This week's host, Sally Gordon, discusses the Pactum Warmundi, a twelfth century treaty between the city-state of Venice and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. This agreement laid the groundwork for Italian colonial settlements in the Holy Land and represents a major landmark in the history of Mediterranean mercantile history. But how did the Pactum Warmundi come about? Why was it so important, and how did it work? (the text of the Pactum Warmundi, as copied into the Chronicle of William of Tyre, can be found in the 1943 translation of Emily Atwater Babcock and Augustus C. Krey. To read it, click here.)