1503 - Venice signed a disadvantageous trade agreement with the Turks in order to concentrate its resources on the mainland. Given the accumulated hostility to Venice it was a dangerous game and when the Republic began to encroach on the Papal Domain in Romagna, it at last provoked a unified response from its opponents. The League of Cambrai formed in 1508) by Pope Julius II, Louis XII, Emperor Maximilian and the King of Spain at its head, pitted almost every power in Europe against the Venetians, in a pact that explicitly declared its intention of destroying Venice's empire as a prelude to conquering the Turks.
The ensuing war went calamitously for Venice - its army was crushed by the French at Agnadello, city after city defected to the League and Venice prepared for a siege. The siege never came and in the end, the conflicting interests of the League enabled the Venetians, through subtle diplomacy, to repossess nearly everything they had held at the start of the war, since the various populations found their new masters even less pleasant than the old ones. Never the less, when the fighting finished in 1509 many of the cities of the Veneto had been sacked, great swathes of the countryside ruined and the Venetian Treasury bled almost dry.

1515 - Louis XII died on the first day of this year exhausted by his energetic 15 year old English bride, the sister of Henry VIII. He was succeeded by his cousin Francis I. Who disappointed the Pope, Pope Leo X or Giovanni de' Medici, by proving to be even less pliable than his predecessor. The Venetian Doge proposed that the Pope enter the treaty it had signed and renewed with France. Despite the advice of his many advisors, including Machiavelli who advised throwing the Papacy's lot in with the French, the Pope allied with the Spanish. Undeterred by this alliance Francis I marched into Italy to retrieve what had been lost. Obeying their treaty stipulations the Venetians marched to meet him in Milan, arriving just in time to prevent the defeat of the French by the Swiss Mercenaries hired by the Pope and commanded by the fierce Cardinal of Scion. Francis was thus able to dictate terms to the Pope from a position of power and the Venetians benefited by retrieving all the territories it had lost previously on the mainland.

1517 - The Ottoman Turks were on the move once more seizing Syria and Egypt. Charles V, the nineteen year-old heir to the Habsburg throne, was crowned Emperor and proceeded to absorb the massive territories of the Spanish Kingdom. In 1522 Rhodes fell to the relentless advance of the Turks.

1527 - After the Sack of Rome the whole Italian peninsula fell under Habsburg rule with the sole exception of Venice who had wisely stayed out of the Papal dispute with Charles V.

1529 - The Ottoman Empire now extended right along the southern Mediterranean to Morocco. In order to survive Venice had to steer a course between the three great powers of the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire and France. The city survived but at a cost.
1538 a combined Christian fleet engaged the Turks at Prevesa. Under Charles V's orders, the supreme commander was so concerned with preventing the Venetians profiting from an allied victory that he lost to the Turks. The Venetians were obliged to accept a punitive treaty shortly after.
The Turks capture Cyprus and Christendom came to Venice's aid as the Turks brutalised the island's populace. The naval battle of LŽpanto was fought and was a decisive allied victory in 1571. During the battle however the Habsburg Supreme Commander, Don John of Austria, refused to reinforce the Venetian forces and in the subsequent negotiations the Venetians were forced to give up Cyprus to the Turks - the reason for the battle being fought!

1575 - 1577 - Venice was gripped by a plague which not only filled the lazzarettos, places for those with the plague or other similar diseases such as leprousy, but also several old galleys that had been towed out into the lagoon as hospital ships. By the time it was all over more than 50,000 Venetians had died and by 1581 its population had been reduced from almost 190,000 to a little over 124,000.

Relations between Rome and Venice were always fractious. Venice's expansion on the mainland was a source of irritation, especially when it turned its attention to areas over which the Vatican claimed sovereignty - the worship of God. There were restrictions imposed upon the Pope's authority within the Republic's boundaries, restrictions which led to Venice being regarded in some quarters as a crypto-Protestant state. The Pope was Venice's spiritual overlord, the Venetians agreed with this, but the Doge and his officers were masters in temporal affairs. The problem for the Papacy was that the Doge's notion of what constituted temporal affairs was far too broad and at the start of the Seventeenth Century, Pope Paul V and the Republic came to a head-on clash.

Two incidents provoked the row :

Venice's insistence that the Pope should routinely approve its candidate for the office of Patriarch

and its determination not to hand over to Papal jurisdiction two clerics it had decided to prosecute.

In fact one of his remarks became a popular Venetian proverb :

"I never tell lies but I don't tell the truth to everyone!"

No sooner was the Interdict out of the way than the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs entered the fray again. The Austrian branch was the first to cause trouble, by encouraging the piratical raids of the Uskoks, a loosely defined and regularly obstreperous community living on the Dalmatian coast. Venice took retaliatory action, Archduke Ferdinand objected, and a half-hearted war began. By 1617 the war with the Austrian Habsburgs had come to an end with the removal of the benighted Uskoks from their ports under the terms of the peace treaty.
But in 1618 the Spanish wing of the Habsburgs , being more devious, attempted to subvert the Venetian state with a wildly ambitious scheme that has since been known as The Spanish Conspiracy. Masterminded by the Spanish Viceroy of Naples, the Duke of Osuna, and the Spanish Ambassador to Venice, the Duke of Bedmar, the plot involved smuggling a Spanish Army into the city in disguised groups of two and three. The scheme then called for the contingent of Dutch Mercenaries already lodged their to be incited to mutiny. Just how convoluted the conspiracy was can be witnessed by the fact that 300 people were executed.

1625 - Venice was once more gripped by a terrible plague in which a third of the populace had died. The premature death was on such a terrible scale that the churchyard of San Stefano, where many of the dead were interred in burial pits, had to be closed to the public for health reasons for the next two centuries! Due to the large amounts of corrupted Perdo and Corporem Vis manifested here the Scuole di Mercere had to post guards to watch over the site and prevent unauthorised use of potentially dangerously uncontrollable magic.

1644 - The Turks once more begin their policy of harassing Venetian colonies and concentrated on Crete.

1649 - A number of visitors fleeing Puritan persecution arrived in Venice and immediately headed for the Scuole di Mercere. The English Ambassador soon dispatched a pair of his Bravi intercept the leader of these refugees. The Bravi were met on a bridge by a masked gentleman and went no further. The masked gentleman left the bridge cleaning his sword on a Bravi's jerkin. The Englishman were met at the Scuole and dispersed amongst supporters in the city. Even the Council of Ten has yet to identify the stranger on the bridge and its lack of knowledge is driving the Capi dei Dieci into a frenzy.

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