venice’s maritime empire in the early modern period 143
were lost during the same years (Negroponte, Coron, Modon, Lepanto,
Zonchio, Argos, Durazzo, and the Albanian inland towns).41
Moreover, considering the expansion and contraction in demographic
terms, the apex of the stato da mar’s development must be pushed several
decades further. The 16th century was a period of a significant population
rise in the Mediterranean basin, including Venice itself and its maritime
empire, and this conjoncture concerned particularly the biggest over-
seas possessions—Cyprus and Crete, the two of which, on the eve of the
Cyprus war, together had nearly 400,000 inhabitants. Therefore, even if
the number of colonies declined in 1509 and continued to fall during the
1537–40 war with the Ottomans, the stato da mar reached its highest point
in demographic terms on the eve of the Cyprus war, that is, in 1570.
The loss of Cyprus and then of Crete were tremendous blows to Venice’s
position as a Mediterranean power, and the conquest of the Peloponnese
in the late 17th and early 18th century was a passing episode, although
a few smaller colonies conquered in the course of the Cretan and the
Peloponnesian wars remained under Venetian rule until the end of the
Republic. But not many historians are aware of the expansion of Ven-
ice’s dominions in Istria by approximately 20 per cent in 1509,42 as well
as of the already mentioned widening of Venice’s dominions in Dalmatia
and Albania in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. From 1718 until the
demise of the Republic in 1797, the long belt of Venetian possessions along
the eastern shores of the Adriatic Sea, which was not as slim as it had been
during the 15th and 16th centuries, extended, together with the numerous
Adriatic islands, down to the Ragusan border. Beyond Ragusa, Venice con-
tinued ruling, in the so-called “Venetian Albania,” the enclave of Cattaro
(also extended during the War of Candia) and that of Budua; the Ionian
islands, including Corfu (with its mainland dependencies of Butrinto and
Parga, and the island dependency of Paxos), Santa Maura or Lefkada (with
its mainland dependencies of Prevesa and Vonitsa on both sides of the
41 Cyprus’s area is 9251 km2, that of Zante is 407 km2, and that of Veglia (Krk) is 406 km2.
Negroponte (Evia) has 3684 km2. For Coron and Modon, including their rural hinterland,
I rely on Andrea Nanetti’s information, according to which, at their maximum expansion in
1424, their area was roughly equivalent to that of today’s municipality of Pylos-Nestoras,
i.e., 552 km2. Yet at the moment of their loss in 1500, their area was smaller. Cephalonia
and Ithaca cover an area of about 900 km2. The area of all other colonies lost during
the war with the Ottomans concluded in 1503 must have been rather small. For caution’s
sake, being unable to assess the area controlled by the Apulian towns (lost in 1509) in
comparison with the one conquered by Venice about the same time in Istria, I would place
the zenith of Venice’s expansion at 1503, the date of the peace treaty with the Ottomans.
42 Ivetic, L’Istria moderna, p. 23.