The Venetians had been pleased to help drive the Normans out of the Adriatic Sea but had demanded a heavy price.

Emperor Alexios I Komnenos had in 1108 granted them trading privileges in Constantinople and elsewhere on terms calculated to outbid the empire’s Greek merchants.

This charter, the cornerstone of the commercial empire of Venice in the eastern Mediterranean, has fed the flames of Greek resentment against the Latins and has provoked the rich, who might have been encouraged to invest their capital in shipbuilding and trade, to rely on the more familiar security of landed property.

Venice had at first been chiefly concerned with gaining control of the European trading ports of the Empire, leaving to private interests the commercial opportunities in Syria and Asia Minor.

Although the Venetians had been the first to win a commercial quarter in Constantinople, they antagonize the Greeks by their arrogance and lawlessness as well as by their superior enterprise.

John II Komnenos, seeking to strengthen imperial finances by ending Venetian trading privileges in the empire, is forced to restore them in 1122 after an unsuccessful war.