Venice

Only Genoa came close to breaking that mastery. In the War of Chioggia of 1378–81 the Genoese seized Chioggia and much of the lagoon itself, but Venice held on, and after the Treaty of Turin of 1381 Genoa never again contested Mediterranean trade with it. Secure at sea, the Republic turned to the land that fed it, and within twenty years of 1404 Vicenza, Padua, Verona, Brescia and Bergamo had become its mainland dominion, the Terraferma. That dominion nearly vanished in 1509, when the League of Cambrai crushed the Venetian army at Agnadello, but the mainland towns rose to the cry of "Marco, Marco", and within seven years the Republic had won back its lands as far as the Adda.

The empire in the east wore away more slowly. After Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, war after war with the sultans stripped Venice of its eastern possessions, while Vasco da Gama's voyage to India in 1497–99 opened a sea route that broke the spice trade on which the city had grown rich. Cyprus was lost in 1571, and the victory at Lepanto that same year did not bring it back. Crete, the greatest of its colonies, was surrendered in 1669 after a siege of twenty-one years, and the Morea, won in 1699, was lost again in 1718.