Foundations of Venetian Naval Strategy from Pietro II Orseolo to the Battle of Zonchio, 1000-1500

"Foundations of Venetian Naval Stragegy from Pietro II Orseolo to the Battle of Zonchio, 1000-1500." Early in the eleventh century the Venetian doge, Pietro II Orseolo, led a naval expedition against Dalmatian pirates based at the mouth of the Narenta River and turned away a Muslim fleet from Bari in Apulia. These two events laid the foundations of Venetian naval greatness. Fleets of galleys and fortified bases at strategic points along the major routes were the means that the Republic deployed to project its power over most of the eastern Mediterranean. For much of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Venice was engaged in a struggle for supremacy with the other Italian maritime republics, Pisa and Genoa. Finally, in the fifteenth century the Ottoman Turks began a combined military and naval offensive that eventually stripped Venice of its overseas holdings. In 1499 at the Battle of Zonchio near the mouth of the Adriatic Sea, the Venetian fleet was decisively overwhelmed by a Turkish one.