Over the course of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the Adriatic Sea underwent profound political and economic transformations. Among the most enduring of these was the expansion of Venetian control over the Adriatic sea-lanes that so marked the subsequent history of the region. Drawing on the rich familial archives of Venice, this paper offers a sketch of the ways in which this expansion spurred the commercial activities of Venetian families within the region, activities that themselves served to reinforce Venetian economic dominance and ultimately to integrate the Adriatic into a regional trade system. In particular, it argues that the increasing importance of the Adriatic region to Venice’s economic well-being, as well as the development of a specifically intra-Adriatic trade system, can be seen in a striking shift in the private commercial activities of Venetian merchants around the year 1200.

The iconographic program of the episcopal throne in the basilica of San Nicola inBari,Italy, has proven tenaciously enigmatic, particularly on account of the central figure on the throne’s base, whose identity has so far eluded scholars. The author reinterprets the Bari throne in light of late eleventh-century ecclesiastical politics, notes artistic echoes within the Adriatic, and demonstrates the crucial importance of contemporary Fatimid art to an understanding of the central figure, who was likely intended to represent a Muslim. The throne is thus reconceived as the expression of a dialogue between a crusading pope and a consolidating prelate, as a response to the social upheaval prompted by the Norman conquest of southernItaly, and as new evidence for cross-Mediterranean cultural contacts at the dawn of the Crusades.