The Republic of Venice

For about eleven centuries, a city built on mudbanks in a lagoon governed itself as a republic and ran a commercial empire across the eastern Mediterranean. The Most Serene Republic of Venice elected its doges for life, guarded power through an intricate web of councils, and built galleys on something close to an assembly line at its state shipyard, the Arsenal. Its gold ducat was trusted from Flanders to Egypt, and its ambassadors' reports are still mined by historians. English owes it the words arsenal, ghetto, and quarantine. The republic ended in 1797 not in a siege but in a vote, when its Great Council dissolved itself under pressure from Napoleon's advancing army.

Venice ruled two worlds. The Stato da Mar, its overseas domain, strung trading posts and islands along the sea routes east: Istria, the Dalmatian coast, the Bay of Kotor, the Ionian Islands with Corfu, ports in the Peloponnese, and at various times Crete, Euboea, and Cyprus. The Domini di Terraferma, conquered mostly in the 15th century, spread across northeastern Italy from Friuli to Bergamo and Brescia, taking in Padua, Vicenza, and Verona on the fertile Po plain and the Alpine foothills. At home lay the lagoon itself, a maze of channels and marshes behind the barrier islands of the Lido. Its former lands now belong to Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Greece, and Cyprus.

By tradition, lagoon communities fleeing invasions of the mainland elected their first doge in 697, nominally under Byzantine authority, and the seat of government settled on the Rialto islands in 810. The Fourth Crusade, which Venice financed and steered to the sack of Constantinople in 1204, won it Crete and a chain of harbors. Centuries of rivalry with Genoa gave way to long wars with the Ottoman Empire, which took Cyprus in 1571 and Crete in 1669, while Atlantic trade routes drained Venetian commerce. French troops entered the city in May 1797, the doge abdicated, and the Treaty of Campo Formio handed Venice to Austria. It joined Italy in 1866, and Venice and its lagoon became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.

• The Byzantine Empire
  Romes Greek-speaking eastern half, ruled from Constantinople for more than a thousand years formerly part of
• Dalmatia
  The island-fringed Adriatic coast of Croatia, ruled in turn by Rome, Venice, and Vienna formerly ruled
• Adriatic Sea
  The long Mediterranean arm between Italy and the Balkans located on
• The Ottoman Empire
  Six centuries of rule from Istanbul over the Balkans, Anatolia, the Arab world and North Africa rival of
• Dalmatia
  The island-fringed Adriatic coast of Croatia, ruled in turn by Rome, Venice, and Vienna ruled
• Croatia
  A crescent of Adriatic coastline, a thousand islands, and walled stone cities today part of
• Greece
  The cradle of Western civilization, scattered across the Aegean and Ionian seas today part of
• Italy
  A boot-shaped peninsula of art, food, and the legacy of Rome today part of