为什么威尼斯、热那亚等意大利城邦国家在大航海和之后的国际贸易中相比于其他西欧国家处于劣势？ 第1页

引自沃勒斯坦的Wallerstein, Immanuel的Three paths of national development in sixteenth-century europe：

Neither the fall of Constantinople nor Portuguese explorations therefore had much to do with Venetian decline.
For Venice did decline. It declined as a center of trade because, with the creation of a European world economy, whose great waterways in the sixteenth century were the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, Venice was no longer geographically central. Furthermore sugar production on Mediterranean islands had gradually exhausted the land and the manpower by the mid-fifteenth century. New lands and peoples had to be exploited--first the Atlantic islands (Madeira, Canary Islands, Azores, São Tomé and Príncipe), then the West Indies and Brazil.