THE EMPIRE OF VENICE

After the fall of Byzantium Venice became quite powerful and their republic made a small empire along the Balkan coast and in southern Greece as well as Cyprus

However this empire declined in the 1700's due to war with the ottomans

Does anyone know how they could have survived and even grown in power?
 
Really unless you can find a way to give them a red sea coast Venice is doomed. The moment that other states find shortcuts that cut them out of trade means that Venice is no longer able to operate as a power since its main advantage (piles of money) is no longer readily available.
 
It's not only the wars with the Ottomans - much more important is the fact that, after the 15th century, the main shipping lanes for the trade with the Orient shifted, as the Western European powers acquired colonies in Asia and obtained direct access to spices and other Asian trading goods. Venice missed out on that because 1) they were concentrating on and defending an empire and trading routes that were in the wrong place, becoming more and more irrelevant and 2) because they didn't have direct access to the Atlantic ocean, which was becoming the main gateway to both Asia (around the Cape of Good Hope) and to the Americas. Of course, the decline was slow and genteel, so perhaps it would perhaps have been beneficial to Venice if they had received a bigger shock earlier, whch may have made them re-orient their energies to the Atlantic and around-Africa trade. Maybe a victory by the Ottomans at Lepanto, with Venice losing most of its possessions South of Dalmatia in the aftermath? And then Venice goes into the trade around Africa, occupying a similar niche like the Netherlands - a small commercial republic with an out-sized colonial empire?
 
After the fall of Byzantium Venice became quite powerful and their republic made a small empire along the Balkan coast and in southern Greece as well as Cyprus

However this empire declined in the 1700's due to war with the ottomans

Actually, the Venetian empire was declining in the 1400s due to wars with the Ottomans.
 
Venice arguably didn't have enough manpower to retain its empire without hiring a lot of (potentially unreliable] mercenaries.
 
It's not only the wars with the Ottomans - much more important is the fact that, after the 15th century, the main shipping lanes for the trade with the Orient shifted, as the Western European powers acquired colonies in Asia and obtained direct access to spices and other Asian trading goods. Venice missed out on that because 1) they were concentrating on and defending an empire and trading routes that were in the wrong place, becoming more and more irrelevant and 2) because they didn't have direct access to the Atlantic ocean, which was becoming the main gateway to both Asia (around the Cape of Good Hope) and to the Americas. Of course, the decline was slow and genteel, so perhaps it would perhaps have been beneficial to Venice if they had received a bigger shock earlier, whch may have made them re-orient their energies to the Atlantic and around-Africa trade. Maybe a victory by the Ottomans at Lepanto, with Venice losing most of its possessions South of Dalmatia in the aftermath? And then Venice goes into the trade around Africa, occupying a similar niche like the Netherlands - a small commercial republic with an out-sized colonial empire?

Problem is, going the colonial/trading-with-Asia route pushes you up into the fights with the big boys, as your rivals all start salivating over your holdings and look for chances to pick on you. The Dutch had the ultra-defensive ability to flood their plains and cut off besieging armies. The Venetians have an island city, yes, but can they hold off the likes of France and Austria forever or will this not just speed up their annexation?
 
The real question to ask with Venice is this: How did it last *so long*?

Venice basically had a thousand year run and change. And that's an enormously impressive feat for a small city-state thallasocracy in a tough neighborhood.

In the end, what killed Venice was the same thing that had helped build it: geography. Specifically, that it was a maritime empire heavily dependent on, but with uniquely potent access to, trade routes to the Near and Far East.

Once the Ottoman Empire emerged and basically cut off those trade routes - or, at best, made access to them extraordinarily expensive and dangerous - Venice was doomed to slow decay unless it could find another major state to partner with. But such a partnership, most likely with a Habsburg power or (less likely) France, would reduce Venice to an adjunct of that power over time.

So your best bet is to make sure that the Ottomans (or some similar Turkic empire) never emerge as a major power. Keep the Eastern Mediterranean a fractured collection of Christian and Muslim states, most of them in need of good relations with Venice. And even in this scenario, Venice will always be vulnerable to a major power land assault in Northern Italy, its Venice Lagoon isolation less and less of a defense to developing military technology. Which, in the end, is what gave Venice her death blow, once Napoleon arrived on the scene.
 
Problem is, going the colonial/trading-with-Asia route pushes you up into the fights with the big boys, as your rivals all start salivating over your holdings and look for chances to pick on you. The Dutch had the ultra-defensive ability to flood their plains and cut off besieging armies. The Venetians have an island city, yes, but can they hold off the likes of France and Austria forever or will this not just speed up their annexation?

Yeah, I think they survived for so long because people looked at them and thought, "Ah, that's just Venice, they're harmless." European empires didn't just Borgify other European states for the fun of it - Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Andorra, Monaco, and San Marino are still around, and butterflies could allow a few other states from long ago to remain; Lorrain, Savoy, etc. (Savoy is a cross between Switzerland and Portugal in my "Sweet Lands of Liberty" for instance, since it winds up witha sea port.)

But the problem is, timeilne-wise it's hard to really cause any of these to have a lot more territory; Luxembourg comes closest, with a few different choices i could have given it Wallonia and parts of the Palatinate in "Created Equal," but that seem ed tricky because it was still in personal union with the Netherlands. Even then, though, if I'd done that I'd probably be doubling its size, or at most, making Luxembourg OTL's Belgium but without colonies. Hardly worthy of being called an empire.
 
First I agree with Athelstane. Venice performed too well historically, against all odds: manpower limitations, blocked sea routes, high tariffs for her merchants in the Ottoman Empire, the hostility of other Italian states and the Pope, competition by bigger powers like France, England, Netherlands.

Also, I agree with wannis: Venice declined more due to the shift of the trade routes than the wars with the Ottomans. But, furthermore, the Venetian products lost their place in the North European markets since the industries of Netherlands and England produced huge amounts of products of smaller quality, but in far smaller prices and dominated the markets of both Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Also, as Norwich notes in his work , despite all the problems of Venetian trade performance in comparison with the Northern Europe, despite the losses of Venetian trade due to the rise of Trieste, in the 18th c. the Venetian economy was at its hights. Only that this financial wellfare was not translated in terms of political power, while the bulk of the national income was going to the hands of very-very few, who spent it all in consumer and luxury goods, so little remained for investments of the state.

Let me explain the situation based on my homeland, Corfu, which was roughly a micrograph of Venice:
The 18th c. was a good time for the island. The last war ended in 1718, having been no too devastating for Corfu. So, there were about 80 years of peace. But, although this, the peasantry's situation worsened, and so did aristocracy's as well. The aristocrats drained more and more of the peasantry, spending it all to luxuries, falling thus in debts towards local and foreign money-lenders. Some reorganization of the political and economical system by a couple of Provisioners failed due to the lack of support by both the local regime (Corfu was not a direct possesion of Venice, so there were two administrational bodies, one Venetian and one local) and the metropolitan one. The whole state fell in decay, which affected the morale of the citizens and subjects, who accepted the French rule (1797) with no reaction at all, just like Venice herself. That's why when Venice fell to the Frech, a group of aristocrat and high-middle youngsters launched a campaign against the Venetian emblems in the town of Corfu and celebrated the forthcoming Revolutionary French rule: despite that would be against their class' interests, they preffered that instead of the "Venetian" decay...
 
mabye getting venice some territory in northern africa, namely around cueta or meilla and the like early on (say through buying it, crusade, etc) you could have it as a stable port fro them to compete in the atlantic trade runs...but even then youd still have them competing against alot of powerful nations that can get back and forth easier and block their trade...

for a venician empire to really be pratical its like what some people have said, you need them to change their structure, trade and society fairly early on to cope with the other growing powers
 
well, if the league of cambrai never happened venice would continue to dig into italy (maybe even uniting a greater part of it?);

also if they could build the suez canal around the 14-1500s they would have a much faster and direct link to the spice trade.

but thats just my thoughts, i don't know much about italian history
 
well, if the league of cambrai never happened venice would continue to dig into italy (maybe even uniting a greater part of it?);

if there was no League of Cambrai, one should be invented!:)

I mean that an Italian state dominant over the rest is not something those states, The Holy Roman Emperor, the Pope, or France and later Austria would tolerate....
 
if there was no League of Cambrai, one should be invented!:)

I mean that an Italian state dominant over the rest is not something those states, The Holy Roman Emperor, the Pope, or France and later Austria would tolerate....

And yet eventually the Pope realized the worse alternative of destroying the only Italian power that could fight the big ones.
 
And yet eventually the Pope realized the worse alternative of destroying the only Italian power that could fight the big ones.

That's excactly why when it was clear that Venice won't carry on an over-the-limits expansionist policy in Italy, the Pope changed his behaviour towards the Serenissima and even helped her in a few occasions...
 
well, if the league of cambrai never happened venice would continue to dig into italy (maybe even uniting a greater part of it?);

also if they could build the suez canal around the 14-1500s they would have a much faster and direct link to the spice trade.

but thats just my thoughts, i don't know much about italian history

Um.... that's not possible. :p
 
That's excactly why when it was clear that Venice won't carry on an over-the-limits expansionist policy in Italy, the Pope changed his behaviour towards the Serenissima and even helped her in a few occasions...

Not exactly. Julius was abiding by 2 dictums: allying with "the lesser of 2 evils" & "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". It was a matter of survival in the aftermath of the League almost destroying Venice as a power and then turning its eyes to threaten the Papacy's possessions.
 
Not exactly. Julius was abiding by 2 dictums: allying with "the lesser of 2 evils" & "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". It was a matter of survival in the aftermath of the League almost destroying Venice as a power and then turning its eyes to threaten the Papacy's possessions.

I agree with you, but I was reffering to the long run..:)
 
I like the notion but I am not sure there is anything Venice itself could do but it could benefit from other’s failures and the world would look a lot different. At least in the Balkans and Levant.

Say the Ottoman empire disintegrates after Bayazid is captured, no Mehmed I. fratricidal warfare and the Ottomans are another one of the muslim failed states of the period.

Second is to give Venice a population base. I think making that in Terra Firma (Italy) is boring and would attract the hostility of the Empire, Pope, France and the other Italian States but absent an Ottoman state there is a power vacuum and an Aegean island based state is feasible - Include Rhodes, Crete, Cyprus and the minor Islands maybe the Rump Byzantines and without the Ottoman threat this all feels more secure and attracts colonists either from Italy or refugees from the wars of the Ottoman successions to the relative stability of the Venetian domains.

These would also be protected from European politics by a strong Hungary and ?Serbia to distract the HRE or vice versa.

Then it all falls apart with the Transoceanic voyages undercutting the trade position. Unless someone else fails (Spain or Portugal). To allow Venice to slip in. Lets say that Portugal concentrates on the conquest of Morocco and Henry the Navigator’s cash gets funnelled into that not exploration and the void is filled by people in Venetian pay. You could get a trade empire - with the Atlantic base on the Canaries there and the Aegean were the main sugar Islands pre Caribbean and similar to Portugal a chain of fortresses with limited garrisons as trade posts. The mercenary bit is less of an issue when they are dependent on the reup from Venice and a loyal series of descendents would arise.

That could make Venice rich enough to fortify the homeland and hire enough mercenaries to protect itself and be a player in Balkan/Italian politics in the 16th 17th centuries it was in any event a respectable regional power. That could also translate into a more successful combination of the Portugese and Ottoman roles in the Indian Ocean trade.

If you want to preserve the power much beyond this then I think an Egyptian client state is necessary and preferably an actively friendly one or more than one, Say Venice is seen as the lesser of two evils and backs the fragmented Sunni states of the Levant and (OTL) ottoman empire against the Safavids with Egypt providing the manpower and Venice the banking/technology and back door into the Persian heartland.

The ancient red sea canal is well attested but its a Nile - Red sea canal and required constant maintenance - which would not be an issue if you had the labour and it made a LOT of money so its feasible. Getting control of Egypt and keeping it is the big deal.
 
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