In the northeast Venice still led a brilliant career, like a charming woman who has received some fatal hurt and does not know it, but instinctively lives more brilliantly than ever. Her fatal hurt was the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks (1453). At first the only obvious ill consequence was war. Venice, willy-nilly, stepped into the place of Constantinople, and became "the bulwark of the West." She waged war after war with the Turks and maintained her reputation for valour and resolution, but Turkey was too strong for her, and little by little stripped her of her long-drawn-out empire of coast and island. A far worse blow than direct war was the cutting of the great trade routes with the East, which damaged all the maritime cities of Italy, but Venice most. Turkey stopped the supplies of Venetian greatness, and slowly but surely sapped Venetian strength. On the stoppage of the straight road to Asia, the blocked current of commerce poked about for a new way, and discovered that it could reach the East by doubling the Cape of Good Hope. Commerce thus avoided Turkey, but it also abandoned the Mediterranean, great centre and source of ancient civilization, and left the maritime cities of Italy stranded, as it were, on the shores of a forsaken sea. This doom, however, was still hidden in the obscurity of the future, and Venice appeared to be at the height of prosperity. The French ambassador, Philippe de Commines, called her "the most triumphant city I have ever seen." The Venetians were a people apart from other Italians; they never suffered from foreign invasion, or domestic revolt; they lived in isolation, maintained their own customs and usages, and enjoyed a sumptuous, opulent life, in proud security. Venice was the richest, the most comfortable, the best governed city in the world. In military strength she was commonly reckoned the first power in Italy, with the Papacy, the Kingdom of Naples, and the Duchy of Milan about equal in second rank. Venice entertained no suspicion of any seeds of decadence, and continued her greedy career of annexation on the mainland, with a haughtiness worthy of ancient Rome. She laid hands on part of Romagna, and angered the Popes who had a title thereto, which, however imperfect, was much better than the Venetian title. She provoked the Emperor Maximilian, of the House of Hapsburg, who claimed Verona as an Imperial city; and to the west she came into dangerous competition with the French invaders. These enemies, taking their cue from the piratical seizure of Naples by the French and Spanish, agreed together to partition the Venetian territory on the mainland, and invited all the powers of Europe to join them and take a share of the booty. The coalition planned a kind of joint-stock piracy. This was the League of Cambrai (1508), which stripped Venice of all her Italian territory, and threatened the city herself. The allies, however, fell out among