Introduction: from 1300 to 1530

In 1300 Venice was one of the largest cities in Europe, its population about 120,000 – or 160,000 if we include the lagoon settlements of the dogado, the only Italian territory it then controlled. In 1530 population figures were similar, after recovery from plague mortality. In both 1300 and 1530 Venice possessed vast wealth connected mostly with trade: its port and shipping, its merchants and market were key intermediaries especially in long-distance dealings linking Europe to the Mediterranean, the centre of world commerce in the late Middle Ages. In political terms, however, much altered over those 230 years. Venice had developed communal government from about the middle of the twelfth century, curtailing the doge's authority, superseding his curia with more numerous conciliar bodies and collegiate magistracies. From 1300 to 1530 its regime remained republican, but there were major changes relating to the broader context (Italian, Mediterranean and European), to the territory it controlled and to important features of the state, government and politics.

In the fourteenth century, rivalry with Genoa in Levantine maritime trade caused alternate tension and open warfare, and so too the development of state-owned and -organised galley convoys as part of tighter regulation and security in sea trade beyond the Adriatic. Foreign policy also sought to consolidate or recover control over northern Adriatic coastal territory via relations with local communities and with hinterland princes. Possessing ports there supported Venice's hegemony in Adriatic trade and the logistics of all its merchant shipping, and the same strategy, mingling commercial and military features, was also served by more distant coastal and island colonies in this fragmented overseas dominion (stato da mar), especially Crete and other, lesser Aegean holdings, taken in the early thirteenth century from the Byzantine empire. Then in the 1380s–90s fears due to Ottoman Turkish advance helped Venice occupy other Greek and Albanian territory, especially Corfù, and assert full control over Negroponte.