The Historical Geography of Europe, Vol. I, Text

by Edward A. Freeman

♦Venice the champion against the Turk.♦

This marks an epoch in the history of Venice and of Europe. The championship of Christendom against the Turk now passes from the New Rome to the hardly less Byzantine city in the Lagoons. The short occupation of Thessalonikê may pass for the beginning of the struggle. Later in the fifteenth century, Venice and the Turk were meeting at every point. ♦Loss of Argos, 1463.♦ In Peloponnêsos, Argos was first lost to the Turk; at the same moment he appeared far to the north, and gradually occupied the Bosnian and Hungarian districts of Dalmatia. ♦1505-1699.♦ Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the inland districts and the smaller towns were lost over and over again, but the Republic always kept the chief coast cities, Zara, Sebenico, and Spalato. ♦Losses of Venice.♦ Meanwhile, to the south of Dalmatia, the Venetian power went back everywhere, except in the western islands. ♦1474-1478.♦ On the mainland Croja, the city of Scanderbeg, was held for a while. ♦1479.♦ But both Croja and Skodra were won by Mahomet the Conqueror, and the treaty which ended this war left to the Republic nothing on the coast of Albania and Northern Greece, save Durazzo, Antivari, and Butrinto. ♦1500.♦ The treaty which followed the next war took away Durazzo, Butrinto, and Lepanto. ♦The Western Islands, 1481-1483.♦ A series of revolutions in the islands of which the Republic already held the overlordship placed them under her immediate dominion, to be struggled for against the Turk. ♦1485.
1502.♦ By the next peace Zakynthos was kept, on payment of a tribute to the Sultan; Kephallênia passed to the Turk, to be won back seventeen years later, and then to be permanently kept. ♦1502-1504.♦ Leukadia was at the same time won for a moment and lost again. ♦Loss of the Peloponnesian fortresses, 1502.
1540.♦ In Peloponnêsos Modon and Koron were lost along with Durazzo and Lepanto, and the great naval war with Suleiman cost the Republic her last Peloponnesian possessions, Nauplia and Monembasia, together with all her Ægæan islands, except Tênos and Mykonos. The strictly Greek dominion of Venice was now for a hundred and forty years confined to the islands, and, after the loss of Cyprus and Crete, almost wholly to the Western islands. But after the loss of Crete came a revival of the Venetian power, like one of the old revivals of the Empire. ♦Venetian conquest of Peloponnêsos, 1685-1699.♦ The great campaigns of Francesco Morosini, confirmed by the peace of Carlowitz, freed all Peloponnêsos from the Turk, and added it to the dominion of Saint Mark.

The same treaty confirmed Venice in the possession of the greater part of Dalmatia. ♦Loss of Peloponnêsos, 1715-1718.♦ The next war cost her the whole of Peloponnêsos, her two Cretan fortresses, and her two remaining Ægæan islands. She now withdrew wholly to the western side of Greece, where she had again won Leukadia and Butrinto, and had enlarged her dominion by the acquisition of Prevesa. ♦Extent of Venetian dominion in Greece in the last century.♦ During the last century the Venetian possessions in Greece consisted of the seven so-called Ionian islands, with the continental posts of Butrinto, Prevesa, and Parga.

♦Venetian territory in Dalmatia.♦

The Dalmatian territory of the Republic during the same time consisted of a considerable inland district in the north-east, and of the whole coast down to Budua, except where the territory of independent Ragusa broke the continuity of her rule. ♦Ragusan frontier.♦ Ragusa was so jealous of the mightier commonwealth that she preferred the Turk as a neighbour. At two points of the coast, at Klek at the bottom of the gulf formed by the long peninsula of Sabbioncello, and again at Sutorina on the Bocche, the Ottoman territory came down to the sea, so as to isolate the dominion of Ragusa from the Venetian possessions on either side. Such was the frontier of the two Hadriatic commonwealths down to the days when, first Venice and then Ragusa, passed away.

♦Possession of Venetian cities.♦

Meanwhile, besides the direct possessions of the Venetian commonwealth, there were other lands within the former dominions of the Eastern Empire which were held by Venetian lords, as vassals either of the republic or of the Empire of Romania. It would be endless to trace out the revolutions of every Ægæan island; but one among the few which claim our notice became the seat of a dynasty which proved, next to the Venetian commonwealth itself, the most long-lived Latin power in the Greek world. ♦The Duchy of Naxos.♦ This is the duchy variously known as that of Naxos, of the Dôdekannêsos, and of the Archipelago, the barbarous name given to the Ægæan or White Sea.[34] ♦1207.
1566.♦ Founded in the early years of Latin settlement by the Venetian Marco Sanudo, the island duchy lived on as a Latin state, commonly as a vassal or tributary state of some greater power, till the last half of the sixteenth century. ♦Annexed by the Turk, 1579.
1617.♦ Shorn of many of its islands by its Ottoman overlord, granted afresh to a Jewish duke, it passed thirteen years later under the immediate dominion of the Sultan. Most of the Kyklades were either parts of this duchy or fiefs held of it by other Venetian families. All came into the hands of the Turk; but some of the very smallest remained merely tributary, and not fully annexed, into the seventeenth century.

♦Settlements of Genoa and of Genoese citizens.♦

The year which saw the Naxian duchy pass from Latin to Hebrew hands saw the fall of the most remarkable of the Genoese settlements in the Greek lands. These settlements, like those of Venice, formed two classes, those which were possessions of the Genoese commonwealth itself and those which came into the hands of Genoese citizens. ♦1304.♦ Genoa had no share in the fourth Crusade; she had therefore no share in the division of the Empire, though, after the restoration of Byzantine rule, her colony of Galata made her almost a sharer in the capital of the Empire. ♦Possessions of Genoa on the Euxine, 1461.♦ But the seat of direct Genoese dominion in the East was not the Ægæan but the Euxine. On the southern coast of that sea the republic held Amastris and Amisos, and in the Tauric Chersonêsos was her great colony of Kaffa. ♦1475.♦ The Euxine dominion of Genoa came to an end during the later half of the fifteenth century; but it outlived the Empires both of Constantinople and of Trebizond.