Way to turn lemons into lemonade. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have brought up lemons. Best wishes, John Green. This system eventually broke down as the Janissaries, who had guns, lobbied to be allowed to have families. But until that happened, the Ottoman system of using a mix of slave administrators and eunuchs to run everything worked incredibly well. To return to the relationship between the Ottomans and the Venetians, after the Ottomans captured Egypt, they pretty much controlled the flow of trade through the Mediterranean. But the Venetians had centuries of experience as mariners, and also lots of boats.