am wrong but I thought that Venice became rich because they were great merchants whose trade lines spanned great distances. I would bet that they brought salt back on these trade lines from Africa or such. This was a lucrative good because few other places were doing this. I don’t believe that they used the surronding salt water to make salt. So in that aspect the documentary was wrong.
From http://www-geology.ucdavis.edu/~GEL115/salt.html
"The great trading ports of the Mediterranean dealt in salt as well as spices and textiles. Not surprisingly, the greatest of them, Genoa and Venice, not only traded in salt but fought for supremacy over the trade.
Salt can be made in almost any suitable seashore locality in the Mediterranean. So although it is possible to envisage a trader’s cartel, it is much more difficult to control the production of salt. It is astonishing how effectively Genoa and especially Venice managed to take control of production as well as trading. Genoa was positioned in the Western Mediterranean and Venice at the head of the Adriatic. Each used all its political and military strength to consolidate its local trade, and to encroach as far as possible on that of its rival. However, Venice was more organized politically, which translated into more ruthless and effective use of state power. And Venice made a conscious decision to concentrate on the salt trade, whereas to the Genoese it was just one of a set of potentially profitable cargoes. Where the two came into conflict over salt, the Venetians tended to win.
Venice managed to make a business out of control of the Adriatic salt trade. Venice owed some of its early wealth to the salt trade from salt works in its lagoon, and had a number of contracts with inland Italian cities in the 13th century to supply them with salt. The more that Venice came to control the salt trade in the Adriatic, the more the resulting profits were used by the city to subsidize other trading activities. Venetian traders delivering salt to the city were given bank credits, for example, allowing them to buy goods quickly. As the historian S. A. Adshead has written, “For the Venetians, salt was not a commodity among commodities… it greased the wheels of all the working parts and fuelled its motor”. The salt trade allowed Venetian traders to compete very effectively with their rivals across the board. Salt was “il vero fondamento del nostro stato.” Always, the Venetians were willing to exercise raw power to foster their control of salt. "
So we have a combination of natural resources (the briny lagoon) and more efficent governance. I didn’t post the entire article 'cause it’s long, but it goes into good detail about the importance of salt through time and has an excellent section on its importance in Europe’s political development.