She adopted, not wholly of her free will, Alfonso of Aragon, King of Sicily, and so brought about, though for a few years only, the reunion of the Two Sicilies. With regard to Sicily we need say nothing except that the royal House, which still had a strain of Hohenstaufen-Norman blood, died out, and that Sicily passed as a marriage portion to the crown of Aragon, and became a mere appanage of that kingdom (1409). Finally, as I have said, King Alfonso was adopted as heir to the second Queen Joan, and took part in the civil wars that devastated Naples. Then began the long struggle of Spaniard against Frenchman (the Neapolitan House of Anjou was still French), which was destined to be so disastrous to Italy. Alfonso conquered and was acknowledged King of the Two Sicilies by his suzerain the Pope (1443). Thus for a time the Southern Kingdom was united and at peace. It is a happy moment to leave it and go northward, in the hope of finding greater moral and intellectual activity, if not greater tranquillity and order. To the northeast, Venice had been growing in power; but with the growth of her power the number of her enemies and their bitterness towards her had grown. Her possessions on the mainland, wrested from Verona, brought her into hostility with Padua; her Adriatic possessions, Istria and Dalmatia, made her an enemy of Hungary; her coastwise empire and trade in the Levant made Genoa her deadly rival; and her imperial expansion entangled her in war after war. Both the war with Padua and that with Hungary told upon her, but the struggle with Genoa was far worse. During the last grapple, known as the war of Chioggia (1378-81), Venice was reduced to narrow straits, and but for her great admirals, Vettor Pisani and Carlo Zeno, would have been defeated. Genoa never recovered from the losses she sustained; but Venice regained her strength, and renewed her conquests on the mainland. She conquered Padua (1404) and strangled the last heirs of the House of Carrara, though they were prisoners of war; she seized Verona, and set a price on the heads of the last of the Scaligers, though they had been her allies. Her chief expansion on the mainland of Italy was under the Doge Francesco Foscari (1423-57), when she annexed Bergamo and Brescia, and carried her western boundary to the river Adda. For the sake of convenience we may divide the life of Venice into four stages: first, her lusty youth, which closed with the profligate capture of Constantinople and the piratical dismemberment of the Byzantine Empire (1204); second, her vigorous prime, which lasted till she annexed Italian territory, threw in her lot with Italy, and from being almost an Oriental outsider became an Italian state (1338); third, her glorious maturity, which continued till the League of Cambrai, when almost all Europe united to destroy her (1508); and fourth, her long period of ebbing fortune, during which she slipped slowly into decrepitude.