Historical Ports

The maritime republic that ruled East Mediterranean trade for five centuries. The Arsenal, the largest industrial complex in Europ...

Founded by Alexander in 331 BC, the greatest harbor of the Hellenistic world. The Pharos lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders, and...

The imperial harbor of Constantinople for sixteen centuries, commanding the trade gate between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean...

The departure point of the Portuguese discoveries. Vasco da Gama sailed from Belem in 1497 to open the sea route to India, and spi...

Holder of the exclusive trade with Spanish America through the Casa de Contratacion from 1503, with treasure fleets officially bou...

The warehouse of the 1600s world economy. The Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602 and often called the first multinational c...

The cloth capital of medieval northern Europe at its 1300s peak, with Hanseatic merchants running a kontor and the term bourse bor...

The Hanseatic wharf of Bryggen, run by German merchants from about 1360, shipped dried cod stockfish from Arctic Norway to Catholi...

The queen of the Hanseatic League, the trading network that controlled northern seas from the 1300s. Lubeck law and Lubeck merchan...

The port of empire, by 1900 the busiest in the world. East Indiamen once queued in the Pool, then docks marched east to Tilbury. T...

The second port of empire and the British gateway to the Atlantic. Around nine million emigrants sailed for new worlds from its qu...

The sultanate port that gave its name to the strait, founded around 1400 as the monsoon rendezvous where Arab, Indian, and Chinese...

Called Zayton by Arab sailors, the largest port in the world around 1300 under the Yuan dynasty. Marco Polo sailed home from here ...

The great spice entrepot of the Malabar coast, where Vasco da Gama landed in 1498 to break the Venetian monopoly on pepper. The Za...

Founded by Phoenicians from Tyre, traditionally in 814 BC, Carthage dominated western Mediterranean trade with its famous double h...

Built by Claudius and expanded by Trajan with a hexagonal basin to replace the silting river harbor of Ostia. Grain ships from Egy...

During the Edo period seclusion, the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki harbor was the only place where Dutch merchants could...

Sultan Said bin Sultan moved the capital of the Omani empire to Zanzibar in the 1840s, turning the island into the leading market ...