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A new unused book.

About the book >.>.> Forty years before Cabot’s famous voyage to America a Bristol merchant called Robent Sturmy attempted to open up an English trade route with the Eastern Mediterranean. Not only would this have allowed him to up the Asian trade but also and above all it would have provided direct access to alum supplies a valuable mineral that was essential to the English cloth industry. This was the first serious English attempt to expand the reach of its seaborne trade beyond the narrow bounds of north- west Europe. In a time when most English merchants rarely strayed beyond Calais the Netherlands and Bordeaux Sturmy’s voyage represented a quantum leap in ambition for his plan was to break the Italians’ monopoly over Mediterranean trade by going straight to their most lucrative market that of Asia Minor and the Aegean. To achieve his ambition Sturmy sought and received support not just from Bristol’s merchant elite but from some of the greatest and most powerful nobles of his time. This was a massive and unprecedented undertaking but it was not to result in a new ‘golden age’ for English overseas trade. His attempt ended in failure when the Genoese attacked his ships off the Maltese coast killing Sturmy in the process. This volume sheds important new light on this incident by publishing for the first time a transcript with English translation of hitherto unknown documents in the Cologne City Archives relating to the trial of the Genoese before the English royal council. In an extensive introduction the editor Stuart Jenks presents a fascinating reappraisal of Sturmy’s expedition which locates it firmly in the context of European commercial expansion in the later medieval and early modern periods. (LL)