Participation in the Crusades was not a solitary proof of the importance of the naval states of Italy. That they had been able to act effectively in the Levant may have been in some measure due to the weakening of the Mohammedans by the disintegration of the Seljukian power, the movements of the Moguls, and the confusion consequent on the rise of the Ottomans. However that may have been, the naval strength of those Italian states was great absolutely as well as relatively. Sismondi, speaking of Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, towards the end of the eleventh century, says 'these three cities had more vessels on the Mediterranean than the whole of Christendom besides.'[29] Dealing with a period two centuries later, he declares it 'difficult to comprehend how two simple cities could put to sea such prodigious fleets as those of Pisa and Genoa.' The difficulty disappears when we have Mahan's explanation. The maritime republics of Italy—like Athens and Rhodes in ancient, Catalonia in mediæval, and England and the Netherlands in more modern times—were 'peculiarly well fitted, by situation and resources, for the control of the sea by both war and commerce.' As far as the western Mediterranean was concerned, Genoa and Pisa had given early proofs of their maritime energy, and fixed themselves, in succession to the Saracens, in the Balearic Isles, Sardinia, and Corsica. Sea-power was the Themistoclean instrument with which they made a small state into a great one.
[Footnote 29: _Ital.Republics, English ed., p. 29.]
A fertile source of dispute between states is the acquisition of territory beyond sea. As others have done before and since, the maritime republics of Italy quarrelled over this. Sea-power seemed, like Saturn, to devour its own children. In 1284, in a great sea-fight off Meloria, the Pisans were defeated by the Genoese with heavy loss, which, as Sismondi states, 'ruined the maritime power' of the former. From that time Genoa, transferring her activity to the Levant, became the rival of Venice, The fleets of the two cities in 1298 met near Cyprus in an encounter, said to be accidental, that began 'a terrible war which for seven years stained the Mediterranean with blood and consumed immense wealth.' In the next century the two republics, 'irritated by commercial quarrels'—like the English and Dutch afterwards—were again at war in the Levant. Sometimes one side, sometimes the other was victorious; but the contest was exhausting to both, and especially to Venice. Within a quarter of a century they were at war again. Hostilities lasted till the Genoese met with the crushing defeat of Chioggia. 'From this time,' says Hallam, 'Genoa never commanded the ocean with such navies as before; her commerce gradually went into decay; and the fifteenth century, the most splendid in the annals of Venice, is till recent times the most ignominious in those of Genoa.' Venice seemed now to have no naval rival, and had no fear that anyone could forbid the ceremony in which the Doge, standing in the bows of the Bucentaur, cast a ring into the Adriatic with the words, _Desponsamus_te,_Mare,_in_signum_veri_perpetuique_dominii_. The result of the combats at Chioggia, though fatal to it in the long-run, did not at once destroy the naval importance of Genoa. A remarkable characteristic of sea-power is the delusive manner in which it appears to revive after a great defeat. The Persian navy occasionally made a brave show afterwards; but in reality it had received at Salamis a mortal wound. Athens seemed strong enough on the sea after the catastrophe of Syracuse; but, as already stated, her naval power had been given there a check from which it never completely recovered. The navy of Carthage had had similar experience; and, in later ages, the power of the Turks was broken at Lepanto and that of Spain at Gravelines notwithstanding deceptive appearances afterwards. Venice was soon confronted on the sea by a new rival. The Turkish naval historian, Haji Khalifeh,[30] tells us that, 'After the taking of Constantinople, when they [the Ottomans] spread their conquests over land and sea, it became necessary to build ships and make armaments in order to subdue the fortresses and castles on the Rumelian and Anatolian shores, and in the islands of the Mediterranean.' Mohammed II established a great naval arsenal at Constantinople. In 1470 the Turks, 'for the first time, equipped a fleet with which they drove that of the Venetians out of the Grecian seas.'[31] The Turkish wars of Venice lasted a long time. In that which ended in 1503 the decline of the Venetians' naval power was obvious. 'The Mussulmans had made progress in naval discipline; the Venetian fleet could no longer cope with theirs.' Henceforward it was as an allied contingent of other navies that that of Venice was regarded as important. Dyer[32] quotes a striking passage from a letter of Æneas Sylvius, afterwards Pope Pius II, in which the writer affirms that, if the Venetians are defeated, Christendom will not control the sea any longer; for neither the Catalans nor the Genoese, without the Venetians, are equal to the Turks.
[Footnote 30: _Maritime_Wars_of_the_Turks_, Mitchell's trans., p. 12.]
[Footnote 31: Sismondi, p. 256.]
[Footnote 32: _Hist.Europe, i. p. 85.]
SEA-POWER IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
The last-named people, indeed, exemplified once more the rule that a military state expanding to the sea and absorbing older maritime populations becomes a serious menace to its neighbours. Even in the fifteenth century Mohammed II had made an attack on Southern Italy; but his sea-power was not equal to the undertaking. Suleymân the Magnificent directed the Ottoman forces towards the West. With admirable strategic insight he conquered Rhodes, and thus freed himself from the danger of a hostile force on his flank. 'The centenary of the conquest of Constantinople was past, and the Turk had developed a great naval power besides annexing Egypt and Syria.'[33] The Turkish fleets, under such leaders as Khair-ad-din (Barbarossa), Piale, and Dragut, seemed to command the Mediterranean including its western basin; but the repulse at Malta in 1565 was a serious check, and the defeat at Lepanto in 1571 virtually put an end to the prospect of Turkish maritime dominion. The predominance of Portugal in the Indian Ocean in the early part of the sixteenth century had seriously diminished the Ottoman resources. The wealth derived from the trade in that ocean, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea, had supplied the Mohammedans with the sinews of war, and had enabled them to contend with success against the Christians in Europe. 'The main artery had been cut when the Portuguese took up the challenge of the Mohammedan merchants of Calicut, and swept their ships from the ocean.'[34] The sea-power of Portugal wisely employed had exercised a great, though unperceived, influence. Though enfeebled and diminishing, the Turkish navy was still able to act with some effect in the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, the sea-power of the Turks ceased to count as a factor of importance in the relations between great states.
[Footnote 33: Seeley, _British_Policy_, i. p. 143.]
[Footnote 34: Whiteway, p. 2.]