1309 - Doge Pietro Gradenigo's support seemed non-existent as Ferrara is lost to the Papacy. The following year saw Bajamonte Tiepolo leads a revolt of a patrician's clique. Bajamonte bears a personal grudge against the Doge and wanted to replace the new democratic system with his own despotic one. Tiepolo's private army was routed in a battle in the centre of the city. As a result of the rebellion the Council of Ten was formed. The Council of Ten was a committee empowered to supervise matters of internal security and its three leaders the Capi dei Dieci. The council members were elected every three months and sat every weekday during their term of office. Though intended as an emergency measure, its tenure was repeatedly extended until in 1334 it was made a permanent institution. Like the Doge the Council of Ten was hemmed in with numerous safeguards to prevent misuse of the information its spies sent back from every part of the world where the Republic had an interest. The Council couldn't make a final decision about important matters without the Doge and his six ministers. For matters of extreme urgency and importance a zonta of additional members could be drawn upon for advice. Despite these checks, the members of the Council of Ten were to become the most feared and respected of the Republic's servants.

Venice was now packed with visitors all year round. Some were rich sight seers, others had come to visit the many shrines in the city. Some even came for the medical facilities and the highly trained doctors of the government sponsored School of Medicine.

The most celebrated attempt to subvert the Venetian Government followed forty-five years after Tiepolo's attempt. This time the crime was perpetrated by the Doge himself! Doge Marin Falier had ironically been heavily involved in the sentencing of the former rebel. Falier's plot was to overthrow the government and install himself as absolute ruler. His attempt seems to have been prompted by his fury at the lenient treatment accorded a young nobleman who had insulted him. By exploiting the grievances felt against certain noble families by, amongst others the director of the Arsenale, Falier gathered together a group of conspirators. The majority of the group were drawn from the working class, a section of Venetian society which was particularly effected by the economic demands of the rivalry with Genoa. To make the situation worse, the return of open warfare was followed by the arrival of the Black Plague (1348-1349). The plague killed almost 60% of the population despite the best efforts of the magi who lent their aid to the skilled doctors of Venice, supplying potions and spells to cure the sick and ease the passage of those beyond help. For their efforts the magi would receive the thanks of a shaken but grateful city. A year before Venice had been struck by an earthquake which had shaken the city so strongly that the bells of St Marks had rung discordantly as masonry from church towers had fallen into the canals. Details of the planned coup leaked out and Falier was arrested and on April 17, eight months after becoming Doge, was beheaded on the steps of the Palazzo Ducale.

1353 - At the Sardinian port of Alghero the Genoese Navy lost a similar proportion of its vessels to the Venetians at the Battle of Curzola. The climax came with the Fourth War of Genoa, better known as the War of Chioggia between 1379 and 1380. Following a victory over the Venetians at Zara in 1379, the Genoese fleet sailed on to Venice, supported by the Paduans and the Austrians, and quickly took Chioggia. This was the zenith of Genoa's power - in August 1380 the invaders were driven off, and although the treaty signed by the two cities seemed inconclusive, within a few decades it was clear that Venice had at last won the battle for economic and political supremacy.

In order to ensure that galleys reached home, Venice supplied each ship with a small crew of highly trained archers in companies of 12, each with its officer. This continued until the development of firearms and cannons. Three times a year public tournaments were held at which prizes of cloth, bows and quivers were awarded to the winners. During the wild celebrations following these contests, Venetians' combative nature came to the fore with arrows and marbles being fired at rival parties.
Open fighting in the streets wasn't confined to the feisty archers of the navy, young nobles in Venice belonged to city clubs which were known as the Della Calza. The membership of these clubs denoted by badges embroidered with gold, silver and precious gems. These clubs would often come to blows, even the clubs for just women clubs.

The sea lanes of the Eastern Mediterranean were the foundation of Venice's wealth but as its dominance as a trading centre clearly depended on free access to the rivers and mountain passes of Northern Italy. Thus, although Venetian foreign policy was predominantly eastward-looking from the start, a degree of intervention on the the mainland was inevitable, especially with the rise in the Fourteenth Century of ambitious dynasties such as the Scaligeri in Verona and the Visconti in Milan. Equally inevitable was the shift from a strategy to preserve Venice's commercial interests, to a scheme that was blatantly imperialistic. The unsuccessful battle for Ferrara was Venice's first territorial campaign. The first victory came thirty years later when the combined forces of Venice, Florence and the league of Lombard cities defeated the Scaligeri, allowing Venice to incorporate Castelfranco, Conegliano, Sacile, Oderzo and, most importantly, Treviso into the domain ruled by the Republic. Having thus secured the roads to Germany, the Venetians turned their eyes westward. New industries were flourishing in Venice. Silk manufacture in the Calle Della Bissa, where craftsmen from Lucca had settled, and the production of looking-glasses on the island of Murano where German experts had introduced methods that would transform the level of quality of La Serrenissima's greatest export. With a prolonged period of peace new wells and cisterns were being dug and streets paved. It was at this time that the city was freed at last from its dependence on imported food. Its territories on the mainland now supplied enough for all.

The political machinations in northern Italy in this period are extremely complicated with alliances regularly made and betrayed, and cities changing hands with bewildering frequency - Treviso, for example, was lost and won back before the close of the Fourteenth Century. The bare outline of the story is that by 1405, Venice had eradicated the most powerful neighbouring dynasty, the Carrara family of Padua, and had a firm hold on Bassano, Belluno, Feltre, Vicenza, Verona and Padua itself. Republic and Turkish naval forces fight an engagement of the coast of Gallipoli in 1416. The annexation of the Friuli and Undino, formerly ruled by the King of Hungary, virtually doubled the area of terra firma under Venetian control and brought the border of the Empire right up to the Alps by the end of 1420.

1423 - Many Venetians felt that any further expansion would be foolish and this view was shared by Doge Tommaso Mocenigo, who on his deathbed urged his companions to refrain from taking what belongs to others or making unjust wars. Specifically he warned them against the ambitions of Francesco F—scari - "If he becomes Doge, you will be constantly at war - you will become the slaves of your masters-at-arms and their captains."
Within a fortnight after the old Doge's death the Venetians had elected F—scari Doge and soon Venice was on the offensive against the mightiest prince of the north - Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan. Not only was Filippo a powerful man but he was also insane. He had been known to strip naked on hot summer days and roll about in the flowers of his garden. Not only fat, he had a deformed leg that was so weak that it would collapse under him if it had to support his weight. In order to rise from a chair the Duke would lean on a page. The Duke was intensely paranoid and nervous. He would scream at the sight of a naked blade and so was deathly afraid of thunder that he had a sound-proof room built. To avoid assassination he slept in a different room each night. Despite these flaws and his profound love of perpetrating dangerous practical jokes on unsuspecting courtiers, even his enemies acknowledged him to be one of the most astute and wily rulers in Italy. In the first phase of the campaign nothing except a tenuous ownership of Bergamo and Brescia was gained, a failure for which the Venetian Mercenary Captain Carmagnola served as scapegoat. He was executed in 1432 for Treason. His place was taken by Erasmo da Nami, who was better known as Il Gattamelata.

1435 - With the Papal Thanks legitimising the presence of magi in society, the Italian Houses consolidated in Venice to form the Scuole di Mercere - the Guild of Mercury, one of many of the Venetian guilds like the glass blowers and the weapons makers. The Verditians, former members of House Verditius, were given the use of a workshop on the top floor of a warehouse in the Arsenale. In 1437 the new houses of the Scuola were officially unveiled by the Doge. The interior partly funded by the government as thanks for the work done by the magi in fighting the epidemic of the Black Plague.

1441 - The Treaty of Cremona confirmed Venetian control of Peschiera, Brescia, Bergamo and part of the territory of Cremona, and by now Ravenna was also officially part of the Venetian Empire. But still the fighting continued.
In 1453 after sharpening his claws on European shipping, the new Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Mehmed II, marched upon Constantinople with an army of 8000. On 29 May 1453 they burst into the city and laid it waste in a three day long pillage. Five hundred of the resident Venetians were killed an d it took the city a further year to obtain the release of the remaining Venetian residents. The advance of the Turk however failed to unify the European powers.
The fighting finally ended in 1454 with the signing of a treaty between Venice and the new ruler of Milan, Francesco Sforza. Venice's erstwhile ally against the Visconti. Ravenna didn't stay Venetian for long although the rest of its mainland empire remained intact till the time of Napoleon.

The other Italian states might have taken concerted action against Venice had it not been for the fact that the entire peninsula now faced the common threat of the Ottoman Turks, as was acknowledged in the pact drawn up at Lodi later that year between Venice, Milan, Naples, Florence and the Papal States. Open conflict between Venice and the Turks had broken out early in the century but the policy of terra firma expansion kept the majority of Venice's warships on the rivers of the north, so reliance had to be placed in diplomatic measures to contain the Turkish advance. They were ineffective.

The trade agreement which the Venetians managed to negotiate with the Turks could not arrest the erosion of their commercial empire in the East. The Turkish fleets penetrated deep into the Aegean and many times in the last years of the Fifteenth Century its cavalry came so close to Venice that the fires from the villages it destroyed could be seen from the top of the Campanille of San Marco. In mid-July 1470 the Venetian island of Negraponte fell despite the brave defence of its citizens. Most of the Venetians were slaughtered, many women raped before their deaths and their children decapitated. The advance of the Ottoman Turks seemed impossible and in 1480 they even established a bridgehead in southern Italy at the port of Otranto. The port became a trading point for the Turks to sell their Christian slaves back to Christendom.

Virtually the only bright spot in all the gloom came about through the marriage of the Venetian Caterina Cornaro to the King of Cyprus in the year 1468.The King of Cyprus died five years later. Caterina immediately became the target of multiple plots all with the intention of seizing power. The Court Doctor and the Chamberlain were assassinated before her very eyes. She was then forced to recognise a bastard son of the King of Naples as the heir in preference to her own son. At this point the Venetians stepped in, sending an expeditionary force to ensure Caterina's son was placed on the throne. The child died two years later. A number of plots immediately sprang up, including a forced marriage to Alfonso of Naples. At this point Venice declared the island of Cyprus to be part of their empire, making up for the signing away of vital Aegean islands to the Turk in 1479. Caterina passed through Venice on her way to exile in the Veneto town of Asolo in the foothills of the Alps.

Italy is invaded by Charles VIII of France in 1494 as he marches on Naples to claim the throne by right of being a member of the House of Anjou. Alfonso II, terrified by the ghosts of victims of his brutality and hearing the stones beneath his feet cry out : "Francia! Francia!", had already fled to a remote Sicillian monastery. An intervention Venice wasted no time in exploiting. By playing various territorial contenders off against each other (mainly France and the Habsburgs), Venice succeeded in adding bits and pieces to the terra firma empire. After enjoying the hospitality of Naples and several of the city's young women, Charles VIII and his army returned to Paris. On the way, the French, now tired and hungry, were met on the banks of the River Taro by an Italian force composed mostly of mercenaries in Venetian pay. Despite being better fed, outnumbering the French and occupying better positions, the Italians were vastly outmatched by the experienced French with their superior cannon.
The Marquis of Mantua captured the French baggage train and since it contained a number of holy relics and Charlemagne's sword declared the battle a victory for Italy.

1499 - The defeat of the Venetian navy at Sapienza led to the loss of the main fortresses of the Morea (Peleponnese) which meant that the Turks now controlled the so-called "door to the Adriatic". Vasco da Gama arrives back in Lisbon after having rounded the Cape of Good Hope and established a faster route to the Orient. Da Gama's travels begin the tilt of the economic balance of power towards the Dutch, English and Portuguese. Louis XII ascends to the French Throne and Venice signed an alliance with him including the division of the Duchy of Milan which Louis claimed through his grandmother.

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