200 benjamin arbel
the help of local inhabitants.281 Venice’s participation in the anti-French
league in 1495 was used as an opportunity to take hold of several Apulian
port towns. Finally, three wars against the Habsburg dynasty were also
somehow related to the stato da mar: shortly before and during the war
of the League of Cambrai (1508–16), in Istria and Apulia; during the war
of the League of Cognac (1526–30), in Apulia again; and finally in 1615–
17, in the so-called War of Gradisca, or of the Uskoks, in the northern
Adriatic.
The Impact on the Countryside
The Republic had to cope several times with a prolonged presence of
huge Ottoman armies on its overseas territories, a presence that often
resulted in these colonies becoming Ottoman territories. Large armies
were involved in the invasions of Negroponte (1470), Corfu (in 1537 and
again in 1715), Cyprus (1570–71), Crete (1645–69), and the Morea (1715–18).282
The prolonged presence of big armies had a destructive effect on the local
countryside.283 The problem of defending the rural areas, where most of
the population generally lived, was impossible to solve in any significant
measure. The number of Corfiots reported to have been taken into slavery
by Barbarossa during his invasion of the island in 1537 fluctuates between
7000 and 24,000.284 During the following war in the early 1570s, many
Cypriots suffered a similar fate, and even those who could find shelter in
the fortified towns were not spared. The lot of Cretans during the 1645–69
war was not much better.
During these wars, several other Venetian territories suffered consider-
ably from raids and incursions. The Ottomans gained access to the Adri-
atic Sea at Valona in 1414, at Castelnuovo (Herzeg Novi), at the entrance
of the Bocche di Cattaro, in 1482, and at Macarsca, at the mouth of the
Narenta, in 1499. Consequently, the danger of sea raids on Venetian ter-
ritories in the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic increased considerably. Incur-
sions that took place in the 1460s and 1470s in the territories of Zara,
281 Miller, “The Ionian Islands,” p. 227.
282 For Negroponte, see Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 2:299; for Corfu, Bacchion,
Il dominio veneto su Corfù, p. 70; for Cyprus, Hill, A History of Cyprus, 3:965; for Crete,
Detorakis, History of Crete, p. 229; for the Morea, Ranke, “Die Venezianer in Morea,” p. 352.
283 For Cyprus, see Benjamin Arbel, “Cypriot Villages from the Byzantine to the British
Period: Observations on a Recent Book,” Κέντρο Επιστημoνικών Ερευνών. Επετηρίδα 26 (2000),
452–54.
284 Bacchion, Il dominio veneto su Corfù, p. 71; Pagratis, ed., Οι εκθέσεις, p. 147.