As Milan was the type of Italian city ruled by a despot or tyrant, so Venice was a type of the commercial, oligarchical city-states. Venice was by far the most powerful state in the peninsula. Located on the islands and lagoons at the head of the Adriatic, she had profited greatly by the crusades to build up a maritime empire and an enviable trade on the eastern Mediterranean and had extended her sway over rich lands in the northeastern part of Italy. In the year 1500, Venice boasted 3000 ships, 300,000 sailors, a numerous and veteran army, famous factories of plate glass, silk stuffs, and gold and silver objects, and a singularly strong government. Nominally Venice was a republic, but actually an oligarchy. Political power was intrusted jointly to several agencies: (1) a grand council controlled by the commercial magnates; (2) a centralized committee of ten; (3) an elected doge, or duke; and (4), after 1454, three state inquisitors, henceforth the city's real masters. The inquisitors could pronounce sentence of death, dispose of the public funds, and enact statutes; they maintained a regular spy system; and trial, judgment, and execution were secret. The mouth of the lion of St. Mark received anonymous denunciations, and the waves which passed under the Bridge of Sighs carried away the corpses. To this regime Venice owed an internal peace which contrasted with the endless civil wars of the other Italian cities. Till the final destruction of the state in 1798 Venice knew no political revolution. In foreign affairs, also, Venice possessed considerable influence; she was the first European state to send regular envoys, or ambassadors, to other courts. It seemed in 1500 as if she were particularly wealthy and great, but already had been sowed the seed of her subsequent decline and humiliation. The advance of the Ottoman Turks threatened her position in eastern Europe, although she still held the Morea in Greece, Crete, Cyprus, and many Ionian and Ægean islands. The discovery of America and of a new route to India was destined to shake the very basis of her commercial supremacy. And her unscrupulous policy toward her Italian rivals lost her friends to the west. So great was the enmity against Venice that the formidable League of Cambrai, entered into by the emperor, the pope, France, and Spain in 1508, wrung many concessions from her. [Sidenote: Genoa] Second only to Venice in commercial importance, Genoa, in marked contrast with her rival, passed through all manner of political vicissitudes until in 1499 she fell prey to the invasion of King Louis XII of France. Thereafter Genoa remained some years subject to the French, but in 1528 the resolution of an able citizen, Andrea Doria, freed the state from foreign invaders and restored to Genoa her republican institutions.