Venice and the Ottoman Threat, 1381–1453

Abstract

This chapter examines the Venetian Senate’s view of the Ottoman impact on the republic’s interests in the north-eastern Mediterranean—Romania—between 1381 and 1453. Romania did not enjoy the central position that scholarship habitually awards it. While Ottoman expansion was the underlying cause of chaos, the senators did not work from grand strategies, but rather operated within short temporal horizons seeking to extract the most while spending the least. The expansion of the Stato da Mar was haphazard, half-hearted, and repeatedly halted or reversed. For all the devastations that raids caused to Venetian subjects, the Ottomans had no monopoly over Venetian troubles between 1381 and 1430. After 1430, Venice and Murad II reached a modus vivendi that left Genoese and Catalans as the main threat to Venetian interests in Romania.