GENOA
Nevertheless she was very hardly beset about the year 1380. Her main fleet had been beaten, the navy of Genoa held her blockaded by sea, and the enemy State of Padua prevented provisions coming to her by land. She was in imminent danger of starvation.
And then the Genoese fleet suffered just that disaster which the Athenian fleet had suffered in its blockade of Syracuse. The Venetians contrived to block the waterway which gave entrance and exit to the lagoon in which the blockading ships of the Genoese lay. They found themselves entrapped precisely as they had proposed to trap the Venetians, and finally had to surrender and hand over the greater part of their fleet. It was a disaster from which Genoa never recovered, and Venice was left mistress of the Mediterranean.
She was mistress, almost without dispute, until the Turkish navy was sufficiently strong to oppose her. The first war between them which went on for fifteen years from 1464, was indecisive, but it ended with Venice paying tribute to Turkey for her trading rights. Venice had no friends. She had been nearly starved out by Padua, lying just inland of her own territory; and lest this should happen to her again she had fought, and fought with success, to add to her mainland territory. Therefore she had not a neighbour with whom she was not on terms of enmity. All were jealous of her and all feared her.
Thus it happened that in the very last year of the fifteenth century, when war with Turkey broke out again, we see the curious spectacle of the Pope himself, of the Emperor, and of the rulers of three other great states of Italy, Naples, Florence, and Milan, all, in some degree, favouring the Turkish and Moslem Sultan in his fight against the Italian and Christian ruler of Venice. Less than fifty years earlier, after the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, the Pope had imposed and endeavoured to collect a tax of one-tenth of the value of all benefices—or of all paid offices in the Church—in order to raise a force to evict the Turks. But now he had come to regard the Moslem Turk as a less dangerous enemy than the Venetian Christian.
In that final year, moreover, the Turks gained their first really crippling naval victory over the Venetians at Sapienza; and for Venice it was the beginning of the end of her great power.
Thus at the opening of the sixteenth century we find the Turk established nearly as far in Europe as it was his destiny to plant himself. He had all that country of the Balkans which various races of the Slavs had held before him and which they again now hold, after him; and he had parts of what before, and also later again, were Austria. Therefore of those Balkans and of those Austrian provinces, he was in no more than temporary possession.