The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

and the new ruler of Milan, Francesco Sforza, Venice’s erstwhile ally against the
Visconti. Ravenna didn’t stay Venetian for long; the rest of its mainland empire,
though, remained intact until the coming of Napoleon.
The Turkish threat
The other Italian states might have taken concerted action against Venice had it
not been for the fact that the entire peninsula now faced the common threat of
the Ottoman Turks, as was acknowledged in the pact drawn up at Lodi later in
1454 between Venice, Milan, Naples, Florence and the Papal States. Open conflict
between Venice and the Turks had broken out early in the century – the Republic
winning the naval battle of Gallipoli in 1416 – but the policy of terra firma expansion
kept the majority of Venice’s warships on the rivers of the north, so reliance
had to be placed in diplomatic measures to contain the Turkish advance. They
were ineffective. Reports of a Turkish military build-up under the command of
the young Sultan Mahomet II were not treated with the necessary urgency, and
the consequence was that Western troops sent to defend Constantinople against
the Sultan’s army were insufficient to prevent the fall of the city in 1453.
The trade agreement which the Venetians managed to negotiate with the Sultan
could not arrest the erosion of its commercial empire in the East. The Turkish
fleets penetrated into the northern Aegean and many times in the last years of the
century the Turkish cavalry came so close to Venice that the fires from the villages
it destroyed could be seen from the top of the Campanile of San Marco. In 1479
Venice was forced to sign away the vital port of Negroponte and a batch of other
Aegean islands; the defeat of the Venetian navy at Sapienza in 1499 led to the loss
of the main fortresses of the Morea (Peloponnese), which meant that the Turks
now controlled the so-called “door to the Adriatic”. Virtually the only bright
spot in all the gloom came about through the marriage of the Venetian Caterina
Cornaro to the King of Cyprus in 1468. In 1473 the king died, and the ensuing
political pressure on the widow paid off in 1489, when Caterina handed over the
island to the government of Venice.
The sixteenth century
In 1494 Italy was invaded by Louis XII of France, an intervention which Venice
lost no time in exploiting. By playing the various territorial contenders off against
each other (mainly France and the Habsburgs), Venice succeeded in adding bits and
pieces to the terra firma empire, and in 1503 signed a disadvantageous treaty with
the Turks so as to be able to concentrate its resources on the mainland. Given the
accumulated hostility to Venice, it was a dangerous game, and when the Republic
began to encroach on the papal domain in Romagna, it at last provoked a unified
response from its opponents. The League of Cambrai, formed in 1508 with Pope
Julius II, Louis XII, Emperor Maximilian and the King of Spain at its head, pitted
almost every power in Europe against the Venetians, in a pact that explicitly declared
its intention of destroying Venice’s empire as a prelude to conquering the Turks.
The ensuing war began calamitously for Venice – its army was crushed by the
French at Agnadello, city after city defected to the League, and Venice prepared
for a siege. The siege never came, and in the end the conflicting interests of the
League enabled the Venetians, through subtle diplomacy, to repossess nearly
CONTEXTS
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A brief history of Venice
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